May 2026 is now in the books after writing 275 original Linux/open-source minded news articles and another 20 featured-length benchmark articles / Linux hardware reviews. There was a lot of exciting topics in May to keep the month interesting and as we approach the Phoronix 22nd birthday this week.

Last year at Tech Tour Arizona, Intel announced Clearwater Forest as the Xeon 6+ series. Details were rather light then while for Computex, Intel is announcing that Xeon 6+ is now "launching" beginning tomorrow, 1 June. In addition to Xeon 6+, the new Intel Ethernet E835 is also launching while there are updates on Crescent Island and Diamond Rapids.

Dell is using Computex to announce their new XPS 13 that comes at their lowest price ever of $599 USD for students and $699 for everyone else. The new Dell XPS 13 aims to compete directly with the Apple MacBook Neo while leveraging the new Intel Wildcat Lake processors as cut-down from Panther Lake.

AMD is kicking off the busy Computex 2026 week with some new product announcements. The embargo is now up so meet the Radeon RX 9070 GRE and other new wares coming out this summer and later in the year from AMD.

The Linux 7.1-rc6 kernel is now available for closing out the month of May and approaching the Linux 7.1 stable release that should be out by mid-June.

With the end of the month comes a new KDE Linux status report from prominent KDE developer Nate Graham.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc6 test kernel due out later today, this week's batch of input subsystem fixes have been sent out that includes enabling a few newer input devices.

Going back to early 2023 there were efforts to disable all the Linux drivers for Microoft's RNDIS protocol. Remote NDIS has proven to be a real security concern while superior, modern alternatives exist.

Building off Friday's release of Wine 11.10 is now the Wine-Staging 11.10 experimental/testing flavor with nearly 300 additional patches atop that upstream code.

For ending out the month of May is a new monthly release of Servo, the open-source, Rust-based browser engine being developed by Linux Foundation Europe stakeholders and the open-source community. There are many nice enhancements on the desktop side with Servo 0.2 while also improving the Android browser UI experience with Servo too.

Zrythm is a wonderful open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) application. Zrythm 1.0 released back in 2024 for this software catering from beginners to audio professionals. It's been a GTK-based application for years but the developers have been porting it to Qt6/QML. Released this weekend is the first Zrythm 2.0 alpha release that moves from GTK to Qt/QML.

The clearcpuid= kernel parameter can be used to disable specific CPUID features for the kernel by specifying the targeted bit numbers of the feature(s) to disable or their flags from the /proc/cpuinfo output. The clearcpuid parameter, for example, has been useful for carrying out AVX-512 comparison benchmarks for apps that check for the presence of the AVX-512 extensions via /proc/cpuinfo. But moving forward the documentation on clearcpuid is being removed to discourage its use.

As expected given AOM Video Model indications last week, the AV2 v1.0 specification was officially released on Friday.

Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc6 kernel due out on Sunday, this week's round of USB fixes have been merged with various new device quirks added as well as some patches as a result of scanning tools.

Rust Coreutils 0.9 was tagged today as the latest major update to this GNU Coreutils implementation in the Rust programming language. Rust Coreutils 0.9 is up to a 90.4% pass rate against the GNU test suite!

NixOS 26.05 is out today as the latest version of this Linux distribution built around the Nix package manager.

On Friday was the latest AMDGPU/AMDKFD pull request landing more kernel graphics/compute driver improvements in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.2 merge window happening in mid-June.

Ahead of the 52nd G7 Summit being held in Evian, France next month, the recently conducted G7 Digital and Technology Ministers’ Meeting came to agreement on shared language around open-source AI and on the importance of open-source in AI.

The latest open-source/Linux patch activity around AMD's next-gen Zen 6 processors is expanding the range of the CPU models detected by the Linux kernel.

GNOME Circle as the initiative for third-party/independent software applications and libraries extending the GNOME desktop ecosystem is taking a stand against AI slop. The GNOME Circle policy has been updated to reject low-effort, vibe coded applications/libraries where the developer is not able to take responsibility for the work.