For fans of the Budgie desktop environment that got its start out of the Solus Linux distribution, the Budgie 10.10 release expected later this quarter will be their first release that is Wayland-only.

A pull request submitted this week to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle is introducing the notion of device memory "DMEM" to cgroup with the main intended use being to restrict device memory usage based on the cgroup hierarchy such as for graphics cards with their dedicated vRAM.

Originally proposed for the Linux kernel nearly one year ago was CBD as the CXL Block Device. Now up to its third revision, the Linux CBD patches are calming down and the performance gains are looking quite nice.

OpenZFS 2.3 continues working its way toward release with Monday having brought the fifth and potentially final release candidate.

The latest from a rather active CES 2025 is NVIDIA announcing the GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" series line-up.

AMD's CES 2025 keynote was used to announce a slew of new products. They are just announcements today without any immediate availability or any hardware reviews to publish, but a look ahead for what is on the horizon for AMD in the consumer space in 2025.

In addition to the HDMI Forum announcing the HDMI 2.2 specification for release in the first half of this year, VESA also took to CES 2025 to announce their forthcoming DisplayPort 2.1b standard.

The HDMI Forum used CES for today announcing the HDMI 2.2 specification that will be available to HDMI 2.x adopters in the first half of the calendar year.

Following last year's launch of Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops, Qualcomm is using CES 2025 this week in Las Vegas for promoting the Snapdragon X Series for mini desktop form factor PCs. But the Linux support and performance out of these forthcoming Snapdragon X Platform mini PCs remain to be seen.

Mozilla has published the Firefox 134.0 release binaries today ahead of their official release tomorrow. This first Firefox update of 2025 brings a few new features to Linux users and those on other platforms.

NVIDIA compiler engineers have spent the past several months working on a proposed GCC option -flto-partition=locality for having the compiler optimize the code layout for locality between callees and callers as part of the link-time optimization (LTO) process. For some workloads NVIDIA is finding this -flto-partition=locality compiler option being of significant help for bettering the CPU performance.

Intel used the start of CES 2025 for announcing the newest Arrow Lake processors for the Core Ultra 200H and Core Utra 200HX mobile processors.

Along with other recent Linux kernel patches around atomic write support, a set of Device Mapper (DM) patches were posted today for implementing said functionality.

For the past several months Intel Linux software engineers have been working on Intel Touch Host Controller drivers as an IP block on the PCH for handling touchscreen, touchpad, and related touch input devices. On Sunday the fourth iteration of these driver patches were sent out as these new Intel open-source drivers near the mainline Linux kernel.

Maxime Ripard of Red Hat today sent out the first set of "drm-misc-next" patches of 2025 for queuing into DRM-Next until the Linux 6.14 merge window opens in the coming weeks.

A discussion that originally started last summer has been reignited: whether it's time to retire GlusterFS within Fedora Linux. But following discussions in recent days, there may be a new packager willing to take over but it doesn't change the fact of declining upstream activity around GlusterFS.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.13-rc6 as the newest weekly test release of the Linux 6.13 kernel that is working its way toward stable later in January.

With the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle Google is poised to have its ChromeOS UCSI driver upstreamed.

For fans of the Xubuntu derivative of Ubuntu Linux, the upcoming Xubuntu 25.04 release will feature the Xfce 4.20 desktop.

This morning I rolled out upgraded forum software to improve the forum experience and also hopefully help the overall Phoronix.com site performance with the database server being hammered recently from the forums.