KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly report on the interesting Plasma desktop changes for the week. This week a long-sought feature for the Plasma desktop was finally merged.

Back in February Steam on Linux was at a 1.45% marketshare, then was corrected to 2.33% for Linux gaming in March, 2.27% for April, a nice jump to 2.69% for Linux gaming in May, and June came in at 2.57% for the Linux gaming population as a percent of Steam users. The July numbers were published this evening and show a new recent high for Linux gamers.

In time for some weekend testing, Wayback 0.2 is now available for this X11 compatibility layer leveraging Wayland components. Wayback 0.2 remains at an alpha quality state but more functionality is now wired up.

Linus Torvalds today merged the initial deferred unwinder infrastructure into the Linux 6.17 kernel on the path toward enabling SFrame stack trace format support.

Today the first Linux kernel patch was posted for Intel's Nova Lake as the anticipated successor to the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Arrow Lake" processors. Today's patch confirms that Intel Nova Lake will be the first Intel processors under their new "Family 18" umbrella.

The Attack Vector Controls work is now in Linux 6.17 for those new tuning knobs worked on by AMD engineer David Kaplan to make it more straight-forward for Linux server administrators and power users to more easily select the CPU security mitigations relevant to their system(s) and intended workloads.

Vulkan 1.4.324 is out today as the first Vulkan API specification update in two weeks with a variety of clarifications/corrections plus a new extension from AMD.

Following the recent Intel driver being orphaned due to layoffs at the company and other Intel Linux engineering changes due to the ongoing restructuring at the company, for the Linux 6.17 kernel there are some additional Intel driver maintainer changes spotted.

The media subsystem updates were submitted and subsequently merged on Thursday for the ongoing Linux 6.17 merge window. There are several notable media changes for Linux 6.17 but arguably most prominent is the IPU7 driver entering staging for working on web camera support for Intel Lunar Lake and next-generation Panther Lake laptops.

During last month on Phoronix were 276 original news articles and another 15 featured reviews/benchmark articles around our forte of Linux hardware. Even with the summer here there has been no slowdown in interesting hardware running on Linux and the pace of innovation happening around open-source software.

The EXT4 file-system enhancements for Linux 6.17 were merged on Thursday and bring better scalability to the block allocation code as well as fixing the file-system's large folios support. The scalability work can show some wild gains in select areas.

The Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" driver improvements were merged earlier this week for the ongoing Linux 6.17 merge window and with that comes a number of Intel hardware platforms now being supported.

This evening Intel released XeSS 2.1 as the newest version of their Xe Super Sampling library with upscaling, frame generation, and low latency optimizations for gamers. Notable with XeSS 2.1 is that it introduces XeSS Frame Generation with Xe Low Latency support now for non-Intel GPUs.

Valve is ending out the month of July with a new Steam beta release that has a few Linux-specific fixes.

All of the open-source kernel graphics driver feature changes were merged earlier today for the Linux 6.17 kernel. For Linux 6.17 there is an enormous amount of new feature work ready to go with the modern Intel graphics driver code. Plus the always active AMD graphics driver changes and various refinements to the many smaller graphics/display drivers.

The x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel. The x86 platform drivers area traditionally has been around Linux laptop hardware support but in recent years more work on handheld devices too plus Intel/AMD server platform functionality.

Back in May when AMD launched the EPYC 4005 "Grado" processors for low-power, low-cost server processors we tested the EPYC 4565P and EPYC 4585PX. The EPYC 4565P is their standard 16-core offering while the EPYC 4585PX is the 3D V-Cache variant for these processors catering to web hosting, SOHO servers, edge computing, and other applications where not needing the performance of the flagship EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. There is also another 16-core variant with the EPYC 4545P and what makes this SKU interesting is the 16-cores / 32-threads but with a 65 Watt TDP. In the Ryzen 9000 series so far AMD hasn't introduced any 16-core, 65-Watt part that makes the EPYC 4545P all the more interesting. Here are some benchmarks of the EPYC 4545P for those shopping for an affordable and very power efficient server platform that still sharply outperforms Intel's Xeon E / Xeon 6300 competition.

For the Ubuntu 25.10 development cycle to complement the daily ISOs, Canonical began releasing monthly snapshots to facilitate more testing from the community and also in working to enhance their build automation / infrastructure. Today marks the third monthly release of Ubuntu 25.10 for testing.

The Apple System Management Controller (SMC) driver was successfully merged this week into Linux 6.17 for being able to reboot modern Apple M1 / M2 Macs under Linux (the Apple M3 / M4 Linux support remains in development). It's the latest improvement for Apple Silicon on the upstream Linux kernel compared to the downstream Asahi Linux code that has been carrying the SMC driver and other in-development/tentative patches.

The AMD Radeon RX 480 / RX 580 "Polaris" graphics cards remain very popular on the Steam Survey and among enthusiasts/desktop users at large even though they are nearly a decade old. The nine year old Polaris graphics cards have aged well in the marketplace and are an affordable choice. For Linux users they continue enjoying strong open-source driver support. It turns out Linux creator Linus Torvalds himself is still relying on an AMD Radeon RX 580 with one of his main systems.