Arch Linux built EndeavourOS has released new install media in celebrating the project's fifth anniversary. Making this 5th anniversary release all the more exciting is the project has restored support for EndeavourOS on ARM.

GNOME 47 Alpha is approaching in the coming days and on Sunday evening the "47.alpha" versions were declared for GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor. This alpha milestone is a big one with seeing enhanced VR headset support, the ability to build Wayland-only desktop environments, GNOME Shell accent color integration, and other Wayland improvements.

The Linux 6.10 kernel cycle continues trending along nominally and giving hope for an on-time stable kernel release in two weeks.

The RISC-V kernel port with Linux 6.11 is introducing the ability to handle memory hot plugging/unplugging.

For those interested in laptops powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite SoC, it's looking like the ASUS Vivobook S15 model could be one of the first devices with decent Linux support. There are patches undergoing review for upstreaming the ASUS Vivobook S 15 DeviceTree support so that much of the basic functionality is working under Linux but various features are known to be broken.

With the first half of the year drawing to a close, here is a look back at the most popular content on Phoronix so far in 2024. Year to date there has been 1,530 original news articles so far and 78 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles written by your's truly. There has been a lot happening in 2024 from Linux kernel improvements to exciting new hardware and other open-source advances.

The Etnaviv kernel graphics driver that provides reverse-engineered open-source support for Vivante graphics (and NPU) IP has seen a fresh round of patches ready to go for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.11 cycle kicking off in mid-July.

Merged on Saturday ahead of today's Linux 6.10-rc6 release is the latest batch of x86 platform driver changes. Notable as part of this week's fixes is improving support for the very latest (2024) LG laptop models.

For those on the Debian stable train, Debian 12.6 is out this weekend as the newest point release to Debian Bookworm.

For the Branch History Injection variant of Spectre (Spectre BHI) there is a patch pending to add a new mitigation option for that two year old CPU security vulnerability.

The Open-Source Firmware Foundation is out with an interesting blog post by Google firmware engineer Subrata Banik around adapting the Coreboot-based Chrome AP Firmware for 64-bit booting. The transition to 64-bit booting is happening for the system firmware powering Chromebooks and other Chrome devices and is driven in part for Intel Panther Lake generation hardware.

This Week in GNOME is out with the latest summary to highlight all of the interesting changes this week.

Niri 0.1.7 is out today as the latest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. While the version number may not signify it, Niri 0.1.7 is quite a notable feature update.

KDE developers have still been busy addressing early fallout from the Plasma 6.1 desktop that released earlier this month while also beginning more feature activity for Plasma 6.2.

Wine 9.12 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release and in passing roughly the half-way point before Wine 10.0 stable enters the sights for early 2025.

On top of already having queued Intel Battlemage display support and the Battlemage device PCI IDs and other Intel kernel graphics driver features like hardware hang replays, Intel engineers today sent out another batch of "drm-intel-next" material slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle.

The Rust-written Servo web layout engine continues progressing for this open-source project now stewarded by the Linux Foundation Europe and seeing code contribution from a range of developers. They have published their June 2024 status update to outline the latest accomplishments for this alternative web engine.

The DRM Panic handler in Linux 6.10 that is used for presenting a visual error message in case of kernel panics and similar when CONFIG_VT is disabled continues seeing new features. This is the Linux equivalent to Windows' Blue Screen of Death or in the case of DRM Panic can also be a black screen of death. With Linux 6.11, the DRM Panic display can now handle monochrome logos.

Merged into Mesa 24.2 on Thursday is Vulkan sparse binding support for the CPU-based Lavapipe driver.

Besides Red Hat / Fedora working on a new web-based UI for their Anaconda OS installer, (open)SUSE developers remain very busy working on their Agama installer with new web-based interface. Agama 9 has now been announced as the latest iteration of SUSE's OS installer work.