As a wonderful New Year surprise, there's good momentum on NVIDIA graphics support for the BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system.

After looking yesterday at the most viewed Linux hardware reviews and benchmarks of 2025, today's look is at the most popular open-source/Linux news of the past year. There were 3,286 original news articles on Phoronix during 2025 written by your's truly, here's a look back at what excited readers the most over these past twelve months.

The ReactOS free software project is turning 30 this year and its "open-source Windows" OS ambitions remain. They are starting out this year with another "major step" towards Windows NT 6.0 compatibility.

For fans of the IceWM X11 window manager, the project kicked off 2026 by releasing IceWM 4.0.

Kicking off the new year for Linux gaming and cross-platform gaming at large is the release of the SDL 3.4 library. SDL is part of the Steam runtime and continues to be widely-used for abstracting software/hardware for creating more portable games and other applications.

Merged to Linux Git on New Year's Eve was a fix in the form of a code revert for broken MediaTek WiFi on the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel.

With Linux 6.19 aging AMD GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs switched the default kernel driver used to provide for much better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other improvements compared to using the legacy Radeon DRM kernel driver. For 2026, Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team has more improvements still planned to enhance these older AMD graphics cards on Linux.

This looks to be a wrap on 2025, Happy New Year to all the Phoronix readers over the past 21+ years. This year on Phoronix there were 226 original Linux hardware reviews and featured benchmark articles written by your's truly. Plus another 3,286 original open-source/Linux software and hardware news articles this calendar year. Here were the big topics of 2025 for the featured Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles.

Ncurses 6.6 was released today prior to closing out 2025. This programming library update for creating terminal-based text user interfaces (TUIs) features a variety of great improvements for ending out the year.

Prominent Asahi Linux developer Sven Peter spoke at this week's 39th Chaos Communication Congress "39C3" in Hamburg, Germany. He provided an update around the still-in-the-works Apple M3 / M4 / M5 SoC and device support as well as other outstanding features like getting DisplayPort working on Apple Macs under Linux.

As part of the various end-of-year annual benchmarking comparisons and the like on Phoronix, today is a look at how the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H "Meteor Lake" performance has evolved under Ubuntu Linux in the two years since launching. Plus with next-gen Intel Panther Lake laptops expected to be showcased next week at CES, it's a good time for revisiting the Meteor Lake performance to see the difference two years have made for Intel Meteor Lake laptops on Linux.

Ahead of the January 2026 ISO refresh for Arch Linux, Archinstall 3.0.15 released today as the newest update to this convenient text-based OS installer.

A New Year's Eve pull request is ready with several Intel/AMD laptop improvements for the ongoing Linux 6.19 kernel cycle. An x86 platform drivers pull request sent to Linus Torvalds today brings several notable driver enhancements with expanding the range of supported laptops.

The GCC compiler and the GNU toolchain ecosystem at large had a great year. From new language front-ends for the likes of Algol 68 and COBOL to maturing support for GCC Rust, new performance optimizations from GCC to Glibc, initial AMD Zen 6 "znver6" support merged for GCC 16, and much more. It's pretty safe to say GCC and the broader GNU ecosystem enjoyed a very successful 2025.

While the Godot Engine receives a lot of attention as a prominent open-source game engine, it's far from the only one in this space. Another open-source game engine capping out 2025 with a new release is the Crown Engine.

OpenCV 4.13 is out this New Year's Eve in providing the latest open-source computer vision (CV) capabilities. OpenCV 4.13 brings a wide variety of enhancements to this widely-used computer vision library.

December happens to be a busy month for video editor releases in the open-source world. This month there's been the release of Flowblade 2.24, OpenShot 3.4, Kdenlive 25.12, and now there is Shotcut 25.12 before closing out the month and year.

Typically when receiving any review hardware preloaded with Microsoft Windows I tend to run some Windows vs. Linux benchmarks just as a sanity test plus it still seems to generate a fair amount of interest even though the outcome is almost always the same: Linux having a hefty performance advantage over Windows especially in the more demanding creator-type workloads. As an unexpected twist and time consuming puzzle the past two months, when recently testing out the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 it's faster for numerous workloads now on Microsoft Windows 11 than Ubuntu Linux.

X.Org package wrangler Alan Coopersmith at Oracle announced today the release of imake 1.0.11, the newest version of this utility that 20+ years ago was used extensively as part of the X Window System build process for generating Makefiles from a template. With this first imake point release in two years, imake itself can now be built via Meson and there is now support for RISC-V and LoongArch architectures.

Over the past few years building the Linux kernel with Clang has matured a lot thanks to upstream improvements to both LLVM/Clang and the Linux kernel. As it's been a while since our last comparison for GCC vs. Clang built kernels on the resulting system performance, our latest year-end 2025 benchmarking is providing a fresh look at the Linux 6.19 upstream Git kernel built under the latest stable GCC 15 and LLVM Clang 21 compilers. Plus with the Clang-built kernel is also the option of the Link-Time Optimized (LTO) kernel for even greater performance.