While the Radeon RX 9070 series as the first of the AMD RDNA4 graphics cards do perform well on Linux, the one area the performance has been less enticing remains with Vulkan ray-tracing while using the Mesa RADV driver. For example, AMDVLK vs. RADV on the RX 9070 series shows the Mesa driver struggling with ray-tracing compared to the official AMD driver. But the good news is there's a concerted effort now to improve the AMD RDNA4 ray-tracing performance with RADV.

Upstreamed to the Linux kernel last year was the alienware-wmi-wmax driver for enabling thermal control support on various Alienware and Dell G-Series systems. Being merged today as a "fix" for Linux 6.15 is extending that thermal control support to a number of additional Dell/Alienware systems.

Today the review embargo lifts on the Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" SoCs: wow, what an upgrade! I've spent the past week testing out the Framework 13 with the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and it's been terrific. Framework 13's modularity continues to pay off and allows easily upgrading to the new Strix Point bearing motherboard with AMD Zen 5 CPU cores and the Radeon 890M (RDNA 3.5) integrated graphics. If you are on a fresh Linux distribution the support is in great shape and paired with great performance for delivering a great 2025 Linux laptop option.

Ubuntu 25.04 ISO images are now available for download along with the various flavors of this newest six-month, non-LTS Linux distribution update.

Arch Linux is the latest Linux distribution replacing its Redis packages with the Valkey fork.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) code was branched today to the releases/gcc-15 branch and GCC 16.0.0 is now the version on the main development branch.

In addition to this week's updated Intel oneVPL GPU Runtime, Intel's software engineers also released their new quarterly version of the Intel Media Driver that provides Video Acceleration API (VA-API) support for integrated graphics hardware going back to Broadwell processors and through the next-gen Panther Lake processors.

LXQt 2.2 was christened today as the newest stable update to this lightweight, open-source Qt desktop environment.

Released on Wednesday was IGC 2.10.8 as the newest update to the Intel Graphics Compiler that is used by their Compute Runtime OpenCL/Level-Zero stack on Windows and Linux as well as being used as their graphics shader compiler under their Windows driver.

Following the recent Plasma 6.3 desktop release, KDE Gear 25.04 is now available for shipping all of the latest and greatest KDE applications.

While Intel's Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" SoCs with on-package memory has been reported to be a one-off design, besides the integrated memory it was also notable for being a hybrid core design while lacking Hyper Threading (HT / SMT) support. The notion of hybrid P/E core CPUs without SMT looks like it will continue with Intel software engineers still exploring Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) around such layouts.

Released at the end of 2023 was TurnkeyML as an open-source collaboration between ONNX and AMD developers. TurnkeyML has evolved into focusing on making it easy to use the most important tools within the ONNX ecosystem and their Lemonade SDK to deploy large language models on various devices/accelerators Out today is TurnkeyML 6.2 with a focus on delivering better AMD Ryzen AI NPU support.

While Fedora 42 was just released yesterday, already Red Hat developers and the Fedora development community have been busy thinking about Fedora 43 that will debut this autumn. Among the early change proposals this week is one for better supporting Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) with this next Fedora Linux release.

Now that Mesa 25.1 is branched for this quarter's Mesa 3D feature release, Mesa 25.2 has entered development on the main Git branch. One of the first merged changes for Mesa 25.2 is removing the old OpenCL Gallium3D "Clover" driver.

Intel open-source software engineers last week posted a set of patches for a new driver: iXD. The three letter acronym party continues and this time even more difficult to decipher than some of their other obscure driver names.

Eric Engestrom is once again stepping up to manage the next quarterly Mesa driver feature release and thus today we have the on-time branching of Mesa 25.1 from Mesa Git and already the release of Mesa 25.1-rc1. This release brings many improvements to the collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers that should be ready for their stable debut in May.

With today's launch of the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti graphics card, NVIDIA has also introduced their first Linux driver beta in the R575 driver series.

Yesterday NVIDIA announced the GeForce RTX 5060 "Blackwell" graphics cards as their new, most affordable offering of the RTX 50 series. While the $299 GeForce RTX 5060 isn't shipping until next month, today the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 8GB goes on sale for $379 USD and the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is also hitting Internet retailers today and starting out at $429 USD. I've been testing out the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB the past several days under Linux and have initial GPU compute benchmarks to share today.

Following yesterday's official Fedora 42 release, Fedora 42 for RISC-V is now available. The delay in the Fedora 42 RISC-V builds is due to RISC-V not yet being a primary architecture and the RISC-V builds being unofficial and produced by the Fedora community.

Merged last month to the widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library was an initial Vulkan-based decoder for FFV1 for the FF Video 1 lossless video coding format. Should you be interested in using this FFV1 decoder on AMD GPUs, there's a reported 3x performance improvement with the newest code.