Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

KDE e.V. along with Linux PC vendor Kubuntu Focus and KDE-aligned consulting firm Techpaladin Software have announced a collaboration of the "bullet-proof KDE Software initiative" for providing at least three years of bug fixes and security updates to KDE Plasma 6.6 LTS and related software.

With the Linux 7.2 kernel expected to be released on Sunday, 16 August, here is a look at some of the most interesting new features and changes to find with this next kernel version to be used by Ubuntu 26.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases.

In addition to 3mdeb providing their Coreboot-based Dasharo built atop AMD openSIL on a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard and recently making their first Dasharo release for an AMD Ryzen AM5 platform with the MSI PRO B850-P WIFI, the firmware consulting firm today released updated versions of their MSI PRO Z690-A and MSI PRO Z790-P Dasharo ports to those Intel Core motherboards.

At the beginning of the year NVIDIA released a native build of GeForce NOW for Linux using Flatpaks. Today their native Linux build has exited beta to reach official production status for this cloud gaming solution from NVIDIA.

The MSI Claw Gamepad driver is set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel for enabling RGB lighting and controller configuration support with the mainline kernel.

While the Apple M4 SoCs aren't yet supported by the mainline Linux kernel and the Apple M3 series hardware isn't yet ready for end-users, there are some early elements of the Apple M4 support beginning to come together by open-source developers working on the Apple Silicon support. Sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list were patches for enabling NVMe solid state drive support with the M4.

While Microsoft continues working on Azure Linux 4.0 as its overhauled Linux distribution built atop Fedora, Azure Linux 3.0 remains the current stable production series. Released overnight was Azure Linux 3.0.20260809 and it comes with more than 233 security patches for recent CVEs in the AI era.

Intel XPU Manager 2.1 is now available as the latest version of this open-source tool for Linux and Windows systems for the monitoring and management of Arc Pro graphics cards. The Intel XPU Manager helps in keeping an eye on device utilization and other metrics via the xpu-smi command and other components.

Rsync as the widely-used, open-source remote sync software for synchronizing files and directories across networks is out today with a very important update.

George Hotz of Comma.ai and Tinygrad today announced the Tiny Chestnut eGPU Dock and the "Chestnut" Dock complete with an AMD Radeon RX 9060 8GB GPU too. Making this Chestnut / Tiny Chestnut Dock interesting is that it runs on open-source firmware.

While the Tenstorrent Ascalon X is known as their high performance out-of-order RISC-V RVA23 CPU core for extreme performance over the H and S models, a new GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) patch today from Tenstorrent makes known a new Ascalon XG core.

Merged today to the GNU Compiler Collection Git code is the new -m128bit-atomic option for next year's GCC 17 feature release.

Manjaro 26.1 Bian-May is now available as the newest feature release to this desktop Linux distribution built atop an Arch Linux base.

Patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list provide support for Apple GMUX hybrid graphics support on 2018~2019 Apple MacBook Pros. This allows for better power savings on these nearly decade old MacBook Pro laptops by allowing the discrete GPU to power down and be properly restored as needed.

Hyunjun Ko of Igalia continues working on Vulkan Video support for Intel graphics hardware on Linux with the ANV driver. Merged now for Mesa 26.3-devel is enabling AV1 video encoding via Vulkan Video on DG2/Alchemist hardware.

One of the Direct Rendering Manager changes made for Linux 7.2 was switching to "fair" as the DRM scheduler default in place of the existing FIFO policy. The intent was on making the DRM scheduler policy more fair with this being used by AMDGPU and various other DRM kernel graphics drivers. But due to a last minute regression report, the fair policy is being reverted for Linux 7.2.

It's been quiet since the Mold 2.41 release back in April while today it's now been succeeded by Mold 2.42 for deliver even greater performance out of this high speed linker.

Intel's LLM-Scaler project that was born out of their Project Battlematrix initiative aims to make it easier to run generative AI on Arc (Pro) B-Series graphics cards with the likes of vLLM, ComfyUI, SGLang, and other popular AI software in this Docker-based pre-configured AI stack. This week new LLM-Scaler releases brought same-day support for new models and other enhancements.

LACT is one of the popular third-party Linux GPU configuration and monitoring utilities that works across NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel graphics. This GUI provides GPU overclocking controls plus a wealth of information reporting, which is especially great considering the lack of any official GUI control panel for AMD Radeon and Intel Arc graphics on Linux. With today's LACT 0.10 release, there are yet more features in tow.

For those using QEMU as part of the open-source virtualization stack, QEMU 11.1 is now available with a number of new feature enhancements and fixes.

A new blog post out today from the Redox OS crew highlights all of the interesting improvements made to this Rust-based, open-source operating system over the course of July.

Intel today published their 20260811 CPU microcode updates to fix a variety of issues for existing processors, including shipping the first new microcode images for Bartlett Lake and Wildcat Lake. The new microcode updates stretch back to Intel Core Gen10 processors.

OpenAI announced today they have brought their ChatGPT Desktop application to Linux and is currently in preview form.

Flatpak 1.19 was released today as a new development release along with the Flatpak 1.18.1 stable point release. Both of these releases ship a number of newly-discovered security issues with this app sandboxing and distribution tech.

GNOME interaction designer Tobias Bernard has shared some of the plans and ideas for long-term GNOME Shell improvements they have been eyeing for future GNOME releases.

Linux developer Rik van Riel has pulled off some nice Linux kernel optimizations over the years and the Meta engineer has been working on another one around batching of look-ups with Linux's follow_page_mask() that is used for translating virtual addresses to the corresponding struct page.

One of the Raspberry Pi device drivers that has remained elusive from the mainline Linux kernel has been for the performance monitoring unit (PMU) for the Broadcom AXI on all Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 5 models. Thanks to the work of a Google engineer, there is a new effort working to get a mainline Linux driver for the Raspberry Pi AXI PMU.

FastFlowLM is the open-source software for getting vision, audio, embedding, and MoE large language models up and running on AMD Ryzen AI NPUs. FastFlowLM 1.0 released today and is also now part of the AMD ROCm software umbrella.

With the recent release of Mesa 26.2 the Rusticl OpenCL driver now supports OpenCL 3.1 on RadeonSI, LLVMpipe, Zink, Intel Iris, and Apple Asahi. But the work is not over and more improvements to this Rust-based, modern OpenCL driver continue to land.

The HP OmniBook X Flip 14-kc0xxx is an AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" powered laptop. While most AMD Strix Point laptops work fine on modern Linux distributions, with this particular HP OmniBook X there is no working audio with current mainline Linux kernel builds. With Claude Opus 5 acting as a debugging assistant and coding agent, patches are now pending to correct the audio support for this HP OmniBook X Flip 14 laptop to function on Linux.

Sent to DRM-Next this week was the DRM Rust core and driver changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window. There continues to be a lot of DRM core infrastructure work happening for Rust integration plus two leading Rust DRM drivers of Nova for open-source NVIDIA GPU support as the successor to Nouveau and then Tyr as the in-development Arm Mali driver.

Fedora's CoreOS as their container-optimized operating system will be moving to enable systemd-oomd by default with Fedora CoreOS 45. Additionally, swap on zRAM will be enabled by default too.

In addition to more ASUS motherboards having working sensors with Linux 7.3, this next kernel version will also get several more Lenovo laptop models to be reporting their fan sensor information under Linux.

Expected to be merged during the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window is a Kernel Control Flow Integrity (KCFI) improvement intended to benefit older Intel processors.

The Qt Group has been working on various AI integrations for the Qt toolkit in recent times like a QML profiler skill for agentic development to help with performance profiling. They have also worked on Qt AI coding assistants and AI agents in the Qt Creator integrated development environment. Their latest AI use is now preparing to introduce a new module in the Qt toolkit itself for edge AI inferencing.

Linux Mint is out today with their July 2026 status update that highlights all the improvements made to their distribution over the past month.

The Meta Superintelligence Labs announced this morning they have released Muse Glimmer as their next large language model featuring 30 billion parameters for always-on local agent workflows. Muse Glimmer features open-source model weights under an Apache 2.0 license.

A minor performance optimization is on the way to the Linux kernel for roughly two decade old CPUs that have SSE but lack SSE2. Among those CPUs to benefit are the AMD Athlon XP series, some early Sempron models, and some Intel Celeron and Pentium III models.

In addition to Linux 7.3 slated to receive initial Apple M3 Pro / Max / Ultra SoC support, this next version of the Linux kernel is also set to bring some minor power savings for the Apple M1 series that remains the best supported Apple Silicon on Linux.

On top of various other Linux drivers for old hardware being removed due to noise generated by AI/LLM coding agents, there are more examples coming with Linux 7.3 as some old Silicon Graphics (SGI) drivers are being removed from the mainline Linux kernel over security concerns.

Linux 7.2-rc7 is now available for testing as we close in on the official Linux 7.2 release hopefully next weekend.

CachyOS is out with its latest media refresh of the year. Beyond the usual desktop improvements for the performance-optimized CachyOS, they continue working toward the upcoming CachyOS Server Edition.

Qualcomm engineers posted a set of 15 patches today for the Linux kernel to enable the Qualcomm Kuno SoC support and their reference development platform.

The Intel graphics compiler code in Mesa 26.3-devel has now enabled the Large GRF mode for Alchemist/DG2 and Battlemage/Xe2 graphics and VRT for Xe3 graphics.

Launched back in 2021 was the Dell Latitude 7320 2-in-1 business laptop/tablet powered by the at-the-time impressive Intel 11th Gen Core "Tiger Lake" processors. Remaining elusive until now has been the web cameras actually working on Linux, but patches posted this weekend finally are cracking that mystery at least for the user-facing web cam.

For those still on the FreeBSD 14 N-1 stable series rather than the latest FreeBSD 15 series, FreeBSD 14.5 is working toward release to deliver various security fixes and backports.

For those with an ASUS ROG Ryujin III all-in-one CPU liquid cooling setup catering to gamers, there are now patches pending to enable this AIO liquid cooling setup to work under Linux for monitoring.

A set of patches from Intel are set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window to enhance the cluster-aware scheduling code so it better handles load balancing on modern Intel Core (Ultra) hybrid CPUs with a mix of P and E/LPE cores.

For those looking to manage the RGB lighting and other features of their Razer devices on Linux, Polychromatic 0.9.8 is now available for that UI front-end that interacts with the OpenRazer kernel drivers for providing a decent albeit unofficial Linux configuration experience.

Making its debut this Saturday rather than the usual bi-weekly Friday release regiment, Wine 11.15 is out today as the newest development release for this open-source software enabling Windows games and applications to run on Linux.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency announced earlier this year a new fellowship program and now as part of that, for the next two years GNOME has a fellow dedicated to working on design and community management.

It's been another busy week in the Linux kernel camp with increased patch activity continuing due to AI/LLM coding agents / bots continuing to uncover different defects in the open-source codebase. The hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem saw many fixes this week for issues mostly raised by the Sashiko AI bot with the issues being described as mostly critical or high severity bugs.

Thanks in part to the power of Claude Opus 5 and Claude Fable 5, a new Windows DirectX 11 driver for QEMU has been created to help improve graphics acceleration for Microsoft Windows guests running under QEMU virtual machines.

The input subsystem fixes for the week include a number of AI-driven patches to address various information leaks, out-of-bounds accesses, validation fixes, and other coding issues that have turned up recently. Plus some device quirks and also adding support for a rather funky gaming controller to the common XPad Linux driver used by many different gaming controllers.