Steam Frame VR Headset Sees Mainline Support With Linux 7.4

The mainline Linux 7.4 kernel will be capable of running on the Steam Frame VR headset...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Frame-FR-Linux-7.4

AV2 Video Codec Adoption Talked Up, SVT-AV2 Being Developed

Back in May the AV2 v1.0 specification was released for this next-generaton, royalty-free video codec. This week the Alliance For Open Media issued a press release talking up the early adoption of AV2...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AV2-Adoption-Plus-SVT-AV2

SpacemiT Announces The V100 Server-Class RISC-V Processor

Following the interesting SpacemiT K3 RVA23 RISC-V SoC, SpacemiT today announced the V100 server-class RISC-V processor...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/SpacemiT-V100

Linux 7.3 Released With Faster I/O Performance, AMD Zen 6 Preparations & More

The Linux 7.3 kernel is out today for an on-time release of this next stable kernel version...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Released

Claude Code / AI Shows Potential For Reverse-Engineering Hardware For Linux Support

AI/LLMs like Claude Code are beginning to prove capable of helping to reverse engineer hardware for Linux support, especially when it comes to the tedious reverse engineering tasks...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AI-Reverse-Engineer-Linux-HW

Microsoft Releases Microsoft Defender For The Linux Desktop

Microsoft's newest software release for Linux is... Microsoft Defender for the Linux desktop. Microsoft Defender has been ported to Linux to "secure Linux desktops" with Microsoft acknowledging that "more developers begin to use Linux desktops" and thus bringing their security application and threat-protection product to Linux desktops to complement their prior ill-used Linux server support...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-Defender-For-Linux-D

KDE Plasma 6.8 Ready For Release Next Week, Sees Last Minute NVIDIA Fix

KDE Plasma 6.8 is gearing up for its official debut next week in coinciding with the 30th anniversary since the KDE project began...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.8-Next-Week

Valve's Work On Foveated Rendering For The Open-Source Turnip Driver On The Steam Frame

As part of Valve's work on developing the Steam Frame VR headset, they worked on foveated rendering support for the Mesa Turnip driver that supports the Qualcomm Adreno graphics with open-source Vulkan API support. Foveated rendering is the technique to more closely mimic human vision by rendering high detail at your direct gaze point and lower quality in the peripheral vision. For c…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Frame-Turnip-Foveated

"Shiva" Being Developed For Mesa Vulkan Drivers, Akin To Gallium3D

Shiva is entering development for Mesa Vulkan drivers as a new framework akin to Gallium3D but for Vulkan drivers rather than OpenGL. It's going to be some time before the work will come to fruition but should hopefully lead to more code sharing and a better Mesa Vulkan driver development experience in the future...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Shiva-For-Vulkan

Alibaba Contributing $3M USD To Omarchy To Work On Making "Ideal" Agentic OS

The Omarchy project announced today that Alibaba Cloud will be contributing a total of three million USD to their foundation for helping development of this Linux distribution and working to make it an "ideal agentic operating system"...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Omarchy-Alibaba-3M

Valve Introduces Pyrowave Video Codec In Beta For Low Latency Streaming

Valve's Steam client beta today introduced Pyrowave as an experimental video codec for high bandwidth, low-latency video streaming...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Valve-Steam-Beta-Pyrowave

Chrome/Chromium Experimenting With Flatpak Packaging

Google engineers responsible for the Chrome/Chromium web browser are experimenting with Flatpak packaging on Linux. They aren't yet committed to officially supporting Flatpak packages but for now are at least exploring the option...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Chrome-Chromium-Flatpak

X.Org Server 26.1 RC1 Prepares For First Feature Release In Five Years

Following today's release of XWayland 26.1 RC1, X.Org Server 26.1 RC1 was tagged. This xorg-server 26.1 release is aiming to become the first major feature release in five years, succeeding the xorg-server 21.1 series...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-26.1-RC1

Additional Old Linux Drivers Face Removal Due To Noise From AI/LLM Coding Agents

There continues to be a lout of cleaning up of the kernel source tree to deal with noise generated by AI / LLM coding agents sending in reports and patches for old drivers that are likely not actively used by anyone on modern upstream kernel builds. Rather than continuing to carry these old drivers around with the uptick in AI/LLM-generated noise, kernel maintainers are finding it better to…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Retiring-Moxa-Driver

Steam On Linux Use Back Above 4% In July

Valve just published the Steam Survey results for July 2026 and point to a small uptick in Linux gaming use...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-On-Linux-July-2026

KDE Plasma 6.8 To Enjoy Huge Performance Gains For Multi-GPU/eGPU Performance

It's been a very exciting week in the KDE Plasma 6.8 development space particularly thanks to performance work on bettering KWin's multi-GPU / external GPU handling...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Plasma-6.8-Faster-eGPU

The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

If you are looking for a reason to celebrate today, the last of the MPEG-4 Part 2 patents expired today...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Last-MPEG-4-Patent-Expired

FreeBSD Laptop Support Continues Improving With WiFi, GPU & Audio Driver Work

The FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Project, which has received more than $750k USD in funding to improve the experience of FreeBSD on laptops, is out with its newest monthly progress report. A lot continues to happen for improving the FreeBSD laptop story, which in many aspects also benefits FreeBSD on the desktop too...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Laptops-June-2026

Khronos Lists First Conformant OpenCL 3.1 Implementation: Apple M1/M2 On Asashi Linux With Rusticl

Back in May OpenCL 3.1 was announced with a focus on AI and HPC workloads. Just over two months later, this incremental update over OpenCL 3.0 mow has its first listed conformant OpenCL 3.1 implementation for passing the OpenCL 3.1 conformance test suite cases. It's Apple Silicon M1/M2 graphics running on Asahi Linux with the Mesa Rusticl driver...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenCL-3.1-Conformance-Apple

Fedora Council Seeks To Shutdown Current Discussions Over AI Developer Desktop

Stemming from the widely varying views over the recent Fedora proposal for an "AI Developer Desktop" catering to running local AI and machine learning workloads in pre-configured environments with a seamless hardware-accelerated experience, the Fedora Council issued a statement this evening to effectively shutdown discussions for now over a Fedora AI Developer Desktop and to pause the Fedora …
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Council-AI-Desktop