Notices by Phoronix (phoronix@masto.ai), page 2

KDE Merges Per-Screen Virtual Desktops After 21 Years

A request made a KDE user all the way back in June 2005 on KDE 3.3.2 is finally resolved. After being sought after for 21 years, the latest KWin code now has support for per-screen virtual desktops...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Per-Screen-Virt-Desktops

Debian Is Figuring Out How Age Verification Laws Will Impact It

With age verification/attestation laws down to the OS level enacted by California and being decided upon by other US states, it's been a hot topic of discussion in the open-source world. For the Debian project that is strictly volunteer/community-driven unlike various commercial Linux platforms, they are figuring out how such laws will impact them...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Undecided-Age-Laws

MidnightBSD 4.0.4 Released With Aged & Agectl For Age Verification/Attestation

MidnightBSD 4.0.4 is out today as the newest update to this desktop-minded BSD operating system. Notable with this update is introducing the Aged daemon and Agectl program for handling age verification and age attestation given the increasing number of US states pursuing laws around age verification at the OS user level...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MidnightBSD-4.0.4

Intel Announces The "Optimization Zone"

Intel today formally announced the Optimization Zone as a new initiative at the company that began last October and is building up a centralized repository for maximizing performance and software optimizations around Intel hardware...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Optimization-Zone

Ubuntu MATE Leader Stepping Down, Seeking New Contributors

After starting and leading the Ubuntu MATE flavor since 2014, Martin Wimpress announced he's looking to step down from leading this flavor of Ubuntu Linux with the MATE desktop environment. He's hoping for new passionate contributors to keep it going...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-MATE-Needs-Leader

XMMS Codebase Brought Back To Life By AI With GTK4 + GStreamer/PipeWire Port

Longtime Linux desktop users will likely remember the glorious days of the XMMS music player inspired by Winamp. It's been about two decades since the last official release but thanks to AI there is now a modern port of the codebase to GTK4 and GStreamer/PipeWire...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/XMMS-AI-Port-To-PipeWire-GTK4

LibreOffice 26.8 To Add A Donation Banner To Its Start Center

LibreOffice 26.8 merged initial support for adding a donation banner to its Start Center. This initial UI when launching LibreOffice aims to make users aware of the community-driven focus of the project and to hopefully solicit additional donations from the community...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/LibreOffice-26-Donation-Banner

Ubuntu Maker Canonical Announces MicroCloud Cluster Manager

Ubuntu maker Canonical announced today MicroCloud Cluster Manager that is now in beta as a new cloud platform for managing lightweight cloud clusters...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Canonical-MicroCloud

systemd 260 Released: mstack, SysV Service Scripts Removed & AI Agents Documentation

Systemd 260 was just released as the newest stable version of this widely-used Linux init system and service manager. Systemd 260 brings yet more features to this critical open-source project and to be incorporated into H1'2026 Linux distributions...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-260-Released

AMD, NVIDIA, OpenAI & Others Form An Optical Scale-up Consortium

AMD, Broadcom, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and OpenAI jointly announced today the formation of the Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) optical scale-up consortium...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Optical-Compute-Interconnect

MSI PRO B850-P WiFi: A Special AMD Ryzen AM5 Motherboard For Linux / Open-Source Enthusiasts

The MSI PRO B850-P WIFI motherboard is a unique AMD Ryzen AM5 motherboard for Linux/open-source enthusiasts that is competitively priced at just $179 USD. It's interesting not because of the doings of MSI but rather 3mdeb with this being the desktop motherboard they are working on porting AMD openSIL and Coreboot to for allowing an open-source firmware stack.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/msi-pro-b850p-wifi

3mdeb Making Progress On AMD Ryzen AM5 Motherboard Port With Coreboot + openSIL

In addition to the 3mdeb firmware consulting firm porting Coreboot with AMD openSIL to an EPYC 9005 "Turin" Gigabyte motherboard, their developers have also been working on a similar Coreboot + openSIL port to an AM5 Ryzen consumer motherboard...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/3mdeb-Ryzen-MSI-Port-Progress

AMD EPYC Turin 128 Core Comparison: EPYC 9745 "Zen 5C" vs. EPYC 9755 "Zen 5"

The AMD EPYC 9755 128-core Zen 5 server processor has been benchmarked a lot at Phoronix since the EPYC 9005 "Turin" launch as their top-end Zen 5 server processor with "full fat" cores compared to the denser Zen 5C cores that extend up to the EPYC 9965 at 192 cores. For those eyeing the 128 core per socket sweet spot, there is also the EPYC 9745 that is made up of 128 Zen 5C cores that allows …
https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9745-9755

GNU Hurd On Guix Is Ready With 64-bit Support, SMP Multi-Processor Support "Soon"

After hearing last month that GNU Hurd is "almost there" with x86_64 support, it was exciting to kickoff today by seeing a developer headline "The 64-bit Hurd is Here!" GNU Hurd 64-bit support is now said to be ready but SMP support for multiple processor cores and the like remain still in development...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Hurd-64-bit-2026

AerynOS 2026.02 Brings More Wayland Compositor Options, Other Improvements

AerynOS 2026.02 was released for closing out February as the newest alpha release for this Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS. In AerynOS 2026.02 are many package updates plus continued work on the tooling and other innovations around this Linux distribution...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AerynOS-2026.02

Linux 7.0 Retires The IBM Mwave ACP Modem Driver Used By Some 1990s ThinkPads

Long past due for retirement, the Linux 7.0 kernel has removed the obsolete Mwave driver for the 3780i ACP Modem found in some Pentium II era IBM ThinkPads from the 1990s...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Retires-Mwave

NTFS3 Driver Sees Improvements In Linux 7.0 While "NTFS Remake" Driver Bakes

The NTFS3 driver maintained by Paragon Software for Microsoft NTFS file-systems today saw a batch of improvements merged for Linux 7.0 This comes as there is also the competing "NTFS Remake" driver that began a few months ago as the "NTFSPLUS" driver. That NTFS Remake driver isn't looking like it will be submitted for the Linux 7.0 merge window so at least for now the NTFS3 driver continues see…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/NTFS3-Linux-7.0

wlroots 0.20 Nears Release With New Protocols, Enhanced Vulkan Renderer

Version 0.20 of the popular wlroots Wayland support library is nearing its official release. Over the past week were two release candidates for wlroots 0.20 were published for this library used by Sway, Wayfire, Cage, Gamescope, and numerous other Wayland compositors...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/wlroots-0.20-Released

AMD openSIL + Coreboot Being Ported To A Modern AM5 Consumer Motherboard

While we are very eager for the AMD openSIL open-source CPU silicon initialization project to achieve production readiness with Zen 6 platforms for ultimately replacing AGESA, there is some experimental excitement on the way for open-source firmware enthusiasts... OpenSIL and Coreboot are being brought to an AM5 motherboard you can buy retail...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-openSIL-Coreboot-AM5-Zen-5

Experimental Zones Protocol Merged To Wayland After 2+ Years, 620+ Comments

After the merge request was opened back in 2023 and after going through 628 comments/activity, merged now to Wayland Protocols is the experimental zones "xx-zones" implementation for area-limited window positioning...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayland-Experimental-Zones