Notices by Phoronix (phoronix@masto.ai), page 5

Servo Announces Sponsorship Tiers To Get More Organizations Backing This Browser Engine

The Servo open-source web browser engine has been making good progress in recent times. Long outside the confines of Mozilla and working as a Linux Foundation Europe project, Servo has been advancing thanks to Igalia and other open-source developers while getting by on around ~$5.7k USD per month thanks mostly to donations from individuals. Servo has now…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Servo-Sponsorship-Tiers

Dell Now Shipping Laptop With Qualcomm NPU On Linux Ahead Of Windows 11

Dell announced today that their new Pro Max 16 Plus laptop with a Qualcomm discrete NPU is now shipping... That is if you are running Ubuntu Linux while the Windows 11 pre-load option is expected in early 2026. An exciting twist with the Linux version of the Dell Pro Max 16 Plus shipping before Microsoft Windows...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Dell-Pro-Max-With-Qualcomm-NPU

Firefox 147 Will Support The XDG Base Directory Specification

A 21 year old bug report requesting support of the XDG Base Directory specification is finally being addressed by Firefox. The Firefox 147 release should respect this XDG specification around where files should be positioned within Linux users' home directory...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-147-XDG-Base-Directory

Wayland-Only Budgie 10.10 Desktop Preview Released

At the start of the year developers behind the Budgie desktop environment hoped for shipping Budgie 10.10 in Q1-2025. We are now in Q4 without a stable release but at long last a preview version is at least available. Budgie 10.10 is the point at which Budgie is going all-in on Wayland in leaving behind the X11 desktop session support...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Budgie-10.10-Preview

systemd Lands Experimental Support For musl libc

Systemd today finally merged support for building against and using the musl libc library. This is a win for Linux distributions like postmarketOS, Alpine Linux, and others that use musl by default as their standard C library or offer it as an option...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-musl-libc

NVIDIA Highlights The Shortcomings With Wayland Screencasting

In addition to showing the need for unifying DRM driver-side APIs within the Linux kernel, NVIDIA's Linux graphics driver team at XDC2025 also showcased the shortcomings of screencasting under Wayland...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Shortcomings-Screencast

ollama 0.12.11 Brings Vulkan Acceleration

ollama 0.12.11 released this week as the newest feature update to this easy-to-run method of deploying OpenAI GPT-OSS, DeepSeek-R1, Gemma 3, and other large language models. Exciting with ollama 0.12.11 is that it's now supporting the Vulkan API...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/ollama-0.12.11-Vulkan

Debian 13.2 Released With Dozens Of Fixes

Debian 13.2 is out today as the latest maintenance update to this current stable version of Debian GNU/Linux...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-13.2-Released

Proton 10.0-3 Released For Steam Play With Dozens Of Fixes, More Games Working

Valve and CodeWeavers today released Proton 10.0-3 as the newest stable update to this Wine-based software that powers Steam Play for enabling countless Windows games to run often extremely well under Linux...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Proton-10.0-3-Released

systemd-appd Is A New Component Being Planned By Flatpak Developers

Given this week's release of Flatpak 1.17 for app sandboxing, open-source developer Sebastian Wick published a blog post on Tuesday around the latest Flatpak developments and a look ahead at some of the feature development planned. Arguably most significant of that is the plans for systemd-appd...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-appd-Flatpak-Dev

AMD RadeonSI Driver Now Defaults To Enabling ACO For Faster Performance

Prominent AMD Radeon Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák just changed the RadeonSI driver's default from the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end over to the ACO back-end initially developed by Valve. This should lead to better performance and quicker shader compilation and in turn faster game loads...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/RadeonSI-ACO-Default-Mesa-26.0

GTK 4.22 To Natively Support SVG - Including Animations

GTK has long supported Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for icons but with up until recently relying on the external librsvg library, the integration hasn't been perfect. But Red Hat engineer Matthias Clasen has been working on having the GTK toolkit natively support SVG...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GTK-4.22-Native-SVG

Fedora Will Allow AI-Assisted Contributions With Proper Disclosure & Transparency

The Fedora Council has finally come to a decision on allowing AI-assisted contributions to the project. The agreed upon guidelines are fairly straight-forward and will permit AI-assisted contributions if it's properly disclosed and transparent...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Allows-AI-Contributions

Linux Mint LMDE 7 Officially Released - Based On Debian 13

Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 is officially out today as the latest version of this Linux Mint distribution based on upstream Debian rather than Ubuntu...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Mint-LMDE-7

Mir 2.23 Released With New Documentation For Building A Desktop Environment

Mir 2.23 is out today as the newest version of this Canonical-led library for crafting Wayland-based shells and for smaller desktops to ease the adoption of Wayland, with a focus on Ubuntu Linux platforms...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mir-2.23-Released

Solus Linux Preparing To Remove Python 2, Big systemd Upgrade & Finish /usr Merge

The Solus Linus project is preparing for an "epoch bump" so they can make breaking / high-impact changes to in effect bump the binary version of their package repository...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Solus-Linux-EOY-2025-Epoch

Cairo-Dock 3.6 Released With Wayland Support & HiDPI

Cairo-Dock is back after a decade hiatus! From the early 2010's you may remember Cairo-Dock / GLX-Dock as a complementary dock for your Linux desktop. The last time writing about it was the Cairo-Dock 3.4 release in 2014 when it was working toward EGL/Wayland support. Since then it was rather inactive the past decade besides a small 3.5 update one year ago with a few fixes. But out this w…
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Cairo-Dock-3.6-Released

Linux 6.17 Gets Ready For Release With Intel Panther Lake & More Performance

The Linux 6.17 kernel is tracking well for its planned stable release on Sunday. Here is a look back at some of the most interesting changes to find with this next kernel version...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.17-Features-Reminder

Steam Will End Windows 32-bit OS Support Next Year - Hopefully Linux Follows

Valve is finally pushing the Steam client beyond the 32-bit world, at least for Microsoft Windows...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Ending-32-bit-Windows

Casilda 1.0 Released As Wayland Compositor Widget For GTK4

Casilda 1.0 is out today as the Wayland compositor widget for the GTK4 toolkit...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Casilda-1.0-Wayland-GTK4