Open-source developer Joel Severin today announced his work on porting the Linux kernel to WebAssembly and has successffully gotten the kernel up and running within WASM-capable web browsers...

NebiOS is an Ubuntu-based desktop Linux distribution with a custom Wayland compositor called NebiDE (based on Wayfire). It features various user interface enhancements, an initial setup module called OOBE, the NebiOS App Runtime (napp-runtime) portable application format with bubblewrap containerization, improved gaming performance with Steam Proton integration, a kernel switcher for easy multi-kernel installation, and the Wine compatibility layer for running some Windows applications. NebiOS is intended as a general-purpose operating system for daily computing tasks, including creative work and gaming.

Kicking off November for Arch Linux users happen to be the releases of Pacman 7.1 as well as Archinstall 3.0.12...

Restructuring to the Linux kernel's PCI Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support is set to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle...

MocaccinoOS is an independently-developed Linux distribution that has its origins in source-based Gentoo Linux and Sabayon Linux. It uses a custom-built package manager called "Luet", which acts as a front-end for container-based software. The distribution's main features are minimalism and small footprint, ease of use, native vanilla Linux kernels, and support for most important cloud technologies. MocaccinoOS is offered in several variants, including live images with GNOME, KDE Plasma, MATE and Xfce desktops, as well as command-line-only "Minimal Desktop" edition.

HydraPWK GNU/Linux is a Debian-based distribution designed primarily for penetration testing. It contains a collection of penetration testing tools, including tools for information gathering, scanning, stress testing, exploitation, cracking, reversing engineering and forensics. Formerly known as BlackTrack, the distribution uses a real-time Linux kernel and features the Xfce desktop.

During the month of October on Phoronix were 305 original news articles around Linux/open-source and another 21 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. There was an exciting mix of software and hardware happenings over the past month. Here is a look back at what excited readers the most...

In mid-October a Meta engineer uncovered an RDSEED architectural issue with AMD Zen 5 CPUs. A patch in turn was sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list to disable RDSEED usage on affected Zen 5 processors. AMD this week issued a security bulletin to acknowledge the issue and report that a microcode fix is coming...

Kiro is an Arch Linux-based distribution with the goal of being an intuitive and customisable ISO image builder. It provides a simple way to build a custom Arch-based installation medium with a choice of packages, settings and scripts. Kiro uses the Xfce desktops, includes the Calamares system installer, and has a modular structure.

Dr.Parted Live is a bootable GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian's "Testing" branch. It is a live image featuring a lightweight Openbox window manager and useful applications for disc partitioning as well as data backup, restore and recovery.

KDE Plasma developers continue to be busy landing more fixes for the recently introduced Plasma 6.5 while also lining up more new features for Plasma 6.6...

Shanios is an immutable desktop Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. It provides optimised builds of the GNOME and KDE Plasma desktop environments. Like most immutable Linux systems, Shanios features rollbacks for instant system recovery, atomic updates through a custom deployment tool called shani-deploy, and Flatpak integration. The distribution's other main features include a blue-green deployment strategy using Btrfs subvolumes, preservation of system integrity with a read-only root partition, and enhanced security through AppArmor profiles, firewalld configurations, and full-disk encryption.

Wine 10.18 is now available for capping off the month of October and working toward the code freeze for Wine 11.0 beginning in early December...

Calam Arch Installer is an Arch-based Linux distribution created to facilitate the installation of an Arch Linux system to a hard disk. It is also a full-featured live Linux system with Xfce as the preferred desktop. The Calamares system installer offers a choice of several popular desktop environments and window managers, including Budgie, Cinnamon, Deepin, GNOME, i3, KDE Plasma, MATE, Openbox and Xfce. The distribution also offers support for both BIOS and UEFI boot, as well as hard disk encryption with LUKS.

For GNOME desktop users desiring a more macOS-like experience, a new GNOME extension provides a macOS-inspired quick menu option...

Over the summer months LunarG announced KosmicKrisp as a new Vulkan-on-Metal implementation for Apple devices and built around Mesa. That alternative to MoltenVK was upstreamed for next quarter's Mesa 26.0 release and now it's also celebrating being an officially Vulkan 1.3 conformant implementation...

A blast from the past returns in style, with Serious Sam 2 from Croteam recently getting a huge 20th Annviersary Update and now it has been Steam Deck Verified.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Yesterday Canonical announced architecture variants for Ubuntu Linux with Ubuntu 25.10 seeing the introduction of "amd64v3" packages that are built for the x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level to assume AVX/AVX2 and other newer CPU ISA features found since Intel Haswell and AMD Excavator processors. Eager to run some initial tests, here is a first look at the Ubuntu 25.10 amd64v3 performance for desktop workloads.

A very nice selection of games here ready for Halloween with the Indie Fears Humble Bundle that makes it a top deal!

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

This is a little PSA to Linux users and Linux gamers, with news reports out there about AMD shifting focus away from certain GPUs.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

A smaller team at Relic Entertainment under the Relic Labs umbrella have released Earth vs Mars, a homage to some classic strategy games like Advance Wars.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

ARK: Survival Ascended entered Early Access in 2023, and while it worked well enough on Linux / Steam Deck - Valve noted it was Unsupported until now.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Over the past day there have been many reports of AMD planning to no longer provide game optimizations for the Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series graphics cards for their Microsoft Windows driver. Surprisingly many in the Linux community still seem to think it will impact the Linux drivers, but long story short, there is no real concern for Linux users/gamers...

Last week there was a fix for a "serious performance regression" in the Linux kernel's power management code that affected some Intel-powered Chromebooks. This week the power management fixes ahead of Linux 6.18-rc4 is addressing another performance regression...