While there is the AMD openSIL project for open-source CPU silicon initialization for platforms moving forward with plans to ultimately replace AGESA and be more friendly toward the likes of Coreboot, for those on aging AMD Bulldozer and Piledriver era platforms there is some updated open-source firmware available thanks to an independent free software project...

SparkyLinux is a lightweight, fast and simple Linux distribution designed for both old and new computers featuring customised Enlightenment and LXDE desktops. It has been built on the "testing" branch of Debian GNU/Linux.

Intel on Monday released version 0.1 of their Low Power Mode Daemon, the open-source daemon in development for several years now for optimizing active idle power on modern Intel Core (Ultra) CPUs under Linux...

It’s that time of the month again: a new version of Mozilla Firefox web browser is available — but what’s new? Well, a fair bit. Firefox 145 includes, amongst other changes, new comment/note taking tools in the built-in PDF editor, visual changes that see tabs, buttons and input fields made rounder, and better browser fingerprinting protections. As a refresher, last month saw Firefox 144 add Google Lens image search options, make the browser’s profile manager available to more users, and expand the on-device translation tool to transpose an array of additional languages (including Icelandic – Þá var tími!). For a […]

You're reading Firefox 145 Adds URL Fragment Creation, Rounder UI, PDF Notes + More, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Sentry is a toolkit for game devs to monitor errors, performance and more and now it should work a lot better on Linux / SteamOS with Wine / Proton.

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Hello GamingOnLinux readers! It's time again to open up the floor as they say so jump into the comments and give your latest recommendations.

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System76 engineer Victoria Brekenfeld and Red Hat engineer Sebastian Wick presented at the recent XDC2025 developer conference with their hopes of finally fixing the multi-GPU experience on Linux. As part of this is getting the necessary Wayland protocols in order as well as a new gpu-daemon service for proper multi-GPU handling for the Linux desktop...

New Linux kernel patches currently undergoing review will allow AMD Ryzen AI NPU power metrics to be exposed under Linux. In turn this is useful for helping to gauge the utilization of the neural processing unit and also helping to evaluate the actual power efficiency of leveraging the AMD Ryzen AI NPU...

The YouTube video recordings for the X.Org Developers' Conference 2025 that took place at the end of September in Austria are finally available. Among the many interesting XDC2025 presentations was Intel engineer Matthew Brost talking about the GPU Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) within Intel's modern Xe kernel graphics driver...

The SDL3 library that is popular with cross-platform games for abstracting various software/hardware features has implemented render batching for its built-in rendering API. This render batching is successfully wired up now for Direct3D 11/12, Apple Metal, and Vulkan APIs for more efficient graphics rendering...

Slimbook OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution customised for the Slimbook line of Linux computers assembled in Spain. It offers a choice of GNOME or KDE Plasma desktops on a single ISO image which also includes some custom extensions and utilities. The distribution provides its own repositories for some software, prioritising DEB and Flatpak packages over Ubuntu's snap options. Some of the other interesting features of Slimbook OS include touchpad gestures (enabled by default), Slimbook service notifications, window tiling, the Terminator terminal emulator, a Ulauncher application for fast searching, and a day/night mode switcher.

Rust-based fish shell has just released a new version, landing a catch of improvement sure to reel in (I’m sorry) those seeking out a bash alternative. Fish 4.2.0 (go on; go leave the obvious comment) nets a couple of minor-ish new features — it’s already a capable shell — with the big one being that fish will now auto-suggest multi-line commands from your command history as you type. Those of you who routinely run commands making use of line breaks or continuation characters to chain actions (or just prettify input so it’s easily readable) this is likely to be a […]

You're reading Fish 4.2 Released with Multi-line Command Suggest + More, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

While there is already AMDXDNA as one of the few currently mainline drivers in the accelerator "accel" subsystem for supporting AMD Ryzen AI NPUs, another AMD accel driver is on the way: amd_vpci. The new amd_vpci driver patches were posted today for review as AMD continues to further expand their diverse offerings in the ecosystem...

EasyEffects is the open-source application formerly known as PulseEffects that transitioned to using native PipeWire filters for providing simple audio effects on the Linux desktop. EasyEffects makes it easy to apply different audio effects like bass enhancer, compressor, pitch shift, reverberation, and many more. With this week's release of EasyEffects 8.0, the user interface has been rewritten in Qt / QML / Kirigami rather than GTK4...

Following yesterday's release of Rust Coreutils 0.4, GNU Coreutils 9.9 is now available as the latest update to this set of core utilities common to Linux systems and other platforms...

Minisforum, a Chinese company famed for selling range of mini PCs, has launched an affordable ARM-based mini workstation with UEFI boot, making it easier to run Linux distributions without the need for custom firmware or bootloaders. The MS-R1 is designed for local inference tasks, Android VM containers in Docker and edge computing. It could (distro dependant) be used as an ARM-powered general purpose desktop PC, but cheaper and more versatile options are out there. It runs a customised version of Debian 12. Other Linux distributions with generic ARM images may work, though some could require tweaks, drivers or newer Linux […]

You're reading Minisforum MS-R1: 12-Core Linux ARM Workstation for AI and VMs, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Google Cloud today is rolling out their N4D compute instances that are optimized for cost/price-performance and geared for general purpose workloads. The N4D instances are powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" processors and offer very nice performance and value over their prior-generation general purpose VMs.

Hello GamingOnLinux readers! It's time again to open up the floor as they say so jump into the comments and give your latest recommendations.

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Volumio (formerly RaspyFi) is a Debian-based Linux distribution designed and fine-tuned exclusively for music playback. It runs on a variety of devices, typically small and cheap computers like the Raspberry Pi, but also on low-power personal computers, notebooks or thin clients. It aims to fully integrate Music Player Daemon, an open-source music player server, into the current Debian releases and to optimise it for Audiophile-quality music playback. Volumio also makes it simple to play music library directly from a USB storage device or from any network-attached storage and it also enables users to listen to web-based radio stations from Spotify, Last.fm and SoundCloud.

Do you like single-player RTS games with a proper narrative to go with it? You may want to keep a close eye on the upcoming Crimson Freedom.

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The EasySMX X05 Pro was sent over for review and after spending weeks with it, this little device nearly turned into a favourite.

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We've have DXVK and VKD3D-Proton for various versions of Direct3D on Linux, but now it seems we're also getting Direct3D 7 as well.

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I'm not entirely sure what I thought of THRASHER but it's certainly a unique experience and it's officially out now with Linux / Steam Deck support.

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Last week when delivering some CachyOS benchmarks against Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 on the Framework Desktop with AMD Ryzen AI Max+, a few Phoronix readers wrote in with the question or belief that openSUSE Tumbleweed would better perform against CachyOS given the distribution's select x86_64-v3 packages and other advantages. As it's been a while since running any benchmarks of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed, here are those benchmarks now in the mix for seeing how the performance compares.