PikaOS Linux is a Linux distribution based on Debian's cutting-edge "Unstable" branch, optimised for gaming. It is designed to provide out-of-the-box gaming experience, excellent performance with up-to-date drivers and custom-tweaked Linux kernel, and a choice of GNOME or KDE Plasma desktops, with separate editions that use the Hyprland Wayland compositor.

GNOME's Glycin project as the Rust-based sandboxed and extendable image loading library now supports XPM and XBM images. This is notable since those formats were the last unsandboxed image loading formats used on Fedora Linux...

Beyond Linux 6.19 switching old AMD GCN 1.0 and 1.1 GPUs to the AMDGPU kernel driver by default for better performance, RADV out-of-the-box, and more, there are still more improvements planned for these aging AMD graphics cards. Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team has been leading the effort to enhance the old graphics card support and on Friday night merged a big improvement for the RADV Vulkan driver in Mesa 26.0...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with the first issue of This Week in Plasma for 2026. Last week was a warning that This Week in Plasma could become less frequent without new volunteers to help takeover. Nate Graham announced that John Veness has stepped up to help co-author these weekly KDE development posts...

blendOS is an Arch Linux-based, rolling-release distribution which automates installing software from supported distributions (Arch Linux, Fedora and Ubuntu) into containers. blendOS tries to make software management in across containers feel native and provides access to the user's home directory for each container.

Aeon is an immutable desktop Linux distribution based on openSUSE. It is a relatively small, low-maintenance system with automated daily updates, thus recommended for Linux beginners or "lazy developers". Some of the distribution's other features include a custom system installer called Transactional Installation Kit (TIK), a pre-configured GNOME desktop, out-of-the-box support for Flatpak packages, Distrobox configured to launch Tumbleweed containers, and automatic rollbacks to its last working state.

EasyOS is an experimental Linux distribution which uses many of the technologies and package formats pioneered by Puppy Linux. The distribution features custom container technology called Easy Containers which can run applications or the entire desktop environment in a container. Packages, desktop settings, networking and sharing resources over the network can all be controlled through graphical utilities.

Expirion Linux is a Devuan-based desktop distribution which offers LXQt and Xfce desktop editions. The project provides separate releases built from the latest "stable" and "testing" branches of Devuan, with runit and SysV as init system options. Expirion ships with a more recent kernel than Devuan does and it also adds some user-friendly touches, custom themes and wallpapers, as well as productivity applications, such as LibreOffice, Chromium, Firefox, Thunderbird, Audacity, Brasero and VLC.

The Aeryn OS Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS has published a 2025 retrospective to recap the project changes over the past year as well as a look ahead to 2026...

What changed in Ubuntu in 2025? From the "oxidisation" of sudo to the end of X11, here's a recap of the 10 biggest changes the distro saw last year.

You're reading 10 Biggest Ubuntu Changes in 2025, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

A patch is on the way to the Linux kernel and looks like it could be ready for the 6.20~7.0 kernel for addressing out-of-memory "OOM" killer inaccuracy behavior when dealing with large core count systems...

A fresh new Humble Bundle to begin 2026 with some quality games and they're highly rated too, and they should all work on Linux / SteamOS.

.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

A new patch series that was posted this week allow for users to more easily replace the default kernel boot logo. While many of us are long accustomed to seeing the picture of Tux as the kernel boot logo, for those preferring to better customize your console boot experience these patches allow it to be easily manipulated via the kernel configuration "Kconfig" options...

Merged on New Year's Day was a set of 36 patches authored by well known AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák for refactoring the NIR compilation code for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

The D7VK project for providing Direct3D 7 support on Linux with Wine / Proton has expanded in the version 1.1 release to add experimental Direct3D 6 support.

.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Much like Epilogue did with the GB Operator for playing actual Game Boy cartridges, they've recently revealed the SN Operator for the SNES.

.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Now that 2025 is done and finished with, we can see what the most popular games were overall on Steam, and for Steam Deck the list is no big surprise at all.

.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

A fresh update on the upcoming game Hytale which will no doubt be quite popular, and it will have what they now say is "experimental" Linux support.

.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

The very popular gaming-focused Bazzite Linux has a fresh release out that ended 2025 with a little spring cleaning, and I've finally joined the ranks.

.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Another loss for game preservation and history, River City Ransom: Underground is being delisted from stores.

.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Another fresh release of the community-made compatibility layer GE-Proton, bringing fixes for some popular games and an issue with spatial audio.

.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Valve have released the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for December 2025, bringing with it a fresh look at how Linux / SteamOS are doing on Steam.

.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

The first bug fix release of 2026 for the open source graphics drivers Mesa is here with Mesa 25.3.3 out now.

.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

During the month of December on Phoronix there was new and original content each and every day, ending the month with 305 original news articles and 25 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Here is a look back at the most exciting Linux/open-source hardware content in ending out 2025...