When beginning some early Linux 7.0 kernel benchmarking this week for looking at its performance in its early development state, I started off testing on Core Ultra X7 "Panther Lake" in being hopeful for better performance with the maturing Arc B390 Xe3 graphics and the like. But I ended up finding Intel Panther Lake seeing some performance regressions on Linux 7.0. So next up I turned to an AMD EPYC Turin server since if regressions existed there at least it's much faster to carry out bisecting of the kernel performance regressions. But with that initial testing wrapped up, I didn't find any regressions like with Panther Lake and standing out were some rather enticing PostgreSQL database server performance benefits when running atop Linux 7.0.

Argent Linux is a Gentoo-based Linux distribution featuring the KDE Plasma desktop and designed for workstations and servers. It uses the systemd service manager which, as it is not available in the upstream Gentoo repositories, the project itself provides in the form of binary packages. The distribution favours the epkg package manager, a highly simplistic wrapper over portage, specially designed for precompiled binaries. Argent Linux maintains a semi-rolling release model, with a stable branch and a development (testing) branch.

The GOG Preservation Program expands again to include more classic games that will be kept alive with patches from the GOG team like The Wolf Among Us.

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Following GNOME 50's Mutter merging sdr-native color mode support for wide color gamut displays this week, another late addition to Mutter has now been merged ahead of next month's GNOME 50 stable release...

While we are on the horizon of seeing PCI Express 6.0 devices, there are already early Linux kernel patches beginning to surface for PCI Express 7.0...

MOUSE: P.I. For Hire is arriving on March 19th and ahead of release a new trailer shows off one of the boss fights, and it really does look awesome.

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Lexispell from MrEliptik is a roguelike that has you spell out words for points with some Balatro-styled mechanics, and the new demo is worth a go.

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Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth is set to arrive on April 27th from he creators of Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley, giving us another lovely adventure.

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Ahead of the Linux 7.0 merge window ending this weekend, the PHY updates were merged this week for this next major kernel release. There are some notable PHY additions particularly for Apple Silicon USB Type-C support as well as additions for Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X2 laptop SoCs...

The ace Luxtorpeda project has expanded, and now it makes it real easy to install the popular MGSHDFix pack for various Metal Gear games on Linux / Steam Deck.

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Unfortunately the stock availability of the Steam Deck has only worsened recently, with the EU now appearing to be completely out of stock.

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Canonical engineer Utkarsh Gupta announced today on the behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team that the Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon" has entered its feature freeze...

Cloud Hypervisor 51 is now available for this Rust-based VMM focused on secure cloud computing. For what began as an Intel open-source project years ago is continuing to be largely led by Microsoft, Cyberus Tech, Tencent, Ant Group, and others...

Last year LunarG announced KosmicKrisp as a new Vulkan implementation atop Apple's Metal API. Initially targeting macOS, KosmicKrisp since was merged to Mesa and has evolved quite nicely as a modern implementation of Vulkan-on-Metal for Apple Silicon. It continues moving ahead with an eye for iOS, more performance optimizations, and completing Vulkan 1.4 support...

All of the Thunderbolt/USB driver changes were merged this week for the nearly-over Linux 7.0 merge window...

Mega Crit just revealed that Slay the Spire 2 is set to arrive in Early Access on March 5, and we're getting 4-player co-op with the launch.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Widelands is a free and open source Settlers-like strategy game, and their developers appear to be setting a firm stance against an AI generated contributions.

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Unfortunately the stock availability of the Steam Deck has only worsened recently, with Europe now appearing to be completely out of stock.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Fluff Linux is an Arch-based distribution featuring a standard KDE Plasma desktop. It is developed by FluffNet, with a focus on delivering a stable, high-performance and hassle-free computing experience.

BleachBit 5.1.0 beta is out with a new cookie manager, expert mode to prevent accidental data loss, new browser support, and fixes for Linux users.

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Vulkan 1.4.344 is out today as the latest routine spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API. Besides a handful of fixes and clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.344 brings a new extension courtesy of Valve engineers...

AUSTRUMI (Austrum Latvijas Linukss) is a bootable live Linux distribution based on Slackware Linux. It requires limited system resources and can run on any Intel-compatible system with a CD-ROM installed. The entire operating system and all of the applications run from RAM, making AUSTRUMI a fast system and allowing the boot medium to be removed after the operating system starts.

It's not too surprising but the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 Long Term Support release will be transitioning to OpenJDK 25 as its default Java version...

TrueNAS CORE (previously known as FreeNAS) is a free and Open Source Network-Attached Storage (NAS) operating system that supports file, block and object storage. TrueNAS CORE is FreeBSD based and is a community-supported branch of the TrueNAS project, sponsored by iXsystems. It also has a commercial branch called TrueNAS Enterprise and a free and HyperConverged storage solution called TrueNAS SCALE. The TrueNAS SCALE branch is based on the Debian Linux distribution.