Linux

In addition to the proposed Hierarchical Queued NUMA-aware spinlocks for better performance, another interesting performance-enhancing patch series posted in the past 24 hours for the Linux kernel is for improving the performance of single-threaded tasks running on high core count CPU desktops / workstations / servers.

Gabriel Krisman Bertazi of SUSE posted the request for comments (RFC) patch series to better the performance of single-threaded tasks with today's many-core CPUs. The optimization is focused around the Linux kernel's "rss_stat" structure that holds statistics around the Resident Set Size (RSS) for the process with the amount of memory in use.

As some additional enticing Linux kernel patches posted this week for review, an updated patch series is working to optimize code generation during context switching.

Xie Yuanbin pposted the set of three patches working to optimize the compiler's code generation during context switching, which given its frequency can be an expensive task especially with the ever-increasing number of CPU security mitigations often making context switching even more costly.

It's been two months since there were any notable Intel Linux engineering departures to note following various layoffs and voluntary departures this year that have unfortunately impacted their Linux/open-source talent. Sadly this US Thanksgiving is a new departure to note: one of Intel's maintainers for the Xe open-source Linux kernel graphics driver is leaving the company. This is for the modern Xe driver used by default since Lunar Lake and playing a pivotal role for Intel Linux graphics moving forward

Whonix 18.0 is now available as a major release upgrade. However, if you haven’t heard of it, let me start with a brief introduction.

It’s a Debian-based distro, targeting privacy-focused individuals who require maximum anonymity protections, designed around a security architecture that separates all activities into two virtual machines: a Gateway VM that routes all traffic exclusively through the Tor network, and a Workstation VM that has no direct internet access and can only communicate through the Gateway.

This design isolates applications from the networking stack, preventing IP leaks even if software inside the Workstation is compromised. Now, back to the novelties in the new release.

Wine 10.20 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software enabling Windows applications and games to run on Linux. This is also with Wine 11.0 stable quickly approaching.

Wine 10.20 was released a few minutes ago while coming next Friday on 5 December will be Wine 11.0-rc1 to mark the beginning of the code freeze for the annual Wine stable release. Wine 11.0 is planning for a January debut and for that to happen the plan is to start the code freeze on 5 December, as previously communicated. Wine 11.0 is a big one with upstream NTSYNC support in the Linux kernel, continued WoW64 support, and many other features having landed over the past year.

We eagerly await to see if the AMD ISP4 driver will be ready for mainlining in the imminent Linux v6.19 merge window but it's getting down to the wire and thus looking less likely it will make it unless action is taken in the coming days. Today though a sixth version of this AMD ISP4 image signal processor driver was posted for this last piece of the puzzle in enabling the web camera on the HP ZBook Ultra G1a Strix Halo laptop as well as future Ryzen high-end laptops.

Getting this AMD ISP4 driver to the mainline kernel is all that's needed for getting the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop's web camera working nicely under Linux -- complete with working offloading unlike the latest Intel IPU-enabled web cameras relying on the CPU-based "Soft ISP" when relying on the open-source user-space software. For now the ISP4 IP is used by just the high-end HP ZBook Ultra G1a Ryzen AI Max+ PRO laptops but it's expected to be used by more next-generation AMD Ryzen laptops for a leading web camera experience. This is the last piece as well for making a nice well-rounded Linux experience for the HP ZBook Ultra G1a with all of the other hardware support in great shape -- even LVFS/Fwupd support!

Canva is seriously considering porting Affinity to Linux - a move that could transform desktop Linux and challenge Adobe.

Zorin OS 18 arrived, hitting 1M downloads in just one month. It’s packed with new features and improvements, so many users are already itching to make the jump to the latest stable release of this user-friendly, visually appealing Linux distro. If that’s you, you’re in the right place.

While the upgrade process is relatively straightforward, it’s always best to do it the safe way—following the proper steps in the correct order with the right guidance. And that’s precisely the purpose of this article.

I’ll walk you through the process of upgrading from Zorin OS 17 to 18, covering all key points. For most cases, the entire process typically takes between 30 and 60 minutes. Needless to say, everything you’ll see below has been tested and proven to work. So, let’s do it.

After a long development cycle, AV Linux 25 and MX Moksha 25 are now available, bringing two distinct approaches to the Enlightenment ecosystem.

AV Linux remains focused on providing a full, production-ready environment for content creation, built around the Enlightenment 0.27.1 desktop environment, while the new MX Moksha edition introduces the Moksha 0.4.1 desktop from the Bodhi Linux project in a minimal, highly customizable form. Both systems share the same MX Linux 25/Debian Trixie base and Liquorix 6.12 LTS kernels.

And while the two releases differ in purpose, they rely on the same underlying infrastructure. AV Linux continues as a complete workstation with its familiar suite of multimedia tools. At the same time, MX Moksha strips the environment down to essentials, letting users build up their own software stack.

0:00 sg2d - https://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk/

0:48 rescatux - https://www.supergrubdisk.org/category/download/rescatuxdownloads/rescatux-stable/

1:06 cmd gems - https://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse

1:30 tldp - https://tldp.org/index.html

2:05 wikis - https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Main_Page, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page, https://wiki.debian.org/

2:38 cmdline weather - curl wttr.in

3:22 sh bible - https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-sh-bible, https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-bash-bible

4:10 shellcheck - https://www.shellcheck.net/

4:44 uefi vs bios - https://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/booting.html

5:47 performance guides - https://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html

6:16 tldr, manual pages - https://github.com/tealdeer-rs/tealdeer

7:44 cmdline cheatsheets - curl cheat.sh

8:31 fhs - https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/index.html

8:58 otw games - https://overthewire.org/

9:38 awesome lists - https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome

10:40 how to learn.

By this I mean the psensor applet icon (second from the left) being to big.

I was messing arround trying to customize my desktop and i followed a guide on how to install and setup latte-dock (kde). Long story short, i failed removed latte (although I think it may have left some stuff behind) and when I restored my cinnamon panel the icon was like this. I've already restored the system with timeshift but it made no difference and tried to set "symbolic icon size" in panel settings but it completely ignores it. I googled for a solution but cant find any :c

Any ideas?

P.S. If I set panel height too small, all the applet icons go halfway off screen through the bottom, something they didnt used to do.

SOLVED: Using this comand:

gsettings reset-recursively org.cinnamon

Reverts the icons to their normal behaviour. Thanks to potatoguy

The NTFSPLUS Linux kernel driver as a modern NTFS file-system driver implementation continues quickly taking shape as it aims to become the most performant and feature-rich NTFS read/write driver for Linux systems.

It was just one month ago that NTFSPLUS was announced by veteran Linux storage/file-system developer Namjae Jeon. Since then Namjae Jeon has been quickly working on addressing remaining gaps in NTFSPLUS compared to Paragon's NTFS3 driver and other NTFS driver alternatives.

Earlier this week I wrote about NTFSPLUS continuing to develop and "v2" patches in an "ntfs-next" Git branch. It remains to be seen how quickly Namjae Jeon will try to get NTFSPLUS in the mainline Linux kernel tree, but he has now announced the v2 iteration of NTFSPLUS and outlined its new features and capabilities.

I had a program sorta freeze up my system without apparently using much resources and its something I have seen a lot in windows and it not happening as much in linux but it does happen. That made me wonder if a system that isolated it more would prevent that. So I guess two questions. Im curious about any distros that isolate the non os programs more and also if anyone knows if this actually would stop what I see happening (my theory is maybe it makes some sort of micro ask for resources that bogs down the system but im not really sure why it happens or for sure which program did it.)

OQB @HubertManne@piefed.social

Oracle Linux 9.7 is now globally available, continuing Oracle’s alignment with Red Hat Enterprise Linux by maintaining full application binary compatibility while offering its own enhancements through the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.

The release highlight is an expanded support for post-quantum cryptographic algorithms. System-wide crypto-policies now prioritize hybrid ML-KEM and pure ML-DSA, and OpenSSL has been updated to include ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA.

QUIC transport support has also been added, improving performance for latency-sensitive applications and boosting the overall efficiency of encrypted connections.

EDIT: v0.9 released

and a dark version

I really just put a bunch of pieces together. Forked from Reactionary Plus, but swapped out the icons, cursors, window decorations, color scheme, and made some slight tweaks to the layout.

More screenshots and changelogs here: https://store.kde.org/p/2330858

To install this, open System Settings, go to Colors & Themes -> Global Theme. In the top right there's a button for "Get New...", wait for it to load (it's very slow) then search for reactionary, and wait again, then install Reactionary 98.

This is my first time messing with any of this stuff, it was a bit janky lol.

I have a couple thinkpads loaded with windows 11 pro, would it benefit me to switch them over to Linux? Would I be able to use all the essential programs (or equivalent programs) that I would need to cover all my bases?

Edit: I should probably include that I'm a complete noob as far as Linux goes. I have a decent handle on computers in the general but have never been close to being any sort of computer enthusiast. Basically, I understand what terminal is but have only used it with direct instruction.

Over a year after the 3.5 release, Tmux 3.6, a terminal multiplexer that lets you split your terminal into panes, manage multiple sessions, and keep them running in the background, is now available, bringing a wide range of improvements and a few standout additions.

One of the most noticeable additions is the added native scrollbar support. The new pane-scrollbars option enables scrollbars directly inside panes.

The update also introduces support for the Mode 2031 theme, automatically reporting the dark or light theme. Alongside this, format operators receive several enhancements, including improved boolean expressions, new loop sorting behavior, and a broader set of variables that expose buffer, session, and cursor-style information.

YESSSSS

With the great upstream support for AMD Radeon graphics in the Linux kernel and Mesa, most desktop users / gamers / enthusiasts are best off just using the latest code shipped by their distributions or via the enthusiast-supported third-party archives/repositories. But for those on older enterprise Linux distributions, Radeon Software for Linux 25.20.3 was recently released for shipping that packaged AMD Linux graphics driver stack. This 25.20 series is the big one where they are now officially supporting the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver in place of their own former Vulkan Linux driver.

Back in May was the announcement from AMD that they would be dropping their proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux in favor of using the OpenGL and Vulkan drivers shipped by Mesa. They said that change-over would happen for the Radeon Software for Linux 25.20 release and now it's publicly available with the v25.20.3 build.

Two years and one week since the prior point release, Common Desktop Environment 2.5.3 is now available as the latest iteration of this Unix desktop environment built around the Motif toolkit. CDE has been open-source for more than a decade now but its development not exactly brisk. But for those resisting the likes of Wayland and other modern display tech -- especially with KDE announcing today Plasma 6.8 will be Wayland-exclusive -- CDE 2.5.3 is now available.

CDE 2.5.3 ships with various bug fixes, dtwm now supporting more mouse buttons, some compiler fixes and resolving some warnings, a systemd service file for dtlogin is added, and other mostly minor changes. Besides the dtlogin systemd service file, perhaps most notable otherwise are the fixes for satisfying the GCC 15 compiler

In the market for a new powerful laptop ready for the holiday season? Perhaps give a look to the new KDE Slimbook VII.

From the press email sent to GamingOnLinux: "Slimbook and KDE are celebrating their 8th anniversary with the launch of the new KDE Slimbook VII, the seventh generation resulting from a long-standing collaboration between specialized hardware and free software".

Well folks, it’s the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.

The GNOME Project released today GNOME 49.2 as the second point release to the latest GNOME 49 “Brescia” desktop environment series with various bug fixes and improvements.

Coming one and a half months after GNOME 49.1, the GNOME 49.2 release improves handling of sticky keys and tiled monitors, adds support for handling ignored modifiers when grabbing keys and buttons on X11, and adds extended layouts to the on-screen keyboard for German and Austrian users.

GNOME 49.2 also adds support for sorting the session list on the login screen by display name, reduces memory usage from thumbnails and correctly sorts loopback devices in the Nautilus file manager, and updates the keyboard shortcut for 300% (Ctrl + 3, 3) zoom in the Loupe image viewer to zoom to 300% instead of 200 %.

The Linux 6.18 kernel is anticipated for release this coming Sunday while this week a last-minute crisis was averted following reports of a kernel crash from recent ACPI code changes.

Borislav Petkov of AMD reported on Monday with the latest development code he was hitting a null pointer dereference within the ACPI code and in turn a crash at boot. This was noticed on an old AMD Phenom II era system with MSI MS-7599 motherboard

It's very clear that the ricing community wants to set any given colorscheme in many apps automatically, most tools do so either with wallpapers (which is inherently opinionated), or the base16 spec. The original base16 repo hasn't been updated in over 2 years, and 16 colors simply isn't enough to make rich granular themes, especially when code has many different syntax elements. We need a successor that allows for more colors on both TUIs and GUIs, more than 16 colors (like 24 or even 32), mapped more granularly.

My story:

I've spent lots of time looking at how to have good colorschemes in apps that change dynamically, to make my desktop pretty and with variety. Many tools can apply colorschemes to apps using image / wallpaper colors like Matugen and Pywal. These tools are very well made, but I realized I actually prefer rainbow colorschemes like Catppuccin. Either way I got attached Matugen, fortunately it can be used without wallpapers and supports custom keywords, there are also base16 colorscheme managers like flavours and tinty.

But Cattppuccin's base16 theme didn't look right compared to its Neovim plugin. The plugin is very well integrated and colors a lot things for you that base16 plugins may not, I would have to set certain UI colors myself if I wanted them to match. Some of the major colors (variables, keywords, brackets, etc.) were shuffled around, so out of the box Catppuccin's base16 theme doesn't even match Cattppuccin's original vision / color harmony. All of this probably applies to other colorschemes as well. So if I want to switch between different schemes while staying true to each one, I would need to set up plugins for each app rather than automatically.