Michael Larabel

The most depressing news of the week: Intel is ending their performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution. Over the past decade the Clear Linux operating system has shown what's possible with out-of-the-box performance on x86_64 hardware... Not just for Intel platforms but even showing extremely great performance results on AMD x86_64 too. But with the cost-cutting going on at Intel, Clear Linux is now being sunset.

Amid Intel's ongoing financial difficulties and multiple rounds of layoffs some Linux engineers at Intel left last year and there's been at least one prominent departure this week amid the latest round of challenges at the company.

The latest round of cost-cutting at Intel seems to be having a larger impact on their software engineering efforts than some of their previous rounds of layoffs. In addition to a prominent Linux kernel developer veteran leaving Intel last week where he worked for the past 14 years and responsible for many great upstream improvements, other Intel software engineers working on their Linux/open-source affairs have also been departing. In just the latest instance, one of the upstream Intel Linux kernel drivers is now "orphaned" due to the developer departing and no one experienced left to maintain the code.

Wayback began recently as an experimental X11 compatibility layer for non-Wayland desktop environments to leverage Wayland components. While still in early form, the project has already taken off from being a personal GitHub project to now being hosted on FreeDesktop.org alongside other projects such as Wayland and the X.Org Server itself plus other prominent software like Mesa and GStreamer and much more.

The Debian release team today shared their final release plans for Debian 13 "Trixie" that aims to be out as stable in less than one month's time.

Ubuntu maker Canonical has decided to "double down" their investment in OpenJDK Java for Ubuntu Linux.

KDE developers this week have been busy with a mix of polishing the recent Plasma 6.4 release as well as taking on more feature development work for Plasma 6.5 coming later in the year.

Three years since the Bash 5.2 release and one year since the first alpha release, GNU Bash 5.3 was released overnight as the newest step forward for this popular shell used on Linux and other operating systems.

Wayback is a new open-source project working on providing an X11 compatibility layer for running full X11 desktop environments using Wayland components with a rootful XWayland server.

KDE developers are improving its clock "KClock" app with leveraging the experimental Wayland picture-in-picture protocol support.

Timur Kristóf as a contractor on Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team is known for his work on the RADV Vulkan driver and ACO shader compiler but recently he's been working on some improvements to the AMDGPU kernel driver. A big feat he's been tackling is enabling support for analog display connectors within the AMDGPU driver for the "DC" code. Besides a few supported older GPUs having DVI-I connections, this analog support is significant in that it's a milestone for unblocking the aging GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs from using the modern AMDGPU driver by default.

The Servo open-source web layout engine continues advancing with its demo Servoshell and continued work around making it suitable for embedding into other software. The Servo project this morning published their latest monthly status update to inform the community what they have been up to the past several weeks.

The GNOME 49 Alpha "49.alpha" release was just announced as the first formal test release in the road to the GNOME 49 desktop release due out in September.

Some commits merged today to FFmpeg Git provide additional hand-tuned Assembly code for AVX-512 with capable Intel and AMD processors.

Red Hat this morning went public with RHEL for Business Developers, an expansion of their RHEL Developer Program to make it easier for business developers to make use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux at no-cost for their development efforts.

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system project just published their June 2025 status report to outline recent progress on this innovative platform.

Ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc6 kernel release due out later today, an x86/urgent pull request was sent out today that includes some fixes for old AMD Zen 2 hardware.

NVIDIA announced this week that they are bringing their CUDA software to RISC-V processors.

DXVK 2.7 released today as a major feature update for this translation layer for enabling Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 based games and applications to run atop the Vulkan API. DXVK is a critical piece of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) software stack for enabling Windows games on Linux.

While the Arch Linux AUR repository can be popular for fetching some packages not found in Arch Linux proper, it's important to keep in mind that AUR stands for the Arch User Repository. These user packages aren't always the best and rarely can be done with malicious intent as shown this week with an advisory over several malicious browser packages being briefly pedaled through AUR.

The open-source and Rust-based Burn deep learning framework developed by Tracel AI shared that their open-source matrix multiplication kernel performance can compete with and even outperform the NVIDIA CUDA cuBLAS performance. Plus Burn isn't limited to just NVIDIA GPUs but can work on most hardware/drivers, including a Vulkan back-end.

KDE Plasma 6.5 is introducing a change that has been "years in the wanting" and that is rounded bottom corners for windows.

With the Debian 13.0 release planned for 9 August, one of the notable fundamental features with this Debian "Trixie" release is now supporting RISC-V as an official CPU architecture. This is the first release where RISC-V 64-bit is officially supported by Debian Linux albeit with limited board support and the Debian RISC-V build process is handicapped by slow hardware.

We are just a few weeks out from seeing the release of the FFmpeg 8.0 multimedia library with many new features and improvements for this widely-used open-source software.

Too much vRAM and too many Instinct accelerators per server is causing system hibernation to fail on some high-end AMD AI Linux-powered servers. Having eight accelerators each with 192GB of device memory can in turn cause system hibernation to run into problems if the Linux server has only 2TB of system RAM... But a new patch series was posted today in working to address this problem with the Linux kernel for high-end systems failing to hibernate. A similar issue is that when thawing the system the process can take nearly one hour due to the amount of memory.