GOG's new owner brands Windows as poor quality while he ponders Linux support — "I'm not surprised that people gravitate outside of the Windows ecosystem."

Wine 11 has been released today as the latest stable version of this free and open-source compatibility layer for running apps and games developed for Windows systems on Unix-like operating systems.

Collabora shares with us today a new project that lets you install and run the Debian GNU/Linux operating system on the open-source OpenWrt One router.

While there are several rootkits that target Linux, they have so far not fully embraced the open-source ethos typical of Linux software. Luckily, Matheus Alves has been working to remedy this lack by creating an open-source rootkit called Singularity for Linux systems. Users who feel their computers are too secure can install the Singularity kernel module in order to allow remote code execution, disable security features, and hide files and processes from normal administrative tools. Despite its many features, Singularity is not currently known to be in use in the wild — instead, it provides security researchers with a testbed to investigate new detection and evasion techniques.

The first maintenance release of the 25.12 series is with the usual batch of stability fixes and workflow improvements

GNU GRUB 2.14 has been released today as a major version for this popular multiboot boot loader that can be found on almost all of today’s GNU/Linux distributions and UNIX-like operating systems.

Hardware and devices

As part of my various end-of-year benchmarks, recently I looked at the Linux LTS kernel performance on AMD EPYC 9005 over the past year, the AMD EPYC Milan-X performance over the past four years, and various other performance comparisons over time to look the evolution of the Linux software performance. Another run I had carried out was looking at the AMD EPYC 8004 "Siena" series since its launch just over two years ago. Here is a look at how an up-to-date Linux software stack can deliver some additional performance gains for these energy efficiency and cost-optimized server processors.

A patch queued up into tip/tip.git's x86/cpu Git branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle enables the Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) functionality by default on the mainline kernel for capable CPUs and those not affected by side-channel attacks due to TSX Async Abort (TAA) and similar vulnerabilities. For newer Intel CPUs with safe TSX support, this change can mean better performance with the kernel defaults...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gnupg2), Debian (firefox-esr), Oracle (cups, gnupg2, libpq, net-snmp, postgresql, postgresql:15, postgresql:16, transfig, and vsftpd), Red Hat (firefox), SUSE (apache2, curl, firefox, gpg2, hawk2, libcryptopp-devel, openCryptoki, python310, python311-urllib3, rke2, squid, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (cpp-httplib, git, python-apt, and simgear).

If all goes well the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release will further enhance the NVIDIA graphics performance under its default GNOME Wayland session. The improvements might be upstreamed to GNOME 50 in time but otherwise it's looking like Ubuntu 26.04 will carry its own patch(es) for improving the NVIDIA Wayland performance...

Linuxiac is causing its own downfall

The Fedora Project announced plans to migrate the Fedora Games Lab spin to the KDE Plasma desktop environment with the upcoming Fedora Linux 44 release, due out in April 2026.

That's just what statCounter is seeing

The PipeWire project has released PipeWire 1.4.10 today as yet another maintenance update of this popular open-source server for handling audio/video streams and hardware on Linux systems.

The Linux kernel patches talked about at the start of the year for more easily changing the boot logo of Tux are now queued into a "for-next" branch and thus expected to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle. Those wanting to replace the Tux icon with an alternative logo during the Linux kernel boot process could already patch the file manually but this new code allows for an easy replacement via Kconfig options...

For those looking for a speedy Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms "BLAS" library, OpenBLAS 0.3.31 is now available for this optimized open-source implementation...

One of the initiatives launched by Intel in 2025 was LLM-Scaler as part of Project Battlematrix. The open-source LLM Scaler is a Docker-based solution for helping to deploy Generative AI "GenAI" workloads on Intel Battlemage graphics cards with frameworks like vLLM, ComfyUI, SGLang, and more. There continues to be routine new feature releases of LLM Scaler for broadening the large language models supported and other improvements...

Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0.4 SD card flashing utility is now available for download with improved handling of files larger than 4GB and other changes.

Wild 0.8 is now available as this speedy linker focused on iterative development, a goal of incremental linking, and written in the Rust programming language...