Linux 7.0 Aims To Replace More Caching Code With Sheaves For "Hopefully" Improved Performance Introduced to the mainline Linux kernel last year was "sheaves" as an opt-in per-CPU array-based caching layer. Sheaves was merged back in Linux 6.18 and while it started as an opt-in caching layer, the plan is to replace more CPU slabs / caches with sheaves. Queued up for slated introduction in the upcoming Linux 7.0 cycle is replacing more of those caches with sheaves... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Replace-Slabs-Sheaves

Shotcut Video Editor Now Using Hardware Decoding By Default Except For NVIDIA On Linux Shotcut 26.1 is now available as the latest feature update to this open-source and cross-platform video editing solution. Shotcut 26.1 is finally defaulting to GPU hardware accelerated video decoding by default for all platforms sans NVIDIA GPUs on Linux... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Shotcut-26.1-Video-Editor

Phosh Mobile Phone UI Making Progress On GTK4 Port Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras presented today at FOSDEM on the latest work around Phosh, the mobile phone user interface / Wayland shell project for mobile Linux environments. Phosh has been making steady progress and has more features out on the horizon... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Phosh-GTK4-Progress

Budgie 10.10.1 Released With Better Stability & Improved Labwc Integration Following the Budgie 10.10 release from earlier this month, Budgie 10.10.1 is now here for closing out January... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Budgie-10.10.1

Linuxulator-Steam-Utils To Enjoy Steam Play Gaming On FreeBSD & Other Options Presented today at FOSDEM in Brussels was the state of gaming on FreeBSD by Thibault Payet. Besides various open-source games able to be compiled natively for FreeBSD, this BSD can get in on the Steam Play gaming scene thanks to the "linuxulator-steam-utils" project as a set of workarounds for the Steam Linux client on FreeBSD 14 and newer. Linuxulator-steam-utils builds off FreeBSD's Linuxulator support for running Linux binaries to enjoy the likes of Steam and even Steam Play (Proton) Windows games running on this translation layer for Linux and in turn running on FreeBSD... https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Gaming-2026

GNOME 50 Is No Longer Treating Variable Rate Refresh "VRR" As Experimental Another great albeit overdue improvement for GNOME 50 has landed: Variable Rate Refresh "VRR" functionality for modern displays is now promoted and no longer treated as an experimental feature... https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-50-VRR-Not-Experimental

Plasma 6.7 Restoring The Air Plasma Theme, Fixes KWin Issue With Intense Alt+Tab'ing KDE Plasma developers remain quite busy preparing for the Plasma 6.6 desktop release coming up in a little more than two weeks while at the same time continuing to land early features for the Plasma 6.7 release coming later in the year... https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Brings-Back-Air-Theme

The Last Of The Dolby Digital Plus "E-AC3" Patents Might Now Be Expired For those interested in the Dolby Digital Plus "Enhanced AC-3" audio compression format for open-source software, the last of the patents for this widely-used format by streaming services and more appears to have expired... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Dolby-Digital-Plus-E-AC3-2026

Intel Xe Linux Driver Updated To Disable GuC Power DCC For Panther Lake Queued up in DRM-Next for the Intel open-source graphics driver ahead of the Linux 7.0 kernel cycle is expanding GPU temperature sensor reporting, multi-device SVM prep, multi-queue support for Crescent Island, Nova Lake display support, and other feature work. With the Linux 6.19 stable release fast approaching, DRM-Next is now focusing in on reading early fixes with concluding feature activity for this next merge window... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Disabling-DCC-PTL

Valve Developer Improves Aging AMD APUs On Linux With VRR, DP/HDMI Audio, HDR & Atomic Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team last year addressed remaining issues in the open-source AMDGPU kernel graphics driver so old AMD GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs could transition to using AMDGPU by default rather than the former "Radeon" kernel driver that is largely in maintenance mode for pre-GCN/RDNA GPUs. One caveat though was the GCN 1.1 APU support still having some limitations leading to Kaveri and friends not being able to use the modern AMDGPU DC "Display Core" code. But new patches from Timur take care of those limitations... https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDGPU-DC-Improved-GCN-1.1-APUs