Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

After looking yesterday at the most viewed Linux hardware reviews and benchmarks of 2025, today's look is at the most popular open-source/Linux news of the past year. There were 3,286 original news articles on Phoronix during 2025 written by your's truly, here's a look back at what excited readers the most over these past twelve months.

The ReactOS free software project is turning 30 this year and its "open-source Windows" OS ambitions remain. They are starting out this year with another "major step" towards Windows NT 6.0 compatibility.

For fans of the IceWM X11 window manager, the project kicked off 2026 by releasing IceWM 4.0.

Kicking off the new year for Linux gaming and cross-platform gaming at large is the release of the SDL 3.4 library. SDL is part of the Steam runtime and continues to be widely-used for abstracting software/hardware for creating more portable games and other applications.

Merged to Linux Git on New Year's Eve was a fix in the form of a code revert for broken MediaTek WiFi on the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel.

With Linux 6.19 aging AMD GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs switched the default kernel driver used to provide for much better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other improvements compared to using the legacy Radeon DRM kernel driver. For 2026, Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team has more improvements still planned to enhance these older AMD graphics cards on Linux.

This looks to be a wrap on 2025, Happy New Year to all the Phoronix readers over the past 21+ years. This year on Phoronix there were 226 original Linux hardware reviews and featured benchmark articles written by your's truly. Plus another 3,286 original open-source/Linux software and hardware news articles this calendar year. Here were the big topics of 2025 for the featured Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles.

Ncurses 6.6 was released today prior to closing out 2025. This programming library update for creating terminal-based text user interfaces (TUIs) features a variety of great improvements for ending out the year.

Prominent Asahi Linux developer Sven Peter spoke at this week's 39th Chaos Communication Congress "39C3" in Hamburg, Germany. He provided an update around the still-in-the-works Apple M3 / M4 / M5 SoC and device support as well as other outstanding features like getting DisplayPort working on Apple Macs under Linux.

Ahead of the January 2026 ISO refresh for Arch Linux, Archinstall 3.0.15 released today as the newest update to this convenient text-based OS installer.

A New Year's Eve pull request is ready with several Intel/AMD laptop improvements for the ongoing Linux 6.19 kernel cycle. An x86 platform drivers pull request sent to Linus Torvalds today brings several notable driver enhancements with expanding the range of supported laptops.

The GCC compiler and the GNU toolchain ecosystem at large had a great year. From new language front-ends for the likes of Algol 68 and COBOL to maturing support for GCC Rust, new performance optimizations from GCC to Glibc, initial AMD Zen 6 "znver6" support merged for GCC 16, and much more. It's pretty safe to say GCC and the broader GNU ecosystem enjoyed a very successful 2025.

While the Godot Engine receives a lot of attention as a prominent open-source game engine, it's far from the only one in this space. Another open-source game engine capping out 2025 with a new release is the Crown Engine.

OpenCV 4.13 is out this New Year's Eve in providing the latest open-source computer vision (CV) capabilities. OpenCV 4.13 brings a wide variety of enhancements to this widely-used computer vision library.

December happens to be a busy month for video editor releases in the open-source world. This month there's been the release of Flowblade 2.24, OpenShot 3.4, Kdenlive 25.12, and now there is Shotcut 25.12 before closing out the month and year.

X.Org package wrangler Alan Coopersmith at Oracle announced today the release of imake 1.0.11, the newest version of this utility that 20+ years ago was used extensively as part of the X Window System build process for generating Makefiles from a template. With this first imake point release in two years, imake itself can now be built via Meson and there is now support for RISC-V and LoongArch architectures.

Intel's open-source graphics driver engineers are ending out 2025 with a bang. Sent out today was the final drm-xe-next pull request of the year of new feature material ready for the next version of the Linux kernel. Today's pull adds support for SR-IOV scheduler groups as well as multi-device Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support.

NVIDIA's Olympus are the ARM64 cores found within the upcoming Vera CPU that will be paired with Rubin. Olympus cores are claimed to be twice as fast as NVIDIA's current CPU cores found in Grace and based on Neoverse-V2. Earlier this year the open-source compilers landed initial support for Olympus while now a proper CPU scheduling model has been upstreamed into LLVM 22.

Added to the Linux kernel earlier this year was the new X86_NATIVE_CPU Kconfig option to enable compiler optimizations for the local/native CPU in use when building the Linux kernel. In effect about ensuring that the "-march=native" compiler flag is set for the kernel build for optimizing the Linux kernel build for your processor being used. Back with Linux 6.16 I ran some benchmarks of the Linux kernel build with X86_NATIVE_CPU to gauge the impact. Now with the current Linux 6.19 kernel and some different hardware, here are some additional on/off benchmarks for evaluating the impact of the Linux kernel build with X86_NATIVE_CPU.

InputPlumber 0.70 is out today as the newest feature update to this open-source input router and re-mapper daemon for Linux systems. With more gaming handhelds coming to market and other controllers as well as the upward trajectory of Linux gaming, InputPlumber is becoming more applicable for this daemon to combine various input devices into different virtual device formats.

An important fix has made it into the X.Org Server XWayland codebase ahead of the new year. XWayland has been fixed to avoid sending incorrect pointer coordinates to X11 clients on pointer enter events.

The open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers making up Mesa had another very successful year. Even with all the years being invested into Mesa largely by Intel, AMD, Valve, Red Hat, and others, the upward trajectory continues for Mesa on expanding the hardware support, punctually adding new Vulkan extensions, and racking up other wins.

In demonstrating one of the gaps of man pages in modern times and likely having hindered the adoption of the Linux kernel's new mount API, it took more than six years for those system calls to be properly documented within man pages. The Linux "new" mount API was introduced back in mid-2019 with Linux 5.2 and since supported by key file-systems after several years but not until weeks ago was this file descriptor based mount API scoped out within man pages.

Hyprland 0.53 was released today as the last feature update to this Wayland compositor for 2025.

One of the unexpected Linux kernel surprises of 2025 was NTFSPLUS being announced as a new driver for Microsoft's NTFS file-system with better performance and more features compared to the classic read-only NTFS driver or the "NTFS3" kernel driver that Paragon Software submitted upstream. That NTFSPLUS driver has continued expanding its feature set and robustness and sent out today was the third iteration of the patches. Now this driver is simply being called "NTFS" with no longer going by the NTFSPLUS name.

One of the many interesting Linux kernel innovations I have closely been following this year has been the proposed Cache Aware Scheduling support. I have shown the Cache Aware Scheduling performance on AMD EPYC as well as the Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids performance, but what about desktops? In this article is a quick look at Cache Aware Scheduling with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D.

Open-source developer Derek J. Clark continues leading the efforts on improving the Lenovo Legion Go series hardware support under Linux. Posted today was the second iteration of the HID driver work for the Legion Go and Legion Go S for configuration support with the built-in controller HID interfaces.

The next Linux kernel cycle, which will be known as Linux 6.20 or more than likely Linux 7.0, is expected to land some IO_uring improvements for better IOPOLL polling.

Longtime Linux users likely have fond memories of SuperTux as the open-source jump-n-run game that used to be included on some early Linux live CD/DVDs for this Super Mario Bros inspired game. There hasn't been a new release of SuperTux in over four years but out today is the beta of SuperTux 0.7 as a major overhaul to the free software, family-friendly game title.

In addition to today's blog post calling out the need for others to takeover the This Week In Plasma series, KDE developer Nate Graham also published another blog post to highlight the successes of the Plasma desktop over 2025. In particular, the KDE Plasma Wayland transition "nears completion" as it works to become Wayland-only in early 2027.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.19-rc3 to ship this week's fixes. Linux 6.19-rc3 is coming in light as expected due to the Christmas week with many corporate developers getting paid time off and others taking part in year-end festivities.

Between the DXVK and VKD3D(-Proton) projects there is good support for Direct3D 8 through Direct3D 12 implementations atop the Vulkan API for Linux gaming usage. For those preferring more retro classic gaming, D7VK came about more recently for Direct3D 7 as a DXVK fork. Out today is D7VK 1.1 and besides delivering fixes for its D3D7 implementation has also now tacked on an experimental D3D6 front-end.

Fedora Linux this year continued in punctually shipping the very latest upstream Linux innovations from the freshest Wayland components to Linux kernel features and continuing to leverage other improvements in the open-source world.

Ahead of Intel Core Ultra "Panther Lake" laptops expected to be showcased in just over one week at CES in Las Vegas, new Xe3_LPD firmware binaries were upstreamed today to linux-firmware.git in getting ready that production-ready support for Intel Panther Lake on Linux.

Within the mainline Linux kernel already is the SteelSeries HID driver for supporting basic battery monitoring on the Arctis 1 and Arctis 9 gaming headsets. But a new patch series posted this morning to the Linux kernel mailing list overhaul this SteelSeries HID driver support. The patches take the support to 25+ different Arctis headset models and provide more comprehensive driver support.

The This Week In Plasma series written by KDE developer Nate Graham has been a great way to keep-up with all of the interesting KDE Plasma desktop developments over the past eight years. This Week In Plasma is regularly featured on Phoronix and always provides an interesting weekend look at the very newest innovations to land in Plasma. Unfortunately, This Week In Plasma will become less frequent or even go on hiatus without new volunteer contributors.

Fish 4.3 is out today as the newest update to this user-friendly command line shell. Fish 4.0 released at the beginning of this year in porting the codebase from C++ to Rust and now before closing out 2025 they have out Fish 4.3.

As part of the many different year-end benchmarks on Phoronix, over the holidays I was curious about how far the Blender 3D modeling software's performance has evolved over the past few years. So in looking at the CPU rendering performance I ran benchmarks of the major releases since Blender 3.0 through the recently released Blender 5.0.

The Simple DirectMedia Library that is widely-used by many cross-platform games and part of the Steam Runtime now has better support for handling more mouse button events under Wayland.

HarfBuzz 12.3 was just released for ending out 2025 with some nice performance improvements to this widely-used text shaping engine. HarfBuzz in turn is used by the prominent Linux desktop environments, Java, Flutter, various game engines, and apps like Chrome and Firefox for text shaping needs with OpenType fonts and more.

GNOME developer Sophie Herold has shared some interesting end-of-year code stats for the GNOME project. The "GNOME" codebase is up to 6,692,516 lines of code at the end of 2025 with 1,611,526 lines of that being from GNOME apps. Where the data gets interesting is on the programming language breakdown in different areas.

With the end of the year quickly drawing to a close, here is a look back at the most-viewed Linux kernel news of 2025.

Adding to the unfortunate engineering setbacks at Intel this year as part of cost-cutting measures, the Intel IWD software development has been on a hiatus for the past three months. Going from previously seeing monthly releases and almost constant activity to now development ceasing up with no activity in the past three months.

Adding to the early headaches of Linux 6.19 with some regressions in performance and functionality were ARM64 hosts crashing on this in-development kernel version for those platforms using EFI. But a fix is now merged ahead of Linux 6.19-rc3 due out tomorrow.