Lemonade 11.6 Integrates Muse-Glimmer 30B, Experimental TheNoise ROCm Image Generation

For those dabbling with generative AI on the weekends, the AMD-led Lemonade SDK 11.6 is out today with its newest feature release of this open-source software for running local AI apps with optimized LLMs across CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs.

Lemonade 11.6 adds Muse Glimmer 30B GGUF model support into Lemonade's Llama.cpp catalog with draft decoding, vision, and tool calling support. Mesa AI researchers this week published Muse Glimmer as a 30B open agentic model for
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Omarchy 4.0 Linux Distro Released With Desktop Shell Now Implemented Via Quickshell

Omarchy as the Arch Linux distribution developed by David Heinemeier Hansson "DHH" / Basecamp is out today with Omarchy 4.0 as the distro's biggest release to date.

Omarchy 4.0 has rewritten its entire desktop shell using Quickshell. The bar, launcher, menus, notifications, and other elements are are in Quickshell using a long-running shell process that is coherent, fully-themed, IPC-scriptable shell to replace a lot of independent prior components positioned around the Hyprland compositor. Quickshell is a toolkit
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Linux 7.1, Linux 7.2 Performance On The Intel Xeon 600 Series

With Linux 7.2 expected for its stable release this weekend, today's testing has some additional testing of the Linux 7.2 Git kernel as well as Linux 7.1 stable compared to Linux 7.0 as used by default on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Phoronix testing previously conducted of Linux 7.2 have shown benefits for Intel Arc B390 Xe3 in some configurations, faster poll performance on AMD Ryzen Threadripper and other hardware, and some nice I/O performance gains

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Features Coming For Linux 7.3 From Optimizing Intel Hybrid CPUs To Old AMD Athlon XPs

With Linux 7.2 expected to see its stable debut Sunday , here is a look at what I have been monitoring as changes expected to be submitted during the Linux 7.3 merge window that will open on Monday.

As usual, each new Linux kernel release is packed with changes between new features and hardware support, iterating on existing functionality, and as of late also removing more old hardware/driver support where it becomes a greater maintenance burden in the era of AI. There is a lot on the table for
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Patches Posted For Fixing The Linux DRM Scheduler's Fair Policy

Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel release expected out on Sunday, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem was forced to revert their "fair" scheduler policy default new for this kernel. Due to a last minute user-reported regression, FIFO returns as the default DRM scheduler policy for Linux 7.2. But patches are now available for addressing that regression and thus hopefully for Linux 7.3 there will be the fair scheduler becoming the default.

Igalia engineer Tvrtko Ursulin has been working through the regression reported

Open-Source exFAT Programs 1.4.3 Improves Fsck & Mkfs

Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel release expected on Sunday, a new release of the exFAT file-system user-space programs was released overnight.

The exfatprogs 1.4.3 release provides for faster file-system checking "fsck" behavior with increased scanning speed when scanning large unused directory tails. The fsck.exfat program will now optimize unused dentry scans and scan unused dentries in larger reads, though no performance numbers were provided on either patch.

The new exfatprogs release will also now honor the user'

Slackware-Based Zenwalk Linux Aims For "True Low Latency Desktop Experience"

It's been a long time since hearing much out of the Zenwalk project, the Linux distribution built off Slackware. It's still around though and with their latest kernel work are hoping for a "true low latency desktop experience" by employing the BORE scheduler.

Most Zenwalk news is close to twenty years old on Phoronix but for this Slackware-compatible distro but was surprised this week with a Phoronix reader sending in a news tip over their effort to have a "true low latency desktop experience". Zenwalk was
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AMD GAIA 0.23 Delivers Ability To Install/Run AI Agents From The Terminal

AMD's GAIA open-source AI software built atop Lemonade for serving as an AI companion for emails , a Bash coding agent , and other AI agent skills is out with a new version today with more features while also improving security and making other improvements.

AMD GAIA 0.23 introduces the ability to install and run agents directly from the terminal. Up to this point with AMD GAIA, users have needed to run a graphical app for installing new AI agents or know the manual Python pip commands for manual installation
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KDE, Techpaladin & Kubuntu Focus Announce The Bullet-Proof KDE Software Initiative

KDE e.V. along with Linux PC vendor Kubuntu Focus and KDE-aligned consulting firm Techpaladin Software have announced a collaboration of the "bullet-proof KDE Software initiative" for providing at least three years of bug fixes and security updates to KDE Plasma 6.6 LTS and related software.

Kubuntu Focus has pledged to provide $100k in direct payments to Techpaladin Software over the next three years for working on this "bullet proof" KDE stack for Plasma 6.6 LTS maintenance. This includes not
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The Best Linux 7.2 Features: Cache Aware Scheduling, AMD Zen 6, AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL

With the Linux 7.2 kernel expected to be released on Sunday, 16 August, here is a look at some of the most interesting new features and changes to find with this next kernel version to be used by Ubuntu 26.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases.

Cache Aware Scheduling is easily one of the most exciting features of this new kernel for those running on modern systems that sport multiple last-level cache (LLC) domains. For some workloads Cache Aware Scheduling can yield very nice performance