While Metro Exodus can run on Linux right now via Steam Play, 4A Games is still working on a port of this popular game to Linux and Mac systems.

Following the reliable ports of Metro 2033 and Metro Redux to Linux, we've been looking forward to the native Linux port of Metro Exodus since at least the earlier versions have been benchmark-friendly for our needs following the Linux port (complete with CLI switches, unlike the Windows version at least at the time).

It's

Intel held a virtual event last week to basically plead their case that AMD Ryzen laptops are gimping on battery-powered performance compared to their own offerings. It was all Windows focused, but at least given their emphasis now on battery performance gave me another opportunity to prod over the lackluster state of Intel DPTF support on Linux with it not being pleasant out-of-the-box and one of the few areas encumbered by blobs or lack of public documentation.

While NVIDIA has supported its own vendor-specific Vulkan ray-tracing extension on Windows and Linux since the GeForce RTX GPUs originally debuted, they are moving quick to support the Khronos ray-tracing extensions for Vulkan given the industry adoption and games coming to market likely opting for using the KHR version.

This morning with Vulkan 1.2.162 the Vulkan KHR ray-tracing extensions were made official after being out in provisional form since earlier this year. NVIDIA has now released beta drivers for Windows and Linux that

With Wine on an annual stable release cadence for shipping new stable feature releases generally at the beginning of each calendar year after a year's worth of bi-weekly development snapshots, Wine 6.0 is due for release around January.

Following Friday's Wine 5.22 release, Wine project founder and leader Alexandre Julliard sent out word this morning that the processes will soon begin rolling for that Wine 6.0 release.

Two weeks from now for the next development release will also mark the start of the

Earlier this year Vulkan ray-tracing arrived in provisional form while with today's Vulkan 1.2.162 specification update this functionality has been promoted to stable and ready for broad industry support.

The Vulkan ray-tracing support is now deemed final and out of the provisional guard. This includes the finalized versions of VK_KHR_acceleration_structure, VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline, VK_KHR_ray_query, VK_KHR_pipeline_library, and VK_

Red Hat for several years now has been working on PipeWire to overhaul audio/video stream management on Linux while being able to fill the duties currently managed by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK and being engineered with Wayland and Flatpak security in mind among other modern Linux technologies. With Fedora 34 next spring they may try to ship PipeWire by default in place of JACK, PulseAudio, and even legacy ALSA.

For a while now Fedora has offered PipeWire packages but not yet used by default when it comes to audio handling.

This New Year's Eve will mark one year since the announcement of the in-development Reiser5 file-system. While the outlook for getting Reiser5 upstreamed into the mainline kernel remains murky given the out-of-tree status of Reiser4, Edward Shishkin does continue advancing this latest Reiser file-system iteration.

Since last year's initial Reiser5 announcement , more features continue to be ironed out for this evolution of Reiser4. The latest Reiser5 functionality hitting a point of stability is its logical

In marking the US Thanksgiving week, the Black Friday / Christmas shopping season, and just another week grinding away during the COVID-19 pandemic while seeing depressed ad rates on top of ad-block users hurting our ability to continue producing new and exciting Linux/open-source content, here is our Phoronix Premium special for the holidays to show your support while getting discounted access to enjoy the site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits.

Through the end of November,