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Phosh Mobile Phone UI Making Progress On GTK4 Port

Phoronix | Jan. 31, 2026, 2:52 p.m. | Original

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.

Phosh has been advancing a lot in part thanks to NLnet funding for various initiatives such as cell broadcast support. There has also been work on improved power management / energy efficiency, per-country emergency numbers, sandboxed thumbnails, lockscreen wallpapers, auto brightness, and more.

Budgie 10.10.1 Released With Better Stability & Improved Labwc Integration

Phoronix | Jan. 31, 2026, 1:56 p.m. | Original

Following the Budgie 10.10 release from earlier this month, Budgie 10.10.1 is now here for closing out January.

This first point release to the Wayland-transitioned Budgie 10.10 desktop brings stability improvements, better integration of the Labwc Wayland compositor, and bug fixes.

Budgie 10.10.1 introduces a new library to centralize their logic around screen and monitor handling, panel management improvements, better Labwc Wayland compositor handling, improved brightness controls, better wallpaper

Linuxulator-Steam-Utils To Enjoy Steam Play Gaming On FreeBSD & Other Options

Phoronix | Jan. 31, 2026, 12:36 p.m. | Original

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

GNOME 50 Is No Longer Treating Variable Rate Refresh "VRR" As Experimental

Phoronix | Jan. 31, 2026, 6:37 a.m. | Original

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.

Going back to GNOME 46 has been experimental Variable Refresh Rate support . Now after two years of behing hidden as an experimental feature, it's being considered stable with GNOME 50. To use GNOME VRR on current releases has required first running gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['variable-refresh-rate

Plasma 6.7 Restoring The Air Plasma Theme, Fixes KWin Issue With Intense Alt+Tab'ing

Phoronix | Jan. 31, 2026, 6:21 a.m. | Original

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.

This Week in Plasma is out with its newest issue for highlighting all of the interesting Plasma developments this past week. Some of the Plasma highlights for late 6.6 activity and early 6.7 feature development include:

- Plasma 6.7 is adding support for the Wayland

The Last Of The Dolby Digital Plus "E-AC3" Patents Might Now Be Expired

Phoronix | Jan. 31, 2026, 6:09 a.m. | Original

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.

While I am not a lawyer, a few Phoronix readers have written in since yesterday with the belief that the last of the E-AC3 patents have now expired. This does align with prior reporting that the last of the Dolby Digital Plus / Enhanced AC-3 patents would expire in

GTK Developers Plot Improvements To Tackle This Year - Possible Opt-In Unstable API

Phoronix | Jan. 31, 2026, 5:55 a.m. | Original

GNOME developers had a busy week in preparing for the GNOME 50 beta release, many GNOME developers attending FOSDEM this weekend in Brussels, and other happenings.

This Week in GNOME is out with its newest issue with some of the highlights for the week being:

- The GTK toolkit developers are meeting in Brussels at FOSDEM for another hackfest. Among the items they are looking at over the next year include new SVG rendering code, better accessibility, icons and other assets, enhanced platform support, and other improvements. GTK developers

Open Source LLM

AI Code Review Prompts Initiative Making Progress For The Linux Kernel

Phoronix | Jan. 30, 2026, 3:55 p.m. | Original

Chris Mason , the longtime Linux kernel developer most known for being the creator of Btrfs , has been working on a Git repository with AI review prompts he has been working on for LLM-assisted code review of Linux kernel patches. This initiative has been happening for some weeks now while the latest work was posted today for comments.

Chris wrote today on the Linux kernel mailing list :

"For anyone that is using the prompts, I'm hoping to get some feedback on changes I pushed today that break the review up

Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Snapshot 3 Released For Testing

Phoronix | Jan. 30, 2026, 1:25 p.m. | Original

Resolute Snapshot 3 is now available as the newest monthly test candidate leading up the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release in April.

While Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon" daily ISO snapshots continue, Canonical engineers continue with their monthly "Snapshot" regiment for helping to exercise their build/release automation. Ubuntu 26.04 Snapshot 3 incorporates all of their latest improvements to help in facilitating early testing and feedback on what will become this Long Term Support version of Ubuntu Linux.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Still Committed To Linux 6.20~7.0 Even If Not Finalized For Release Time

Phoronix | Jan. 30, 2026, 12:23 p.m. | Original

Last year Canonical committed to shipping the latest upstream Linux kernel versions in new Ubuntu releases compared to their more conservative choices in prior releases that didn't always align nicely for the latest Linux kernel upstream. Back in December they confirmed Ubuntu 26.04 plans for Linux 6.20~7.0 and their plans remain that way, even if it means the stable Linux 6.20~7.0 stable release won't be officially out quite in time for the initial ISO release.

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