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.

Timur Kristóf published a New Year's Eve blog post

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.

Below is a look at the

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.

Ncurses 6.6 remains source compatible with Ncurses 6.5 and versions going back to v5.0. A big focus with Ncurses 6.6 is on enhancing the MinGW / Windows Terminal driver. The modern Windows Terminal driver for Ncurses that has been in development the past half-decade

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.

Sven covered the many patches they upstreamed this year from the Asahi Linux project to the mainline Linux kernel, many of which were covered on Phoronix. There

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.

Archinstall 3.0.15 is out today with several new options for enhancing the Arch Linux installation experience. From Archinstall you can now opt for the CUPS print server installation, support is added for booting with the rEFInd boot manager, enabling the Intel IWD wireless daemon as a supported network back-end selection, and support for

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.

First up the Alienware WMI WMAX driver has added support for the Area-51, x16, and 16X Aurora laptops. This Alienware Linux driver allows platform profile support on Linux , thermal controls , and other functionality.

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.

With the end of the year upon us, below is a look at

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.

Crown Engine continues moving ahead as a cross-platform solution focused on flexibility, performance, and a fast iterative approach for this MIT-licensed code paired with GPLv3+ game engine tooling.