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.

D7VK

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.

Fedora enjoyed the successful Fedora 42 and Fedora 43 releases this year, including going with Wayland-noly GNOME and further phasing of 32-bit packages. Fedora's KDE spin continued improving too and the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution enjoyed a wealth of other improvements this year.

In reliving some of the best moments for

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.

Similar to Panther Lake's new NPU getting ready for Linux with the firmware binaries now upstreamed, this Sunday there were new versions of the Xe3_LPD firmware pushed to the de facto repository for Linux firmware/microcode assets

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.

Open-source developer Sriman Achanta posted the set of patches to greatly expand the supported Arctis headset line-up for the upstream hid-steelseries driver.

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.

There was no This Week In Plasma edition this week and Nate Graham today put out a blog

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.

The Fish Shell has scripting improvements including a new status language command and other enhancements. There are also interactive enhancements, Ctrl - W now also deletes escaped spaces, new special input functions, and a variety of terminal support

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.

Blender 5.0 released in November with many enhancements. As part of various year-end benchmarking comparisons on Phoronix I freshly re-tested from 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.

Last week was a bug report over supporting more mouse buttons than five. While some mice end up binding their extra mouse buttons to keyboard keys, some mice such as when configured via Libratbag+Piper can map them to higher key press input event codes. Theoretically, allowing up to 48 key press input events in total.