Dell announced today that their new Pro Max 16 Plus laptop with a Qualcomm discrete NPU is now shipping... That is if you are running Ubuntu Linux while the Windows 11 pre-load option is expected in early 2026. An exciting twist with the Linux version of the Dell Pro Max 16 Plus shipping before Microsoft Windows.

The new Dell Pro Max 16 Plus features a Qualcomm AI 100 PC inference accelerator. The Dell Pro Max 16 Plus makes it the first mobile

Canonical has been bullish on RISC-V with Ubuntu being one of the most common Linux distributions endorsed by RISC-V board vendors. Canonical also has been bullish on the Flutter toolkit for crafting their desktop installer UI and other modern UI/app interfaces. But these two together haven't panned out with Flutter not currently supporting RISC-V. Canonical has submitted pull requests now for enabling RISC-V support with Flutter.

The lack of RISC-V support by Flutter has been a known issue to Ubuntu engineers for

PHP 8.5 is out today as the annual major feature release for this popular scripting language.

PHP 8.5 delivers many new features including the pipe operator, support for backtraces on fatal errors, support for closures and first-class callables in constant expressions, support for casts in constant expressions, array_first() and array_last() built-in functions finally, and a variety of other improvements.

An updated version of the Steam Linux Runtime 4 branch was rolled out that has now shifted from Debian 11 to Debian 13 libraries for some significant upgrades. In the process more libraries have gone x86_64 only in foregoing the i386 builds. In addition, the SDL 2 library support for the Steam Runtime is now provided by sdl2-compat as the compatibility layer for SDL2 atop SDL3.

Valve and their partners at Collabora have rolled out a significant Steam Linux Runtime update

We're closing in on the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release likely in little more than one week (30 November barring any delays) and today's batch of x86 platform driver updates is bringing some new hardware support as well as some notable consumer device fixes/improvements.

The x86 platform driver co-maintainer Ilpo Järvinen of Intel sent out today's batch of "fixes" material for the Linux 6.18 cycle.

New hardware support in this pull

A set of Linux kernel patches posted back in October for rewriting the kernel's memory-mapped concurrency ID code for some nice performance wins looks like it will land for Linux 6.19. This is the code that prominent Intel engineer Thomas Gleixner found to yield up to an 18% improvement for the PostgreSQL database. My testing of this "mm/cid" code has also shown some nice performance wins too.

Intel Fellow Thomas Gleixner overhauled the CID management code after finding the existing complex code introduced significant

VKD3D 1.18 is now available for this Direct3D 12 implementation that is part of the upstream Wine project. The VKD3D 1.18 release also comes just ahead of next month's feature freeze for the upcoming Wine 11.0 stable release.

VKD3D 1.18 is another step forward for this D3D12-on-Vulkan implementation for Linux systems. VKD3D is the upstream Wine project while many Linux gamers relying on Valve

A 21 year old bug report requesting support of the XDG Base Directory specification is finally being addressed by Firefox. The Firefox 147 release should respect this XDG specification around where files should be positioned within Linux users' home directory.

The XDG Base Directory specification lays out where application data files, configuration files, cached assets, and other files and file formats should be positioned within a user's home directory and the XDG environment variables for accessing those locations. To date Firefox has just positioned all files under ~

Along with getting the NVIDIA GSP fully booted and initialized for Ampere GPUs with the Nova driver code coming to Linux 6.19, this next kernel version is also beginning to make preparations for eyeing next-generation NVIDIA GPU support on this open-source driver.

As I wrote about back in October, NVIDIA engineers have begun making Nova driver preparations for next-gen GPUs . In particular, the first step of plumbing "Boot42" support for hardware initialization as a new requirement for post-Blackwell GPUs.