During the month of October on Phoronix were 305 original news articles around Linux/open-source and another 21 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. There was an exciting mix of software and hardware happenings over the past month. Here is a look back at what excited readers the most.

From the Linux 6.18 kernel activity with exciting new features to mailing list drama, the release of the Plasma 6.5 desktop, Ubuntu 25.10 and Fedora 4

In mid-October a Meta engineer uncovered an RDSEED architectural issue with AMD Zen 5 CPUs . A patch in turn was sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list to disable RDSEED usage on affected Zen 5 processors . AMD this week issued a security bulletin to acknowledge the issue and report that a microcode fix is coming.

AMD-SB-7055 was made public this week with and described as RDSEED Failure on AMD “Zen 5” Processors . This RDSEED failure is rated as a high severity due to loss

KDE Plasma developers continue to be busy landing more fixes for the recently introduced Plasma 6.5 while also lining up more new features for Plasma 6.6.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly status update of interesting Plasma developments with This Week in Plasma. Some of the key highlights for KDE Plasma this week included:

- More bug fixing for early regressions on Plasma 6.5. Plasma 6.5.2 is coming out on Tuesday with it hopefully having "all the important stuff sorted" for

Wine 10.18 is now available for capping off the month of October and working toward the code freeze for Wine 11.0 beginning in early December .

Wine 10.18 brings more improvements to the WoW64 mode for allowing 32-bit Windows programs to run on 64-bit Linux systems via emulating the native Windows WoW64 subsystem. The WoW64 mode in Wine 10.18 includes now supporting OpenGL memory mappings using Vulkan as well as SCSI pass

For GNOME desktop users desiring a more macOS-like experience, a new GNOME extension provides a macOS-inspired quick menu option.

As pointed out in GNOME's weekly This Week in GNOME publication, there is a new extension option for those wanting a macOS-like quick menu for their desktop.

It is called the Kiwi Menu and had its first release this week to provide recent items, a power menu, and other options.

Over the summer months LunarG announced KosmicKrisp as a new Vulkan-on-Metal implementation for Apple devices and built around Mesa. That alternative to MoltenVK was upstreamed for next quarter's Mesa 26.0 release and now it's also celebrating being an officially Vulkan 1.3 conformant implementation.

LunarG announced on Thursday that KosmicKrisp has passed the Vulkan conformance test suite for Vulkan 1.3. This provides a specifications-compliant Vulkan 1.3 implementation on macOS 15 and newer running atop Metal. This works

Over the past day there have been many reports of AMD planning to no longer provide game optimizations for the Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series graphics cards for their Microsoft Windows driver. Surprisingly many in the Linux community still seem to think it will impact the Linux drivers, but long story short, there is no real concern for Linux users/gamers.

AMD is reportedly moving the Radeon RX 5000 / RX 6000 series more to a "maintenance mode" with