Valve is ending out the month of July with a new Steam beta release that has a few Linux-specific fixes.

For Linux gamers with today's Steam beta release there is a notable fix to address the Steam UI scale not updating to match system DPI changes under XWayland. Now when the system DPI changes in XWayland, it should be properly reflected with the Steam user interface.

Additionally, the Steam beta has a Linux fix for where Steam would freeze and fail to recover after a process crash.

All of the open-source kernel graphics driver feature changes were merged earlier today for the Linux 6.17 kernel. For Linux 6.17 there is an enormous amount of new feature work ready to go with the modern Intel graphics driver code. Plus the always active AMD graphics driver changes and various refinements to the many smaller graphics/display drivers.

There are many highlights on the Intel side this time especially given their Project Battlematrix initiative . Given their Project Battlematrix roadmap, the Intel graphics driver work on the

The x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel. The x86 platform drivers area traditionally has been around Linux laptop hardware support but in recent years more work on handheld devices too plus Intel/AMD server platform functionality.

With the x86 platform driver changes for Linux 6.17 there is the new Intel discovery driver plus the much talked about Lenovo Legion WMI gaming drivers for enhancing that handheld platform. The highlights this merge window include:

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For the Ubuntu 25.10 development cycle to complement the daily ISOs, Canonical began releasing monthly snapshots to facilitate more testing from the community and also in working to enhance their build automation / infrastructure. Today marks the third monthly release of Ubuntu 25.10 for testing.

Questing Snapshot 3 was just released as the newest monthly development milestone for Ubuntu 25.10. Ubuntu 25.10 "Questing Quokka" continues pacing well and is working toward shipping in October atop the Linux 6

The Apple System Management Controller (SMC) driver was successfully merged this week into Linux 6.17 for being able to reboot modern Apple M1 / M2 Macs under Linux (the Apple M3 / M4 Linux support remains in development). It's the latest improvement for Apple Silicon on the upstream Linux kernel compared to the downstream Asahi Linux code that has been carrying the SMC driver and other in-development/tentative patches.

As covered in the aforelinked article, the Apple System Management Controller exposes

The AMD Radeon RX 480 / RX 580 "Polaris" graphics cards remain very popular on the Steam Survey and among enthusiasts/desktop users at large even though they are nearly a decade old. The nine year old Polaris graphics cards have aged well in the marketplace and are an affordable choice. For Linux users they continue enjoying strong open-source driver support. It turns out Linux creator Linus Torvalds himself is still relying on an AMD Radeon RX 580 with one of his main systems.

Due

Another change proposal filed recently for the Fedora Linux 43 release is to hardlink identical files within /usr by default for RPM-provided files that are 100% identical and can be then deduplicated to help conserve disk space and increase system efficiency.

Fedora already allows selectively to hardlink identical files in RPMs while this change would make it done everywhere by default for RPM-provided files within the /usr directory.

The Fedora 43 change proposal notes:

"As mentioned in the Summary, hardlinking deduplicates the data in

Upstreamed to the Linux kernel back in 2019 was the Lockdown security module for opt-in hardware/kernel security restrictions . It was a difficult and contentious process getting to the Linux kernel but then was left without any formal maintainer shortly after being mainlined. Now for helping to renew this Linux security module, two developers have stepped up to takeover maintainership of Lockdown.

Since Lockdown was mainlined six years ago, attack vectors have emerged and bypass bugs for this security module typically paired with UEFI Secure Boot to help fend