Ubuntu Linux Will Begin Landing AI Features Throughout The Next Year

Now that Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has shipped, Canonical is opening up on their next major focus for Ubuntu development: lots of AI features...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-AI-Features-2026

Coreboot Comes To AMD Ryzen Powered Star Labs StarBook MK VI After 3+ Year Wait

For those that had purchased a StarBook MK VI laptop 3+ years ago over the advertised support for Coreboot, Star Labs has now delivered with a Coreboot build finally available and working for this AMD Ryzen 5000 series powered laptop...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Coreboot-StarBook-MK-VI

NVIDIA Provides Preview Driver With DRM Color Pipeline API Support

Following the DRM Color Pipeline API making it into the Linux 6.19 kernel, NVIDIA today released a preview Linux driver with their support for the DRM per-plane color pipeline API that will benefit the broader Linux/Wayland desktop HDR ambitions...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Preview-DRM-Color-Pipe

Ubuntu Will Switch To ntpd-rs As Its Next Rust System Component

Canonical engineers are planning a switch to ntpd-rs as the newest Rust-based system component for Ubuntu Linux for handling time synchronization...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Switching-To-ntpd-rs

GNU Hurd On Guix Is Ready With 64-bit Support, SMP Multi-Processor Support "Soon"

After hearing last month that GNU Hurd is "almost there" with x86_64 support, it was exciting to kickoff today by seeing a developer headline "The 64-bit Hurd is Here!" GNU Hurd 64-bit support is now said to be ready but SMP support for multiple processor cores and the like remain still in development...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Hurd-64-bit-2026

GNOME GitLab Redirecting Some Git Traffic To GitHub For Reducing Costs

If you are cloning from a GNOME repository on their GitLab and now finding your Git traffic being redirected to GitHub, you are not alone. GNOME's infrastructure team is now redirecting Git traffic from the GNOME.org GitLab over to GitHub mirrors for reducing bandwidth costs...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-GitHub-GitLab-Redirect

Firefox 148 Now Available With The New AI Controls / AI Kill Switches

Firefox 148 release binaries are now available ahead of the official release announcement on Tuesday. Most notable is the new AI controls found with Firefox 148 for those wishing to disable Firefox's growing AI capabilities...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-148

GNU Gawk 5.4 Released With New MinRX Regex Matcher, Faster Reading Of Files

Developers behind the widely-used GNU Awk text processing utility today released Gawk 5.4...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Gawk-5.4-Released

AppArmor Enhancements Merged For Linux 7.0

The AppArmour security module for the Linux kernel, which most notably is backed by Canonical for Ubuntu, has some small improvements and fixes for Linux 7.0...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-AppArmor

Linux 7.0 Speeds Up Reclaiming File-Backed Large Folios By 50~75%

Merged on Wednesday were some additional memory management "MM" updates for the Linux 7.0 merge window. Most interesting out of these latest three dozen patches is support for batched unmapping of file-backed large folios...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.0-Faster-Large-Folios

Lutris 0.5.20 Linux Game Manager Brings New Features, Wine Wayland Option

For fans of Lutris as the open-source desktop client for installing and playing many games on Linux, Lutris 0.5.20 is out today with new features that further enhance the integration with different emulators and compatibility layers...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Lutris-0.5.20-Released

Google Chrome 145 Released With JPEG-XL Image Support

Back in 2022 Google deprecated and then removed JPEG-XL image support from the Chrome/Chromium browser codebase and now in 2026 it's back. Last month I wrote about JPEG-XL decoding merged back to Chromium/Chrome and that has rolled out today as part of today's Chrome 145 stable debut...
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Chrome-145-Released