Strongly disagree. Hardware support improved by leaps and bounds last decade and a half. Namespace isolation and cgroups driven containerization. eBPF appeared and gained adoption. Async I/O (and later just everything async) converged on io_uring. Btrfs is _stable_ - some people believed it would never be possible, ever. All kinds of scheduling were iterated and iterated over.

All these things are visible across the board, both from developers and end users side.

Isn't this the case with most well established software?

There is still a lot of work done on the background, perhaps even more than ever.

But unless you are a power user eagerly waiting for one of the things currently worked on, you wouldn't notice or care unless the interface changes (which usually only happens on visual interfaces).

I've been daily driving Linux since ubuntu 12.04. Things have improved a lot. It used to be the best OS for (a certain class of) programmers. It's now the OS I installed on my 7 year old son's computer. Things like connecting Bluetooth peripherals, multiple audio devices, multiple screens (with multiple DPI) are a not just possible, but easy now, and robust.

i remember back in the day, when i built my project, using 100% cpu, the whole system became lagging and choppy and you really can't do anything anymore.

Now it behaves more like Windows/Mac, even when 100%, my youtube/spotify tab can still run smoothly.

(Of course i think there will be hit in some areas, like my code would be built slower, there is no free meal).

Maybe it's distro packaging, but I suspect it's the kernel, too: In the 20 years I have dipped my toes into Linux, there is no better time to be a desktop user than today. With CachyOS and modern kernel, I have zero audio issues, zero GPU issues, (thanks to Wine/Steam Proton) no gaming issues, and much more rare instances of wifi or sleep problems. The idea of having to install hacky wifi drivers from USB stick are over.

Not really. I never had this less issues on Linux with hardware. I remember 15 years back when I wanted to install it on a Desktop/Laptop, many things simply didn't work. Now you can install Linux on a self-assembled box and 99% of things will work out of the box.

> From the outside it looks like almost nothing ever changes

You should try to compile a custom kernel for your machine and strip the unneeded things out. Good luck.

Linux has diabetes.

It doesn't give any specifics about what changed on the HDMI Forum side, but this article [0] from June indicates that Valve worked closely with AMD to get it pushed through prior to the release of the Steam Machine (which supports HDMI 2.1 VRR).

[0] https://www.digitalfoundry.net/news/2026/06/valves-hdmi-2-1-...

As far as I can recall: some internal implementation documentation leaked which made the legal position tougher for them somehow to protect it as proprietary (it made sense when I heard it explained, but now I feel like I'm missing an important detail to that), and then Valve had some talks with the HDMI Forum to convince them to let it go, presumably so they could have such support integrated into Linux for their hardware (Deck, Machine, Frame, etc).

So now the HDMI Forum just doesn't really care anymore I guess.

I've seen some people say that since HDMI 2.2 recently released the HDMI forum doesn't care as much about "protecting" 2.1 anymore.

If FOSS drivers support HDMI 2.2 when devices start shipping with HDMI 2.2 ports then this'll be disproven, but the HDMI forum held off on allowing AMD to implement 2.1 support in their Linux drivers for years and only relented when they released HDMI 2.2. Valve with the Gabecube probably didn't have much to do with it considering how low volume it is.

8K still not working properly

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-More-AMDGPU

I just assumed they could tell that the world was getting close to just switching to DP if they kept making hdmi inconvenient, so the choice is be convenient or be irrelevant.

I don't mean that specifically the linux kernel mattered so much to them, but in general for consumers (product makers) all up and down the line.

[flagged]

As a long time desktop and server user, why do I look at changelogs...

New filesystems and major changes to existing ones (large performance improvements, new features like adding better compression standards which I now know I can use, fixes to long-standing bugs which open new use cases).

New protocols like wireguard when it was new and exciting (still is now that I think of it). When that was mainlined, I knew I had some network rearchitecting to do.

New device drivers like amdgpu when it was massive news. Less so these days since most hardware is well supported, and I don't buy the absolute latest.

New kernel APIs which I can use in my programs — like landlock, when it was merged I knew it was time to improve sandboxing in some of my stuff.

Though LWN and kernel newbies do it best, already linked by others.

> Who is the main audience for this type of content?

I make technology decisions at a large embedded shop that makes cars.

Content like this tells me Igalia has serious programmers and is relevant upstream. The memory sticks.

It's also informative, which makes me feel good.

They're a consultancy. It's good for business.

It's a well-formatted changelog of the most salient features of the release. Linus doesn't provide one apart from a list of added commits and merged branches, which isn't very useful unless you are a kernel developer.

    =USB4STREAM for streaming data with USB4=

    In addition to Thunderbolt networking, which was already supported, this release adds support for streaming data directly over a cable as well (USB4STREAM). It is very simple and basically just transfers raw packets from one host to another. The driver exposes /dev/tbstreamX devices on each side of the link that can be used to transfer data using regular filesystem operations such as read(2) and write(2):

    host1 # cat /dev/tbstream0
    host2 # echo hello > /dev/tbstream0

    This can be useful in cases where network tooling is not available or just for existing applications like dd and cat that do not support sockets. This feature can be used at the same time with thunderbolt_net so they don't rule each other out, and it allows multiple streams to be created.

I think it is mostly "marketing" for Igalia's services. If you want to pay people to do "stuff" in Linux and adjacent projects like Mesa, Igalia seems very competent.

I'm using a recently released laptop, and Linux hardware support hasn't caught up yet. So I've been following the changelogs of recent kernel releases to understand the current state of support.

It's the sort of content I expect to see on HackerNews, rather than popular science/technology-type journalism.

I'd say mostly sys admins type users that want to stay on top of things?

I install Linux on a wide variety of hardware for both work and personal reasons.

I don't read the detailed changelogs religiously but after years of paying some attention to them I can understand most of it and see where the industry is investing developer efforts, what cool new hardware is gaining support and what new security or performance features people are focusing on.

I look for wake from sleep fixes, nvidia the primary offender there (they have at least two bugs affecting it across several driver versions). But my intel wifi driver (BE200) also has an apparent hard lock on wake. Looks like this particular release doesn't have any fixes for me, though claude says its not the full change list.

hi audience, we know about this stuff you use on a daily basis, you may be interested in our executive summary of the latest release of the stuff

It’s intrinsically interesting

I for one am excited about HDMI 2.1 support on AMD.

You only come here for the AI hype blogs?

I don't think there is much too it, it's a consulting firm. Would you hire a consulting firm with an empty tech blog portifolio? It's ticking a box, it's stating it's a consulting firm in tech, that it's target audience are companies with Linux machines etc...

Have you considered zram/swap? Since running it, i have never seen mem usage > 95%, even under absurd workloads and have never been oom-killed ever since.

... look into earlyoom , its a pretty neat solution just prescribe to it, all the stuff to never oom no matter what I've never had to hard reboot anymore due to OOM

After setting up earlyoom to gracefully start shutting stuff down at a threshold before hitting oom, robustly works all the time even under intense ram + swap pressure + 100% cpu on all cores sorta workload

https://man.archlinux.org/man/earlyoom.1.en

[dead]

If you’re using a TV. They rarely have DP ports.

HDMI is a king on consumer TVs. Linux (in form of SteamOS) is becoming a major console gaming platform thanks to Valve.

> Okay, so ELI 5 why I would now use HDMI instead of DP?

For A/V stuff: CEC and (e)ARC.

* CEC: control one device, and downstream items receive instructions so you're (ideally) not fiddling with multiple remotes.

* ARC: the TV/display can decode audio/video and pass the audio to a sound bar or other audio system.

HDMI 2.1 carries more bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.4. Plenty of GPU/monitors have that port arrangement, as recent as Nvidia's RTX 40 Series.

Because your motherboard only supports HDMI. The last three I used had HDMI, and sometimes VGA.

> Okay, so ELI 5 why I would now use HDMI instead of DP?

I use DP too when I can. For example my main desktop is using DP.

But many devices have HDMI, not DP. For example I've got seven Raspberry Pi here: they all have HDMI and none has DP. There's, what, 100 million Raspberry Pi in the world by now? Don't know the number but: devices that do not support DP aren't rare.

And Linux runs on much more than desktop PCs.

Which part of "because the device doesn't have a DP port" is not enough for you?

You can't picture such devices or what's the holdup?

I have been using HDMI to game on TV for most or all of my adult life. Mostly console gaming. A few years back I built a dedicated gaming rig, but I still use it with a controller from my couch connected to a TV.

So this is a win for couch gamers and open source in general.

What’s DP? My desktop and laptop both have HDMI.

[flagged]

People who want to play video games, or watch videos using hardware decoding, or train machine learning models? DRM here means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager

> DRM exposes an API that user-space programs can use to send commands and data to the GPU and perform operations such as configuring the mode setting of the display.

> User-space programs can use the DRM API to command the GPU to do hardware-accelerated 3D rendering and video decoding, as well as GPGPU computing.

Here it doesn’t mean “digital rights management”, but “Direct Rendering Manager”, a component of the kernel’s graphics stack: https://docs.kernel.org/gpu/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

This is DRM as in Direct Rendering Manager, which is the kernel interface to GPU hardware; not Digital Rights Management.

The Direct Rendering Manager is useful for any Linux user who wants to display things on a monitor (unless you're happy with like 640x480 VESA, in which case maybe you don't need it)

DRM refers to Direct Rendering Manager in this context.

Different DRM, the one in the kernel is Direct Rendering Manager, which is basically managing access to the GPU.

DRM = Direct Rendering Manager. GPU scheduling.

its the Direct Rendering Manager, not the other DRM