Linux 7.x: A Kernel in Overdrive

The Linux kernel has been on a relentless march forward, with both the freshly released 7.2 and the in-development 7.3 generating considerable excitement across the enthusiast and professional communities. Linux 7.2 landed with a headline feature that caught the attention of desktop users and server admins alike: cache-aware scheduling, which promises smarter CPU task placement alongside measurable performance boosts for the ext4 and Btrfs filesystems. The development cycle itself broke records, with more than 2,100 individual contributors participating over nine weeks — a merge window first. Notably, roughly five percent of commits carried an 'assisted-by' tag indicating some degree of AI involvement, a quiet but telling sign of how machine assistance is creeping into even the most foundational software on the planet. The release also shed over 13,000 lines of legacy i486 CPU emulation code, a clean break from hardware that has long since left the building.

Meanwhile, Linux 7.3 is shaping up to be an equally ambitious release. Early benchmarks run on an HP Z4 G6i workstation powered by an Intel Xeon 678X Granite Rapids processor paint a mixed but largely encouraging picture — performance improvements are real in many workloads, though a handful of regressions have also been flagged for attention before the final release. The Btrfs filesystem is a particular standout: the 7.3 pull request claims performance gains of roughly three to five times in specific operations, and independent benchmarks comparing 7.2 stable against 7.3 Git have confirmed those numbers are not just marketing. For anyone relying heavily on Btrfs for storage, the upgrade case is compelling.

Hardware support in 7.3 is also expanding on multiple fronts. The sound subsystem has taken in a large batch of new audio hardware support, as submitted by SUSE's Takashi Iwai. The HID subsystem merges have brought in initial kernel driver support for the 2026 Valve Steam Controller — early days, but a clear signal of the kernel community staying in step with gaming hardware. On the networking side, improvements to the ath11k driver for Qualcomm Wi-Fi 6 chipsets are delivering results that border on the spectacular: a patch series currently in progress is reportedly yielding seven times lower latency, or alternatively 2.2 times greater throughput at the same latency. For anyone running Qualcomm wireless on Linux, that is not a marginal improvement — it is transformative.

Linux 7.3 is also tightening up its security posture, albeit at the cost of some flexibility. The AF_ALG interface — which lets user-space programs tap into the kernel's cryptographic API — has been undergoing steady restriction across recent cycles. It was deprecated in 7.2 and is now being further locked down in 7.3, with features like zero-copy support and offloading already removed in previous releases. The kernel community has characterised the interface as a security and maintenance liability, making this a case of deliberate subtraction rather than neglect. Separately, the modern NTFS driver is gaining read support for Windows System Compression (WOF), a practical win for dual-boot users who need to access compressed Windows system files from Linux without drama.

Multi-Kernel Linux: A New Architecture Takes Shape

One of the more architecturally ambitious developments in the Linux world is the continued progress on multi-kernel Linux. First proposed last year, the concept allows multiple independent kernel instances to coexist on a single physical machine, each running on dedicated CPU cores while sharing the underlying hardware. Linux 7.0-mk2 has now been released, advancing this experimental but promising approach. Performance results from early testing have been described as promising, and the architecture could have significant implications for workloads that benefit from strict isolation between CPU domains — think real-time processing, high-frequency trading, or workloads that simply cannot afford the jitter of a shared scheduler.

It is still early days for multi-kernel Linux, and it remains a patched, out-of-tree experience rather than something you will find in a mainstream distro kernel tomorrow. But the steady cadence of releases and the documented performance results suggest this is a project with serious engineering momentum behind it, not just a proof-of-concept gathering dust on a mailing list.

Wayland vs X11: The Performance Question Gets an Answer

The long-running debate over whether Wayland is actually faster than X11 has received some of its most rigorous scrutiny yet, courtesy of the PorteuX Linux distribution. PorteuX, which positions itself as a high-performance, minimalist distro, forked Xfce's xfwm4 window manager to create xfwm4-gl, adding OpenGL compositing support. As part of that project, the team developed a dedicated window manager and compositor benchmark to evaluate real-world performance and efficiency. Their conclusion: Wayland is intrinsically faster than X11, but not necessarily more efficient — a nuanced finding that should put some of the more breathless claims on both sides of the debate to rest.

The distinction between raw speed and efficiency matters. A compositor can push more frames per second while consuming more CPU and GPU resources to do so — which may or may not be the right trade-off depending on your hardware and use case. PorteuX's benchmark infrastructure is a useful contribution to a conversation that has often been driven more by tribalism than data, and the results are likely to inform future window manager development on both protocols.

On a related note, KDE's Plasma 6.8 is making targeted improvements to its remote desktop experience as part of the broader effort to close the remaining functional gaps between Wayland and X11. Developer David Edmundson has outlined work underway to ensure that Plasma's remote desktop functionality meets the full set of expectations that X11 users have historically taken for granted. As Wayland continues to mature, it is incremental work like this — fixing the long tail of edge cases — that will ultimately determine when it can be considered a complete replacement rather than a capable but imperfect alternative.

Ubuntu: Distro Updates, Old Bugs, and App Centre Woes

The Ubuntu ecosystem has had a busy few weeks. The most forward-looking news is that Ubuntu 26.10, codenamed 'Stonking Stingray', has entered feature freeze as of 20 August, signalling that the release is transitioning from feature work to stabilisation. Canonical engineer Paride Legovini posted to the developer mailing list urging contributors to shift focus toward bug fixes rather than landing new capabilities. The final stable release is targeted for October, and the freeze — albeit announced a little later than usual — puts the project on track. The remaining window before release will be critical for ensuring the package set is in good shape.

For users still on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, a significant update is rolling out to open-vm-tools, the package that handles integration between Linux virtual machines and VMware hypervisors. The update brings the package all the way from version 12.3.5 to 13.0.10 — the same version shipping in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS — in a full backport. Canonical's Lena Voytek explained the rationale plainly: without the update, users running 24.04 LTS on newer VMware hypervisors encounter compatibility issues. For anyone running virtualised Ubuntu workloads in an enterprise VMware environment, this is a quietly important fix.

On the more whimsical side of Ubuntu news, a decade-old Launchpad bug surfaced briefly in the spotlight this weekend when it was finally marked as invalid. Bug #1589796 was filed in 2016 by a user who had spent £700 on Ubuntu Phone and tablet hardware, only to find no documentation on the official website explaining how to use it. Canonical shuttered the Ubuntu Phone project in 2017, leaving the bug in limbo for nearly ten years. Its closure by Adolfo Jayme Barrientos on the bug triage team triggered an impromptu reunion in the comments from many of Canonical's former engineers who worked on the phone project — a bittersweet moment of community nostalgia for a road not taken.

Less charming is the ongoing situation with Ubuntu's App Centre, which has a habit of surfacing an error dialog that informs the user only that "something went wrong" and that the software itself is unsure what the problem actually is. It is the kind of UX failure that would be a minor footnote if it were rare, but the fact that it persists across releases suggests it is not a priority fix. For a distro that positions itself as the friendly face of Linux, an error message that essentially throws its hands up is not a great look.

Linux Mint, GeForce NOW, and the Desktop Getting Tidier

Linux Mint is rolling out a meaningful quality-of-life improvement to its kernel management story. Currently, kernel tools live inside the Update Manager; they are being relocated to the System Administration tool across both the standard Mint editions and LMDE. More significantly, the distro will now automatically delete old kernel versions on a weekly schedule to reclaim disk space — a common pain point for users who install kernel updates regularly and forget to prune older entries. The system will also track kernels by series rather than individual releases, with users able to configure how many older kernels within a given series are retained beyond the currently booted one. It is a sensible, user-friendly approach to what has historically been a manual housekeeping chore.

Gaming on Linux got a notable boost with the news that NVIDIA's GeForce NOW native Linux application has officially exited beta after seven months of community testing. The app, which serves as a front-end for NVIDIA's cloud gaming service with a catalogue of over 4,500 PC titles, now officially supports Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and later. NVIDIA credited the beta community with driving improvements in performance, stability, and polish. The app gives Linux users access to GeForce RTX-class rendering, ray tracing, and DLSS without needing to own the underlying hardware locally — a meaningful proposition for Linux desktop gamers who have historically had a narrower set of options than their Windows counterparts.

For those who like to personalise their Ubuntu desktop, a fork of an existing GNOME picture widget has arrived with more flexibility. The Picture Desktop Widget Remake allows users to place multiple photo frame widgets on the desktop, each pulling images from a separately assigned folder at random. Size, position, border radius, and aspect ratio can be configured individually per widget, and each frame has its own toggle in the Preferences panel. It is a small thing, but desktop customisation tools with this level of granularity are exactly the sort of community contribution that keeps the Linux desktop feeling alive and personal.

Tuba for Linux Gets a Major Update

Tuba, widely regarded as the best Mastodon client for Linux desktops, has received a substantial update with version 0.11. The release adds full support for Mastodon's quote post functionality and Collections, two features that have become increasingly important to the Mastodon experience as the platform has matured. Beyond that, the update brings UnifiedPush support — allowing notifications without a proprietary push service — and, perhaps most intriguingly, an early experimental Android build. That last point is significant: Tuba has historically been a Linux-first application, and an Android port, even in its earliest stages, suggests the project has ambitions beyond the desktop.

Developer Corner: Tools, Tricks, and Bare-Metal BASIC

On the developer tooling front, a self-hosted deployment automation tool for Windows and IIS called FDeploy has been released after seven years of on-and-off development. The creator, who candidly acknowledges that parenthood contributed to the extended timeline, has launched with what they describe as a generous licensing model: free for commercial use for companies with up to one million US dollars in annual recurring revenue. The motivation was not financial, but a reaction to the steady price increases from established players in the deployment automation space. Whether it finds an audience will depend on how it competes technically, but the pricing philosophy alone is likely to attract attention from smaller shops and indie developers.

For those who like their computing deeply retro, a project called Thoreau BASIC has emerged on itch.io: a BASIC interpreter that boots directly on x64 machines via UEFI, with no operating system underneath it whatsoever. The creator wanted the nostalgic experience of a computer that boots to a "Ready" prompt — line numbers, immediate mode, simple graphics, the whole classic package — and then decided there was no good reason it needed an OS to do so. The UEFI version uses the Graphics Output Protocol for its framebuffer and reads keyboard input directly from firmware. It is a delightful piece of engineering curiosity.

Elsewhere, a deep-dive blog post on the likely and unlikely branch prediction macros in the Linux kernel has been making the rounds on Reddit's programming community. These macros, which hint to the compiler about which branch of a conditional is more likely to be taken, are a small but instructive example of the micro-optimisation culture baked into the kernel codebase — and a useful read for anyone interested in the gap between high-level code and what actually executes on silicon.

Security Watch: The Sleepwalker Backdoor

On the Windows security front, researchers have identified a previously unknown backdoor dubbed Sleepwalker — and its design is notably patient. Rather than immediately phoning home or generating detectable outbound traffic, Sleepwalker sits silently in memory, waiting for a single specifically crafted network packet — a so-called "magic packet" — before activating. Once triggered, it operates using a 23-instruction internal command language capable of executing code directly in memory and exfiltrating data from the compromised machine. The absence of outgoing traffic during its dormant phase makes it particularly difficult to detect through conventional network monitoring. Security researcher Dominik is credited with identifying and documenting the malware. The discovery is a reminder that the most dangerous threats are often the quietest ones.

Quick Notes

  • The Linux PDF ecosystem on desktop remains a sore spot: a discussion on Lobsters highlighted that while there are plenty of Linux PDF viewers and basic page-editing tools, a true Adobe Acrobat equivalent — covering image editing, outline creation, and full annotation workflows in one package — still does not exist. PDF4QT was mentioned as a partial solution, but acknowledged as falling short of the full feature set.
  • A developer on Hacker News is exploring the creation of a custom Android ROM with Linux-level customisation, soliciting community feedback on the technical limitations of such a project. The post generated discussion around the inherent constraints of the Android ecosystem compared to a full Linux environment.
  • Parallels Desktop 27 for Mac has launched, claiming up to 160% faster OpenGL performance for Windows applications such as Blender 4.3, along with AI acceleration support on M4 Macs and newer hardware.
  • A Linux-to-Android customisation deep-dive discussion on Hacker News explored why Android's customisability still lags behind desktop Linux, with contributors weighing in on bootloader restrictions, hardware abstraction layers, and the general difficulty of building a truly open Android derivative.