The 305th installment of the 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup is here for the week ending August 16th, 2026, keeping you updated on the most important developments in the Linux world.

The PreSonus Quantum 2626 is a high-end, Thunderbolt 3 based audio interface. PreSonus just maintains Windows and macOS drivers for this high-end audio interface while now an open-source Linux driver has been posted after being independently developed via reverse engineering...

Garuda Linux “Temeraire” is out today as the latest snapshot of this Arch Linux-based distro that promises to deliver a powerful, beautiful, and user-centric Linux desktop experience.

With the Intel Xeon 678X "Granite Rapids WS" processor that I have been recently testing within the HP Z4 G6i workstation, there are 48 cores plus with Hyper Threading is a total of 96 threads for this high-end workstation processor with a 300 Watt TDP. For those curious about the performance impact of HT/SMT on this Intel Xeon 600 series workstation processor, here are some comparison benchmarks.

WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou” introduces responsive styling, a new image editing workflow, richer collaboration tools, and Playlist and Tabs blocks.

The Linux kernel has supported the CONFIG_COMPAT_32BIT_TIME Kconfig build time option for optionally disabling of legacy 32-bit time system call support. This is intended to disable the code that uses a 32-bit integer for time that is thus not Year 2038 safe, but at the cost of breaking compatibility for legacy 32-bit applications. Even if building without Linux 32-bit time support, it turns out some 32-bit time code persisted but that is now being fixed with Linux 7.3...

RPM 6.1 has been released today as a major update to this package manager system for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Linux-based distributions.

Modular has opened Mojo’s compiler and tooling under Apache 2.0, but says outside compiler contributions will have to wait until later this year.

In addition to the IOmap improvements helping EXT4 performance in Linux 7.3, the main EXT4 feature pull request has now been submitted for this next kernel version. That pull is set to land yet more performance optimizations for EXT4...

Go 1.27 introduces generic methods, a new JSON v2 implementation, faster small memory allocations, goroutine leak profiling, and new crypto features.

Andrew Morton on Tuesday sent out all of the memory management "MM" updates for the Linux 7.3 merge window. The MM pull was particularly heavy as he noted 1,250 "added-to-MM" emails were sent out this cycle compared to 920 the prior cycle. With a lot of patch churn, he also turned to Google's Gemini AI for writing his patch summaries. In going through the very verbose AI-generated summary, there are two patch series that get me excited on the performance front with Linux 7.3...

Garuda Linux Temeraire arrives with a new CachyOS-based kernel, Plasma Login Manager, revamped Hyprland setup, and major tooling changes.

Here is a simple KDE Plasma rice with an "Abandoned Machine" vibe that features a clean setup, easy customization, and is perfect for daily use. Just a quick note to be transparent: I actually created this setup about five months ago, but I am finally sharing it now. For the visual components, I used the Layan Global Theme paired with the Layan Breath Kvantum Theme, the Gruvbox Plus icon pack, and the KDE Modern Clock widget.

Once you get past what can best be described as an interesting default desktop photo, Poland's Linux Q83's latest offering makes one wonder: With one this solid, why is this Debian-based distro ranking in the 90s on Distrowatch.com when it should be much higher?

COSMIC Desktop 1.6 adds per-application sound controls, compositor protocol improvements, terminal enhancements, and fixes across core desktop components.

COSMIC Epoch 1.6 was released this evening as the latest milestone for this open-source, Rust-based desktop environment led by System76 as part of the work on their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...

Following the release of Mozilla Firefox 154 today, the Mozilla Thunderbird 154 open-source email, calendar, news, chat, and address book client has been released with various new features and improvements.

There was a proposal under discussion the past few months on building x86-64-v3 packages for Fedora 45 while retaining x86-64-v1 packages. The hope was building the Fedora packages with x86-64-v3 where AVX/AVX2, FMA, BMI2, and other newer ISA features can be assumed in the name of better performance. Unfortunately, the x86-64-v3 plans are now delayed but may be reconsidered next year with Fedora 46...

Mozilla Thunderbird 154 is now available with optional system tray support, Microsoft Graph integration, improved search behavior, and more.

Merged earlier this year for Linux 7.1 was extended attributes on sockets support as a feature sought after by the likes of GNOME and systemd for helping with Varlink IPC usage and other purposes. A limitation though of the functionality has been no efficient means for a BPF program to read those user extended attribute labels back. But with Linux 7.3 that's being addressed with the new bpf_sock_read_xattr() kernel function...