SDL Now Prefers Vulkan Over Direct3D 12 On Windows The SDL abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games now prefers using Vulkan on Windows as its ideal graphics API. Direct3D 12 has been demoted lower in priority compared to Vulkan for this Simple DirectMedia Layer... https://www.phoronix.com/news/SDL-Prefers-Vulkan-Windows

KDE Optimizes How It Finds Mount Points - Up To 80% Speed-Up KDE developers have been busy preparing for Plasma 6.2 with lots of bug fixing and polishing while also beginning to land some features for Plasma 6.3... https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Faster-Mount-Points

Wine 9.18 Delivers New Desktop Control Panel Applet Wine 9.18 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software that enables running Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-9.18-Released

Proposal Seeks To Replace MySQL With MariaDB By Default For Ubuntu 25.04 Most Linux distributions have been defaulting to MariaDB as the default MySQL server for years. Ubuntu though has been a notable outlier still relying on Oracle MySQL for the default MySQL service. A proposal raised by an Ubuntu developer hopes to change that for Ubuntu 25.04 in the new year... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-25.04-Maybe-MariaDB

Haiku OS Working On USB 3 SuperSpeed Plus Support The Haiku open-source operating project known for letting the BeOS spirit live on is out with their newest monthly progress report... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Haiku-OS-August-2024

Wow! Microsoft DirectX Adopting SPIR-V Moving Forward Well this is a hell of a surprise... Microsoft announced today that DirectX will be adopting SPIR-V as the interchange format of the future. Microsoft's DirectX 12 will accept shaders compiled to SPIR-V, the intermediate representation defined by The Khronos Group and commonly associated with Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenCL drivers... https://www.phoronix.com/news/DirectX-Adopting-SPIR-V

Linux 6.12 Scheduler Code Adds SCHED_DEADLINE Servers & Complete EEVDF The scheduler updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.12 kernel and come with several notable enhancements... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.12-Scheduler

H.264/H.265 Vulkan Encoder Support Merged Into FFmpeg The FFmpeg multimedia library continues to enhance its support around the Vulkan Video APIs with the latest commits seeing H.264 and H.265/HEVC Vulkan encode support merged... https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-Vulkan-Encode-H.265

Btrfs Sees Minor Performance Optimizations With Linux 6.12 The Btrfs file-system continues marching ahead with the Linux 6.12 kernel... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.12-Btrfs

Mir 2.18 Released With Wayland Server-Side Decorations Canonical today shipped Mir 2.18 as the latest version of this set of open-source libraries for assembly Wayland-based shells. Mir 2.18 brings a number of new features including Wayland server-side decorations... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mir-2.18-Released