After looking yesterday at the most viewed Linux hardware reviews and benchmarks of 2025, today’s look is at the most popular open-source/Linux news of the past year. There were 3,286 original news articles on Phoronix during 2025 written by your’s truly, here’s a look back at what excited readers the most over these past twelve months.
Below is a look at the most popular news of the past year with several top articles revolving around Valve’s ongoing Linux improvements, KDE Plasma advancing especially around Wayland, and the never-ending flow of Linux kernel improvements as well as insightful commentary by Linus Torvalds. Thanks for those that supported Phoronix over the past year either by viewing the site without ad-blockers, tipping, or being a Phoronix Premium supporter.
Meta Is Using The Linux Scheduler Designed For Valve’s Steam Deck On Its Servers
An interesting anecdote from this month’s Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo is that Meta (Facebook) is using the Linux scheduler originally designed for the needs of Valve’s Steam Deck… On Meta Servers. Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on the hyperscaler’s large servers.
Mozilla Names New CEO, Firefox To Evolve Into A “Modern AI Browser”
Mozilla Corporation has named its new CEO in replacing interim CEO Laura Chambers.
Linus Torvalds Grows Frustrated Seeing “Garbage” With “Link: ” Tags In Git Commits
Linus Torvalds has grown frustrated enough with seeing “Link: ” tags within Git commits/patches that often times they are of no value and he’s had enough of it. For Linux kernel activity moving forward he’s going to be more strict over “useless” link tags in Git commit messages.
Intel Announces It’s Shutting Down Clear Linux
The most depressing news of the week: Intel is ending their performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution. Over the past decade the Clear Linux operating system has shown what’s possible with out-of-the-box performance on x86_64 hardware… Not just for Intel platforms but even showing extremely great performance results on AMD x86_64 too. But with the cost-cutting going on at Intel, Clear Linux is now being sunset.
KDE Plasma 6.4 Tackles An 18 Year Old Feature Request, More Wayland Protocols Added
The KDE Plasma developer sprint in Graz wrapped up just days ago but there’s still been no shortage of new feature work landing into Plasma 6.4 this week. It was another exciting week of feature development as the soft feature freeze approaches for Plasma 6.4.
The Linux Kernel Looks To “Bite The Bullet” In Enabling Microsoft C Extensions
Two patches queued into the Linux kernel’s build system development tree, kbuild-next, would enable the -fms-extensions compiler argument everywhere for allowing GCC and LLVM/Clang to use the Microsoft C Extensions when compiling the Linux kernel. Being in kbuild-next these patches will likely be submitted for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window next month but remains to be seen if there will be any last minute objections to this change.
KDE Plasma 6.4 Beta Released With Aurorae & KWin-X11
The beta release of the KDE Plasma 6.4 beta desktop is now available for testing ahead of its official release in June.
KDE Plasma Remains Committed To A Wayland Future: 70%+ Already On Wayland
Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham put out a blog post today reaffirming the KDE Plasma’s intent that Wayland is their main focus and X11 support continues to be maintained but eventually it will go away. Nate Graham also noted around 73% of KDE Plasma 6 users are already using the Wayland session.
Plasma LTS Releases Being Discontinued, Better KDE Telemetry Like Valve’s Steam Survey
KDE Plasma open-source developers were meeting the past week in Graz, Austria to plot out fundamental changes and improvements moving forward for this great desktop. Among the changes decided on were ending their practice of Plasma LTS releases, enhancing the telemetry capabilities to be more useful, and more.
KDE Preps More Wayland Improvements, Addresses Another Possible KWin Crash
KDE developers continue to be very busy working toward the Plasma 6.4 desktop release and making other enhancements throughout this open-source desktop.
KDE Plasma 6.4 Adds Time-Of-Day Wallpapers, Disabling Adaptive-Sync By Default
KDE developers have been busy addressing bugs within the Plasma 6.4 desktop ahead of its stable release in June. But there has been some last minute feature work to arrive, including support for time-of-day wallpapers with Plasma 6.4.
KDE Plasma 6.4 Introducing An HDR Calibration Wizard
Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary to highlight all of the interesting Plasma happenings for the past week.
KDE Developers Prepare More Wayland Improvements For Plasma 6.4
As we near the end of April, KDE developers remain quite busy working on more enhancements for the Plasma 6.4 desktop while many of them were also meeting this week in Graz, Austria for further development and planning.
KDE Plasma Will Now Make Sure Your System Doesn’t Suspend When Transferring Files
KDE Plasma 6.4 embarked on its soft feature freeze this week. Thus KDE Plasma developers are now predominantly working on bug fixing and UI polishing for this next open-source desktop release.
Linus Torvalds Lashes Out At RISC-V Big Endian Plans
Linus Torvalds has come out strong against proposed support for RISC-V big endian capabilities within the Linux kernel.
KDE Plasma 6.5 To Introduce Wayland Picture-In-Picture Support
While KDE Plasma 6.4 is set for release next week, there are already exciting feature improvements brewing for Plasma 6.5.
Linus Torvalds Expresses His Hatred For Case-Insensitive File-Systems
Linus Torvalds is sharing some of his classic and straight-to-the-point wisdom today over file-systems with case-folding / case-insensitive file and folder support.
KDE Developers Begin Working On A New Login Manager
KDE developer David Edmundson has published a lengthy blog post today outlining the long-standing challenges they have with the SDDM display manager, unimplemented features they want out of a log-in manager, and acknowledging GNOME’s GDM as a “gold standard” for display managers. While not yet an official project, they have begun working on a new KDE Login Manager for improving the situation.
KDE Plasma 6.4 Beta 2 Brings XWayland Fixes
The second beta release of KDE’s Plasma 6.4 desktop is now available for testing ahead of the official release in June.
KDE Plasma 6.4 Desktop Released With Many Fantastic Improvements
KDE Plasma 6.4 is out today with many fantastic improvements for this open-source desktop.
