The Daily Brief — Tech Edition

Daily tech news, edited and dated.

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Thursday, 18 June 2026

78 stories filed.

Bcachefs Tools 1.38.6 Brings Many Performance Improvements

Phoronix ·

Kent Overstreet announced the release today of Bcachefs-Tools 1.38.6 as the user-space tools built around the Bcachefs copy-on-write file-system. There are a few new features and a lot of performance work in v1.38.6 without bringing any on-disk format breakage...

Show HN: An 8-bit live gamecast for baseball

Hacker News ·

Hey HN, I built a website to watch live baseball games in an 8-bit broadcast. It takes live MLB data streams and converts them into near real-time pixel art gamecasts. Been waiting to share this for when there’s actually a good slate of games happening since the site is pretty bare otherwise.

Discussion: Hacker News thread →

Experimental, Reverse-Engineered & AI Assisted Rust Driver Targets Modern DisplayLink Hardware

Phoronix ·

The original DisplayLink USB display adapters were great for working with an upstream, open-source driver while sadly the newer DisplayLink tech has been limited to an out-of-tree driver and proprietary user-space daemon. But posted today is an experimental "Vino" driver that is a clean-room, reverse-engineered driver for newer DisplayLink hardware...

Epic Games Announces Lore Open-Source Version Control System

Phoronix ·

Epic Games announced today they have created a new version control system that is now open-source as Lore. Given the proliferation and excellence of Git, you may be wondering why Epic Games is pursuing another VCS option... They are specifically catering Lore to games and entertainment purposes with large file sizes...

Intel Core Ultra X7 Panther Lake Performance On Linux 7.1

Phoronix ·

After recently noting the Intel Arc B580 Battlemage performance improving with Linux 7.1 and similarly finding performance gains for the Arc Pro B70 on Linux 7.1, several Phoronix readers have been wondering whether the newer Xe3 graphics with Panther Lake similarly benefit. Here are some CPU and iGPU benchmarks of the Core Ultra X7 358H "Panther Lake" SoC between Linux 7.0 and the recently…

Myna Announced As Speech-To-Text Solution For The Ubuntu Desktop

Phoronix ·

Earlier this month plans were shared publicly of Ubuntu 26.10 aiming to build a context-aware desktop with local AI features and one of the first capabilities to be integrated speech-to-text support. Now we have more details on the speech-to-text plans with Canonical announcing the Myna project...

Initial AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL Support Successfully Merged For Linux 7.2

Phoronix ·

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display and accelerator driver changes have been merged for Linux 7.2. The Linux 7.2 DRM merge is headlined by the long-awaited HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link (FRL) support for the AMDGPU open-source driver as part of the larger effort of finally proceeding with a full HDMI 2.1 implementation for this AMD Radeon Linux driver...

Qt Creator 20 IDE Released With AI Agent Support

Phoronix ·

The Qt Creator integrated development environment focused on Qt/C++ programming is out today with Qt Creator 20 and this new version is headlined by adding AI agent support...

GCC 17 Lands Initial Infrastructure For C++29

Phoronix ·

Merged yesterday to the GCC Git development codebase for next year's GCC 17 release is the initial infrastructure laying out support for -std=c++29 and the like for targeting the C++29 standard not anticipated for release until around 2029...

U.S. science is in chaos

Hacker News ·

Article URL: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/americas-compact-between-science-and-politics-is-broken/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48568058 Points: 521 # Comments: 583

Discussion: Hacker News thread →

Linux Finally Ends AppleTalk Protocol Support

Phoronix ·

While the AppleTalk networking protocols were innovative when they first appeared for their plug-and-play capabilities, Apple itself ended their AppleTalk support back in 2009. Now 17 years later, the Linux kernel is ending AppleTalk support due to a recent surge of AI-generated patches...

Mozilla Firefox Usage Of zlib-rs For Better Safety & Performance

Phoronix ·

Since the release in May of Firefox 151, Mozilla has been relying on the zlib-rs library for Gzip compression/decompression. This subtle change to use this Rust-based Zlib implementation has yielded some performance benefits and better memory safety but also some headaches when dealing with Intel CPU bugs...

Linux Enacts Guidance To Tighten Acceptance Of New File-Systems Into The Kernel

Phoronix ·

There is no shortage of different file-systems available for Linux. New file-systems continue to come about in the open-source world but ultimately many of them end up not being well maintained or having very limited users and not necessarily innovating enough to make them worthwhile over other alternatives. Given the continued increase in file-systems looking to get into the Linux kernel, such…

KDE Plasma 6 Desktop Finally Comes To Slackware

Phoronix ·

It's been a while since there has been any Slackware news to pass along, but this week they've finally landed the KDE Plasma 6 desktop in this legendary Linux distribution...

Kirkland Roundabouts

Hacker News ·

Article URL: https://kirklandroundabouts.com Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48533098 Points: 132 # Comments: 104

Discussion: Hacker News thread →

Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation

Hacker News ·

I've made a drawing app based on my physical sketching practice, using fluid sim and some shader tricks to mimic watercolor-style ink washes. Best used on iPad or with a drawing tablet. The linked article shows how the core engine works, with plenty of little interactive demos.

Discussion: Hacker News thread →

Image Compression

Hacker News ·

Article URL: https://www.makingsoftware.com/chapters/image-compression Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48522927 Points: 127 # Comments: 17

Discussion: Hacker News thread →