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Max 16 Plus laptop with a Qualcomm discrete NPU is now shipping... That is if you are running Ubuntu Linux while the Windows 11 pre-load option is expected in early 2026. An exciting twist with the Linux version of the Dell Pro Max 16 Plus shipping before Microsoft Windows.

The new Dell Pro Max 16 Plus features a Qualcomm AI 100 PC inference accelerator. The Dell Pro Max 16 Plus makes it the first mobile workstation with such an "enterprise grade" discrete NPu.

The best one I've ever heard is they like the Microsoft wallpapers. Yes i told them you can use them on linux too. But they argued with me that they wouldn't be compatible.

OQB @lordnikon@lemmy.world

We're closing in on the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release likely in little more than one week (30 November barring any delays) and today's batch of x86 platform driver updates is bringing some new hardware support as well as some notable consumer device fixes/improvements.

The x86 platform driver co-maintainer Ilpo Järvinen of Intel sent out today's batch of "fixes" material for the Linux 6.18 cycle.

New hardware support in this pull includes adding support for the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally gaming handheld to the AMD PMC driver for the platform management controller. This was motivated for adding the "spurious_8042" quirk for dealing with spurious interrupts during resume on this Windows-focused gaming handheld.

Zorin OS 18 was released on October 14. Just 48 hours later, the team announced it had already been downloaded 100K times. Now, a month later, they’re reporting an even bigger milestone: Zorin OS 18 has surpassed 1M downloads in its first month.

“We’re thrilled to announce that Zorin OS 18 has amassed 1 million downloads in just over a month since its release, breaking all previous records.”

In fact, it would be great to see more Linux distributions adopt this practice and share their download numbers. That alone would give us a much clearer sense of how widely each one is used, since the Linux community still doesn’t have a reliable way to measure the popularity of individual distros.

• Olmo 3 in the Ai2 Playground → https://playground.allenai.org/
• Download: https://huggingface.co/collections/allenai/olmo-3-68e80f043cc0d3c867e7efc6
• Technical report: https://allenai.org/papers/olmo3

Along with new functionality, systemd is broadening its distro support even further, which will surely delight members of the wider Linux community.

Systemd v259-rc1 is the first preview release of what will be the next version of the most widely used system and service manager in the Linux world. It is also, of course, the most controversial, and some of the changes in this version further widen systemd's scope – which we suspect will provoke some push-back, but probably won't slow down its adoption or growth.

The latest plea for official Proton support started on Reddit, where Scout339v2 shared their screenshot of Rust running "on a server with EAC disabled to show that the game already works perfectly on Linux." Disabling Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) is the key factor here, and part of a broader conversation where Facepunch and its Linux/Proton userbase don't see eye-to-eye.

While it's true Rust runs on Proton, you can't join official servers, and most unofficial servers, with EAC disabled. Facepunch considered changing its stance in 2022 when the Steam Deck launched, but didn't end up introducing official Proton support. COO Alistair McFarlane said at the time that Linux is "safer for cheat developers," and that trying to support EAC on another platform could reduce the team's ability to support Windows.

To ensure games run well on Linux either via Native Linux builds or Windows games with Proton, part of the magic is in the Steam Linux Runtime. A new version of it, the Steam Linux Runtime 4.0 was recently put up with some pretty big changes.

What's the point of it? It ensures Steam and games run through Steam on Linux work properly across all the many different Linux distributions. Another secret Valve sauce for Linux. Well, not secret at all but you get my meaning I'm sure.