On Sunday, November 1, 2026, Linus Torvalds tagged the first release candidate of the next Linux kernel, Linux 7.4-rc1. If you own a Linux laptop, or you’re thinking about buying one, here’s what’s actually in it, what “rc1” means, and when you can expect to see 7.4 on your own machine.

Everything below comes from primary sources: Linus’s announcement on the Linux kernel mailing list, kernel.org, and the pull requests that maintainers sent to Linus during the merge window. We’ve kept what’s merged today separate from what’s still expected.

What Linus said

Linus’s announcement, “Linus 7.4-rc1,” went out on the linux-kernel mailing list on November 1 (archived at https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2611.0/00796.html). The short version:

It’s a big one. Linus called it a “BIG merge window,” with “almost 20k commits vs the more common ~15k.”
A lot of it is AMD GPU headers. “A full third of the patch is just AMD GPU register offsets and bit masks,” he wrote, and suggested ignoring that noise.
It’s mostly drivers. About half of the changes are drivers (closer to two-thirds if you count those AMD headers), with the rest spread across architecture code, filesystems, tooling and the core kernel.
AI-found fixes are part of the picture. Linus said he’s “much happier” seeing AI-triggered work land during the merge window than as a flood of fixes later on.
Possibly the next LTS. Linus noted that “people are expecting 7.4 to be the next LTS release.” That’s an expectation, not an announcement. Long-term support kernels are chosen by the stable kernel maintainers, so we’ll wait for that to be confirmed.

kernel.org lists 7.4-rc1 as the current mainline release. The newest stable kernel is 7.3.1 (https://www.kernel.org/).

What is a release candidate, anyway?

Every new kernel follows the same rhythm. After a release (7.3 in this case), there’s a two-week merge window where maintainers send Linus their new features and drivers. When it closes, Linus tags rc1. From then on, the focus is testing and fixing, with a new rc most Sundays.

Most kernels need seven or eight release candidates. With rc1 on November 1, that puts a final Linux 7.4 release somewhere around late December 2026 as a rough estimate. That’s an estimate based on the usual cycle, not a date anyone has announced, and it can slip if testing turns up problems.

A release candidate is for developers and testers, not the laptop you need for work on Monday. If you like to experiment, try rc kernels on a spare machine. For everyone else, your distro’s stable kernel is the right choice.

What’s in Linux 7.4 for laptops

These come from pull requests Linus lists as merged in his rc1 summary, each linked to the maintainer’s write-up.

Laptop platform drivers (HP, Lenovo, Acer, ASUS and more)

The x86 platform driver pull (https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2610.3/08785.html) handles the hotkeys, fans, LEDs, performance profiles and battery controls that make a laptop feel fully supported. Highlights include:

HP: support for more OMEN and Victus gaming models and the HP Laptop 15-fd1xxx, plus a suspend (s2idle) quirk for the HP Laptop 14-fq1xxxx
Lenovo: camera switch support on some Yoga Pro 7 and Legion Pro 7 models, keyboard attachment detection for the ThinkPad X1 Fold, fan speed reporting on the ThinkPad L440, and an s2idle quirk for the ThinkPad L14 Gen 3
Acer: a new battery control driver, and fan control, performance profiles and hardware monitoring for the Nitro ANV15-51
ASUS: mute LED support, ScreenPad backlight fixes and more tunables in asus-armoury

Power management and suspend

Rafael Wysocki’s ACPI pull (https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2610.2/07983.html) reworks how the kernel enumerates ACPI devices so it doesn’t start power management too early on devices whose dependencies aren’t ready yet. An earlier attempt in the 7.3 cycle had to be reverted, so this time it was done “much more carefully.” There’s also new wake-event handling for suspend-to-idle on x86 and new quirks for backlight handling.

The power management pull (https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2610.2/07972.html) is mostly fixes and cleanups. It also adds early support for AMD Zen 6 client processors in the amd-pstate driver, support for rugged Intel Panther Lake systems in intel_rapl, and a hibernation fix for x86.

Graphics: AMD and Intel

The DRM pull (https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2610.2/14993.html) is where those huge AMD headers come from. For AMD Radeon users, amdgpu gains HDMI 2.1 FRL, along with HDMI 2.1 FreeSync, VRR and ALLM support, plus finer-grained runtime power management and USB4 fixes. On the Intel side, the Xe driver adds memory page offlining and a new Panther Lake PCI ID, and i915 picks up an eDP quirk for the HP Pavilion Plus. Several new laptop eDP panels are supported as well.

Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and audio

The networking pull (https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2610.2/16631.html) brings Intel iwlwifi support for newer UEFI/BIOS tables, MediaTek mt7925 improvements, RTL8723BS support in rtw88, and Bluetooth support for Intel’s Draco and Titan Lake and MediaTek’s MT7928.

Audio gets plenty of attention too. The sound pull (https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2610.2/17985.html) adds HD-audio quirks for “numerous laptops” from Lenovo, ASUS, HP, Acer, HONOR, MSI and others. These quirks are usually what make speakers, headphone jacks and mic-mute LEDs work properly on a specific model.

Filesystems

Btrfs (https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2610.1/19249.html) gets faster reflinks, a small zstd decompression speedup and less lock contention. ext4 (https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2610.2/16342.html) adds a new buffered iomap I/O path with big gains for large writes. It’s opt-in through a buffered_iomap mount option and isn’t turned on by default.

When will you actually get Linux 7.4?

Here’s the part most laptop owners care about. Even after 7.4 is final, it reaches each distro at a different speed:

Arch Linux follows new kernels closely, but not instantly. When we checked on November 1, Arch’s linux package was still on 7.2.14 (https://archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/linux/), two weeks after 7.3 came out. Arch users will likely see 7.4 within weeks of its final release, not days.
Fedora also waits a bit before moving to a new kernel series. On November 1, Fedora’s stable updates were also on 7.2.14, with 7.2.15 in testing (https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/?packages=kernel).
Ubuntu releases ship with a kernel picked during development. LTS releases get newer kernels over time through the Hardware Enablement (HWE) stack (https://ubuntu.com/kernel/lifecycle), not right after a mainline release.
Linux Mint builds on Ubuntu’s kernels, so it follows a similar timeline.

For most people, Linux 7.4 will likely arrive sometime in 2027 as a normal update, already tested by their distro. That’s a good thing.

Do you need to do anything?

No. If your laptop works well today, keep installing your distro’s regular updates. The new hardware support in 7.4 will come to you when your distro ships it. If you have one of the models listed above and something isn’t working yet, like a hotkey, fan control or audio, 7.4 may be worth watching for.

Linux laptops, ready out of the box

At The Linux Laptop Company, we install Linux on new Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Asus notebooks, test the Wi-Fi and other radios, and you keep the manufacturer’s warranty. Our laptops ship with your distro’s current stable kernel, not release candidates, so they’re ready for everyday use.

Before a laptop leaves us, every available Linux OS package update is installed. Firmware and BIOS updates are applied when they’re available and compatible with current stable kernels.

Looking for a laptop that runs Linux from day one? Take a look at https://thelinuxlaptop.com/.