Svobodný software

In light of Plasma 6.8 looking to go Wayland-exclusive and retire their X11 session support, SonicDE (formerly "KDE-Lite") is getting off the ground as a fork of the relevant X11 support within the KDE desktop...

Upstreamed to the Nouveau open-source kernel driver in Linux 6.19 was support for larger pages and with that compression support available with the larger page sizes. Subsequently the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver began making use of the larger pages and compressed image support dependent upon the larger page sizes as it should help with performance. But for now it's being temporarily disabled due to a discovered issue...

Raspberry Pi is gearing up to launch another new product: a Raspberry Pi Smart Display Module...

FreeRDP 3.22 was just released as the newest version of this Apache-licensed open-source Remote Desktop protocol (RDP) implementation for interfacing with another computer over the network...

A request for comments (RFC) patch series was sent out today for providing Klint integration with the Linux kernel. Klint is a new linting tool written in the Rust programming language that helps with static code analysis for errors/bugs as well as code styling inconsistencies...

While the Asahi Linux project has made good progress on bringing Linux to Apple Silicon hardware, much of the success and in turn upstreaming to the Linux kernel has been around the aging M1 and M2 Macs. Apple M3 and newer has been a struggle but progress is being made. One of the Asahi Linux developers shared the ability now to boot to the KDE Plasma desktop with the experimental Asahi Linux code on an M3 MacBook but without any GPU acceleration yet...

In addition to Mesa 26.1 today seeing Vulkan present timing support finally merged to help reduce game stuttering and separately another long-in-development Mesa merge request for DG2 / Meteor Lake to improve performance as much as 260% in some scenarios, there is another merge today to Mesa Git for enhancing Intel graphics on Linux. For Intel Linux gamers the newest Mesa code adds a new DriConf workaround that is capable of halving the initial game load time for at least one problematic game title...

GStreamer 1.28 is out today as the newest feature release for this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework...

GNU C Library "glibc" developers have decided to move ahead with plans of migrating their core services from Sourcware.org infrastructure over to the Core Toolchain Infrastructure "CTI" project hosted by the Linux Foundation...

Following the KDE Plasma 6.6 Beta from two weeks ago, a second beta of the upcoming Plasma 6.6 desktop is now available for testing. KDE Plasma 6.6 stable remains on-track for a mid-February release...

Back in 2024 Google rolled out their Axion in-house ARM processors with the Google Cloud C4A instance type. Today they are expanding their Axion offerings in Google Cloud with the N4A instances now out of preview. The Google Cloud N4A instances are designed for scale-out web servers and microservices, containerized applications, back-end application services, databases, data analytics, and cost-effective development/staging/testing environments.

Systemd founder and lead developer Lennart Poettering announced the creation of a new company called Amutable. The Amutable company being led by Chris Kühl (CEO), Christian Brauner (CTO) and Lennart Poettering (Chief Engineer) will be focused on delivering determinism and verifiable integrity to Linux systems...

TigerVNC 1.16 is out today for this high performance, multi-platform VNC server and client implementation. Most notable with TigerVNC 1.16 is "w0vncserver" as a new server for sharing Wayland desktops...

Following the release of zlib-rs 0.6 last week, the developers behind this Rust-based Zlib implementation have declared their API stable and complete...

Xfce developers are using their donations from the community to fund a longtime core developer to create Xfwl4, an entirely new Wayland compositor for Xfce...

The Vulkan EXT_present_timing was in development for years to help avoid game stuttering and released this past November with Vulkan 1.4.335. This significant extension as of today has been wired up in Mesa 26.1-devel for the key Vulkan drivers and working on both X11 and Wayland...

A set of 18 patches were merged overnight to Mesa 26.1 for working around graphics corruption on Meteor Lake and DG2/Alchemist class graphics hardware. Not only are some graphics corruption issues worked around but for that hardware there is as much as "a whopping 260%" performance improvement observed for some graphics workloads...

Being worked on for a while by Lenovo engineer Vishnu Sankar is nicely handling support for double-tap functionality with TrackPoints on ThinkPads under Linux. The sixth iteration of this enablement work was posted today and is just documentation updates, so it's looking like this new TrackPoint doubletap code could soon be crossing the threshold for the mainline Linux kernel...

Being worked on since last year by Google engineer Roman Gushchin was the latest attempt for the Linux kernel to support managing the out-of-memory "OOM" behavior using BPF programs. It's been a while since there has been anything new to report on that front but published overnight is the latest iteration of those patches...

Keith Packard published Picolibc 1.8.11 on Monday as the newest release for his C library designed for embedded 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. Picolibc continues tacking on new CPU architecture support and other features for this project that started out as a conglomeration of the Newlib and AVR Libc C library codebases...