Svobodný software

For all of those that were intrigued over the independent code porting the Firefox web browser to the GTK4 toolkit, there has been a bit more progress and all of the code is also now obtainable via GitHub for this unofficial port...

A few weeks ago I wrote about ISD as a new open-source project for interactively managing systemd that aims to be more user intuitive especially for those that aren't veteran Linux server administrators. ISD has continued evolving and out today is ISD v0.5 with the latest enhancements for better managing systemd...

The friends at CodeWeavers have relayed work that they are looking to hire multiple Wine developers to join their paid team working on upstream Wine as well as their CrossOver products, Valve's Proton downstream for Steam Play, and related Wine-based tech...

Complementing the recent Linux GPU benchmarks of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 and GeForce RTX 5090 looking at both the Linux / Steam Play gaming performance as well as GPU compute and other areas, in today's testing is a wide multi-generation look seeing how the NVIDIA GeForce performance has evolved going back to the GeForce GTX 980 Maxwell GPUs up through the newest GeForce RTX 5080/5090 graphics cards.

Last month when the state of the open-source RADV Vulkan driver for RDNA4 GPUs was outlined, it was noted that cooperative matrix support was missing along with DCC support and Vulkan Video for these upcoming Radeon RX 90x0 GPUs. Vulkan cooperative matrix support ended up being merged earlier this month while hitting Mesa Git today is the DCC support that is important for RDNA4 performance...

Intel software engineers overnight released the newest version of the Intel Extension for PyTorch. The v2.6 release brings new optimizations for current-generation Xeon 6 processors as well as new large language model (LLM) performance optimizations...

MatterV 0.7 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source virtual machine management platform built atop KVM. MatterV aims to make it easy to manage VMs across different environments while with today's v0.7 release adds the ability to run unmodified VMware virtual machines atop KVM...

Limine 9.0 is out today as the newest major release for this open-source modern multi-protocol bootloader and boot manager. Limine also boasts its own Limine Boot Protocol in addition to the native Linux support and chainloading/multiboot capabilities...

Wayland Protocols 1.41 is shipping today with the color management protocol added for enabling high dynamic range (HDR) support on the Wayland-powered Linux desktop...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.14-rc3 as the newest weekly release candidate for Linux 6.14 that will debuting as stable before the end of March...

A few weeks back the Linux kernel "Faux Bus" was proposed by Greg Kroah-Hartman as a "fake" bus solution for simple devices. Today ahead of the Linux 6.14-rc3 tagging, the faux bus code was merged and comes at the same time both with C and Rust language bindings...

For four years there has been an open bug report for Mozilla Firefox requesting the browser's GTK widget support be updated for GTK4. An independent user/developer has taken it into his own hands and has managed to get Firefox using the GTK4 toolkit up and running on Linux...

The GNOME 48 Beta release was officially announced this morning as the latest stepping stone toward the official GNOME 48 desktop release due out in mid-March...

The upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle will be adding support for Intel Killer E5000 Ethernet...

Btrfs-Progs 6.13 was released this weekend as the newest routine update to the user-space utilities for the Btrfs file-system...

While it's an old language, in recent months there's been a renewed effort over a COBOL language front-end for the GCC compiler. There's been out-of-tree COBOL support for GCC that is working to get into the mainline GNU Compiler Collection codebase. This weekend saw the latest iteration of those patches amounting to 134k lines of new code...

Following last week's FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 1 release to kick off this next FreeBSD 13 point release that will also end the series, FreeBSD 13.5 Beta 2 is out this weekend for testing...

One of the great new features of Linux 6.14 is the NTSYNC driver being completed for better emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives so that software like Wine and Proton (Steam Play) can provide for better performance when running Windows games on Linux. But it turns out an oversight up to now has meant that in practice it's not really too usable out-of-the-box...

Karol Herbst has been a Nouveau driver developer for over a decade working on this open-source, reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux graphics driver. He went on to become employed by Red Hat. While he's known more these days for his work on Mesa and the Rusticl OpenCL driver for it, he's still remained a maintainer of the Nouveau kernel driver. But today he announced he's resigning as a Nouveau driver maintainer due to differences with the upstream Linux kernel developer community...

KDE Plasma 6.3 released this week as the newest step forward for the KDE desktop. While it was smooth on the whole, there were some early bugs that KDE developers were dealing with this week. KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly development summary for the Plasma desktop...