Svobodný software

Archinstall 2.8 is out today as the latest update to this easy-to-use, text-based Arch Linux installer that makes it much faster deploying this popular Linux distribution...

FEX 2404 is now available for this open-source emulator project to allow running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) LInux systems. FEX has been one of the leading avenues for opening up gaming on AArch64 Linux hardware, even making use of Wine / Proton (Steam Play) for enjoying Windows x86 games within AArch64 Linux confines...

For fans of the Vim text editor, the latest development code has landed support for the XDG Base Directory "XDG_BASE_DIR" specification...

As expected the Linux 6.9-rc4 test kernel is out today as Linux 6.9 works its way toward release by mid-May...

Going through my usual scanning of all the "-next" Git subsystem branches of new code set to be introduced for the next Linux kernel merge window, a very notable addition was just queued up... Linux 6.10 is set to merge the NTSYNC driver for emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives within the kernel for allowing better performance with Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and Wine of Windows games and other apps on Linux...

AMD on Saturday submitted a big batch of AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel graphics driver feature patches ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle...

The OpenJPH project that provides an open-source implementation of JPEG-2000 Part 15 for High Throughput J2K (HTJ2K) / JPH support is working on extending its abilities to handle low-latency High-Throughput JPEG-2000 images and other capabilities...

Miguel de Icaza who founded GNOME and of Mono / Ximian / Xamarin fame is now talking up the greatness of the Godot game engine and the opportunities that are presented with code proposed for mainlining to introduce "LibGodot" to make it easy to embed Godot scenes into other apps...

OpenRazer 3.8 is out today as the newest update to this collection of community-developed, open-source drivers for Razer devices on Linux. OpenRazer allows for Razer device customization and support under Linux to make full use of these gaming peripherals outside of Windows / macOS. Paired with the likes of the Polychromatic UI, OpenRazer allows a nice Razer hardware experience on Linux...

The Linux 6.9-rc4 weekly test release is due out later today and ahead of that this week's "x86/urgent" material has been sent in that includes several patches for various x86 speculation mitigation fixes...

In addition to a SLUB optimization for extreme scenarios, faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption for modern Intel/AMD CPUs, and other performance optimizations on the way for Linux 6.10, another minor one was queued up this week...

Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has merged a big optimization / bug fixing effort he's recently been tackling for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver...

A change proposal has been filed for building the CPython interpreter and the Python standard library using the "-O3" compiler optimization flag rather than Fedora's imposed default of the "-O2" optimization level. This is being sought in the name of greater Python performance on Fedora 41...

KDE developers had a very busy week with a lot of new feature work continuing to land for Plasma 6.1 plus continuing to address bugs and other fallout from the recent Plasma 6 introduction...

APT as the packaging tool built around Debian Linux is embarking on some big upgrades with the APT 2.9 development series to then roll-out as APT 3.0. There's big improvements to the command-line user interface with the new APT and it's certainly looking nice from my initial Friday night encounter...

The XWayland 23.2 series was introduced last August while now release preparations have begun for releasing XWayland 24.1 as the next feature release for this X.Org Server derived code for allowing X11 clients (apps / games) to work within the confines of Wayland environments...

KDE Frameworks 6.1 is out today as the first monthly update since the release of KDE Frameworks 6.0 alongside KDE Plasma 6.0...

A patch to the Linux kernel's SLUB allocator has been queued ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.10 merge window to help reduce memory consumption in extreme scenarios...

David Rheinsberg has released Dbus-Broker 36 as the newest version of this speedy, drop-in DBus implementation for Linux systems...

As the first new release since last September, LPython 0.21 has been released for this alpha-stage Python ahead-of-time compiler written in C++. LPython remains focused on providing "the best possible performance" especially for numerical use-cases, cross-platform compatibility, and hopes to be able to eventually transform Python code over to C++ and Fortran or other languages...