Latest Linux and open source news from around the web
Merged today to Mesa 26.3-devel is a nice performance boost for Intel graphics with Valve's Steam Play when using DXVK for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 over the Vulkan API. The open-source Intel ANV driver is seeing up to 5% better performance with DXVK...
The XFS file-system improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3. For end-users the only notable change for this file-system on the new kernel is adding support for FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES...
I recently re-encountered my favourite ‘error’ dialog in Ubuntu, which is thrown by the distro’s App Center (snap-store), which is the default GUI software management tool. I don’t see it often, but when I do it (un)helpfully informs me: “Something went wrong. We’re sorry, but we’re not sure what the error is.” While I sympathise with its honesty and the general sense of unease in imparts – I say something similar, looking at the state of the world right now – isn’t it the software’s job to know what’s wrong? You can see the dialog in question here, in situ […]
They say never judge a book by its cover, and few do if said book is a dictionary – but what about desktop dictionary apps? I recently discovered Wordbook, a modern English-English dictionary powered by OpenEnglish WordNet and eSpeak for pronunciations, that works entirely offline. Wordbook is in GNOME Circle; the GTK4/libadwaita UI is a good fit for the desktop. Wordbook uses a lexical database, with words grouped into ‘synsets’ based on their meaning. It makes it easier to explore related words, distinguish between words that look similar (but have different meanings) and find different precise alternatives. A random word […]
TUXEDO is replacing Ubuntu’s HWE-based kernel cadence with a continuously updated model built around Debian Testing.
The company's VP of Engineering expects WSL users to outnumber native Ubuntu desktop users within months.
Aura Glass gives the GNOME Desktop a polished glassmorphism makeover with dynamic blur, multiple color schemes, custom styling, and an interactive installer.
Everything you need for your classes, notes, and deadlines are already in Linux.
Among the early pull requests merged today by Linus Torvalds for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle were removal of some ancient file-systems while adding in a new pseudo file-system...
Earlier this year Natalie Vock of Valve's Linux graphics team laid out some patches for improving the Linux gaming experience for systems with limited vRAM. The kernel work for improving that video memory management is set to be introduced in the Linux 7.3 kernel. While that's a celebration on its own, Vock is pursuing more improvements still for bettering the Linux GPU driver video memory management behavior...
Earlier it was screen and now a days tmux. But there are many more terminal multiplexers out there worth exploring.
Linus Torvalds released the 7.2 kernel on August 17, after noting that the number of fixes coming in was still "bigger than I would have wished for". In fact, 7.2 was one of the busiest development cycles in the kernel's history, adding nearly 600,000 lines of code. It's time to look at some statistics to get a handle on how the kernel's development community is changing.
The FFmpeg multimedia library can now enjoy faster H.265/HEVC video encoding with the Vulkan-powered encode path. With the optimizations merged today, the H.265 encode performance should be roughly at parity to the H.264 encode speed...
This year's edition of the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference, better known as "FOSSY", moved north to the beautiful (and enormous) campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada from its home for the three previous editions: Portland, Oregon, in the US. There were many different types of talks at FOSSY, from deeply technical kernel-track topics, through talks on legal and community issues, to the "FOSS in Daily Life" talks. In the "Toolchains and Other Development Tools" track, Timothy Sample gave a presentation about bootstrappable builds, which is somewhat less well-known than its cousin, reproducible builds, though LWN did look at the topic just over two years ago. In short, a bootstrappable build is one that starts with a tiny program that can build another slightly larger program, which can build yet another, and so on, until the entirety of a modern Linux user space is built from a small seed. Ultimately, it results in code with a completely
A new research paper published on LLVM offloading to GPU accelerators using the Rust programming language is talking up the prospects of making use of safe Rust code for GPU kernels while retaining Rust's memory safety and other advantages over C++ / CUDA / HIP...
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