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OMG! Ubuntu

Xubuntu Reveals How Its Website Was Hijacked in October

The Xubuntu team has shared details on last monthโ€™s worrying website hijack, pinpointing how the attack happened and the steps its taking to prevent a repeat in the future. As detailed in our coverage back in October, the official Xubuntu download page began serving a malicious .zip file to users attempting to download the official torrent on October 15. Though the incident was resolved quickly once detected, questions were raised about how it couldโ€™ve happened in the first place, and whether any one had been affected. Today, the Xubuntu team, based on information Canonical has shared with it, has answers. [โ€ฆ]

Phoronix

Vulkan SER Showing Up To ~47% Performance Improvement For Ray-Tracing

Last week's Vulkan 1.4.333 brought a new ray-tracing extension with VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder that was derived from a prior NVIDIA vendor extension (VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder). This new extension for Shader Execution Reordering "SER" is showing to deliver some nice performance potential for Vulkan ray-tracing performance...

Phoronix

Uniwill Laptop Driver Set To Premiere In Linux 6.19 Kernel

For the past several months a Uniwill laptop driver for the Linux kernel has been in development to expose extra platform capabilities for laptops manufactured by this Taiwanese OEM/ODM manufacturer. Assuming no last minute issues, this driver is now set to premiere in Linux 6.19 for helping Uniwill laptops and hardware from other brands relying on Uniwill as the device manufacturer...

LWN.net

Blender 5.0 released

Version 5.0 of the Blender animation system has been released. Notable improvements include improved color management, HDR capabilities, and a new storyboarding template. See the release notes for a lengthy list of new features and changes, and the bugfixes page for the 588 commits that fixed bugs in Blender 4.5 or older.

Linux Journal

Firefox 145: A Major Release with 32-Bit Linux Support Dropped

by George Whittaker Introduction Mozilla has rolled out Firefox 145, a significant update that brings a range of usability, security and privacy enhancements, while marking a clear turning point by discontinuing official support for 32-bit Linux systems. For users on older hardware or legacy distros, this change means itโ€™s time to consider moving to a 64-bit environment or opting for a supported version. Hereโ€™s a detailed look at whatโ€™s new, whatโ€™s changed, and what you need to know. Major Changes in Firefox 145 End of 32-Bit Linux Builds One of the headline items in this release is Mozillaโ€™s decision to stop building and distributing Firefox for 32-bit x86 Linux. As per their announcement: โ€œ32-bit Linux (on x86) is no longer widely supported by the vast majority of Linux distributions, and maintaining Firefox on this platform has become increasingly difficult and unreliable.โ€ From Firefox 145 onward, only 64-bit (x86_64) and relevant 64-bit architectures (such as ARM64) will be offici

LWN.net

[$] The current state of Linux architecture support

There have been several recent announcements about Linux distributions changing the list of architectures they support, or adjusting how they build binaries for some versions of those architectures. Ubuntu introduced architecture variants, Fedora considered dropping support for i686 but reversed course after some pushback, and Debian developers have discussed raising its architecture baseline for the upcoming Debian 14 ("forky"). Linux supports a large number of architectures, and it's not always clear where or by whom they are used. With increasing concerns about diminishing support for legacy architectures, it's a good time to look at the overall state of architecture support on Linux.