The first beta release of Krita 6.0 is now available for this featureful digital painting program. Krita 6.0 is re-based against the Qt6 toolkit while Krita 5.3 Beta is also being released at the same time for those sticking to Qt5.

Today marks the tandem releases of both Krita 5.3 Beta and Krita 6.0 Beta. Krita 6.0 shifts to the new Qt6 toolkit while Krita 5 is still being maintained due in part to Android and ChromeOS with Qt6

For those not fond of the increasing use of the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel or FreeBSD's considerations for Rust in its kernel , you can perhaps find refuge within NetBSD. One of the NetBSD developers has explained why you likely won't be finding Rust code within the NetBSD kernel anytime soon.

NetBSD developer Benny Siegert who also works for Google wrote a blog post this week explaining why there likely won't be Rust code within its kernel anytime soon. That's even with NetBSD's kernel

Intel ISPC 1.30 is now available as the latest feature update to their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as a variant of the C programming language to easily target their array of CPUs and GPUs.

The ISPC stack for this C-based Single Program Multiple Data (SPMD) programming language has added AMX support to its standard library. For helping accelerate matrix operations, Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) support is present in ISPC's standard library. There is also a new "amx.isph" header file for

The Linux 6.19 merge window had introduced support for larger pages and compression with the Nouveau kernel driver, which ultimately should help provide a performance win to this open-source NVIDIA driver. The Mesa NVK driver was ready to make use of that new kernel driver functionality but then it ended up being disabled due to bugs . Fortunately, for the Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel those issues should be resolved so then the Mesa NVK usage of the larger pages / compression support could be restored.

Following December's release of COSMIC Epoch 1 along with the Pop!_OS 24.04 release by System76, today they shared more of their feature plans for the next two major COSMIC desktop updates.

System76 still has some pretty grand plans for this open-source, Rust-based desktop environment. While since the big inaugural release there have been some point releases to help polish it , for COSMIC Epoch 2 and then Epoch 3 are some pretty significant features planned. A Vulkan renderer

Ahead of the imminent GNOME 50 beta release, the GNOME Shell and Mutter components have declared their "50.beta" releases to ship the latest bug fixes, memory leak fixes, and some last minute improvements ahead of the stable release in March.

Helping make GNOME 50 all the more exciting with its release next month are some last minute improvements making the beta cut-off. GNOME Shell has landed improved discrete GPU detection while Mutter now treats Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) functionality as stable, improved frame

Microsoft engineers and other stakeholders have been developing LiteBox as a security-focused library OS written in the Rust programming language and leveraging Linux Virtualization Based Security "LVBS". The design is for LiteBox to operate as a secure kernel protecting the normal guest kernel via virtualization hardware.

LiteBox is self-described as:

LiteBox is a sandboxing library OS that drastically cuts down the interface to the host, thereby reducing attack surface. It focuses on easy interop of various "North" shims and "South" platforms. LiteBox is designed

You may recall the news last month around no one was left on Debian's data protection team and other volunteer staffing challenges with different Debian efforts in the past. Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille has been looking at the issue of the challenges that arise when Debian's all-volunteer developers quietly drift away either due to time commitments, other interests, or other reasons but don't properly communicate it to the Debian project.

The issue being encountered isn't that Debian's volunteers stop contributing but that it

Eric Engestrom is out with another on-time Mesa release. Mesa 26.0-rc3 provides the latest week's worth of bug fixes as we work toward the stable Mesa 26.0 release as soon as next week.

Mesa 26.0-rc3 picks up the newly-merged change for disabling Intel Vulkan Video encode on newer graphics hardware -- Alchemist and Meteor Lake and newer -- due to current bugs and insufficient testing. Mesa 26.0-rc3 also