KDE Kicks Off 2020 With Landing New Feature Work
While New Year's festivities lightened the development activity this past week, KDE developers still managed to accomplish a fair amount this first week of January...
SuperTuxKart 1.1 Released With Better Online Play, UI Enhancements, New Arena
For those looking for some family-friendly, open-source gaming fun this weekend, SuperTuxKart 1.1 has been released as the Mario Kart inspired cross-platform racing game...
WiFi 6E Opens Up WiFi To 6GHz Operation
Ahead of this week's Consumer Electronics Show, the Wi-Fi Alliance has announced WiFi 6E...
GIMP 2.99.x Development Releases Likely Starting Soon For GIMP 3.0
It's 2020 and GIMP remains one of the last holdouts for a major software application still relying upon the GTK2 tool-kit even with GTK4 potentially coming around the end of the calendar year. Fortunately, at least, the GIMP 2.99.x development releases on the path to the GTK3-based GIMP 3.0 should be starting up soon...
Arch's Switch To Zstd: ~0.8% Increase In Package Size For ~1300% Speedup In Decompression Time
Arch Linux has been working the past several months on transitioning to Zstd-compressed packages in place of XZ compression for faster package installation. At the end of December that package compression scheme changed and the results are impressive...
Linux 5.4 vs. Liquorix Kernel Benchmarks For AMD Ryzen + Radeon Gaming On Ubuntu
The Liquorix kernel is the long-standing effort for providing a "better distro kernel" optimized for desktop/multimedia/gaming workloads. As it's been a while since last testing the Liquorix kernel spin of Linux, I recently carried out some tests of its Linux 5.4 based kernel compared to Ubuntu's generic mainline PPA images of Linux 5.4 as well as the low-latency kernel variety.
AMD's Trusted Execution Environment Is Coming With Linux 5.6
Last week I wrote about the AMD Secure Processor support for Linux 5.6 being queued as part of the cryptography subsystyem work with supporting the PSP / Secure Processor of Raven Ridge APUs. That AMD Secure Processor support is now rounded out with the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) driver being queued for wiring into that subsystem...
Vim Creator Bram Moolenaar Aiming To Improve Vim Performance With Vim9 Fork
Bram Moolenaar began developing Vim as an improvement over the Vi editor while now he is looking to make improvements over Vim itself with an experimental fork called Vim9...
Zink Is Moving Closer To OpenGL 3.0 Support Over Vulkan
Zink was one of the Mesa/Gallium3D innovations that saw mainline status in 2019 for offering OpenGL support atop Vulkan hardware drivers. While an interesting approach, so far only the dated OpenGL 2.1 support has been exposed but the Collabora-led effort is closing in on OpenGL 3.0 capabilities...
X.Org Server Development Hits A Nearly Two Decade Low
With Red Hat shifting their support to Wayland and expecting the X.Org Server to go into a hard maintenance mode quickly, in 2019 indeed it did...