Phoronix

For those wanting to add some "bling" to your command-line programs to make some "rad" terminal apps, Notcurses 3.0 was released today for designing colorful and complex text-user interfaces. Notcurses allows adding a range of multimedia, Unicode, and other graphics capabilities to command-line applications across Linux / macOS / Windows...

The Qt Company has officially shipped Qt Creator 6 as the latest major update to their Qt/C++ minded integrated development environment...

Over the past year there has been a lot of work for getting AMD's suspend-to-idle "s2idle" support in order under Linux and the latest is a one-line code change expected to help at least some Ryzen laptops behave properly...

With the beginning of a new month comes updated Steam Survey results from Valve for the month prior. The Steam on Linux marketshare continues increasing albeit ever so slightly...

While Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) functionality has been present in CPUs going back to Skylake, it took until last year with Linux 5.11 for SGX support to finally be mainlined and required more than 40 rounds of review/revisions. Finally today Intel posted patches for bringing up SGX2 as the next iteration of Software Guard Extensions and already found in shipping processors...

Wasmer as "the universal WebAssembly runtime" that focuses on being able to run WASM code on any platform is out with its next major release...

A set of two patches under review on the kernel mailing list for tweaking some kernel scheduler behavior can provide noticeable performance benefits to those using AMD EPYC and Ryzen processors on various workloads...

With the accelerating growth of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for serving up system and component firmware files to Linux users for flashing via the fwupd utility, today it crossed the milestone of having served up more than 40 million firmware files...

The first beta of LibreOffice 7.3 is now available for testing as the next installment of this leading open-source, cross-platform office suite...

An early batch of Intel kernel graphics driver feature updates intended for Linux 5.17 was sent out yesterday to DRM-Next for queuing until that next merge window opens around the start of the new year. Notable with this pull is Icelake "Gen11" graphics finally seeing variable rate refresh enabled!..

The long-awaited Tesseract 5.0 is now available as a big update to this leading open-source, optical character recognition (OCR) engine that via neural networks offers great accuracy and supports more than 100 languages for turning images of text into actual text...

NixOS is an original Linux distribution built atop its own unique Nix package manager that is focused on being functional, reliable, and reproducible. The Nix package manager concept is great but somewhat ironic is the new NixOS 21.11 release not even shipping with the latest Nix package manager version due to known regressions...

Version 1.7 of the Julia programming language implementation is now available, the open-source high-performance language that is general purpose but especially popular for computational science and numerical analysis...

With another month of the pandemic in the books, here is a look back at the exciting Linux and open-source highlights that came about during the course of November. This month was particularly exciting for new Linux kernel developments, never-ending work on open-source graphics drivers, the much anticipated launch of Intel 12th Gen "Alder Lake", gamers continuing to clamor for the Steam Deck, and much more...

Earlier this year OpenPrinting took over development of the CUPS print server with Apple no longer interested in handling the future development of this open-source Linux/macOS/Unix/Solaris print server. Out this week is CUPS 2.4 as the first major release under the guidance of OpenPrinting...

Early patches providing for IO_uring zero-copy send support for the Linux kernel's networking subsystem is looking extremely promising for greater throughput...

Amazon Web Services today shared that C7g instances are coming powered by Graviton3, their next-gen in-house AArch64 processors...

Following all the work carried out by Mike Blumenkrantz (Valve) and others, the Mesa Zink code is ending the year in terrific and very capable shape for OpenGL running atop the Vulkan API. Here is a look at where things currently stand with mainline Mesa for Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan compared to the native RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver.

With the graphics driver support for Alder Lake S-series in good shape with Linux 5.16 and the Alder Lake P-series support also coming together for upcoming ADL-based laptops, next up is the Alder Lake N enablement happening for Linux...

Sent out today was the fifth revision to AMD's new "amd-pstate" kernel driver focused on providing enhanced CPU frequency controls for Linux systems...