Phoronix

Ogre 2.3 is out for a holiday release as the newest feature release of the Ogre-Next open-source 3D rendering engine code used both for games and applications...

Systemd 250 is the latest major open-source software project release for those trying to get out their releases before year's end... Simply put, systemd 250 is a very big feature release...

Polychromatic as the open-source GUI front-end for working in turn with OpenRazer for configuring Razer peripherals under Linux is out with a new holiday release...

An exciting LLVM development has landed in time for Christmas! Complementary to the LLVM SPIR-V back-end work that could soon be mainlined, Clang has now merged the initial SPIR-V toolchain support. This allows going from Clang to the SPIR-V intermediate representation that is conformant to the OpenCL environment specification -- such as for compiling OpenCL kernels into SPIR-V...

Recently I looked at the macOS 12 performance against Linux when it comes to the Intel-based Macs. Stemming from reader requests and curiosity how Windows would perform in the mix, here are such benchmark results with macOS 12.1, Windows 10, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu 21.10.

The first release candidate of the Sway 1.7 Wayland compositor is now available for testing...

Krita is easily one of the best digital painting / 2D animation / raster graphics programs out there for being open-source / free software and today is now even better with the Krita 5.0 release...

For those making use of the GNOME desktop and running a laptop with dual-GPU hybrid graphics, Mutter has landed some fixes that may help if you have been experiencing crashes...

The newest Linux hardware support patches for the kernel revolve around i2c bus sharing support for newer SoCs where the i2c bus is being shared by AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP). This i2c controller is based on common DesignWare IP but new kernel code is being crafted for handling that bus sharing between the kernel and the PSP co-processor...

While not talked about as much as raw performance and other factors, but in the recent testing of the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2 laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U, it was observed that the GNOME Wayland session by default on Ubuntu 21.10 is delivering better battery life / lower power consumption than using the GNOME X.Org session...

Well known open-source video game SuperTux that is inspired by Super Mario Bros is out with its first release in one and a half years for the Tux-themed platform game...

Arch-based Manjaro Linux is out with version 21.2 "Qonos" ahead of the holidays in offering some nice incremental updates for this popular enthusiast distribution...

For those wanting to pickup some new games to enjoy around the holidays and/or expand your game collection ahead of the Steam Deck beginning to ship next quarter, Valve's Winter Sale is now underway...

While the VKD3D-Proton fork has been very active and running an increasing number of Direct3D 12 Windows games well as part of Valve's Steam Play, CodeWeavers and the upstream Wine community does continue working on VKD3D. CodeWeavers is planning to make big improvements to VKD3D in 2022 to offer better DirectX 12 support with their commercial CrossOver software for Linux and macOS...

Intel has now made their oneAPI Toolkits 2022 release publicly available after announcing it earlier this quarter...

Released earlier this month was AMD's AOCC 3.2 compiler based on LLVM/Clang/Flang that provides optimized support for AMD Zen processors. I've been running some benchmarks of AOCC 3.2 compared to prior AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler releases and this newest release has been helpful in squeezing a bit more out of Zen 3.

Linux 5.17 will have a seemingly important fix for upcoming Intel Alder Lake mobile processors. Without this change/fix, you might not see the advertised one-core turbo frequencies being met for your processor depending upon the system and whether tuning your EPP...

Intel's open-source IWD modern wireless daemon that works with the likes of NetworkManager, systemd-networkd, and their own ConnMan has been preparing support for WiFi Device Provisioning Protocol (DPP)...

Sent out last month were an early set of patches working on IO_uring zero-copy send support for the networking subsystem. This work to boost the throughput potential has evolved now into a second revision of the patches and continues looking very promising...

GIMP 3.0 still isn't ready for release and won't be in 2021 but the GIMP 2.10.30 release is out today in time for working on your Christmas photos or holiday cards...