Phoronix

With 2019 and in turn this decade quickly drawing to a close, here is a look back at the most popular open-source/Linux news on Phoronix from 2010 to present. So far this decade on Phoronix has been 27,840 original news articles pertaining to Linux/open-source/hardware...

Along similar aims to GhostBSD and MidnightBSD, GhostBSD is another one of the BSD distributions focused on providing a nice out-of-the-box experience. NomadBSD 1.3 is now available that is in turn based on the recent FreeBSD 12.1...

Introduced back in Ubuntu Server 17.10 and improved upon since has been "Subiquity" as a new Ubuntu Server install option rather than their classic installer derived from Debian. But with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, they will be dropping that Debian Installer based option and focusing solely on their modern "Subiquity" server installer option...

The currently-experimental Qt Shader Tools allows for graphics/compute shader conditioning and used by the in-development Qt graphics abstraction layer for supporting Vulkan / Metal / Direct3D / OpenGL APIs...

Mesa 20.0 due out in Q1'2020 is now the magical release that is set to switch on RadeonSI NIR usage by default in place of the TGSI intermediate representation. What makes this IR switch-over prominent is that OpenGL 4.6 is then enabled by default on this open-source Gallium3D driver supporting Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs and newer...

Chrome 79 is out as Google's last feature update to their web browser for 2019...

GraphicsFuzz is the project born out of academia a few years ago for fuzzing GPU drivers to find OpenGL / OpenGL ES (WebGL) driver issues. This work was ultimately acquired by Google and then open-sourced just over one year ago. Today marks the release of GraphicsFuzz 1.3...

Ubuntu 19.10.1 has been released as an unscheduled re-spin of Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine for Raspberry Pi 2 / 3 / 4 ARM single-board computers...

CodeWeavers has announced the availability of CrossOver 19 for their Wine-based software for running Windows programs/applications/games on macOS and Linux...

Back in September we learned that Microsoft was bringing their Microsoft Teams software to Linux and today it has entered a public preview state...

Mesa 19.3 could be released as soon as this week after being challenged by several delays over blocker bugs. This release should be making it out in the days ahead and is a fantastic Christmas gift to Linux desktop users and a big step-up for these OpenGL / Vulkan driver implementations as we end out 2019.

An issue affecting some Linux users with Radeon graphics for at least the last four months around graphics corruption problems when switching to newer versions of the Linux kernel have been resolved...

Unisoc, the Chinese SoC provider for smartphones that is part of the Tsinghua Unigroup, has published a new open-source DRM display driver that ultimately they are looking to get into the mainline kernel...

While we are approaching 2020 and the four year anniversary since the Vulkan 1.0 launch, one aspect that has been a bit disappointing has been the lack of not seeing quicker uptake by various Linux window managers / compositors in at least offering a Vulkan code path. One of the best examples of a Vulkan-powered compositor with that has been the independent ChamferWM...

The TURNIP Mesa Vulkan driver providing support for recent Qualcomm Adreno graphics processors and akin to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver has added an important performance-boosting feature...

Google's Hans Wennborg is once again stepping up to manager the next feature release of LLVM and sub-projects like Clang. If all goes well, LLVM 10.0 will be out with Clang 10.0 and friends before the end of February...

With Intel Jasper Lake graphics support making it as one of the prominent hardware support additions for Linux 5.5, the user-space OpenGL/Vulkan driver support is now found within Mesa 20.0-devel...

Last month was a proposal for Fedora 32 to disallow empty passwords for local users by default but at today's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) they completely shot down that proposal...

Multipass, the Canonical-led open-source project that aims to make it easy to spin up Ubuntu VM instances on Linux and Windows and macOS, is up to version 0.9 ahead of a possible 1.0 release for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS...

Last month we reviewed the OnLogic Karbon 700 as a passively-cooled, industrial-grade PC powered by an eight-core / sixteen-thread Intel Xeon, 16GB of RAM, 512GB NVMe storage, and a plethora of connectivity options in suiting to industrial use-cases. The performance was great and even the thermal performance was very good for being a fan-less PC. In seeing how well other Linux distributions were panning out on the Karbon 700, I tested five popular Linux distributions on the Xeon Coffee Lake system and once again Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux squeezed out much more performance potential.