Open-source News

The hid-pidff driver exists within the Linux kernel for enabling force feedback "FF" support on various USB HID PID (Physical Interface Device) compliant devices. With a new set of patches posted yesterday, that hid-pidff driver is extended to "hid-universal-pidff" for supporting more functionality on quirky devices...

Linux "hid-universal-pidff" Driver Proposed For Fixing More Quirky Devices  Phoronix

Zlib-ng 2.2.3 is out as the "next gen" Zlib replacement led by Hans Kristian Rosbach that retains a Zlib-compatible API while also offering a modernized API, modern C11 syntax, support for more CPU intrinsics, and other leading-edge features compared to upstream Zlib...

RISC-V on the software front made very nice progress over the past year with a lot of Linux kernel and toolchain improvements, new targets being enabled, and new instructions being supported along with other additions for improving the overall RISC-V software ecosystem. When it comes to hardware though most of the readily available RISC-V systems are painstakingly slow and the more performant/featureful options are much harder to come by...

RISC-V Made Nice Software Progress In 2024 While Interesting Hardware Still Rare  Phoronix

The Steam snap is now much better for gaming  XDA Developers

The Arch Linux project appears to have enjoyed a rather robust and successful 2024 with Valve continuing to make use of it as a base for their SteamOS distribution and now engaging more with upstream Arch Linux. Downstreams like CachyOS, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS continue to make it an appealing choice for enthusiasts and gamers. And then the continued improvements to Archinstall for an easy-to-use and quick installer and other enhancements overall made for a well-rounded year...

With New Year's Eve at Phoronix it means combing through Git statistics for the past year of various open-source projects among other end of year coverage... The most surprising takeaway from today's end of year exploration was seeing the Linux kernel hitting a decade low for the number of new commits this year. But not all is bad as on a line count the annual metric is comparable to more recent years...

The Linux Kernel Hit A Decade Low In 2024 For The Number Of New Commits Per Year  Phoronix

Debian 13 “Trixie” Installer Alpha Released with Linux 6.12 LTS, RISCV64 Support  9to5Linux

Why 2025 Will Not Be The Year Of Linux On The Desktop  Hackaday

In working toward the Debian 13 "Trixie" stable release in 2025, as a lovely New Year's Eve surprise today is the first alpha release of the Debian Installer for Trixie...

Debian Installer Trixie Alpha 1 Brings RISC-V & Drops i386 Installer  Phoronix

One of the unexpected twists this year was after several years of AMD quietly funding the ZLUDA developer for enabling unmodified CUDA applications to run on AMD GPUs at near-native performance, the ZLUDA atop AMD HIP code was made available and open-source following the end of the AMD contract. But then later on that ZLUDA code was taken down at the request of AMD. Back in October ZLUDA then decided to pursue a new life as an open-source multi-GPU CUDA implementation with an emphasis on AI workloads. Now as a New Year's Eve surprise, ZLUDA v4 was released as the first step to that new codebase...

The Samsung ARM device updates are in the process of being queued up to the SoC tree ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window in January...

Samsung Galaxy S20 & S9 With Exynos 9810 Support Coming To Linux 6.14  Phoronix

This year was another interesting year for Microsoft with continuing to make more of their software projects open-source, adding more Unix/Linux-like features to Windows, continuing to advance Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), keeping up with maintenance on their Azure Linux distribution, and other unexpected open-source/Linux surprises...

Microsoft Continued With Many Linux & Open-Source Announcements In 2024  Phoronix

Wayland's Wild 2024 With Better KDE Plasma Support, NVIDIA Maturity & More Desktops  Phoronix

It was a mighty fine year for the Wayland ecosystem on the Linux desktop with KDE Plasma 6 having brought much more polished Wayland support and now at parity to its X11 session, the NVIDIA driver stack seeing much better Wayland support with its latest drivers, LXQt and Xfce and others working more on Wayland support, and the continued climb of various innovative Wayland compositors...