Open-source News

When navigating the AMD.com driver downloads area the Radeon Software for Linux 19.30 driver is still referred to, which was released back on 5 November. That 19.30 driver series has been around for a while and we've been waiting for the 19.50 series driver to match their recent Windows driver update. It turns out there is a Radeon Software for Linux 19.50 driver that is public albeit not widely advertised...

Radeon Software for Linux 19.50 Quietly Released For Newest Enterprise-Focused Driver Support  Phoronix

Linux 5.5 as of this morning should have one less performance regression in tow if you are running on Debian/Ubuntu or otherwise having AppArmor enabled...

Linux 5.5 Lands Fix For The AppArmor Performance Regression  Phoronix

Linux 5.5 Lands Fix For The AppArmor Performance Regression  Phoronix

As you may recall a few days ago there was the information on the Linux kernel scheduler causing issues for Google Stadia game developers. The scheduler was to blame and in particular Linux's spinlocks. Linus Torvalds has now commented on the matter...

Torvalds' Comments On Linux Scheduler Woes: "Pure Garbage"  Phoronix

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...

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...

Ahead of this week's Consumer Electronics Show, the Wi-Fi Alliance has announced WiFi 6E...

Building a remote development team presents unique challenges. Trying to build a cross-functional team, full of various personalities, virtually can lead to communication disasters. Fortunately, through planning, smart hiring, training, and communication, project leaders can build and lead virtual development teams successfully.

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At GitHub, Brian Douglas' official title is developer advocate, but the one he prefers to use is "Beyoncé advocate." This is partly because he views the 40 million GitHub users and the Beyhive, Beyoncé's enormous and passionate fan base, similarly. He says his role at GitHub is to "go to bat for the hive"—helping people answer questions and find resources to help them develop on GitHub better.

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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...

EA Prevents Linux Users from Accessing Battlefield V  Somag News

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...

Arch's Switch To Zstd: ~0.8% Increase In Package Size For ~1300% Speedup In Decompression Time  Phoronix

Kali Linux to Default to Non-Root User With 2020.1 Release  BleepingComputer

Linux 5.4 vs. Liquorix Kernel Benchmarks For AMD Ryzen + Radeon Gaming On Ubuntu  Phoronix

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.

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...