Open-source News

At the start of Q4, Intel released Media SDK 20.3 with AV1 accelerated decode, Rocket Lake, DG1/SG1 discrete GPU support, and other improvements. Now to end out the quarter is a new release coming in at version 20.5.1...

PlayStation 5 DualSense controller to get support for Linux  Gamepur

Testing The Intel "Workload Hints" Capability Of Linux 5.11  Phoronix

There are many new features with the Linux 5.11 kernel that is presently under development but one of the ones I've been more curious about for how well it works is the Intel "workload hints" that can be passed via its thermal framework. This is about providing the system with hints of workloads being run to optimize the thermal/power properties.

Windows freezing for few seconds at a time since undervolting CPU [Big Post!] - Internal Hardware  BleepingComputer

You may need a COVID vaccine passport to travel In 2021  Wink News

KDE Saw Its Wayland Support Stabilize Nicely In 2020, Much Polishing Throughout  Phoronix

KDE had a very eventful year even with the pandemic where it saw its Wayland support come together quite well that it's usable on a day-to-day basis, KWin has been seeing some renewed attention, and there was much application work as well as fixes and polishing throughout the massive KDE ecosystem...

With it recently being noticed that the Linux AES-NI XTS performance regressed big time from the return trampolines "Retpolines" enacted nearly three years ago as a defense against Spectre, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance cost involved to this day using Retpolines and the impact on the XTS encryption/decryption performance measured by cryptsetup that is used for setting up encrypted disks under Linux...

New worm turns Windows, Linux servers into Monero miners  BleepingComputer

Valve this year continued contributing significantly to not only improving the Linux gaming experience but also the Linux desktop at large with their continued open-source graphics driver enhancements and other infrastructure work...

Valve Continued Doing A Lot For Linux Gaming & Open-Source Radeon Drivers In 2020  Phoronix

The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver in Linux 5.11 didn't see any exciting features but there is now a patch pending for this DRM driver so it will at least handle mini DisplayPort connections properly...

Nouveau Sees Fix To Properly Handle Mini DP Connectors - Avoids GNOME Mutter Crashing  Phoronix

How to install Cinnamon desktop on Elementary OS distro - Linux Shout  H2S Media

OAS software now supports Raspberry Pi 4 for Industry 4.0 solutions  CNX Software

The advantage of plain text is that there’s no extra computer-specific information cluttering up your otherwise human-readable writing. The good thing about computers is that they’re programmable, and so as long as we humans agree to follow very specific conventions when writing, we can program computers to interpret human-readable text as secret instructions. For instance, by surrounding a word with two asterisks, we not only give a visual cue to humans that a word is significant, but we can also program computers to display the word in bold.

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Best of 2020: Was This Huawei’s Failed Attempt at a Linux Backdoor?  Security Boulevard

As in recent years, Python proved a popular programming language in 2020.

Each year, Opensource.com publishes various articles about Python to pique new users' interest and help long-time Pythonistas expand their skills. The following are Opensource.com's top 10 articles about Python in 2020.

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If you're a fan of scripting languages like Bash, Python, or Ruby, you might find Lua interesting. Lua is a dynamically typed, lightweight, efficient, and embeddable scripting language with an API to interface with C. It runs by interpreting bytecode with a register-based virtual machine, and it can be used for everything from procedural programming to functional programming to data-driven programming. It can even be used for object-oriented programming through the clever use of arrays, or tables, used to mimic classes.

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