Open-source News

If you're reading this in 2019, it's almost Christmas (as celebrated according to the Western Christian calendar), and, like all children and IT professionals, it's time to write your letter to Santa/St. Nick/Father Christmas. Don't forget: those who have been good get nice presents and those who haven't get coal. Coal is not a clean-burning fuel, and with climate change well and truly upon us,1 you don't want to be going for the latter option.

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FreeBSD Along With The Other BSDs Had A Pretty Good Run This Decade  Phoronix

While not attracting as much interest as Linux in the cloud, AI, and other growing markets, the BSDs have seen their share of adoption in many of these areas too as well as the likes of powering some of today's video game consoles. FreeBSD is also well known for powering much of the networking infrastructure of Netflix and other large enterprises. The BSDs advanced a lot from hardware support to new security features and other capabilities this decade setting them on a good trajectory as we get into the 2020s...

Darktable 3 Released With GUI Rework and New Features  It's FOSS

LLVM Began Its Dominance Of The Compiler Landscape This Decade  Phoronix

Not only has LLVM's Clang compiler proven to become a viable alternative to C/C++ and is now widely used by many different vendors for building production software and nearly at parity for performance to GCC, but the LLVM compiler infrastructure has proven to be a huge success. Beyond Apple as one of the original stakeholders, LLVM is also used by multiple software projects within Intel, AMD is making extensive use of it for their graphics compiler and other purposes, and many other companies leveraging the LLVM projects for various often innovative purposes -- Microsoft is even using it within select projects...

After many delays, and seemingly as a Christmas miracle, Eric S Raymond now believes his Reposurgeon utility is officially ready to convert GCC's SVN repository over to Git...

Now Even Your Business Card Can Run Linux  Hackaday

How to install and use Firejail on Linux  TechRepublic

AMD Athlon 3000G Linux Performance Benchmarks - The New $50 Processor Review  Phoronix

Announced last month was the Athlon 3000G as a ~$49 processor based on Zen and featuring two cores / four threads and Vega 3 graphics. This 35 Watt TDP processor has finally begun appearing at more Internet retailers in stock last week and I was able to pick up one of these budget CPUs for $55 USD. Here are benchmarks of the Athlon 3000G on Ubuntu Linux compared to other low-end and older processors.

Blender And V-Ray CPU Rendering: Linux vs. Windows  Techgage

Purism has shared an update on their software work for the Librem 5 Linux smartphone over the course of last month...

This Business Card Runs Linux And You Could Build One Too  Hot Hardware

This DIY Linux-Powered Business Card With USB Port Costs Just $3  Fossbytes

Some Skype Users Are Facing High CPU Usage During Video Calls  Appuals

Google Chrome 79 crashing on Linux with NOD32 installed, ESET denies responsibility  PiunikaWeb

For those looking for some fresh reference numbers on the impact of using GCC's Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO), here are some benchmark runs looking at the GCC 10 PGO performance on an Ubuntu 19.10 workstation built around the Ryzen Threadripper 3960X...

How to Use Linux on Your Chromebook  Beebom

Fedora continued serving at the forefront of many Linux distribution innovations over the past decade and the largely Red Hat driven platform continued contributing their work back upstream from countless GNOME features to hardware improvements/fixes, UEFI "flicker-free boot" crossing the finish line, good hardware firmware updating support, and much more...