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• DreamWorks’ Renderer Used for ‘Puss in Boots’ is Going Open-Source — DreamWork animation company is making its in-house renderer open-source very soon
• OpenMoonRay.org — MoonRay is DreamWorks’ open-source, award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer, which has been used on feature films such as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Trolls World Tour, The Bad Guys, and Puss In Boots: The Last Wish.
• MoonRay Documentation Home
• Systemd 253 — Systemd 253 has been released. As always, the list of changes is extensive. Support for version-1 control groups and separate /usr systems is going away later this year. There is a new tool for working with unified kernel images, a number of new unit-file options have been added, and much more.
• systemd 253: The future of enterprise Linux boot processes.
• Debian Installer Testing Call — Starting with this release, official images include firmware packages from main and non-free-firmware, along with metadata to configure the installed system accordingly.
• Linux 6.2 — Please do give 6.2 a testing. Maybe it's not a sexy LTS release like 6.1 ended up being, but all those regular pedestrian kernels want some test love too.
• Linux_6.2 - Linux Kernel Newbies — This release includes faster mitigration of the Retbleed vulnerability and a new FineIBT mitigation feature; Btrfs RAID5/6 and performance improvements, sysfs knobs that allow controlling block device writeback, support for TCP Protective Load Balancing, improved Rust support, BPF features like User defined objects, the runtime verification tool, and some optional RCU power savings.
• The Best Linux 6.2 Features From Intel Arc Graphics To Better Performance For Older PCs
• LUP 500 Micro Brewery Meetup — Sat, Mar 4, 2023, 4:00 PM at 192 Brewing Company in Mount Vernon, WA

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• KDE Plasma 5.27 To Provide Better Multi-Monitor Support — KDE developer Marco Martin wrote a blog post today outlining some of the multi-monitor work that's been going into Plasma 5.27
• This week in KDE: big UI improvements!
• Schedules/Plasma 5 - KDE Community Wiki
• KDE Kicks Off 2023 With UI Refinements, More Fixes
• GNOME 44 Hopes and Dreams — GNOME devs are already working hard on the next major release, GNOME 44, due out in late March 2023 with more new features and enhancements.
• Dynamic Triple Buffering Hopefully Will Land For GNOME 44
• OpenZFS Performance Gains — With the combination of enabled prefetch and avoided memory copy this change improves sequential single-threaded read speed from a wide NVMe pool from 2049 to 3932 MiB/s. During write profiler shows 22% reduction of unhalted CPU cycles at the same throughput of 3653 MiB/s.
• End of the 4.9 Series — Greg KH: I'm announcing the release of the 4.9.337 kernel. All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade.
• Linux 6.1.4
• Linux 4.9.337 Released To End Out The 2016 LTS Series
• Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Starts to Play Games — Red Hat engineer and longtime open-source Nouveau developer Karol Herbst wrote on his chaos.social account about NVK running games and showing off a screenshot of The Talos Principle running with this open-source, "community" Vulkan driver.
• karolherbst on Social
• The Talos Principle — The Talos Principle is a philosophical first-person puzzle game from Croteam, the creators of the legendary Serious Sam series, written by Tom Jubert (FTL, The Swapper) and Jonas Kyratzes (The Sea Will Claim Everything).

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• LVFS Has Served More Than 52 Million Firmware Files To Linux Users — LVFS has served up 52.1 million firmware files to end-users over its lifetime. There has also been over a 99% success rate on the firmware being deployed correctly to users.
• Fwupd 1.8.1 Released With Firmware Updating For More HP, Corsair, PixArt, Lenovo Devices
• A Fix Is On The Way For A Previously-Reported Linux 5.18 Performance Regression — Back during the Linux 5.18 merge window in March I wrote about a big NUMA benchmark performance regression I noticed and bisected.
• Nouveau Begins Shifting Around Code For Use By New Driver — "This just moves the codegen build into a separate library, this is just prep work for a future where another drivers wants to reuse this code. this isn't perfect for plugging into a vulkan driver, but doing that requires more in depth surgery."
• NVIDIA 515.48.07 Linux Driver Released As Stable With Open Kernel Driver Option
• Welcoming Rocket.Chat to Matrix! — We just wanted to take a moment to welcome Rocket.Chat to Matrix, given the recent announcement that they are switching to using Matrix for standards-based interoperable federation!
• Rocket.Chat Leverages The Matrix Protocol for Decentralized and Interoperable Communications
• AlmaLinux 9.0 Released — AlmaLinux OS 9.0 is based on upstream kernel version 5.14 and contains enhancements around cloud and container development and improvements to the web console.
• AlmaLinux 9 Now Available! - AlmaLinux OS Blog
• GPU Price-Performance Benchmarking Report
• NixOS 22.05 Released With New Graphical Installer — NixOS 22.05 builds atop the Nix 2.8 package manager, which brings better performance, general improvements, the experimental nix fmt command that applies a formatter defined by the flake output to the Nix expressions in a flake, and other additions.
• NixOS GUI Configuration Editor — A simple NixOS configuration editor application built with libadwaita, GTK4, and Relm4. The goal of this project is to provide a simple graphical tool for modifying and managing desktop NixOS configurations.
• NixOS - Blog → Announcements
• Calamares Installer — Calamares aims to be easy, usable, beautiful, pragmatic, inclusive and distribution-agnostic
• NixOS Calamares PR: fix calamares modules, add nixos modules, and add new iso by vlinkz
• NixOS/calamares-nixos-extensions: NixOS Calamares Extensions

Special Guest: Christian F.K. Schaller.

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• Why is the open source driver release from NVidia so important for Linux? | Christian F.K. Schaller — Today NVidia announced that they are releasing an open source kernel driver for their GPUs, so I want to share with you some background information and how this will impact Linux graphics and compute going forward.
• NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules — This release is a significant step toward improving the experience of using NVIDIA GPUs in Linux, for tighter integration with the OS and for developers to debug, integrate, and contribute back.
• NVIDIA Transitioning To Official, Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Driver — NVIDIA's open kernel modules is already considered "production ready, opt-in" for data center GPUs. For GeForce and workstation GPUs, the open kernel module code is considered "alpha quality" but will be ramped up moving forward with future releases.

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• openSUSE Developing “Adaptable Linux Platform” For Next-Gen SUSE Linux Enterprise — Another important point is that we intend to split what was a more generic, everything is closely intertwined into two parts: One smaller hardware enabling piece, a kind of "host OS", and the and the layer providing and supporting applications, which will be container (and VM) based.
• Update on next generation of SLE - openSUSE Mailing Lists
• An update to Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye — With this latest release, the default “pi” user is being removed, and instead you will create a user the first time you boot a newly-flashed Raspberry Pi OS image. This is in line with the way most operating systems work nowadays, and, while it may cause a few issues where software (and documentation) assumes the existence of the “pi” user, it feels like a sensible change to make at this point.
• PipeWire 0.3.50 — WINE applications using the JACK backend should no longer crash.
• OpenSSH 9.0 released — It is claimed to be primarily a bug-fix release, but it also switches to a new, quantum-computer-proof key-exchange protocol by default and includes a number of sftp changes, some of which may create some compatibility issues with scp.
• Reiser5 Issues New Development Release, Performance Numbers For Scaling Out — Shishkin published an new Reiser5 unstable snapshot today that targets Linux 5.16 kernel compatibility. Along with updating Reiser5 for newer kernel compatibility and other changes since its prior snapshot, Shishkin accompanied today's announcement with some benchmark numbers.
• New NVIDIA Open-Source Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Appears — Appearing with NVIDIA's latest Linux4Tegra code drop is a new open-source kernel graphics driver not previously published. This driver isn't based on the existing Nouveau driver but rather appears to be derived from their internal driver code-base with some copyright references going back to 90's.
• NVIDIA Publishes Signed Ampere Firmware To Finally Allow Accelerated Open-Source Support — Even with the signed firmware images, there are still complications around re-clocking the GPU to get off the rather low boot clock frequencies. Those complications around power management in the context of signed firmware images have meant the GTX 900 series and newer hasn't been able to operate with the open-source driver at its optimal clock frequencies...
• Debian still having trouble with merged /usr — The addition of the "/usr merge" feature has been something of longstanding mess in the Debian world. It seems like a relatively innocuous change, but ever since we first covered the feature introduction for Debian—more than six years ago—it has a been a recurring series of headaches within that community. Recent events have seemingly simply prolonged the pain, though perhaps the end is in sight.
• Usr move status in various distros
• The Case For The Usr Merge

Plus, our concerns with Google's clever long-term Fuchsia strategy.

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• Microsoft Teams is now available on Linux — Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available for Linux users in public preview, enabling high quality collaboration experiences for the open source community at work and in educational institutions. Users can download the native Linux packages in .deb and .rpm formats.
• Zulip 2.1: Open source team chat — Zulip is the world’s most productive team chat software, used by thousands of teams as an alternative to Slack, HipChat, Mattermost and IRC. Zulip's unique topic-based threading combines the immediacy of chat with the asynchronous efficiency of email-style threading, and is 100% free and open source software.
• Why Zulip - The best group chat
• Updated images of Ubuntu for the Raspberry Pi 2, 3 and 4 — With the new images, USB ports are now fully functional out of the box on the 4GB RAM version of the Raspberry Pi 4.
• Eben Upton on Twitter — Raspberry Pi numbers get stale fast. We sold our thirty-millionth unit some time last week (we think Tuesday).
• Eben Upton on Twitter — The average is much closer to $35. I believe we're at pretty much exactly one billion dollars.
• Google's Fuchsia to support Chrome OS tablet 'Flapjack' — Chrome OS won’t be the only operating system this device supports, as Google’s Fuchsia OS team is also looking to support the “Flapjack” tablet.
• Flutter gathers pace
• Twitter wants to decentralize, but decentralized social network creators don’t trust it — Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made a theoretically huge announcement: he wanted Twitter to stop being a self-contained platform and start delivering content from a decentralized system
• A decentralized Twitter would bring the company back to its past
• Twitter Makes A Bet On Protocols Over Platforms
• DXVK To Enter Maintenance Mode — Not because it's considered feature complete and bug-free, but because the main developer considers that DXVK has become a "fragile, unreliable and frustrating maintenance nightmare".
• Feral's Lead Vulkan Developer Leaves The Company For Sony
• NVIDIA Looks To Have Some Sort Of Open-Source Driver Announcement For 2020 — Start looking forward to March when NVIDIA looks to have some sort of open-source driver initiative to announce -- likely contributing more to Nouveau

Plus why you might actually want to use the new Dex, significant performance gains for a beloved project, and more.

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• NVIDIA Starts Publishing GPU Hardware Documentation To Help Open-Source Drivers — NVIDIA is releasing more GPU hardware documentation at long last.
• GitHub - NVIDIA/open-gpu-doc
• Enhancing our ZFS support on Ubuntu 19.10 — We are going to enhance ZFS on root support in the coming cycles. Ubuntu 19.10 is a first-round towards that goal. We want to support ZFS on root as an experimental installer option, initially for desktop, but keeping the layout extensible for server later on.
• Big performance improvements for LibreOffice — The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.3, a feature-rich major release of the LibreOffice 6 family with better performance, a large number of new and improved features, and enhanced interoperability with proprietary document formats:
• You might actually want to use the new DeX on the Galaxy Note 10 — Among the many new updates and features coming with the Galaxy Note 10 and Note 10 Plus is a revamped take on DeX, Samsung’s desktop-like software that is powered by the phone.
• Huawei officially reveals Harmony OS — Harmony OS is microkernel-based, like Google’s in-development Fuchsia OS.
• Linux Journal Ceases Publication — On August 7, 2019, Linux Journal shut its doors for good. All staff were laid off and the company is left with no operating funds to continue in any capacity.
• Linux Format - Print or Digital