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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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• New subsystem for compute accelerator devices — This is the fourth (and hopefully last) version of the patch set to add the new subsystem for compute accelerators.
• Compute Accelerator Subsystem Hopes To Be Ready For Linux 6.2
• Peter's Talk at Linux Plumbers Conference — All types of wireless in Linux are terrible and why the vendors should feel bad - Peter Robinson
• Intel’s IWD 2.0 Released For Modern Linux Wireless Daemon — Released this week was IWD 2.0 as the latest milestone for this open-source wireless daemon.
• Phoronix Premium Black Friday Deal — For this year's deal, you can go premium for just $30 per year or $150 for a lifetime subscription.
• Asahi Linux Updates — This month’s update is packed with new hardware support, new features, and fixes for longstanding pain points, as well as a new bleeding-edge kernel branch with long-awaited support for suspend and the display controller!
• Feature Support · AsahiLinux/docs Wiki

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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

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• Ubuntu gets a new rolling-release remix — The new flavor is the brainchild of MrBeeBenson, building on work by Martin Wimpress, who is the project leader of the Ubuntu MATE remix.
• AMD Recruiting More Linux Engineers For Debug, CXL Enablement & More — Notable with their latest batch of Linux openings is hiring a CXL engineer. This role will focus on AMD's support for Compute Express Link (CXL) hardware enablement under Linux.
• WirePlumber 0.4.9 Fixes Surround Sound For Some Linux Games — It was reported that some games within Steam were not able to enjoy 5.1 surround sound with PipeWire in a year-old bug report. A fix landed in WirePlumber a month ago to relax the format parsing within the si-audio-adapter module and this appears to fix up that issue
• New Linux kernel patch speeds up server shutdowns — The problem is caused by the relatively long time it takes to properly shut down an NVMe drive: apparently, as much as four-and-a-half seconds.
• Linux 5.18 Hardens The Kernel For 64-bit Arm With Shadow Call Stack Support — With the Linux 5.18 hardening updates there is support added for ARM64 (AArch64) Shadow Call Stack support when building the Linux kernel with GCC 12 and newer.
• Linux 5.18 Power Management Brings Improvements For Both Intel & AMD — Intel's P-State driver will now use the default default Energy Performance Preference (EPP) exposed by the firmware, and over on the AMD CPU side, the CPUPower utility that lives within the kernel source tree now supports running in conjunction with the AMD P-State driver.
• Linux 5.18 Moves Ahead With Deprecating ReiserFS — The plan is to treat it as deprecated and formally remove it from the mainline Linux kernel in 2025.
• XFS Online Repair Functionality To Undergo A Massive Design Review — XFS online repair has been talked about for years along with online scrubbing and it looks like it's about all buttoned up. Darrick Wong will be spending the next roughly two months focusing on the "massive" design review for XFS online repair code.
• Problems emerge for a unified /dev/*random — A bunch of changes for the kernel random-number generator (RNG) were merged by Linus Torvalds on March 21. Unfortunately a user-space regression surfaced that led Torvalds to say that he would revert the patch. The idea was good, but it "causes problems for various platforms that can't do jitter entropy and have nothing else happening either".

Plus, the new tech in SteamOS 3 that might make it a great desktop OS.

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• Raspberry Pi OS hits the bullseye — Raspberry Pi announced the release of a new version of Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian), which advances to the Debian 11 “bullseye” release.
• What’s new in RHEL 8.5 — Customers running Microsoft SQL Server on RHEL will see a number of enhancements to help configure, manage and operate RHEL more efficiently.
• Major Changes in 8.5
• Red Hat 8.5 released with SQL Server and .NET 6
• AlmaLinux OS 8.5 Stable Now Available — AlmaLinux OS 8.5 includes features and improvements to container tools to reduce friction and make the build and deploy processes more flexible, support for OpenJDK 17, additional OpenSCAP profiles for hardening and security compliance, new system roles, and Network Time Security (NTS) for NTP, amongst other additions and enhancement.
• Canonical Makes It Easier to Run Ubuntu VMs on Apple M1 Macs with Multipass — Multipass promises to offer Apple M1 MacBook developers interesting in developing apps for the Linux/Ubuntu desktop the fastest way to run Linux cross-platform, running a Ubuntu VM in as little as 20 seconds.
• Hector Martin on Twitter — Say hi to an M1 Pro 14" MacBook Pro running KDE Plasma 5 on Arch Linux ARM! Notch compatible! I made NVMe work today and decided it's time to properly install a distro ;)
• Hector Martin on Twitter: “It’s been running the glxgears demo (60% all-core CPU usage) all night, lid closed, no display sleep. It’s barely warm to the touch, and I can only hear the fan if I put my ear 15cm away from the vents. This is why I’m putting Linux on these machines :-) https://t.co/HPBDskirSf” / Twitter
• Big Btrfs Changes in the Works — I’m working on a large set of on-disk format changes to address some of the more painful parts of Btrfs’s design. There’s a lot of discrete changes here, but they’ll all go under the single umbrella of “extent-tree-v2.”
• On-Disk Format Changes Ahead To Improve “Painful” Parts Of Btrfs Design
• Steam Deck Release Pushed Back To February 2022 — For those that pre-ordered the Steam Deck your position in the queue remains, but is now all shifted back by approximately two months.
• Valve Shares New Steam Deck Details, Proton Update Available For Testing — Steam Deck will use an immutable root file-system, albeit can be changed for developers/enthusiasts wanting more control over the system state. The immutable root file-system approach is similar to the likes of Fedora Silverblue.
• Valve Says SteamOS 3.0 Will Be Available for Everyone to Download and Install
• Steam Deck Development Live Stream - YouTube
• Valve adds documentation for Steam Deck development, suggests Manjaro Linux for now

Plus, the new initiative that has Apple, Google, and Microsoft all working together.

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• GRUB Adds Backup/Restore Safeguard
• grub-install: Add backup and restore
• fs: Use 64-bit type for filesystem timestamp
• fs/xfs: Add needsrepair incompat feature support
• fs/xfs: Add bigtime incompat feature support
• PipeWire 0.3.29
• WebRTC Work
• Firefox 89.0, See All New Features, Updates and Fixes
• Forming the WebExtensions Community Group | WebExtensions Community Group
• WebExtensions Community Group
• Browser Extension Community Group — Browser Extension Community Group
• Web Extensions Group Charter
• Phoronix Turns 17 Years Old This Week - Phoronix
• The Insane Power Use Of Benchmarking Linux Every Day
• OpenBenchmarking.org
• LinuxBenchmarking.com
• openSUSE Leap 15.3 Released - Built Using Same Binary Packages As SUSE Linux Enterprise - Phoronix
• openSUSE Leap 15.3 Bridges Path to Enterprise
• GNOME’s Need To Broaden Its Audience For Greater Impact & Funding
• Atari VCS finally actually launches (in the US) on June 15 | GamingOnLinux
• Atari VCS Controller Support Added To SDL2 - Phoronix

Plus the new Firefox security features in beta, great news for F-Droid, and Apple transfers CUPS to a new home.

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• Chrome OS’s Linux app support is leaving beta — Google announced at I/O that Linux on Chromebooks would finally be coming out of beta with the release of Chrome OS 91.
• Android 12 will finally let alternative app stores update apps on their own — In Google's official blog post announcing Android 12 the company confirmed that it’s "delivering on [its] promise to make third-party app stores easier to use on Android 12."
• Red Hat Is Hiring Even More Graphics Engineers — Red Hat is now hiring two more graphics engineers working on the Linux graphics drivers. This will be focusing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and upstream graphics drivers for the open-source code around Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA.
• Senior Software Engineer - GPU Hardware Enablement
• Software Engineer - GPU, Input and Multimedia
• Principal Engineer - Hardware Enablement for Infotainment/Automotive
• New opportunities in the Red Hat Desktop team — Christian F.K. Schaller — We also have flexibility for people who want to work remotely, so as long as there is a Red Hat office in your home country you can work remotely for us.
• OpenPrinting Now Developing Upstream CUPS, Apple Bows Out — Apple has decided not to pursue feature development further on CUPS and upstream feature development has been effectively transferred to the OpenPrinting project.
• Introducing Firefox’s new Site Isolation Security Architecture — Site Isolation builds upon a new security architecture that extends current protection mechanisms by separating (web) content and loading each site in its own operating system process.
• Linux 5.13 Reverts + Fixes The Problematic University of Minnesota Patches — Linux kernel developers have finally finished reviewing all UMN.edu patches to address problematic merges to the kernel and also cleaning up / fixing their questionable patches.
• Freenode IRC staff quit after new owner "seizes" control of network — Founded 26 years ago and home to some 80,000 users over 40,000 channels, the freenode is reportedly the largest IRC network and has enjoyed something of a rollercoaster history.
• Freenode Debacle Prompts Staff Exodus, New Network — Through a complex series of events which actually started several years ago, control of Freenode has been taken from the community and put into the hands of an enigmatic and wealthy entrepreneur who claims his ultimate goal is to revolutionize IRC and return it to the forefront of online communication.
• Upheaval at freenode — Evidently there has been a change of control within the volunteer-run organization that has led to the resignations of multiple different volunteers, at least in part due to a concern about the personal information of freenode users under the new management.
• Freenode IRC staff resign en masse, unhappy about new management
• Welcome to Libera Chat — We’re excited to announce the launch of Libera.Chat, and welcome you to a next-generation IRC network for free and open source software projects and similarly-spirited collaborative endeavours.
• [HN comments] Welcome to Libera Chat
• CentOS IRC channels moving to irc.libera.chat
• Freenode IRC and Gentoo
• Spaces: The next frontier — Spaces rethink groups in Element and Matrix, and today we’re launching public beta testing on Element Web, Desktop and Android (with iOS coming soon!).
• [FOSDEM 202] Building massive virtual communities in Matrix — In this talk, we'll explain all the features we've been adding to let Matrix scale to support massive virtual communities such as FOSDEM itself, Mozilla, KDE and others.
• JB Matrix Server

Plus the imminent problem KDE solved this week, and more.

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• Initial Apple M1 SoC Support Aims For Linux 5.13 Kernel — This initial Apple M1 Linux port gets the UART, interrupts, SMP, and DeviceTree bits in place for offering basic functionality.
• “Challenge accepted”
• Ars: Apple M1 hardware support merged into Linux 5.13
• Official support for Linux on the M1 Macs could come as soon as June
• [GIT PULL] Apple M1 SoC platform bring-up for 5.13
• Asahi Linux on Twitter — Initial M1 support has been merged into the Linux SoC tree and will be coming to Linux 5.13!
• SiFive FU740 PCIe Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.13 — The HiFive Unmatched has a FU740 RISC-V SoC that features four U74-MC cores and one S7 embedded core, 16GB of RAM, USB 3.2 Gen 1, one PCI Express x16 slot (operating at x8 speeds), an NVMe slot, and Gigabit Ethernet.
• How to Secure phpMyAdmin
• Firefox Is Making WebRender The Default Rendering Engine On Linux This Month And There Is A Facelift Coming In May — The Firefox web browser is finally making the long-anticipated WebRender rendering engine the default on GNU/Linux when Firefox 88 is released later this month.
• uBlock Origin works best on Firefox — The Firefox version of uBO makes use of WebAssembly code for core filtering code paths. This is not the case with Chromium-based browsers because this would require an extra permission in the extension manifest which could cause friction when publishing the extension in the Chrome Web Store.
• Wayland Is Driving Fragmentation Around EDID Parsing - A Call To Fix That — Currently there is no de facto EDID parsing library for Linux but many different choices and most Wayland compositors rolling their own. Rather than exposing all of the parsed information from the kernel, there is now a call to have a more unified Linux EDID parsing library.
• vgpu_unlock — Unlock vGPU functionality for consumer-grade GPUs.
• Hacker figures how to unlock vGPU functionality intentionally hidden from certain NVIDIA cards for marketing purposes
• Announcing KDE’s Qt 5 Patch Collection — As Qt 5 support is drawing to a close, and we shift to Qt 6, we need to ensure that KDE products are as reliable as ever. To this end, KDE will be maintaining a set of patches with security and functional fixes so that we can enjoy good KDE Software still based on Qt5 until our software is reliably based on Qt 6.
• Mars Helicopter Flight Delayed to No Earlier than April 14 — During a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a “watchdog” timer expiration.
• LUP 400 Beer Stein

Plus Michael Larabel from Phoronix joins us to discuss the state of Linux hardware support in 2020.

Special Guest: Michael Larabel.

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Links:

• Budgie 10.5.2 Desktop Environment Released with Support for the GNOME 3.38 Stack
• Budgie 10.5.2 Released
• KDE Plasma 5.20.4 Is Out with More Than 40 Bug Fixes and Improvements
• Plasma 5.20.4 complete changelog
• GNOME 3.38.2 Desktop Environment Is Out with Even More Improvements and Bug Fixes
• 3.38.2/NEWS
• Cinnamon 4.8 Desktop Environment Released, This Is What’s New
• New Raspberry Pi OS release — The traditional end-of-year new release of Raspberry Pi OS, which we launch today.
• Raspberry Pi’s V3DV Vulkan Driver Now Supports Wayland — Raspberry Pi fans were celebrating that the V3DV driver is now officially Vulkan 1.0 conformant for supporting this modern high-performance graphics/compute API atop the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer.
• Should Red Hat be afraid of SUSE’s Rancher acquisition? — SUSE, a major Linux and cloud company, finalized its acquisition of Rancher Labs earlier this year.. Rancher, formerly a privately held open-source company, had over 37,000 active users and 100-million downloads of its flagship Kubernetes management program, Rancher.
• Rancher Labs - Wikipedia
• Network World
• SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs - YouTube