Following last week's code branching / feature freeze and first release candidate of Mesa 26.0, Mesa 26.0-rc2 is now available with an initial batch of bug fixes for this quarter's feature update to these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers...

The widely-used FreeType library used for rendering text onto bitmaps has landed a significant optimization for its LCD filtering code path for Microsoft ClearType-like rendering. Thanks to the improvement, the rendering can be around 40% faster...

Blender, the free and open source 3D creation software has pulled in another major supporter, with Netflix now funding future development.

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AI continues to be everywhere, and now it's appearing on the GOG store too most recently a big banner for their New Year Sale.

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Aruma Studios have announced that their supernatural comedy point and click adventure Shadows of the Afterland is set for launch now on February 10th.

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SysLinuxOS is a Debian-based GNU/Linux live distribution designed for system administrators and system integrators. It offers a complete networking environment that is organised to integrate various software tools and has a friendly graphical interface using the MATE and GNOME desktops. SysLinuxOS was built to work right out of the box, with all networking tools already installed by default. It includes all major Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), several remote control clients, various browsers, as well as WINE, Wireshark, Etherape, Ettercap, PackETH, Packet Sender, Putty, Nmap, Cutecom, Packet Tracer, tools for serial console, and the latest stable Linux kernel.

Zorin OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution designed especially for newcomers to Linux. It has a Windows-like graphical user interface and many programs similar to those found in Windows. Zorin OS also comes with an application that lets users run many Windows programs. The distribution's ultimate goal is to provide a Linux alternative to Windows and let Windows users enjoy all the features of Linux without complications.

FydeOS, developed by China's Fyde Innovations, is a lightweight operating system that carries a Linux kernel, a browser platform and a container technology driver. It is very similar to Google Chrome OS in use. FydeOS supports the latest web application standards, and is able to run Android and Linux applications (by activating the included Android and Debian subsystems), providing a Google Chromebook-like experience. Users have a choice to use cloud services provided by Google, services powered by Fyde Innovations, or a local account. FydeOS is based on the open-source ChromiumOS and includes the Chromium browser; it is available free of charge for most standard Intel/AMD personal computers.

Ahead of tomorrow's official availability of the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D at $499 USD, today the review embargo lifted. This faster variant to the existing Ryzen 7 9800X3D has been undergoing lots of Linux benchmarking the past two weeks for seeing the performance capabilities of this fastest 8-core 3D V-Cache processor.

We're getting a new Witcher game - but it's not one you would expect. It's Reigns: The Witcher, and it arrives February 25th.

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The Xfce desktop environment is expanding with plans afoot for a new Wayland compositor called xfwl4.

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Love classic Sonic games and other similar platformers? The Surge Engine and the included Surge the Rabbit game are great open source projects.

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The open-source voxel game creation platform Luanti (formerly Minetest) version 5.15 was recently released with an assortment of upgrades.

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In light of Plasma 6.8 looking to go Wayland-exclusive and retire their X11 session support, SonicDE (formerly "KDE-Lite") is getting off the ground as a fork of the relevant X11 support within the KDE desktop...

Upstreamed to the Nouveau open-source kernel driver in Linux 6.19 was support for larger pages and with that compression support available with the larger page sizes. Subsequently the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver began making use of the larger pages and compressed image support dependent upon the larger page sizes as it should help with performance. But for now it's being temporarily disabled due to a discovered issue...

Raspberry Pi is gearing up to launch another new product: a Raspberry Pi Smart Display Module...

FreeRDP 3.22 was just released as the newest version of this Apache-licensed open-source Remote Desktop protocol (RDP) implementation for interfacing with another computer over the network...

If you enjoy your more casual chilled building games, Belle Citique looks like one that brings something fresh to the table.

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The story of GPD and Bazzite Linux continues, with the founder of Bazzite releasing a fresh statement making it clear there's nothing happening between them.

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GParted Live is a live distribution with a single purpose - to provide tools for partitioning hard disks in an intuitive, graphical environment. The distribution uses X.Org, the light-weight Fluxbox window manager, and the latest 4.x Linux kernel. GParted Live runs on most x86 machines with a Pentium II or better.

A request for comments (RFC) patch series was sent out today for providing Klint integration with the Linux kernel. Klint is a new linting tool written in the Rust programming language that helps with static code analysis for errors/bugs as well as code styling inconsistencies...

Frosted blur effect is coming to System76's COSMIC desktop, giving apps and desktop elements a modern feel. These images shared by the team show how it looks.

You're reading COSMIC Desktop ‘Frosted Glass’ UI Effect Previewed, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

While the Asahi Linux project has made good progress on bringing Linux to Apple Silicon hardware, much of the success and in turn upstreaming to the Linux kernel has been around the aging M1 and M2 Macs. Apple M3 and newer has been a struggle but progress is being made. One of the Asahi Linux developers shared the ability now to boot to the KDE Plasma desktop with the experimental Asahi Linux code on an M3 MacBook but without any GPU acceleration yet...

Alpine Linux is a community developed operating system designed for routers, firewalls, VPNs, VoIP boxes, containers, and servers. It was designed with security in mind; it has proactive security features like PaX and SSP that prevent security holes in the software to be exploited. The C library used is musl and the base tools are all in BusyBox. Those are normally found in embedded systems and are smaller than the tools found in GNU/Linux systems.