Michael Larabel

This month's Arch Linux install media update now provides "archinstall" as the guided installer for Arch Linux for those preferring a quick and easy route for deploying Arch Linux.

Well known GNOME developer Georges Stavracas has been working to make OBS Studio fully-working under Wayland and today that reality has been achieved with native Wayland support and the ability to capture monitors and windows on Wayland compositors.

The big GNOME 40 desktop update is now available.

For a long while now Linux kernel developers have discusses the prospects of optionally allowing the Rust language to be used for new device drivers within the Linux kernel areas and other areas within the kernel for this language that prides itself on safety and performance. As the first baby step towards that dream, initial Rust support appeared this week in the Linux-Next tree.

Along with today's NVIDIA 465 series Linux beta an exciting shift at the company is they are now supporting accelerated GPU access by VMs with their GeForce consumer GPUs.

While the independent effort to get the Apple M1 ARM-based SoC working under Linux has just been happening for a few months, with the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle the very preliminary support for Apple's M1 and initial M1-powered devices looks to land.

To kick off a new month of Linux gaming, Valve today released Proton 6.3-1 as the latest version of their Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux.

If your current Vulkan-based Radeon Linux gaming performance isn't cutting it and a new GPU is out of your budget or you have been unable to find a desired GPU upgrade in stock, the Mesa RADV driver has added an option likely of interest to you... Well, at least moving forward with this feature being limited to RDNA2 GPUs for now.

The NVIDIA-led work to allow XWayland OpenGL and Vulkan acceleration with their proprietary driver has just been merged into X.Org Server Git.

While recently Arch Linux developers and stakeholders were discussing the possibility of raising the x86-64 base requirements for this Linux distribution to the "x86-64-v2" micro-architecture feature level that roughly correlates to Intel Nehalem and newer, now the discussion has shifted to keeping the same x86-64 base level while potentially offering a "x86-64-v3" port for those with newer Intel/AMD CPUs.

NVIDIA has proposed a merge request to Mesa that would lay the infrastructure for allowing alternative GBM (Generic Buffer Manager) back-ends to be loaded, such as for NVIDIA's proprietary driver should it presumably implement GBM in the future.

The pandemic is still not showing any signs of slowing down KDE development but with the new month brings more changes and improvements to this open-source desktop.

AMD published a security whitepaper this week looking at their Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) feature that is new to Zen 3 series processors. AMD is going to allow customers to disable this performance feature as they think it may be vulnerable to a Spectre-like attack.

Mesa developers are currently discussing the raising of the default compiler baseline for Mesa drivers moving forward, which would raise the base CPU requirements for these open-source Mesa drivers unless overriding the compiler flags. However, only the very oldest systems would be negatively impacted.

Mesa 21.1 is looking to be another exciting release to be introduced later this quarter while going into feature freeze around mid-April. The latest work to land is threaded context support for Zink, which means faster performance for this OpenGL-over-Vulkan implementation.

It's 2021 and proposed patches by upstream developers would finally remove Linux's legacy IDE driver code.

The beta of Ubuntu as well as its various flavors/derivatives is out ahead of the official "Hirsute Hippo" launch later this month.

Not only is the Linux kernel moving to allow Rust code to be optionally used within the kernel, but Google is now allowing Rust code to be used for system programming work on Android's low-level operating system components too.

There was a lot to get excited about over the course of the past month when it comes to our open-source and Linux area of focus.

Git 2.31 is out today as the newest version of this distributed revision control system.

FreeBSD 13.0 was supposed to be out by the end of March but a bumpy past few weeks has led to extra release candidates. Out this weekend is FreeBSD 13.0-RC5 for what might now be the final test release.

Audacity 3.0 is out today as a big update to this popular, longtime open-source digital audio editor.

This past week Debian 11 "Bullseye" embarked on its hard freeze in gearing up for release later this year.

For many years it's been possible to run Linux games on FreeBSD along with other Linux applications thanks to FreeBSD's "Linuxulator" Linux binary compatibility layer. With that more recently it's becoming possible to run even more recent games thanks to improvements to FreeBSD's graphics drivers, the Linux binary compatibility code, and other FreeBSD improvements -- Steam is even working out for more titles.

Recently Ubuntu maker Canonical committed to using Google's Flutter user-interface toolkit as its "default choice" for their mobile and desktop applications moving forward. There is now an Ubuntu Blog post further detailing their interests in Flutter.