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Jump to navigationJump to search- Web Browser Performance Round-Up April 2021We benchmarked Brave, Chromium, Firefox, MS Edge, Midori, Naver, Otter, Opera and SeaMonkey to see which web browser provides the best performance on modern machines running GNU/Linux distributions. The numbers reveal that there is little difference since most modern browsers are merely Chromium-skins using the same rendering engine. Firefox and SeaMonkey are different, yet they are in the same performance-ballpark in everything except graphics-intensive applications. They are really bad in that particular area.
- SuperTuxKart Has Polished And Revamped Karts Ready For The Next Big ReleaseThe fun free kart racing game SuperTuxkart has gotten four kart re-vamped during the last few months. A new release is not imminent, and we do not know when it will be. What we do know is that there are some nice improvements happening in the SuperTuxKart graphics repository. None of the latest source code changes deal with the OpenGL rendering pipes, so the games graphics performance remains the same as it was in the last release.
- Liberty or Death!March 23, 2021 - a day which will live in infamy - the Free and Open Source community was suddenly and deliberately attacked by Silicon Valley. The tyrants of Big Tech, under the disguise of non-profit organizations, called for a hostile occupation of our community by issuing a blockade against Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation, and any other user who stands in opposition to their ideology of personal profit.
- SeaMonkey 2.53.7 Is ReleasedSeaMonkey is a cross-platform web browser with a mail client, IRC chat client and a HTML editor built-in. The latest release is based on the web browser backend from Firefox 60.8 and the e-mail backend from Thunderbird 60.0. This release drops support for the in other browsers long-deprecated NPAPI plugins used by things like the Adobe Flash Plugin. The graphical interface is now rendered using GTK3 on Linux. SeaMonkey 2.53.7 is otherwise mostly the same product as it was 10+ years ago. Its performance is pretty decent and it is even faster than Firefox rendering WebGL content.
- PeerTube 3.1 Is Released With Advanced Transcoding Options And A More Polished User-InterfacePeerTube is a free video hosting platform you can use to create your own YouTube-like video hosting platform. The latest version has better and much more configurable video encoding capabilities and a slightly more polished user-interface with new trending features and a new subscribe button that makes it easier to remotely subscribe to users on your local PeerTube instance.
- Linux Market Share On Steam Remained Below 1% In March 2021The GNU/Linux operating system, including all variants of it such as Ubuntu, Manjaro and Arch Linux, is still struggling to gain more than one percent of the total market share on the proprietary Steam game store/launcher. The overall GNU/Linux market share is, according to data from NetMarketShare, slightly below two percent as of March 2021.
- Is Mozilla Still Needed Nowadays?tl;dr: Happy 23rd birthday, Mozilla! (it was founded March 31st, 1998) And for the question: yes. Here's a bit more rambling on this topic...
- GIMP 2.10.24 Is Released With A New "Negative Darkroom" FeatureGIMP 2.10.24 may sound like a minor bug-fix release, but that's not the case. There is a brand new "Negative Darkroom" for photo negatives, many improvements to commonly used file formats (JPEG, PNG, TIFF, etc), better support for off-canvas editing and many smaller subtle bug-fixes in this release.
- The Fiio K5 Pro Audio DAC+AMP On LinuxThe Japanese have examined the K5 Pro Audio DAC+AMP technology in combination with B&W P7 headphones and Sony SRS-D5 speakers and found it to be a great audio solution for GNU/Linux machines. They tweaked the PulseAudio settings to send the K5 Pro "high resolution" audio quality, but they did not find any audible difference between the defaults and the "tweaked" settings.
- Virtueror For Linux Will Be Released On April 1st 2022Vivaladev, the indie game developer behind the upcoming Virtueror strategy game, has announced that a GNU/Linux version of the game will be released on April 1st, 2022. The GNU/Linux version will be priced at $1774.99, slightly higher than the Windows edition of the game which will be priced at $14.99, after research done by Wall Street Bets reveal fundamental differences in how supply and demand laws apply to GNU/Linux users.
- Salt Your Data!It is never wise to give anyone or anything on the Internet more information than they need. That is specially true when signup up to websites and services run by large multi-national corporations. "Salting" your data with false and misleading information is far wiser than handing out your personal information willy nilly.
- RMS Hate Letter Signers Overtake RMS Support Letter Signers By A Wide Margin Thanks To "Discovered" Mail-in BallotsTwo groups recently published two very different open letters about honorary Doctor Richard Stallman. One letter, written by free software users, voices support. The other letter, written by corporate-funded organizations lead by 白左 activists and bullies who do not even use free software themselves, demands that Richard Stallman is kept out of any and all leadership positions. The letter voicing support had nearly five thousand signers at the end of March, leading the disgraceful hate-letter by nearly two thousand signers. The numbers have since flipped, the letter against RMS is now leading by thousands of signers.
- New Libreboot release, ETA late April 2021 / early June 2021Rapid progress is being made towards a new Libreboot release. It should be done by late April or early June 2021. Many new boards will be supported, with lots of bugs fixed, new features added and the latest coreboot/GRUB/SeaBIOS versions used on all boards. The Libreboot website will be massively overhauled.
- Libreboot Maintainer Leah Rowe: "Defend Richard Stallman!"2 years ago, known Thought Criminal Richard M Stallman was falsely accused of defending rape in an Orwellian smear campaign, orchestrated by mainstream media at the behest of proprietary software vendors. 36 years fighting for your digital freedom, cancelled. It was so vicious that he resigned from his post as president of the Free Software Foundation. The FSF did nothing to protect or defend him. However, you can defend him!
- Almalinux 8.3 Is Released As A Stable RHEL Clone For Those Who Liked CentOSCentOS used to be the go-to alternative for those who wanted to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) without having to pay RedHat to use it. It was a almost 1:1 clone until RedHat took control of it and turned it into what is now a RHEL beta-version, not a stable RHEL release without the branding. Almalinux is one of several projects that have made their own RHEL forks in response. The first Almalinux version is now released.
- Ubuntu Entertainment Has Released A Wonderful Teaser Video For Yukika Teramoto's Upcoming Mini-Album "timeabout".The South Korea-based actor and singer Yukika Teramoto (Korean: 유키카; Japanese: ユキカ) will launch a new mini-album titled "timeabout", published by her agency Ubuntu Entertainment, on April 7th. The mini-album will have six wonderful and amazing tracks - if the short clips in the teaser video is anything to go by.
- Linus Torvalds on Intel And AMDs New Approaches To Interrupt And Exception Handling - And MicrokernelsAMD and Intel are both working on new standards for handling interrupts and exceptions on x86-64 processors. AMD is proposing a set of new "Supervisor Entry" extensions as a band-aid to the current interrupt descriptor table event handling system. Intel wants to throw that whole legacy system away and start over with a fundamentally different "Flexible Return and Event Delivery" (
FRED) system. Linux-architect Linus Torvalds weighted in on the merits of both approaches a few weeks ago.
- Linux Steering Wheel Manager Oversteer v0.6.0 Brings support For 6 Additional WheelsOversteer is a graphical application that lets you configure steering wheels connected to GNU/Linux machines - assuming they are supported by the Linux kernel or user-space drivers. The latest version has a new profile manager and support configuring 6 additional steering wheels.
- Total War: Three Kingdoms - Fates Divided Is Now Available For LinuxThe British proprietary digital game developer Feral Interactive have made their "Fates Divided" add-on package for their "Total War: Three Kingdoms" game available to GNU/Linux users.
- John Sullivan, Executive Director Of The Free Software Foundation, Has ResignedJohn Sullivan, up to now executive director of the Free Software Foundation, as resigned from his position after being with the FSF in various positions for 18 years. There is no formal announcement on the FSF website as of yet, only a message announcing the resignation on Sullivan's personal Twitter account.
- HOWTO Make A USB Adapter For A VISTA80 Keyboard From 1977Jeremy Ouellet bought an old VISTA80 from the Canada Science and Technology museum and figured out how to use it on modern computers using a passive USB adapter. He shared his experience in a 14 minute long video at the virtual FOSDEM conference in February 2021.
- Squashfs-tools-ng 1.1.0 Brings Broken tar2sqfs Compressed Tarball Supportsquashfs-tools-ng, a independent implementation of squashfs-tools, has made a new release with support for creating squashfs images using shell globing filters and support for creating squashfs images directly from tarball archives (ie
.tar.bz2andtar.xz) using a tool calledtar2sqfs. It doesn't work as advertised, but it is there and the not-functional support for archives is new.
- Grass-roots Richard Stallman Support-Letter Has Reached 3600+ SignersBig technology corporations with a vested interest in controlling "open source" software, and FOSS organizations they directly or indirectly fund, wrote a "open letter" viciously demonizing Richard Stallman after he announced that he will be returning to the Free Software Foundation's board in a live stream at the LibrePlanet 2021 virtual conference. Actual free software users wrote a competing open letter supporting Stallman in response. More than 3600 people have so far signed on to that letter, which is far more than the corporations and the 白左 bullies working for them have gathered.
- Mesa Considers Dropping Default Support For 16+ Year Old x86 CPUsThe Mesa graphics stack supports a really wide range of hardware. The current stable 21.0 Mesa version works on really old 32-bit x86 computers with ancient graphics cards. By-default support for some of those old x86 computers could soon be a thing of the past, the Mesa developers are currently discussing if the SSE2 processor instructions should be a default compiler flag for Mesa builds. GNU/Linux distributions will still be able to set their own flags.
- Debian Buster 10.9 Is ReleasedMinor versions don't really mean anything on Debian, it is just its developers way of reminding people that they should open a terminal and type
sudo apt -y update && sudo apt -y upgradeonce in a while. They do list some security-updates for the ancient packages Debian Buster carries in their announcement.
- WJSN (우주소녀) Announces "Unnatural" Comeback Mini-Album With "Hidden" Teaser FilmStarship Entertainment has announced that WJSN is doing a comeback with a new mini-album titled "Unnatural". They have not yet released a tracklist, but they have set a release-date: The new WJSN "Unnatural" mini-album will become available on March 31st, 2021.
- GOverlay 0.5 Is Released With Support For MangoHud GraphsGOverlay is a user-friendly heads-up display and effects manager for tools like MangoHud and vkBasalt that have no graphical interface of their own. The latest version adds support for configuring graphs on the MangoHud heads-up display and a on/off button for MangoHuds FPS counter.
- A Factual Timeline of Attempts to Pressure the FSF Into Submission (Not to Promote Real Community and Freedom)An objective (based on underlying facts) assessment of what has happened over the past 5 days; a lot of energy was spent getting angry over the wrong thing, usually based on misunderstandings.
- The Fake ‘Door Sign’ Used to Frame Richard Stallman and Misrepresent Him One Year Ago (the Media Never Corrected This Slanderous Allegation)False and ruinous assertions never corrected by so-called ‘professional’ journalists... Richard Stallman (RMS) is still being defamed in the media, which never bothered correcting obvious falsehoods and libel about RMS
- QEMU Support For Rendering Vulkan Software On The Hosts GPU In Virtual Machines Using Virgil 3D Is UnderwayIt is currently possible to run OpenGL applications in virtual Linux machines in QEMU and have the rendering done on the host machine's GPU. It works, and it is faster than software rendering within the virtual machine, but it is not blazing fast. It will eventually be possible to render Vulkan software the exact same way.
