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...

COSMIC, the Linux desktop that can look and work however you dang well like, is adding more bling. System76 co-founder Carl Richell has given us our first look at the ‘Frosted Glass’ effect coming to the COSMIC desktop in Epoch 2 (as the desktop releases are named): System76’s engineering team is opting to use a ‘more performant’ Dual Kawase blur, commonly used in gaming, to handle the dynamic effect. This apparently offers a ‘close approximation’ of Gaussian blur, but is not as resource intensive. That’s important. Flashy UI effects often involve a performance hit and, more keenly, a knock-on effect […]

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.

FUSS is a Debian-based Linux distribution for managing an educational network. It provides server, thin client and desktop solutions based on free software that go beyond any economic or technical reasons, maintaining an ethical choice of freedom and knowledge sharing. FUSS, which stands for "Free Upgrade in South Tyrol's Schools" started in 2005 in Italy's autonomous province of Bolza, with the aim of bringing free software to schools.

In addition to Mesa 26.1 today seeing Vulkan present timing support finally merged to help reduce game stuttering and separately another long-in-development Mesa merge request for DG2 / Meteor Lake to improve performance as much as 260% in some scenarios, there is another merge today to Mesa Git for enhancing Intel graphics on Linux. For Intel Linux gamers the newest Mesa code adds a new DriConf workaround that is capable of halving the initial game load time for at least one problematic game title...

Parrot (formerly Parrot Security OS) is a Debian-based, security-oriented distribution featuring a collection of utilities designed for penetration testing, computer forensics, reverse engineering, hacking, privacy, anonymity and cryptography. The product, developed by Frozenbox, comes with MATE as the default desktop environment.

GStreamer 1.28 is out today as the newest feature release for this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework...

GNU C Library "glibc" developers have decided to move ahead with plans of migrating their core services from Sourcware.org infrastructure over to the Core Toolchain Infrastructure "CTI" project hosted by the Linux Foundation...

Following the KDE Plasma 6.6 Beta from two weeks ago, a second beta of the upcoming Plasma 6.6 desktop is now available for testing. KDE Plasma 6.6 stable remains on-track for a mid-February release...

Back in 2024 Google rolled out their Axion in-house ARM processors with the Google Cloud C4A instance type. Today they are expanding their Axion offerings in Google Cloud with the N4A instances now out of preview. The Google Cloud N4A instances are designed for scale-out web servers and microservices, containerized applications, back-end application services, databases, data analytics, and cost-effective development/staging/testing environments.

With a huge bumper of additional content for the game, Terraria version 1.4.5 the "Bigger and Boulder" update is now officially live.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Systemd founder and lead developer Lennart Poettering announced the creation of a new company called Amutable. The Amutable company being led by Chris Kühl (CEO), Christian Brauner (CTO) and Lennart Poettering (Chief Engineer) will be focused on delivering determinism and verifiable integrity to Linux systems...

TigerVNC 1.16 is out today for this high performance, multi-platform VNC server and client implementation. Most notable with TigerVNC 1.16 is "w0vncserver" as a new server for sharing Wayland desktops...

Flatcar Container Linux is a container-optimized operating system based on Gentoo Linux. It is a minimal operating system image which includes only the tools needed to run containers and it supports all of the popular methods for running containers. The distribution ships an immutable filesystem and includes automatic atomic updates. Flatcar Container Linux runs on most cloud providers, virtualization platforms and bare metal servers.

The new Mecha Comet would have been a dream device to mess about with when I was younger, a fully modular Linux-powered handheld.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Following the release of zlib-rs 0.6 last week, the developers behind this Rust-based Zlib implementation have declared their API stable and complete...

Xfce developers are using their donations from the community to fund a longtime core developer to create Xfwl4, an entirely new Wayland compositor for Xfce...

The Vulkan EXT_present_timing was in development for years to help avoid game stuttering and released this past November with Vulkan 1.4.335. This significant extension as of today has been wired up in Mesa 26.1-devel for the key Vulkan drivers and working on both X11 and Wayland...

Valve, creator of Steam, now face legal action in the UK as a lawsuit has been given the go-ahead that could result in up to £656 million in damages.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

The CachyOS madness hasn't quite caught on for me, but I definitely want to take a good look at what all the fuss is about soon - and there's a big new release.

Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.

Essora Eos is a set of desktop Linux distributions based either on Debian's "Stable" branch or Devuan, featuring the lightweight JWM or Openbox window managers or the heavyweight KDE Plasma desktop environment. The Devuan edition uses the OpenRC init system. The distribution aims to be clean, minimal, fast and customisable, with only the essential tools installed by default. Essora Eos uses the Calamares system installer and provides a custom graphical configuration utility called "Essora Control Centre".

A set of 18 patches were merged overnight to Mesa 26.1 for working around graphics corruption on Meteor Lake and DG2/Alchemist class graphics hardware. Not only are some graphics corruption issues worked around but for that hardware there is as much as "a whopping 260%" performance improvement observed for some graphics workloads...

Being worked on for a while by Lenovo engineer Vishnu Sankar is nicely handling support for double-tap functionality with TrackPoints on ThinkPads under Linux. The sixth iteration of this enablement work was posted today and is just documentation updates, so it's looking like this new TrackPoint doubletap code could soon be crossing the threshold for the mainline Linux kernel...