LLVM/Clang 22.1 was released overnight as the first stable release of the LLVM 22 series. This is a nice, feature-packaged half-year update to this prominent open-source compiler stack with many great refinements…

WINSYSTEMS’ SBC-ZETA-3950 is a rugged mini single board computer based on the Intel Atom Apollo Lake E3950, designed for industrial and space-constrained applications. It combines a COM Express Mini Type 10 module with a rugged carrier board in an 84 x 55 mm form factor. The SBC-ZETA-3950 uses the quad-core Intel Atom E3950 processor running […]

Wine 11.3 brings Mono 11.0, VKD3D 1.19, better DirectSound, and 30 bug fixes to improve how Windows apps and games run on Linux.

37 groups urge the company to drop ID checks for apps distributed outside PlaySoon, developers who just want to make Android apps for sideloading will have to register with Google. Thirty-seven technology companies, nonprofits, and civil society groups think that the Chocolate Factory should keep its nose out of third-party app stores and have asked its leadership to reconsider.…

The Document Foundation has revived LibreOffice Online, resuming development after formally reversing its 2022 decision to freeze the project.

It’s quite a mouthful but today AMD posted Linux kernel patches for preparing SEV-SNP BTB isolation support for further enhancing the security of virtual machines (VMs) for confidential computing…

Lutris 0.5.21 is now available as the latest version of this open-source Linux game manager. With Lutris 0.5.21 comes some new runners for executing games in different environments…

Apache NetBeans 29 cross-platform IDE released with Java performance improvements, PHP fixes, and updated Git integration.

LibreOffice online is a web-based version of the LibreOffice suite that can
be hosted on anybody’s infrastructure. This project was put into stasis back in 2022, a move marked by
some tension with Collabora, a major LibreOffice developer that has its own online offering. Now,
the Document Foundation has announced
a new effort to breathe life into this project.

We plan to reopen the repository for LibreOffice Online at The
Document Foundation for contributions, but provide warnings about
the state of the repository until TDF’s team agrees that it’s safe
and usable – while at the same time encourage the community to join
in with code, technologies and other contributions that can be used
to move forward.

Meanwhile, this
post from Michael Meeks suggests that the tension around online
versions of LibreOffice has not abated.

Ardour 9.2 has been released today as the latest stable version of this powerful, free, cross-platform, and open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems.

The KDE Project released today KDE Plasma 6.6.1 as the first maintenance update to the latest KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop environment series with an initial batch of improvements and bug fixes.

While System76 has been hard at work on a redesigned Thelio desktop chassis design, this hasn’t slowed down their software work. Today they shipped COSMIC Epoch 1.0.8 as the newest work on their open-source, Rust-based desktop environment used by their in-house Pop!_OS Linux distribution as well as found in other Linux distributions too…

The Alliance for Open Media has started developing OAC, a new open-source audio codec intended as the long-term successor to Opus.

D7VK is the open-source project that began implementing the Direct3D 7 APIs atop Vulkan and with time the scope expanded to include Direct3D 6 support as well as Direct3D 5 support. Out today is D7VK 1.4 for continuing to enhance the support for these older D3D versions on Vulkan under Linux…

Following various Intel open-source projects recently being archived with Intel formally discontinuing their development, another wave of Intel open-source projects were formally sunset on Monday…

Version
5.4.0 of GNU awk
(gawk) has been released. This is a major release with a change in
gawk’s default regular-expression matcher: it now uses MinRX
as the default regular-expression engine.

This matcher is fully POSIX compliant, which the current GNU matchers
are not. In particular it follows POSIX rules for finding the longest
leftmost submatches. It is also more strict as to regular expression
syntax, but primarily in a few corner cases that normal, correct,
regular expression usage should not encounter.

Because regular expression matching is such a fundamental part of
awk/gawk, the original GNU matchers are still included in gawk. In order
to use them, give a value to the GAWK_GNU_MATCHERS environment variable
before invoking gawk.

[…] The original GNU matchers will eventually be removed from
gawk. So, please take the time to notice and report any issues in the
MinRX matcher, so that they can be ironed out sooner rather than later.

See the release announcement for additional changes.

BSD support improves, FreeBSD eyes a desktop option, and the init wars refuse to dieThe latest KDE desktop environment is out. Among other things, it comes with a pledge that it won’t require systemd, and this version has improved OpenBSD support. FreeBSD 15.1’s installer offers KDE too.…

Version
148 of Firefox has been released. The most notable change in this
release is the addition of a “Block AI enhancements” option that
allows turning off “new or current AI enhancements in Firefox, or
pop-ups about them” with a single toggle.

With this release, Firefox now supports the Trusted
Types API to help prevent cross-site scripting attacks as well as
the Sanitizer
API that provides new methods for HTML manipulation. See the release
notes for developers for changes that may affect web developers or
those who create Firefox add-ons.

The facilities provided by the kernel for the management of processes have
evolved considerably in the last few years, driven mostly by the advent of
the pidfd API. A pidfd is a file
descriptor that refers to a process; unlike a process ID, a pidfd is an
unambiguous handle for a process; that makes it a safer, more deterministic
way of operating on processes. Christian Brauner, who has driven much of
the pidfd-related work, is proposing
two new flags for the clone3()
system call, one of which changes the kernel’s security model in a
somewhat controversial way.

Google Cloud recently launched their N4A series powered by their in-house Axion ARM64 processors. In that launch-day benchmarking last month was looking at how the N4A with Axion compared to their prior-generation ARM64 VMs powered by Ampere Altra. There were dramatic generational gains, but how does the N4A stand up to the AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon instances? Here are some follow-up benchmarks I had done to explore the N4A performance against the Intel Xeon N4 and AMD EPYC N4D series.