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Unvanquished 0.54.1 Released With Rendering Fixes & Better Bots
Unvanquished 0.54.1 Released With Rendering Fixes & Better Bots
6 Hours Ago - Linux Gaming - Unvanquished 0.54.1 - Add A Comment

Unvanquished has been a promising open-source first person shooter game in development for over a decade. It started out putting monthly alpha releases and quite a brisk development pace but in recent years the releases have been much less frequent. This year started out with Unvanquished 0.54 being released and in now approaching the end of the year is seeing a new point release.

Lubuntu 24.04 LTS Aiming For Optional Wayland Session, Default in 24.10
Lubuntu 24.04 LTS Aiming For Optional Wayland Session, Default in 24.10
16 Hours Ago - Ubuntu - LXQt + Ubuntu - 5 Comments

Lubuntu as the Ubuntu Linux spin featuring the lightweight LXQt desktop has shared some of their plans for the upcoming Lubuntu 24.04 LTS release. As part of this release due out in April they are aiming to have an optional Wayland session in place although they don't expect to make it the default until Lubuntu 24.10.

OBS Studio 30.0.1 Released With Crash Fixes
OBS Studio 30.0.1 Released With Crash Fixes
16 Hours Ago - Free Software - OBS Studio - Add A Comment

Released last month was OBS Studio 30 with Intel QSV AV1 acceleration on Linux, WHIP/WebRTC output, YouTube Live Control Room Panel support, and a variety of other features for this software popular with game streamers and live-casting. Out today is OBS Studio 30.0.1 with some crash fixes and other refinements for last month's update.

Improved Sound Open Firmware On The Way For Valve's Steam Deck OLED
Improved Sound Open Firmware On The Way For Valve's Steam Deck OLED
22 Hours Ago - Valve - SOF For Steam Deck OLED - 7 Comments

Earlier Phoronix reporting on the "Valve Galileo" as a new Steam Deck device proved accurate and that is the new Steam Deck OLED gaming console. Further improving the upstream Linux kernel support is a set of patches to further refine the Sound Open Firmware (SOF) support for this new platform.

9 December

W4 Games Raises $15M To Help Push Open-Source Video Game Development With Godot
W4 Games Raises $15M To Help Push Open-Source Video Game Development With Godot
9 December 05:48 AM EST - Linux Gaming - W4 Games - 9 Comments

Last year W4 Games was formed by Godot game engine developers as part of an effort to strengthen the open-source Godot ecosystem as well as work on commercial products and services, such as integrating with the proprietary game console/cloud platforms. They started out with $8.5 million dollars last year while this week announced a series A funding round of $15M.

8 December

Intel Striving To Overhaul Their Multiple Ethernet Linux Drivers: "The Great Code Dedup"
Intel Striving To Overhaul Their Multiple Ethernet Linux Drivers: "The Great Code Dedup"
8 December 11:01 AM EST - Intel - Reducing Code Duplication - 18 Comments

Intel engineers maintain multiple Ethernet drivers in the Linux kernel for their wide-range of networking hardware from consumer to high-end data center wares. There's been an ongoing effort to overhaul their Ethernet driver management to reduce code duplication between the different drivers for better code sharing and with an end goal of more unification.

7 December

Wine Wayland Driver Lands Mouselook Support, Relative Cursor Motion
Wine Wayland Driver Lands Mouselook Support, Relative Cursor Motion
7 December 07:12 PM EST - WINE - Wine Wayland Driver - 29 Comments

Friday's release of Wine 8.22 is expected to be the last bi-weekly feature release before shifting focus to the code freeze and making Wine 9.0 ready for release in early 2024. It's coming down to the finish line how much more Wine Wayland driver functionality will be merged in time.

Intel Will Submit New Xe Kernel Graphics Driver Soon - Likely For Linux 6.8
Intel Will Submit New Xe Kernel Graphics Driver Soon - Likely For Linux 6.8
7 December 02:27 PM EST - Intel - SUPER EXCITING - 10 Comments

It looks like Intel will soon be submitting their first Xe Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver pull request to DRM-Next for mainlining this modern, current and future hardware focused kernel graphics driver to be added to the mainline Linux kernel. It looks like this mainlining is set to still happen in time for the upcoming Linux 6.8 cycle.

KDE's KWin Adds DMA-Fence Deadline Support
KDE's KWin Adds DMA-Fence Deadline Support
7 December 10:27 AM EST - KDE - DMA-Fence Deadline - 23 Comments

KDE's KWin compositor has added DMA-Fence deadline support to its DRM back-end that can help ensure rendering is completed on-time and otherwise helping to boost the GPU clock speeds.

6 December

AMD Announces The Ryzen 8040 Series Mobile Processors With Better Ryzen AI
6 December 03:00 PM EST - Processors - 58 Comments

In addition to AMD using its AI event today for launching the Instinct MI300A and MI300X along with ROCm 6.0, AMD also announced the Ryzen 8040 series mobile processors. A big emphasis with these forthcoming laptop processors is on the AI capabilities between the dedicated NPU with AMD XDNA, Zen 4 CPU cores with AVX-512 VNNI support, and AMD RDNA3 graphics capable of accelerating AI.

Feral's GameMode 1.8 Adds CPU Core Pinning & Parking
6 December 12:45 PM EST - Linux Gaming - GameMode 1.8 - 8 Comments

While there hasn't been much in the way of new Linux game ports from Feral Interactive since Steam Play (Valve's Proton + VKD3D-Proton) took over the scene, they do continue maintaining their GameMode open-source service and today released GameMode 1.8 with work by them and the open-source community.

Austrian Game Studio Now Sponsoring Krita Development
6 December 09:51 AM EST - Free Software - Broken Rules - 10 Comments

While Blender is at the forefront of receiving corporate sponsorships and funding for advancing that open-source 3D modeling software, other free software graphics programs haven't all received the same level of support. As good news for further raising the open-source creative/graphics ecosystem, an Austrian video game studio has become one of the new Krita sponsors.

More AMD GFX12 Additions Land In LLVM Git For RDNA4 GPUs
6 December 08:42 AM EST - Radeon - AMDGPU LLVM GFX12 - Add A Comment

As noted in late November, AMD has begun enabling new "GFX12" hardware in LLVM for their AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end. GFX12 is the target for next-generation RDNA4 graphics processors and that upstreaming effort has continued with more patches being upstreamed.

AlmaLinux's ELevate Begins Handling EPEL Repositories
6 December 06:46 AM EST - Operating Systems - ELevate + EPEL - 24 Comments

AlmaLinux's ELevate software is a wonderful utility to help ease migration between existing major versions of RHEL derivatives. In particular, it's been very useful for moving past CentOS 7 and/or upgrading from AlmaLinux 8 to 9, along with the ability to even move to other RHEL derivatives.

One Week Left To Vote On openSUSE's New Logo
6 December 06:06 AM EST - SUSE - openSUSE Logo - 34 Comments

The openSUSE project has been working on a rebranding to better differentiate between this community open-source project and SUSE itself. There's been work on a logo design contest with just under one week left to vote in this survey.

5 December

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