ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Intel Thermal Daemon 2.5.9 Prepares For Panther Lake

([Intel] 12 February 06:21 AM EST Intel Thermal Daemon)

Intel on Tuesday released Thermal Daemon 2.5.9 as their newest feature release of this open-source daemon to help monitor and control the CPU/SoC temperature within laptops and other modern Intel hardware.



Python 3.14 Alpha 5 Released With New Tail-Call Interpreter

([Programming] 11 February 04:53 PM EST Python 3.14 Alpha 5)

Python 3.14 Alpha 5 is out today as the latest of many development releases in stepping toward the Python 3.14 stable release in October.



Healthy Competition With GCC 15 vs. LLVM Clang 20 Performance On AMD Zen 5

([Software] 11 February 01:03 PM EST 10 Comments)

In the recent discussion over the GNU Gold linker being deprecated, there was the usual LLVM vs. GCC compiler/toolchain debate. Fortunately, with recently working on some initial benchmarks of the GCC 15 compiler I was following that up with some fresh LLVM Clang compiler comparison metrics on the same AMD Zen 5 hardware.



Intel CPU Microcode Updated For Five New Security Issues

([Intel] 11 February 12:15 PM EST Intel CPU Microcode)

Intel just published new CPU microcode for Alder Lake, Emerald Rapids, Ice Lake, Raptor Lake, Sapphire Rapids, Sierra Forest, and other platforms going back to Coffee Lake H. There are five new security issues being addressed plus a number of different functional issues being resolved.



GNOME 48 Now Allows Grouping Notifications By App

([GNOME] 11 February 10:18 AM EST Notifications Grouped By App)

While the GNOME 48 feature and UI freezes went into effect just a little more than one week ago, a freeze exception was granted for merging support in GNOME Shell for grouping notifications on a per-app basis.



Ubuntu 25.04's GNOME Web Browser Will Be Able To Play More Web Videos By Default

([Ubuntu] 11 February 09:54 AM EST Bad Plugins)

Those making use of the GNOME Web "Epiphany" web browser with the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release will be able to enjoy playing more popular web videos thanks to a packaging change.



Arm Mali Panfrost Driver Lands OpenCL C Support In Mesa 25.1

([Mesa] 11 February 08:46 AM EST Panfrost OpenCL)

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver has merged initial OpenCL C infrastructure into Mesa 25.1 for allowing OpenCL compute on Arm Mali graphics using this open-source Linux driver stack.



FLAC 1.5 Finally Delivers Multi-Threaded Encoding

([Multimedia] 11 February 08:36 AM EST FLAC 1.5)

FLAC 1.5 is out today as the newest feature update to the software built around the Free Lossless Audio Codec.



KDE Plasma 6.3 Released With Improved Fractional Scaling & Other Enhancements

([KDE] 11 February 06:44 AM EST KDE Plasma 6.3)

Out just ahead of Valentine's Day is the much anticipated KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop release for further advancing this Qt6/KF6-based open-source desktop.



AMD AOMP 20.0-2 Compiler Adds The "flang-new" Fortran Compiler Option

([AMD] 11 February 06:24 AM EST AMD AOMP 20.0-2)

AOMP 20.0-2 was released on Monday as the newest update to this AMD downstream of the LLVM/Clang/Flang code that is focused on delivering the latest staging/testing patches around OpenMP offloading to AMD GPUs using ROCm. Many of AMD's AMDGPU/OpenMP patches end up being upstreamed into LLVM proper while AOMP is the staging area for those wanting to have the latest and best experience for Clang C/C++ and Flang Fortran offloading to AMD Instinct/Radeon hardware.



BeOS-Inspired Haiku OS Starts 2025 Off Introducing An AMD CPU Temperature Driver

([Operating Systems] 11 February 06:13 AM EST Haiku Changes For January 2025)

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project has published their January 2025 status report that outlines all of the interesting work over the past month.



Systemd Adding The Ability to Boot Directly Into A Disk Image Downloaded Via HTTP

([systemd] 10 February 08:43 PM EST systemd)

Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering has been working on adding the ability to let systemd boot directly into a disk image downloaded via HTTP within the initial RAM disk (initrd) during the Linux boot process.



Firefox ForkServer Getting Ready To Enhance Linux Browser Performance

([Mozilla] 10 February 03:11 PM EST Firefox ForkServer)

Firefox has been shipping their nightly Linux builds the past three months with ForkServer enabled to improve the multi-process browser experience. The results are looking good and Firefox official releases for Linux should soon begin shipping with ForkServer too for this performance win.



Intel's Newest Open-Source Project Is "Polite Guard"

([Intel] 10 February 12:40 PM EST Intel Polite Guard)

Intel's newest open-source project and addition to their AI offerings is... Polite Guard.



Apple Touch Bar Backlight & Keyboard Mode Drivers Slated For Linux 6.15

([Apple] 10 February 12:18 PM EST Apple Touch Bar Drivers For Linux)

For those making use of the Intel-powered Apple MacBook Pro laptops featuring the Touch Bar, better support for that interface is slated to land with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle.



GIMP 3.0 RC3 Released For A Final Round Of Testing

([Free Software] 10 February 10:51 AM EST GIMP 3.0 RC3)

GIMP 3.0 RC3 is out today as what is hopefully the last release candidate before the long-awaited stable release of GIMP 3.0 as this long in development free software alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop.



Python 3.14 Lands A New Interpreter With 3~30% Faster Python Code

([Programming] 10 February 09:02 AM EST Python 3.14 New Interpeter)

Merged last week for Python 3.14 is a new tail-call intepreter that aims to offer significantly better performance with around 10% faster performance in PyPerformance or around a 40% speed-up in Python-heavy benchmarks. This tail-call interpeter can even outperform the current Python JIT compiler but for maximum performance benefits Python should be built with Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO).



Union Hopes To Address KDE's Fragmented Ways Of Styling Apps

([KDE] 10 February 08:51 AM EST KDE Union)

KDE/Qt apps can be styled many different ways with Qt widgets, SVG-based styling, Qt Quick, and other routes for styling of applications. That fragmentation of different ways to styling KDE apps can probe problematic for UI designs and lead to a less cohesive user experience. KDE developer Arjen Hiemstra is hoping to change that with the Union project.



Formerly Known As YQPkg, Myrlyn Package Manager GUI Adds Repository Configuration

([SUSE] 10 February 08:28 AM EST Myrlyn)

You may recall the YQPkg package management tool announced last year that's been talked up by openSUSE developers as a Qt-based package manager GUI and alternative to YaST. It's now known as Myrlyn and has added repository configuration as its newest feature.



New Proposal To Raise The Linux Kernel's Default Timer Frequency To 1000Hz

([Linux Kernel] 10 February 06:43 AM EST 250Hz To 1000Hz)

A patch sent out on Sunday by Google engineer Qais Yousef is proposing to raise the Linux kernel's default timer frequency from 250Hz to 1000Hz.



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incentive program, n.:
The system of long and short-term rewards that a corporation uses
to motivate its people. Still, despite all the experimentation with
profit sharing, stock options, and the like, the most effective
incentive program to date seems to be "Do a good job and you get to
keep it."