GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 11, 2025

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • This Week in Linux 310: GNOME's New Director, Mesa 25.1, GNU/Linux Mint's Theme, Hyprland 0.49, & more GNU/Linux news

    This week in Linux, we have a ton to talk about. GNU/Linux Mint is modernizing their default theme. Then we have a new release of Hyperland, the tiling window manager. We've also got three new distros to talk about. And there's a new release from the Home Assistant project, as well as the Mesa drivers. And GNOME announced their new Executive Director this week. And that's not all. We've got all of that and more on This Week in Linux, the weekly news show that keeps you up to date with what's going on in the GNU/Linux and open source world. Now let's jump right into Your Source for GNU/Linux GNews.

  • Tux Digital ☛ This Week in Linux 310: GNOME’s New Director, Mesa 25.1, GNU/Linux Mint’s Theme, Hyprland 0.49, & more GNU/Linux news

• Kernel Space

  • Ars Technica ☛ Linux kernel is leaving 486 CPUs behind, only 18 years after the last one made

    Intel's i486 was the first "computer number" I ever really understood. Sure, my elementary school computer lab had both the Apple IIGS and Apple IIc, and one of them was slightly more useful, for reasons unexplained to me. But soon after my father brought home his office's discarded Gateway desktop with a 486DX 33 MHz inside, I was catapulted into my first Intel sorting scheme. I learned there was an x86 before this one (i386), and there were models with different trailing numbers (16–100 MHz) and "DX" levels. This was my first grasp of what hardware I was actually using and what could improve inside it.

    More than 36 years after the release of the 486 and 18 years after Intel stopped making them, leaders of the Linux kernel believe the project can improve itself by leaving i486 support behind. Ingo Molnar, quoting Linus Torvalds regarding "zero real reason for anybody to waste one second" on 486 support, submitted a patch series to the 6.15 kernel that updates its minimum support features. Those requirements now include TSC (Time Stamp Counter) and CX8 (i.e., "fixed" CMPXCH8B, its own whole thing), features that the 486 lacks (as do some early non-Pentium 586 processors).

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games with Native GNU/Linux Clients, including Ocean Keeper: Dome Survival - 2025-05-07 Edition

    Between 2025-04-30 and 2025-05-07 there were 44 New Steam games released with Native GNU/Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 564 games released for backdoored Windows on Steam, so the GNU/Linux versions represent about 7.8 % of total released titles. This time it’s a bit more average than last week, but there’s still a few ones with good potential like Ocean Keeper: Dome Survival mixing mining with twin-shooter mechanics.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • BSD

    • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ DragonFly 6.4.2 released

      6.4.2, a bugfix upgrade to 6.4.1, is ready to download.  Why so soon?  A few annoying bugs that have been around a long time – and affect the installer – are fixed.  These changes will help you out if you run Qemu as host, run chrome, or use ipv6.

    • Ted Unangst ☛ fan service

      ASUS laptops generally have a feature that lets the user toggle the fan speed. Fn-F5 on some models, Fn-F on others. The direct effect is to limit the fan speed, from whisper mode to megablast, and indirectly control performance. But it doesn’t work in OpenBSD, so I needed to write an ASUS ACPI WMI driver.

  • Debian Family

    • Sparky GNU/Linux ☛ Meru

      There is a new application available for Sparkers: Meru What is Meru? Gmail desktop app for macOS, backdoored Windows & GNU/Linux (Formerly Gmail Desktop).

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Access/Content

      • Taavi Väänänen: Wikimedia Hackathon Istanbul 2025

        It's that time of the year again: the Wikimedia Hackathon 2025 happened last weekend in Istanbul. This year was my third time attending what has quickly become one of my favourite events of the year simply due to the concentration of friends and other like-minded nerds in a single location.¹