GNU/Linux Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 16, 2025

• HowTo Geek ☛ Linux Is Getting Better on Apple Silicon Macs

  Asahi Linux, the project to bring a native desktop Linux experience to Apple Silicon Mac computers, is ‘upstreaming’ several major components to the Linux kernel. The team says the change “lightens our maintenance burden,” fixes bugs, and speeds up future development on supporting newer Mac models.

• Codethink Limited Announces Baseline Safety Assessment for Linux-Based OS to SIL 3 / ASIL D

  Codethink has announced the publication of its baseline Safety Assessment report for Codethink Trustable Reproducible Linux (CTRL OS). The report validates Codethink’s safety argument for use of CTRL OS in safety-critical and mixed-criticality systems up to SIL 3 / ASIL D, and independently confirms that Codethink’s approach satisfies the expectations of both IEC 61508 and ISO 26262.

• Graphics Stack

  • Simon Ser ☛ Simon Ser: Status update, May 2025

    Hi!

    Today wlroots 0.19.0 has finally been released! Among the newly supported protocols, color-management-v1 lays the first stone of HDR support (backend and renderer bits are still being reviewed) and ext-image-copy-capture-v1 enhances the previous screen capture protocol with better performance. Explicit synchronization is now fully supported, and display-only devices such as gud or DisplayLink can now be used with wlroots. See the release notes for more details! I hope I’ll be able to go back to some feature work and reviews now that the release is out of the way.

• Games/Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • 404 Media ☛ ‘Doom: The Dark Ages’ DRM Is Locking Out Linux Users Who Bought the Game

    According to multiple posts on Reddit, Doom: The Dark Ages uses the infamous anti-piracy software Denuvo. One Reddit user on the Linux gaming subreddit said that they were getting a black screen in the game when using FSR, AMD’s technology for upscaling and frame generation which basically makes games look better and run faster. In an attempt to troubleshoot the problem, this person tried testing the game on different versions of Proton, a compatibility layer developed by Valve that allows games that were designed to run on Windows to work on Linux-based operating systems. Denuvo detected these tests as “multiple activations” of the game, and locked the Reddit user out of the game for 24 hours.

• Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Felipe Borges: Using Libravatar/Gravatar for your profile in Planet GNOME

      Now that the new planet.gnome.org website is live, we have added Libravatar and Gravatar support. Instead of having the Planet website host user images itself, we are giving members the choice to use profile images/avatars from these services.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • Introducing Assignments

      Over the last few days, we’ve been focused on improving how responsibility is tracked in packages. Today, we’re excited to introduce Assignments. These updates are part of the Foster Collaboration beta programs. You can find more information about the beta program here. Our efforts to foster collaboration started in August 2024, when we introduced labels and bug report links. Next, we’ve improved labels to foster collaboration. Then, we focused on labeling projects.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Ubuntu ☛ vBRAS NFVI reference architecture with Huawei OceanStor and Canonical OpenStack

      Traditionally, BRAS has suffered from challenges, including low resource utilization, complex management and maintenance, and slow service provisioning. Virtual broadband remote access server (vBRAS) offers a way to address these challenges, accelerating service rollout, improving resource utilization, and simplifying operations and maintenance (O&M).

    • Ubuntu ☛ Building an end-to-end Retrieval- Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow 

      In our previous blog on understanding and deploying RAG, we walked you through the basics of what this technique is and how it enhances generative AI models by utilizing external knowledge sources such as documents and extensive databases. These external knowledge bases enhance machine learning models for enterprise applications by providing verifiable, up-to-date information that reduces errors, simplifies implementation, and lowers the cost of continuous retraining.