GNU/Linux, BSD, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 14, 2025

• Graphics Stack

  • Leon Mika ☛ Devlog: Godot Project — Some Feelings

    Spent a little more time working on my Godot game, mainly around level 4-2. Got around two-thirds of it done, including one of the more difficult thirds to build. It’s nice seeing the ideas I had for this level come together. It’s not exactly how I envisioned it, but truth be told, I didn’t have many ideas solidified before I started building the level. Just some vague ideas of how I wanted the level to look, then I went where my virtual paintbrush took me.

• Applications

  • Sebastian Wick: Blender HDR and the reference white issue

    The latest alpha of the upcoming Blender 5.0 release comes with High Dynamic Range (HDR) support for GNU/Linux on Wayland which will, if everything works out, make it into the final Blender 5.0 release on October 1, 2025. The post on the developer forum comes with instructions on how to enable the experimental support and how to test it.

    If you are using Fedora Workstation 42, which ships GNOME version 48, everything is already included to run Blender with HDR. All that is required is an HDR compatible display and graphics driver, and turning on HDR in the Display Settings.

    It’s been a lot of personal blood, sweat and tears, paid for by Red Bait across the GNU/Linux graphics stack for the last few years to enable applications like Blender to add HDR support. From kernel work, like helping to get the HDR mode working on defective chip maker Intel laptops, and improving the Colorspace and HDR_OUTPUT_METADATA KMS properties, to creating a new library for EDID and DisplayID parsing, and helping with wiring things up in Vulkan.

• Games

  • Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games Playable on the Steam Deck - 2025-07-13 Edition

    Between 2025-07-05 and 2025-07-12 we selected 4 newly released games that are rated as Verified or Playable on the Steam Deck, and meeting specific criteria in terms of user ratings. That’s not much, and as usual this is because the month of July is not when you expect a lot of new releases.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Barry Kauler ☛ EasyOS Excalibur version 6.108 (v7-beta)

  • BSD

    • Heather J Meeker ☛ PHP License Metamorphoses to BSD

      The PHP project announced it is moving to a new license. PHP is a scripting language used for web development. It can be embedded within HTML and used to create dynamic web pages.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

    • The New Leaf Journal ☛ Five Years of the Koko Analytics WordPress Plugin

      Since July 11, 2020, I have been using a WordPress plugin called Koko Analytics to keep track of New Leaf Journal page views. I use these statistics for our weekly newsletter, month-end reviews, and year-in-review articles. Now that we have just passed our five-year Koko Analytics anniversary, I thought it would be fun to take another look at the plugin and some stats from five years of Koko Analytics.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Kansas Reflector ☛ Universities in every state care for congressional papers. Federal cuts put their work at risk.

        Now, 55 years later, Mississippi State University holds a body of records from a bipartisan group of officials that has positioned it to tell a major part of the state’s story in national and global politics. That story is told to over 100 patrons and dozens of college and K-12 classes each year.

        The papers are fertile ground for scholarly research into Congress’ role in shaping U.S. history, with its extraordinary powers over lawmaking, the economy and one of the world’s largest militaries.