Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 04, 2025

• Libre Arts ☛ LibreArts Weekly recap — 31 August 2025

  Back to recaps after a summer break. What’s new recently: Wacom upgrades its Blender Foundation support; new releases of GIMP, RapidRAW, Kdenlive, and Shotcut; new features in Inkscape and Ardour.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Chromium

    • Dedoimedo ☛ Brave browser on the iPhone - Very, very interesting

      I went through the Brave settings, toggling options on and off. Notably, by default, you get a rather busy home screen, which shows the number of trackers and ads blocked (Privacy Hub), several shortcuts to online services, and a background image. You won't miss the casual snide of Youtube being the first icon, and the notification about the difference of using Brave being associated with it, ergo videos sans stupid ads.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • The Register UK ☛ Matrix.org homeserver grinds to a halt after RAID meltdown

    A RAID failure has taken the Matrix.org homeserver offline, leaving users of the decentralized messaging service unable to send or receive messages while engineers attempt a 55 TB database restore.

  • Jeremy Cherfas ☛ Doing Typepad’s Dirty Work

    So I used my weak grep-fu to discover that there are links to Typepad in 28 of almost 2000 blog posts on this site. To check them one by one would be quite a lot of effort, first to find the post, then to find the link, then to see if it lives, archive it if it does or search archive.org if it doesn’t, and then amend my link.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Remainder of the Text Properties

    So, after the font family, opentype handling and font metrics rework, there’s some text properties left that aren’t particularly related to one another. Furthermore, at time of writing I also have tackled better UI elements, as well as style presets, so I’ll talk a bit about those too.

    Language

    The first few properties are all affected by the language set on the text shape. So the first thing I tackled was a language selector.

  • LWN ☛ New ELF specification for public review

    Cary Coutant has announced a draft for version 4.3 of the Executable and Linking Format (ELF) object file format. The specification was formerly part of the Unix System V Release 4 (SVR4) gABI document: [...]