Highlights of Shotcut 23.11 include support for the NVIDIA AV1 (av1_nvenc) hardware encoder on Linux and Windows systems, as well as the addition of easing for keyframes, including Ease In, Ease Out, and Ease In/Out with different levels of acceleration and tricks like elastic and bounce.
digiKam 8.2 is here after about four months after the digiKam 8.1 release, which introduced four new templates for 6.8 inch photo papers in the Print Creator feature, added the ability to remove all face tags from selected items and to remove all tags from selected items except face tags, and improved the usability of the Image Properties sidebar tab.
Coming six months after NixOS 23.05, the NixOS 23.11 release is here to introduce the latest GNOME 45 “Riga” desktop environment series. The GNOME edition ships with the GNOME 45.1 desktop by default on a Wayland session for both bare metal and virtual machines.
For Linux users, the new Steam Client update fixes several bugs in the Steam Overlay that caused rendering to stall in some video games, such as Watch Dogs, and some crashes in other titles, as well as to improve double click handling and mouse clicks for the Counter-Strike 2 video game.
Armbian 23.11 (codename Topi) introduces support for new devices, including the Khadas VIM1S and Khadas VIM4 single-board computers, Texas Instruments SK-TDA4VM processor starter kit for edge AI vision systems, NanoPi R6S and NanoPi R6C IoT gateways, HiKey 960 development platform, ArmSoM-W3 board, Tanix TX6 media player, Inovato Quadra and Mekotronics R58X-Pro ARM mini PCs, as well as the Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro tablet.
Still using the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series that was introduced in 4MLinux 43, the 4MLinux 44 release is here to add system-wide support for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) through the Mesa graphics stack, improved support for SPL printing, as well as improved support for wireless networking.
Highlights of the Mesa 23.3 graphics stack include official support for the Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer via the v3d (OpenGL) and v3dv (Vulkan) drivers, as well as the NVK Vulkan driver developed by Collabora for NVIDIA hardware, which recently reached Vulkan 1.0 conformance.
Accompanied by the beta versions of KDE Frameworks 6 and KDE Gear 24.02 software suites, all built against the Qt 6 application framework, the first KDE Plasma 6 beta release is here with another layer of bug fixes and improvements that make the upcoming desktop environment more stable and reliable for everyday use.
The biggest new feature in the Cinnamon 6.0 desktop environment is the implementation of an experimental Wayland session. As I mentioned in some of my previous articles, it certainly looks like 2024 is the year of the Wayland desktop as more and more desktop environments and GNU/Linux distributions are adopting it by default.
