Operating Systems and Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 12, 2024

• Operating Systems

  • Games

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Valve now sells refurbished Steam Deck OLED for 20% cheaper than brand new — 512GB model for $439 and 1TB model for $519

      Valve has introduced the Steam Deck OLED model into its refurbishing service, bringing the price down by 20% for certified refurbished OLED models.

    • Boiling Steam ☛ New Steam Games with Native GNU/Linux Clients, including Gridroad - 2024-12-11 Edition

      Between 2024-12-04 and 2024-12-11 there were 20 New Steam games released with Native GNU/Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 124 games released for backdoored Windows on Steam, so the GNU/Linux versions represent about 16.1 % of total released titles. Again a slow week, but there’s one gem, Gridroad, that lets you plan for road structures to ensure that the traffic flows as smoothly as possible. There have been many games in the genre but Gridroad seems to be equipped with an excellent and very intuitive UI.

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Kaidan 0.10.0: Too Much to Summarize!

        We finally made it: Kaidan’s next release with so many features that we cannot summarize them in one sentence!

        Most of the work has been funded by NLnet via NGI Assure and NGI Zero Entrust with public money provided by the European Commission. If you want Kaidan’s progress to continue and keep more free software projects alive, please share and sign the open letter for further funding!

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • HaikuOS ☛ Haiku Activity & Contract Report, November 2024

    This report covers hrev58292 through hrev58368.

    apl added an “installed” indicator to icons in HaikuDepot’s list view, and continued the refactoring of its internal data model. humdinger contributed icons for the “native” indicator, and apl added this to HaikuDepot’s display as well.

    korli fixed an occasional crash in Screen preferences.

    X512 fixed an incorrect port deletion in BApplication.

  • BSD

    • Klara ☛ FreeBSD 14 replaces Sendmail with DMA

      FreeBSD 14 introduces DMA, the lightweight Mail Transport Agent from DragonFly BSD, as the default replacement for Sendmail. This article outlines the reasons behind the change, highlights the benefits of DMA, and provides a step-by-step guide to configuring it for efficient email handling on minimal systems.

    • FreeBSD ☛ 2024: A Year of Advocacy and Growth for the FreeBSD Foundation

      In 2024, the FreeBSD Foundation celebrated 31 years of FreeBSD during FreeBSD Day, highlighting its legacy in open-source ecosystems. The event featured user stories, community highlights, and campaigns to promote its achievements.

      Additionally, the Foundation raised awareness about FreeBSD’s governance model and its important role in the open-source world, reinforcing its relevance in today’s fast-changing technology landscape.

  • Arch Family

    • LWN ☛ Arch Linux finally starts licensing PKGBUILDs

      Arch Linux is popular as a base for other Linux distributions; examples of Arch-derivatives include EndeavourOS, Manjaro, Parabola, and SteamOS. There's one small problem: the control files used to describe how to build packages for Arch Linux have no stated license. That creates a bit of uncertainty about the rights and responsibilities for the downstream derivatives. So far, that doesn't seem to have been a problem, nor has it stopped other projects from assuming that reuse is allowed. However, the Arch project is looking to add some clarity by explicitly assigning a liberal license to its package sources. Currently the project is in the process of reaching out to contributors to see if they have any objections.

      An Arch Linux package is described using a PKGBUILD file, which is a Bash script used by the makepkg utility to compile the package source and make it ready to install using the pacman package manager. The Arch wiki has a good overview of the components and steps needed to create an Arch package.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Nico Cartron ☛ Text-based tools I'm using on my FreeBSD laptop

    As I mentioned before, I recently switched to i3 as Window Manager on my FreeBSD laptop.

    I was already using some text-based tools, but with i3 being all about focus, I made the switch for other tools as well.

  • James G ☛ Artemis, a calm web reader, is available (in beta)

    Artemis updates once per day at ~12am UK time, adding all posts available at the time of the update. No matter how many times you check throughout the day, the contents of the reader will be the same. There are no notifications, no metrics — no numbers. But there is a cute cat mascot.

  • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • Silicon Angle ☛ SkySQL nabs $6.6M for its AI-integrated cloud database

      SkySQL Inc., a startup with a cloud-based relational database service, today disclosed that it has raised $6.6 million in seed funding. Eniac Ventures, Good Capital and WTI provided the capital. SkySQL launched last year after spinning out from MariaDB plc, a company that commercializes a popular open-source database of the same name.

  • FSF

    • FSF ☛ FSF Blogs: Resolve to have a freer 2025

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Federal News Network ☛ IC’s new OSINT standards cover open source data, Hey Hi (AI) services

        As OSINT becomes a major focus for the intelligence community, the new standards give analysts and collectors explicit instructions for citing certain data.