KDE Roadmap for 2021, Nvidia now loves Wayland, and Epic Games Store on Linux - Linux News
2,532Visit http://linode.com/linuxexperiment for a 100$ credit on your new Linode account!
This time we have the KDE roadmap for the year, Nvidia preparing to better support Wayland and ray tracing on Linux, the death of Flash Player, and an open source epic games store client for Linux. Let's take a look, right after this.
Join this channel to get access to a weekly patroncast and vote on the next topics I'll cover:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5UAwBUum7CPN5buc-_N1Fw/join
Support the channel on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/thelinuxexperiment
Follow me on Twitter : http://twitter.com/thelinuxEXP
My Gaming on Linux Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaw_Lz7oifDb-PZCAcZ07kw
Follow me on LBRY: https://lbry.tv/@TheLinuxExperiment:e
The Linux Experiment merch: get your goodies there! https://teespring.com/en-GB/stores/the-linux-experiment
00:00 Intro
01:23 Linux News
04:01 Open Source News
06:27 Application News
07:59 Gaming News
KDE published their broad roadmap for 2021, and there are some interesting things in there: the team is aiming for a production ready Wayland session.
https://pointieststick.com/2021/01/01/kde-roadmap-for-2021/
Linux is now available on some pretty amazing hardware: the Nintendo 64. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/01/linux-on-the-nintendo-64-yes-thats-possible-and-theres-a-new-up-to-date-port
Remember that project to port Linux to the Apple M1 chips? Well this project has a name now: Asahi Linux.
https://asahilinux.org/about/
Linux developers are pondering whether to remove support for old CPUs from the kernel.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=2021-Linux-Drop-Old-CPUs
Nvidia seems to be willing to move forward to support hardware accelerated XWayland.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/01/nvidia-getting-geared-up-to-support-hardware-accelerated-xwayland
The GNOME team has published a new update on their upcoming redesign of the SHell's multitasking interface.
https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2021/01/07/a-shell-ux-update/
Slimbook has announced a new laptop, called the TITAN. It's AMD based, with a ryzen 7, and an Nvidia RTX 3070.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/01/slimbook-reveal-the-ryzen-7-and-rtx-3070-powered-titan
Seems like the death of Flash is finally real. The older plugin had already been reviled and cast out since smartphones started poking their noses and creating a mobile web, but now, most if not all browsers have officially dropped support for it, including Firefox.
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2020/11/17/ending-firefox-support-for-flash/
Mozilla has also now opened their VPN to Mac and Linux users.
https://vpn.mozilla.org/
Some bad news for Linux gaming, Mad Max and Shadow of Mordor are now dropped from Linux and Mac OS X. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/01/mad-max-and-shadow-of-mordor-delisted-for-linux-and-macos-on-steam
Do you have a few games on the Epic Games Store? Do you wish it was better supported under Linux? Well now you can have a good experience with the Epic Games Store, thanks to the Heroic Games Launcher. https://github.com/flavioislima/HeroicGamesLauncher
Nvidia released a new version of their stable driver for Linux, which is nothing special, except that this new release supports the Vulkan ray tracing API. This drivers supports a lot of Vulkan ray tracing extensions, and should improve performance as they increased the OpenGL and Vulkan shader disk cache, which means that there will be less need to rebuild these shaders on the fly. Still no news on the support of the necessary vulkan extension for Cyberpunk 2077, though.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/01/nvidia-4603203-released-their-first-stable-driver-with-official-vulkan-ray-tracing
14
Wine 6.0 was released after a few release candidates through the end of 2020. This new release includes more than 8000 individual changes, and brings all the core mdules to the PE format, they now have a Vulkan backend for theur WineD3D implementation, Wine now supports DirectShow and The Microsoft Media Foundation, all important to play these cutscenes in a lot of games. his new wine release will be the base for the next major releases of Proton, so it's always interesting to see what's new.
https://www.winehq.org/announce/6.0
15
Speaking of which, Proton 5.13-5, a minor release, is now out. It brings to the stable Proton branch a bunch of the changes from the experimental Proton branch, including support for the OpenXR virtual reality API, a new version of VkD3D-proton, a fix for world sounds not being audible in Cyberpunk 2077, and the ability to play online for Red Dead Online. There are also a bunch of crashes and bugs fixed for Gears Tactics, Fallout 76 or Conan Exiles. As always, you'll find this new release directly through Steam.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/01/proton-513-5-is-now-up-bringing-in-some-of-the-experimental-changes