Linux and OpenSource News You Might Have Missed - 1st to 15th December
844Lots of interesting news, these days, with DXVK and D9VK merging, major releases for KDE applications, updates to elementary OS, and Zorin OS 15, and more desktop environment interoperability, plus a few hint that Nvidia might go open source soon!
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KDE announced that they will better support GTK apps using Client side decorations, of which there are many, namely most headerbar enabled apps.
https://pointieststick.com/2019/11/30/this-week-in-kde-gtk-csd-support-and-more/
elementary OS 5.1 Hera was released. It’s a minor version, but not in the features department. If you’ve been using elementary OS Juno, you already have all the improvements it ships with.
https://blog.elementary.io/
Firefox 71 was released, with support for MP3 decoding on all platforms, a better integrated password manager, and more information on what Firefox blocks on webpages.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/71.0/releasenotes/
DXVK 1.4.6 was released. It fixes crashes when changing the display mode, improves performance over time on games where the CPu is the bottleneck, and, more importantly, adds fixes so that Warcraft 3 reforged can now run on Linux.
https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases/tag/v1.4.6
Nvidia will apparently host a talk at the GPU Technology Conference, with a session titled “Open Source, Linux Kernel, and NVIDIA”.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/nvidia-presenting-a-talk-at-gtc-2020-about-linux-drivers-and-possibly-some-open-source-news.15555
Ubuntu started a survey about their next LTS, Ubuntu 20.04.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScaxWCuI919CsXTL2GbPAQbRI-716FBl8tY6ccjezPs0upuSg/viewform
Disney+ now works on Linux machines.
https://betanews.com/2019/12/09/linux-users-can-now-enjoy-disney/
The Microsoft Teams client is now available on Linux.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/Microsoft-Teams-is-now-available-on-Linux/ba-p/1056267
KDE released the KDE application suite version 19.12. It contains a bunch of updates to all major KDE applications. Highlights include Kdenlive using a lot less memory, being speedier with audio thumbnailing, and supporting a brand new audio mixer, KDE connect now has a whole new SMS app which lets you see the whole conversation history and control the whole computer’s volume from your phone, and the Elisa music player now supports HiDPI screens, and web radios.
https://kde.org/announcements/releases/2019-12-apps-update/
Zorin OS 15.1 was released, and it improves on its already excellent base. Zorin Connect, the rebranded version of KDE connect, now allows to move the mouse pointer by moving the phone itself, it ships GameMode, a performance enhancement tool for games, and the auto switch between dark and light mode can now be configured manually.
https://zoringroup.com/blog/2019/12/12/zorin-os-15-1-is-released-a-better-way-to-work-learn-and-play/
In a dedicated blog post, Fedora and GNOME developers explained they are working on improving dual GPU support.
http://www.hadess.net/2019/12/dual-gpu-support-follow-up-nvidia.html
Proton 4.11-10 has been released, with support for playing Halo THe Master Chief collection out of the box, without any tweaks.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Changelog
In totally related news, D9VK has also received an update, bringing it to version 0.40. The compatibility library can now access more than 4GB of RAM on 32bit games, and should help games that have been expanded with mods and tend to use a lot more resources than their creators intended.
https://github.com/Joshua-Ashton/d9vk/releases/tag/0.40
It seems that Google is now blocking less used browsers on Linux, such as Falkon or Konqueror. Gmail, Google Maps, or Google Docs seem to display a warning that the browser might not be secure, and ask users to use a supported browser.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/12/couldnt-sign-you-in-google-browser-error-linux
DXVK and D9VK have merged into a single project.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/d9vk-is-no-more-as-it-merges-with-dxvk-making-dxvk-a-d3d-9-10-11-to-vulkan-layer.15607