Marketshare on the rise, Nvidia open source SDK, and GTG is back from the dead!
1,347Here are some Linux, open source and privacy news for the first half of July 2020. This month, we’ve got more market share growth, a great productivity app being brought back from the dead, and Nvidia going open source with their SDK to help gaming on Linux. Let’s take a look !
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The Linux marketshare can’t seem to stop growing! For the third month in a row, Linux has gained marketshare, as reported by Netmarketshare. It passed 3.6% in June compared to 3,17% in May.
https://netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx
Open SUSE Leap 15.2 was released.
https://itsfoss.com/opensuse-leap-15-2-release/
Chrome OS might get access to Steam through an Ubuntu VM.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/07/ubuntu-steam-chromebook-gaming
Pusirms has released their Librem 14 laptop, and damn it looks good. While I’ve been critical of their Librem 5 efforts, their laptop actually have a pretty good reputation, and could have been candidates for my next work laptop, but this thing has a 6 core intel CPU, with up to 32Gb of RAM, and great, simple design.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/07/purism-librem-14-linux-laptop
Wine 5.12 was released, bringing support for the websocket API, bringing more DLLs to the PE format, and updating the Vulkan spec. It also fixes 48 bugs, including for Wing commander 4, Battle.net, League Of Legends, Star Citizen, or Divinity Original Sin 2.
https://www.winehq.org/announce/5.12
Duck Duck GO reappareared in India, after being gone since the first of July. The reason for its unavailability wasn’t clear, with users speculating that the indian government blocked it, or that DNS lookups were failing. https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/4/21313393/duckduckgo-india-privacy-apps-banned
Proton already had DXVK for Direct X 9,10 and 11 games, and is now has VKD3D for DirectX 12 games. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/07/vkd3d-proton-is-the-new-official-direct3d-12-to-vulkan-layer-for-proton
With the new privacy invasive laws being passed in Hong Kong, Facebook and Twitter announced that they wouldn’t comply with data requests emanating from the local government, which is great. https://www.androidcentral.com/facebook-and-whatsapp-will-stop-pulling-user-data-hong-kong-government
Getting Things GNOME, an older productivity focused app for GNOME, that had been forgotten and cast aside, has now been resurrected. It’s first new release, version 0.4, is now available on Flathub, with a more modern, headerbar powered interface, and hundreds of bug fixes.
https://fortintam.com/blog/gtg-0-4-released/
Canonical and Google are teaming up to bring Flutter to Linux. Flutter is a cross platfor, app development framework based on Dart. https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/07/flutter-sdk-linux-desktop
Nvidia open sourced their NVAPI SDK. It’s the core Nvidia SDK that allows people to access the hardware on Windows machines. This gives the DXVK team something to sink their teeth in, as it will allow them to better understand and use Nvidia GPUs in Wine and proton, instead of spoofing an AMD GPU.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/07/nvidia-open-sourced-part-of-nvapi-sdk-to-aid-windows-emulation-environments
Microsoft won’t support PHP for Windows anymore. Starting with PHP for Windows version 8, Microsoft won’t provide any support for it, although some other team can take up the packaging and support duties. https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/110907
The Linux kernel will no longer use the terms blacklist, whitelist, master or slave. This comes at a time where peope are more aware of sensitive terms. I’m not going to go into that debate here, let’s just say that if a terminology offends people, I don’t see why we woudln’t change it, especially since it has basically no impact on how the linux kernel works. It seems a lot of other projects are also going to migrate from these previous terminologies, so it shouldn’t be too complicated to adopt.
https://thenextweb.com/dd/2020/07/13/linux-kernel-will-no-longer-use-terms-blacklist-and-slave/
July 15th
ThePine64 released a new, more powerful PinePhone, equipped with 3Gb of RAM, and accompanied by a USB dock that lets users use the phone as a full desktop. This new version should run a little bit better than the previous one I got, which was, pretty slow in its early days. It will sell for 199$, which is a very reasonable price, and I’d recommend you gor this one instead of the base model if you want to dabble with a Linux phone !
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/07/buy-pinephone-postmarketos