Open Source More Vulnerable, Linux game benchmarks, and GNOME 3.36 - Linux News 1-15th March
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Here are some Linux, privacy, and open source news for the first half of march 2020, and we have some interesting stuff, including the release of GNOME 3.36, an interesting game benchmarking tool, and a surge in open source vulnerabilities.
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Unity8, the continuation of the Ubuntu Unity project, will get a name change: the desktop will now be called Lomiri.
https://itsfoss.com/unity8-lomiri/
Ubuntu will ship the GNOME Software store as a snap, starting from 20.04 https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/02/ubuntu-snap-store-transition
DXVK 1.5.5 was released, improving directX9 support for older intel hardware, and correcting bugs for a huge number of games, including Skyrim, Elite Dangerous, Just Cause, Saint’s Row III and IV, Rocket League, and Vampire the Masquerade.
https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases/tag/v1.5.5
The freedesktop.org gitlab is in danger of losing its continuous integration servers.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X.Org-Cloud-CI-Cost-Sponsors
A little study ranked various web browsers in terms of what telemetry data they send to their home companies. Brave, ranks first, and Edge and the Yandex browser rank last.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-deemed-most-private-browser-in-terms-of-phoning-home/
Zorin OS 15.2 was released. Although it doesn’t bring any specific new features to Zorin OS, it now benefits from newer software versions, and from the latest hardware enablement stack from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/03/zorin-os-15-2-release
Duck Duck Go announced Tracker Radar, a publicly available data set about trackers on the web. it’s open source, and can be used to create block lists to stay free of tracking when you’re browsing. https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-tracker-radar/
The website Its FOSS published an interesting interview of Gael Duval, the founder of the ./e/ project. For those who haven’t heard of it, it aims to provide an Android distribution completely de-googled.
https://itsfoss.com/gael-duval-interview/
Firefox 74 was released, with DNS over HTTPS enabled by default for american users.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/74.0/releasenotes/
Proton 5.0-4 was released, and it fixes quite a lot of bugs. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Changelog
GNOME 3.36 was released, with performance improvements, and a lot of attention focused on the shell itself.
https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.36/index.html.cs
Wine 5.4 was released, with more features for DIrect2D, and support for drawing text using DirectX9, which should fix a bunch of games that didn’t display text correctly. 30 bugs were also fixed, including for Divinity Original sin 2, Final Fantasy V, Nier Automata or RPG Maker.
https://www.winehq.org/announce/5.4
The number of reported vulnerabilites in open source projects has surged 50% in 2019, with over 6000 vulnerabilities disclosed. The good news is, these are very often reported with a patch to fix them, in 85% of cases, and this means that open source projects are still being watched for security and fixed rapidly. Still, it also means that open source teams have to spend more of their time on these issues than on improving the projects in other ways, and since open source developers don’t always have enough time already, it could put a strain on the advancement of various FOSS projects.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/13/open_source_bugs/
MangoHUD, the overlay designed to benchmark and oversee gaming performance on Linux has a new release. While it was limited to recording performance on vulkan games, it now can handle OpenGL as well ! This means that the overlay should now be compatible with most games running on Linux. It also now displays Input output read and write speeds, the GPU clock speed, and the ability to change to color of the HUD elements.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/mangohud-the-excellent-linux-overlay-layer-adds-opengl-support-in-addition-to-vulkan.16215
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