News in KDE: mainly Plasma
We’ve had the last QT Fifth Plasma 5.27 in the world for a few days now, so it’s logically the topic a large part of the news of the last week in a summary Nate Graham. He adds that the few regressions that were found have already been fixed, making five-twenty one of the smoothest KDE desktop releases ever.
In Dolphin, from version 23.04, it will be possible to set the way of displaying rights ( drwx / 755 / combination). Various novelties will be heading to Plasma 6.0, Discover will offer, for example, an improved one podporu Flatpaks. Gwenview 23.04, in turn, will bring smooth zooming of photos when changing with Ctrl+scroll on the touchpad. Either way, the news listing suggests that, aside from minor fixes for Plasma 5.27.x, the developers are indeed working on the six-series. Otherwise, 106 bugs were fixed in the last week.
AMD vydala GPUOpen FidelityFX FSR2 v2.2
The GPUOpen team has released a new version of the upscaling package FSR2 2.2 (FidelityFX Super Resolution). When using it, users should see a significantly better quality of the resulting image, because it is the first release of a significantly better binary version, i.e. FSR2, within the open GPUOpen project.
Progress on preparing Ubuntu for Lenovo ThinkPad X13s ARM laptop
Lenovo ThinkPad X13s will come with Linux 6.3 kernel again a bit more usable on Linux. Everything will not make it to version 6.2, which is coming these days, but in the next version we can expect a big improvement in the support of the used ARM SoC Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, namely the MSM DRM driver for the included graphics core.
Heinrich Schuchardt, who is working on the project at Canonical, now reports that although there are problems with the Linux 6.2 kernel when running from a USB device, everything is working now when using a prepackaged image on NVMe storage. The current situation can be evaluated in such a way that we do not expect Linux to run smoothly on the mentioned laptop this year, but next year, for example with Ubuntu 23.04, everything may be different.
Both Ubuntu 23.04 and Debian are getting ready for Triple Buffering in GNOME
It seems that triple buffering in GUI rendering won’t appear until GNOME 45. But that doesn’t stop Debian and Ubuntu developers, to not implement it sooner. Among other things, he participates in the support of dynamic triple buffering in GNOME Daniel van Vugt from Ubuntu / Canonical, using this method will lead to an overall smoother environment compared to simple double buffering. The latest work and Daniel’s patches address, for example, the optimization of the need for CPU performance when simply moving the mouse cursor, where the latest optimization brings a 10% decrease.
GNOME 44 is currently in a feature freeze phase and has not been included. However, the relevant patches have already found their way into the development branches of Debian and Ubuntu 23.04 and can easily be deployed even with GNOME 43, albeit somewhat from the outside. Daniel adds that on his Intel graphics, with triple buffering in situations where the previous frame is delayed in rendering, and triple buffering forces the GPU to clock higher clocks, he achieves an increase in interface rendering from 30 to 60 fps. Development is already underway more than two yearsbut so far some users are still reporting, for example, crashes or stiffening after waking up.
Released Wine 8.2
It is already in the world ranking the second partial update of Wine eighth series. It brings further improvements to debug information in Wow64 mode and Wow64 support in the WPCAP library. The creators have also implemented support for the Indeo IV50 codec as well as monitor name sets from EID data. A total of 22 errors have been corrected, where the longest wait for closure since reporting took almost 3 years, and the shortest took two days.
Giant package of new code for LLVM: 700 thousand lines from Intel
Runtime code for running OpenCL on a CPU, this is Intel’s latest contribution to the LLVM package. Developers of the processor giant do not play with it, their merge request has size of almost 719 thousand lines of code in more than 2750 source files. However, it is not unexpected, Intel has been asked for open CPU OpenCL support for many years, with the first reports of the future opening already coming two years ago. But only time will tell how quickly this megapackage will settle in the LLVM project.
