Linux Magazine January 2025

Dear Reader, It is well known that many of our most excruciating arguments about religion and philosophy are secretly arguments about definitions. With that said, I will add, it is quite a novel thing when the definition is in the foreground and everyone knows that is what they are arguing about. A doozy of a definition argument is brewing right now at the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The OSI recently released version one of their definition for “Open Source AI” [1]. At a glance, the definition appears to fall squarely into the basic open source ethos. The user is accorded the right to: • Use the system for any purpose and without having to ask for permission. • Study how the system works and understand how its results were created.…

Fedora 41 Workstation Live 64-bit Fedora is the community source for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, AlmaLinux, and Rocky Linux. The Live Workstation edition can be booted without affecting an existing system or used for installation. This release includes Gnome 47, benefiting from cosmetic changes such as new options for accent colors and restyled dialog windows as well as enhanced support for low-resolution screens. It also introduces Ptyxis, a terminal app with support for containers that also features the terminal inspector for debugging, a choice of dark or light modes, and user-customizable keyboard shortcuts. In addition, the hardware support includes support for recent camera models via PipeWire, and a camera icon in the top panel to show when the camera is on. Among other features of interest are enhanced support for…

You read that right; a single line of code from Intel has shown the Linux kernel could receive a performance jump of up to 4,000 percent by way of will-it-scale.per_process_ops. An Intel kernel testing bot discovered this, and the change was added to commit efa7df3e3bb5 (“mm: align larger anonymous mappings on THP boundaries”). That commit was related to efficient memory management and mapping (mm and mmap) techniques that use Transparent Hugepages (THPs) and Page Middle Directory (PMD). Before anyone gets too excited, the discovered performance increase was isolated to a synthetic test case, so real-world workloads will probably never see such incredible gains. However, it does make a solid case for how well Linux is capable of performing. One issue with the change is that it was shown to significantly…

Fedora is beloved by many as a Linux distribution that not only just works but is powerful, efficient, and ready for users of all types. However, Fedora’s main edition ships with the Gnome desktop, which some new users might have trouble acclimating to. Fear not, because Fedora KDE is now listed as an official spin. What does this mean? First off, Fedora KDE will now be listed at the same level as the Workstation edition on fedoraproject.org (http://fedoraproject.org/). Next, it means there will be a new flagship site page for Fedora KDE. Finally, there also will be marketing support for Fedora KDE that is along the same lines as the Workstation edition at events. This was opened two months ago and was finally made a reality on November 8. If…

Valve has released a new version of the popular Steam gaming app for all supported platforms (including Linux) that not only fixes several bugs but also adds improvements for gaming natively on Linux. The big ticket addition, however, is the built-in Game Recording feature that allows users to record and share their gameplay footage. This new feature makes it easy for you to record and share footage as it runs in the background (so you never miss a moment). You can read about all of the changes in the official announcement (https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/4472730495692571025?utm_ source=SteamDB). As far as Linux is concerned, some of the fixes include miscellaneous common crashes, a slow startup issue (due to a reverse hostname lookup for the loopback interface), detecting and passing commands to an already running Steam…

To date, I’ve used Gnome OS as a means to see what’s coming for the desktop environment. Typically, I run Gnome OS from within the Boxes app (because you can’t run it as a virtual machine). However, this will probably change once Gnome OS transitions (as it has been reported by Linuxiac – https://linuxiac.com/gnome-os-to-become-a-general-purpose-linux-distro/) to a general-purpose Linux distribution. There are some things that will remain a part of Gnome OS. First and foremost, it will continue to deliver a very stock, unaltered version of the Gnome desktop environment. Second, it will remain an immutable distribution, which is great for security. Gnome OS will also stick with Flatpak apps as the primary source of app distribution and installation. Adrian Vovk, a contracted developer for Gnome, wrote in his blog (https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2024/10/25/a-desktop-for-all/),…