AI Assistant App For GNOME Adds MCP Server Support To Integrate With Much More Software
Hitting the “1.0” milestone last summer was the GNOME AI virtual assistant app called Newelle. This third-party GNOME app has continued evolving as an AI-focused assistant on the GNOME desktop and has now rolled out MCP server support to integrate with “thousands” of other apps… ⌘ Read more
‘The Downside To Using AI for All Those Boring Tasks at Work’
The promise of AI-powered workplace tools that sort emails, take meeting notes, and file expense reports is finally delivering meaningful productivity gains – one software startup reported a 20% boost around mid-2025 – but companies are discovering an unexpected tradeoff: employees are burning out from the relentless pace of high-level cognitive work.
Roge … ⌘ Read more
I think my widget toolkit will have an amber theme by default:
https://movq.de/v/22662db9b2/amber.png
My first PC had a monochrome amber screen and I just love looking at this. 😃
(It looks even better with redshift enabled, but I can’t screenshot that.)
Only downside is that there aren’t that many amber shades in the standard 256 color palette. Or well, maybe that’s actually a good thing, as it probably helps to keep the theme more minimal and less cluttered/noisy. 🤔
Founder of Spyware Maker PcTattletale Pleads Guilty To Hacking, Advertising Surveillance Software
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The founder of a U.S.-based spyware company, whose surveillance products allowed customers to spy on the phones and computers of unsuspecting victims, pleaded guilty to federal charges linked to his long-running operation. pcTattle … ⌘ Read more
DRM Splash Screen Updated To Simply Drawing A Colored Background, Displaying A BMP Image
Back in October was an initial proposal for a DRM splash screen client for the Linux kernel that would be primarily useful for embedded systems for rendering a simple “splash screen” when updating the system firmware/software, early display activation at boot, during system recovery, or similar processes. Sent out today was a second revision to the DRM splash screen code… ⌘ Read more
AMD Releases GAIA 0.15 - Positioning It As A Framework/SDK For Building AI PC Agents
Last year AMD announced GAIA as short for “Generative AI Is Awesome”. It started off as a Windows-only AI demo but over time added Linux support along with introducing different AI agents. For going along with AMD’s AI announcements at CES 2026, AMD released GAIA 0.15 where they are now positioning this software as a framework/SDK for building AI PC agents… ⌘ Read more
I think this is finally a good metaphor to talk about “simple” software:
https://oldbytes.space/@psf/115846939202097661
Distilled software.
I quote in full:
principles of software distillation:
Old software is usually small and new software is usually large. A distilled program can be old or new, but is always small, and is powerful by its choice of ideas, not its implementation size.
A distilled program has the conciseness of an initial version and the refinement of a final version.
A distilled program is a finished work, but remains hackable due to its small size, allowing it to serve as the starting point for new works.
Many people write programs, but few stick with a program long enough to distill it.
I often tried to tell people about “simple” or “minimalistic” software, “KISS”, stuff like that, but they never understand – because everybody has a different idea of “simple”. The term “simple” is too abstract.
This is worth thinking about some more. 🤔
GNU ddrescue 1.30 “Orders of Magnitude” Better In Recovery From Drives With A Dead Head
GNU ddrescue as the free software data recovery tool from files or block devices is out today with a big feature release. The new GNU ddrescue 1.30 is improved by “orders of magnitude” for the automatic recovery from drives with a dead head… ⌘ Read more
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Mikuru (みくる)
https://projects.laidback.moe/mikuru/
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@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe I can’t believe Trace and Edgewall Software is still around and in use 🤣
ReactOS Starts 2026 With Another “Major Step” Toward Windows NT6 Compatibility
The ReactOS free software project is turning 30 this year and its “open-source Windows” OS ambitions remain. They are starting out this year with another “major step” towards Windows NT 6.0 compatibility… ⌘ Read more
SDL 3.4 Released With Many New APIs, Better Emscripten & Native PNG Support
Kicking off the new year for Linux gaming and cross-platform gaming at large is the release of the SDL 3.4 library. SDL is part of the Steam runtime and continues to be widely-used for abstracting software/hardware for creating more portable games and other applications… ⌘ Read more
AMD Ryzen AI Max, Intel Graphics & Other Linux Benchmarks That Commanded 2025
This looks to be a wrap on 2025, Happy New Year to all the Phoronix readers over the past 21+ years. This year on Phoronix there were 226 original Linux hardware reviews and featured benchmark articles written by your’s truly. Plus another 3,286 original open-source/Linux software and hardware news articles this calendar year. Here were the big topics of 2025 for the featured Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles… ⌘ Read more
Great article about how #Wikimedia runs on metal and not someone else’s cloud - and why. Includes other interesting tidbits, like software decisions, AI, et cetera…
NTFSPLUS Linux Driver Renamed To Just “NTFS” With Latest Code Restructuring
One of the unexpected Linux kernel surprises of 2025 was NTFSPLUS being announced as a new driver for Microsoft’s NTFS file-system with better performance and more features compared to the classic read-only NTFS driver or the “NTFS3” kernel driver that Paragon Software submitted upstream. That NTFSPLUS driver has continued expanding its feature set and robustness and sent out today was the third iteration of the patches. Now this driver is s … ⌘ Read more
SuperTux 0.7 Reaches Beta For Reviving An Open-Source Classic
Longtime Linux users likely have fond memories of SuperTux as the open-source jump-n-run game that used to be included on some early Linux live CD/DVDs for this Super Mario Bros inspired game. There hasn’t been a new release of SuperTux in over four years but out today is the beta of SuperTux 0.7 as a major overhaul to the free software, family-friendly game title… ⌘ Read more
Blender 5.0 Benchmarks Since Blender 3.0 For CPU Rendering Performance
As part of the many different year-end benchmarks on Phoronix, over the holidays I was curious about how far the Blender 3D modeling software’s performance has evolved over the past few years. So in looking at the CPU rendering performance I ran benchmarks of the major releases since Blender 3.0 through the recently released Blender 5.0… ⌘ Read more
Free Software Foundation Receives ‘Historic’ Donations Worth Nearly $900K - in Monero
On Wednesday (Christmas Eve), the Free Software Foundation announced it had received two major contributions totaling around $900,000 USD — in the cryptocurrency Monero.
The two donations “are among some of the largest private gifts ever made to the organization,” the FSF said in a statement.
“The donors wi … ⌘ Read more
Intel Open-Source Software Setback: IWD Development Hiatus
Adding to the unfortunate engineering setbacks at Intel this year as part of cost-cutting measures, the Intel IWD software development has been on a hiatus for the past three months. Going from previously seeing monthly releases and almost constant activity to now development ceasing up with no activity in the past three months… ⌘ Read more
‘Memory is Running Out, and So Are Excuses For Software Bloat’
The relentless climb in memory prices driven by the AI boom’s insatiable demand for datacenter hardware has renewed an old debate about whether modern software has grown inexcusably fat, a column by the Register argues. The piece points to Windows Task Manager as a case study: the current executable occupies 6MB on disk and demands nearly 70MB of … ⌘ Read more
NVIDIA CUDA Tile IR Open-Sourced
As a wonderful Christmas gift to open-source fans, NVIDIA dropped their proprietary license on the CUDA Tile intermediate representation and has now made the IR open-source software… ⌘ Read more
Final Benchmarks Of AMDVLK vs. RADV AMD Radeon Vulkan Drivers
One of the pleasant surprises this year was AMD ending the AMDVLK driver development with AMD dropping their proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan driver components on Linux at long last for their Radeon Software for Linux packages. This was arguably long overdue with enthusiasts and Linux gamers long preferring the RadeonSI+RADV Mesa drivers and those drivers even doing very well in recent years for workstation graphics workloads. One of the areas where AMD … ⌘ Read more
The Death Of Clear Linux, Other Intel Linux Engineering Setbacks In 2025
When it came to the most viewed AMD Linux/open-source news of 2025 there were a lot of accomplishments for the company this year both on the CPU and graphics side of the house and from consumer to server hardware. Today is a look back at the most popular Intel open-source/Linux news of the year, which unfortunately, their layoffs and other cuts to their software engineering were attracting a lot of interest… ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Says It’s Not Planning To Use AI To Rewrite Windows From C To Rust
Microsoft has denied any plans to rewrite Windows 11 using AI and Rust after a LinkedIn post from one of its top-level engineers sparked a wave of online backlash by claiming the company’s goal was to “eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030.”
Galen Hunt, a principal software engineer responsible for sever … ⌘ Read more
ServiceNow To Buy Armis For $7.75 Billion As It Bets Big On Cybersecurity For AI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MarketWatch: ServiceNow announced a deal to acquire cybersecurity company Armis on Tuesday, marking a new milestone in the software giant’s artificial-intelligence business strategy. The $7.75 billion all-cash transaction is part of ServiceNow’s goal of advancing governance and tru … ⌘ Read more
‘Fragmented’ Microsoft Tools Undercut Efficiency at Amazon and Whole Foods, Internal Deloitte Review Finds
An anonymous reader shares a report: It’s been more than eight years since Amazon bought Whole Foods, but the two companies still haven’t aligned their setup for the Microsoft software their employees use. That disconnect was flagged in an 8-week Deloitte review of W … ⌘ Read more
Europe’s Public Institutions Are Quietly Ditching US Cloud Providers
European public institutions are quietly migrating away from American cloud providers and office software, driven less by policy ambitions in Brussels than by the mundane legal reality that GDPR-mandated risk assessments keep flagging the US CLOUD Act as an unacceptable threat to citizen data.
Austria’s Federal Ministry for Economy, Energ … ⌘ Read more
Welcome To America’s New Surveillance High Schools
Beverly Hills High School has deployed an AI-powered surveillance apparatus that includes facial recognition cameras, behavioral analysis software, smoke detector-shaped bathroom listening devices from Motorola, drones, and license plate readers from Flock Safety – a setup the district spent $4.8 million on in the 2024-2025 fiscal year and considers necessary given the scho … ⌘ Read more
Package Forge: The Lesser Known Snap/Flatpak Alternative Without Distro Lock-In
An anonymous reader shared this report from the site It’s FOSS:
Linux gives you plenty of ways to install software: native distro packages, Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, source builds, even curl-piped installers. The catch is that each one solves a different problem, yet none of them fully eliminates the “works here, break … ⌘ Read more
FSF Says Nintendo’s New DRM Allows Them to Remotely Render User’s Device ‘Permanently Unusuable’
“In the lead up to its Switch 2 console release, Nintendo updated its user agreement,” writes the Free Software Foundation, warning that Nintendo now claims “broad authority to make consoles owned by its customers permanently unusable.”
“Under Nintendo’s most aggressive digital restric … ⌘ Read more
Darktable 5.4 RAW Photography Software Reaches Parity Between X11 & Wayland
Darktable 5.4 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source RAW photography software. Besides improving camera support, UI enhancements, and more the Wayland support has been improved with Darktable. With today’s Darktable 5.4 release, the Wayland support should be on par with the X11 support… ⌘ Read more
Riot Games Is Making an Anti-Cheat Change That Could Be Rough On Older PCs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: At this point, most competitive online multiplayer games on the PC come with some kind of kernel-level anti-cheat software. As we’ve written before, this is software that runs with more elevated privileges than most other apps and games you run on your PC, allowing it … ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Made Another Copilot Ad Where Nothing Actually Works
Microsoft’s latest holiday ad for its Copilot AI assistant features a 30-second montage of users seamlessly syncing smart home lights to music, scaling recipes for large gatherings, and parsing HOA guidelines – none of which the software can actually perform reliably when put to the test. The Verge methodically tested each prompt shown in the ad and foun … ⌘ Read more
Linux Preps For “Slow Workload Hints” With Intel Panther Lake
Five years ago Intel began introducing “workload hints” used for thermal and power purposes with their SoCs and in turn on the software-side being enabled with their INT340X kernel driver on Linux systems. That Intel workload hint coverage was added to the Linux kernel in late 2020 and then a big addition in 2023 with Meteor Lake introducing new workload hint type capabilities. Now patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list for ne … ⌘ Read more
Yet another free software web git interface going behind a paywall thanks to all the “AI bots” trying to kill the small web. Just great.
Judge Hints Vizio TV Buyers May Have Rights To Source Code Licensed Under GPL
A California judge signaled support for forcing Vizio to provide the full source code for its SmartCast TV software after finding a contractual obligation under the GPL. If upheld, the case could strengthen users’ rights to modify GPL-licensed software embedded in consumer electronics. The Register reports: The legal comp … ⌘ Read more
Apple Opens iOS To Alternative App Stores, Payment Systems in Japan
Apple has announced a sweeping set of changes to iOS in Japan that will allow alternative app marketplaces, third-party payment processing, and non-WebKit browser engines – all to comply with Japan’s Mobile Software Competition Act, which takes effect December 18. The changes, now available in iOS 26.2, bear a strong resemblance to Apple’s … ⌘ Read more
Meta ‘Pauses’ Third-Party Headset Program
Meta has paused its third-party Horizon OS headset program, effectively canceling planned VR headsets from Asus and Lenovo as it refocuses on “building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to advance the VR market.” Road to VR reports: A little over a year and a half ago, Meta made an “industry-altering announcement,” as I called the move in my reporting: the company wa … ⌘ Read more
Linux Patches Begin Adapting RAID Code To Use Folios
A new set of patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list begin adapting the Linux software RAID code paths to begin making use of the folio data structure… ⌘ Read more
Intel XPU Manager Updated With BMG-G31 GPU Support
Intel XPU Manager 1.3.5 released today as the newest version of this open-source software for monitoring and managing Intel GPU hardware with a focus on their data center products. Notable with this revision is adding BMG-G31 GPU support… ⌘ Read more
Google Sues Alleged Chinese Scam Group Behind Massive US Text Message Phishing Ring
Google is suing a Chinese-speaking cybercriminal group it says is responsible for a massive wave of scam text messages sent to Americans this year, according to a legal complaint filed Tuesday. From a report: The group, known as Darcula, sells software that allows users to send phishing text messages en masse … ⌘ Read more
Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC 9755 128-Core Showdown With The Latest Linux Software For EOY2025
Since receiving the Gigabyte R284-A92-AAL1 a while back as a Xeon 6900 series 2U server platform to replace the failed Intel AvenueCity reference server, I have been getting caught-up in fresh Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids benchmarks with the latest software updates over the past year. I’ve provided fresh looks at the DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM-8800 performance, the AMX benefits for AI, SNC3 vs. HEX mode, Latency Optimized Mo … ⌘ Read more
Linux Exposing Support For Lenovo ThinkPads Being Able To Detect Hardware Damage
Newer Lenovo ThinkPads are adding the ability to detect and report varying degrees of hardware damage. The Lenovo ThinkPad ACPI driver for Linux is being adapted for being able to communicate said hardware damage to user-space Linux software… ⌘ Read more
ZLUDA For CUDA On Non-NVIDIA GPUs Enables AMD ROCm 7 Support
The ZLUDA open-source project that has been through several incarnations but ultimately about getting CUDA software up and running on non-NVIDIA GPUs now supports the AMD ROCm 7 series… ⌘ Read more
US Tech Force Aims To Recruit 1,000 Technologists
The Trump administration announced Monday the United States Tech Force, a new program to recruit around 1,000 technologists for two-year government stints starting as soon as March – less than a year after dismantling several federal technology teams and driving thousands of tech workers out of their jobs.
The program will primarily recruit early-career software engineers an … ⌘ Read more
LG’s Software Update Forces Microsoft Copilot Onto Smart TVs
LG smart TV owners discovered over the weekend that a recent webOS software update had quietly installed Microsoft Copilot on their devices, and the app cannot be uninstalled. Affected users report the feature appears automatically after installing the latest webOS update on certain models, sitting alongside streaming apps like Netflix and YouTub … ⌘ Read more
Is the R Programming Language Surging in Popularity?
The R programming language “is sometimes frowned upon by ‘traditional’ software engineers,” says the CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe, “due to its unconventional syntax and limited scalability for large production systems.” But he says it “continues to thrive at universities and in research-driven industries, and “for domain experts, it remains a power … ⌘ Read more
‘Free Software Awards’ Winners Announced: Andy Wingo, Alx Sa, Govdirectory
This week the Free Software Foundation honored Andy Wingo, Alx Sa, and Govdirectory with this year’s annual Free Software Awards (given to community members and groups making
“significant” contributions to software freedom):
Andy Wingo is one of the co-maintainers of GNU Guile,
the official extension language of the GNU operating … ⌘ Read more
Doom Studio id Software Forms ‘Wall-To-Wall’ Union
id Software employees voted to form a wall-to-wall union with the CWA, covering all roles at the Doom studio. “The vote wasn’t unanimous, though a majority did vote in favor of the union,” notes Engadget. From the report: The union will work in conjunction with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), which is the same organization involved with parent company ZeniMax’s … ⌘ Read more
Blender Working On KosmicKrisp Support For Vulkan On macOS
The Blender 3D modeling software could enjoy better macOS support with better cross-platform code paths thanks to in-development work for leveraging KosmicKrisp for Vulkan API usage on macOS via Metal… ⌘ Read more
Parece que há ainda por aí pessoas que querem oferecer uns presentes e não sabem bem o quê…
Pois…
- eu acho que bem podem oferecer um CD de #kokori ;-) (interessadx? Deixa-me uma mensagem!)
- a @shizamura acha que deviam oferecer uns livrinhos d’O Sarilho (vê mais em https://ciberlandia.pt/@shizamura/115696420054772976 )
- a @paulasimoes recomenda o apoio a causas do mundo do Software e Cultura Livres (ver imagem)