Open Source

In working toward the stable release of Plasma 6.0 at the end of February, today marks the release candidate of Plasma 6.0 along with the updated Qt6-ported KDE Gear apps and KDE Frameworks 6.0 that comprise the "KDE 6th Megarelease" software.

The KDE community has put out the first release candidate of their KDE 6th Megarelease that includes their Qt6/KF6-ported wares and the flagship Plasma 6.0 desktop shell.

Over the earlier alpha and beta releases of the KDE 6th Megarelease, KDE Plasma 6.0 / KDE Frameworks 6 / KDE Gear have all received many bug fixes and polishing to prepare for this major release next month. In particular, many Wayland fixes continue flowing in with Plasma 6 sticking to their plans for defaulting to the Wayland session.

Downloads and more details on the KDE 6th Megarelease RC1 via KDE.org. A second release candidate is planned for 31 January while the actual Plasma 6.0 stable release is penciled in for 28 February.

Eric Engestrom has released Mesa 23.3.3 as the latest stable update to this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers plus being the first update of the new year.

Given the recent end-of-year holidays and Mesa 23.3 already being in good shape, Mesa 23.3.3 isn't all that big. There are a few open-source Intel driver fixes, a few Radeon RADV fixes, AMD ACO compiler fixes, and also some Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan fixes, among other small fixes throughout. But nothing really exciting or even any really prominent fixes. Mesa 23.3 has been running well and Engestrom continues to do a good job managing the timely releases.

Those curious about any of the particular fixes in Mesa 23.3.3 can find the change-log via the release announcement.

Mesa 24.0 meanwhile is working its way toward release that likely should be around the end of February depending upon how the rest of the release cycle plays out.

Ahead of the planned release at the start of February, the release candidate of LibreOffice 24.2 is now available for this leading free software office suite to rival Microsoft Office predominantly on Linux systems as well as other platforms.

LibreOffice 24.2 is packing many new features besides also shifting to a new "YEAR.MONTH" based versioning scheme. LibreOffice 24.2 features include improved multi-page floating tables, Small Caps for LibreOffice Impress, "save auto-recovery information" is now enabled by default, "always create backup copies" is also now enabled by default, there is now a password strength meter when saving documents with a password, and various other improvements.\ The 24.2 release notes provide more insight into all of the changes for this open-source office suite that have been committed over the past six months.

With today's LibreOffice 24.2 RC1 release, there have been 59 issues fixed since last month's beta release.

Those wanting to try out LibreOffice 24.2 RC1 can find the new development builds via the Document Foundation QA blog. LibreOffice 24.2 stable should be formally out the first week of February.

Out for Christmas is Ruby 3.3 as a big update to this dynamic open-source programming language. With Ruby 3.3 the Prism parser is added as well as a new pure-Ruby just-in-time (JIT) compiler.

Ruby 3.3 brings with it the Prism parser as a portable, error-tolerant, and maintainable recursive descent parser. Prism is considered production-ready and can be used now in place of the Ripper parser.

Ruby 3.3 also adds RJIT as a pure-Ruby compiler to replace MJIT. Right now though RJIT only supports x86_64 on Unix-like architectures and is considered for experimental purposes only.

While RJIT is interesting, it's not yet production ready and users are recommended to use the YJIT compiler still. YJIT with this Ruby 3.3 release has received many performance improvements, significantly improved memory usage, and a variety of other enhancements to make this JIT compiler much better than with prior releases.

Ruby 3.3 also goes on to use Lrama as the parser generation to replace Bison, the M:N thread scheduler was introduced, and there are a variety of other performance improvements such as to Ruby's garbage collector.

Downloads and more details on this big Christmas update with Ruby 3.3 can be found via Ruby-Lang.org.

KDE Gear 23.08 is available today as the four-month update to this collection of KDE desktop applications.

There is a lot of new features and improvements with KDE Gear 23.08 for enhancing the KDE application ecosystem. Some of the highlights for KDE Gear 23.08 include:

• Tweaks to the Dolphin file manager, like being able to open a duplicate of a tab by just double-clicking on it.

• Document signing within the Okular document viewer now allows adding extra metadata to the signature.

• KDE's Kalendar application for a desktop calendar is now renamed to Merkuro. Developers working on this app plan on adding email support and more to Merkuro.

• The Skanpage scanner utility has an improved preview area.

• The Kate text editor that is working towards becoming an all-around IDE (integrated development environment) has added support for GLSL and Godot's game design engine to its LSP client.

• The Tokodon app for posting to the Mastodon service has received a visual overhaul.

• Various improvements to the Elisa music player.

• The Kwordquiz flash-card based educational app was ported to QML and redesigned.

Downloads and more details on KDE Gear 23.08 via KDE.org.

One nugget of information in the LibreOffice 7.6 release announcement for those who missed it and deserves calling out specifically... Succeeding LibreOffice 7.6 will not be v7.7 or v8.0 but rather v24.2.

LibreOffice developers are moving to a year.month based versioning system. Thus the next release with their six-month based release cadence will be LibreOffice 24.2 and in turn LibreOffice 24.8, 25.2, 25.8, 26.2, etc. Due to the maturity of the LibreOffice codebase, the current versioning system isn't really reflective of major changes and in turn can be hard to genuinely justify bumping the significant version number. By switching to a calendar-based numbering system it's now decoupled from features or not of that release.

There were some internal discussions whether it should move to say LibreOffice 2024.2 but in the end they decided for a YY.M-based scheme. There were also discussions whether to just always increase the major version number with each new release as Firefox and Google Chrome do now, but that too was decided against.

So next February, look forward to LibreOffice 24.2.

LibreOffice 7.6 is now available as the latest major release to this leading open-source office suite that is widely used on the Linux desktop and elsewhere.

LibreOffice 7.6 is providing bibliography improvements in LibreOffice Writer, improved keyboard navigation through LibreOffice Writer forms, improved formula input validation in LibreOffice Calc, support for zoom gestures on touchpads, support for OOXML files created in Zip64 format, PDF exporting is now done to PDF v1.7 specifications by default, tagged PDFs are now produced by default, and a variety of other improvements. More details via the release notes.

GENERAL

• Support for zoom gestures when using touchpads in the main view. • Support for document themes, and import and export of theme definitions for ODF and OOXML documents. • Many improvements to font handling, especially for right-to-left scripts, CJK and other Asian alphabets.

WRITER

• New Page Number Wizard in the Insert menu, for easy one-step insertion of the page number in the header/footer. • The Paragraph Style dropdown in the Formatting toolbar shows a list of styles used in the document, rather than the full list of the available styles. • Tables of Figures can be generated more flexibly based on paragraph styles, and not only from categories or object names. • Bibliography entries can be edited directly from a bibliography table, and bibliography marks hyperlink by default to the matching row in a bibliography table. • Highlighting for used paragraph and character styles and direct formatting in text. • Phrase checking: multi-word dictionary items of Hunspell and custom dictionaries are now accepted.

CALC

• Number format: “?” is now supported when exporting to ODF to represent an integer digit, replaced by blank if it is a non significant zero, and decimals for formats in seconds without truncation like [SS].00 are now accepted. • Spreadsheets copied to another document now retain a user-defined print range. • Solver settings are saved with documents, and page styles are exported even if they are not in use. • Support for drawing styles for shapes and comments, including a dedicated style for comments that makes it possible to customize the default look and text formatting of new comments. • New compact layout for pivot tables. • Autofilter support for sorting by colour. Filter/sort by color considers colours set by number format. • The Import Text dialog (as CSV file or as unformatted text) has a new option to not detect number in scientific notation (only if "Detect Special Numbers" is off).

IMPRESS & DRAW

• New navigation panel for switching slides while viewing a presentation (option is enabled by flagging a checkbox in Slide Show Settings). • Objects can now be listed in front to back order in the Navigator, with the top-most object at the top of the list. • Support for free text annotations to PDFium import, plus support for ink, free text and polygon/polyline annotations in PDFium export. • Modified the auto-fitting text scaling algorithm to work in a way similar to MS Office. Text scaling now separates scaling for space (paragraph and line) and scaling fonts, where space scaling can be 100%, 90% and 80%, and font scaling is rounded to the nearest point size. Horizontal spacing (bullets, indents) is not scaled anymore. • Several improvements to font management for CJK and Arabic languages.

The free software LibreOffice 7.6 office suite can be downloaded from LibreOffice.org.

The first beta release of the forthcoming OBS Studio 30 screencasting software is now available for testing.

OBS Studio 30 will drop support for Qt 5 and FFmpeg versions prior to 4.4. OBS Studio 30 is also already doing away with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS support.

New with OBS Studio 30 Beta is adding Intel Quick Sync Video (QSV) support on Linux, WHIP/WebRTC output, a redesigned status bar, a shader cache to reduce the start-up time on Windows, 10-bit capture support for Decklink hardware along with HDR playback support, and a variety of other enhancements.

OBS Studio 30 Beta 1 also has dozens of bug fixes compared to prior OBS Studio releases. Some of the minor changes in OBS Studio 30 that are coming include the ability to set FFmpeg VA-API options, IPv6 support for RTMP streaming, enabling GPU scaling for rescale output where possible, and more.

Downloads and more details on the OBS Studio 30 Beta via GitHub.

It's been nearly one month since Wine 8.13 was released while today marked the debut of the Wine 8.14 development milestone.

The Wine development releases traditionally happen on a bi-weekly basis but Wine founder and project leader Alexandre Julliard typically takes a summer holiday in July~August away from work. That happened again this time and thus the Wine 8.14 release was pushed out until his return.

While there's been extra time for Wine 8.14 changes to accumulate, this release isn't particularly big - other Wine developers are likely enjoying summer holidays as well. The Wine 8.14 release highlights come down to:

• PCSC framework used on macOS for smart card support.
• Dumping of Windows registry files in WineDump.
• Fixes for Wow64 window messages.
• Various bug fixes.

On the fixes side there is a collection of 30 known bugs squashed this round. The bugs range from games like dealing with issues in DiRT 2 and Civilization 6 to issues with Steam and then application fixes from Notepad++ to GStreamer and more.

Downloads and more details on the Wine 8.14 release via WineHQ.org.

KDE developers continue to be quite busy working on Plasma 6 development and related enhancements to this popular open-source desktop environment.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary to highlight all of the KDE software changes made for the week. Among the KDE highlights this week include:

• More first-party widgets and system tray icons are now always monochrome and symbolic regardless the thickness of the panel where they reside. Some of these icons include Trash, Folder, and Minimize All Widgets.

• Bluetooth-based Internet connections are now distinguished in the network panel via a new icon.

• The "Open" toolbar button for many QtWidgets-based KDE applications now has an arrow next to it for accessing recent documents.

• All KDE apps now support the QOI image format. QOI is the "Quite OK Image Format" for lossless image compression.

• Various bug and crash fixes.

More details on the KDE changes this week via Nate's blog.

fjärrinlägg från: https://lemmy.ml/post/2811840

> # PipeWire 0.3.77 (2023-08-04) > > This is a quick bugfix release that is API and ABI compatible with previous 0.3.x releases. > > ## Highlights > > - Fix a bug in ALSA source where the available number of samples was miscaluclated and resulted in xruns in some cases. > - A new L permission was added to make it possible to force a link between nodes even when the nodes can't see each other. > - The VBAN module now supports midi send and receive as well. > - Many cleanups and small fixes.