The Steam Deck has revolutionized the gaming handheld market. With the Linux-based immutable SteamOS, Valve has fostered an active community developing mods and alternative systems for this platform. Other manufacturers distribute Windows-based mobile consoles. However, time and time again it has been shown that they lag behind Linux in terms of software support.

But how easy is it to bring a Linux distribution, say openSUSE, to the Steam Deck?

In this talk, a prototype based on openSUSE's open technologies and infrastructure will be presented, which is already (almost) fully functional on the Steam Deck and many other devices.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21673583

> RISC-V International, the global standards organization, today announced that the RVA23 Profile is now ratified. RVA Profiles align implementations of RISC-V 64-bit application processors that will run rich operating systems (OS) stacks from standard binary OS distributions. RVA Profiles are essential to software portability across many hardware implementations and help to avoid vendor lock-in. The newly ratified RVA23 Profile is a major release for the RISC-V software ecosystem and will help accelerate widespread implementation among toolchains and operating systems. > > Each Profile specifies which ISA features are mandatory or optional, providing a common target for software developers. Mandatory extensions can be assumed to be present, and optional extensions can be discovered at runtime and leveraged by optimized middleware, libraries, and applications. > > Key Components of RVA23 Include: > - Vector Extension: The Vector extension accelerates math-intensive workloads, including AI/ML, cryptography, and compression / decompression. Vector extensions yield better performance in mobile and computing applications with RVA23 as the baseline requirement for the Android RISC-V ABI. > - Hypervisor Extension: The Hypervisor extension will enable virtualization for enterprise workloads in both on-premises server and cloud computing applications. This will accelerate the development of RISC-V-based enterprise hardware, operating systems, and software workloads. The Hypervisor extension will also provide better security for mobile applications by separating secure and non-secure components. >

SiFive announced the availability of its state-of-the-art HiFive Premier P550 development board. An initial pre-release batch of 100 Yocto Linux-based boards, called the "Early Access Edition," is available for purchase through Arrow Electronics. A broader release with Canonical Ubuntu 24.04 pre-installed is scheduled for December, providing developers with an unparalleled out-of-box experience.

The quad-core SiFive Performance P550 processor, running at 1.4GHz, makes the HiFive Premier P550 the highest-performing RISC-V development board available. Its out-of-order core architecture delivers exceptional compute density and performance, all within an energy-efficient footprint.

HiFive Premier P550 Key Features:

• The world’s highest performing commercially available RISC-V CPU- SiFive P550
• 16-32GB LPDDR5 / 128GB eMMC
• Robust PC connectivity: SATA, PCIe, SD, M.2, USB 3
• Integrated Imagination GPU and ESWIN NPU

RISC-V International, the global standards organization, today announced that the RVA23 Profile is now ratified. RVA Profiles align implementations of RISC-V 64-bit application processors that will run rich operating systems (OS) stacks from standard binary OS distributions. RVA Profiles are essential to software portability across many hardware implementations and help to avoid vendor lock-in. The newly ratified RVA23 Profile is a major release for the RISC-V software ecosystem and will help accelerate widespread implementation among toolchains and operating systems.

Each Profile specifies which ISA features are mandatory or optional, providing a common target for software developers. Mandatory extensions can be assumed to be present, and optional extensions can be discovered at runtime and leveraged by optimized middleware, libraries, and applications.

Key Components of RVA23 Include:

• Vector Extension: The Vector extension accelerates math-intensive workloads, including AI/ML, cryptography, and compression / decompression. Vector extensions yield better performance in mobile and computing applications with RVA23 as the baseline requirement for the Android RISC-V ABI.
• Hypervisor Extension: The Hypervisor extension will enable virtualization for enterprise workloads in both on-premises server and cloud computing applications. This will accelerate the development of RISC-V-based enterprise hardware, operating systems, and software workloads. The Hypervisor extension will also provide better security for mobile applications by separating secure and non-secure components.

Valve released a new update to the Steam Client Beta for Steam Deck and Desktop, with some Steam Input changes and some improvements for Linux too. It's the same across Desktop / Deck since it's a Steam Client update.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21415339

> As Big Tech’s market power grew, so did its political clout. Now, as the EU tries to rein in the most problematic aspects of Big Tech – from disinformation, targeted advertising to unfair competition practices – the digital giants are lobbying hard to shape new regulations. > > Read the full report. > > In 'The Lobby Network', Corporate Europe Observatory and Lobbycontrol offer an overview of the tech industry's EU lobbying firepower. For the first time, we map the 'universe' of actors lobbying the EU’s digital economy, from Silicon Valley giants to Shenzhen’s contenders; from firms created online to those making the infrastructure that keeps the internet running; tech giants and newcomers. > > We found a wide yet deeply imbalanced ‘universe’: > - with 612 companies, groups and business associations lobbying the EU’s digital economy policies. Together, they spend over €97 million annually lobbying the EU institutions. This makes tech the biggest lobby sector in the EU by spending, ahead of pharma, fossil fuels, finance, and chemicals. > - in spite of the varied number of players, this universe is dominated by a handful of firms. Just ten companies are responsible for almost a third of the total tech lobby spend: Vodafone, Qualcomm, Intel, IBM, Amazon, Huawei, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google spend more than €32 million making their voices heard in the EU. > - out of all the companies lobbying the EU on digital policy, 20 per cent are US based, though this number is likely even higher. Less than 1 per cent have head offices in China or Hong Kong. This implies Chinese firms have so far not invested in EU lobbying quite as heavily as their US counterparts. > - digital industry companies are not just lobbying individually. They are also collectively organised into business and trade associations which are themselves important lobby actors. The business associations lobbying on behalf of Big Tech alone have a lobbying budget that far surpasses that of the bottom 75 per cent of the companies in the digital industry. > >

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21458338

> The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) support for the C23 programming language standard is now considered "essentially feature-complete" with GCC 15. As such they are preparing to enable the C23 language version (using the GNU23 dialect) by default for the C language version of GCC when not otherwise specified. > > Preparations are now underway to set the default C language version of GCC to GNU23 as the GNU dialect of C23. Or in other words, implying -std=gnu23 when no other C standard is specified. >

OGRE has grown to become one of the most popular open-source graphics rendering engines. It’s been 2 years since 2.3.0 and almost a year since the last 2.3.x release. It’s about time for 3.0.0!

• Ogre to OgreNext name migration
• Dealing with ABI mismatches: AbiCookie
• ABI Semver
• Move to C++11 and general cleanup

Forgejo v9.0 is the first version to be released under a copyleft license, after a year of discussions. Among the motivations for this change is the realization that a pattern emerged over the years, exemplified by Redis, CockroachDB, Terraform and many others. They turned proprietary because people chose their own financial gain over the interest of the general public. Forgejo admins no longer have to worry about this sword of Damocles: relicensing it as a proprietary software is not allowed.

The removal of the go-git backend is part of a larger effort to make Forgejo easier to maintain, more robust and even smaller than it already is (~100MB). When presented with go-git as an alternative to Git, a Forgejo admin may overlook that it has less features and a history of corrupting repositories. It would have been possible to work on documentation and new tests to ensure administrators do not run into these pitfalls, but the effort would have been out of proportion compared to the benefits it provides.

The Forgejo localization community was created early 2024 with the ambitious goal of gaining enough momentum to sustain a long term effort. A daunting task considering there are over 5,000 strings to translate, verify and improve. There has been many calls for help in the past and the community keeps growing steadily. Fortunately, the translation hackathon (translathon) organized by Codeberg in October was exceptional. It attracted an unprecedented number of participants who improved or created thousands of translations.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) support for the C23 programming language standard is now considered "essentially feature-complete" with GCC 15. As such they are preparing to enable the C23 language version (using the GNU23 dialect) by default for the C language version of GCC when not otherwise specified.

Preparations are now underway to set the default C language version of GCC to GNU23 as the GNU dialect of C23. Or in other words, implying -std=gnu23 when no other C standard is specified.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21439893

> Meta has a Palestine problem. If you use Facebook or Instagram, you’ve probably seen the censorship yourself. Dena Takruri uncovers an internal culture of censorship, intimidation and fear within Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. > > She speaks to Meta employees who’ve tried to fix the problem or speak out, and say they were silenced or even fired. She also investigates Meta leaders’ deep ties to Israel, which may explain why it’s suppressing and censoring Palestine content for billions of users around the world.

Meta has a Palestine problem. If you use Facebook or Instagram, you’ve probably seen the censorship yourself. Dena Takruri uncovers an internal culture of censorship, intimidation and fear within Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook.

She speaks to Meta employees who’ve tried to fix the problem or speak out, and say they were silenced or even fired. She also investigates Meta leaders’ deep ties to Israel, which may explain why it’s suppressing and censoring Palestine content for billions of users around the world.

This new edition has been the occasion to overhaul the presentation in many places, but its main purpose is the update to the new C standard, C23. The goal was to publish this new edition of Modern C at the same time as the new C standard goes through the procedure of ISO publication. The closest approximation of the contents of the new standard in a publicly available document can be found here. New releases of major compilers already implement most of the new features that it brings.

The Godbolt Compiler Explorer is a fantastic tool for assembler programmers. In this post, I show you how to use Compiler Explorer to generate RISC-V assembly code and offer some ideas to make best use of this tool.

In the last few years, we’ve seen an explosion of RISC-V CPU designs on FPGA and ASIC, including the RP2350 found on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2. Thankfully, RISC-V is ideal for assembly programming with its compact, easy-to-learn instruction set. This series will help you learn and understand 32-bit RISC-V instructions and programming.

The KDE Goals initiative is working to improve support for input devices such as game controllers, fancy mice, handhelds — anything for your gaming needs.

This Sunday, Oct 20th at 18:00 (UTC), the KDE Goals champions will be answering your questions live. Post your questions here and I'll make sure they'll answer them.

We'll be streaming here: https://tube.kockatoo.org/w/2tAyknEQc8EhL2AyoAUE8M

You can get in touch with the community at the Matrix room.

Speed Dreams is a Motorsport Simulator featuring high-quality 3D graphics and an accurate physics engine, all targeting maximum realism. Initially forked from TORCS, it has now reached a clearly higher realism level in visual and physics simulation, thanks to its active development team and growing community. It mainly aims to implement exciting new features, cars, tracks and AI opponents to make a more enjoyable game for the player, while constantly pushing forward visual and physics realism. It is also intended for any research, study or teaching activity, around physics and AI, thanks to its GPL v2+ license, and the clear and modular architecture of its C/C++ code base.

In this video of work-in-progress circuit you can see some of the new developments the developers are working on, like the particles (smoke, sparks, dust...), and also the AI tuning... This track is under development. You can donwload it from the leillo's personal repository: https://codeberg.org/leillo1975/ardennen-spa

The version of the game used for this video corresponds to an internal development version. If you want to enjoy it you will have to build the source code from: https://sourceforge.net/p/speed-dreams/code/HEAD/tree/

You can find this game and more info about this Open Source project on: https://www.speed-dreams.net

As Big Tech’s market power grew, so did its political clout. Now, as the EU tries to rein in the most problematic aspects of Big Tech – from disinformation, targeted advertising to unfair competition practices – the digital giants are lobbying hard to shape new regulations.

Read the full report.

In 'The Lobby Network', Corporate Europe Observatory and Lobbycontrol offer an overview of the tech industry's EU lobbying firepower. For the first time, we map the 'universe' of actors lobbying the EU’s digital economy, from Silicon Valley giants to Shenzhen’s contenders; from firms created online to those making the infrastructure that keeps the internet running; tech giants and newcomers.

We found a wide yet deeply imbalanced ‘universe’:

• with 612 companies, groups and business associations lobbying the EU’s digital economy policies. Together, they spend over €97 million annually lobbying the EU institutions. This makes tech the biggest lobby sector in the EU by spending, ahead of pharma, fossil fuels, finance, and chemicals.
• in spite of the varied number of players, this universe is dominated by a handful of firms. Just ten companies are responsible for almost a third of the total tech lobby spend: Vodafone, Qualcomm, Intel, IBM, Amazon, Huawei, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google spend more than €32 million making their voices heard in the EU.
• out of all the companies lobbying the EU on digital policy, 20 per cent are US based, though this number is likely even higher. Less than 1 per cent have head offices in China or Hong Kong. This implies Chinese firms have so far not invested in EU lobbying quite as heavily as their US counterparts.
• digital industry companies are not just lobbying individually. They are also collectively organised into business and trade associations which are themselves important lobby actors. The business associations lobbying on behalf of Big Tech alone have a lobbying budget that far surpasses that of the bottom 75 per cent of the companies in the digital industry.