Linux 7.2 brings cache-aware scheduling, faster ext4 and Btrfs
Linux kernel 7.2 has been released, adding cache-aware scheduling, ext4 filesystem performance boosts and a slew of new and improved hardware drivers for laptops and peripherals. A merge widow record was also set during the 9-week development cycle, with more than 2,100 individual contributors involved. AI, obviously, has helped. Commit-crunching by LWN found roughly 5% of commits in 7.2 have an ‘assisted-by’ tag, indicating AI usage. Not that the latest kernel update was all additions. More than 13,000 lines of code for legacy i486 CPU emulation were removed from Linux 7.2, as was a 40-year-old Hercules graphics card driver, AppleTalk […]
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If you remember that desktop picture widget for GNOME I wrote about last year, but found it a bit too basic for your personalisation preferences, you weren’t alone. Another user felt it could lacked enough flexibility, so forked and improved it. Picture Desktop Widget Remake improves on the original. It lets add multiple picture widgets to your Ubuntu desktop, and assign each one a different folder to pull images from, at random. Plus, you can set the size, position, border radius and aspect ratio of each widget individually. Each photo frame has its own on/off button in Preferences, so you […]
GeForce NOW’s native Linux app has exited beta after seven months of testing, with official support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and later. The app is a frontend for Nvidia’s game streaming service, with more than 4,500 PC titles running in the cloud on Nvidia servers. Users get GeForce RTX-class performance, ray tracing and DLSS without the need to own the relevant hardware. In a blog post to announce its ‘graduation’ from beta, Nvidia say GeForce NOW for Linux has picked up “performance, stability and polish” improvements thanks to community feedback during the beta test period. The company also touches on […]
LightDM, Ubuntu’s former display manager, has had its first new release in four years – and the first under a new set of maintainers. LightDM v1.33.0 is a ‘catch up’ release that adds Qt6 support (Qt5 still works, don’t worry) and clears a backlog of fixes that had built up since the previous release in 2022. There shouldn’t be any breaking changes either, per the release notes. While it might sound like a sudden revival of a legacy effort, LightDM is still widely used by Linux distributions and desktops. LightDM: what is it? LightDM is a backend that handles logging […]
The next version of GNOME Shell, out in September, is ‘likely’ to include a redesigned search experience. In current versions of the desktop, when you start a search from the GNOME Shell overview, a dedicated search results screen replaces the one you’re looking at, i.e., the workspace row and dash (aka dock) are obscured. GNOME’s design team has long wanted to adopt a ‘semantic’ layout for search, where elements visibly enter and exit from a specific place, so users know how one screen relates to the next. For search, results would appear in an overlay that ‘spawns out of the […]