Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell I sorta wish the Nvidia open sourcing happened because it was cowing to hacker demands (it really didn’t). But open source (plus firmware blobs) or no, the EGLsteams/GBM binary will ensure that people still have something to argue about, graphics-wise. Sooner or later my AMD RX480 will need replacing, but I’ll probably stick with Team Red. Nick Peers While I welcome Nvidia’s announcement, my sole reason for buying its GTX 1660 Super for my PC was its support for the Turing Nvidia encoder. I’d hoped it would turbo-charge my media rips – and it did – but the resulting h264 files were too large to be usable. Les Pounder I’m a pragmatist at heart. I prefer Nvidia’s cards over AMD and this all stems from an ATI card…

Jonni Bidwell I sorta wish the Nvidia open sourcing happened because it was cowing to hacker demands (it really didn’t). But open source (plus firmware blobs) or no, the EGLsteams/GBM binary will ensure that people still have something to argue about, graphics-wise. Sooner or later my AMD RX480 will need replacing, but I’ll probably stick with Team Red. Nick Peers While I welcome Nvidia’s announcement, my sole reason for buying its GTX 1660 Super for my PC was its support for the Turing Nvidia encoder. I’d hoped it would turbo-charge my media rips – and it did – but the resulting h264 files were too large to be usable. Les Pounder I’m a pragmatist at heart. I prefer Nvidia’s cards over AMD and this all stems from an ATI card that I had in a…

It seems that Tux can safely visit Hell, because last issue it froze over when Nvidia announced it’s starting on the long journey to producing a fully open source driver stack. It’s clear this is going to be a drawn-out affair. Just look at what happened when AMD bought ATI back in 2006. A year on (mid-2007) it announced it would be open sourcing its driver stack, and the SUSE engineering team began work on the Radeon HD driver. I’m not even going to try and catalogue the saga here, but by 2012 there was the promise of same-day driver support for the HD 8000 range release. It never came, although by this point performance of the open source driver was getting competitive with the closed-source Catalyst driver. It wasn’t until nine-years…

It seems that Tux can safely visit Hell, because last issue it froze over when Nvidia announced it’s starting on the long journey to producing a fully open source driver stack. It’s clear this is going to be a drawn-out affair. Just look at what happened when AMD bought ATI back in 2006. A year on (mid-2007) it announced it would be open sourcing its driver stack, and the SUSE engineering team began work on the Radeon HD driver. I’m not even going to try and catalogue the saga here, but by 2012 there was the promise of same-day driver support for the HD 8000 range release. It never came, although by this point performance of the open source driver was getting competitive with the closed-source Catalyst driver. It wasn’t…

Opinions remain divided over the effectiveness of Snaps, Canonical’s sandbox software format. Many Ubuntu users complain about Snaps’ poor performance compared with competitors such as Flatpak. While Flatpak, which used to be known as xdg-app, is widely supported by many distros including Debian, Ubuntu has stuck with Snaps, despite it offering similar functionality, naming packaging and being able to distribute software that can be run in a ‘sandbox’, safely away from important operating system files. To mark Ubuntu 22.04’s launch, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth took part in a video Q&A session on the Ubuntu OnAir YouTube channel (which you can see at https://bit.ly/lxf291ubuntuonair). During the session Mark was asked if Ubuntu would ever come with Flatpak support out of the box. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was pretty adamant that it wouldn’t,…

Opinions remain divided over the effectiveness of Snaps, Canonical’s sandbox software format. Many Ubuntu users complain about Snaps’ poor performance compared with competitors such as Flatpak. While Flatpak, which used to be known as xdg-app, is widely supported by many distros including Debian, Ubuntu has stuck with Snaps, despite it offering similar functionality, naming packaging and being able to distribute software that can be run in a ‘sandbox’, safely away from important operating system files. To mark Ubuntu 22.04’s launch, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth took part in a video Q&A session on the Ubuntu OnAir YouTube channel (which you can see at https://bit.ly/lxf291ubuntuonair). During the session Mark was asked if Ubuntu would ever come with Flatpak support out of the box. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was pretty adamant that it wouldn’t, saying…