After releasing **Garuda Linux “Broadwing”** , the development team behind this Arch Linux-based distribution _announced_ that they’re working on a new edition featuring the up-and-coming COSMIC desktop environment. Garuda Linux is known for maintaining several editions with some of the most acclaimed desktop environments and window managers, including **KDE Plasma** , GNOME, Xfce, Cinnamon, Hyprland, Sway, i3, and others. It even offers a Garuda Nix Subsystem edition to let you easily try out **NixOS**. Now, there will be a new Garuda Linux edition featuring the COSMIC desktop environment, which is written from scratch in the Rust programming language by renowned Linux hardware vendor System76. As COSMIC is still under heavy development, the new Garuda COSMIC edition comes with a warning. “It is very barebones at the moment; basically just the stock COSMIC packages on a Garuda base–but if there is community interest in this, we can certainly build it up as people chime in with their tweaks and ideas,” said the Garuda Linux team. The Garuda COSMIC edition is in the same state as you would experience it on any other GNU/Linux distribution, including Arch Linux itself, whose menu-based installer has an experimental feature that lets you deploy a brand-new installation with the COSMIC desktop environment. However, the Garuda Linux team took the liberty of including their brand-new Welcome app called Garuda Rani, as well as the Garuda Settings Manager, FireDragon web browser, Garuda Boot Repair, Garuda Chroot, Garuda Network Assistant, Garuda System Maintenance, Garuda Boot Options, and other tools. Other than that, you’ll find the standard COSMIC apps and utilities like COSMIC Files, COSMIC Store, COSMIC Settings, COSMIC Terminal, COSMIC Text Editor, and COSMIC Screenshot. Unfortunately, the COSMIC Media Player app introduced in the **COSMIC Alpha 5** release isn’t included since it has limited functionality. All in all, the new Garuda COSMIC edition is functional and ready for exploration if you want to take it for a test drive on your personal computer or in a virtual machine. Garuda Linux devs urge users who test Garuda COSMIC not to report COSMIC bugs to the Garuda Linux team, but to _System76_. You can download the Garuda COSMIC edition right now from _here_.

Collabora informs today on some of the major changes coming to the major Mesa 25.1 open-source graphics stack for NVIDIA GPU users in terms of the default graphics driver. > “If we did this right, most users wouldn’t even notice beyond getting a slightly more stable experience with better performance. Until now, the Mesa graphics stack defaulted to Nouveau as the open-source graphics driver for NVIDIA GPUs, but starting with the Mesa 25.1 series, the old OpenGL driver will be taking a backseat in favor of a combination of the Zink Gallium driver and the **NVK** open-source Vulkan graphics driver, both developed by Collabora. Zink is an OpenGL implementation written on top of Vulkan, while NVK is a Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs, supporting Turing (NVIDIA RTX 20XX and NVIDIA GTX 16XX series) and later GPUs, Vulkan 1.4, and many other features. NVK will also receive support for older NVIDIA GPUs, such as Kepler (GeForce 600 and 700 series). Collabora’s Faith Ekstrand says that this major change should not have a big impact for NVIDIA GPU users installing a new system in the coming months that ships with the Mesa 25.1 graphics stack by default, apart from a slightly more stable experience with better performance compared to using the old Nouveau OpenGL driver. “Zink has matured a lot since the initial blog post in 2018. It has grown to support OpenGL 4.6 and is a conformant implementation on top of multiple hardware drivers. It’s also improved significantly in performance and stability over the last few years. At this point, we’re fairly confident that Zink+NVK will be an improvement over Nouveau GL across the board,” said Faith Ekstrand in a _blog post_. NVK has been making a lot of progress lately, and this news shouldn’t come as a surprise to most Linux users using NVIDIA GPUs, which are most likely using the **NVIDIA** graphics driver rather than the default open-source offering provided by the Mesa graphics stack, which is installed by default in all distros. Nevertheless, this is a welcome change. NVIDIA GPU users should notice a slightly faster desktop experience when running a Linux distro in live mode or after installing the system, before upgrading to NVIDIA’s more powerful graphics driver, which is highly recommended for gaming and 3D apps.

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IPFire 2.29 Core Update 192 open-source hardened Linux firewall has been released today, and it’s now available for download, with Linux kernel 6.12 LTS and other interesting changes. The biggest change in the new IPFire release is the switch to the latest LTS (Long-Term Support) kernel branch, namely **Linux 6.12 LTS** , a major update from the Linux 6.6 LTS kernel series used until now, along with a new driver for Realtek 8812au chips, a set of firmware for **Raspberry Pi** SBCs, and U-Boot 2024.10. Both the Linux 6.12 and 6.6 LTS kernel series are expected to be supported until December 2026, but the former introduces several key features, such as improved TCP performance of up to 40 percent, TCP fraglist GRO support, scheduling enhancements for lower latency when processing packets, and better hardware support. “Overall, there has been a lot valuable work gone into the kernel release which will bring you the most secure version of IPFire – and it is the most snappy one. On various hardware, the system responds a lot faster and provides better throughput throughout,” said Michael Tremer. IPFire 2.29 Core Update 192 also updates the collectd service for collecting statistics about IPFire’s status to version 5.12.0, replaces the legacy DEFLATE zlib compression library with zlib-ng for faster compression/decompression for the DELFATE algorithm on modern CPUs, and updates the DNS root zone. Another interesting change is that the CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) printing server has been removed from this release due to a couple of security vulnerabilities and upstream abandoning the project, but also because most modern printers are now all network-enabled. Other than that, the new IPFire release updates speedtest-cli so it can be launched at the top of the hour and thirty minutes past the hour, improves the French translation, improves the displaying of the logos uploaded to the IPFire Captive Portal, and updates several core packages and add-ons. Check out the _release announcement page_ for more details. Meanwhile, you can download the IPFire 2.29 Core Update 192 release from the _official website_ as ISO or USB images for 64-bit (x86_64) and AArch64 (ARM64) hardware architectures. _Image credits: Logo by the IPFire project (edited by Marius Nestor)_

Time for a bit of modernisation. With the upcoming Mesa 25.1 release, Collabora developer Faith Ekstrand announced a big change for NVIDIA GPU users. If you're not using the proprietary NVIDIA driver, that is.

I am happy to announce that Vox Pupuli’s OpenVox packages and repositories are now available under the voxpupuli.org domain! We now provide the following URLs for your convenience: https://apt.vox...

The KDE Project released today KDE Plasma 6.3.3 as the third maintenance update to the latest KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop environment series to address more of those pesky issues and also add some enhancements. Coming two weeks after **KDE Plasma 6.3.2** , the KDE Plasma 6.3.3 release implements battery charge threshold support for more devices, improves the way colors are displayed on the screen when using the Night Light feature on Intel GPU machines, and adds a warning message when you disable power management. KDE Plasma 6.3.3 also improves support for **LibreOffice** Writer so that it no longer inserts anchor links when copying text, prevents screen refresh rate changes when forcing “Adaptive Sync” to be on, adds a nicer-looking font picker dialog to the Digital Clock widget, and allows for more granular scale factors in System Settings. Apart from these enhancements, KDE Plasma 6.3.3 is a massive bugfix release addressing lots of issues including black lock screen on X11, a KWin crash on login, Plasma crashes after waking from sleep or when closing apps by middle-click, as well as a screen locker issue failing to respond to keyboard actions. Also fixed are a couple of behavioral anomalies when manually manipulating windows in the stacking order, a strange crash when configuring Plasma to have multiple “Notifications” widgets, a recent regression affecting the “Legacy X11 app scaling” setting, and two color scheme issues. The list of fixes continues with a bug that prevented configuration of panel widgets when disabling animations globally while in panel edit mode, ome visual glitches visible on blurred Plasma widgets, a **KRunner** issue where the text starts to overflow off the right edge, and a keyboard accessibility issue on the KWin Rules page in System Settings. Moreover, KDE Plasma 6.3.3 fixes a keyboard navigation issue in the “Application Dashboard” widget when using a right-to-left language, multiple keyboard navigation issues throughout the Plasma desktop, a GTK bug that caused in-window menus in GTK apps to act weird when clicking on one menu and then moving the pointer to another menu. The Info Center app has been improved as well to correctly show the names of some **NVIDIA** GPUs, the Calendar and Digital Clock widgets now switch to the appropriate month, year, or decade when rapidly clicking the “Next” or “Previous” buttons on the calendar, and Discover now correctly shows release notes for updateable Flatpak and Snap apps. Among other changes, KDE Plasma 6.3.3 updates the **Plasma Discover** package manager to correctly uninstall end-of-life Flatpak runtimes that are being used by some apps, bumps the maximum number of dots shown per day on the calendar event view grid from 3 to 5, and makes the icon for the current day’s forecast more accurate in the Weather widget. Check out the _full changelog_ for more details about the changes include in KDE Plasma 6.3.3, which will soon arrive in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distributions. Make sure that you update your installations as soon as possible for a more stable and reliable Plasma desktop experience.

Here's a collection of forever open licensed tabletop roleplaying games and resources. Borrowed from and inspired by the Forever Open Source RPG game jam series. Example Open Licenses Creative Commons Zero ("CC0"). Release your work into the public domain. The most open license. Creative Com

From developer 8BitSkull (BORE BLASTERS, Void Scrappers) their next game is Skull Horde, an auto-battling dungeon crawler where you raise up an undead army while floating around.

With a first episode that's completely free, Muffles' Life Sentence is a really weird dark comedy 2D RPG where have to swap your face and it's well worth a look. Here you've been sent to prison, where their doctors do clearly pretty terrible things to you depending on your crimes.

Tellus Games have released Oblin Party, a physics-based 2D party party brawler where you have direct control over your two hands made with Godot. It has Native Linux support and should work great on Steam Deck too.

In the dynamic field of conversational AI, managing coherent and contextually meaningful interactions between humans and digital assistants poses increasingly complex challenges. As dialogue lengths…

LJ Linux Users Group - Supporting Linux and open source software

STRAFTAT originally launched in October 2024, and just recently the developer added a Linux version. It's a completely ridiculous competitive 1v1 online shooter with quick rounds and lots of weapons.

Contribute to BraininaBowl/Quartz-7DRL2025 development by creating an account on GitHub.

The developers of the lightweight LXQt desktop environment have _showcased_ some of the major changes coming to the LXQt 2.2 release, which is due in mid-April. LXQt 2.2 promises to further improve the Wayland session introduced in the **LXQt 2.1** release and flagged as experimental. In LXQt 2.2, the Wayland session will still be experimental, but it will let you set the default compositor and the screen locker by distribution or system-wide. The Wayland session will also feature partially enabled input settings, man pages, and updated configuration files. Moreover, the LXQt Runner will allow width configuration, as well as screen settings and position for multi-monitor setups under Wayland. Also, the LXQt Panel can be configured per monitor when using the Wayland session, monitor settings for kwin_wayland will now work if one or both screens are scaled, the dropdown QTerminal window has been improved under Wayland, and there’s now a shortcut handler using D-Bus. LXQt 2.2 also promises to improve the QTerminal terminal emulator with a new “Activate on mouse over” setting for subterminals, cursor blinking, the ability to hide the mouse cursor with a timeout, reordered preferences panes, as well as fixes for text rendering and the prompt when closing the app while processes are running. On top of that, the LXQt 2.2 desktop promises improvements for app transparency and font dialog on X11, colored text and a tooltip for the “Custom Command” widget in the LXQt Panel, support for exclude apps from showing up in the “Taskbar” widget, and better tab sizes with large texts for the PCManFM-Qt file manager. Talking about PCManFM-Qt, the file manager received support for custom arguments when opening a directory in the terminal and the ability to clean up the filter bar with the Backspace key. The ScreenGrab screenshot utility has been improved as well in LXQt 2.2 with new setting for notifications. Of course, there will be many other changes across the board, especially bug fixes for a more reliable and stable LXQt desktop experience. As mentioned before, the final LXQt 2.2 release is expected sometime in mid-April 2025 if everything goes according to plan.

Zimly is an open-source Android application that allows seamless backups to any S3 compatible storage solution.

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