February seems to be a really big month for desktop environment news because KDE Plasma is almost upon us with the release next week. GNOME has announced the beta release of GNOME 46. LXQt has dropped some big news that LXQt 2.0 is on its way. and there may be another distro already interested in System76’s COSMIC desktop. We’re also going to take a look at a few laptops coming on the marketing in a new Linux Hardware News segment. Valve is releasing more of their software as Open Source proving once again Valve is a great member of the community. Plus we got some news from the movie animation studio DreamWorks and what they are doing with Open Source. All of this and more on this episode of This Week in Linux, Your Source for Linux GNews!
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:08 CrossOver 24 Released – [link]
03:05 DreamWorks OpenMoonRay 1.5 Released – [link]
06:30 Linux Hardware News Roundup – [KDE Slimbook, System76, Juno Saturn, Manjaro Slimbook]
12:05 Sponsored by Kolide – [link]
13:27 Valve Releases Steam Audio as Open Source – [link]
14:31 GNOME 46 Beta Released – [link]
16:13 Fedora COSMIC Desktop Spin Being Considered – [link]
18:42 Miracle-WM: Tiling WM for Wayland Compositor – [link]
23:25 Last Development Release before GIMP 3.0 – [link]
29:05 LXQt 2.0 Desktop Coming in April – [link]
32:30 Outro
16:14 The Cosmic SIG is moving forward with some traction. I’ll say that having it in the Atomic Desktop flavor is the right choice. Since Cosmic is so fresh, and might have bugs it’s great to see it go that way.
Also, the project has been going for a while now. You can try it here ;
23:26 GIMP3.0 is gonna be huge. I do want to make notes, that there might be confusions or assumptions about. NDE’s have been in GIMP for a while. As a matter of fact, A majority of the GEGL operations are NDE’s ! Also the lack of understanding of the filters and how they are used is a big issue. People do not realize that the Graph editing is basically a Nodes tool. So chaining of filters and the like is possible creating tons of possibilities.
Anyone looking to try it out, I currently use PhotoGIMP : “A patch for optimizing GIMP 2.10+ for Adobe Photoshop users” , It is also working for the 2.99.18rc. Very helpful for those looking to jump in.
Here is the download for GIMP 2.99.18 btw GIMP - Development Downloads
I agree, this would be very good. I would prefer to see this as an official spin managed by System76 but this is still very cool because the Universal Blue team makes a lot of good stuff.
This is interesting, I was not aware that they were using a Node style tool. That will certainly be confusing for a lot of people because that is a massive workflow conflict from what people expect. It’s possible to be a good thing because Nodes can be incredibly useful if done right.
GEGL is very nice and I was super excited when it was first announced. I am still very optimistic that GEGL will be what it was set out to be and revolutionize the project. With that said, GEGL’s NDE functions are quite limited. I know GIMP has some minor pieces that are NDE such as the masking and coming soon with the filters but NDE is a much larger workflow and GIMP is in the infancy of this workflow. For a tool to compete in the professional realm it needs NDE everywhere on every tool because that is what professional tools offer so GIMP has a very long path to get there.
I know people don’t like to hear this but it is my genuine opinion that until they change the name of the tool, the project will always be so far behind that playing catchup is an understatement. I hope that someday they realize this and make the simplest change for the better of the project but I don’t really have much hope for this anymore.
Thanks for this @MichaelTunnell - I’m watching a few months late, so maybe some of the releases mentioned in this episode are out already. I don’t mind the wonkiness at all, though I was listening rather than watching. Screen time currently minimal, doc’s orders, following a minor injury a few days ago.
Delighted to hear Fedora are interested in Cosmic collaboration. As bug triager for KDE, I really appreciate Fedora KDE spin and use that for testing more than KDE Neon at the moment. I have also upgraded this week to Fedora 40 KDE spin, and am looking forward to continuing my experiments with Kirigami with Qt6.
I went to the Codeweavers website and may be interested in the product when I am back in employment, as having Amazon Kindle app (rather than the in-browser version) on Linux would help me enormously.
Gnu Image Manipulation Package version 3 sounds very exciting, but like you, I agree they need to change the name, preferably.
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