After the first round of community feedback, we’re happy to share the second release candidate for GIMP 3.0! People gave us really helpful feedback from the first release candidate and we were able to fix a lot of bugs.

Fixed a bug that could cause suspend/resume to fail when using the NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations option: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/472 Fixed a bug that caused the cursor image to be truncated on Gamescope: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/1099 Re-enabled GLX_EXT_buffer_age on Xwayland. This extension had been previously disabled on Xwayland due to a bug which is now fixed. Added support for mmap of exported DMA-BUF objects. Reduced some cases of stutter with OpenGL syncing to vblank while using GSP firmware. Fixed a regression that could cause some applications to exit due to resource exhaustion on some GPUs while using GSP firmware. Added several new per-plane and per-CRTC vendor-specific properties to nvidia-drm. These properties may be used by Wayland compositors to program the GPU's color pipeline for HDR hardware acceleration. Introduced a driver optimization to mitigate the performance loss from the 'd3d9.floatEmulation' option in DXVK. Fixed a bug that caused FarCry 5 running through DXVK to display a black screen. Updated the framelock settings page of the nvidia-settings control panel to use the GTK3 theme text color rather than defaulting to white for the text color, improving legibility with some themes. Fixed some performance regressions that were observed with Vkd3d 2.9. Fixed a bug that could cause flickering in some applications when using Unified Back Buffer (UBB). Fixed a bug which could cause incorrect and/or washed out colors to be displayed with HDR scanout: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=482780 Implemented support for VK_EXT_depth_clamp_control. Fixed a bug which could cause applications using GBM to crash when running with nvidia-drm.modeset=0. Fixed a bug that could cause kernel crashes upon attempting KMS operations through DRM when nvidia_drm was loaded with modeset=0.

The ESA, which represents several major gaming companies, has shared an updated list of notorious piracy threats with the U.S. Government. One of the notable newcomers is FitGirl-Repacks, which has been a dominant player in the game piracy landscape for years. Meanwhile, ESA's report no longer mentions malware, cryptocurrencies, or Scene release groups, which were previously seen as 'growing trends'.

You can try out the Proton-Cachyos with frame gen package if you're on arch-based systems with pacman -U archive.cachyos.org/proton/proton-cachyos-1:9.0.20240928-1-x86_64_v3.pkg.tar.zst

or you can download custom tkg-proton with frame generation from mediafire.com/file/lv7d8jci0gyf6z0/proton_dlssfg.tar.zst/file and put into your ~/.steam/steam/compatibilitytools.d/

We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.

This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed-up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors. We are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.

These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.

In this video, I provide an overview of the 5 best or most exciting features coming to the highly-anticipated GIMP 3.0 release! These are my 5 favorite new features coming to GIMP 3.0, including non-destructive editing, smart guides, and CMYK support.

The isos with Cosmic alpha are now downloadable from system76's site!

Fixed a bug that caused widespread crashing with Xwayland games.
Fixed a race condition involving modeset ownership which could lead to flip event timeout errors when enabling the 'fbdev' kernel module parameter in nvidia-drm.
Fixed a regression that caused nvidia-powerd to exit when nvidia-dbus.conf was not present in the /etc/dbus-1/system.d/ directory.
Fixed a bug that could cause memory corruption while handling ACPI events on some notebooks.
Fixed a bug that could cause external displays to become frozen until the next modeset when using PRIME Display Offloading with the NVIDIA dGPU acting as the display offload sink.

Friday's release of Wine 8.22 is expected to be the last bi-weekly feature release before shifting focus to the code freeze and making Wine 9.0 ready for release in early 2024. It's coming down to the finish line how much more Wine Wayland driver functionality will be merged in time.

A few days ago Wine Wayland's Vulkan support evolved into a usable state while today "part 11" of the Wine Wayland enablement was merged. This 11th set of Wine Wayland driver patches is for mouselook support, including wiring up ClipCursor and relative motion events. The relative mouse cursor support in particular is important for first person shooters and other games.

More details on this latest Wine Wayland code to be merged upstream can be found via this MR. As with the other Wine Wayland work, it's being carried out by Collabora's Alexandros Frantzis.

Opened today is also another merge request for the Wine Wayland driver with that change-set intended to apply surface configuration during Vulkan presentation. This fixes some games running that they resize the area as they become full-screen.

WINE The third and final part of the Vulkan enablement code for allowing Vulkan API graphics use within the Wine Wayland driver has been merged to Wine Git.

There's been Vulkan support being worked on for Wine Wayland that was split into three sets of patches. The final portion of this work by Collabora's Alexandros Frantzis has now been merged -- meaning Vulkan use by Windows software (or going Direct3D to Vulkan) running on Linux within a Wayland native environment is now do-able.

However, mouse not all games will be working properly yet until additional mouse functionality is implemented:

"With this MR you can start enjoying some of your games with the Wayland driver (either directly with Vulkan or with a D3D->Vulkan translation). Please note, however, that we don't currently support what's needed for mouselook (you will currently get erratic view movement), so most first-person 3D games are not playable yet."

See the merge for more details. With the Wine 9.0 feature freeze quickly approaching it remains to be seen if any more of the Wine Wayland code will make it in time for this next stable Wine release due out in early 2024.