PorteuX 2.7 has been released with Linux kernel 7.1.1, GNOME 50.2, KDE Plasma 6.7.0, a switch to the new NTFS-Plus driver, and a number of performance-focused optimizations. The developer is also claiming the distro now outperforms CachyOS in Geekbench 6. Do you think benchmark results like these are meaningful when comparing Linux distributions

Out Loud is a free, open-source AI text-to-speech app that runs 100% offline. Nothing you read or type ever leaves your device — no cloud, no accounts, no tracking. Get 50+ natural voices across 8 languages (English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, Italian, Portuguese, and more) on macOS, Windows, and Linux, plus a Chrome extension that reads any webpage, PDF, or email aloud with one click.

MIT licensed and free forever — audit it, fork it, improve it. A genuine alternative to subscription TTS services, with no fees, ever.

Download v2.0.0: https://www.out-loud.io/#download Star on GitHub: https://github.com/light-cloud-com/out-loud

A friend of mine made a cool calculator and unit converter. It parses natural English phrases like “how many inches are in 3 feet?” and “300 miles / 65 mph in hours and minutes” and “download 10GB 1Gbps”. You can access it from web (including PWA), CLI or as a library. It has a strong FOSS philosophy behind it.

tubeup uses yt-dlp to download a Youtube video (or any other provider supported by yt-dlp), and then uploads it with all metadata to the Internet Archive using the python module internetarchive. It was designed by the Bibliotheca Anonoma to archive single videos, playlists (see warning below about more than video uploads) or accounts to the Internet Archive.

Prerequisites

This script strongly recommends Linux or some sort of POSIX system (such as macOS), preferably from a rented VPS and not your personal machine or phone.

• https://github.com/bibanon/tubeup
• https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/main/Formula/t/tubeup.rb
• https://archive.org/
• https://wiki.bibanon.org/

Fair Warning: Long Linux nerd rambling ahead.

I actually was responding to another post where someone revealed to another that Linux is not free of corporate influence. I started to write out this spiraling drawl and realized it had nothing to do with the OP, but thought maybe someone else might find it interesting here.

Feel free to correct me should I have some details wrong, I wrote this off the cuff.

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The history of Linux is inreresting, but just remember, Linux “won” in some senses just like how Windows, Apple, Intel, etc. “won” their respective domains. Microsoft “won” corporate desktop and office tooling ecosystems. Apple “won” the consumer computing and personal devices (tablet/phone) ecosystems. Linux “won” the servers ecosystem. And the history of how that happened is just as interesting as the fabled stories as to how Microsoft or Apple came to prominence today.

The only reason new Linux users are sometimes caught off guard by the fact that Linux is highly influenced by corporate entities is because they haven’t looked into the tumultuous and messy, but very interesting, history of UNIX, Linux, GNU, BSD, and others.

What follows is not entirely related, but take this example of how Linux ended up, perhaps by sheer luck, to have ended up as one of the dominant surviving UNIX-like OSes today:

Take the 1992 lawsuit by UNIX System Laboratories vs BSD. One might say, okay, but what does this have to do with Linux? Well Linus Torvalds created Linux in 1991. BSD had been around since 1978, and had been gaining considerable popularity during the 1980s. BSD has its own messy history, but the short of the long of it is that Bell Labs allowed UNIX to be utilized, researched, and modified by Universities, which resulted in an explosion of UNIX derivative OSes (distributions), including one Berkeley School Distribution, or BSD. During this time period, the attempts to standardize UNIX by vendors resulted in what came to be known as The UNIX wars. It was in the culmination of these “wars” that aforementioned lawsuit occurred, during which BSD development was ground to a halt (eventually forks of BSD like the ones you see today are the sole inheritors of the BSD family of OSes). This was during the same time the Linux Kernel and the GNU OS would come onto the scene and essentially eat BSD’s cake.

In essence, were it not for the timing of this lawsuit (which you can view as unfortunate or serendipitous depending on your views of BSD vs Linux), we might all be talking about BSD the way we talk about Linux today. Maybe, even then that’s highly speculative.

OC by @z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml

Like a cult classic movie, Godot 4 has only gotten better with age. The first few releases focused on stability, granting the engine a rock-solid foundation that could be safely and easily iterated upon. Gradually, this has shifted more towards polish and quality-of-life, peaking in Godot 4.6 giving developers the tools to put them and their workflow first.

This brings us to Godot 4.7. With 3 years under its belt, the 4.7 Director’s Cut offers colors of never-before-reached intensity. HDR output radiates bold and brilliant new hues, allowing your projects to shine like never before. Inject some juice to your UI without breaking a sweat using the new Control offset transforms. Find the plugin that will help push your game even further with the new Asset Store, bask in the ease of creation with standalone Android exporting and publishing, and helm a bevy of new features to eliminate any remaining friction between you and your vision.

KDE Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile too) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. In addition to other hardware, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.7.

This new major release brings back the Oxygen and Air themes from the KDE 4 era, including the Horos wallpaper. The ability to switch virtual desktops independently for each output/display was added. It is now easier to toggle between light and dark mode directly from the Brightness & Color widget. You can now test microphones from the audio settings, and assign a custom global keyboard shortcut for “push-to-talk” microphone un-mute. If you have Plasma keyboard enabled and a physical keyboard key is long-pressed a selection of related special characters is presented to choose from. When it comes to printing it is now much easier to connect to shared printers on Windows networks, and a new print queue management tool offers more power than ever before. Vietnamese lunar calendar was added, and you can now select the default system calendar application. It is now possible to set mouse and tablet stylus pointers to be synced. ICC color profile can now be applied when HDR mode is active. Graphical performance has been improved and power usage lowered for CPU-rendered applications, some full-screen applications and on Intel graphics hardware. This release also features an experimental preview of the Union theming engine, which is based on web-like CSS definitions and will make creating and using new themes easier in the future.

For complete list of new features and changes check out the KDE Plasma 6.7 release announcement and the complete changelog.