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Archives For November 30, 1999

GNOME 46 to Add “Variable Refresh Rate” Configure Option

Last updated: March 6, 2024 — Leave a comment

GNOME 46, the default desktop for Ubuntu 24.04 and Fedora 40, will finally have the option to enable Variable Refresh Rate.

Variable Refresh Rate, VRR in short, is a feature for TV, monitor, and other displays, allowing to adjust refresh rate on the fly to match the frame rate of the graphics card. Which, is useful for smoother viewing experience, and reducing screen tearing.

GNOME has the feature request for VRR support 3 years ago. It’s finally merged and planned for GNOME 46, which will be released later this month!

According to this request, it’s an experimental feature. User needs to enable it first either via Dconf Editor or gsettings tool via the command:

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['variable-refresh-rate']"

Then, log out and back in. Gnome Control Center, aka Settings, will have the option in “Displays” panel, when you click expand the “Refresh Rate”.

image from gitlab.gnome.org

Once enabled the feature, and selected your preferred value, the Refresh Rate will be displayed as “Variable (up to xxx.xx Hz)”.

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Ubuntu 24.04 Going to Drop the Games from Installer

Last updated: March 2, 2024 — 1 Comment

Ubuntu has a few offline games out-of-the-box. Now, the developer team is going to remove them from the installer in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

Since Ubuntu 23.10, Ubuntu Desktop no longer provides ‘Minimal installation‘ option in the installer. Instead, it’s “re-named” to “Default installation” with just the essentials, web browser and basic utilities. User can choose “Full installation” option for the office, media player, games, and other app packages that’s previously installed by default in old Ubuntu releases.

Just a few days ago, the desktop team proposed to remove the games from full installation, then made the decision with wider support.

Meaning that the game packages may be completely removed from the iso image, though they are still available to install in Ubuntu Software (App Center).


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VS Code 1.87 Released with Voice Dictation in Editor

Last updated: March 1, 2024 — Leave a comment

Visual Studio Code announced version 1.87 as the new February 2024 release!

The release features voice dictation support in editor. With VS Code Speech extension installed, user can use voice to dictate directly into the editor.

It can be started by pressing Ctrl+Alt+V on keyboard, and stop via Escape key. Or, press and hold the key combination (Ctrl+Alt+V) to enable walky-talky mode, that the voice recognition stops as soon as the keys released.

The VS Code Speech extension now has 26 supported languages support. Each language comes as its own extension. And user can choose between them using accessibility.voice.speechLanguage setting.

Other changes in the release include:

  • Multi-cursor inline completions are previewed and applied at both the primary and the secondary cursor positions.
  • Rename suggestions from Copilot.
  • Pylance extension for Python support now has an Add Imports code action for adding missing imports.
  • Enable sticky scroll by defaul, and increase maximum display number from 10 to 20.
  • GitHub Copilot Chat suggests templates and features when adding dev container configuration files to a workspace
  • Side-by-side preview refactoring – Preview refactorings across files with multi diff editor.


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Kid3 Audio Tag Editor 3.9.5 Released with Webp Image Support

Last updated: February 25, 2024 — Leave a comment

Kid3, the free open-source Qt based audio tag editor, release new 3.9.5 version on Saturday.

The release brings keyboard shortcut support for its built-in player. Meaning user can specify custom shortcuts to control play/pause, stop playback, next/previous track playback actions.

The release also added new option to fix the audio output used. And, the code has been modernized for C++17 and now supports TagLib 2.0.

Configure Kid3 shortcut for audio playback

Other changes include:

  • Webp image format support.
  • arm64 support for macOS.
  • Snap package support (available in Ubuntu Software)
  • Clicking again on 1 star makes star rating disappear.
  • Support ‘\|’ to escape string list separators.
  • Support multiple values in APE text items.

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NVIDIA Driver 550.54.14 Released with Better Wayland Support

Last updated: February 24, 2024 — Leave a comment

NVIDIA announced the first stable release for 550 series Linux driver this Friday. It’s NVIDIA Driver 550.54.14 released as latest production branch version.

The release brings better support for Wayland, the more security touchscreen and HiDPI friendly display server, that’s already default in Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux with recent GNOME Desktop. They include:

  • NVIDIA VDPAU driver for hardware video acceleration can run in XWayland.
  • Support GNOME ‘Night Light’ and KDE ‘Night Color’ features on Wayland.
  • Support for PRIME render offload to Vulkan Wayland WSI.
  • Add support for virtual reality displays, such as the SteamVR platform, on Wayland compositors support DRM leasing.
  • Fix Source 2 engine games hang on Wayland session.
  • Fix that Wayland apps sometimes run at extreme low frame rate on Maxwell, Volta, and Pascal series GPUs.
  • Fix VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) not working with Wayland.

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Wine 9.3 is Out with New HID Pointer Device Driver

Last updated: February 24, 2024 — Leave a comment

Wine, the free open-source software for running Windows apps on Linux, macOS, & BSD, announced a new development 9.3 release this Friday.

The new Wine 9.3 improved proxy configuration reading and writing by using new option to query global proxy settings, and wininet functions to set proxy settings.

The release also introduced a new HID pointer device driver, but only matches with digitizer devices for now, it could later be used for HID mice but for now wine use a different path for that.

Other changes in the release include timezone database update, more exception fixes on ARM platforms, and a total of 23 bug-fixes for apps and games, including Free Download Manager, Final Fantasy XI, Solidworks 2008, Virtual Life 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, and more. For more, see the official release note.

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Ubuntu 22.04.4 Released with New Arm64 ISO for Machine Learning

Last updated: February 23, 2024 — Leave a comment

The Ubuntu team announced the 4th point release of Ubuntu 22.04 this Thursday!

The new release comes with a new arm64+largemem ISO for ARM servers. The iso includes a kernel with 64k page size, which is typically used for machine learning, databases with many large entries, and high performance computing. However, it comes at the cost of increased memory use, only suitable for servers with plenty of memory.

For default kernel with 4k page size, user can switch to the new kernel, by installing linux-generic-64k-hwe-22.04 without re-installing the whole system.

“As usual, this point release includes many updates and updated installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and corrections for other high-severity bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.” said in the announcement.

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GIMP 2.99.18 Released as Last Dev for Next Major 3.0

Last updated: February 22, 2024 — Leave a comment

GIMP image editor announced the new 2.99.18 development release today. It’s marked as the last dev release for the next major 3.0 version.

The new release has a new welcome dialog, with Personalize tab to set your favorite theme, icon and font scaling, and select program language, Contribute tab with a few links for who want to contribute to GIMP, and Create tab with quick buttons to create, open, open recent images. It as well has an option to enable on every start.

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You can now Test Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop Installer in Web Browser

Last updated: February 21, 2024 — 1 Comment

For those who are interested in the development of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, the developer team has opened a channel for the desktop installer usability test.

Anyone can try out the desktop installer by simply visiting a page in web browser. It will ask to grant permission to share the screen of browser window (Screen Sharing), so developer team can know where you spend time, get stuck, and go smoothly.

Also it asks to enable Microphone, so you can tell what you’re thinking as you go. And, of course either or both can be disabled!
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