NVDEC doesn't come with Nova + NVK, but maybe Vulkan Video will take care of hardware decoding in the future...

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So... which game engines are better on Proton with Vulkan? As far as I know, Unity is worse than DXVK. Is that true across the board?

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I will finally be able to get rid of Solanum!

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GNOME 49 will likely deprecate X11. GNOME 50 will remove it entirely. There was some intent to get it deprecated in GNOME 48, but that suggestion came too late in the cycle. Now that Global Shortcuts are implemented and Orca works, plus color management is well on its way, there is nothing blocking deprecation of X11.

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GIMP 3.0 is finally out! With many great improvements, including non-destructive editing.

And all I've read online is:

* They should change the name already! (which is a fair point)
* Can you draw circles yet? (it's coming; it's slated for 3.2 and is likely the next big thing - they just need to get vectors working)
* The interface sucks and the developers refuse to admit it! (they're working on improving the UI now that the 3.0 release is finally out of the way)
* Why not just use Krita?
* Can I copy and paste things without dealing with a floating selection yet? GIMP is so dumb! (yes, floating selections are gone now)
* Great, now port it to GTK4. That'll probably be another 12 years, lol! (the GTK 3 port involved getting rid of all the custom GTK2 extensions, planning for a GTK4 port, and not relying on GTK3 features removed in GTK4, so this will be a lot easier)
* Wow, all that time just to port it to GTK3. And they originally created the toolkit, how ironic, haha! (read the changelog; it contains so much more than just that. For a start, it also involved migrating from Python 2 to Python 3! There were a huge number of feature changes too.)
* So I wonder if anything is happening with that 1 million dollars worth of donations in BTC. (fair point)

People really hate GIMP! I don't think I've ever seen this many people so desperate to tear apart a free software program's newest release that wasn't about a license change. And GIMP's still as free as it ever was.

Many of the people developing GIMP today aren't even the same people who were around 20 years ago! Jehan, the current maintainer, started contributing in 2013, if I remember rightly. The original developers abandoned it long ago, and now work on CockroachDB, an offering that was originally free software but was rug-pulled and became anti-commercial.

I think the contributors today have done a great job improving GIMP. It's a lot more usable now. And it really looks like a thankless job at times.

So, thank you, Jehan, Alx Sa, and everyone else working on GIMP. It's nice to be able to use it to get my simple image manipulation tasks done on Linux. Hope the Wilbur Foundation is up and running soon.

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I can report that the desktop session is still X11. I wonder what's on their shortlist that makes them not touch that default yet.

From KDE's own list, accessibility seems like the only obvious one: https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues [External Link]

Otherwise the Wayland session fixes a lot of X11 issues such that it should be a better experience for most people now: https://community.kde.org/Plasma/X11_Known_Significant_Issues [External Link]

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In contrast, my Steam Replay stats went from 90% Linux in 2022, to 88% in 2023, to 31% in 2024... I try not to think about it.

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Without Steam, this thing is dead in the water. Steam is what makes Windows handhelds work at all.

Microsoft could make a better product by making it easy to access games on GOG, Epic, Steam, and the Microsoft Store without a convoluted interface like normal Windows or SteamOS. Will they?

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I'm okay with games temporarily being encumbered with extreme DRM like Denuvo if it is removed within the year. It just means I get to buy a DRM-free game at a discount.

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I don't understand why they are counted. They should be on their own client. I've never heard of such a thing outside of Steam.

Why shouldn't Chinese Steam users be counted? They make up a great portion of the whole.

On the other hand, they have access to significantly fewer games, if I recall correctly.

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Wow, macOS slipped below 1%.

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