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GE-Proton 10-2 brings some essential fixes for Windows games on Linux, SteamOS / Steam Deck  GamingOnLinux

Learn more about our partnership with the University of Michigan to bring AI training and more career skills to students.Learn more about our partnership with the University of Michigan to bring AI training and more career skills to students.

Intel Gaudi 3 PCIe Accelerator Cards Now Available - Still Waiting On Upstream Linux Driver  Phoronix

"The Danish government plans to evaluate the prospect of beginning a nuclear power programme," reports the Telegraph, noting that this week Denmark lifted a nuclear power ban imposed 40 years ago. Unlike its neighbours in Sweden and Germany, Denmark has never had a civil nuclear power programme. It has only ever had three small research reactors, the last of which closed in 2001. Most of the renewed interest in nuclear seen around the world stems from the expected growth in electricity demand from AI data centres, but Denmark is different. The Danes are concerned about possible blackouts similar to the one that struck Iberia recently. Like Spain and Portugal, Denmark is heavily dependent on weather-based renewable energy which is not very compatible with the way power grids operate... ["The spinning turbines found in fossil-fuelled energy systems provide inertia and act as a shock absorber to stabilise the grid during sudden changes in supply or demand," explains a diagram in the article, while solar and wind energy provide no inertia.] The Danish government is worried about how it will continue to decarbonise its power grid if it closes all of its fossil fuel generators leaving minimal inertia. There are only three realistic routes to decarbonisation that maintain physical inertia on the grid: hydropower, geothermal energy and nuclear. Hydro and geothermal depend on geographic and geological features that not every country possesses. While renewable energy proponents argue that new types of inverters could provide synthetic inertia, trials have so far not been particularly successful and there are economic challenges that are difficult to resolve. Denmark is realising that in the absence of large-scale hydroelectric or geothermal energy, it may have little choice other than to re-visit nuclear power if it is to maintain a stable, low carbon electricity grid. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

5 Paid and Donation-Based Linux Distros  Yahoo

All Linux Is Not Free: 5 Distros That Ask for Your Money  How-To Geek

Intel Announces Arc Pro B-Series, "Project Battlematrix" Linux Software Improvements  Phoronix

Open-Source NVIDIA Blackwell + Hopper Support Slated For Linux 6.16  Phoronix

Device Memory TCP TX Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 6.16  Phoronix

Microsoft finally solve the Linux dual-boot issue after 9 months  GamingOnLinux

PowerVR Rogue BXS-4-64 GPU Firmware Uploaded To linux-firmware.git  Phoronix

glibc Vulnerability Exposes Millions of Linux Systems to Code Execution Attacks  CybersecurityNews

"Despite many obstacles — and what you may read elsewhere — electric-vehicle sales continue to grow at a healthy pace in the U.S. market," Cox Automotive reported this week. "Roughly 7.5% of total new-vehicle sales in the first quarter were electric vehicles, an increase from 7% a year earlier." An anonymous reader shared this analysis from Autoweek: "Despite a cloud of uncertainty around future EV interest and potential economic headwinds hanging over the automotive industry, consumer demand for electric vehicles has remained stable," according to the J.D. Power 2025 US Electric Vehicle Consideration Study released yesterday. Specifically, the study showed that 24% of vehicle shoppers in the U.S. say they are "very likely" to consider purchasing an EV and 35% say they are "somewhat likely," both of which figures remain unchanged from a year ago... Globally the numbers are even more pro-EV. Electric car sales exceeded 17 million globally in 2024, reaching a sales share of more than 20%, according to a report issued this week by the International Energy Agency. "Just the additional 3.5 million electric cars sold in 2024 compared with the previous year is more than the total number of electric cars sold worldwide in 2020," the IEA said. China, which has mandated increases in EV sales, is the leader in getting electric vehicles on the road, with electric cars accounting for almost half of all Chinese car sales in 2024, the IEA said. "The over 11 million electric cars sold in China last year were more than global sales just 2 years earlier. As a result of continued strong growth, 1 in 10 cars on Chinese roads is now electric." Interesting figures on U.S. EV sales from the article: 2024 EV sales rose 7.3% from 2023, according to Cox Automotive data. "Last year American consumers purchased 1.3 million electric vehicles, which was a new record, according to data from KBB. "Sales have never stopped growing, and the percentage of new cars sold powered purely by gasoline continues to slip.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechCrunch reports: The world's only net-positive fusion experiment has been steadily ramping up the amount of power it produces, TechCrunch has learned. In recent attempts, the team at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Ignition Facility (NIF) increased the yield of the experiment, first to 5.2 megajoules and then again to 8.6 megajoules, according to a source with knowledge of the experiment. The new results are significant improvements over the historic experiment in 2022, which was the first controlled fusion reaction to generate more energy than the it consumed. The 2022 shot generated 3.15 megajoules, a small bump over the 2.05 megajoules that the lasers delivered to the BB-sized fuel pellet. None of the shots to date have been effective enough to feed electrons back into the grid, let alone to offset the energy required to power the entire facility — the facility wasn't designed to do that. The first net-positive shot, for example, required 300 megajoules to power the laser system alone. But they are continued proof that controlled nuclear fusion is more than hypothetical.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When you sell your shares of stocks/ETFs/mutual funds in a taxable brokerage account, your broker will also record the specific shares and the original value at purchase (cost basis) at which you bought them. Even if you don’t expect to sell your shares very often, it can still be important how you set the cost basis tracking option inside your brokerage account.

Allan Roth has a useful ETF.com article about why your choice of cost basis tracking could possibly make a difference of thousands of dollars or more. Here’s his real-world example:

Not too long ago, a very seasoned and knowledgeable investor shared a story of a mistake he recently made. He meant to buy 300 shares of the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI) but mistakenly punched an extra zero and bought 3,000 instead.

He quickly realized his mistake and sold the 2,700 shares he accidentally bought. The ETF was only up slightly, and he used the Minimum Tax (MinTax) cost basis method on Vanguard’s brokerage platform. He was shocked to learn he just realized a long-term capital gain of about $150,000. […] Because the recently purchased lot of VTI had a tiny short-term gain, it was last in the prioritization of sales and his prior lots with large long-term gains were sold.

Are your current settings still the default? For example, at Vanguard, the default cost basis method appears to be:

• Average cost (AvgCost) as the default cost basis method for mutual funds at Vanguard.
• First-in, first-out (FIFO) as the default cost basis method for all investments other than mutual funds.

You can usually change this setting. Here’s what I see as my available options at Vanguard:

At Fidelity, the default cost basis method appears to be First-in, first-out (FIFO) as well for brokerage accounts. Here’s what I see as my available options at Fidelity:

Roth suggests that the best practice is to manually choose specific tax lots. In my experience, using the SpecID setting at Vanguard will force you to choose the “specific shares” that you want to sell when you enter the order. This has come in handy for me, forcing me to think about the tax consequences before I submit. Roth also shares a recent change that Vanguard only allows market orders (no limit orders) on SpecID sales. He decides that it is more important to get the tax basis right than the small added safety of a limit order. I would agree.

At Fidelity, when you sell the shares, on the order ticket there is either a “Sell Specific” action option, or after “Sell” you can click on a small link to “Specify shares”. Unfortunately, I don’t see an option that forces you to manually pick a specific tax lot. Fidelity does a good job of presenting the tax lots clearly on your Positions screen, but you’ll still have to remember on your own when the time comes.

However, if you do forget but remember quickly afterward, I found these instructions to reassign the tax lots before settlement:

Follow these steps to specify tax lots AFTER a trade is placed but before settlement:

– Log into Fidelity.com and Select “Accounts & Trade,” then choose “Account Positions”
– Navigate to the “Closed Positions” link above the “Symbol” column
– Click on “Select Action” next to the appropriate account and choose “Reassign Lots”

Most major brokerage firms should have a similar option, although some of the new ones may not. For example, Robinhood only added their Tax Lots feature in December 2024, more than a decade after starting out. Yet even they admit the potential benefits:

Tax Lots allow customers to choose specific assets to sell—whether it’s the ones held long term, the ones with the lowest or highest cost basis, or the ones that might have experienced the greatest loss. This gives customers the ability to make more informed decisions and manage their tax bill.

In any case, I used this as a timely reminder to be double-check all of your current brokerage account settings.

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. This week in DistroWatch Weekly:
Review: GoboLinux 017.01
News: Red Hat releases Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 to customers, Debian announces first release candidate of Debian Installer for "Trixie", openSUSE retires YaST
Questions and answers: How to run applications which rely on X11 on Wayland
Released last week: Nobara Project 42,....

OpenAI CEO and Sam Altman believe Artificial General Intelligence could arrive within the next few years. But the speculations of some technologists "are getting ahead of reality," writes the New York Times, adding that many scientists "say no one will reach AGI without a new idea — something beyond the powerful neural networks that merely find patterns in data. That new idea could arrive tomorrow. But even then, the industry would need years to develop it." "The technology we're building today is not sufficient to get there," said Nick Frosst, a founder of the AI startup Cohere who previously worked as a researcher at Google and studied under the most revered AI researcher of the last 50 years. "What we are building now are things that take in words and predict the next most likely word, or they take in pixels and predict the next most likely pixel. That's very different from what you and I do." In a recent survey of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a 40-year-old academic society that includes some of the most respected researchers in the field, more than three-quarters of respondents said the methods used to build today's technology were unlikely to lead to AGI. Opinions differ in part because scientists cannot even agree on a way of defining human intelligence, arguing endlessly over the merits and flaws of IQ tests and other benchmarks. Comparing our own brains to machines is even more subjective. This means that identifying AGI is essentially a matter of opinion.... And scientists have no hard evidence that today's technologies are capable of performing even some of the simpler things the brain can do, like recognizing irony or feeling empathy. Claims of AGI's imminent arrival are based on statistical extrapolations — and wishful thinking. According to various benchmark tests, today's technologies are improving at a consistent rate in some notable areas, like math and computer programming. But these tests describe only a small part of what people can do. Humans know how to deal with a chaotic and constantly changing world. Machines struggle to master the unexpected — the challenges, small and large, that do not look like what has happened in the past. Humans can dream up ideas that the world has never seen. Machines typically repeat or enhance what they have seen before. That is why Frosst and other sceptics say pushing machines to human-level intelligence will require at least one big idea that the world's technologists have not yet dreamed up. There is no way of knowing how long that will take. "A system that's better than humans in one way will not necessarily be better in other ways," Harvard University cognitive scientist Steven Pinker said. "There's just no such thing as an automatic, omniscient, omnipotent solver of every problem, including ones we haven't even thought of yet. There's a temptation to engage in a kind of magical thinking. But these systems are not miracles. They are very impressive gadgets." While Google's AlphaGo could be humans in a game with "a small, limited set of rules," the article points out that tthe real world "is bounded only by the laws of physics. Modelling the entirety of the real world is well beyond today's machines, so how can anyone be sure that AGI — let alone superintelligence — is just around the corner?" And they offer this alternative perspective from Matteo Pasquinelli, a professor of the philosophy of science at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, Italy. "AI needs us: living beings, producing constantly, feeding the machine. It needs the originality of our ideas and our lives."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Kotaku: One of the most striking things about Bungie's Marathon is its presentation. The sci-fi extraction shooter combines bleak settings with bright colors in a way that makes it feel a bit like a sneaker promo meets Ghost in the Shell, or as designer Jeremy Skoog put it, "Y2K Cyberpunk mixed with Acid Graphic Design Posters." But it now looks like at least a few of the visual design elements that appeared in the recent alpha test were lifted from eight-year old work by an outside artist. "The Marathon alpha released recently and its environments are covered with assets lifted from poster designs I made in 2017," Bluesky user antire.alâ posted on Thursday. She shared two images showing elements of her work and where they appeared in Marathon's gameplay, including a rotated version of her own logo. A poster full of small repeating icon patterns also seems to be all but recreated in Marathon's press kit ARG and website... Bungie has responded and blamed the incident on a former employee. The studio says it's reaching out to the artist in question and conducting a full review of its in-game assets for Marathon ["and implementing stricter checks to document all artist contributions."] "We immediately investigated a concern regarding unauthorized use of artist decals in Marathon and confirmed that a former Bungie artist included these in a texture sheet that was ultimately used in-game," the studio posted on X. "As a matter of policy, we do not use the work of artists without their permission..." their X post emphasizes. "We value the creativity and dedication of all artists who contribute to our games, and we are committed to doing right by them. Thank you for bringing this to our attention."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux 6.15-rc7 Released With AMD Zen 6 CPU Identification, New Intel & ARM Mitigations  Phoronix

15 Popular Games You Can Surprisingly Play on Linux  How-To Geek