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These are the Linux Apps I Couldn't Live Without in 2025  It's FOSS

It has been a busy second half of the year for the Search Central Live (SCL) team! Zipping through the busy streets of Bangkok to the skyscrapers of Tokyo and the vibrant harbor of Hong Kong, we've been on a mission to connect, share, and—most importantly—listen.

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Canaima project, which produces a set of Linux distributions, based on Debian "Testing" and designed for use in Venezuela's public sector, has announced the release of Canaima GNU/Linux 8.3: "Canaima GNU/Linux, a project of the National Center for Information Technologies (CNTI), launched its new update, Canaima GNU/Linux 8.3....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. PorteuX is a Linux distribution based on Slackware Linux. The project has published a new version, PorteuX 2.5, which introduces Flatpak support and updates the available desktop editions. "This release brings Flatpak to PorteuX. On the first run, the user should provide a valid path where the Flatpak....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The developer of Pearl Linux OS has published a new release of the project's Debian-based desktop Linux distribution with a macOS-like user interface called PDE: "Our second release running on Debian 13 'Trixie' as the base. This release uses our own desktop environment called PDE. PDE is a....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. GuideOS, a beginner-friendly German Linux distribution based on Debian 13, has reached version 1.0. Created jointly with the LinuxGuides.de project, GuideOS offers a customised Cinnamon desktop, some useful utilities developed in-house, and a good selection of open-source software, all localised into German. The English translation of the release....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Volker Theile has announced the release of OpenMediaVault 8.0-12, a major update of the specialist Debian-based Linux distribution for network-attached storage (NAS) servers. The 8.x series of OpenMediaVault is based on the stable Debian 13 release: "Since no critical errors were reported during the RC phase, it is....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Dario Camonita has announced the release of Parrot 7.0, a major update of the project's Debian-based Linux distribution designed for security specialists, hackers, developers, system administrators and network engineers. The new version is based on Debian 13 and comes with KDE Plasma as the default desktop: "The Parrot....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Andreas Mueller has announced the release of Gnoppix AI Linux 26, an updated build of the project's Debian-based Linux distribution with integrated privacy and artificial intelligence features. This version replaces Firefox with LibreWolf as the default web browser and Thunderbird with Betterbird as the preferred email client: "As....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Besgnulinux, a Debian-based Linux distribution with the lightweight JWM window manager as the preferred desktop user interface, has been updated to version 3-2. The new release is available in three separate editions - "Full", "Simple" and "Core". While the first two come with a full graphical environment (the....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The postmarketOS team has announced a new version of its operating system for mobile devices and desktop computers. The new version, 25.12, is based on Alpine Linux 3.23 and includes several improvements from the upgrade, along with updates to the distribution's user interfaces. "As always we target the....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. elementary OS is an Ubuntu-based distribution which runs the Pantheon desktop environment. The project's latest release is version 8.1 and it incorporates several small improvements and enhancements all across the desktop, package management, and display stack. Support for ARM hardware has also improved: "Today, we are proud to....

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: South Africans ... have found a remedy for power cuts that have plagued people in the developing world for years. Thanks to swiftly falling prices of Chinese made solar panels and batteries, they now draw their power from the sun. These aren't the tiny, old-school solar lanterns that once powered a lightbulb or TV in rural communities. Today, solar and battery systems are deployed across a variety of businesses -- auto factories and wineries, gold mines and shopping malls. And they are changing everyday life, trade and industry in Africa's biggest economy. This has happened at startling speed. Solar has risen from almost nothing in 2019 to roughly 10 percent of South Africa's electricity-generating capacity. No longer do South Africans depend entirely on giant coal-burning plants that have defined how people worldwide got their electricity for more than a century. That's forcing the nation's already beleaguered electric utility to rethink its business as revenues evaporate. Joel Nana, a project manager with Sustainable Energy Africa, a Cape Town-based organization, called it "a bottom-up movement" to sidestep a generations-old problem. "The broken system is unreliable electricity, expensive electricity or no electricity at all," he said. "We've been living in this situation forever." What's happening in South Africa is repeating across the continent. Key to this shift: China's ambition to lead the world in clean energy. The report says that more than 7 gigawatts of solar capacity have been installed in South Africa over the past five years -- about 1/10 of the country's total installed capacity (55 GW). And most of this new solar capacity is privately owned and installed by households and businesses rather than utilities. Across the continent, Chinese solar imports rose 50% in the first 10 months of 2025. Cheap Chinese solar is rapidly reshaping Africa's energy landscape from the bottom up but it's also shifting geopolitical influence, hollowing out local manufacturing opportunities, and deepening divides between those who can afford energy independence and those who can't. "The solar surge does little to address the most pressing social and economic problems of developing countries like South Africa, the need to generate new jobs for millions of young citizens," reports the NYT. "Installation labor is local, but the panels and batteries are almost all made in China." Further reading: Why Solarpunk Is Already Happening In Africa

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an opinion piece for Computerworld, columnist Steven Vaughan-Nichols argues that restrictive visa policies and a hostile border climate under the Trump administration are driving foreign tech workers, researchers, and conference speakers away from the U.S. The result, he says, is a gradual shift of talent, events, and long-term innovation toward more welcoming regions such as Europe, Canada, and Asia. From the report: I go to a lot of tech conferences -- 13 in 2025 -- and many of those I attend are outside the U.S.; several are in London, one is in Amsterdam, another in Paris, and two in Tokyo. Wherever I went this past year, when we weren't talking about AI, Linux, the cloud, or open-source software, the top non-tech topic for non-Americans involved the sweeping changes that have occurred since President Donald J. Trump returned to office last January. The conversations generally ended with something like this: "I'm not taking a job or going to a conference in the United States." Honestly, who can blame them? Under Trump, America now has large "Keep Out!" and "No Trespassing!" signs effectively posted. I've known several top tech people who tried to come to the U.S. for technology shows with proper visas and paperwork, but were still turned away at the border. Who wants to fly for 8+ hours for a conference, only to be refused entry at the last minute, and be forced to fly back? I know many of the leading trade show organizers, and it's not just me who's seeing this. They universally agree that getting people from outside the States to agree to come to the U.S. is increasingly difficult. Many refuse even to try to come. As a result, show managers have begun to close U.S.-based events and are seeking to replace them with shows in Europe, Canada, and Asia. [...] Once upon a time, everyone who was anyone in tech was willing to uproot their lives to come to the U.S. Here, they could make a good living. They could collaborate, publish, and build companies in jurisdictions that welcome them, and meet their peers at conferences. Now, they must run a gauntlet at the U.S. border and neither a green card nor U.S. citizenship guarantees they won't be abused by the federal government. Trump's America seems bound and determined to become a second-rate tech power. His administration can loosen all the restrictions it wants on AI, but without top global talent, U.S. tech prowess will decline. That's not good for America, the tech industry or the larger world.

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One-Netbook has unveiled the OneXSugar Wallet, the first gaming handheld with a folding OLED display. The Verge reports: The OneXSugar Wallet was announced on China's Weibo yesterday, but with few details about its features and capabilities. That folding OLED screen has a resolution of 2480 x 1860 pixels, and the handheld will be powered by an unspecified "Qualcomm gaming platform flagship processor," but its performance and emulation capabilities are unknown. Based on photos and a video released by One-Netbook, the OneXSugar Wallet will feature a standard set of controls including asymmetrical thumbsticks, four action buttons, and a D-pad situated on either side of the lower half of its display. There are also shoulder buttons and triggers on the back of the handheld, and a pair of front-facing speakers flanking the top half of the screen. The biggest question is how much will the handheld cost...

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PC Gamer argues that 2025 was a year full of high-profile AI embarrassments across games and entertainment, with Disney and Lucasfilm serving as the "opening salvo." From the report: At a TED talk back in April, Lucasfilm senior vice president of creative innovation Rob Bredow presented a demonstration of what he called "a new era of technology." Across 50 years of legendary innovation in miniature design, practical effects, and computer animation, Lucasfilm and its miracle workers at Industrial Light & Magic have blazed the trail for visual effects in creative storytelling -- and now Bredow was offering a glimpse at what wonders might come next. That glimpse, created over two weeks by an ILM artist, was Star Wars: Field Guide: a two-minute fizzle reel of AI-generated blue lions, tentacled walruses, turtles with alligator heads, and zebra-stripe chimpanzees, all lazily spliced together from the shuffled bits of normal-ass animals. These "aliens" were less Star Wars than they were Barnum & Bailey. It felt like a singular embarrassment: Instead of showing its potential, generative AI just demonstrated how out of touch a major media force had become. And then it kept happening. At the time, I wondered whether evoking the legacy of Lucasfilm just to declare creative bankruptcy had provoked enough disgusted responses to convince Disney to slow its roll on AI ventures. In the months since, however, it's clear that Star Wars: Field Guide wasn't a cautionary tale. It was a mission statement. Disney is boldly, firmly placing its hand on the hot stove. Other embarrassing AI use cases include Fortnite's AI-powered Darth Vader NPC, Activision's use of AI-generated art in what was widely described as the "weakest" Call of Duty launch in years, McDonald's short-lived AI holiday ad, and Disney's $1 billion licensing deal with OpenAI.

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Intel Boosts Xe Driver with Multi-GPU SVM in Linux Kernel 7.0 for AI  WebProNews

Shotcut 25.12 Adds NVIDIA NVENC Encoder Support to Screen Recording on Linux/X11  9to5Linux

Shotcut 25.12 Adds NVIDIA NVENC Encoder Support to Screen Recording on Linux/X11  9to5Linux

Shotcut 25.12 Adds NVIDIA NVENC Encoder Support to Screen Recording on Linux/X11  9to5Linux