The team behind Blur Busters has created an overlay called ShaderBeam that finally brings its motion-blur-reducing CRT Beam Simulator to the desktop environment and PC games. The overlay can be downloaded from GitHub.

Blur Buster's CRT emulator was previously only available in a demo format, through RetroArch, or n ithe VintVideo Player. ShaderBeam changes this and enables the emulator to be used in Windows with any Windows application. To get the app to work, all you'll need is a 100Hz display or greater and Windows 10 or newer.

Ncurses 6.6 was released today prior to closing out 2025. This programming library update for creating terminal-based text user interfaces (TUIs) features a variety of great improvements for ending out the year.

Ncurses 6.6 remains source compatible with Ncurses 6.5 and versions going back to v5.0. A big focus with Ncurses 6.6 is on enhancing the MinGW / Windows Terminal driver. The modern Windows Terminal driver for Ncurses that has been in development the past half-decade has seen a variety of improvements to the terminal driver code.

Extension allows you to read articles from (supported) sites that implement a paywall.

You can also add a domain as custom site and try to bypass the paywall. Weekly updates are released for fixes and new sites.

Chrome: https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean

Firefox: https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean

Adblocker filter (& userscripts): https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters

PS GitFlic only has Russian interface (use like Google Translate).

• Maintained by: https://x.com/Magnolia1234B
• https://torrentfreak.com/bypass-paywalls-clean-shut-down-for-dmca-anti-circumvention-violations-240820/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean

During the 1990s, everyone wanted to surf the information super-highway — also known as the World Wide Web or just ‘Internet’ — but not everyone was interested in getting one of those newfangled personal computers when they already had a perfect good television set. This opened a market for TV-connected thin clients that could browse the web with a much lower entry fee, with the WebTV service being launched in 1996. Bought by Microsoft in 1997 and renamed MSN TV, it lasted until 2013. Yet rather than this being the end, the service is now being revived by members of the community through the WebTV Redialed project.

Github

Shotcut, a popular open-source video editor, has released version 25.12, introducing one of its most significant image-quality upgrades to date with full 10-bit CPU video processing and expanded linear color handling.

Until now, 10-bit video support was limited when working outside GPU effects, forcing users to avoid transitions, blending, or many CPU-based filters to prevent a fallback to 8-bit processing. With this release, many CPU video effects have been ported to support both 10-bit and 12-bit sources, including transitions and track compositing.

As we’re about to say goodbye to 2025, I decided to look back at the year through the lens of Linux and open source, and recall for our readers the most significant developments it brought to the ecosystem. I’ll start with something fundamental, of course: the Linux kernel.

Hey guys this is an image viewer i made in pure c it uses an exe to launch so no need for folders or dependencies and its under a megabyte in size and is the most lightweight and user-friendly for user it has more details in the link i want others to test it out to give their feedback hope you all could do that for me. Link for it: https://github.com/samsa12/Pix

Haruna, a Qt-based media player developed as part of the KDE ecosystem and built on top of MPV, has released version 1.7. The most visible changes center on playlists, as the player now supports advanced sorting and grouping, making larger music collections easier to navigate.

The application also remembers and restores the last active playlist on startup, reducing friction for users who rely on persistent playback queues. In addition, a new context menu entry opens files directly in Hana, KDE’s thumbnail generator when installed

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/57743235

Lawnchair is an open source Android launcher. They just released v15 beta-2, and the other updates are in the linked post

From their description:

Lawnchair is a supercharged version of the Pixel Launcher you know and love. Being an open-source project, you get all the latest Pixel Launcher features shipped by Google in their latest Android release, plus added customizability. The best part? No root required!

Hello!

I wonder if there is any open source video conferencing tool that works fine or even has special features for teaching music (e.g. singing with background music).

They already tried Jitsi but it seems to filter parts of the music as background noise.

Any ideas or suggestions would be great, thank you!

This contribution, delivered by Sven Thomsen, CIO of the German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein, outlines the state’s pioneering path toward digital sovereignty through Open Source and Open Innovation. It highlights the risks of dependency on proprietary software - including lack of transparency, inflated costs, and reduced security - and positions Open Standards and Open Source as essential for autonomy, resilience, and competitiveness. The speech details Schleswig-Holstein’s concrete migration from proprietary to Open Source solutions across its administration, supported by strategic planning, procurement reforms, and budget shifts. Initiatives such as the state’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO) and innovation hubs foster collaboration between government, industry, academia, and civil society, ensuring sustainable adoption and stimulating regional economic growth. Emphasizing both national security and Europe-wide competitiveness, the keynote calls for collective action to establish Open Source as the new normal in public IT systems, framing the transformation as a shared European mission for digital independence.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/technology/p/1608391/the-rime-of-the-ancient-maintainer

Every culture produces heroes that reflect its deepest anxieties. The Greeks, terrified of both mortality and immortality, gave us Achilles. The Victorians, haunted by social mobility, gave us the self-made industrialist. And Silicon Valley, drunk on exponential curves and both terrified and entranced by endless funding rounds, has given us the Hero Developer: a figure who ships features at midnight, who “moves fast and breaks things,” who transforms whiteboard scribbles into billion-dollar unicorns through sheer caffeinated will.

Coreboot 25.12 is out today as the latest quarterly feature update to this open-source BIOS/firmware solution.

Coreboot 25.12 rolls out proof-of-concept level support for AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. Great seeing EPYC Turin finally getting Coreboot treatment similar to Genoa. AMD EPYC (and Ryzen) will hopefully see more expansive Coreboot support and greater motherboard availability with their next-gen (Zen 6) wares as openSIL reaches production status.

Libreboot as the Coreboot downstream focused on free, open-source boot firmware is out with a new test release for Christmas.

Libreboot 26.01-rc1 released for Christmas with a handful of new systems/motherboards supported and working to a successor for the existing Libreboot 25.06 stable release.

Libreboot 26.01-rc1 has support for a few new systems including the Topton X2E N150, Lenovo ThinkPad T580, and HP Pro 3500 Series. The Topton X2E N150 is a firewall computer built around the Intel N150 that may be of interest to some folks. The Lenovo ThinkPad T580 with its 8th Gen Intel Core "Coffee Lake" processors is hardly to get excited about in 2026. Beyond the age of the laptops, the 8th Gen Intel CPUs being vulnerable to many CPU security mitigations takes a toll on performance too.

The GStreamer team has released the tenth bug-fix update, 1.26.10, of its cross-platform open-source multimedia framework for the stable 1.26 series.

Several fixes target streaming and demuxing reliability, including improvements to HLS and DASH stream selection in playbin3, addressing issues when disabling and re-enabling audio or video streams with adaptivedemux2. Support for FLAC audio in DASH manifests has also been added.

Audio handling sees multiple corrections. The FLAC plugin now properly supports 6.1 and 7.1 channel layouts and adds encoding and decoding support for 32-bit audio. Opus encoding benefits from improved multichannel and surround sound handling.

As a wonderful Christmas gift to open-source fans, NVIDIA dropped their proprietary license on the CUDA Tile intermediate representation and has now made the IR open-source software.

Earlier this month with CUDA 13.1 NVIDIA announced the CUDA Tile programming model as "the largest and most comprehensive update to the CUDA platform since it was invented two decades ago" The intermediate representation (IR) to CUDA Tile is now open-source software.

Over seven months after its previous 1.4.2 bugfix release, the popular open-source vector graphics editor Inkscape has issued its latest version, 1.4.3, as the third maintenance update to the 1.4 series, which includes roughly 124 bug and crash fixes.

Twenty-four of them fix crashes and freezes, many of which previously prevented users from opening specific files, exporting objects, or working reliably with text, paths, and Live Path Effects.

Several of these crashes affected common operations such as PDF export, text-on-path editing, layer manipulation, and alignment tools.

audacity devs make a christmasfying PR to demonstrate how easy it is to modify the new Qt UI. builds included thanks to CI (linux example)

The judge in the Vizio GPL-compliance lawsuit has ruled, in a summary judgment, that the GNU General Public License, version 2, does not require the provision of signing keys needed to install modified software on a device.

Read as a whole, the Agreements require Vizio to make the source code available in such a manner that the source code can be readily obtained and modified by Plaintiff or other third parties. While source code is defined to include "the scripts used to control compilation and installation," this does not mean that Vizio must allow users to reinstall the software, modified or otherwise, back onto its smart TVs in a manner that preserves all features of the original program and/or ensures the smart TVs continue to function properly. Rather, in the context of the Agreements, the disputed language means that Vizio must provide the source code in a manner that allows the source code to be obtained and revised by Plaintiff or others for use in other applications.

As the Software Freedom Conservancy, the plaintiff in the case, has pointed out, the judge has ruled against a claim that was never actually made.

SFC has never held the position, nor do we today hold the position, that any version of the GPL (even including GPLv3!) require "that the device continues to function properly" after a user installs their modified version of the copyleft components.

Linus Torvalds, meanwhile, has posted his own take on the ruling that has, as one might imagine, sparked an extended discussion as well.

Kitty, one of the most feature-rich, GPU-accelerated, and highly efficient cross-platform terminal emulators, has just unveiled its latest update, version 0.45.

The most visible addition is a new kitten designed for fast file selection using a keyboard-first workflow. The tool supports previews for a wide range of content, including text files with syntax highlighting, images, videos, and e-books.

Image handling sees notable improvements through updates to the icat kitten. The built-in rendering engine now supports animated PNG and animated WebP files, netPBM images, ICC color profiles, and CCIP color space metadata.

Found this launcher last week and I've been playing with it since.

It still works with "muscle memory" but instead of placement, it's the gesture (or direction) that triggers the action. With time it can become quicker and easier, i think, than lawnchair, eblan &c or search based launchers

also on https://github.com/Elnix90/Dragon-Launcher

Pinta 3.1 has been released today as a major update to this open-source, free, and cross-platform paint program written in GTK# for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Coming more than eight months after Pinta 3.0, the Pinta 3.1 release implements a new axonometric grid under View > Canvas Grid, a new Cells effect, a polygon selection mode to the Lasso Select tool, a Radius Percentage parameter to the Twist effect, and a revamped canvas widget to improve performance.

Pinta 3.1 also updates the Gradient tool with handles for adjusting the gradient length and direction, updates the Dithering effect to use Pinta’s current palette in addition to the effect’s preset color palettes, and updates the Splatter brush to repeatedly draw while holding the mouse down.