Mozilla: Rust and Privacy

• This Week in Rust 260

  This week's crate is cargo-nono, a cargo subcommand to check a crate's dependencies for no-std compatibility. Thanks to Hobofan for the suggestion!

• Your Privacy Focused Holiday Shopping Guide

  The lyrics to “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” detail an omniscient Saint Nicholas. But in 2018 — in an era of always-listening products and apps — the lyrics might as well be detailing the latest connected device. This holiday season, Mozilla is helping consumers identify which connected products are secure and trustworthy — and which aren’t. The goal: help consumers shop for gifts based on how well they protect the privacy and security of their friends and family, in addition to traditional factors like a product’s price and performance.

KDE and GNOME: NVIDIA, Krita/Atelier and GSoC Mentors Summit 2018

• NVIDIA Working On An EGLStreams Back-End For KDE On Wayland

  With no recent activity on the NVIDIA-led Unix device memory allocation work that all developer communities could get behind to supersede GBM and EGLStreams for use by Wayland compositors, NVIDIA is working on an EGLStreams back-end for KDE's KWin compositor. Similar to the work done on an EGLStreams back-end for GNOME and other EGLStreams work by the smaller Wayland compositors, a NVIDIA engineer is now officially working on an EGLStreams back-end for KWin so that the NVIDIA proprietary driver would play well with KDE on Wayland. Up to now KWin has only supported the Mesa GBM interfaces. KDE developers have said they wouldn't invest in developing an EGLStreams back-end, but that they wouldn't be opposed if say NVIDIA would contribute and maintain the code -- that's what is happening now.

• Shop update! Digital Atelier and a new USB-Card

  And we’ve also created a new USB-card, with the newest stable version of Krita for all OSes. Includes Comics with Krita, Muses, Secrets of Krita and Animate with Krita tutorial packs.

• GSoC Mentors Summit 2018

  I represented GNOME, sadly alone because the other selected mentor didn’t get the US visa in time. This was my first trip out of India and I couldn’t plan it properly1, so I went there for just the two conference days.

Graphics: Screen Tearing, Wayland Alpha Compositing Protocol, AMDGPU

• What Is Screen Tearing and How to Get Rid of It on Linux

  Unfortunately for Linux fans, screen tearing is, and has been, a persistent annoyance that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. There are a couple of factors enabling the longevity of the screen tearing issue. First, and probably most obviously, is the dated, broken, and bloated X server. Even with the progress of Wayland, X is here to stay for the immediate future. Next is the strange and inconsistent graphics driver picture. One of the biggest offenders in causing screen tearing is also the most popular GPU manufacturer on Linux, NVIDIA. Throw in different desktop environments with their own display settings and compositors, and you have a real mess. These methods will hopefully eliminate screen tearing in most situations, but it’s impossible to provide a one-size-fits-all solution, thanks to the amount of variables involved. Try what applies to your system, and keep in mind that there might be new factors involved.

• Collabora Revives Work On Alpha Compositing Protocol For Wayland

  Collabora's Scott Anderson has revived work on the alpha compositing protocol for Wayland, which is based upon the work done by Google on this functionality for Chromium on Wayland. The Wayland Alpha Compositing Protocol is intended to control the alpha compositing and blending of surface contents within a Wayland environment. This experimental protocol allows for advanced blending and alpha operations on Wayland surfaces (wl_surface) and Google's work on it dates back at least two years.

• Radeon Linux Driver Preparing Adaptive Backlight Management (ABM)

  The "AMDGPU" Radeon Linux kernel graphics driver is preparing support for "Adaptive Backlight Management" as a backlight power-savings feature for laptops. Adaptive Backlight Management reduces the backlight level in an effort to save power but increases the pixel contrast and luminance to improve image quality and readability under the lower light condition.

Tux Machines is proud to be hosted by