Opensource

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/39446054

I have seen folks talk about a pain point for using FF (or forks) being related to YouTube being super slow. The about:config settings the article mentions did seem to lead to YouTube loading faster on both my FF and Zen-Browser installs. So maybe this might help for others that specifically don't like to use FF as their main browser because of YouTube.

For those that just want the settings:

gfx.webrender.compositor.force-enabled (set to true and restart FF)

If on AMD GPU, this extra setting is supposed to help reduce CPU usage:

media.wmf.zero-copy-nv12-textures-force-enabled (set to true and restart FF)

What is it?

Harper is a free English grammar checker designed to be just right. You can think of it as an open-source alternative to Grammarly. I created it after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition.

Private

Harper is completely private, in every sense of the word.

Since Harper runs on-device, your data doesn't go anywhere you don't want it to.

That means you have 100% certainty we don't violate your copyright by training large language models.

Harper also intentionally avoids including any kind of generative AI in any part of our processing pipeline.

Dutch open hardware specialist FusionXvision has opened crowdfunding for a design it says can provide lab-grade programmable power from any USB Type-C Power Delivery (PD) power adapter: the BenchVolt PD.

"BenchVolt PD transforms any USB Type-C power adapter into a versatile, multi-channel laboratory power supply," FusionXvision's Suleyman Yasin Dundar says of the company's latest launch. "Designed for makers, engineers, and professionals, it combines portability, safety, and flexibility to put bench-grade power performance in your pocket. With up to 100W of total power, five output channels, and built-in monitoring, it's the perfect tool for powering prototypes, testing circuits, or working in the field without bulky equipment."

One of the great things about Valve's hardware is that it's not locked down, and they put a lot of money into open source for SteamOS (Linux). With the upcoming new Steam Machine and Steam Frame, the open source never stops.

And here we have Igalia, one of the Free Software consultancies that Valve works with, writing up a post detailing some of the work that goes into it all. In this case, it's especially interesting for the Steam Frame. Igalia have people working on FEX, as just one example, which is a fast usermode x86 and x86-64 emulator for Arm64 Linux. Basically, it allows running x86 applications on ARM64 Linux devices - this is part of how the Steam Frame will actually run games.

Yesterday, Pebble watch software was ~95% open source. Today, it’s 100% open source. You can download, compile and run all the software you need to use your Pebble. We just published the source code for the new Pebble mobile app!

"Apertus: a fully open, transparent, multilingual language model

EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus 2 September, Switzerland’s first large-scale, open, multilingual language model — a milestone in generative AI for transparency and diversity.

Researchers from EPFL, ETH Zurich and CSCS have developed the large language model Apertus – it is one of the largest open LLMs and a basic technology on which others can build.

In brief Researchers at EPFL, ETH Zurich and CSCS have developed Apertus, a fully open Large Language Model (LLM) – one of the largest of its kind. As a foundational technology, Apertus enables innovation and strengthens AI expertise across research, society and industry by allowing others to build upon it. Apertus is currently available through strategic partner Swisscom, the AI platform Hugging Face, and the Public AI network. ...

The model is named Apertus – Latin for “open” – highlighting its distinctive feature: the entire development process, including its architecture, model weights, and training data and recipes, is openly accessible and fully documented.

AI researchers, professionals, and experienced enthusiasts can either access the model through the strategic partner Swisscom or download it from Hugging Face – a platform for AI models and applications – and deploy it for their own projects. Apertus is freely available in two sizes – featuring 8 billion and 70 billion parameters, the smaller model being more appropriate for individual usage. Both models are released under a permissive open-source license, allowing use in education and research as well as broad societal and commercial applications. ...

Trained on 15 trillion tokens across more than 1,000 languages – 40% of the data is non-English – Apertus includes many languages that have so far been underrepresented in LLMs, such as Swiss German, Romansh, and many others. ...

Furthermore, for people outside of Switzerland, the external pagePublic AI Inference Utility will make Apertus accessible as part of a global movement for public AI. "Currently, Apertus is the leading public AI model: a model built by public institutions, for the public interest. It is our best proof yet that AI can be a form of public infrastructure like highways, water, or electricity," says Joshua Tan, Lead Maintainer of the Public AI Inference Utility."

Six folks pledged lumps of cash to make it happen.

Since the 2022 release of memtest86+ 6.0 as a rewrite of this long-used RAM testing utility, this open-source software has continued advancing nicely after a decade hiatus. Released on Sunday night was memtest86+ 8.0 as the latest iteration of this popular RAM tester for enthusiasts.

The memtest86+ 8.0 release can now be built with the Clang compiler and LLVM LLD linker. Plus there are many internal updates as well as now being able to provide a single binary that works for both UEFI and legacy boot environments.

I'm a tournament organizer for a local Smash tournament. We normally host our brackets on start.gg. However, the site is pretty unreliable. Occasionally, we've had to run the bracket on challonge.com instead. Recently, the venue wifi was having issues and we almost had to run it on our phones which wouldve been brutal. Every alternative I can find is either web-based or is commercial software for big E-sports events. I just need software on my laptop (I'm running Linux Mint, the other TO uses a MacBook) that can generate a double-elinination bracket based on a seeded list of entrants. After that, it should be able to track the bracket progress over the course of the event. This seems like a pretty simple concept but I haven't been able to find anything.

Welcome to the 47th week of Linuxiac’s 2025 Weekly Roundup — your go-to source for all things Linux & Open Source. Here’s a look at the biggest Linux and FOSS highlights from the past week (Nov 17 – 23).

I wonder that I didn't find any good quiz engine yet that is open source.

There are games like It's Quiz Time or You Don't Know Jack. There also are some web quiz platforms like Kahoot or MyQuiz that can be used for educational purpose too. The idea is that you get quiz questions on one device and players can vote with their mobile device. Depending on the software, it supports different varieties of questions.

Something like Tux Quiz would be nice, an open source project with community driven questions. What do you think? Does something like this already exist?

In addition to Valve contributing to the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for enhancing the Linux gaming experience and their AMD-powered Steam Deck, the upcoming Steam Frame VR headset is making use of Mesa's open-source "Turnip" Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics.

Linux consulting firm Igalia who has long seen funded work from Valve wrote a blog post today to outline their recent efforts given last week's Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller announcement. Igalia highlighted the work they have been doing for the Steam Frame around FEX for x86/x86_64 emulation on ARM for the Qualcomm Snapdragon powered VR device. Plus the work done to Turnip for serving as the Vulkan driver on the Steam Frame

The Servo open-source web browser engine has been making good progress in recent times. Long outside the confines of Mozilla and working as a Linux Foundation Europe project, Servo has been advancing thanks to Igalia and other open-source developers while getting by on around ~$5.7k USD per month thanks mostly to donations from individuals. Servo has now announced sponsorship tiers in hopefully to solicit more donations from larger organizations.

Servo's sponsorship tiers announced today range from the "bronze" level at $100 USD per month up to the top-tier "platinum" level with $10k USD monthly contributions from organizations (or individuals). Those contributing at the different sponsorship tiers will be featured on the project's homepage.

The popular open-source e-book management tool, Calibre, has just released version 8.15, bringing improvements in the Comments editor, bug fixes, and updates to its news-source catalog.

The e-book viewer adds a small enhancement: hovering over a highlight now displays the date it was created. The Comments editor receives two updates focused on text handling. Case-change operations now preserve as much existing formatting as possible, improving accuracy when editing styled text.

In addition, new keyboard shortcuts have been introduced for all case-change actions. Users can select text, open the right-click menu, and view the new shortcut list.

Microsoft announced today that they're preserving a bit of history here - with Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III now officially and clearly open source. The source has been around for a while but now it's all proper.

From the announcement they said:

Today, we’re preserving a cornerstone of gaming history that is near and dear to our hearts. Together, Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO), Team Xbox, and Activision are making Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III available under the MIT License. Our goal is simple: to place historically important code in the hands of students, teachers, and developers so they can study it, learn from it, and, perhaps most importantly, play it.

Wireshark, the world’s most popular network protocol analyzer, has been updated today to version 4.6.1, a minor point release to the latest and greatest Wireshark 4.6 series, addressing various bugs and updating protocol support.

Wireshark 4.6.1 is here to update support for the 802.11 Radiotap, AC DR, ASN.1 BER, ASN.1 PER, BPv7, BT L2CAP, CFM, Darwin, DNS, DTLS, EAPOL-MKA, HTTP, HTTP3, ISObus VT, KRB5, LTP, NAS-EPS, NETDFS, NMEA 0183, P1, RPC_NETLOGON, RTSE, SGP.22, SGP.32, SMB, SNMP, TCP, TECMP, TFTP, VLAN, WINREG, X509AF, X509SAT, and ZBD protocols.

Wanna hear a joke about construction? I am still working on it🤣

Why did the developer go broke? Because he ran out of cache 🤣