GNOME gets a €1M investment, generative AI comes to Krita, Windows can’t Threadripper, and saving Itanium on Linux.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
04:22 GNOME gets a €1M investment
09:13 Generative AI comes to Krita
14:07 Windows can’t Threadripper
20:52 Saving Itanium on Linux
GNOME €1M
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/11/gnome-sovereign-tech-fund
https://foundation.gnome.org/2023/11/09/gnome-recognized-as-public-interest-infrastructure/
- This is big news for one of the most used open source projects in Linux, GNOME receives a €1M investment from the Sovereign Tech Fund.
- The Sovereign Tech Fund is a German government-funded initiative run by Adriana Groh and Fiona Krakenbürg.
- On their website they state:
- “The Sovereign Tech Fund supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital infrastructure.”
- GNOME plans to use the funds to improve tooling, accessibility, and support features that the users need and want.
- I was very excited to hear that GNOME plans to use the money to “Improve the current state of accessibility” and “Design and prototype a new accessibility stack” as this is so needed on the Linux desktop.
- The GNOME desktop is currently the best at accessibility with the inclusion of the Orca screen reader and its tools which are integrated, but it could be better.
- GNOME I have a suggestion of an open source app that is greatly needed on Linux for those who have a hard time typing or are dealing with carpal tunnel syndrome, a good speech to text app that is integrated in the desktop.
- I have been donating to the GNOME Foundation for many years, and when they were at SCaLE I bought some merch from them to support them, like this shirt I am wearing.
Krita AI
https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion
- Surprised to see someone working on this since the Krita community and core team have been anti-AI.
- Generative AI for Krita provides what “Generative Fill/Expand” does in Photoshop.
- Inpaint, outpaint, live painting, and upscaling.
- Works with CUDA and ROCm.
- It’s using ComfyUI as the backend.
- This is like “Generative Fill/Expand” in Photoshop, but much more powerful.
- You can also generate new images by using words or existing images in the prompts.
- And history is saved for every result, so you can go back and preview each image change and use whichever one you like.
Linux is faster
- Did you know that there is a new AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX processor with a whopping 96 cores available?
- And what operating system do you think runs faster on the 96 core “Threadbooper”, well Linux of course!
- So there have been hardware benchmarks recently that show Ubuntu running 20% faster on the new 96 core Threadripper Pro than Windows 11.
- No surprise to me, as Linux is optimized for high core counts, enterprise, server side and is more efficient on these systems.
- The test system:
- An HP Z6 G5 workstation featuring a Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX, 128GB of DDR5-5200 Hynix RDIMMs, a Samsung NVMe SSD, and a GeForce RTX A4000 GPU.
- Windows 11 Pro version 23H2 was benchmarked vs the latest Ubuntu, Ubuntu 23.10.
- LuxCore, Intel Embree, OSPRay, Geekbench, Blender, video encoding and more were used for the tests.
- Overall, Ubuntu performed 19.5% faster than Windows 11, with the exception of a few benchmarks.
- Threadbooper <3 Linux!
- All of these videos this week about the new Threadripper and nobody bothered to check the obvious.
- Or was it so obvious that nobody bothered?
- Does anyone expect Windows to know what to do with 96-cores?
Unsinkable Itanic
https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/21/saving_linux_on_itanium/
https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/CAHk-=whFLZ67ffzt1juryCYcYz6eL_XjQF8WucDzwUR5H65+rA@mail.gmail.com/
- The death of Itanium was announced for kernel 6.7.
- As is tradition people have come out of the woodwork to protest this change.
- Linus is open to the idea and has provided a way forward.
- If the people wanting the return if Itanium “maintain an out-of-branch patch set for the architecture for a year” Linus will consider bringing it back.
- I’m a big fan of this strategy.
- This strategy seems on point for me too, and Linus has another great point:
- “The thing is, nobody doing new kernel code wants to deal with itanium,
so relegating it to the same situation that i386 support was (“it
still works in old kernels”) doesn’t seem to be a huge issue for the
people who actually want to use those machines.”
- As someone who still owns and uses i386 machines I understand why it was deprecated from the Linux Kernel. I just run older Linux Kernels on those machines like Linus says.
