Linux / Unix

The mid-range smartphone, which made a name for its high level of repairability, is the first Android 11 handset to run the open-source operating System.

The upcoming Titan BM15 from Bitblaze features decent specs except for the processor that integrates outdated ARM Cortex-A57 cores and an even older Mali-T628 GPU. Otherwise, there is a 15.6-inch IPS display with 1080p resolution, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, up to 512 GB M.2 SSD storage, a 6000 mAh battery that lasts up to 5 h, and a decent selection of ports. Price could end up spicy due to the economic restrictions.

Although the update for the mobile version is still at least a few days away, Vivaldi 5.4 for desktop users is now available with custom rocker gestures, the ability to turn off sound in web panels, as well as multiple under-the-hood optimizations for Vivaldi Mail, Calendar, and Feed Reader.

The new RS2 is HiBy's second digital audio player that uses the Darwin audio architecture and can be pre-ordered for US$479. It supports up to 4 TB of storage via two card slots, 3.5 / 4.4 mm dual headphone output, PCM 384 kHz/DSD 256 audio, as well as up to 10 hours of play time and 40 days standby.

Made available to the public yesterday, Linux Mint 21 "Vanessa" arrived more than two years after its predecessor. Just as expected, it is available in three versions, namely Cinnamon, Xfce, and MATE. Linux Mint 21 is a long-term support release that will receive updates until 2027.

Dell and Canonical continue to collaborate on bringing Ubuntu to the XPS series. The XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition is now the first laptop certified for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, which builds on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS that Dell already ships with the XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will begin shipping with the XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition from next month onwards.

GPD has confirmed Valve's intentions to optimise Steam OS for new gaming handhelds that ship with Windows 11 by default. To be available for AMD Ryzen 7 6800U-backed machines first, the cooperation between GPD and Valve could allow other manufacturers to release Steam OS images for their latest gaming handhelds too.

CPU options include the Core i5-1235U and Core i7-1255U models that can be coupled with up to 40 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM and up to 4 TB SSD storage via two M.2 slots. Other highlights include a Thunderbolt 4 connector, a 1080p webcam with IR sensor and a microSD card reader.

No pricing or exact availability info for now, but the first RISC-V laptop dubbed ROMA is powered by an unannounced quad-core processor complemented by up to 16 GB of LPDDR4X and up to 256 GB of storage. It also integrates a GPU and an NPU and offers support for most Linux distros.

The Pocket Reform mini laptop is set to integrate a few processor options like the NXP I.MX8M Plus or Raspberry Pi CM4 with ARM cores or even a RISC-V-based model from AMD / Xilinx. It also features a 7-inch 1080p screen and a mechanical keyboard with optical trackball.

Anbernic has unveiled the RG353P in two colours. Launching for US$129.99, the Anbernic RG353P has a 3.5-inch touchscreen display, a Rockchip RK3566 and 2 GB of LPDDR4X RAM, among other features.

Labeled 2.17 and called "Danger Zone," the latest update for War Thunder brings the legendary F-14A Tomcat jet, an Israeli helicopter tech tree, the first Chinese helo, napalm bombs, two new locations, as well as the rewind functionality for replays. The patch also comes with a long list of bug fixes and tweaks.

US$299 gets you a Ryzen 5 3550H with Vega 8 iGPU plus 256 GB of SSD storage, but no RAM. For US100 more you can also get 16 GB of RAM and up the storage to 512 GB, however. Manjaro Linux is also streamlined to work on budget solutions.

Firefly has unveiled the ROC-RK3588S-PC, a single-board computer (SBC) that will be available in multiple memory configurations with up to 32 GB of RAM. Currently, the ROC-RK3588S-PC starts at US$219 and is the first SBC that leverages the Rockchip RK3588S, a cheaper alternative to the RK3588.

Microsoft offers two flavours of its infamous Office software: Microsoft 365 for US$69.99 per year or US$149.99 for a perpetual licence. If neither of those options sound ideal, you're not alone in thinking that. Fortunately, there is a whole host of free, open-source alternatives to choose from.

Lambda, a company known for building deep learning-focused PCs, and Razer have teamed up to release a new version of the Tensorbook, a slim laptop with machine learning chops. The notebook is packed to the gills with hardware designed for AI development, comes preinstalled with lots of Lambda's software, and has some solid gaming capabilities.

ASUS has released the Tinker Edge R, another single-board computer (SBC) by the company. The 100 x 72 mm SBC is compatible with Android and Debian and relies on a Rockchip RK3399 Pro SoC. ASUS equips the Tinker Edge R with 16 GB of eMMC flash storage too, and a small fan, among other features.

The first major update of 2022 comes with the legendary A-10A Thunderbolt II ground-attack aircraft, alongside other planes, Swedish helicopters, multiple ground vehicles, various ships, as well as an updated graphics engine (Dagor Engine 6.5) with significantly improved effects and a massive Ultra HD texture pack.

Prime Computer has announced the PrimeBook Circular, a modern laptop with modular components. Available with various processors from the Intel Celeron 6305 to the Core i7-1185G7, the PrimeBook Circular has a 77 Wh battery, a 3,000 x 2,000-pixel touchscreen display and weighs 1.5 kg. The PrimeBook Circular comes with 3-years manufacturer's warranty by default, too.

Testing performed by Phoronix on some AMD and Intel CPUs has revealed that Intel CPUs suffer as much as a 35% performance drop due to the Spectre-v2 mitigation on Linux, whereas almost all AMD processors post a drop of less than 10%.

Valve finally shipped its Steam Deck handheld console to users in early 2022. While handheld gaming PCs have existed for quite some time, the Steam Deck is in a class of its own and is setting the example for what a mobile gaming computer can look like.

The flagship of the T series was renovated last year, and another redesign is happening this year, due to the change toe 16:10 screens. Another focus: The new Intel Alder Lake CPUs and AMD Ryzen 6000, as well as a new screen option.

XDA Senior Member Danny Lin (@kdrag0n) has managed to get entire virtual machines running on the Google Pixel 6 with relative ease. This was possible due to the new KVM feature that is being introduced with Android 13. The developer could even run Windows 11 on ARM and even play the classic Doom game on the Pixel 6 with decent performance.

The latest Linux kernel 5.16 update brings scheduling and hybrid handling improvements that give Linux a significant advantage over Windows 11 in Alder Lake systems. The current Ubuntu 22.04 LTS uses the 5.15 kernel and suffers from performance regressions on Alder Lake as a result.

The JingPad A1 is available for a hefty discount, with the tablet starting at US$384.45 for a short time. Jingling has also published Android ROM source code for the 11-inch tablet and now allows people to unlock the JingPad A1's bootloader. Ongoing support for JingOS could be scaled back though, as Jingling looks to downsize operations.

More high-end performance options are now available for Linux-based users through the introduction of the updated System76 Kudu6 laptops that now feature the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X APU and Nvidia's RTX 3060 GPUs.

The Steam Deck finally has a concrete launch date, having been delayed towards the end of last year. The gaming handheld will debut on February 25 and should start shipping on February 28. However, Valve will only allow people to purchase a Steam Deck if they have reserved one; reservations will only remain valid for three days from February 25 too.

Humble Choice has suspended its support for Mac and Linux systems as the company develops a new launcher for its subscription. The launcher will only be available for Windows PCs on February 1. Subscribers on Mac and Linux have until the end of the month to download DRM-free games from the Trove collection that are still supported, as some of these indie games will no longer be available in Mac and Linux versions.

PINE64 has started selling the PineNote, a large eReader with a built-in digitizer. The PineNote has a 10.1-inch display, 4 GB of RAM, 128 GB of eMMC flash storage and a 4,000 mAh battery. The eReader is available for US$399 and supports Wacom EMR-based pens.

Pointing out the undeniable fact that it is being used extensively by extremist groups, Germany aims to shut down Telegram across the country, and even across the entire European Union. In addition to death threats against officials, Telegram is employed by anti-vaxxers in their campaign against COVID-19 shots.

PINE64 has started selling the PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition, another Linux-based smartphone produced by the company. The Explorer Edition costs US$399 and comes with a Rockchip RK3399S, a 720p display and a 3,000 mAh battery, among other features.

At the end of a successful Indiegogo campaign that raised almost one million Euros by early May 2020, the Astro Slide 5G was supposed to arrive in March 2021. Now, there are over 5,000 backers and 2.2 million Euros involved. The device is on display at CES 2022 and shipments are scheduled to kick off in March.

Acer’s 14-inch laptop scores some major points thanks to its great battery life, silent operation, keyboard backlight and matte IPS screen. The quad-core Pentium Silver N6000 performs about as well as a Skylake chip. Windows is not included.

Introduced yesterday, War Thunder 2.13 "Winged Lions" is a major update that brings a wide range of Israeli aircraft (in Closed Beta stage for now, unfortunately) into the game, alongside quite a few new tanks, ships, locations, missions, improved graphics effects (air movement now has an impact on particle effects such as fire and smoke), and more.

SiFive and AB Open present a rack-mount RISC-V cluster of four HiFive Unmatched motherboards, each integrating a Freedom U740 SoC. The rack also includes a PSU and fans, which are controlled via a HiFive1 Rev. B dev board.

While Vivaldi 5.0 for Android becomes the world's first mobile browser to introduce two-level tab stacks, as well as desktop-like Panels for tablets and Chromebooks, its desktop sibling comes with a fully reworked theme editor, theme sharing, a translate panel, as well as a download pop-up on the address bar.

The Huawei Qingyun L420 laptop with 5 nm Kirin 9006C chip has had its specifications leaked along with a couple of related images. The ARM-based device is clearly the incoming successor to the Qingyun L410 laptop that sported a Kirin 990 SoC. The L420 also comes with 8 GB of LPDDR5 RAM and up to 512 GB of UFS 3.1 storage.

Sipeed recently tweeted a short video depicting its RISC-V RV64-powered smartphone prototype running Android 10. If all goes well, the Chinese company expects to release the first commercial models in 2022.

The thin and light InfinityBook S17 - Gen6 is almost the size of a 15.6-inch laptop thanks to the slim-bezeled 17.3-inch FHD IPS display. It can be equipped with Intel's Core i5-11300H or Core i7-11370H Tiger Lake-H processors, up to 64 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM and up to 4 TB of NMVe SSD storage. Notable features include a Thunderbolt 4 connector, a cooling-optimized Lift-Up hinge and a miniSD card reader.

In a rather silent move, Google introduced Chrome 96 on all platforms. However, it looks like this new piece of code is all about under-the-hood changes. The update will roll out to all devices in the coming weeks and — at least for now — there is no information regarding security updates that come with it.

By joining forces with the fastest blockchain in the world, Brave Browser is planning to provide the best-in-class wallet features to its desktop and mobile browsers starting in the first half of 2022. However, the company will continue to support Ethereum and aims to integrate additional blockchains over time.

Almost a year after the release of the first public preview of Microsoft Edge for Linux, the Redmond giant has finally released the first stable version of this piece of code. This flavor comes in .deb and .rpm packages and is supposed to fully support Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE.

Today, Mozilla unleashed Firefox 94.0 for desktop users across all relevant platforms, but also for Android devices. The list of new features and noticeable enhancements includes Colorways, site isolation enabled by default, as well as multiple performance and security improvements across all platforms.

With only one year left until the anniversary of its first decade, War Thunder celebrates by offering 50 percent discounts on premium accounts, in-game vehicles, as well as on modifications, backup vehicles, and talismans. Obviously, all these only stand as a part of the entire collection of anniversary offerings available.

Dubbed "Ground Breaking" and released earlier today, War Thunder 2.11 brings a new tech tree into the game, although Israel only got two premium aircraft for now and no regular military hardware. However, the highlight of this update is terramorphing, alongside new maps, missions, visual effects, and quite a few new vehicles.

The refreshed Juno lineup includes the budget-oriented 15-inch Nyx models with AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processors and integrated Vega 7 graphics, the Saturn mid-ranger with intel COre i7-11800H and RTX 3050 / 3050 Ti dGPU options, and the Neptune high-end solutions with i7-11800H and Max-Q variants of the RTX 3070 / 3080 dGPUs.

New Linux graphics kernel patches with USB4 DisplayPort Tunneling are now available from AMD. The tunneling feature allows the USB, DisplayPort and PCIe transfer protocols to operate simultaneously by sharing the available bandwidth. For now, only the DisplayPort 1.4 specs are supported with AMD's tunneling drivers. Hopefully, DisplayPort 2.0 specs could be added by the time AMD introduces its next gen embedded and laptop solutions in early 2022.

XDO Tech's Pantera Pico PC may be one of the best-known mini-PCs of recent days, thanks to its highly successful Kickstarter campaign. This crowdfunding drive has now closed, having raised "over 4800%" of its original its availability has shifted to InDemand on Indiegogo, starting at ~US$160 on this platform.

Valve has disassembled the Steam Deck in a teardown video. However, the company hopes that the video will serve as a deterrent, rather than as a teardown guide. Nonetheless, replacing the machine's M.2 2230 looks relatively simple.