It’s “DOS Week” here in The Lunduke Journal Community! But, even though we’re having a lot of fun playing around with various DOS systems, that doesn’t mean the wider world of Linux, Alternative operating systems, and retro computing goes on pause!
What follows are the news items that made me smile the most this week.
KDE releases TV interface: “Bigscreen”
The Beta release of KDE Plasma version 5.26 was just released. And it has some really fun stuff — and big stuff — in there. Far more than a “5.26” point release would otherwise suggest.
The biggest, in my opinion, being their new “Bigscreen” interface, intended for use when connected to a TV.
“Plasma Bigscreen is an open-source user interface for TV's. Running on top of a Linux distribution, Plasma Bigscreen turns your TV or setup-box into a fully hackable device. A big launcher giving you easy access to any installed apps and skills. Controllable via voice or TV remote.”
And it looks pretty good, too! Or, at least it looks a lot like most streaming interfaces nowadays. Which makes for a low learning curve. Also worth noting: it includes voice navigation using Mycroft.
Big things happening for cross platform Godot
Godot Engine is an open source game creation suite that allows for games to be built for a huge number of platforms. Windows, Mac, Linux, some BSDs, iOS, Android, Switch, PS4, and even an “HTML5” export option.
Tools like this which help software get ported to more platforms is a great thing, in my book. Especially for games.
And this week was a big one for Godot. At the start of the week Irish game company W4 Games announced that they’d raised $8.5 Million in seed funding to focus on development of Godot-related tools. This shows tremendous maturity of the Godot ecosystem and has big potential for further growth.
We’ve talked a bit about SerentyOS here on The Lunduke Journal. Because it’s one seriously cool — and highly promising — open source operating system.
And we’ve covered the recent experiments that they’ve done to port their — completely from-scratch — web browser engine to Linux. The net result was a web browser named “Ladybird”.
Well now Ladybird has become it’s own dedicated project. Which seems like a great idea to me — helps encourage more rapid development of the core web engine.
“I originally imagined Ladybird as a debugging tool that made it easier for people to remain in Linux while working on LibWeb if they wanted to. It’s now two months later, and I find myself using Ladybird for most of my own browser development work.
At this point, we might as well tweak the scope from “browser engine for SerenityOS” to “cross-platform browser engine” and build something that many more people could potentially have use for some day. :^)”
While I realize that Ladybird may not be ready for full time usage (at least not for most of us)… I love that a new web rendering project is gaining traction. It was desperately needed.
