• Mozilla Localization (L10N): L10n Report: April 2020 Edition

  Before we get into the report, we must share that Youghourta Benali, one of the Arabic l10n community’s managers, has passed away due to prior health issues. He was a passionate activist for the open Web and Arabic’s presence on the Web, localizing Mozilla projects for over 7 years. We’ll all miss him and wish his family and friends peace at this time. The surviving Arabic managers are currently writing a guest post that we’ll post here when ready.

• WebGPU Support Begins Coming Together In Firefox Nightly Builds

  The latest Firefox Nightly builds have the experimental WebGPU support working in early form. WebGPU is the W3C-backed web standard for modern graphics and compute that is based upon concepts from the likes of Vulkan and Direct3D 12.

• A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox

  The group has mostly resolved the major architecture issues of the API. Recently we agreed on the WebGPU Shading Language direction based on the Tint prototype. We still need to solve a lot of design riddles before we make it available to end users to write shaders in.

  One of the unresolved issues is the API for data transfers between CPU and GPU. Working with memory directly is where the web platform differs greatly from native platforms. We’ve discussed a dozen different proposals but have not yet found a design solution that fulfills our principles.

  Overall, the spec is still heavily a work in progress. It’s available for early hackers but not recommended for any use in production yet. We are hoping to get a minimum-viable-product version of the spec and implementations by the end of 2020. The current state of implementations can be checked on webgpu.io.

It is with great sadness that I must report we lost a great community member today. Octavio Mendez, a long-time cornerstone of the Mexican Blender and open source community, has passed away after fighting the Corona virus.

Claudio Malefico Andaur contacted me about this, and shared the following...

Also: For real...

• Lars Kurth RIP

  Ian Jackson posted a note to the xen-announce mailing list with the sad news that Xen community manager and project advisory board member Lars Kurth has died.

• Lars Kurth

  I'm very sad to inform you that Lars Kurth passed away earlier this
  week.  Many of us regarded Lars as a personal friend, and his loss is a
  great loss to the Xen Project.
  
  We plan to have a tribute to Lars on the XenProject blog in the near
  future.  Those who are attending FOSDEM may wish to attend the short
  tribute we plan for Sunday morning:
    https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/vai_memory_of_lars_kurth/
  
  For the moment, Lars's mail aliases @xenproject.org, and the
  community.manager@xenproject alias, will be forwarded to myself
  and/or George Dunlap.
  
  Ian Jackson.
  

• [PCLinuxOS] Screenshot Showcase

• PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight: rgradle

  PCLinuxOS (KDE) is currently running on my desktop machine (ASUS m/b with AMD A10 processor), and on an HP laptop computer (AMD Phenom II/Mate). Performance on the desktop machine is great, but a bit slow on the laptop. I do some video editing for my church on the desktop machine using Kdenlive, a native Linux application that is very powerful. I also do some graphics development for the church using GIMP. Very powerful, but long learning curve with GIMP. Now I wish I had paid more attention to the GIMP articles that appeared in the PCLinuxOS magazine some time ago. I have a Windows 10 virtual machine on my desktop computer for a few applications that will not run under Linux. My wife, a Windows user from way back, was right at home on her KDE desktop in no time at all. When people try to tell me how complicated Linux is to use, I always bring up my my wife's experience as an example of how easy Linux, and especially PCLinuxOS, is to use.

  One of the things I always appreciate about PCLinuxOS is that the software is well thought out, meaning that the updates generally work well and without problem. This is really a nod to those to maintain the software in the repository. Thank you, thank you. Also, I always appreciate the help available on the forum. Even when I have made newbie errors, someone is always willing to provide direction to get me on the path forward. Just outstanding.

• R.I.P, Sproggy! You Will Be Missed!

  On December 23, 2019, our beloved PCLinuxOS family member, Sproggy, lost his battle with cancer.

  [...]

  When I first joined the PCLinuxOS forum, Sproggy was a moderator. We both hit it off pretty early on. My interactions with him increased a lot when I took over the editor's role for the magazine. We would chat frequently -- usually daily -- in the magazine's IRC channel on FreeNode, then called #pclinuxos.mag (it's now #pclosmag).

  We would chat about everything and anything. We'd talk about family, politics (particularly anytime there was a General Election coming up in the U.K.), world events, personal trials and tribulations, work, what's for dinner, and sometimes just nonsense. There was hardly a topic we didn't touch on. At that time, the magazine's IRC channel was a hopping place. Joble, Hootiegibbon, CSolis, grnich, ms_meme, AndrezjL, Meemaw, myself and many others frequently hung out there. Sproggy would join in on the conversations with just about everyone.