Proprietary Software News Archives

Discord, the popular instant messaging and VoIP communication platform, announced some significant improvements being made to their Linux client.

Last month Opera released the Opera GX gaming-focused web browser for Linux. It rolled out in RPM and Debian package format support while now for those interested is also available via Flatpak and Snap sandboxed app formats.

It's been a while since most of you probably thought about the Opera web browser, but these days they have been catering their "Opera GX" web browser to gamers. Today they have finally delivered this Opera GX gaming-focused browser for Linux users.

Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab announced that it's bringing its flagship Kaspersky anti-virus software for home users over to Linux. Kaspersky software was previously available for Linux just for business/enterprise deployments.

Tellusim as the company known so far for its GravityMark benchmark and being started by Alexander Zapryagaev who was a Unigine Corp co-founder has now launched the Tellusim Core SDK as a new cross-platform, commercial engine.

SPEC today finally published an updated Linux-native build of their SPECViewPerf industry graphics benchmark for professional applications.

Blackmagic Design has announced Davinci Resolve 16 beta as the newest feature update to the very feature-rich and cross-platform but proprietary video editor.

EditShare, which continues developing the professional-grade Lightworks video editor, does continue maintaining their Linux support and this year they are planning for more improvements. But not shared as part of their 2019 plans is any word on making good about the "open-source" version of the software they originally announced back in 2010.

Besides the lack of games, one of the other pressing reasons why some desktop/workstation users haven't migrated full-time to Linux has been over the lack of Adobe's Creative Suite working natively on Linux (and the Wine-based options often only working well for dated versions of Adobe's software). But if you hope to see Adobe Linux software, their customer care recommends you vote.

Lightworks, the long-standing non-linear video editing system that has offered a native Linux build the past few years after being challenged by delays for a few years, is out today with version 14.5 and comes with Linux, macOS, and Windows support.

DaVinci Resolve 15 has been released by Blackmagic Design as the company's professional-grade video editing, visual effects, motion graphics, and audio post-production software.

The current VR landscape is fragmented and quite a mess with the lack of standardization and wide variety of hardware capabilities at this point, though fortunately the forthcoming OpenXR standard coming out of The Khronos Group for a standard API for application developers as well as a standard device layer / abstraction interface will clear this up when released later in 2018. But for now we have some interesting remarks from an open-source developer that has been engaging in this area and doing his best with the current VR scene.

I can't imagine many Linux desktop users are interested in a closed-source, commercial-driven password manager for their systems, but for those that are, Keeper launched a new version of its Keeper Password Program Manager for Linux.

Are you still using the Vivaldi web browser? If so, you can now use it on ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi.

The latest version of the TeamViewer remote control / desktop sharing / web conferencing software is now available for Linux with a number of improvements.

Adobe has confirmed they will be ending their support for Flash by the end of the year 2020.

Opera Software today announced that the Opera 43 web-browser is shipping, assuming you are still running this closed-source web-browser on Linux.

The Lightworks cross-platform video editor for Linux/macOS/Windows is on the verge of a big new release with Lightworks 14.0 while out today is a new beta release.

With the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) that allows for "Bash on Windows" via the Windows 10 Anniversary update, Ubuntu is the default choice while a new WSL-Distribution-Switcher open-source project makes it easy to now load the distribution of your choice under Windows.

Last month Adobe returned to updating their NPAPI Linux Flash plug-in after they went four years without updating it. In September was Flash Player 23 for Linux while available now is the Flash Player 24 beta.

For those still using the Opera web-browser, Opera 41 is now available as the latest stable release and seems primarily focused on performance improvements.

Earlier this week Canonical announced their Kernel Livepatching Service for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users. Canonical's service is free for under three systems while another alternative for Ubuntu Linux users interested in a commercial service is CloudLinux's KernelCare.

Besides Mozilla Firefox 49 being available, so is the latest stable update to the Opera browser powered by Chromium's Blink engine.

Adobe stopped updating its NPAPI-based Linux Flash Player four years ago and planned to stop supporting it entirely in 2017, but now the company has backtracked on those steps with a commitment to regularly update their NPAPI and PPAPI versions of the Flash Player for Linux.

Tresorit is an end-to-end encrypted file sharing service aimed at sharing files among team members. Tresorit has supported Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, and even Blackberry and Windows Phone while now they are finally supporting the Linux desktop.

For those still using the cross-platform Opera web browser, a new developer build is available today that provides new features.

For those wishing to access EXT-based file-systems from Windows, Paragon Software Group has announced a new version of their ExtFS software for Windows with better support for EXT4 file-systems.

Now that my Linux reviews of the GeForce GTX 1070 and GeForce GTX 1080 have been published, next on my agenda this week are running some fresh Windows vs. Linux graphics benchmarks with these Pascal graphics cards.

If Audacity and Ardour aren't cutting it for your audio editing needs on Linux, there's another Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) option coming to Linux: Reaper.

Two days ago Microsoft pushed out a Windows 10 update that added the recently announced Ubuntu user-space with Bash for Windows using a new Linux subsystem for Win10. Have you tried it out?

Following last week's announcement of Canonical and Microsoft working together to bring Ubuntu's user-space with Bash to Windows 10 in user-space using a new Windows 10 Linux subsystem, the preliminary support is now available with the latest Windows Insider update.

Today marks the first stable release of the Vivaldi web browser.

BitTorrent Sync, the P2P file synchronization tool for many different platforms, finally has official Linux packages.

For those that haven't heard yet, Opera Software ASA has received a buy out offer led by a Chinese tech group for buying the browser maker for $1.2 billion USD.

Microsoft has reportedly said that Windows 10 has been installed on 200 million devices so far worldwide.

Adobe has announced they'll be renaming Flash To Animate CC.

Opera rolled out a developer update to their web-browser update yesterday. Opera's Debian packages are finally being complemented by RPMs.

My most recent Windows 10 benchmarks compared to Linux were some NVIDIA numbers from early August. With the ever-advancing state of Linux graphics on both the open and closed-source driver fronts, I've started this week with doing another fresh Windows 10 vs. Linux performance comparison for Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA.

For those of you interested in the multi-platform, closed-source Vivaldi web browser "built for power users", it's now in beta.

Opera made available a new beta update to their Opera 33 web-browser this week with some updated branding and other changes for Linux users.

Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman's Xamarin company, which continues to focus on Mono solutions especially for C# apps iOS and Android, has acquired RoboVM.

Substance Designer is a node-based texturing tool and is quite advanced software. Up to now Allegorithmic's Substance software has just been available for Windows and OS X, but now it's being ported to Linux.

Apple released OS X 10.11 "El Capitan" today as a free update for Apple computer owners. Are you interested in some fresh OS X vs. Linux benchmarks?

The crew still working on the Opera web-browser has released version 32 of the cross-platform, Chromium-powered web browser.

This probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise, but the Norway-based Opera Software is considering a sale of the company with multiple parties supposedly being interested in this web-focused Oslo outfit.

Well, it looks like the Free Software Foundation's message about Windows 10 wasn't too effective: reportedly, as of this morning, Windows 10 has already been installed on more than 67 million PCs.

The Free Software Foundation has issued a warning this week over the newly-released Windows 10 while blasting Microsoft.

I've been playing with Windows 10 since yesterday... I must applaud Microsoft that it's a heck of a lot better than Windows 8, as the Windows 10 desktop experience is alright and Edge is nicer than Internet Explorer, but I still don't have any intentions on switching back to Windows this lifetime.

Windows 10 launches today! I'm excited about this latest Microsoft operating system release, but only for running some interesting Windows vs. Linux benchmarks.

A new patent pool is forming that wants 0.5% of the gross revenue for H.265 videos from content owners and distributors.