MazonnaCara89

Libreboot is a coreboot distribution (coreboot distro), in the same way that Debian is a Linux distribution. Libreboot provides free, open source (libre) boot firmware based on coreboot, replacing proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware on specific Intel/AMD x86 and ARM based motherboards, including laptop and desktop computers. It initialises the hardware (e.g. memory controller, CPU, peripherals) and starts a bootloader for your operating system (OS). Linux and BSD are well-supported.

Libreboot has, as of today, become an official member project within SPI, or more formally, Software in the Public Interest. Libreboot's project page is here:

https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/libreboot/

Software in the Public Interest (SPI) is a non-profit corporation in New York, which provides legal and fiscal infrastructure for Free Software projects. They assist projects in the handling of administrative tasks, money and so on, allowing those projects to focus on the thing that matters most: the code.

Organisations like SPI are vital for the health of the entire Free Software movement, and I'm extremely grateful to SPI for accepting Libreboot!

I contacted them earlier in 2025, around the time I attended FOSDEM 2025 in Belgium.

Here is the resolution from SPI's board meeting on 14 July 2025, where Libreboot was officially accepted as a member project:

https://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/resolutions/2025/2025-07-14.js.1/

SPI holds their board meetings on IRC. Here is the public IRC log of the board meeting, in which the above resolution was accepted unanimously:

https://www.spi-inc.org/meetings/logs/2025/2025-07-14.txt

SPI then contacted me with their invitation, based on this resolution, and I accepted their invitation!

Going forward, I will be using Libreboot's SPI membership for several things, such as:

• Accepting donations from the public, to provide funding for Libreboot; this includes things like research/development costs (buying hardware and equipment mostly, for porting to Libreboot and for testing).
• Paying for project expenses - I'll likely start using it to pay for e.g. domain name renewals, hosting, and so on, in the future. I currently pay these expenses myself.
• Legal assistance; for example if Libreboot ever wants to use contractors in the future to work on things, that sort of thing. And of course, if Libreboot generally ever needs help with legal documents.
• In general, if the project ever has much larger expenses in the future, SPI can also manage whatever assets Libreboot needs it to.

SPI is one of the oldest fiscal sponsor organisations specifically for Free Software projects, and one of the biggest there is. For example, they sponsor the Debian Linux project!

Here are some examples of other, major Free Software projects that they support:

• https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/archlinux/
• https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/debian/
• https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/ffmpeg/
• https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/libreoffice/
• https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/openssl/
• https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/openzfs/

Libreboot is a lifelong passion of mine (I am its founder and lead developer), but the problem it has always had is that it's basically just me; I rely heavily on help from the various upstream projects that Libreboot uses, and from contributors to Libreboot. A number of people have made major contributions to Libreboot over the years.

But the problem was always that Libreboot didn't have formal infrastructure in place, until today. This, more generally, is why I sought to join SPI. I had considered creating my own Libreboot Foundation many years ago, and this is still a possibility, but it's easier for a smaller project like Libreboot to lean on organisations like SPI instead.

So basically, where I once funded Libreboot entirely by my own means, SPI will now provide an official, organised way to do so - and I anticipate that this will mean Libreboot can gain greater funding and support as a result. I'm expecting great things! Libreboot always had a strong future, but SPI membership now makes that future even stronger.

At the time of this article, the SPI-based donations page for Libreboot has not yet been set up, but it will be online in the near future.

Once again, I would like to thank SPI for accepting Libreboot! Libreboot will be able to achieve great things, with SPI's help, and I'm very much looking forward to the future.

Thank you! And to my readers: watch this space.

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week, KDE contributors from around the world are traveling to Akademy, KDE’s annual conference. I myself am on a train right now as I write these words (though hopefully not still there when you read them), on my way to meet with fellow KDE people for a week of working, planning, and social bond strengthening! Expect a light report next Saturday, or none at all.

Nevertheless, this week, folks managed to be productive anyway. We’ve got a new feature, some UI improvements, bug fixes, efficiency Improvements… the works!

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.5.0

The “Flatpak Permissions” page in System Settings has grown into a more general “Application Permissions” page by additonally letting you configure settings related to the XDG portal system, such as taking screenshots, accepting remote control requests, and more! (David Redondo, link)

Implemented support for the XDG Wallpaper portal, which allows portal-using apps to requests to change the desktop and lock screen wallpaper. (David Redondo, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.5.0

The focus stealing prevention settings on System Settings’ Window Behavior page now do sensible things on Wayland. At one end, “Extreme” requires a valid activation token for every focus request. On the other end, “None” ignores them completely, allowing every activated window to immediately take focus. The default setting is “Low”, which should result in fewer failed activations now, while still not letting apps go nuts and steal focus all the time. (Xaver Hugl, link 1 and link 2)

System Settings’ Day/Night Cycle page (which is where the Night Light timing settings moved to) now lets you enter times in AM/PM style, if that’s what the rest of your system shows and uses. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

You’re no longer required to manually create a remote desktop account for remote-desktop purposes; now your existing user account works as expected, and you can just supply its credentials to the client app. (David Edmundson, link)

Discover is now more verbose about what it’s doing while fetching updates, so it doesn’t seem stuck and you can tell which source is being slow and gumming up the works. (Aleix Pol Gonzelez, link)

Improved keyboard navigation in the Kicker Application Menu widget when no apps are marked as favorites. (Christoph Wolk, link)

The monospace font you choose on System Settings’ Fonts page is now synced to GTK apps. (Reilly Brogan, link)

System Settings’ Tablet page now warns you if you try to use it to configure a tablet that’s being managed by a custom user-space tablet driver, because these can conflict and produce odd results. (Joshua Goins, link)

Frameworks 6.18

Improved the visuals of how toolbars load themselves in various Kirigami-using apps and System Settings pages. (Marco Martin, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.4.5

Improved the reliability with which screen settings are chosen and restored. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

The Night Light feature no longer somewhat distorts the colors in screenshots and screen recordings. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed an issue in KWin that caused dragging-and-dropping items in Firefox’s bookmarks sub-menus to not work properly. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed an issue in KWin’s Zoom effect that caused the cursor to use the wrong shape when it passed over a zoomed-in area of an XWayland-using app that would normally use a different cursor shape. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Frameworks 6.18

Fixed a case where various Kirigami-using apps and System Settings pages could crash under certain circumstances. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Fixed an issue in draggable list items throughout Kirigami-using apps and System Settings pages that prevented them from being dragged upwards in a way that would require scrolling the view. (M. Sadık Uğursoy, link)

Fixed an issue that prevented the “File already exists!” dialog from appearing when you try to rename a file on the desktop to have the same name as another file there. (Pan Zhang, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 4 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 26 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.5.0

Added support for “Underlays”, which promise to improve efficiency in GPUs that support it. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Made KWin’s blur effect per-view, which looks better when screencasting. (Xaver Hugl, link)

How You Can Help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist, too.

You can also help us by making a donation! A monetary contribution of any size will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

Steven Deobald has been in the post of GNOME Foundation Executive Director for the past four months, during which time he has made major contributions to both the Foundation and the wider GNOME project. Sadly, Steven will be leaving the Foundation this week. The Foundation Board is extremely grateful to Steven and wish him the very best for his future endeavors.

The Executive Director role is extremely diverse and it is hard to list all of Steven’s contributions since he has been in post. However, particular highlights include:

• energetic engagement with the GNOME community, including weekly updates focused on the Foundation’s support of GNOME development, and attention to topics of importance to our contributors, such as Pride Month and Disability Pride

• the creation of a new donations platform, which included both a new website, detailed evaluation of payment processors, and a strategy for distributing donations to GNOME development

• a focus on partner outreach, including attending UN Open Source Week, adding postmarketOS to our Advisory board, and the creation of a new Advisory Board Matrix channel, alongside many conversations with partner organisations

• internal policy and documentation work, particularly around spending and finances

• the addition of new tooling to augment policies and documentation, such as an internal Foundation Handbook and vault.gnome.org

• assistance with the board, including recruiting a new treasurer and vice-treasurer

We are extremely grateful to Steven for all this and more. Despite these many positive achievements, Steven and the board have come to the conclusion that Steven is not the right fit for the Executive Director role at this time. We are therefore bidding Steven a fond farewell.

I know that some members of the GNOME community will be disappointed by this decision. I can assure everyone that it wasn’t one that we took lightly, and had to consider from different perspectives.

The good news is that Steven has left the Foundation with a strong platform on which to build, and we have an energetic and engaged board which is already working to fill in the gaps left by his departure. I’m confident that the Foundation can continue on the positive trajectory started by Steven, with a strong community-based executive taking the reins.

To this end, the board held its regular annual meeting this week, and appointed new directors to key positions. I’ve taken over the president’s role from Rob McQueen, who has now joined Arun Raghavan as one of two Vice-Presidents. The Executive Committee has been expanded with the inclusion of Arun and Maria Majadas (who is our new Chair). We have also bolstered the Finance Committee, and are looking to create new groups for fundraising and communications.

Steven has been very helpful in working on a smooth transition, and our staff are continuing to work as normal, so Foundation operations won’t be affected by these management changes. In the near future we’ll be pushing forward with the fundraising plans that Steven has set out, and are hopeful about being able to provide more financial support for the GNOME project as a result. If you want to help us with that, please get in touch.

Should you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to president@gnome.org.

On behalf of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors,

– Allan

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week saw huge improvements to the Plasma clipboard, KRunner, and drawing tablet support — not to mention a bunch of UI improvements in Discover, and plenty more, too! So without further ado…

Notable New Features

Plasma’s clipboard now lets you mark entries as favorites, and they’ll be permanently saved so you can always access them easily! This is very useful when you find yourself pasting the same common text snippets all the time. The feature request was 22 years old; this may be a new record for oldest request ever implemented in KDE! (Kendrick Ha, link)

Plasma now lets you configure touch rings on your drawing tablet! (Joshua Goins, link)

Discover now lets you install hardware drivers that are offered in your operating system’s package repos! (Evan Maddock, link)

KRunner and KRunner-powered searches can now find global shortcuts! (Fushan Wen, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.5.0

KRunner and KRunner-powered searches now use fuzzy matching for applications. (Harald Sitter, link)

Improved the way Discover presents error messages to be a bit more user-friendly and compliant with KDE’s Human Interface Guidelines. (Oliver Beard and Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)

Discover now lets you write a review for apps that don’t have any reviews yet. (Nate Graham, link)

On operating systems using RPM-OSTree (like Fedora Kinoite), there’s no longer an awkward red icon used in the sidebar and other places you’d expect black or white icons. (Justin Zobel, link)

KDE Gear 25.12.0

Opening a disk in KDE Partition Manager from its entry in Plasma’s Disks & Devices widget no longer mounts the disk, which is annoying since you’ll then have to unmount it in the app before you can do anything with it. (Joshua Goins, link 1 and link 2)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.4.5

Fixed a critical issue that could cause the text of a sticky note on a panel to be permanently lost if that panel was cloned and then later deleted. This work also changes handling for deleted notes’ underlying data files: now they’re moved to the trash, rather than being deleted immediately. Should be a lot safer now! (Niccolò Venerandi, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a very common KWin crash when changing display settings that was accidentally introduced recently. (David Edmundson, link)

Made a few strings in job progress notifications translatable. (Victor Ryzhykh, link)

Fixed an issue that could allow buttons with long text to overflow from System Monitor’s process killer dialog when the window was very very small. (Nate Graham, Link)

Fixed an issue in the time zone chooser map that would cause it to not zoom to the right location when changing the time zone using one of the comboboxes. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

The warnings shown by System Settings’ Fonts page in response to various conditions will now be shown when you adjust all the fonts at once, not only when you adjust one at a time. (Nate Graham, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while you were configuring the weather widget. (Bogdan Onofriichuk, link)

Fixed an issue that could cause System Settings to crash while quitting when certain pages were open. (David Redondo, link)

Plasma is now better at remembering if you wanted Bluetooth on or off on login. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Panels in Auto-Hide, Dodge Windows, and Windows Go Below modes will now respect the opacity setting. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Frameworks 6.18

Fixed an issue that caused Plasma to crash when dragging files from Dolphin to the desktop or vice versa when the system was set up with certain types of mounts. (David Edmundson, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 4 very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 5 last week). Current list of bugs
• 26 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 27 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.5.0

Implemented support for “overlay planes” on single-output setups, which have the potential to significantly reduce GPU and power usage for compatible apps displaying full-screen content. Note that NVIDIA GPUs are currently opted out because of unresolved driver issues. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Implemented support for drag-and-drop to and from popups created by Firefox extensions, and presumably other popups implemented with the same xdg_popup system, too. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed an issue that would cause V-Sync to be inappropriately disabled in certain games using the SDL library. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Undetermined release date

The annotating feature in Spectacle has been extracted into a re-usable library so that it can also be used in other apps in the future! Such integration is still in progress (as is working out a release schedule for the git repo that the library lives in now), but you’ll hear about it once it’s ready! (Noah Davis and Carl Schwan, link)

How You Can Help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist, too.

You can also help us by making a donation! A monetary contribution of any size will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

In 2020, Apple released the M1 with a custom GPU. We got to work reverse-engineering the hardware and porting Linux. Today, you can run Linux on a range of M1 and M2 Macs, with almost all hardware working: wireless, audio, and full graphics acceleration.

Our story begins in December 2020, when Hector Martin kicked off Asahi Linux. I was working for Collabora working on Panfrost, the open source Mesa3D driver for Arm Mali GPUs. Hector put out a public call for guidance from upstream open source maintainers, and I bit. I just intended to give some quick pointers. Instead, I bought myself a Christmas present and got to work. In between my university coursework and Collabora work, I poked at the shader instruction set.

One thing led to another. Within a few weeks, I drew a triangle.

In 3D graphics, once you can draw a triangle, you can do anything.

Pretty soon, I started work on a shader compiler. After my final exams that semester, I took a few days off from Collabora to bring up an OpenGL driver capable of spinning gears with my new compiler.

Over the next year, I kept reverse-engineering and improving the driver until it could run 3D games on macOS.

Meanwhile, Asahi Lina wrote a kernel driver for the Apple GPU. My userspace OpenGL driver ran on macOS, leaving her kernel driver as the missing piece for an open source graphics stack. In December 2022, we shipped graphics acceleration in Asahi Linux.

In January 2023, I started my final semester in my Computer Science program at the University of Toronto. For years I juggled my courses with my part-time job and my hobby driver. I faced the same question as my peers: what will I do after graduation?

Maybe Panfrost? I started reverse-engineering of the Mali Midgard GPU back in 2017, when I was still in high school. That led to an internship at Collabora in 2019 once I graduated, turning into my job throughout four years of university. During that time, Panfrost grew from a kid’s pet project based on blackbox reverse-engineering, to a professional driver engineered by a team with Arm’s backing and hardware documentation. I did what I set out to do, and the project succeeded beyond my dreams. It was time to move on.

What did I want to do next?

• Finish what I started with the M1. Ship a great driver.
• Bring full, conformant OpenGL drivers to the M1. Apple’s drivers are not conformant, but we should strive for the industry standard.
• Bring full, conformant Vulkan to Apple platforms, disproving the myth that Vulkan isn’t suitable for Apple hardware.
• Bring Proton gaming to Asahi Linux. Thanks to Valve’s work for the Steam Deck, Windows games can run better on Linux than even on Windows. Why not reap those benefits on the M1?

Panfrost was my challenge until we “won”. My next challenge? Gaming on Linux on M1.

Once I finished my coursework, I started full-time on gaming on Linux. Within a month, we shipped OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux. A few weeks later, we passed official conformance for OpenGL ES 3.1. That put us at feature parity with Panfrost. I wanted to go further.

OpenGL (ES) 3.2 requires geometry shaders, a legacy feature not supported by either Arm or Apple hardware. The proprietary OpenGL drivers emulate geometry shaders with compute, but there was no open source prior art to borrow. Even though multiple Mesa drivers need geometry/tessellation emulation, nobody did the work to get there.

My early progress on OpenGL was fast thanks to the mature common code in Mesa. It was time to pay it forward. Over the rest of the year, I implemented geometry/tessellation shader emulation. And also the rest of the owl. In January 2024, I passed conformance for the full OpenGL 4.6 specification, finishing up OpenGL.

Vulkan wasn’t too bad, either. I polished the OpenGL driver for a few months, but once I started typing a Vulkan driver, I passed 1.3 conformance in a few weeks.

What remained was wiring up the geometry/tessellation emulation to my shiny new Vulkan driver, since those are required for Direct3D. Et voilà, Proton games.

Along the way, Karol Herbst passed OpenCL 3.0 conformance on the M1, running my compiler atop his “rusticl” frontend.

Meanwhile, when the Vulkan 1.4 specification was published, we were ready and shipped a conformant implementation on the same day.

After that, I implemented sparse texture support, unlocking Direct3D 12 via Proton.

…Now what?

• Ship a great driver? Check.
• Conformant OpenGL 4.6, OpenGL ES 3.2, and OpenCL 3.0? Check.
• Conformant Vulkan 1.4? Check.
• Proton gaming? Check.

That’s a wrap.

We’ve succeeded beyond my dreams. The challenges I chased, I have tackled. The drivers are fully upstream in Mesa. Performance isn’t too bad. With the Vulkan on Apple myth busted, conformant Vulkan is now coming to macOS via LunarG’s KosmicKrisp project building on my work.

Satisfied, I am now stepping away from the Apple ecosystem. My friends in the Asahi Linux orbit will carry the torch from here. As for me?

Samsung has decided to proceed with the Bootloader blocking also in Europe, a move that has caused a lot of discussion. Behind this choice is a European regulation that will come into force in August 2025 and which risks changing smartphone usage in Europe forever. This is why other manufacturers may soon follow suit.

From 1 August 2025, new provisions will come into force RED Directive (Radio Equipment Directive), which redefines the compliance requirements for all radio devices sold in Europe. This is a significant change, not so much for the amount of regulations introduced, but for the effect they will have on the entire Android ecosystem. The issue revolves around three articles that impose specific protections: against network interference, personal data compromise, and digital fraud. These are, in themselves, sacrosanct rules.

But the crux comes with the interpretation prevailingEach device must ensure full compliance not only with the hardware, but also with the software that controls the radio modules. This is where the bootloader comes in. Unlocking it essentially allows you to replace the original operating system with an alternative one, such as LineageOS or GrapheneOS.

But these systems, if they modify the radio drivers even minimally, invalidate the CE certification. An uncertified device can no longer be legally marketed or used, at least according to the most stringent reading of the law.

This scenario has therefore led Samsung to protect its devices. Not on a whim, but to avoid any software modifications falling under your legal liability. If a user installs a ROM that interferes with radio frequencies or compromises communications security, the manufacturer (and in some cases the importer) may be held directly liable.

RED does not explicitly talk about unlocking the Bootloader or custom ROM, but it opens one regulatory space in which the margins for maneuver are they narrow. And in doing so, it provides a solid argument for those who have been trying for years to close the loop between hardware, software, and services. After all, customizing the operating system also means breaking away from proprietary services and, therefore, from the model that ties the user to the brand.

Samsung is just the first to move, but it's hard to imagine it will be the only one. Starting in August 2025, it's very likely that other manufacturers will follow suit, at least for the European market.