Summary of the week of May 13, 2024

[cobito]

Nvidia starts using the free driver by default

Nvidia has decided to activate its free driver by default on GPUs starting from Turing in the next version of its driver for Linux.

History of the hard drive

In this video they explain the history of the mechanical hard drive, from the first IBM units of the 50s to the current landscape where three companies try to keep afloat a technology that is increasingly niche.

Linux 6.9 available

Version 6.9 of the Linux kernel is now available. It doesn't come with many features aimed at the general public and most of the changes are internal development issues, although it does bring something called NTSync, an optional module that seems to substantially improve graphics performance in Wine.

Ryzen 7 3700U

Someone has brought us a Ryzen 7 3700U. It comes with 4 Zen+ cores and its 15W TDP means it doesn't stand out much compared to other models of the architecture, placing it in the middle of the ranking, very close to the 3300U that someone brought us last week.

Toshiba reaches 30TB

Toshiba has announced that it already has 30TB drives, joining Seagate and Western Digital in this range of capacities.

Firefox 126 available

Firefox 126 comes with the ability to copy addresses by removing tracking information. In addition, support for zstd compression has been added, which offers better ratios with the same CPU load as gzip.

Restarting a hung computer

Sometimes, a failure in a driver or another problem can leave the system hung. The usual thing is to press the reset button, but in Linux there is a safer way to restart using the system request key (print screen). The sequence is Alt+SysRq+R,E,I,S,U,B.