When it comes to free, open-source desktop publishing (DTP) there’s little as capable, as fully-featured, or as widely used in professional settings as Scribus.

Now a brand new stable release of this powerful page-making tool is available, the first since 2019.

Scribus 1.6.0 ships with “thousands of enhancements and fixes across all areas of the program”, with its development team noting it’s more featured, faster, and more stable than all versions prior.

Used to create everything from newsletters to books, Scribus provides scores of features commonly found in paid-for, proprietary DTP software, allowing users to design and create complex layouts, manipulate text, insert images, manage colours, and export documents for free.

Interestingly, Scribus is now around 23 years old, so it is a solidly mature product. Yet it can work on macOS Apple Silicon and also has a distro-independent AppImage installation available. It’s the perfect tool to design once and use across all desktop OS’s.

Scribus has many unexpected touches, such as powerful vector drawing tools, support for a huge number of file types via import/export filters, emulation of colour blindness or the rendering of markup languages like LaTeX or Lilypond inside Scribus.

The Scribus file format is XML-based and open. Unlike proprietary binary file formats, even damaged documents can be recovered with a simple text editor – sometimes a challenging problem with other page layout programs.

Reliable PDF creation is the key to a successful print run at a commercial printing house, and it has been a pillar of Scribus development since the early days of its development. Scribus was the first DTP program in the world that supported the demanding PDF/X-3 specification. Scribus also offers a wide range of options with respect to PDF export.

See omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/01/scribu…
#Blog, #DTP, #opensource, #publishing, #technology

Some canny devs have started looking elsewhere, not least the open source and free game engine Godot. In fact, on hearing the original Unity announcement, two industry veterans decided to learn the engine and build a game satirizing the situation – and they did it all in one week.

The result is Install Fee Tycoon, an idle clicker in the vein of Cookie Clicker only instead of baking cookies at exponential rates, it’s reinstalls of games built on the “Chaos3D” engine.

Granted, an idle clicker isn’t exactly the most advanced type of game, but it demonstrates the point that experienced devs can whip up something in Godot, fully formed, in no time and that Unity is not the be-all and end-all. It also neatly plays on concerns many had about how Unity’s install tracking would work and how it could potentially be open to abuse.

Yes, it is certainly not as great as Unity when it comes to that super-realism, but for many games it would really suffice quite well enough. That goodness there is some competition available so that devs do have some choices. I often feel it is better to stay a step or two behind the fanciest features, and rather retain your freedoms and not get locked into a subscription model you get held hostage to (sounds a bit like some cloud subscription services).

I remember a time when most games were not ultra-realistic, and we still got totally lost in enjoying the gameplay itself.

Godot is completely free and open source under the permissive MIT license. No strings attached, no royalties, nothing. Users’ games are theirs, down to the last line of engine code. Godot’s development is fully independent and community-driven, empowering users to help shape their engine to match their expectations. It is supported by the Godot Foundation not-for-profit. It is cross-platform for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and Web Editor.

But there are also other alternatives such as Cocos2d-x, CryEngine (PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S), Armory, OpenMW, and LÖVE.

See theregister.com/2023/09/27/uni…
#Blog, #gaming, #opensource, #technology

In the world of Linux, few debates have stirred as much controversy as the battle between the traditional System V init system, often known as SysVinit, and the newer systemd.

systemd is a system and service manager, first introduced in 2010 to replace the traditional System V init system. It was designed to improve boot-up speeds and manage system services more efficiently. Today, systemd is the default init system for many popular Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Fedora, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Despite the name, systemd is not a daemon. Instead, it’s a software suite that provides a number of system components for Linux. Its goal: to standardize service configuration and behavior across Linux distributions.

Personally, I have no preference at all. It’s there, and I use it sometimes when I need to change or troubleshoot something. My take on it really is that Linux has many options and therefore there will always be differences of opinion, just like we also have for all the “best” Linux distros. When do you ever hear Windows users passionately debating for or against the Yellow and Blue version of Windows? You don’t, because they don’t have those options. And for macOS, of course, Steve knows best…

I think most newer Linux users have not really experienced the pre-systemd era, and also probably don’t delve much into where systemd is actually changed much. With modern Linux there is less and less reason to delve down into systemd unless you are in the habit of experimenting, learning, pulling things apart. But sometimes the topic flares up, so it is interesting to hear a bit about what and why.

See itsfoss.com/systemd-init/
#Blog, #linux, #systemd, #technology