Codrut Nistor

After more than two decades in development, the service management daemon GNU Shepherd has finally reached the 1.0-labeled milestone. Its highlights include transient and timed services, log rotation, integrated logging, as well as improved service insights. Additionally, the deprecated GOOPS interface is now gone.

Introduced earlier this year, the Sora AI model for generating videos from text has moved up to Sora Turbo, which is much faster. Now, it comes as a standalone product available at Sora.com for ChatGPT Plus and Pro users. The videos generated can be up to 1080p in resolution and 20 seconds long (or shorter).

Starlink has recently expanded its coverage to include four new markets. Starting on the 9th of December, Elon Musk's internet satellite service arrived in Cape Verde, Timor-Leste, Canada, and Nauru. This push makes Starlink available to over 4 million users across more than 100 territories.

Thanks to the changes in licensing requirements announced by the local Department of Communication and Digital Technologies, Starlink could enter South Africa next summer. However, this is not certain yet, although Elon Musk's satellite-based internet service gained political support in the country already.

While no details about the particular processor (or processors) developed so far, Chinese media has just unveiled that Gree Electric is now producing its own chips, six years after announcing its plans in this field. All research, design, and manufacturing efforts were funded without the government's involvement.

This year's last major update, labeled 2.43 "Storm Warning" by Gaijin, brings quite a few exciting pieces of military hardware to War Thunder. Alongside the Eurofighter Typhoon and the Rafale jets, this refresh also brings the M44 and PzH 2000 self-propelled howitzers, several ships, the Attica location for ground battles, and more.

The final release of the year sees Kali Linux dropping support for 32-bit kernels while sporting GNOME 47 and Python 3.12. Additionally, the update labeled 2024.4 comes with 14 new tools, a major refresh to the Kali NetHunter store and website, as well as more supported devices, pushing the list up to a total of 100.

Grml, an Austrian Linux distribution based on Debian, has returned with version 2024.12. While it drops x86 support, this update is the first to bring this minimal, live Linux distro to 64-bit ARM hardware. In addition to these, Grml 2024.12 also comes with fresh Debian 13 software packages alongside many minor tweaks and fixes.

The 13th release of the year, which is also the last one of 2024, speeds up and further enhances the security provided by CachyOS while also improving compatibility thanks to RustiCL, which replaces the default OpenCL driver. Additionally, CachyOS 241221 comes with the Bluetooth service enabled by default.

Based on Sid (the unstable Debian version), siduction has been around for over a decade with multiple desktop choices. Sadly, version 2024.1.0 discontinues three flavors, namely GNOME, MATE, and Cinnamon. The main highlight is KDE Plasma 6 and it comes in five flavors: KDE, LXQt, Xfce, Xorg, and no X.