Intel's Skylake audio binary-only firmware landed today within the linux-firmware Git tree.

For those still relying upon NetBeans as an integrated development environment primarily built around Java, the big 8.1 release is now available.

The latest development release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 (codenamed Hammerfest) is now available for open-source, cross-platform benchmarking.

NVIDIA is readying their Vulkan drivers for a same-day release and on the Windows side they've already begun exposing some of the Vulkan interface.

Microsoft and Red Hat have jointly announced a partnership today to "deliver more flexibility and choice" in the cloud.

While Jonathan Riddell stepped down as the Kubuntu release manager immediately following the Kubuntu 15.10 release and Kubuntu's post-15.10 future was portrayed as uncertain, the developers still with the project are focusing on making a great 16.04 "Xenial Xerus" release.

The Ubuntu Online Summit for Ubuntu 16.04 began yesterday with a keynote by Mark Shuttleworth.

Intel's Purley platform, which is reported as the biggest server platform advancement in a decade, isn't set to debut until 2017 but the Linux support is already in the works.

Besides landing the LightNVM / Open-Channel SSD supprot, another pull request by Jens Axboe is adding another new feature for Linux 4.4.

The release of openSUSE 42.1 Leap is now available, which they call the "first hybrid distribution" and is comprised of sources from SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Timothy Arceri has now fully-finished up the work on ARB_arrays_of_arrays OpenGL support for the Intel Mesa driver.

Jens Axboe sent in the patches today for landing support for LightNVM and Open-Channel SSDs within the mainline Linux kernel!

While Epic Games is still hard at work on their Unreal Tournament game powered by Unreal Engine 4, this afternoon they surprisingly announced a new game: Paragon.

Octavian Purdila of Intel has announced today the Linux Kernel Library, a.k.a. LKL, for re-using kernel code more easily in user-space.

Back in September I posted Fedora vs. openSUSE vs. Manjaro vs. Debian vs. Ubuntu vs. Mint Linux Benchmarks. Of that six-way Linux distribution comparison, several Phoronix readers complained that I was somehow anti-openSUSE or that testing out-of-the-box distribution performance isn't right, since openSUSE 42.1 Leap tended to lose the most in that testing. Well, thanks to those tests, the out-of-the-box performance for openSUSE 42.1 is now going to be better.

Mozilla published Firefox 42.0 as the newest version of their cross-platform web browser.

The Dropbox developers working on Pyston today announced the latest version of their high-performance Python JIT implementation.

David Airlie has pulled the Nouveau DRM driver changes into his DRM-Next tree, which will then end up in Linux 4.4 within the next few days.

Rafael Wysocki notes that with the power management and ACPI updates for Linux 4.4 there are "quite a [few] features are included this time" for improving Linux power use.

Matthew Miller has announced the release of Fedora 23.

Trusted Platform Module 2.0 support has been around for a few kernel cycles now and with the forthcoming Linux 4.4 kernel it will be in much better shape.

Distributions have been working on it for years to let the X.Org Server run without root privileges. This feat has now been accomplished for Debian testing users where if using systemd and a DRM/KMS graphics driver, you can run the xorg-server as a user.

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

One of the many pull requests sent in today by Ingo Molnar for the Linux 4.4 merge window was the EFI subsystem update.

The past few kernel cycles we've seen a fair amount of x86 Assembly changes with a goal of turning more Assembly into C code for the Linux kernel. That process has continued with the in-development Linux 4.4 kernel.

One month after the release of the Enlightenment 0.20 Alpha with much better Wayland support that led to the Wayland support from Enlightenment 0.19 being removed, the support continues to mature.

Google posted a blog post a few minutes ago entitled "Chrome OS is here to stay" where they counter the rumors that ChromeOS would be folded into Android.

Prolific Mesa contributor Ilia Mirkin has taken initial steps towards working on parallel shader compiles in Mesa.

The Ubuntu Online Summit for developers and contributors to Ubuntu Linux begins tomorrow and runs through Thursday as planning gets underway for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, a.k.a. the Xenial Xerus.

Coming in just a few days after the Wine 1.7.54 release is the experimental Wine-Staging 1.7.54 release with a few extra features.

In time for this week's release of Fedora 23 is the opening of the Fedora Developer Portal.

The 2015 October Steam Hardware/Software survey results are now available. While Steam Machines with SteamOS are just days away from launching, right now the Linux gaming market-share is reported at under 1%.

We've heard AMD is planning a large Catalyst driver update for this month and now more details are coming to light. Meet the Radeon Software Crimson Edition, which will hopefully be out for the Linux driver too.

Building off yesterday's release of Linux 4.3 is now the GNU Linux-libre 4.3 kernel. As usual, the GNU Linux-libre kernel strips-out/disables code from the mainline Linux kernel that depends upon binary-only firmware/microcode files and other non-free components.

Herbert Xu mailed in the crypto subsystem updates this morning for the Linux 4.4 merge window.

LXQt, the "lightweight Qt Desktop Environment", is out with their next major release.

Within hours of the Linux 4.3 release, Neil Brown sent in the MD updates for the Linux 4.4 kernel.

Portable Computing Language (POCL) v0.12 was released last week as the open-source, portable implementation of OpenCL powered by LLVM.

Linux 4.3 has been released as was anticipated.

With Linux 4.3 expected for release today, I ran GitStats atop the latest Linux mainline Git code this morning for the latest development statistics.

A Phoronix reader wrote in to share the work on the Kakoune open-source, vim-inspired code editor he's been developing for the past four years.

GNU Scientific Library is a collection of numerical computing routines written in C. GNU Scientific Library 2.0 was declared this weekend over a number of internal code changes, including some API changes.

Following the recent BusyBox 1.24 release, the developers behind this "Swiss Army Knife of embedded Linux" have decided to drop systemd support.

The fourth alpha release for Kodi 16 "Jarvis" is available this Sunday for testing.

Here's the Halloween edition of the most popular Phoronix open-source / Linux news over the past month.

Stepping ahead of the Linux 4.3 release is a Halloween release of GNU Hurd 0.7, GNU Mach 1.6, and GNU MIG 1.6.

As there's been some discussion lately about the "size" of the different open-source Linux graphics drivers, here are some fresh looks at the rough code size of each of the main DRM/KMS kernel drivers as well as the Mesa/Gallium3D user-space drivers.

While there was still a fair amount of code churn this week, if Linus remains comfortable with the state of the kernel, Linux 4.3 will be released this weekend.

Fedora 23 is being released next week and with this bi-annual update to Red Hat's Fedora Linux distribution are a number of new features.

Maxime Ripard of Free Electrons published a set of nineteen patches yesterday for adding Allwinner A10 display engine support via a new DRM driver for the Linux kernel.

Over a few commits yesterday, the Intel Mesa driver now exposes ARB_shader_clock support.

A NVIDIA developer has posted two updated patches for PRIME synchronization with the Intel DRM driver to hopefully fix tearing when using PRIME GPU sharing.

Christian Hergert has shared a blog post with some of his plans for what he hopes to accomplish during the GNOME 3.20 cycle with regard to his GNOME Builder integrated development environment.