For fans of LXQt or those still looking for a nice lightweight Qt5 desktop, LXQt 0.17 is out as the latest version of this open-source desktop environment.

OpenZFS 2.1 is nearing release as the next feature update to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently supporting Linux and FreeBSD systems.

It should come as little surprise -- especially given the recent news of Google allowing Rust to be used for Android system-level code -- but engineers at the search giant are in support of Rust code being used within the mainline Linux kernel.

After the release cycle dragged on an extra month due to blocker bugs, LLVM 12 was officially tagged on Wednesday night as the latest half-year update to this open-source compiler stack.

A new release of Hangover is now available for getting Wine up and running with cross-architecture support so you can enjoy the likes of Windows games and applications under 64-bit ARM and IBM POWER hardware on Linux.

As scheduled, Metro Exodus saw its native Linux port debut today. This first person shooter from 4A Games launched on Windows and consoles in 2019 while the 4A Engine powered game only debuted today for macOS and Linux. Previously it would work with Steam Play but now there is a native Linux port albeit with some kinks still to work out.

Last month the initial infrastructure for allowing the Rust programming language to be used within the Linux kernel landed in the Linux-Next tree for more widespread testing ahead of its possible inclusion in the mainline kernel. Now a "request for comments" has been started again on the kernel mailing list around the prospects of Rust code for the Linux kernel.

Google officially promoted Chrome 90 to its stable channel today as the latest feature update to their cross-platform web browser.

Feature development for this quarter's Mesa 21.1 release is now over with it having been branched from main and the first release candidate issued.

Over the past year there has been an uptick in Linux developers from different vendors working on laptop privacy screen support under Linux. When it comes to the support with newer Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, it looks like that kernel support could soon land and the GNOME desktop is already preparing to support this feature.

At the end of March NVIDIA released the 465 beta Linux driver while today has been promoted to stable in the form of the 465.24.02 release.

Earlier this month I reported on a WMI temperature driver for Gigabyte motherboards being worked on by an independent developer. That "gigabyte-wmi" driver is now slated for inclusion in the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle.

The feature freeze and code branching for Mesa 21.1 is imminent but last minute feature work continues to pour in. Hitting Mesa Git this morning as the latest activity were some fixes and improvements in Gallium Nine for providing Direct3D 9 support atop Gallium3D drivers to Wine/Windows programs.

The "Virgl" virtual 3D GPU project for providing OpenGL (and work-in-progress VirtIO-GPU Vulkan) acceleration within guest virtual machines continues to mature for improving the open-source Linux desktop virtualization stack.

The Linux Foundation's OpenBMC project to provide an open-source BMC firmware stack is quite exciting for freeing this low-level aspect of servers, but finding a supported motherboard that works well with OpenBMC can be a challenge at this stage. Fortunately, Linux 5.13 is set to support a lower-cost motherboard option in hopes of boosting OpenBMC development/usage.

FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE is now officially available as the debut of the big FreeBSD 13 feature update.

System76 has their in-house Pop!_OS Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu and have long been customizing their GNOME-based desktop. However, the Linux PC vendor is now taking things a step further by developing their own desktop environment dubbed COSMIC.

Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative has uncovered another security issue with the X.Org Server.

SiFive's OpenFive business unit announced today they have completed their first tape out of a RISC-V processor core using TSMC's 5nm process.

For years we have been eager to learn more about the long mentioned Vulkan Video API, which was supposed to come in H1-2020, but now has finally arrived with today's v1.2.175 update in provisional form. The new Vulkan Video extensions allow for GPU-accelerated video encode/decode. The initial public work is treated as a provisional specification and with limited codec coverage but will be expanded upon in time.

Last month Google engineers proposed multi-generational LRU for Linux to enhance the kernel performance and today the work has advanced to a second version.

Vulkan 1.2.175 is now public as the latest Vulkan API specification and it's bringing with it many new extensions.

AOMP 13.0 is out today as the first update to AMD's Radeon OpenMP offloading compiler since AOMP 11.0 last December.

Back in February Slackware 15.0 went into alpha, nine years since Slackware 14.0 made its debut or even five years since Slackware 14.2. Now Slackware 15.0 is up to its beta phase.

In development for more than one year has been the ability to create secret memory areas on Linux that would be visible only to the owning process and is not mapped for other processes or the kernel page tables. That "memfd_secret" system call has finally materialized in Linux-Next and looking like it could be ready for mainline.

Arcan, the long running open-source display server built atop a game engine that has embraced technologies like XR/VR and Wayland and claims feature parity with X.Org this week announced their new Pipeworld project.

Google engineers are responsible for a number of programming languages like Go and Dart while their newest one to be made public is Logica.

NVIDIA announced today in kicking off GTC21 the "Grace" high performance Arm processor for AI and high performance computing workloads. But before getting too excited, this high performance Arm chip isn't expected to be ready until 2023.

More KDE KWin Wayland improvements are coming down the pipe.

While these kernel patches aren't expected to land until the Linux 5.14 kernel cycle later in the summer, a set of 19 patches published on Monday morning begin allowing a test system to boot with the DG1 graphics card.

The MSM DRM driver changes have been sent to DRM-Next for this Freedreno aligned project providing open-source graphics/display driver support for Qualcomm SoCs.

While Intel is often very proactive in adding new CPU families to the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers where it tends to land a year or more in advance of the processors actually shipping, occasionally there are slipups. Today in fact the "Rocket Lake" support finally was merged into GCC 11 days ahead of that compiler release and after the CPUs were already launched at the end of March.

The Linux 5.12 stable kernel release is quickly approaching but may be challenged by an extra release candidate.

Following the PLATYPUS discovery last year that CPU energy information could be used for possible side channel attacks, the Intel RAPL counters were not only restricted to root but the "amd_energy" driver for exposing CPU energy information on supported Zen series CPUs was also dialed back to root-only in the name of security. Linux 5.13 is introducing a new mechanism so AMD CPUs will be able to still read the energy counters even if not operating as root.

Arguably the most interesting RISC-V board announced to date is SiFive's HiFive Unmatched with the FU740 RISC-V SoC that features four U74-MC cores and one S7 embedded core. The HiFive Unmatched also has 16GB of RAM, USB 3.2 Gen 1, one PCI Express x16 slot (operating at x8 speeds), an NVMe slot, and Gigabit Ethernet. The upstream kernel support for the HiFive Unmatched and the FU740 SoC continues.

While EXT4 supports both case-folding for optional case insensitive filenames and does support file-system encryption, at the moment those features are mutually exclusive. But it looks like the upcoming Linux 5.13 kernel will allow casefolding and encryption to be active at the same time.