Linux 4.21 is set to further improve the system security around potentially malicious Thunderbolt devices.

Besides the lack of games, one of the other pressing reasons why some desktop/workstation users haven't migrated full-time to Linux has been over the lack of Adobe's Creative Suite working natively on Linux (and the Wine-based options often only working well for dated versions of Adobe's software). But if you hope to see Adobe Linux software, their customer care recommends you vote.

With aiming to improve the deep learning development experience, Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has announced the Deep Learning Reference Stack.

Adiantum, Google's newly developed crypto algorithm to replace their planned use of the controversial Speck, is ready to begin providing speedy file-system encryption support for low-end devices with the upcoming Linux 4.21 merge window.

It looks like AMD could be announcing Vega II as new 7nm Vega GPUs soon complementing the recently announced Vega 20 Radeon Instinct MI50 / MI60 accelerators.

While the i.MX8 series was announced almost two years ago and the open-source developers working on the enablement for these new NXP SoCs hoped for initial support in Linux 4.17, the Linux 4.21 kernel that will be released in the early months of 2019 is slated to possibly have the first i.MX8 support in the form of the i.MX8MQ and also supporting its development/evaluation board.

Unvanquished had been easily one of the most promising open-source games several years back with decent in-game visuals/art, a continually improving "Daemon" engine that was a distant mod of ioquake3 while leveraging ETXReaL components and more, and all-around a well-organized, advancing open-source game project. Their monthly alpha releases stopped almost three years ago while today that's changed just ahead of Christmas.

Released on Friday was Wine 4.0-RC1 while coming out over the weekend was the Wine-Staging re-base that is carrying still over 800 patches on top of the upstream Wine code-base.

While many Linux distributions have moved past GnuPG 1 and some no longer even packaging it, Fedora Linux continues using GnuPG 1 as the default gpg, but that is likely to change with Fedora 30.

An open-source audio initiative that's been in development for years but flying under our radar until its lead developer chimed in is AeonWave, which supports Windows and Linux systems while being inspired by Microsoft XAudio and Apple's CoreAudio.

Linus Torvalds has just rolled out the sixth weekly test release of the upcoming Linux 4.20.

Phoronix Test Suite 8.4.1 is now available as a minor but important update to last month's Phoronix Test Suite 8.4-Skiptvet release.

KDE Frameworks 5.53 is now available as the latest monthly update to this collection of add-on libraries complementing Qt5.

KDE developers aren't slowing down at all as the end of the year quickly approaches, this week they had another busy week landing more usability enhancements and other refinements to their slew of applications and Plasma desktop.

Junio Hamano has released Git 2.20 as the newest version of this widely-used distributed revision control system.

Published on Friday was my Radeon RX 590 Linux benchmarks now that the kinks in the support for this latest Polaris refresh are worked out (at least in patch form). Here are some complementary data points with some of the OpenGL tests outside of the Steam games for those curious about the RX 590 performance in other workloads or wanting to see how your own GPU performance would compare to these results.

While Qualcomm was busy hosting their Tech Summit this week in Hawaii, the independent open-source developers were pressing ahead with their reverse-engineered Qualcomm Adreno 3D graphics driver support.

While it's not as exciting as if seeing full 3D open-source driver support, with the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel are some mainline Tegra improvements that does include HDMI audio support for the X2 and Xavier SoCs.

After a short-lived experience on Linux 4.20 when it was added and then reverted due to fallout, the reworked high-resolution scroll-wheel support will re-premiere with Linux 4.21.

Hopefully you can set aside some time this weekend to upgrade to Linux 4.19.8 as there's the BLK-MQ fix in place for the recent "EXT4 corruption issue" that was plaguing many users of Linux 4.19.

Intel's Mesa OpenGL driver has been supporting KHR_debug as required by OpenGL 4.3+, but without making full use of the extension. Now though to help with the shader debugging process, it will be exposing more information via this OpenGL debugging extension.

If you happen to have any Number Nine Imagine 128 or Matrox graphics cards sitting around, there are new Linux X.Org display driver updates out this weekend for these vintage parts.

A final pull request of new feature material for the AMD Linux graphics drivers was submitted on Friday for the upcoming 4.21 cycle.

For helping to enhance the security of servers running KVM for virtualization, there's been a ROE protection kernel hardening patch series in the works. This new addition to the kernel allows the host operating system to restrict a guest's access strictly to its own memory. It's unclear though yet if the ROE protection will make the cut in time for the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel cycle.

This week the Blender 3D modeling software finally picked up support for CUDA 10 in order to support the latest NVIDIA RTX "Turing" graphics cards.

While we are looking forward to AMD's next-gen Navi architecture in 2019, it looks like the Vega family may be getting bigger soon.

As expected, Wine 4.0 Release Candidate 1 was issued today that also marks the code freeze leading up to the official Wine 4.0.0 release in January.

NVIDIA has released an updated stable 415 series Linux driver today. While normally their stable driver updates aren't too exciting compared to the beta development releases, this update is notable for adding VK_EXT_transform_feedback.

The UBports community that continues to maintain Ubuntu Touch for Ubuntu Linux on mobile devices has today officially rolled out their OTA-6 update.

Another high profile Linux game port Feral Interactive is working on besides Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the DiRT 4 racing game!

Mesa 18.3 is now available as the latest quarterly feature update to these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers for Linux.

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service has scored a major win in the trek of easily updating of BIOS/firmware images from Linux... BIOS/firmware vendor AMI has joined the LVFS!

With the Linux 4.20 kernel the Cedrus VPU decoder driver was mainlined that was developed this year over at Bootlin for providing open-source accelerated video support for Allwinner SoCs. That driver continues to be ramped up to increase its usefulness.

While Coffeelake processors have been available for a year now, Intel initially didn't intend to support their open-source Graphics Virtualization Technology (GVT) with these chips but now are in the process of bringing up such support.

It's been a year and a half since the release of Mageia 6 while finally the Mageia 7 beta images have surfaced.

One of the areas where Linux performance has been lower this year since Spectre came to light has been for networking performance, but with the upcoming Linux 4.21 cycle that will be partially addressed.

With time winding down before the release of Linux 4.20 and the opening of the Linux 4.21 merge window, a final drm-misc-next pull request was submitted this week for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the 4.21 kernel cycle.

While we are all super anxious to learn more about the Intel discrete graphics card offerings planned for their initial debut in 2020, in representing the beauty of open-source, there was an open-source Linux display driver update on Thursday for their "original" discrete card: the Intel740.

The Free Software Foundation today came out with an endorsement of Hyperbola GNU/Linux to the organization's small list of recommended Linux distributions.

With the success of Fortnite and Player Unknown's Battlegrounds in the "battle royale" genre, Valve is getting in on the action with CS:GO Danger Zone.

It took the better part of a month since the debut of the latest Polaris hardware refresh, but with the latest AMDGPU kernel driver patch posted today, the AMD Radeon RX 590 now appears to be in great shape with the open-source Radeon graphics driver stack for Linux.

A new release of the Guix transactional package manager and the GuixSD system distribution is now available.

Microsoft today confirmed the recent rumors that they are rebuilding their Edge web-browser atop the Chromium browser engine.

PHP 7.3 is out today as the first big update in a year to the PHP7 programming language.

For those still on the GCC7 stable series rather than the current GCC8 series that soon will be succeeded by GCC9, GCC 7.4 is available today.

The bumpy Linux 4.19~4.20 road continues but at least another performance regression is now crossed off.

The Qt Company began shipping Qt 5.12 this morning as their latest long-term support version of the Qt5 tool-kit while also shipping Qt Creator 4.8 as their C++ focused integrated development environment.

A new release of the FreeBSD+ZFS-based network attached storage operating system, FreeNAS, is now available for this platform developed by iXsystems.

Originally slated for the current Linux 4.20 kernel cycle was high-resolution scroll wheel support for Logitech mice. Just a short time after merging, the support was reverted as it ended up breaking support for some existing devices. Fortunately, the revised implementation is progressing and perhaps will be ready for Linux 4.21.

While at the start of the year Nouveau developers expressed their hope to create a basic open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver this calendar year, it doesn't look like it's panning out.