Mesa 18.3 was released less than a week ago while today Mesa 18.3.1 was issued due to an error in the Vulkan specification.

Intel's promising IWD open-source wireless daemon continues picking up additional functionality in its trek towards potentially replacing wpa_supplicant. Out this week is IWD 0.13.

FreeBSD 12.0 has made its debut as the latest stable version of this popular BSD operating system.

Firefox 64.0 is available today as the last major feature update to Mozilla's web browser for 2018.

A new beta relase of Proton 3.16 is now available, the Wine-based software that powers Valve's Steam Play for running many Windows games on Linux.

It was just several years ago that the open-source ecosystem began supporting the x32 ABI, but already kernel developers are talking of potentially deprecating the support and for it to be ultimately removed.

Out today is DAV1D as the first official (v0.1) release of this leading open-source AV1 video decoder.

Just in time for the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel, the developers working on the reverse-engineered, open-source support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX "Turing" GPUs have published their preliminary code. But before getting too excited, there isn't GPU hardware acceleration working yet.

Following the move by upstream Mozilla in switching their Linux builds of Firefox from being compiled by GCC to LLVM Clang, Fedora is planning the same transition of compilers in the name of compilation speed and resulting performance.

For hopefully helping out with code reviews and getting code staged in a timely manner before being upstreamed to the mainline Linux kernel, Daniel Vetter of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center is set to become a co-maintainer.

Good news for those using the LLVM Clang compiler on OpenBSD or DragonFlyBSD: the OpenMP run-time should now be supported with the latest development code.

Red Hat developers have proposed a new VirtIO-FS component to provide better support for shared folders/files between the host and guest virtual machines.

It should come as no surprise since it was deprecated in this year's GCC 8 release, but the PowerPC SPE code has been removed.

It looks like the recent efforts led by Red Hat / Fedora on providing a flicker-free Linux boot experience and thanks to their upstream-focused approach is starting to pay off for the other desktop Linux distributions... A flicker-free boot experience can now be achieved on Arch Linux with the latest packages, assuming you don't have any quirky hardware.

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.