After being started by LinkedIn and open-source now for more than a half-decade while incubating at the Apache Software Foundation the past three years, Apache Pinot is the latest project graduating to become a top-level Apache project.

LLVM 13.0 feature development has ended with the code now branched and the first release candidate tagged.

X-Plane is not only the most realistic flight simulator that has long offered native Linux support but it's the only instance of a Vulkan-powered flight simulator I am aware of. While long tied to OpenGL, the company behind X-Plane is making it clear that the graphics rendering future is with Vulkan (and Metal when talking about Apple platforms).

Monday marked the release of Git 2.33-rc0 as the first test release of the next version of this distributed revision control system.

AMD continues pushing new code out for Linux in better exposing their platform's capabilities in the open-source world. The latest AMD driver work now queued via "-next" branches for introduction this autumn in Linux 5.15 is SB-RMI sensor support.

The excellent WireGuard open-source secure VPN tunnel has been seeing growing adoption on Linux now that it's been in the mainline kernel for a while and also seeing continued progress on the BSDs. While there has been beta WireGuard for Windows in user-space, "WireGuardNT" was announced today as a native high-performance port to the Windows kernel.

While FWUPD 1.5.12 released last week with expanded support for Poly web cameras, FWUPD 1.6.2 is out today as the newest feature release in their latest series. FWUPD 1.6.2 brings several significant improvements for advancing open-source firmware update capabilities on Linux.

Along with other optimizations to benefit the Steam Deck, AMD and Valve have been jointly working on CPU frequency/power scaling improvements to enhance the Steam Play gaming experience on modern AMD platforms running Linux.

Debian 11 "Bullseye" is set to be released mid-August while out this morning is the third release candidate of the Debian Bullseye installer. With this installer update is more documentation for users letting them know the risks of modern graphics cards and the like that are often inoperable unless loading firmware that isn't considered free software.

Red Hat's Marcelo Tosatti has submitted his latest patches implementing a basic task isolation interface for the Linux kernel that would be particularly useful for real-time workloads and high-bandwidth networking applications making use of user-space drivers.

Version 2.34 of the GNU C Library (glibc) is now available with a wide variety of changes that accumulated over the past six months.

Several X.Org/X11 components saw new releases on Sunday for kicking off August, including the xeyes program seeing its first non-point release in eleven years.

Dav1d 0.9.1 was released on Sunday as the newest feature update to this leading open-source CPU-based AV1 video decoder.

Linux 5.14-rc4 is available today as a rather smooth update with nothing too worrisome but just a decent amount of fixes and nothing that is causing Linux creator Linus Torvalds to be frustrated.

Not only did Valve announce Steam Deck in July but the overall Linux gaming marketshare according to the Steam Survey also hit a multi-year high.

Linux 5.15 is positioned now to see a Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) implementation with the code now queued in net-next with this being a protocol for communication between management controllers and managed devices.

ReactOS as the long-running open-source project striving for Windows ABI compatibility has been making some significant progress this summer on various endeavors.

LibreOffice 7.2 is preparing to ship this month while out today is LibreOffice 7.2 RC2 for facilitating last minute testing of this leading open-source office suite.

July was a pretty damn exciting summer month amid the pandemic thanks to many interesting Linux software and hardware announcements.

SDL 2.0.16 is being prepared for release as the successor to SDL 2.0.14. Particularly for Linux users this SDL 2.0.16 update is significant with some key enhancements for this library that is common to multi-platform games and part of the Steam runtime.

Lutris 0.5.9-beta1 is out this Sunday as a rather significant update to this open-source Linux game manager. With this new version there are many new features for this centralized game launcher.

At the end of 2019 a rework to the Linux kernel's pipe code saw some of its logic reworked to only wake up readers if needed and avoid a possible thundering herd problem. But it turns out some Android libraries abused the functionality and this has led to broken Android applications when moving to recent kernels. While the user-space software is in the wrong, the kernel is sticking to its policy of not breaking user-space and as such Linus Torvalds has changed the code's behavior for Linux 5.14 and to be back-ported to prior stable kernels.

It's looking like the new NTFS file-system kernel driver developed by Paragon Software and over the past year revised more than two dozen times could be ready for mainlining in the kernel in about one month's time when the Linux 5.15 merge window opens. Everything is finally aligning and looking like the code is in good enough shape for its initial merging though not necessarily replacing the existing NTFS driver at this point.

As a weekend blast from the past, the Linux 5.14 kernel saw some Alpha CPU architecture updates -- including various fixes and the removal of an Alpha-specific binary loader for running a decades dated x86 software emulator.

For those looking to purchase a high-end Linux-friendly web camera for your home office or other environment, there are a few more options now compatible with Linux's fwupd if interested in having the capability of updating the camera firmware under Linux.

The real-time (RT) patches for the Linux kernel still appear a ways off from mainline but at least there is movement on this important patch series for embedded and other use-cases needing real-time support.

While KDE on Wayland has generally enjoyed good HiDPI support, it's now taken until 2021 for KDE's X11 HiDPI support to be in a position of greater usability after evolving over the years.

What started off as Lindows twenty years ago as an easy-to-use Linux-based operating system with great Wine integration and easy application support but then changed to Linspire following a Microsoft lawsuit has had quite a journey. PC/OpenSystems LLC revived Linspire after a multi-year gap following the closure of Xandros and since then it's been a rather peculiar platform. Today they are now shifting focus once again.

Wine developers have popped open a new bi-weekly development snapshot of this software that allows Windows games/applications to run on Linux and macOS along with being what powers Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and CodeWeavers' CrossOver.

Intel's Compute-Runtime stack for providing open-source OpenCL and Level Zero compute for their graphics hardware under Linux is out with a new release.

For those making use of Radeon graphics on Linux with an X.Org-based environment and not using the generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX but rather than the xf86-video-amdgpu driver, AMD today put out a rare update to that diminishing driver component.

AMD driver engineers have submitted their latest batch of AMDGPU feature updates to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the Linux 5.15 merge window opening up in about one month's time. With this latest pull request the big addition is the new "Cyan Skillfish" GPU support.

VMware has found the Linux 5.13 kernel that was released as stable one month ago has led to a serious performance regression for their ESXi enterprise hypervisor.

Years ago particularly when the open-source Linux GPU drivers were in their infancy it was known in some cases having to fake/spoof the GPU driver name or model in order to workaround artificial bugs / problematic code paths targeted to a particular OpenGL driver or even to achieve greater performance. With a new Mesa merge request called "Unleash the dragon!", this is still very much a problem in 2021 even now in the Android space.

For those wondering what has been going on in the Xubuntu camp for this Xfce desktop spin of Ubuntu, a Xubuntu 21.10 development update was shared concerning package changes and other happenings.

Following last week's release of Chrome 92, Google has now made available the Chrome 93 beta as the next iteration of their cross-platform web browser.

In addition to the AOCC compiler for Zen CPUs, another LLVM/Clang downstream maintained by AMD is the AOMP compiler as where they host their various patches not yet merged around Radeon OpenMP offloading support. This week marked the release of AOMP 13.0-5 as their latest work on that front for the newest OpenMP GPU offloading capabilities.