While solidly into the "fixes" stage of Linux 5.14 kernel development, the x86 platform driver pull request this week -- which has already been merged to mainline -- does have some new additions worth mentioning.

RenderDoc continues maturing gracefully as the leading frame-capture based graphics debugging system for OpenGL / Direct3D / Vulkan across all major operating systems as well as some consoles.

Following the formation of the Open 3D Foundation and their open-source IBM-led work around watering farms from the cloud, the Linux Foundation's newest effort is around trying to enhance firefighter safety with open-source.

Apache Cassandra 4.0 is finally available as the latest major feature release to this widely-used NoSQL database management system.

FreeType 2.11 is out as the newest version of this widely-used library for font rasterization.

Released on Friday was a new version of the Hashcat open-source password recovery tool that now adds an AMD HIP back-end.

DigiKam as the popular open-source image organizer is out with its version 7.3 feature release.

Back in May we wrote about China launching an alternative to Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. This global open-source program hosted by the Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences is running "Summer 2021" for encouraging university-aged students regardless of gender or nationality to get involved in open-source development.

Darktable 3.6 is out as this summer's feature update to this open-source RAW photography software package and a great alternative to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Ubuntu maker Canonical has partnered up with the Blender Foundation to offer paid enterprise support around the long-term support versions of Blender.

The OpenSSL project today shipped their OpenSSL 3.0 Beta, which is their equivalent to a release candidate ahead of the planned official 3.0.0 release next quarter.

The wildly successful Blender 3D open-source modeling software has been working hard towards its Blender 3.0 release but will likely now be proactively delayed to allow developers more time to relax with COVID-19 lockdowns/restrictions loosening, the possibility of developer meetups pre-3.0, and letting more changes flow into this big feature release.

There's a new, cross-platform, cross-API graphics benchmark out there that is free to download and focused on delivering maximum GPU acceleration support when rendering hundreds of thousands of objects.

Version 2.32 of the Git distributed revision control system is now available with a variety of improvements from performance optimizations to usability enhancements and a whole lot of bug fixes.

The GRUB bootloader saw some fresh feature work merged this week.

Dbus-Broker 29 was released on Wednesday as the latest version of this high-performance Linux message broker that retains compatibility with the original D-Bus implementation.

Blender has introduced the Blender 2.93 LTS 3D creation suite as their last major milestone of the Blender 2.x series before moving to the next-generation 3D creation pipeline with Blender 3.0.

Along with various open-source projects leaving the Freenode IRC network following infighting/managerial changes at Freenode, Fosshost that provides web hosting services for many open-source projects also shifted from Freenode to Libera.Chat. But now this week, Fosshost announced they have entered into a long-term partnership with Freenode.

OBS Studio 27.0 is out as the latest major feature release to this cross-platform, open-source software for desktop screen recording and livestreaming.

Over the past month on Phoronix there was a lot of excitement by readers around the in-development Linux 5.13 kernel, Mesa advancements, notable new software releases like dav1d and Zstd 1.5, new hardware benchmarking around Xeon Scalable Ice Lake and AMD's latest wares, and more.

The Cairo 2D vector graphics library used by the likes of GTK, Mozilla, WebKit, and many other open-source projects is seeing some big strides made on its SVG back-end.

The BLAKE3 high performance crypto hashing function that is much speedier than MD5, SHA-1/SHA-2/SHA-3, and the former BLAKE2, is nearing its v1.0 release for its official Rust and C implementations.

Following the earlier release candidate, Inkscape 1.1 is now officially available as the latest feature update to this leading open-source vector graphics application.

Seemingly by the minute today there are more free software projects leaving the Freenode IRC network and moving to alternative IRC networks or other chat platforms.

Back in 2007 Apple effectively acquired the open-source CUPS project and in 2017 then decided to no longer develop CUPS under the GPL but instead the Apache 2.0 license for this widely-used Unix/macOS/Linux print server. But then at the end of 2019 the CUPS lead developer left Apple and following that public development of CUPS seemingly halted. Fortunately, now there is a happy next chapter to the CUPS printing story.

The Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) in cooperation with the Chinese openEuler Linux distribution have been working on their own project akin to Google Summer of Code and Outreachy for paying university-aged students to become involved in open-source software development.

GIMP 2.99.6 is out today as the latest development release of this popular open-source image manipulation program.

Earlier this year with v21.02 Alpha, 7-Zip added initial Linux support upstream at long last. Out this week is now version 21.02 alpha that continues to refine the Linux support while also now punctually publishing the source code too.

The release candidate of the upcoming Inkscape 1.1 open-source vector graphics editor is now available for testing.

If you are still relying on Apache OpenOffice in 2021 you might want to really make it a goal this year to transition to the much more featureful LibreOffice, but in any case you'll want to move at least to OpenOffice 4.1.10.