Phoronix

Today marks twenty-seven years since the late Ian Murdock started Debian as one of the original Linux distributions. It was on 16 August 1993 when Ian Murdock started this distribution while it wasn't until September when he released the first version. Debian remains one of the oldest Linux-based distributions / operating systems. Over the years Debian has gone on to power numerous other Linux distributions like Ubuntu and SteamOS while continuing to experience much success in its own right as well...

While LibreOffice 7.0 was just released earlier this month, with the code branching having already happened earlier this summer, there are a number of changes already accumulating in the code-base for LibreOffice 7.1...

SQLite 3.33 is out as the latest update to this widely-used, embed-friendly database library used by countless applications and other software...

Back in June after Intel first published the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) specification, the open-source/Linux patches were quick to come by their large software team. That work has continued over the summer in ensuring the Linux ecosystem and developers are ready for Intel AMX programming come next year with Sapphire Rapids...

Picolibc is a newer C library implementation written by longtime free software developer Keith Packard with a focus on being lightweight for embedded systems. Last year marked the release of Picolibc 1.0 while work on it hasn't let up...

With the mainline NTFS driver in the Linux kernel offering read-only support for this widely-used Microsoft file-system and the more popular "ntfs-3g" driver being FUSE-based, Paragon Software is looking to mainline their read-write driver into the mainline kernel tree as a significant improvement over the existing NTFS kernel driver. But in the current state it's not clear if the driver will be accepted...

GNOME 3.37.90 has been released this weekend to serve as the beta of the upcoming GNOME 3.38 desktop release...

Merged last week to Linux 5.9 were the main set of power management updates while hitting the kernel now are some last minute power-related changes...

System76 has been on a spree of interesting hardware launches this year and their next one is a new Bonobo WS ultra high-end laptop...

Following the release yesterday of Wine 5.15, Wine-Staging 5.15 is out this morning and is coming in slightly smaller as a result of the XACT Engine work being upstreamed...

KDE developers remain very busy tacking new features onto Plasma 5.20 and other improvements for polishing their desktop...

As reported a few days ago the NFS server with Linux 5.9 saw user xattr support finally merged for user-extended attributes as defined by RFC 8276. The NFS client changes have now been sent in for this kernel and include the user xattr support along with other changes...

While RISC-V is flourishing when it comes to this open-source CPU architecture, the related OpenRISC architecture is still advancing but not seeing as much hardware efforts around it. In any case, the Linux kernel support continues improving for OpenRISC and with Linux 5.9 are more improvements...

Wine 5.15 is out as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot for this program allowing Windows games/applications to generally run quite gracefully on Linux and other platforms...

Intel has published a whitepaper on their new TDX "Trust Domain Extensions" technology for better securing virtual machines...

Back in Linux 5.4 Xen 32-bit PV guest support was deprecated while now for Linux 5.9 it's set to be removed entirely. Last year's deprecation comes with the 32-bit usage dwindling in general but PVH being preferred to PV, Meltdown mitigations not being present, and the code not seeing much activity. Now for Linux 5.9 that support is being gutted...

Over the months ahead with Apple preparing future desktops/laptops with their in-house Apple silicon built on the ARM 64-bit architecture, Wine developers are beginning to eye how to support these future 64-bit ARM systems with macOS Big Sur...

Stemming from the recent discussions over NVIDIA NetGPU code that relied on another shim for interfacing between NVIDIA's proprietary driver and the open-source kernel code, a new patch is on the way for Linux 5.9 to fight back against such efforts...

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is among the early rolling-release distributions now shipping a Linux 5.8-based kernel by default...

Following last week's release of Ubuntu 20.04.1, the prior Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 Long Term Support series are also seeing new releases...