Phoronix

While Fedora 33 desktop variants are aiming to use Btrfs by default, non-desktop environments are not and Red Hat remains committed to XFS and their Stratis Storage technology for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Coming to Fedora 33 will also likely be Stratis 2.1 for offering the latest on that front...

Surprising many in the open-source community in recent weeks was the LibreOffice 7.0 release candidate branded as a "Personal Edition". While still being free/open-source software and no licensing change, the traditional LibreOffice build was going to be marketed as "Personal Edition" to differentiate from other stakeholders that may market their professional/enterprise services around this cross-platform, open-source office suite. Those Personal Edition plans are now officially being reverted from next month's LibreOffice 7.0 release...

For those looking at an NVMe PCIe M.2 solid-state drive enclosure for connecting to USB 3.1/3.2 systems, Sabrent offers a nice option with their EC-TFNB enclosure that is constructed out of aluminum, 100% tool-free, and runs well. I recently bought this Sabrent USB 3.2 enclosure along with the Sabrent Rocket Q 2TB NVMe solid-state drive, which offers nice performance for a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD and the 2TB capacity can be found for just about $250 USD.

Over the past several months there has been work on Intel's Linux kernel graphics driver for async page-flipping to yield better performance. That work was revised against today for hopefully making it into a kernel release in the near future albeit too late for Linux 5.9 but regardless nice to see this work moving forward...

A few months back we wrote of experimental work for creating "secret" memory areas with memfd and now that work has turned into the secretmemfd system call that is under review...

Vulkan 1.2.148 was released on Sunday with two new extensions...

While the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver allows pre-GCN AMD graphics card owners continue making use of their graphics cards, there are diminishing returns with newer games requiring Vulkan that is not supported by pre-HD7000 series hardware as well as far greater performance and efficiency improvements in the more recent generations. In any case, if you are still using a Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics card, some new life is being pushed into the open-source driver via the in-development NIR back-end...

The latest FFmpeg multimedia library code can see faster H.265 video encoding with the Video Acceleration API when running on Icelake and newer Intel graphics...

While Linus Torvalds has been concerned by the size of Linux 5.8 at times, he just released Linux 5.8-rc6 and so far things are looking good...

In addition to this week bringing an AMDGPU pull request with new GPU support and initial Intel DG1 graphics card support as material for DRM-Next to in turn land with Linux 5.9 in the weeks ahead, there was also another DRM-Misc-Next pull with further material to these smaller drivers...

When it comes to open-source audio software, the Ardour digital audio workstation and Audacity audio editor are the two flagship offerings. But Zrythm continues advancing as another promising open-source digital audio workstation project. Zrythm is currently in a late alpha stage with its newest release this weekend but a beta appears to be on the horizon...

Riding off Friday's Wine 5.13 release, an updated Wine-Staging is now available coming with 669 patches atop the code-base...

Intel's IWD wireless daemon for Linux systems has been seeing work in recent days on integration around WiFi Display support, a.k.a. WFD / Miracast...

The Lutris open-source gaming platform manager that also makes it easier installing Windows games via Steam is now employing the Valve-backed VKD3D-Proton fork for Direct3D 12 over Vulkan...

While DragonFlyBSD has its own, original HAMMER2 file-system, for those needing to access data from EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 file-systems, there is a brand new "ext2fs" driver implementation for this BSD operating system...

For those looking for another rolling-release Linux distribution to try and one whose roots trace back to the legendary Mandrake Linux, OpenMandriva has been working to establish its own rolling-release spin for those preferring the latest software packages as opposed to their conventional releases. Additionally, OpenMandriva is nearing the end of its i686 repository offering while continuing to work with Wine and 32-bit games...

Debian 9.13 is now available as the last planned update for the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" series...

Way back in 2010 it was announced that Lightworks would be going open-source as this high-end, non-linear and cross-platform video editor solution. This video editing system has been used by many films over the years from The Wolf of Wall Street to Bruce Almighty to Moulin Rouge to Pulp Fiction as well as many other movies and television shows while also being approachable enough that it's used by less advanced video editing enthusiasts. Lightworks going open-source would be a big win, but ten years after their failed plans were announced they finally have shed some light on why such move away from being a proprietary application never materialized...

At the end of June was the first batch of AMDGPU changes queued for DRM-Next to in turn go into the Linux 5.9 kernel when that cycle opens up in August. On Friday a second batch of feature changes for this open-source AMD Radeon kernel graphics driver was submitted...

This week KDE developers have seen a lot of bug and regression fixes materialize for Plasma and other components...