Phoronix

Built off yesterday's exciting Wine 5.7 release that brought more WineD3D Vulkan bits and the start of a USB driver, Wine-Staging 5.7 is out with a number of its patches upstreamed into yesterday's release plus a bit of new functionality...

Friday marked the release of LXQt 0.15, the first big update to this lightweight Qt5-based desktop environment since January 2019. There comes a fair number of improvements with this desktop that was born out of the LXDE and Razor-qt initiatives...

In addition to this week seeing the slew of KDE Apps updates, developers working on the applications, Plasma, and other areas of the KDE ecosystem have remained as busy as ever during the COVID-19 crisis for continuing to improve this open-source desktop...

Adding to the growing list of changes building up for Linux 5.8 this summer is now having Tiger Lake Thunderbolt/USB4 support...

One of the lesser known Mozilla software efforts is DeepSpeech as a speech-to-text engine built atop TensorFlow with CPU and GPU (CUDA) acceleration. Friday marked a new release of this DeepSpeech software that is yielding great results for converting spoken audio streams to text...

Earlier this week I highlighted the Dell XPS 7390 "Ice Lake" ultrabook seeing a big performance drop on recent versions of the Linux kernel. Intel engineers seem to have sorted it out and now have a solution in place, which affects those running Linux 5.4 or newer...

Wine 5.7 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release and it's a fun one with multiple interesting advancements...

While there has been the CPU-based "Kazan" Vulkan driver (formerly Vulkan-CPU as a Google Summer of Code project) and Google's SwiftShader has been implementing CPU-based Vulkan support, it turns out Red Hat's David Airlie has been working on a Mesa/Gallium3D-inspired Vulkan software renderer...

NVIDIA has released their latest weekly-ish beta update to their Vulkan Linux driver...

Earlier this month I reported that Linux developers were reviving work on the Intel FSGSBASE patches as a performance helper going back to Ivy Bridge CPUs but for which past patch series never got over the finish line for mainlining. On Thursday a new version of the FSGSBASE patches were sent out...

With last week's release of Radeon Software for Linux 20.10 as AMD's first packaged graphics driver update for Linux of 2020, here are some benchmarks showing how the performance compares to what is shipped by Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS as well as when using the newer Mesa and Linux kernel releases for the very latest open-source performance, including switching over to RADV+ACO for Vulkan gaming.

When it comes to finding laptops with Linux pre-loaded by the OEM, it's mostly Ubuntu or its derivatives found most often on these devices. But Lenovo and Red Hat are announcing today that Fedora Workstation 32 will begin appearing soon on select ThinkPad laptops...

Either a ploy by Ubuntu developers / Canonical staffers or it's looking like Ubuntu 20.10 could be known as the Groovy Gorilla...

Intel's ISPC compiler (Implicit SPMD Program Compiler) for targeting its C-based single-program, multiple data language is out now with a new feature release...

A number of additional game controllers / gamepads / input devices have been added to the SDL2 code-base in recent days...

Last month Marvell announced the ThunderX3 server processors with up to 96 ARM cores per SoC and with 4-way SMT means up to 384 threads per socket. This 7nm Arm server processor also supports eight DDR4-3200 memory channels, 64 lanes of PCIe 4.0, and other advancements to provide more competitiveness in the Arm server space. Marvell is now working on getting the ThunderX3 software support ironed out, including for the GCC compiler...

Due to unclear communication over patches queued for a given Mesa point release and ensuring all relevant patches are included, Mesa developers will begin making use of Gitlab's "milestones" functionality for tracking the work to be included in the next point release...

Many likely didn't realize the functionality was still in place, but LibreOffice 7.0 will finally phase out its export support for Adobe Flash (SWF)...

After it was delayed last week, Fedora 32 will now be released next week...

KDE today released its April 2020 Apps Update, what formerly would have been known as KDE Applications 20.04...