Open-source News

Linus Torvalds Releases Linux Kernel 5.5 With Better Hardware Support  Fossbytes

Last year, I brought you 19 days of new (to you) productivity tools for 2019. This year, I'm taking a different approach: building an environment that will allow you to be more productive in the new year, using tools you may or may not already be using.

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In Linux, every program and daemon is a "process." Most processes represent a single running program. Other programs can fork off other processes, such as processes to listen for certain things to happen and then respond to them. And each process requires a certain amount of memory and processing power. The more processes you have running, the more memory and CPU cycles you'll need. On older systems, like my seven-year-old laptop, or smaller computers, like the Raspberry Pi, you can get the most out of your system if you keep an eye on what processes you have running in the background.

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I am often approached by software developers who are on board with the switch to test-driven development (TDD). They understand that describing expectations first and then writing code to meet those expectations is the best way to write software. And they agree that writing tests first does not introduce any overhead since they must write tests anyway. Still, they find themselves stuck, not being clear on what to test, when to test it, and how to test it. This article will answer those questions.

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Linux 5.6 "HWMON" Changes Sent In With Big AMD Improvements  Phoronix

Following the Linux 5.5 kernel release one of the first pull requests sent in is for the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates. Dominating the HWMON interest this cycle is a long overdue SATA temperature monitoring driver and vastly improving the k10temp driver for AMD Zen desktop and server CPUs...

Linux 5.5 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS and RISC-V Architectures  CNX Software

More than a decade after Apple acquired the CUPS source-code and its lead developer, that developer, Michael Sweet, recently parted ways with Apple...

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.5 as stable...

Linux 5.5 Released With Many Hardware Support Improvements  Phoronix

Rocket League Drops Linux and Mac Support But Won't Refund Microtransactions  Screen Rant

MPV 0.32 is out today as the newest update to this open-source video player based on MPlayer...

Formally announced earlier this month was Kubuntu Focus as the most polished KDE laptop we've ever tested. Besides offering a great KDE desktop experience, the Kubuntu Focus offers high-end specs while now there is a slightly cheaper base model introduced...

Linux 5.5 is likely to be released later today and with that are many new features. But as soon as 5.5 is released it marks the opening of the Linux 5.6 merge window and this next kernel has us particularly exciting... It's certainly shaping up to be one of the most exciting kernel cycles in recent times with many blockbuster features and improvements...

Dracut that is used for generating the initramfs image on Linux distributions like Fedora / RHEL, Debian, openSUSE, and many other distributions could be much faster...

The Dracut Initramfs Generator Is Slow - Could Be Much Faster As Shown By Distri's Minitrd  Phoronix

Fedora IoT already uses swap-on-ZRAM by default given IoT devices are often running with limited amounts of RAM, but for Fedora Workstation 33 the developers are looking at enabling SWAP-on-ZRAM by default for all new installations...

KDE developers were busy as always this week working to polish up the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.18 and other areas of their open-source desktop stack...

Last year, I brought you 19 days of new (to you) productivity tools for 2019. This year, I'm taking a different approach: building an environment that will allow you to be more productive in the new year, using tools you may or may not already be using.

read more

What's your favorite Linux distribution? Take our 7th annual poll. Some have come and gone, but there are hundreds of Linux distributions alive and well today. The combination of distribution, package manager, and desktop creates an endless amount of customized environments for Linux users.

We asked the community of writers what their favorite is and why. While there were some commonalities (Fedora and Ubuntu were popular choices for a variety of reasons), we heard a few surprises as well. Here are a few of their responses:

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