Microsoft, NVIDIA & Linux 4.1 Dominated Linux News In April

Written by Michael Larabel in Microsoft on 30 April 2015 at 09:30 PM EDT. Add A Comment
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With the month coming to an end, here's a look at the most popular open-source and Linux-related news stories over the past 30 days... This month on Phoronix there were 261 original news stories written by your's truly covering the interesting Linux / free software happenings.

Before looking at the top ten most popular articles over the past month, if you'd like to support Phoronix as the leading Linux/open-source enthusiast news source be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Google+. You can also do a huge favor to furthering our mission of enriching the Linux hardware experience by subscribing to Phoronix Premium and/or considering a PayPal tip. With that said, here's the ten most popular Phoronix news items for April 2015:

Nouveau: NVIDIA's New Hardware Is "VERY Open-Source Unfriendly"
While NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 900 series is dominating for Linux gamers with excellent performance with their $1000+ GPU as well as great Linux OpenGL/OpenCL performance out of their lower-cost GPUs with excellent power efficiency, that's only when using the proprietary driver... NVIDIA's newer GTX 900 / Maxwell hardware is less open-source friendly than their previous generations of hardware.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Supports Targeting Linux
Microsoft announced their Visual Studio 2015 line-up this week, but why is it important for Linux users/developers?

It Doesn't Look Like KDBUS Will Make It For Linux 4.1
While Linux 4.1 is bringing many new features and improvements, there's one addition that's noticeably absent.

Linux 4.1 Brings Many Potentially Risky x86/ASM Changes
Another one of the Linux 4.1 pull requests sent in today by Ingo Molnar is for the x86/asm code.

Features Expected For The Linux 4.1 Kernel
While the Linux 4.0 kernel hasn't even been released yet, there's already a number of items we're looking forward to seeing with Linux 4.1.

VirtualBox 5.0 Now In Beta, Adds PV To Windows/Linux Guests
Oracle engineers have done an April Fool's Day release of the first development version of VirtualBox 5.0.

AMD Releases New "AMDGPU" Linux Kernel Driver & Mesa Support
At long last the source code to the new AMDGPU driver has been released! This is the new driver needed to support the Radeon R9 285 graphics card along with future GPUs/APUs like Carrizo. Compared to the existing Radeon DRM driver, the new AMDGPU code is needed for AMD's new unified Linux driver strategy whereby the new Catalyst driver will be isolated to being a user-space binary blob with both the full open-source driver and the Catalyst driver using this common AMDGPU kernel driver.

Microsoft Announces An LLVM-Based Compiler For .NET
Microsoft has today lifted the lid on LLILC, their new LLVM-based compiler for .NET's CoreCLR.

Linux 4.0 Kernel Released
Linus Torvalds went ahead and released the Linux 4.0 kernel today as expected.

Ubuntu's Desktop-Next Switching From .DEBs To Snappy
Ubuntu 15.04 was just released and Canonical isn't wasting any time with starting to share their plans for Ubuntu 15.10 due out in October. This next release will feature a build that switches away from Debian packages (.deb) to using Snappy Personal.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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