Michael Larabel

Rafael Avila de Espindola is the fifth most active contributor to LLVM with more than 4,300 commits since 2006, but now he has decided to part ways with the project.

Going back several years one of our most favorite open-source games to monitor was the Unvanquished game project with its roots in the Tremulous game and built off the Daemon Engine that is a distant fork to ioquake3 by way of the also once very promising ET: XreaL work.

It's still not clear if the EGLStreams XWayland support will be merged for xorg-server 1.20 but at least the patches were revised this week, making it possible to merge them into this next X.Org Server release for allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver to work with XWayland.

It's been over a half-decade since the GIMP 2.8 stable debut and today marks the long-awaited release of GIMP 2.10.

With the release of the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.20 finally being imminent, here is a look at the many features that were merged over the past year and a half for this long drawn out release process. While more of the Linux desktop continues moving towards Wayland, X.Org Server continues evolving as shown by the 1.20 release and as part of that is also plenty on the XWayland side.

It was just last year that open-source RadeonSI/RADV developers were trying to get the Radeon RX 580 "Polaris" GPU to be competitive with the GeForce GTX 1060 as it is under Windows given each GPU's capabilities. We've seen the RX 580 and GTX 1060 dancing under Linux the past few months and yesterday's 20-way GPU comparison with Rise of the Tomb Raider was quite significant -- perhaps most surprising being how well the RX 580 performed. Heck, just one or two years ago it was an accomplishment seeing any official Radeon driver support at-launch for new Linux game releases. So here are some extensive tests looking closer at the GTX 1060 vs. RX 580 battle in this latest Vulkan-powered Linux game port.

One of Sony's compiler experts has taken to working on some tuning for the AMD Ryzen "znver1" microarchitecture support within the LLVM compiler stack. This begs the question why Sony is working on Ryzen improvements if not for a future product.

Arch Linux is finally transitioning to glibc 2.27, which may make for a faster system.

Purism has been working on reverse-engineering the Intel Firmware Support Package (FSP) module but it looks like that work may have taken a turn.

Following years of work in bringing the KDE Plasma 5 desktop to FreeBSD, it's getting into shape and the x11/kde5 package is now in the ports tree for easing the process of setting up the modern KDE desktop stack.

Following controversies the past few weeks about their GeForce Partner Program (GPP), NVIDIA is today ending the initiative.

Yesterday I wrote about GCC developers moving to drop Intel MPX support and now the Linux kernel developers are looking at dropping the Memory Protection Extensions support too, thereby rendering this modern CPU feature unsupported by Linux.

Last year Canonical began developing a new Ubuntu Server installer and while it was quite rough at first, it got into shape in subsequent months and is used by default for the newly-released Ubuntu Server 18.04.

FFmpeg 4.0 is now available as the latest major release for this widely-used open-source multimedia encode/decoder library.

Ubuntu 18.04, the Bionic Beaver release, is now available as Canonical's latest Long-Term Support (LTS) release.

The widely talked about "GNOME Shell memory leak" causing excessive memory usage after a while with recent versions of GNOME has now been fully corrected. The changes are currently staged in Git for what will become GNOME 3.30 but might also be backported to 3.28.

This week the latest open-source drama was a differing of opinions between Richard Hughes of Red Hat who maintains Fwupd and LVFS for Linux firmware updating from the desktop and that of Linux PC vendor System76.

The GCC 8 compiler will likely be introduced as stable this week or next in the form of the GCC 8.1 premiere release. Here's a look at the prominent changes for this annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection.

As part of fixes landing for the Linux kernel sound drivers, several sound drivers were hardened against Spectre Variant One.

With Red Hat deprecating Btrfs in RHEL7 with that "next-gen" Linux file-system not having panned out like many had hoped for or expected, Red Hat has been investing in their new "Stratis" storage project. More details on Stratis have now come to light.

Last year we reported on GCC deprecating Intel Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) and now it looks like with GCC 9 they will be dropping the support entirely.

LibreOffice 6.1 Alpha 1 was tagged overnight as the first development release towards this next updated open-source office suite release succeeding the big LibreOffice 6.0.

The Arcan Display Server that is the display stack built off (in part) a game engine and also developing the Durden desktop and most recently developing a "Safespaces" VR Linux desktop has also been working on porting the code from Linux to OpenBSD.

One month ago Linux game porter Feral Interactive introduced GameMode as a utility/service for dynamically optimizing the Linux system performance when running games. The initial focus on GameMode was on ensuring the CPU scaling governor was in its performance mode while today brought the GameMode v1.1 release.

Wine 3.7 is out today as the latest bi-weekly development release of Wine that will culminate next year with the Wine 4.0 debut.