Phoronix

It's coming a day later than anticipated, but the seventh weekly update for the Linux 4.0 kernel is now available...

For users of KDE's Krita digital painting / raster graphics editor, the Qt5 port of the program won't be fully ready for at least another half-year, but it's being done right...

GCC 5 is expected to be formally released later this month and it by far is looking to be the most exciting GNU Compiler Collection update yet! GCC 5 has amassed a ton of exciting open-source compiler features over the past year...

OpenBSD 5.7 is planned for release in less than one month and it will be presenting a number of new features for this security-minded BSD operating system...

Talked about recently were the KDE Plasma 5 transition plans for openSUSE and coming out today are more details on the planned switch...

With the systemd developers pursuing their vision for how distributions/software should be distributed, more Btrfs specific functionality is being added to the init manager...

For users of the vim text editor interested in new syntax highlighting options, meet color_coded...

For those still living in the GNOME 2 days, the MATE Desktop 1.10 has arrived for Easter...

Following Intel's development of NIR as the new intermediate representation for Mesa and the Raspberry Pi graphics driver switching to NIR, the Freedreno Gallum3D driver as the open-source user-space GPU driver for Qualcomm Adreno now has NIR support too...

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...

While the Radeon, Nouveau, and LLVMpipe/Softpipe drivers have already supported the OpenGL ARB_clip_control extension, the Intel (i965) driver now finally supports this OpenGL 4.5 extension too...

Making the rounds on the Internet this weekend is that BioWare -- which is owned by EA Games -- has released their first open-source project...

Following Friday's release of Wine 1.7.40, the equivalent Wine-Staging update is now out with a few extra changes...

For users of QEMU as part of their Linux virtualization that wish to test out the very latest features, the QEMU 2.3-rc2 development release is now available...

This is a "first impression" review. I've had the system in my hands for all of about twenty-four hours and am still exploring and forming more solid opinions. Also any problems I had likely do have solutions, but as I said: less than forty-eight hours of ownership so I haven't had a chance to. Linux-centric system review will follow this weekend / next week.

AMD tech support has allegedly confirmed that Catalyst is being ported to FreeBSD...

Version 1.1 of Godot, an impressive open-source game engine, is now out in beta form...

Version 1.4.0 of libvpx was finally released today by Google developers. This new release is codenamed the "Indian Runner Duck."..

The beta of Rust 1.0 was released ahead of Easter weekend and all libraries/language features planned for the v1.0 milestone have been marked as stable...

While Linux users tend to prefer open-source hardware drivers out of philosophical beliefs or just making an easier out-of-the-box Linux experience, Valve and other early Vulkan stakeholders have yet another reason to appreciate open-source drivers as it allowed them to jump-start porting of the Source 2 Engine over to the new graphics API much faster and easier than if they were relying on a closed-source Vulkan driver. Here's the story that LunarG has exclusively shared with Phoronix about their process of bringing up Vulkan with open-source.

Wine 1.7.40 was released this morning and besides closing over two dozen bugs, there's a handful of new features...

A Microsoft Technical Fellow has publicly stated that it's "definitely possible" that all or parts of Windows could be open-sourced to better compete with Linux and the like...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 was released in March and since then all of the RHEL derivatives have been busy testing and pushing out their updates. The Scientific Linux development community is close to getting out their SL7.1 release but they're hoping for some last-minute testing...

For X.Org members that haven't yet voted in this year's particularly important elections, there's just a few days to cast your ballot...

Paul Frields, the manager of the Fedora Engineering team at Red Hat, has written an interesting blog post about the future of Fedora. In particular, how Fedora is currently assembled and how that will likely change over the next few releases...

A patch series that's been baking for a while by Laércio de Sousa provides Xephyr input hot-plugging and other changes needed to allow for single-GPU multi-seat support...

The "Etnaviv" DRM driver is now under review as an open-source, reverse-engineered graphics driver for the Vivante GPU found by some ARM SoCs...

The first development snapshot of Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 "Belev" is now available, coming just one week after the release of Phoronix Test Suite 5.6...

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

With the latest Git code for Mesa 10.6 development, the Raspberry Pi VC4 Gallium3D driver has switched to using the NIR intermediate representation...

There's already been a fair amount of code building up for the DRM graphics subsystem for the Linux 4.1 kernel and a new feature was just committed to Git last night...

The openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling-release distribution has already been using systemd for some time, but they've kept to using syslog for system messaging logging. However, that's going to change as Tumbleweed integrates systemd's journal...

Version 4.4 of the popular phpMyAdmin MySQL database administration software is now available...

Valve's monthly hardware/software survey is out for the data collected in March and provides an interesting look at the current Linux gaming market-share...

With Kodi 14.2 now having been released, Kodi 15 Alpha 2 is now available for those wishing to live on the bleeding-edge Kodi/XBMC multimedia experience...

Oracle engineers have done an April Fool's Day release of the first development version of VirtualBox 5.0...

This month's release of Ubuntu 15.04 will feature some Go language support improvements that are coming about at the last minute in the Ubuntu Vivid archive...

Towards the end of last year a development version of a big new version of SuperTuxKart was released that brought a new OpenGL 3.1+ graphics engine and other improvements. The new SuperTuxKart game looks great (especially for being an open-source game) and is now closer to being officially released with now having an RC version out...

Blender 2.74 was released yesterday as the newest version of this leading open-source 3D/modeling software...

The first release candidate to Qt Creator 3.4 is now available...

Allwinner has been taking a lot of heat lately for violating open-source licenses with their Linux binary blob components. They then got caught obfuscating their code to try to hide their usage of open-source code, shifted around their licenses, and has continued jerking around the open-source community...

It's been five years since the Phoronix visit to Chernobyl, the nuclear disaster site in Ukraine...

March was a terrific month for Phoronix readers with the Khronos Group unveiling SPIR-V and Vulkan, BioShock Infinite was finally released for Linux gamers, and there were numerous other highlights...

There's a concentrated plan now to try to release Debian 8.0 "Jessie" by the end of April...

Before ending out March, here's some new OpenGL Linux benchmarks comparing the closed-source Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver against the Linux 4.0 development kernel with Mesa 10.6 Git for the freshest open-source graphics driver code.

Mozilla is today releasing Firefox 37.0 and with this open-source web-browser update comes many changes...

The OpenIndiana crew responsible for this community-based OpenSolaris-derived operating system using the Illumos kernel is out with their first update in quite some time...

Following last week's release of GNOME 3.16, the initial builds of the GNOME SDK Runtime are now available for those wishing to experiment with their new fully-sandboxed Linux app tech and other new app runtime abilities...

Daniel Vetter of Intel today sent in more code for DRM-Next that in turn will be merged for the Linux 4.1 kernel. It was also signaled that the initial hardware enablement of the graphics processor on Intel's upcoming "Braxton" SoC might happen for this next version of the Linux kernel...

KDE developers have been porting their Plasma 5 + KDE Frameworks 5 stack over to Wayland, but at this point it's not nearly as mature as the GNOME Wayland support. As such, KDE developers have to fend off questions from time-to-time why they don't "just integrate QtCompositor" or the Weston library for speeding up their efforts...