It's been another week of fixes and feature work for the KDE desktop as the march continues toward the Plasma 5.22 release this summer.

Some HP Spectre laptops and possibly other HP models as well should be performing better when running on AC power starting with the Linux 5.10 kernel.

While EXT4 supports both case-folding for optional case insensitive filenames and does support file-system encryption, at the moment those features are mutually exclusive. But it looks like the upcoming Linux 5.13 kernel will allow casefolding and encryption to be active at the same time.

The LuxCoreRender open-source physically based rendering (PBR) software is out with its latest major feature release that now offers NVIDIA OptiX/RTX acceleration support alongside the existing CPU, NVIDIA CUDA, and OpenCL rendering paths.

It's been another week of fixes and feature work for the KDE desktop as the march continues toward the Plasma 5.22 release this summer.

If your current Vulkan-based Radeon Linux gaming performance isn't cutting it and a new GPU is out of your budget or you have been unable to find a desired GPU upgrade in stock, the Mesa RADV driver has added an option likely of interest to you... Well, at least moving forward with this feature being limited to RDNA2 GPUs for now.

Wine 6.6 is out as the open-source project's first release of April for running Windows games and applications primarily on Linux and macOS platforms. With Wine 6.6 comes more feature work that will ultimately be incorporated into the Wine 7.0 release due out in early 2022.

The NVIDIA-led work to allow XWayland OpenGL and Vulkan acceleration with their proprietary driver has just been merged into X.Org Server Git.

Following last month's launch of the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" series prominent motherboard vendors have been fairly quick to enable Milan support for capable motherboards originally launched for the prior EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors. For those in the market for a 1P ATX motherboard that will work with these exciting new server processors, the Supermicro H12SSL-i is a nice entry-level motherboard that gets the job done and with its BIOS v2.0 release is working well for the new Zen 3 server CPUs.

The upcoming release of Fedora 34 will make it the first major Linux distribution to have sevctl available, an open-source utility for managing AMD EPYC systems with Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV).

The latest open-source compiler infrastructure effort seeking to target a wide spectrum of devices from CPUs through GPUs, FPGAs, and accelerators is HPVM. The HPVM project today celebrated its 1.0 milestone.

FFmpeg 4.4 is out today as a large update to this widely-used multimedia library and with it comes many new features including new demuxers, AV1 support improvements, and other enhancements.

The ability to randomize the kernel stack offset at each system call looks like it will land for the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle. This optional feature makes it much more difficult to carry out stack-based attacks on the Linux kernel.

Toward the end of March was the AMD ROCm 4.1 release with a few new features. Released today is ROCm 4.1.1 with seemingly no real code changes but just to clarify two items around ROCm's HIP.

It was just a few days ago was the talking of the VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver looking to be upstreamed into Mesa and now this Google "Venus" project has indeed landed.

While the independent effort to get the Apple M1 ARM-based SoC working under Linux has just been happening for a few months, with the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle the very preliminary support for Apple's M1 and initial M1-powered devices looks to land.

Out today is version 4.15 of the open-source Xen hypervisor. The focus of Xen 4.15 is on "broader accessibility, performance and security" with a number of noteworthy additions.

Werner Koch announced the availability today of GnuPG 2.3 as the start of the (fairly stable, effectively production ready) test releases leading up to the GnuPG 2.4 stable update.

GCC 10.3 is out today as the latest stable release of the GNU Compiler Collection, weeks ahead of the GCC 11.1 feature release as the first stable version of GCC 11.

AMD engineers have a patch pending to improve the idle power consumption for Radeon RX 5000 "Navi 1x" GPUs on Linux.

Red Hat engineers spearheaded the work on Debuginfod for being able to fetch debuginfo/sources from centralized servers for a project to cut-down on manually having to install the relevant debug packages manually on a system as well as that occupying extra disk space and just being a hassle. The Fedora project is now getting their Debuginfod server off the ground and for Fedora Linux 35 are planning to make use of it by default.