Last year Microsoft announced the "GVFS" open-source project as the Git Virtual File-System. Many took issue with Microsoft's open-source project being called GVFS since for years prior GNOME has been developing the well known GVfs as the virtual file-system for GIO/GLib. At first Microsoft resisted calls for changing their project's name, but now are making good on doing so.

While Mesa 18.2 is on track for debuting as the next stable feature release by the end of August, for those sticking to the latest stable releases, that's now Mesa 18.1.5.

Feature development on GNOME 3.30 is nearing the end ahead of the stable desktop environment update premiering in September. Nautilus developer Carlos Soriano has provided a look at some of the improvements coming to GNOME's file manager for the 3.30 milestone.

The beta releases of Wayland 1.16 and the Weston 5.0 reference compositor are now available for testing.

Following the success of their work on open-source video decode for MPEG/H.264 following their crowd-funding campaign, Bootlin has now taken to working on H.265 video decode for the Sunxi-Cedrus open-source effort.

With Dell's seventh-generation XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop it has shipped with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS up until now, but beginning today in the US there is now the option for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver now has support for ETC2 texture compression on select GPUs.

It's been a while since last hearing anything about the Trinity Desktop Environment, which is a fork of the KDE 3.5 desktop, but a new release is on the way.

NetSpectre is a new network-based speculative attack vulnerability that doesn't require exploited code to be running on the target machine.

Taking place this week was DebCamp while officially starting this weekend is DebConf18, the first DebConf (Debian Conference) to be held in Asia.

For those that tend to wait for the first point release of a new Ubuntu LTS release before upgrading, Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" is now available.

Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat today announced the relase of GCC 8.2 stable as the first point relase to the stable GCC 8 compiler that debuted earlier this year.

While the Linux 4.18 kernel is still likely a week and a half out from being released at least, a ton of new material has been staged already ahead of the Linux 4.19 cycle that has us excited.

Earlier this week SpectreRSB was revealed by University of California researchers as a new Spectre V2 like attack affecting modern processors. A Linux kernel patch is in the works for starting to mitigate SpectreRSB.

At the beginning of the year Oracle reaffirmed their commitment for DTrace on Linux. For those still interested in using this dynamic tracing framework on Linux, Oracle has been rolling out a number of feature updates.

PECI is a new one-wire bus interface being developed at Intel for communication between Intel CPUs and chipset components to external monitoring/control devices. The Linux support for this Platform Environment Control Interface continues to be worked out by Intel's open-source Linux kernel developers.

Back during GDC 2018, Alen Ladavac serving as the CTO of Croteam presented on their research and testing into frame timing for helping uncover why some games are stuttering even when being rendered at high frame-rates. The short story is the issue can be addressed by just not measuring the time for rendering each frame in a game but to measure the time needed to actually present that frame on a display output. For that there is VK_GOOGLE_display_timing for Vulkan and other similar extensions.

Mesa 18.2 is going to be branched at the end of the month to mark the end of feature development for this quarterly Mesa feature release. This is a few weeks later than originally scheduled and has allowed for some extra features to land. Here is a look at some of the Mesa 18.2 changes on the way.

Recently I have been posting a number of Linux laptop battery benchmarks including how the power consumption compares to Windows 10. If you are curious how these numbers play out on the desktop side and when using AMD hardware, here are some results for your viewing pleasure with a Ryzen 7 2700X and Radeon RX Vega 64 desktop system.

Less than one full week after their previous code drop, the AMD developers maintaining the AMDVLK Vulkan Linux driver today pushed out their freshest code.

LibreOffice 6.1 is planned for release by the middle of August but for that next version to happen without a hitch, the LibreOffice team could use a hand with the testing of their latest release candidates.

With the cutoff of new feature material to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 4.19 cycle coming to an end, here is an overview of the prominent Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) changes on the plate for this next kernel version.

Out today is a new release of the Intel IWD network stack, the wireless daemon hoping to eventually replace WPA Supplicant.

While Fedora 28 has been a fantastic release, Fedora 29 that is currently under development for releasing in October is going to be what feels like a massive amount of changes.

C-SKY is the 32-bit embedded CPU architecture developed in Hangzhou, China for the CK610/CK807/CK810/CK860 cores, among others.

An Intel engineer has today published a patch providing support for enhanced IBRS within the Linux kernel, which aims to provide better Spectre Variant Two protection by default with future generations of Intel CPUs.

In between hacking on patches to RadeonSI Gallium3D for better performance and new functionality, AMD's prolific Mesa contributor Marek Olsak has written a new OpenGL extension.

Several Chromebooks now have upstream support for Coreboot.

Back in 2012 was feature work to upgrade Fedora from using the Liberation Fonts to Liberation Fonts 2. That change at the time for Fedora 19 was then diverted due to the updated fonts causing some fuzzy/blurred rendering. That issue has been fixed now following an update to F18 at the time and with Fedora 29 they are looking at once again trying Liberation Fonts 2 by default.

The V3D Gallium3D driver (formerly known as VC5) for supporting Broadcom's VideoCore V hardware and newer is reaching a better grade for OpenGL ES conformance.

Valve has shipped SteamOS 2.154 as their latest Brewmaster upgrade and promoting what was previously in their beta channel.

Yet another change proposal for Fedora 29 is upgrading its Xfce packages to what is currently in the 4.13 "development" series.

Since the transition from Unity 7 to GNOME Shell as the default desktop environment on Ubuntu, designers have been working on a proper new theme called "Communitheme" while now it has a new name.