The release candidate of the upcoming Inkscape 1.1 open-source vector graphics editor is now available for testing.

If you are still relying on Apache OpenOffice in 2021 you might want to really make it a goal this year to transition to the much more featureful LibreOffice, but in any case you'll want to move at least to OpenOffice 4.1.10.

Flatpak 1.11.1 is out this morning as the first development step towards the eventual Flatpak 1.12 stable release.

LunarG, the consulting firm known for their contributions around Vulkan and also having been involved with Mesa development over the years and experimenting with Gallium3D features and other interesting efforts like the past LunarGLASS, is looking to hire another experienced graphics driver development engineer.

Blender's Cycles engine is celebrating its tenth birthday today and in marking the occasion, the Blender project has announced the ongoing work on "Cycles X" as what started as a research project in preparing this engine for the next ten years. It's a big step forward for Cycles but with Cycles X the OpenCL rendering kernels are being removed.

Earlier this week was a surprising Linux kernel networking commit that removed an IBM engineer as one of the driver maintainers for the IBM Power SR-IOV Virtual NIC driver. Seemingly at issue with this VNIC driver work was the developer using his personal email address in working on the driver in his off-hours. IBM has now clarified their stance on such work.

Blender has an exciting year still ahead with a road-map they just published that does include Vulkan API support.

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.

GIMP 3.0 still isn't out yet but the GIMP 2.10 stable series continues seeing new point releases with additional feature work until that GTK3 version of this image editor / Photoshop alternative is ready.

An interesting open-source project that has been brought up now a few times by Phoronix readers is Box86 for allowing 32-bit x86 programs to run unmodified on non-x86 Linux systems like ARM.

Of the many possible areas for advancing Linux and open-source, the latest project being embraced by the Linux Foundation is Liquid Prep for helping farmers water their crops. It's a noble cause but not too Linux centered unless talking about cloud resources.

FreeCAD 0.19 was released this weekend as the newest major feature release for this respected open-source CAD solution / parametric 3D modeling solution.

Per reader requests, several software-defined radio (SDR) benchmarks have been added alongside the 640+ other distinct workloads available for benchmarking via the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org.

Following the recent promotions of DataSketches and ECharts, the Apache Software Foundation has promoted Daffodil as their newest top-level project. Apache Daffodil is an open-source universal interchange implementation of the Data Format Description Language (DFDL).

Given this week's launch of Chrome 89 and the recent Firefox 86 debut, here are some quick benchmarks for those curious about the current performance when using Ubuntu Linux with a AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and Radeon graphics.

Blender 2.92 is out today as the latest feature release for this award-winning, open-source 3D graphics/modeling software.

Ampere Computing with their 80-core Ampere Altra processors and Mount Jade reference platform continue making progress on open-source firmware support for interested parties.

Libinput 1.17 is out as the newest version of this Wayland/X.Org input handling library for the Linux desktop.

It's rare to hear of OpenOffice usage these days compared to LibreOffice, but the open-source office suite is still going ahead under its volunteer work at the Apache Software Foundation. This past weekend at FOSDEM 2021 was a status update on Apache OpenOffice.

Following in the footsteps of Apache Superset and Apache ECharts, DataSketches has been promoted to being a top-level project within the Apache Software Foundation.

Just last week Apache Superset was promoted to being a top-level project by the Apache Software Foundation. Apache Superset is around big data visualizations and business intelligence solutions through data exploration while now Apache ECharts has joined it as the latest top-level project.

The Apache Software Foundation that oversees 340+ Apache projects saw a measurable rise in security related issues during the course of 2020.

The open-source/Linux Apple M1 work continues to be quite busy this week... The latest is Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been working on reverse-engineering the M1 graphics processor has been able to write some early and primitive code for rendering a triangle.

The Apache Software Foundation announced on Thursday that Apache Superset reached "top-level" status.

New Year's Eve two years ago I wrote about the open-source / Linux letdowns of 2018. It was well received at the time and sparked some interesting discussions so as we celebrate the start of 2021 I figured it would be interesting to look back and see which of those letdowns were since resolved and what ones are remaining.

Darktable 3.4 is out in time for dealing with any of your RAW holiday photos.

Just one week shy of one year since CUPS founder Michael Sweet left Apple, which in turn seemingly led to the downfall of CUPS, PAPPL 1.0 has been released as his modern alternative printer application framework.

The Webboot project has been in development now for more than one year as an easy means of booting Linux ISO images from the web. From this minimal boot environment users can configure their network connection and download a new ISO or use a pre-existing ISO. From there Webboot allows kexec'ing into that ISO for booting it up.

The BUS1 kernel code for providing an in-kernel, capability-based IPC mechanism hasn't seen much (or any?) activity in well over a year but at least the Dbus-Broker project continues ahead. Dbus-Broker continues ahead as this D-Bus compatible implementation focused on correctness while being optimized for performance.

Outreachy interns have been announced for the winter 2020 round. Selected participants are working on various open-source tasks from December through March in exchange for a $5,500 USD stipend to become involved with open-source.