Manjaro 21.0 is out today as the newest feature release to this popular desktop Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux.

Manjaro 21.0 is powered by the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel while continuing to keep Linux 5.4 LTS around for those wanting it on older hardware. Manjaro 21.0 is also making use of Pamac 10 graphical package manager, which released at the end of last year with performance improvements, optimized database interaction, systemd dynamic users, and other new features.

Now that Xfce 4.16 has been out for a while after successfully hitting its one-year release cycle goal and some maintenance updates to Xfce 4.16 have been made, planning for Xfce 4.18 is beginning.

Xfce developer Simon Steinbeiß laid out some of the recent 4.16 maintenance work and early stage work around Xfce 4.18. Additionally, Xfce developers have been working to enhance their developer documentation to make it easier to attract new developers.

Some of the new

Mozilla Firefox 87.0 is out today as the newest release of this open-source, cross-platform web browser.

Firefox 87 continues the ongoing trend of privacy and security improvements. Firefox 87 uses Mozilla's new default HTTP Referrer policy, less website breakage when running in Privacy Browsing and Strict Enhanced Tracking Protection, and a variety of other improvements. Firefox 87.0 also comes with various accessibility improvements, full support for the macOS screen reader, and many bug fixes.

Originally slated to

Consulting firm Igalia continues working on the open-source Broadcom V3DV Mesa Vulkan driver that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and later SBCs. Since reaching Vulkan conformance they have continued working on further enhancing the performance of this driver.

Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias of Igalia wrote a new blog post today outlining the V3DV work on pipeline caching to further enhance the performance. By going from a two-cache to one-cache lookup and other improvements, one of the V3DV test cases

Fedora 34 Beta is out today as the march is on towards this latest installment of this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.

It should come as no surprise with Fedora continuously living on the bleeding-edge of open-source innovations, but Fedora 34 is going to be another big and exciting release. Particularly on the Fedora Workstation front, Fedora 34 is bringing GNOME 40 to the desktop, Btrfs transparent file-system compression is enabled, PipeWire is by default in place of PulseAudio, there is a new

Published back in January was the initial work on a HMM-based SVM memory manager for the open-source Radeon compute stack. A second version of that work is now available as it continues working towards the mainline kernel.

This Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) memory manager implementation makes use of the Linux kernel's modern Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) code. As part of working on continuing to advance their ROCm compute stack and preparing for their big HPC/super-computer deployments using a combination of AMD EPYC CPUs

Excitement is building around initial support for the Rust language within the Linux kernel that arrived in Linux-Next and is now seeing more developer interest.

This very preliminary infrastructure work around supporting Rust code within the Linux kernel and an example module in tow continues to mature within Linux-Next while awaiting to see if it will try to be mainlined in a few weeks for the 5.13 cycle. Now that activity is happening, more upstream kernel developers are taking note.

With that initial Rust drop in Linux-Next

They are a bit late in doing so, but Ubuntu developers are working to figure out if it makes sense to run FSCK "file-system check" at boot time. It turns out Ubuntu Server and other Ubuntu installations making use of their Curtin installation component haven't enabled the functionality for FSCK at boot but now they are (re)visiting the matter.

This bug report from 2018 points out that Ubuntu Server is setting "fs_passno" to 0 which means no FSCK at boot.

Shells.com is a "personal cloud computer" that makes it possible to have a remote secure desktop from the browser whether it be running on a smartphone, tablet, smart TV, or other device. They have been supporting a number of different Linux distributions while more continue to be on the way.

Shells.com basically provides a cloud-based Linux desktop that is secure and can be accessed from any device with a web browser or their Windows / iOS / macOS / Android / Linux apps. Shells is backed