Valve continues to be making exciting progress in the realm of Steam Play for improving the experience of running Windows games on Linux.

First up is a new Proton Experimental build now available . This latest Proton Experimental build has more work on reducing CPU overhead and helping performance, memory allocator performance work, support for Futex2 patches in FSYNC when using the latest kernel patches, better non-US keyboard support, improved video support, and a variety of other enhancements. For those with a VR headset, the virtual reality start-

System76 today introduced the Thelio Mira as their nwest desktop computer offering that is sized between the Thelio and Thelio Major while still packing quite a bit of compute potential.

The Thelio Mira is powered by AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors and can be powered by up to two NVIDIA Quadro GPUs and taps out at 128GB of RAM. The Thelio Mira starts out at $1499 USD for the desktop computer with their in-house manufactured chassis, Ryzen 5 3600 (

Intel sent out their latest open-source Linux driver patches today for their new "XE_LPD" display architecture that will be found with upcoming hardware platforms. XE_LPD features "version 13" display capabilities but not to be confused with "Gen13" graphics as they are beginning to more segregate their different Intel GPU IP blocks.

The Intel "XE_LPD" patches are for their next-gen display architecture, also referred to as version 13 of their display IP. XE_LPD

GitLab is following the same approach of GitHub and others in now using "main" as the default branch name for new Git repositories.

Following the upstream Git work that came together last year for enabling a default branch name with ease rather than just relying on "master" and going along with the broader free software ecosystem movement to remove master/slave references from the technology dictionary, GitLab is following a similar approach to GitHub, Atlassian, and others in encouraging the use of "main" as the default branch name moving

Last week Intel wired up Gallium3D threaded context support to their "Iris" OpenGL driver for yielding some sizable performance improvements. Now the Freedreno driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware has hooked into the threaded context support as well.

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver now supports threaded contexts (u_threaded_contexts) as well for helping with performance with this open-source Qualcomm Adreno GL/GLES driver.

The Gallium3D threaded context support was originally written by AMD with a focus on their driver for allowing the command

An editor's draft for post-Spectre web development guidance was made available by the W3C.

The W3C is preparing guidelines for web developers in better ensuring their code is safe from potential exploit by Spectre security vulnerabilities. Spectre has been public since January 2018 and concerns have been known around JIT'ed JavaScript. Made public recently though was the first "fully weaponized" exploit for Spectre beyond the early proof-of-concept code.

The editor's draft of "Post-

LLVM 12.0 was aiming for release at the start of March but it missed that goal post and a third release candidate was tagged on Wednesday. But, fortunately, it looks like the official release will be out soon.

Tom Stellard as the LLVM release manager announced LLVM 12.0-RC3 on Wednesday and indicated that it should be the last release candidate barring any new major issues from becoming known. This will be the first major LLVM release of 2021 and keeping up with their

The Mesa release train once again rode off the tracks but this week looks like it will get back on track with hopes of releasing Mesa 21.0 on Thursday.

Mesa 21.0 was branched earlier than normal in the quarter with hopes of releasing by early to mid February. That didn't happen but now as we hit the middle of March it looks like this stable release is about to materialize.

Mesa normally sees weekly release candidates after branching until the official release is ready, but even that too