Zrythm 1.0.0-alpha.12.0.1 released this week as the interesting open-source, GTK-based digital audio workstation that has been moving closer to a 1.0 release .

This latest Zrythm 1.0 release features much better stability, in now advertising that there should be "almost no crashes" left to this digital audio workstation.

Besides crashing less, the update brings PulseAudio support, better HiDPI support, more LV2 features, DSP and user-interface performance improvements

Void Linux , a rolling-release distribution we have covered before that is known for its XBPS package manager and interesting design decisions like using the Runit init system and supporting the Musl C library, has recently been working on enhancing its POWER CPU architecture support.

Daniel Kolesa who serves as the primary maintainer for the POWER port of Void Linux spoke at FOSDEM 2021 earlier this month on their improvements to benefit IBM POWER / OpenPOWER hardware.

Void Linux for POWER has been working on 32-bit little endian support

Greg Kroah-Hartman this week sent in "the large set of char/misc/whatever driver subsystem updates", which as usual -- given it's a catch-all area of kernel drivers not fitting well into other subsystems -- there is an interesting mix of additions.

Linux 5.12 still isn't moving forward with any "accelerator" subsystem for the likes of the Habana Labs driver and other accelerators / offload cards, even with Linux 5.12 bringing the Broadcom VK accelerator

For those enjoying the Valheim, the new survival/sandbox game that has been an incredible success and sold more than four millions of copies so far while being a low-budget indie game, Mesa should be providing better performance when using its OpenGL renderer.

Valheim is powered by the Unity game engine and is natively supported on Linux. Initially the focus was on the OpenGL rendering support while the game is now running out Vulkan support. But for those sticking to OpenGL usage, Mesa Git is performing better thanks to enabling OpenGL

Two weeks ago Wine-Staging 6.2 came in at 669 patches while now with the Wine-Staging 6.3 point release has climbed to just under 700 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base.

Wine-Staging 6.3 clocks in at 694 patches even with a number of patches having been upstreamed, primarily around the WIDL WinRT code.

There are new patches with Wine-Staging 6.3 in trying to address some permission issues. In particular, Bug 39

KDE developers have been wrapping up February with a number of new command line tools being worked on for applying various cosmetic changes to the desktop. There have also been many crash fixes addressed in recent days.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly post summarizing all of the development happenings for the past week. Among the highlights for these open-source desktop environment changes over the past week include:

- New command-line tools to allow setting the global themes, color schemes, cursor themes, plasma themes, and

Google's AI team has announced "Lyra" as a very low bit-rate codec for speech compression designed for use-cses like WebRTC and other video chats... With a bit rate so low that when combined with the likes of the AV1 video codec could potentially allow video chats over 56kbps Internet connections.

Google engineers formally announced Lyra on Thursday as this new codec to challenge the likes of Opus. Lyra leverages machine learning to make it suitable for delivering extremely low bit-rate speech compression

Mageia 8 is out today as a significant and long overdue update to this Linux distribution long ago derived from Mandriva/Mandrake lineage.

Mageia 8 entered alpha nearly one year ago with better ARM support, compressing RPM metadata using Zstd instead of XZ, Python 2 removal work, and more. Mageia 8 Beta then arrived over the summer with more updates. Earlier this month the Mageia 8 release candidate arrived with an interesting change of enabling AMDGPU by default for GCN 1.0 / 1.1 GPUs rather than defaulting to the

Wine 6.3 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot of this free software solution for running Windows games and applications under Linux and macOS.

Wine 6.3 isn't the most exciting release in recent time but does have some low-level improvements.

- Better debugger support in the NT syscall interface.
- WineGStreamer library converted to PE.
- Still more WinRT support in WIDL.
- Optional support for build IDs.
- Various bug fixes.

There are two dozen known bug fixes to help