While Plasma 5.21 isn't even out for a few more days, there is now a big reason to look forward to KDE's Plasma 5.22 release later in the year: KWin finally supports direct scan-out for full-screen games/apps!

The KDE KWin compositor with Plasma 5.22 will finally support direct scan-out for full-screen software, namely games. This direct scan-out is about avoiding an unnecessary copy of the screen contents by the compositor

FOSDEM, the Free Open-Source Developer Europeans' Meeting, remains one of the top open-source/Linux events in my book. Each February for this long tenured event thousands of open-source/Linux enthusiasts would gather in Brussels, Belgium for many technical and interesting talks on a wide range of subjects. Unfortunately due to the COVID-19 pandemic, FOSDEM can only take place virtually this year but that does allow for broader participation and you can enjoy all of the content online this weekend.

The virtual

For those that have been meaning to try out an Arch Linux based distribution that is easy-to-use and not time consuming with sensible defaults, EndeavourOS is out with its first new spin since 2021 -- and in fact their first fresh ISO release since September.

EndeavourOS for its February 2021 is shipping with the Linux 5.10 kernel and making use of other up-to-date packages like the latest Mesa 20.3, the newest Firefox web browser, Xfce

While the AMDGPU back-end has been part of mainline LLVM for years, not until now has it supported an OpenMP toolchain for offloading to Radeon GPUs.

The AMD work for allowing an OpenMP offloading toolchain for the AMDGPU back-end has been merged this week. Ultimately this is for allowing OpenMP code to be offloaded to Radeon GPUs for compute,

AMD has been maintaining AOMP as their downstream of LLVM Clang for supporting OpenMP offloading to Radeon hardware. But exciting is this merge request after one month of review now being mainlined

The GNU Network Utilities (inetutils) has seen its first major release in nine years or even the first release at all in six years since the prior point release. With GNU inetutils 2.0 are several updates to common programs like ping and ifconfig.

GNU's inetutils provides the commonly used command-line network utilities on Linux and other Unix-like systems. Given the significant time since the inetutils 1.9 release in 2011, there are a number of changes to find with today's

In addition to this week seeing Zink now running on NVIDIA's proprietary driver for supporting this Gallium3D-based OpenGL over Vulkan implementation, it can now run on top of Lavapipe as the CPU-based Vulkan implementation. But for end-users that is really something you would want to avoid.

With the newest Mesa 21.1-devel code as of today, there is support for running Zink on Lavapipe. Lavapipe is the software Vulkan implementation merged last year to Mesa as a CPU-based Vulkan

The plan for Fedora 34 to improve font rendering by enabling HarfBuzz in FreeType was approved this week by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.

Fedora 34 is now set to enable the HarfBuzz text shaping engine within the FreeType font rasterization engine. The net gain is improved hinting of glyphs particularly for languages with complicated text shaping like where glyphs are composed from multiple characters.

FreeType has supported HarfBuzz for more than a half-decade and Fedora enabling it with its FreeType packaging will allow for some bugs to finally be addressed.

Intel sent out a news release on Thursday proclaiming their new 11th Gen H35 "Tiger Lake H" processors deliver the "fastest single-threaded laptop performance" thanks to the Core i7 11375H delivering up to 5GHz turbo frequencies.

Intel's news release compares the new Core i7 11375H Tiger Lake processor against their existing parts and then the now-prior generation AMD Ryzen 4800HS / 4900H parts.