The Linux-friendly folks at OnLogic (nee Logic Supply) have launched a line of fanless, industrial-grade computers powered by Intel's Elkhart Lake .

Last September is when Intel introduced the Atom x6000E series as the initial Elkhart Lake products along with Celeron N and Pentium J models. Elkhart Lake is intended for ultra low-power devices and is the successor to the Denverton chips while the CPU cores are 10nm Tremont with Gen11 graphics.

OnLogic has launched Elkhart Lake fanless

As part of work on GNOME 40 , the GNOME Shell is seeing some big refinements like shifting of its workspaces to be horizontally laid out, which has now been merged.

GNOME Shell mock-ups have been making some evolutionary changes to the desktop and that work is coming together. Merged on Friday to GNOME Shell is making horizontal workspaces . That code is now in place but follow-up improvements are expected.

This goes along with making the dash and App Grid horizontal, various GNOME Shell Overview improvements, a new

KDE Plasma 5.21 Beta released last week while the official Plasma 5.21 stable release is slated for 16 February. As such, KDE developers have been very busy working on fixes for this big desktop update bringing better Wayland support and other enhancements and new features.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly development recap. Giving the timing between the beta and final release, developers have mostly been working to button up the Plasma 5.21 release but there has also been work on

Following the release of Wine 6.0 stable earlier this month, Wine 6.1 is now available as the first bi-weekly development snapshot that will ultimately culminate with the Wine 7.0 stable release next year.

Coming out of the code freeze that has been in effect since early December, there is already a number of improvements to find with Wine 6.1 as this first development snapshot in the new series.

Wine 6.1 supports VKD3D 1.2 for its Direct3D 12

While most Linux users likely don't get excited when hearing of a new Glibc release, version 2.33 of the GNU C Library is due to be released next week and it's pretty darn interesting for having the new HWCAPS functionality in opening up for more optimized out-of-the-box Linux performance moving forward.

GNU C Library 2.33 is due for release around 1 February and is expected for Ubuntu 21.04, Fedora 34, and other upcoming distributions.

While Intel's large open-source Linux graphics driver team has been pushing a lot of code over the past number of months for bringing up their DG1 graphics and other current/forthcoming discrete graphics offerings, one area that is still in its infancy is around the multi-device handling. At least from the compute side, there is some recent progress being made for multi-device support.

With Intel's Linux graphics driver being designed around their long history of integrated graphics, it has taken a lot of

On top of aiming to use Wayland by default , another high profile change being worked on for this spring's release of Ubuntu 21.04 is using link-time optimizations (LTO) for all 64-bit package builds.

Joining the likes of Fedora and openSUSE who have been enabling LTO optimizations by default for their package builds, Ubuntu developers are working to flip on link-time optimizations by default with their package builds. The plan is to have LTO enabled for all 64-bit package

For those Linux gamers and other desktop users of the open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers with some extra time this weekend, Mesa 21.0-RC3 is now available for testing as what might be the last release candidate before officially releasing Mesa 21.0 as soon as next week.

With Mesa 21.0 having branched earlier in the quarter than usual and so far the release cycle playing out well, Mesa 21.0.0 could be out as soon as next week unless opting