In addition to shipping the Plasma 5.21 beta this week, KDE developers were very active in not only working out fixes for next month's Plasma 5.21 desktop but also other improvements to KDE applications.

Among the highlights this week in KDE land as noted by developer Nate Graham were:

- The Kate text editor now has a HUD-style command palette. This command palette is searchable for all of Kate's many options.

- Plasma's Pulse Connect Secure VPN support now works correctly

Adding to the list of big ticket changes for GNOME 40 is Mutter now supporting atomic mode-setting .

The popular mainline DRM/KMS drivers for years have generally supported atomic mode-setting while finally with Mutter 40 the bits are coming into place for GNOME. Atomic mode-setting is much cleaner than the older legacy mode-setting path, principally allows for testing of modes prior to applying, can reduce flickering in some instances, and also tends to be faster.

The new Mutter atomic mode-setting code

Pyston started out as a fork of CPython and was very promising during its early days as a Dropbox project for delivering on high performance Python. Its performance was great but in 2017 Dropbox stopped supporting it . Then at the end of 2020, Pyston reappeared and Pyston 2.0 promoted ~20% faster performance than Python 3.8. Pyston 2.x was developed by many of the original developers from Dropbox now out working on their own firm.

Fast forward to now, Pyston

The open-source/Linux Apple M1 work continues to be quite busy this week... The latest is Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been working on reverse-engineering the M1 graphics processor has been able to write some early and primitive code for rendering a triangle.

Alyssa Rosenzweig of Panfrost fame has been working to reverse engineer the Apple M1 graphics as part of the Asahi Linux effort with developer Marcan.

It's taken nearly twenty five years but the mainline Linux kernel this year will be able to boot on the Nintendo 64 game console... It's looking like the Nintendo 64 support will be merged with the upcoming Linux 5.12 kernel.

Back on Christmas we wrote about a new Linux kernel port to the Nintendo 64 . The port was done by longtime open-source developer Lauri Kasanen and done for his own personal satisfaction with being unsure if there would be any interest in having

New feature material for Linux 5.12 continues getting ready ahead of the merge window opening in February to formally kick off the cycle.

On top of the prior Intel graphics driver improvements queued up in recent weeks to DRM-Next, another batch of Intel updates were sent out this week. The latest work included with this pull includes:

- Faster suspend/resume performance by using WBINVD rather than overlapping CLFLUSH calls.

- Intel Gen7 graphics now support per-engine reset rather than just resetting the entire GPU.

In addition to Oracle's GraalVM 21.0 being released this week, the Eclipse Foundation has released OpenJ9 v0.24 as the newest feature release for their high performance JVM.

OpenJ9 continues moving ahead as a high-performance, scalable Java Virtual Machine born originally out of IBM. OpenJ9 0.24 contains nearly 400 changes including countless bug fixes, numerous performance optimizations, a few Java 16 bits, and an assortment of other changes. There is also at least

Now that Chrome 88 released, attention is turning to Chrome 89 of which an interesting technical change is the enabling of AV1 encode support within the web browser.

Going back to 2018 there's been AV1 decode support within the browser when wanting to enjoy content encoded in this royalty-free, modern codec. But now for Chrome 89 is coming AV1 encode support.

AV1 encode support is being added for the WebRTC use-case for real-time conferencing. Web applications