With the in-development Linux 5.11 kernel there are many great features and improvements especially for AMD users with some new drivers and other pleasant enhancements. But as I outlined back on Christmas day: Linux 5.11 Is Regressing Hard For AMD Performance With Schedutil . Fortunately, a fix is now en route to the Linux 5.11 kernel for fixing that performance regression affecting AMD Zen 2/3 desktops and servers.

As outlined in that original article after bisecting the sizable performance regressions and in follow

Lightworks, the professional-grade video editing system that works well on Linux but has remained elusive of its long past open-source promise , is out with its first major release of 2021.

The new Lightworks 2021.1 release comes following this non-linear video editing system becoming independent of EditShare as its prior parent company. With Lightworks 2021.1 is a big improvement to how it handles frame rates especially for now properly dealing with media content of different frame-rates

One of the last pieces of the puzzle for supporting an entirely Vulkan-based Wayland compositor is coming together with a new extension that looks like it will be merged soon and there already being work pending against Sway/WLROOTS to make use of the Vulkan path.

The VK_EXT_physical_device_drm extension to Vulkan has been in the works for a number of months and is for allowing the mapping of Vulkan physical devices and DRM nodes. VK_EXT_physical_device_drm allows for querying DRM

If Red Hat's new no-cost offering for up to 16 production systems for RHEL doesn't fit your requirements and are evaluating alternatives to CentOS 8 that will be EOL'ed this year, Rocky Linux remains one of the leading contenders and is on track for its inaugural release in Q2 of this year.

Rocky Linux and CloudLinux's AlmaLinux appear to be the two main contenders (along with existing players like Oracle Linux) coming out of last month's announcement that CentOS 8 will be

Following a very active past couple of days, developers from security startup Corellium have followed through on their word so far of publishing the Apple Silicon patches to the Linux kernel mailing list for possible upstreaming in the future that allow the Linux kernel to boot with Apple M1 hardware.

Corellium developers sent out their first set of seven patches under a "request for comments" flag this morning. These are the minimal changes needed for getting Linux to boot on the current Apple M1 ARM-based hardware.

Linux is now completely

Following the announcement at the end of last year that CentOS 8 will be ending and instead focusing on CentOS Stream as the future upstream to RHEL , there have been many concerned by the absence of CentOS 8 past this year. In trying to fill that void, Red Hat announced today they will be making Red Hat Enterprise Linux free for small production deployments.

Red Hat has announced an expanded developer program where now the individual RHEL Developer subscription is supported for production environments up to 16 systems. Previously the program allowed free RHEL

For those still making use of pre-GCN AMD graphics cards supported by the R600 Gallium3D driver (namely the Radeon HD 5000/6000 series), the open-source "R600g" Gallium3D driver now has nearly feature complete NIR support.

Gert Wollny has been near single handedly working on NIR support for the R600g driver to make use of this modern graphics driver intermediate representation as an alternative to the long-standing

LibreOffice 7.1 should be released at the start of February while now the second to last release candidate is available for testing of this leading cross-platform, open-source office suite.

LibreOffice 7.1 RC2 is available for testing following nearly one hundred commits and 64 bug fixes since the prior release candidate.

Those wanting to test the latest release candidate for this leading Microsoft Office alternative can find the 7.1 RC2 downloads via the QA blog .

The third and final release candidate is expected next

Several readers have expressed concerned that Qt open-source downloads have disappeared but The Qt Company has now commented it's only a temporary issue due to a "severe hardware failure" in the cloud.

Qt's open-source online installer and offline packages are not currently working for the open-source options but the commercial downloads are working. While that may raise concerns given Qt's increasing commercial focus , The Qt Company posted to their blog that this interruption around open-source package downloads is due to a