While it shouldn't come as much of a surprise given Fedora's tendency to always ship with the freshest open-source packages, but Fedora 34 should be including the latest Xfce 4.16 desktop packages for those seeking that GTK based desktop.

Xfce 4.16 released earlier this month with a variety of improvements -- better client side decorations handling, fractional scaling, and other UI work. Considering that Fedora 34 isn't being released until the spring, it's of little

The GNU Project had a very active year with the GNU toolchain in particular continuing to make major strides in punctually supporting new C/C++ features, continuing to enhance device offloading / accelerator support, support new CPU features, and more. GCC also saw its conversion this year finally over to Git among other accomplishments by the large number of GNU software projects.

GNU free software developers were as busy as ever in 2020 with fortunately the pandemic not interfering. Besides all of the GCC excitement, GRUB continued

For years LLVMpipe has been around as a superior software-based OpenGL implementation for those without a working GPU / hardware driver support or needing to test a bit of GL code along a vendor-neutral path. LLVMpipe thanks to leveraging LLVM is more performant than the traditional Mesa software rasterizer or similar avenues like Softpipe. Finally as we hit 2021, SWRAST has been removed from the Mesa code-base.

Earlier this month Mesa 21.0 dropped the classic OSMesa code while for ending out the year Red

NVIDIA's RTX 30 "Ampere" launch was quite a success for 2020 along with new Jetson products and more. Meanwhile on the Linux front this year NVIDIA's proprietary driver continued providing same-day support, features roughly at parity to Windows, and little bread crumbs of open-source support so far. But there still are indications of more possible open-source actions to come as well as potentially better Wayland support to look forward to in 2021.

Sadly there was not

Fedora Workstation 33 successfully switched over from EXT4 to using Btrfs as its default file-system. Now with Fedora 34 due out in the spring we are seeing Fedora beginning to make use of more features offered by Btrfs.

We previously reported on Fedora 34 looking to make use of DNF/RPM copy-on-write functionality in conjunction with Btrfs. Now another Btrfs feature being eyed for use by default in this next release is transparent file-system compression.

For several months now Fedora developers have been

At the start of Q4, Intel released Media SDK 20.3 with AV1 accelerated decode, Rocket Lake, DG1/SG1 discrete GPU support, and other improvements. Now to end out the quarter is a new release coming in at version 20.5.1.

The Intel Media SDK is their API for offering video decode/encode on Intel Gen HD/UHD/Iris/Xe Graphics. From HEVC through VP9 and now AV1 with the very latest hardware, Intel has

With it recently being noticed that the Linux AES-NI XTS performance regressed big time from the return trampolines "Retpolines" enacted nearly three years ago as a defense against Spectre, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance cost involved to this day using Retpolines and the impact on the XTS encryption/decryption performance measured by cryptsetup that is used for setting up encrypted disks under Linux.

While patches are on the way for improving the AES-NI kernel code so the Retpoline performance hit is addressed, here is a look at

KDE had a very eventful year even with the pandemic where it saw its Wayland support come together quite well that it's usable on a day-to-day basis, KWin has been seeing some renewed attention, and there was much application work as well as fixes and polishing throughout the massive KDE ecosystem.

As we hit the end of 2020, here is a look back at the most popular KDE stories on Phoronix for the year:

KWinFT: KDE's KWin Forked To Focus On Better Wayland