KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary highlighting the desktop project's changes for the week. WebRTC support with the screencast code in Plasma now works on Wayland, but the Plasma Wayland changes are lighter than we've seen in recent weeks. Instead the emphasis this week seems to have been on enhancing KDE's usability.

Among the changes that landed over the course of this past week include:

- Support for meetings/screencasts using WebRTC will now work in the KDE Plasma Wayland session with Plasma

Announced earlier this year by Micron was the HSE open-source storage engine aimed for low-latency, speed-performance on modern SSD storage and ideal for powering the likes of NoSQL databases. In squeezing out one more major release before year's end, HSE 1.9 was released on Friday.

The Heterogeneous-Memory Storage Engine continues to be tweaked for providing a low-latency, high performance key-value store atop NAND flash or persistent memory. With the HSE 1.9 release there are quality of

For over the past year there has been work on the new "Maple Tree" data structure led by Oracle for the Linux kernel and this week marked the patches being sent out in "request for comments" (RFC) form with the aim still on helping the kernel performance.

Maple Tree amounts to a data structure that works well on modern CPUs and in an RCU-safe manner for storing index ranges that map to a single pointer. Oracle's Liam Howlett sums up the Maple Tree data structure as " an

Following last week's Wine 6.0-RC1 release that marked the feature freeze and start of the release process for the annual stable Wine release, Wine 6.0-RC2 is out today with the latest assortment of fixes.

Wine 6.0 is expected to debut in January as the annual feature release following the Wine 5.x development builds over the past year. But until then these weekly release candidates will continue.

Wine 6.0-RC2 comes with 40 known bug fixes

Just one week shy of one year since CUPS founder Michael Sweet left Apple , which in turn seemingly led to the downfall of CUPS , PAPPL 1.0 has been released as his modern alternative printer application framework.

Since leaving Apple, Michael Sweet has been developing PAPPL as a a printer application framework that supports all major imaging formats and printers via USB or network connections. PAPPL embeds an IPP server, implementing IPP Everywhere, and has been developed in conjunction with his LPrint project. PAPPL's CUPS Printer Applications are the

KDE Plasma users will hopefully be seeing the KWin Wayland compositor perform better and more reliably in 2021.

As KWin becomes more focused as a Wayland compositor rather than imposing the current limitations found with X11, the KDE Plasma desktop experience should improve nicely. KDE developer Vlad Zahorodnii penned a post today outlining some of the KWin improvements being pursued particularly around compositing scheduling.

Multi-screen KDE desktop users could see a better experience in the next release. Being addressed right now are per-screen refresh rates rather

The Linux 5.10 kernel is expected to be released this Sunday that will in turn start the Linux 5.11 merge window. Based on the material queued so far into the various "-next" branches, here is a look at what should be on the table for this next major kernel release and come February will be the first major kernel release of 2021.

Among the likely Linux 5.11 material that we have been tracking includes:

- AMD VanGogh APU and RDNA2

While working on some core Mesa cleaning/improvements, Eric Anholt has retired the classic OSMesa support in next quarter's Mesa 21.0 .

Those wanting Mesa software rendering in 2020 and beyond should really be using LLVMpipe or otherwise Softpipe should LLVM not be available for your software/hardware platform. LLVMpipe offers much better performance not to mention OpenGL 4.6 and is actually maintained. With classic OSMesa code just rotting and being of minimal use these days for off-screen rendering, the classic code