The Kodi HTPC software formerly known as XBMC is now up to a beta state for their big version 19 "Matrix" release.

Kodi 19 is a big update for this open-source, cross-platform HTPC software. Kodi 19.0 is gearing up for release in early 2021 and features a wealth of improvements, especially at the low-level in that they have been working to gut out the EOL'ed Python 2 and replace it with Python 3 for the software's

MPV as the open-source, cross-platform media player based long ago off the MPlayer/MPlayer2 code-base is out with a new feature release ahead of the holiday season.

MPV 0.33 is the first release since MPV 0.32 that happened back in January, thus there are a lot of changes in store.

MPV 0.33 now relies exclusively on Python 3 for its build system with Python 2 support having been dropped given its EOL status, Direct3D 11

Flatpak and the Flathub "app store" and build service are rolling out a new repository format in order to scale better now that there are around one thousand applications on Flathub.

Flathub continues seeing new Flatpak packages added to the service and thus better scalability is on the mind of developers, especially in wanting to support additional CPU architectures.

A new Flatpak repository format is supported by Flatpak 1.9.2+ and already deployed on Flathub. This new repository format is more efficient and also allows isolating the metadata to download

For those looking for some technical open-source/Linux video content to enjoy this weekend, the Debian crew has been hosting a virtual MiniDebConf devoted to gaming and all of the material is online.

This MiniDebConf running Saturday and today has included sessions on DRM-free games, gaming utilities to be found within the Debian ecosystem, open-source games like 0 A.D., open-source VR/AR with the likes of Monado, and engine talks like GemRB / Engine / Godot, and other Debian-

Greg Kroah-Hartman has issued new point releases for all of the Linux kernel series he is still maintaining as a result of that IBM POWER9 processor vulnerability plus other random fixes that have accumulated.

Made public on Friday was that IBM POWER9 processor vulnerability whereby the L1 data cache needs to be flushed when crossing privilege boundaries . To fend off the potential and improper leakage of L1 data if paired with other side channels, the Linux kernel by default is now set to flush the L1d when entering the

It's been twenty-five years to the day since GIMP was started as an open-source image editor and in turn sparked the creation of the GTK tool-kit.

There is no major news to share today for GIMP's 25th birthday, but there is a brief highlight announcement at GIMP.org .

For years now GIMP 3.0 has been in the works as the long awaited major overhaul to this image editor that switches to the GTK3 toolkit and has a wealth of modernization work

For over one year the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) has supported case-folding for optional case-insensitive file/folder support . The past number of years F2FS has also supported FSCRYPT-based file encryption . But now as we roll into 2021, support is finally seemingly ready for mainline in supporting casefolding with encryption enabled.

The combination of having case-folding and encryption on the same data hasn't been supported by F2FS. For the past number

Out this weekend is Phoronix Test Suite 10.2-Harstad Milestone 1 as the first development snapshot of this next quarterly feature update to our cross-platform, open-source benchmarking software.

Over this quarter's Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 release there is a lot of work on the Phoronix Device Interface "Phodevi" as the software/hardware abstraction layer, various system logging improvements, improved user experience on the OpenBenchmarking.org auto comparison functionality, and other low-level changes.

On the Phodevi

Within Intel's vast open-source software ecosystem and much of the attention being on oneAPI as their preferred programming model for developers these days and there being multiple different open-source Intel graphics compiler back-ends, one that is often forgotten about is the Intel C for Metal Compiler that on Friday saw a new release.

The Intel C for Metal Compiler "cm-compiler" is for their C language dialect as a GPU kernel programming language for Intel graphics processors. C for Metal is their optimized GPU programming language