For fans of the Arch Linux distribution their Arch Conf 2020 virtual presentations have all been posted now for your enjoyment.

Arch Conf started as a new annual tradition last year when they met in Berlin as a meeting of the key developers. This year Arch Conf was held virtually given the pandemic while now the edited recordings and all presentation material has been collected and organized in an easily accessible manner.

Arch Conf 2020 talks ranged from the state of Arch to reproducible builds, packaging Rust software, creating

Wine 5.21 was just released as one of the smaller bi-weekly updates this year.

Wine 5.21 has just a few prominent changes and only two dozen bug fixes over the past week. Notable with Wine 5.21 is the GDI32 library being converted to the portable executable (PE) format, fixes to the windowless RichEdit implementation, and many timezone updates.

Two dozen bug fixes is a bit light compared to most Wine development releases. Among the fixes this cycle are around

Zink as the Mesa Gallium3D implementation putting OpenGL 3.x/4.x on top of the Vulkan API is now offering near-native performance.

Mike Blumenkrantz who has been extensively working on Zink in recent time with implementing much of OpenGL 4.x as well as enhancing the performance has made great strides in making this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation a very capable alternative to dedicated OpeNGL drivers.

It was just last month that he was proud of hitting ~69% the speed of Intel'

GIMP 2.99.2 is finally available as their "first step" towards releasing GIMP 3.0 that most notably transitions from the GTK2 to GTK3 toolkit.

With GIMP 3.0 on GTK3 there is user interface improvements including the likes of native Wayland support and properly supporting HiDPI displays. This work also improves the input device handling for GIMP and new theme possibilities.

Outside of moving to GTK3, GIMP 2.99.2/3.0 also features a brand new plug

VKD3D-Proton as the Valve-backed fork of Wine's VKD3D for mapping the Direct3D 12 API atop Vulkan is now supporting more features with today's v2.0 release and thus handling more Windows games running on Linux with Steam Play.

VKD3D-Proton 2.0 was tagged today now that it supports Direct3D 12 Feature Level 12.0 and Shader Model 6.0 DXIL.

D3D12 games now expected to be

Back in August we reported on Red Hat engineers developing Stalld as a new Linux service for detecting stalled threads and also allowing select threads to be boosted based on policy. In the months since Stalld continues to be developed and recently saw new releases.

Stalld continues to mature as this modern Linux solution for detecting stalled system threads and those that are ready-to-run but not allotted any processor time. The boosting is handled via using the SCHEAD_DEADLINE policy.

Stalld 1.1 was released at the end of October

FlightGear 2020.3 is out today as the newest feature update to this long-standing, open-source flight simulator software package.

While not as elaborate as Microsoft Flight Simulator or X-Plane, FlightGear continues to advance and has a steady following.

With FlightGear 2020.3 there are improvements to the flight models and other simulation systems, Iceland assets have been added, there are various performance improvements to the simulator, improvements for various aircraft, texture caching improvements as well as texture compression

It's not across the finish line at least yet but Mesa 20.3 just merged today the initial prep changes needed for exposing OpenCL 3.0 support within the Clover Gallium3D state tracker.

David Airlie of Red Hat has merged Clover's "CL3.0 precursor patches" as the initial changes in moving this OpenCL Gallium3D state tracker to OpenCL 3.0 support. Basically it adds the new version number and other prep work around differences in the OpenCL 3.0 spec but