For four years now since Fedora 25 the default GNOME Shell desktop environment has been using Wayland by default. Next spring with Fedora 34, the KDE Spin is finally planning a similar migration to use Wayland by default with the KDE Plasma desktop.

The Wayland support with Plasma and related KDE components has improved in recent times with many bugs being ironed out and other improvements now that they have a Wayland-first mentality to X11. In early 2021 with Fedora 34 the plan is to switch

Intel's September 2020 security advisories were posted today and include four security advisories around nine vulnerabilities.

Details on some of the vulnerabilities still aren't loading yet but INTEL-SA-00404 is the most significant this month and it's another Intel AMT/ISM advisory ranked "critical". INTEL-SA-00404 sadly isn't the first major AMT/ISM vulnerability but at least the second AMT vulnerability of the year scoring a CVSS 9.

When looking at the performance of Zink's OpenGL over Vulkan implementation just about one year ago the performance had a lot to be desired. But since then they have patches bringing it all the way to OpenGL 4.6 compared to the OpenGL 2.1 days and there has also been a lot of work on the performance. The performance at least for select operations is now turning out better than even the developers were expecting.

Mike Blumenkrantz formerly of Samsung OSG and Enlightenment fame who has been devoting much time to Zink

With Intel Gen11 graphics and newer supporting Adaptive-Sync / Variable Refresh Rate for minimizing tearing and stuttering, their open-source developers have now added the necessary bits to the generic xf86-video-modesetting X.Org driver for supporting the VRR functionality.

Months ago they posted the VRR patches for xf86-video-modesetting while now the patches have been merged to X.Org Server Git. These patches in turn are based on AMD's FreeSync/VRR support they added to the

Hikari, the FreeBSD-focused Wayland compositor that also works on Linux systems, is out with a new feature release.

Hikari is a stacking Wayland compositor focused on offering a minimalistic look and feel with modal interface, keyboard oriented commands, and is based on the WLROOTS library.

Hikari 2.2 adds support for WayVNC as the Wayland VNC server code based on WLROOTS. The WayVNC support on the compositor side includes support for virtual input. Hikari 2.2 also adds middle-click emulation, fallback layouts, improved handling

GStreamer 1.18 is now available for this widely-used, cross-platform multimedia framework.

There is a lot of new material in GStreamer 1.18 from much better Microsoft Windows support to including Intel's SVT-HEVC H.265 encoder. The highlights of GStreamer 1.18 include:

- HDR video information representation and signaling enhancements.

- Integration of the Intel SVT-HEVC encoder.

- Instant playback rate change support.

- Windows hardware-accelerated video decoding via DXVA2

The GNOME Power Profiles Daemon (power-profiles-daemon) has begun taking shape over the past few weeks for ultimately allowing better controls over system power preferences with different profiles.

Longtime GNOME developer Bastien Nocera has been developing power-profiles-daemon this summer for supporting power profiles handling and exposing it via D-Bus. The intended power profiles at this point are "balanced", "power-saver", and "performance" but the performance profile ultimately will only have any bearing on systems with hardware capable of

Following the major Inkscape 1.0 release happening back in May for this very popular, cross-platform vector graphics program there is the first point release now available.

Inkscape 1.0.1 comes with globs of fixes throughout... There are about one dozen crash fixes, various tool fixes, better performance (no longer unresponsive) when opening documents with lots of style tags, extensions work, command line improvements, and much more in the way of fixes and further polishing.

Besides many fixes as well as

Version 5.6 of KDevelop as the KDE-focused integrated development environment is now available.

KDevelop 5.6 isn't the most exciting IDE release in recent times but brings with it a focus on better stability, performance, and with future maintainability in mind for its code-base.

KDevelop 5.6 does bring with it the ability to display inline notes for problems at the end of the line, better CMake project support with a variety of improvements, better C++ language support, better PHP language