As expected Linus Torvalds has christened Linux 5.9-rc1 to mark the end of the merge window and new feature development of Linux 5.9 as another featureful update that will debut as stable this autumn.

Linus noted that by line of code count, Linux 5.9 is fairly normal if ignoring the big header file additions coming once again to the AMDGPU kernel driver. Due to the "Sienna Cichlid" and "Navy Flounder" GPU additions for Navi 2, there is yet again big auto-generated

Today marks twenty-seven years since the late Ian Murdock started Debian as one of the original Linux distributions. It was on 16 August 1993 when Ian Murdock started this distribution while it wasn't until September when he released the first version. Debian remains one of the oldest Linux-based distributions / operating systems. Over the years Debian has gone on to power numerous other Linux distributions like Ubuntu and SteamOS while continuing to experience much success in its own right as well.

Today the project is celebrating

While LibreOffice 7.0 was just released earlier this month, with the code branching having already happened earlier this summer, there are a number of changes already accumulating in the code-base for LibreOffice 7.1.

As usual for the release rhythm of this open-source office suite, LibreOffice 7.1 as the next installment should likely be out in late January / early February as that is their traditional target that complements their early August summer release.

The LibreOffice 7.1 release notes have already begun to document

SQLite 3.33 is out as the latest update to this widely-used, embed-friendly database library used by countless applications and other software.

With SQLite 3.33 the maximum size of database files has been increased to now allow up to 281 TB files.

Another significant addition with SQLite 3.33 is support for the UPDATE FROM syntax, based on the PostgreSQL implementation. UPDATE FROM is for performing an UPDATE statement using data driven by other tables. More details on SQLite's

Back in June after Intel first published the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) specification, the open-source/Linux patches were quick to come by their large software team. That work has continued over the summer in ensuring the Linux ecosystem and developers are ready for Intel AMX programming come next year with Sapphire Rapids.

Intel already landed initial support in LLVM as well as GCC and related components like the GNU Assembler . Intel's stellar software engineers have been working punctually to ensure all the bits are out there. AMX consists

Picolibc is a newer C library implementation written by longtime free software developer Keith Packard with a focus on being lightweight for embedded systems. Last year marked the release of Picolibc 1.0 while work on it hasn't let up.

Picolibc was born in part from code found within Newlib and AVR's libc. Picolibc 1.1 followed the 1.0 release last year but since then there hasn't been too much to report on this libc implementation. This weekend though longtime X11 developer Keith Packard

With the mainline NTFS driver in the Linux kernel offering read-only support for this widely-used Microsoft file-system and the more popular "ntfs-3g" driver being FUSE-based, Paragon Software is looking to mainline their read-write driver into the mainline kernel tree as a significant improvement over the existing NTFS kernel driver. But in the current state it's not clear if the driver will be accepted.

The existing NTFS driver is basically unmaintained in the kernel and lacks proper write support along with

GNOME 3.37.90 has been released this weekend to serve as the beta of the upcoming GNOME 3.38 desktop release.

A lot has been building up over the past six months for GNOME 3.38, which we'll have our usual feature overview in the weeks ahead. As far as new changes to the GNOME 3.38 beta, some of the latest work includes:

- GNOME Shell now allows rearranging items in the app picker, screencasting has been moved into a