KDE is adding Matrix to its instant messaging infrastructure

KDE has been looking for a better way of chatting and live-sharing information for several years now. IRC has been a good solution for a long time, but it has centralized servers KDE cannot control. It is also insecure and lacks features users have come to expect from more modern IM services. Other alternatives, such as Telegram, Slack and Discord, although feature-rich, are centralized and built around closed-source technologies and offer even less control than IRC. This flies in the face of KDE's principles that require we use and support technologies based on Free software. However, our search for a better solution has finally come to an end: as of today we are officially using Matrix for collaboration within KDE! Matrix is an open protocol and network for decentralised communication, backed by an open standard and open source reference implementations for servers, clients, client SDKs, bridges, bots and more. It provides all the features you’d expect from a modern chat system: infinite scrollback, file transfer, typing notifications, read receipts, presence, search, push notifications, stickers, VoIP calling and conferencing, etc. It even provides end-to-end encryption (based on Signal’s double ratchet algorithm) for when you want some privacy. Also: KDE To Support Matrix Decentralized Instant Messaging

Android Leftovers

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• Xiaomi Mi 6 may not get an official Android Pie update

• Xiaomi Mi 9 hands-on preview: Performance without the premium

• Xiaomi Mi 9 vs the sensibly priced competition

• Forget the Galaxy S10, Xiaomi’s brand new Android phone with 12GB of RAM is insanely affordable

• Best Tips and Tricks for Samsung Galaxy phones running One UI (Android Pie)

• Qualcomm Reportedly Developing Low-Cost SoC For Android Go Devices

• Android Enterprise Recommended Adds Managed Service Providers

• This is how Android will work on foldable phones

• LG brings multi-camera phtography and notch designs to affordable Android smartphones

• Oracle discovers another major fraud operation affecting Android users and mobile advertisers

Canonical Is Planning Some Awesome New Content For The Snap Store

There I was, thoughtfully drafting an article titled "3 Things Canonical Can Do To Improve The Snap Ecosystem," when I jumped on the phone with Evan Dandrea, an Engineering Manager who just so happens to be responsible for the Snapcraft ecosystem at Canonical. As it turns out, that headline will need a slight edit. One less number. That's because I've just learned Canonical has some ambitious plans for the future of the Snap Store.

Extensive Benchmarks Looking At AMD Znver1 GCC 9 Performance, EPYC Compiler Tuning

With the GCC 9 compiler due to be officially released as stable in the next month or two, we've been running benchmarks of this near-final state to the GNU Compiler Collection on a diverse range of processors. In recent weeks that has included extensive compiler benchmarks on a dozen x86_64 systems, POWER9 compiler testing on the Talos II, and also the AArch64 compiler performance on recent releases of GCC and LLVM Clang. In this latest installment of our GCC 9 compiler benchmarking is an extensive look at the AMD EPYC Znver1 performance on various releases of the GCC compiler as well as looking at various optimization levels under this new compiler on the Znver1 processor.