Lenovo G50 & CentOS 7.2 MATE - Fairly solid

Is there a perfect track record for any which distro? No. Do any two desktop environments ever behave the same? No. Is there anything really good and cool about the MATE offering? Yes, definitely. It's not the finest, but it's definitely quite all right. You do get very decent hardware support, adequate battery life and good performance, smartphone and media support is top notch, and your applications will all run happily. On the other hand, you will struggle with Samba and Bluetooth, and there are some odd issues here and there. I think the Gnome and Xfce offerings are better, but MATE is not to be dissed as a useless relic. Far from it, this is definitely an option you ought to consider if you're into less-than-mainstream desktops, and you happen to like CentOS. To sum it all up, another goodie in the growing arsenal of CentOS fun facts. Enjoy.

digiKam 5.2.0 is published...

After a second release 5.1.0 published one month ago, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.2.0 of digiKam Software Collection. This version introduces a new bugs triage and some fixes following new feedback from end-users. This release introduce also a new red eyes tool which automatize the red-eyes effect reduction process. Faces detection is processed on whole image and a new algorithm written by a Google Summer of Code 2016 student named Omar Amin is dedicated to recognize shapes and try to found eyes with direct flash reflection on retina.

Games for GNU/Linux

• Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II coming to Mac and Linux this month

• Warhammer® 40,000®: Dawn of War® II, Chaos Rising™ and Retribution™ released for Mac and Linux on September 29th

• For a few more days, you can get both 'Frederic' rhythm games for a massive 90% discount, demos available

• Heroine's Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok is coming to Linux, developer looking for testers

Linux Graphics

• The Ongoing Work Of Nouveau Power Management / Re-Clocking

• The Student Working On "Soft" FP64 Support Is Good News For Older GPUs

• The Mesa On-Disk Shader Cache Has Been Revised Again (V5)

• Wayland 1.13 Is Open For Development

  Following this week's Wayland/Weston 1.12 release, Wayland 1.13 and the reference Weston 1.13 compositor are now open for development. Release manager Bryce Harrington has bumped the versions on Git master for marking the Wayland and Weston Git trees being open for v1.13 development work. In the Weston space, Weston 1.13 is anticipated to have more improvements to the libweston and libweston-desktop components that have been about making it easier for other Wayland compositors to re-use parts of Weston's basic functionality. There is also the idle inhibition protocol in the works and other changes expected in the next few months for Wayland/Weston.