On your next system upgrade you will receive all the latest versions of KDE’s Plasma, Applications and Frameworks, in addition to the usual package updates. There is a new series 18.08 out for for Applications, with improvements aimed at making your usability and productivity better, in addition to adding new features.

For more details and the full changelogs on KDE’s software releases, you can read the official announcements:

Plasma 5.13.4
Applications 18.08.0
Frameworks 5.49.0

• From the Eastern District of Texas (US) to Australia Patent Quality Remains a Problem
• Alice/35 U.S.C. § 101 and PTAB Are Here to Stay and Even Their Critics (Patent Maximalists) Have Come to Accept That
• Patent Trolls Roundup: Conversant Wireless Licensing (Formerly Core Wireless) and Blackbird ‘Technologies’ Still Prey on Real Companies
• David Ruschke, the PTAB’s Chief, is Moving So the Patent Maximalists Push Their Anti-PTAB Agenda
• If David Chiles Turned the USPTO Into a ‘Microsoft Shop’ That Might Explain Three Days (or More) of Outages
• Links 19/8/2018: Skrooge 2.15.0, Wine 3.14, End of Akademy 2018
• Links 17/8/2018: GNU/Linux From ASUS, Debian at 25, Lubuntu Plans
• Links 16/8/2018: MAAS 2.4.1, Mesa 18.2 RC3

• Dragon Ball: 20 Strange Things About Android 18's Body

• Google Pixel 3 release - Everything we think we know about upcoming Android flagship

• Delayed Android updates? Here's why it happens on non-Google phones

• Why does it take so long to get the latest Android updates on non-Google phones?

• Quindim, quiche or quesito? What will Android Q be called?

• Android Giants: Samsung Note 9 vs. Huawei P20 Pro, which one should you go for?

This past week we looked at the Windows 10 vs. Linux performance for AMD's just-launched Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX and given the interest from that then ran some Windows Server benchmarks to see if the performance of this 64-thread CPU would be more competitive to Linux. From those Windows vs. Linux tests there has been much speculation that the performance disparity is due to Windows scheduler being less optimized for high core/thread count processors and its NUMA awareness being less vetted than the Linux kernel. For getting a better idea, here are benchmarks of Windows Server 2019 preview versus Ubuntu Linux when testing varying thread/core counts for the AMD Threadripper 2990WX.

Toggled via the BIOS was SMT as well as various CCX configurations and each step of the way comparing the Windows Server 2019 Build 17733 performance to that of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the Linux 4.18 kernel in various multi-threaded benchmarks supported under both operating systems.

• RISC-V's Linux Kernel Support Is Getting Into Good Shape, Userspace Starting To Work

  The RISC-V open-source processor ISA support within the mainline kernel is getting into good shape, just a few releases after this new architecture port was originally added to the Linux Git tree.

  The RISC-V code for Linux 4.19 includes the ISA-mandated timers and first-level interrupt controllers, which are needed to actually get user-space up and running. Besides the RISC-V first-level interrupt controller, Linux 4.19 also adds support for SiFive's platform-level interrupt controller that interfaces with the actual devices.

• A Hearty Batch Of KVM Updates Land In Linux 4.19

  There is a lot of new feature work for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) within the Linux 4.19 kernel.

Even with KDE's annual Akademy conference happening this past week in Vienna, KDE development has been going strong especially on the usability front. The Kate text editor and the KTextEditor component within KDE Frameworks 5 have been the largest benefactors of recent improvements.

This KDE text editing code now has support for disabling syntax highlighting entirely if preferred. When using syntax highlighting, there have been many KTextEditor enhancements to improve the experience as well as improvements to the highlighting for a variety of languages from JavaScript to YAML to AppArmor files.

KStars 2.9.8 is released for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It is a hotfix release that contains bug fixes and stability improvements over the last release.

Also: KDE Itinerary - How did we get here?

• Project curl governance

  Over time, we've slowly been adjusting the curl project and its documentation so that we might at some point actually qualify to the CII open source Best Practices at silver level.

  We qualified at the base level a while ago as one of the first projects which did that.

  Recently, one of those issues we fixed was documenting the governance of the curl project. How exactly the curl project is run, what the key roles are and how decisions are made. That document is now in our git repo.

• How to install OwnCloud 10 on CentOS 7 and RHEL 7

• How to Get Google Camera Port for Asus ZenFone Max Pro M1

• How to check your CentOS Version

• 5 Practical Examples of chgrp command in Linux

• Trinity Desktop R14.0.5 Brings Modern Compiler Support and Security Fixes

  Trinity Desktop, the Linux desktop environment which is forked from KDE 3, has just released an update bringing Trinity Desktop to version R14.0.5.

  Because Trinity Desktop is a “traditional desktop” based on KDE 3 and focuses on function rather than a lot of special effects, its benefits are typically things like increased battery life on laptops, and just overall efficiency for the user.

• This week in Usability & Productivity, part 32

  I’m back from Akademy, and I can’t wait to share some of the cool stuff that happened there over the past week. I’m going to post the video of my talk as soon as it’s up. But first, I know what you’re all really waiting for: this week’s Usability & Productivity update. Though we were all quite busy, somehow everyone managed to accomplish an enormous amount of work, too!

• Reminder: Shotwell Facebook publishing no longer working

  As announced earlier, since August 1st, 2018 Shotwell cannot publish to Facebook any more. The API that Shotwell used for that was removed and it is currently not clear to me how developers that do not use Android, iOS or Facebook’s web SDKs should provide similar functionality.

• Gentoo on Integricloud

  Integricloud gave me access to their infrastructure to track some issues on ppc64 and ppc64le.

  Since some of the issues are related to the compilers, I obviously installed Gentoo on it and in the process I started to fix some issues with catalyst to get a working install media, but that’s for another blogpost.

  Today I’m just giving a walk-through on how to get a ppc64le (and ppc64 soon) VM up and running.

• Industrial Mini-ITX board pumps up with Coffee Lake

  Commell’s “LV-67X” Mini-ITX board runs on 8th Gen “Coffee Lake” processors, with up to 32GB DDR4, 3x SATA, triple 4K displays, USB 3.1, and PCIe x16 and mini-PCIe expansion.

  The LV-67X, which shares some of the layout and feature set of its Intel Apollo Lake based LV-67U board, is the first industrial Mini-ITX board we’ve seen with Intel’s 8th Gen Coffee Lake CPUs. (Going forward, we’ll likely use the caffeinated nickname rather than “8th Gen” because Intel also applies the 8th Gen tag to the transitional and similarly 14nm Kaby Lake-G chips as well as the new, 10nm Cannon Lake processors.)

• Unofficial OpenGApps for Android Pie 9.0 Released for ARM and ARM64 Platforms

• Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst on strategy and culture

  Red Hat Inc. is a successful, public open source software company. It’s the first open source company to crack $1b in revenue and is closing in on $3b. Here is some advice from the CEO for your own business.

  Red Hat gives away all its intellectual property and products. Where it makes money is from support. To be clearer, Red Hat takes the free Linux operating system and other open source projects and makes them more robust, more scalable and more secure for enterprise and government. It sells subscriptions to its software along with support, and with the guaranteed long-term stability of the product.

  Red Hat is the first company with this open source model to crack one billion US dollars in revenue and is closing in on $3b per annum.

  iTWire had the opportunity to speak directly with the CEO, Jim Whitehurst, during the annual Red Hat Summit in San Francisco earlier this year, asking what can a company like Red Hat teach other companies about strategy, planning and culture.

• Elk Creek Partners Stake in Nuvasive (NUVA) Increased as Share Value Rose; As Red Hat (RHT) Market Valuation Rose, Holder Davis R M Trimmed Stake by $3.46 Million

• $827.44 Million in Sales Expected for Red Hat Inc (RHT) This Quarter

• Analysts Expect Red Hat Inc (RHT) Will Post Earnings of $0.81 Per Share

• Silverblue Still Aiming To Be In Great Shape By Fedora 30 Next Spring

  DevConf.US is happening this weekend in Boston, a Red Hat sponsored event for free and open-source software. Among the interesting talks is Red Hat's Matthias Clasen providing an update on the Fedora Silverblue initiative.

  Silverblue as a refresher is what was formally Fedora Atomic Workstation But now there's this new branding for the container-based Fedora Workstation built around RPM-OSTree and envisioning what a future operating system stack could look like, albeit fully working today with leveraging Flatpak, RPM-OSTree, etc.

• FLOCK 2018 – Dresden Germany [Latam in Flock]

• Montreal's Debian & Stuff - August 2018

  Summer is slowly coming to an end in Montreal and as much as I would like it to last another month, I'm also glad to fall back into my regular routine.

  Part of that routine means the return of Montreal's Debian & Stuff - our informal gathering of the local Debian community!

• Testing & Fuzzing Microconference Accepted into 2018 Linux Plumbers Conference

  Testing, fuzzing, and other diagnostics have greatly increased the robustness of the Linux ecosystem, but embarrassing bugs still escape to end users. Furthermore, a million-year bug would happen several tens of times per day across Linux's installed base (said to number more than 20 billion), so the best we can possibly do is hardly good enough.

• Linux 4.19 Is Finally Offering An In-Kernel GPS Subsystem

  The Linux 4.19 kernel will finally be introducing a GPS subsystem to hopefully better standardize a lot of the Linux GPS drivers that have been out there for years out-of-tree.

  The GNSS subsystem (Global Navigation Satellite System, i.e. GPS) provides initial support for receivers. This subsystem abstracts the underlying interfaces of the devices and provides a new class type that exposes a character device to user-space for reading these GNSS receivers. The protocol handling and more is left to user-space.

• Uber Open Sources Its Large Scale Metrics Platform M3

  Uber's engineering team released its metrics platform M3, which it has been using internally for some years, as open source. The platform was built to replace its Graphite based system, and provides cluster management, aggregation, collection, storage management, a distributed time series database (TSDB) and a query engine with its own query language M3QL.

  [...]

  M3's query engine provides a single global view of all metrics without cross region replication. Metrics are written to local regional M3DB instances and replication is local to a region. Queries go to both the regional local instances as well as to coordinators in remote regions where metrics are stored. The results are aggregated locally, and future work is planned wherein  any query aggregation would happen at the remote coordinators.

• SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Dev.to

  This week’s highlighted project comes courtesy of a community of developers who hope that their codebase will be used to foster communities like theirs, focused on education and collaboration among peers of any skill level. Dev.to’s codebase is open-source as of last week week and the community-building platform’s developers think that further community involvement in development will lead to great things.

  [...]

  Halpern made sure to clarify in the post that this release is not simply a library for creating the types of community-driven communication platforms that dev.to embodies, but the for-profit company’s entire codebase. “However, that is a perfectly valid use case in the future,” Halpern wrote in a post leading up to the release. “If you are interested in contributing such that we can eventually help people stand up their own version of this platform for their own business or society, we’ll definitely welcome that input.”

  The platform is a Ruby on Rails app with a Preact front-end. The company is hard at work on native apps for iOS and Android but say its technology choices are fluid.

• RLS 1.0 release candidate

  The current version of the Rust Language Server (RLS), 0.130.5, is the first 1.0 release candidate. It is available on nightly and beta channels, and from the 3rd September will be available with stable Rust.

  1.0 for the RLS is a somewhat arbitrary milestone. We think the RLS can handle most small and medium size projects (notable, it doesn't work with Rust itself, but that is large and has a very complex build system), and we think it is release quality. However there are certainly limitations and many planned improvements.

  It would be really useful if you could help us test the release candidate! Please report any crashes, or projects where the RLS gives no information or any bugs where it gives incorrect information.

• Mozilla brings back Stylish Add-on to Firefox after it was Banned Last Year

  The Stylish add-on, with which you can give websites their very own style, is back for Firefox. This improvement has been welcomed by many users. The history of this Add-on is quite complicated as it was supposedly twice removed and added back before it was removed again. Now it has been added back as reported by Vess (@VessOnSecurity).

  [...]

  The add-on Stylish has been brought back in the Mozilla’s add-on storehouse. What users should know: This expansion was criticized some time prior as a user data collector and has been prohibited and banned a year back from Mozilla’s Add-on store.

  Owing to its notoriety of collecting data of users’ website visits in a way which makes it convenient to reveal users’ identity to third parties, Google and Mozilla banned it last year. It is indeed surprising as to why Mozilla decided to bring it back to its browser after it was criticized for compromising users’ identity.

• LibreOffice 6.1: A week in stats

  On August 8, we announced LibreOffice 6.1, a new version of the suite with many great features and updates created by our worldwide community. Let’s look at some stats from the last week!

• Graphos 0.7 released

  Graphos 0.7 has been released a couple of days ago!

• Tesla open sources its security software, Hollywood goes open source, and more news

• How Changa Bell is taking an ‘open source’ approach to grow the Black Male Yoga Intiative

• As Academic Publishers Fight And Subvert Open Access, Preprints Offer An Alternative Approach For Sharing Knowledge Widely

  That's certainly true, but is easy to remedy. Academics who plan to publish a preprint could offer a copy of the paper to the group of trusted journalists under embargo -- just as they would with traditional papers. One sentence describing why it would be worth reading is all that is required by way of introduction. To the extent that the system works for today's published papers, it will also work for preprints. Some authors may publish without giving journalists time to check with other experts, but that's also true for current papers. Similarly, some journalists may hanker after full press releases that spoon-feed them the results, but if they can't be bothered working it out for themselves, or contacting the researchers and asking for an explanation, they probably wouldn't write a very good article anyway.

  The other concern relates to the quality of preprints. One of the key differences between a preprint and a paper published in a journal is that the latter usually goes through the process of "peer review", whereby fellow academics read and critique it. But it is widely agreed that the peer review process has serious flaws, as many have pointed out for years -- and as Sheldon himself admits.

  Indeed, as defenders note, preprints allow far more scrutiny to be applied than with traditional peer review, because they are open for all to read and spot mistakes. There are some new and interesting projects to formalize this kind of open review. Sheldon rightly has particular concerns about papers on public health matters, where lives might be put at risk by erroneous or misleading results. But major preprint sites like bioRxiv (for biology) and the upcoming medRxiv (for medicine and health sciences) are already trying to reduce that problem by actively screening preprints before they are posted.

• MUMPS Masochism part I: Line and Block Scope

  It's sort of an open secret that I sometimes use ANSI M, better known as MUMPS. It was developed in the 60's, and it definitely still looks like something from the 60's. But it's 1,000 times uglier than anything from that decade. I've made plenty of people, from software testers at work to other developers on IRC, recoil in horror from showing them samples of even relatively mundane code like a simple "Hello, World!".

• OpenSSH Username Enumeration

   

  We realized that without this patch, a remote attacker can easily test whether a certain user exists or not (username enumeration) on a target OpenSSH server

• Microsoft open sources new framework for Windows driver development [Ed: openwashing Microsoft Windows by pretending that when you write proprietary drivers for a proprietary O/S that does DRM, spies on users etc. you actually do something "open"]

• Microsoft to Open Source Its Network Replication Software [Ed: Microsoft is openwashing some more of its entirely proprietary 'offerings', a hallmark of a company of liars. Come to us! The traps are free, the cages will be "open".]

• GitHub goes off the Rails as Microsoft closes in [Ed: Microsoft will take GitHub off the rail like it did Skype and LinkedIn (totally lost)]

  GitHub's platform group is about 155 people at the moment and growing, said Lambert. And much of the group's focus is on breaking GitHub apart.

  GitHub is about a third of the way through an architectural change that began last year. The company is moving away from Ruby on Rails toward a more heterogeneous, composable infrastructure. Ruby still has a place at GitHub – Lambert referred to the company as a Ruby shop, but he said there's more Go, Java and even some Haskell being deployed for services. The goal, he explained, is to make GitHub's internal capabilities accessible to integrators and partners.

  "Our monolith is starting to break up and we're starting to abstract things into services," said Lambert. "The platform we've chosen to put them on is Kubernetes."

• Google rolls back Android Messages to old design and removes dark mode

• Essential Phone's notch settings may return in future Android Pie update

• The Android Pie security settings you need to know about

• Why a $100 phone will get Android Pie before your Samsung Galaxy S9

• 5 Android apps you shouldn't miss this week – Android Apps Weekly

With the MSI MEG X399 CREATION that we received as part of the launch package for the Threadripper 2950X and Threadripper 2990WX it includes the XPANDER-AERO that provides 4-way M.2 NVMe SSD slots on a PCI Express x16 card. The XPANDER-AERO is actively cooled and could be passed off as a small form factor graphics card upon a very cursory examination. With this card I've been running tests on four Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSDs in RAID to offer stellar Linux I/O performance. Here are some initial benchmarks using Btrfs.

• Kate gains Support for Inline Notes

  Thanks to Michal Srb and Sven Brauch for pioneering the work an a new KTextEditor interface that allows applications like Kate, KDevelop, etc. to display inline notes in a text document.

• Akademy 2018 was great!

  So Akademy 2018 has finished and it was a very impressive event. It happened in Vienna, Austria and it was my first opportunity to join in a KDE event, to travel to another country and to meet people from the community!

  I couldn’t participate during the first day of the event (August 11th) because my flight delayed a little bit and I only arrived in Vienna by night. So in the first day I only had the opportunity to join the people for a drink and prove some Wiener schnitzel and food from Austria.

• Akademy 2018 wrap-up

  As I am writing this, I am sitting in a train home from Akademy 2018, KDE’s annual developer conference, which took place in Vienna this year.
  Akademy always is a great mix of some talks, some socializing with people you otherwise only communicate with through mailing lists or IRC, and some hacking, and this year’s conference was no exception to this.
  In this post, I will detail some of the technical progress we made and some of the things we discussed.

• And we’re almost home…

  I went to Akademy feeling that the relationship been Krita and KDE is kinda difficult. Krita is part of KDE, but at the same time, Krita is getting really big. We’re using up quite a chunk of bandwidth, after plasmashell, we’re the project with the second-most bugs reported per year, and still people working on Krita don’t have much of a tie to KDE, and people working on KDE seldom have much of an idea what’s going on in Krita — other than nodding and telliing me Krita is one of KDE’s flagship projects. Sure it is, and I got very much reassured that we’re not using too large a chunk of KDE’s resources, and could even use more. I’m not sure how to “fix” this, if a fix is possible. If we’d have our Krita sprint during Akademy, I’m sure that would help — but it would also be a pretty improductive sprint for Krita.

• SPI on Fedora, or how to use a Nokia 5110 display

• Type examination in gdb

• How to Install Minimal Ubuntu on Your Old PC

• Share Files Securely With Onionshare

• A record pager built with YAD

• How to Set Up Apache Virtual Hosts on CentOS 7

• Sharing Linux Terminal Sessions With Tmux and Screen

• Dev nonsense: netstat and ifconfig

• CLI: Simple Guide To View Processes In Linux

• Linker symbol lookup order does not work the way you think

• LibreOffice Impress: Custom Default Template

• Ubuntu Linux install OpenSSH server

• Quirky Xerus 8.6 features latest DEBs from Ubuntu 16.04.x

  The independent Linux-based operating system, Quirky 8.6, a side project of Puppy Linux made with Woof, has just hit the market. According to an announcement by its creator, Barry Kauler, who retired from the Puppy Linux project to work on the Quirky Distro, the woofQ operating system is live for users to download and enjoy. The latest release mainly features bug fixes and minor improvements from previous Quirky OS 8.x versions.

  The release notes of Quirky’s Xerus version 8.6 explain that the update comes with a package upgrade to version 2.49.4 SeaMonkey and Kernel 4.14.63 with aufs patch. The new release is built with the latest DEBs from the Ubuntu 16.04.x range and features improvements for its EasyShare with specific improvements for Android connections. A Gxlat language translator has been introduced in this update and there are 10 architectural improvements and fixes as well. Several minor security bugs have also been patched since its predecessor.

• Snapcraft at Europython 2018

  In July, several members of our advocacy and design teams went to Europython 2018 in Edinburgh. It was a really well-organised event, mixing great speakers from a vibrant community at a great location.

  The main reason for us to get closer to the Python developer community was to promote Snapcraft as the best way to publish on Linux, for app developers in general, and for Python developers in particular. As well as increasing awareness of Snapcraft, we gained a deeper understanding of the needs of Python developers and made contact with interesting products and engineers.

• Cloud Native, Docker, K8s Summit

• Ubuntu 18.04.1 Bionic Beaver Has Been Released (Download Links)

• Wayland 1.16 / Weston 5.0 RC2 Released To Fix Vulnerabilities

  Two release candidates of Wayland 1.16 / Weston 5.0 were not originally scheduled, but it's been necessitated due to some pressing issues both with Wayland and its reference compositor.

  Samsung's Derek Foreman issued these "RC2" releases on Friday rather than going straight to the official Wayland 1.16 and Weston 5.0 releases. On the Wayland front, Michael Srb found and fixed issues that could cause pointer overflows within Wayland's connection code. These overflow fixes are the only changes in this Wayland 1.15.94 (RC2) version.

• RAGE & Doom Get Radeon Workarounds In Mesa 18.3-dev

  If you are looking to enjoy id Software's RAGE or Doom VFR games this weekend on Linux via Wine, they should be playing nicer with the latest open-source Mesa graphics driver code.

  Timothy Arceri at Valve has added a workaround to get RAGE working under Wine with RadeonSI. The workaround is a DRIRC configuration addition for allowing GLSL built-in variable redeclarations. This is enough to get RAGE working with RadeonSI on Mesa Git. Though only RadeonSI is working out currently since the game relies upon the OpenGL compatibility profile mode that is only supported currently by RadeonSI when it comes to the Mesa drivers. Thanks to Valve's developers and others, the OpenGL compatibility profile mode for RadeonSI has matured into great shape these past few months.

• Adreno 600 Series Support Lands In Mesa 18.3 Gallium3D

  With the Adreno 600 series support going into Linux 4.19 for the kernel bits, the user-space OpenGL driver support for the latest-generation Qualcomm graphics has now been merged into Mesa.

  Kristian Høgsberg Kristensen of Google's Chrome OS graphics team (yes, Kristian of Wayland and DRI2 fame) has been working on the Gallium3D support for the Adreno 600 series hardware along with Freedreno founder Rob Clark. This A6xx support is being tacked onto the existing Freedreno Gallium3D driver and amounts to just over six thousand lines of new code. Keep in mind this A6xx Freedreno back-end must also be used with the supported MSM DRM driver in the Linux 4.19+ kernel.

• AMDGPU-PRO 18.30 Radeon Linux Driver Released with Support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

  Featuring official support for the AMD Radeon PRO WX 8200 graphics cards and initial Wattman-like functionality, the Radeon Software for Linux 18.30 finally adds support for some of the most recent Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS Linux distributions.

  These include Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS (Bionic Beaver), Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.10, CentOS 7.5, and CentOS 6.10. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and Server (SLED/SLES) 12 Service Pack (SP) 3 is supported as well, but not the latest SUSE Linux Enterprise 15.

• AMDVLK Vulkan Driver Update Fixes Witcher 3 Issue, Bug Fixes

  In addition to AMD releasing AMDGPU-PRO 18.30 on Friday, they also did their usual weekly source push of their newest "AMDVLK" open-source Radeon Vulkan driver code.

• Linux 4.19 Staging Brings EROFS File-System & Gasket Driver Framework

  Following the USB subsystem updates, Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the kernel's staging area work for the Linux 4.19 merge window.

  This experimental/testing area of the Linux kernel is adding a new file-system with 4.19: EROFS. EROFS is developed by Huawei for possible Android device use-cases. EROFS stands for the Extendable Read-Only File-System and is developed to address shortcomings in other Linux read-only file-systems. EROFS features compression support and other features, but the on-disk layout format isn't 100% firm yet -- hence going into the staging area.

• USB Patches Posted For Linux 4.19 Kernel, Including The New USB-C DisplayPort Driver

  Having wrapped up his latest stable kernel wrangling and the fallout from L1TF/Foreshadow, Greg Kroah-Hartman got around today to sending out the feature pull requests for the kernel subsystems he oversees.

  His first new batch of changes for Linux 4.19 today is the USB subsystem work.

• One Week Past Linux 4.18.0, The Linux 4.18.3 Kernel Is Already Out

  Greg Kroah-Hartman had a fun Friday night issuing new point releases to the Linux 3.18 / 4.4 / 4.9 / 4.14 / 4.17 / 4.18 kernels only to have to issue new point releases minutes later.

  It was just on Thursday that Linux 4.18.1 was released along with updates to older stable branches for bringing L1TF / Foreshadow mitigation. Friday night then brought Linux 4.18.2, Linux 4.17.16, Linux 4.14.64, Linux 4.9.121, Linux 4.4.149, and Linux 3.18.119 with more patches. Those kernels brought various fixes, including in the x86 PTI code for clearing the global bit more aggressively, crypto fixes, and other maintenance work.

• 2018.08.18: Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.5 Released!

  The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the new TDE R14.0.5 release. TDE is a complete software desktop environment designed for Unix-like operating systems, intended for computer users preferring a traditional desktop model, and is free/libre software.

  R14.0.5 is the fifth maintenance release of the R14.0 series, and is built on and improves the previous R14.0.4 version. Maintenance releases are intended to promptly bring bug fixes to users, while preserving overall stability through the avoidance of both major new features and major codebase re-factoring.

• Trinity Desktop R14.0.5 Lets You Keep Enjoying The KDE 3 Experience In 2018

  For those that have fond memories of the K Desktop Environment 3, you can still enjoy a KDE3-derived experience in 2018 with the just-released Trinity Desktop R14.0.5.

  Trinity Desktop continues to see occasional updates as the fork of the KDE 3.5 packages. Trinity Desktop R14.0.5 is the new release this weekend and their first since R14.0.4 was released last November.