LibreOffice 6.4 beta 1 is available

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One Last RC of Linux 5.4, New Features and Linux 5.5

• Linux 5.4-rc8

  I'm not entirely sure we need an rc8, because last week was pretty
  calm despite the Intel hw workarounds landing. So I considered just
  making a final 5.4 and be done with it, but decided that there's no
  real downside to just doing the rc8 after having a release cycle that
  took a while to calm down.
  
  But it *has* calmed down, and I expect the upcoming week to be quiet
  too (knock wood).
  
  In fact, considering that the week after that is Thanksgiving week in
  the US, I'm hoping that most of the pull requests I get next week
  aren't fixes for 5.4, but people sending me early pull requests for
  when the merge window for 5.5 opens. That way those proactive
  developers can then sit back and relax during that turkey-filled
  feast...
  
  Anyway, looking at the rc8 diffs, the bulk of it is for the intel hw
  issues, both on the CPU side (TSX Async Abort, and the iTLB multihit
  thing), and on the GPU side (GPU hang and invalid accesses). None of
  the patches are big, and honestly, shouldn't affect anybody.
  
  The other noticeable thing in the diffs is the removal of the vboxsf
  filesystem. It will get resubmitted properly later, there was nothing
  obviously wrong with it technically, it just ended up in the wrong
  location and submitted at the wrong time. We'll get it done properly
  probably during 5.5.
  
  Outside of those two areas, there's some kvm fixes, and some minor
  core networking, VM and VFS fixes. And various random small things.
  
  Nothing really looks all that worrisome from a release standpoint, and
  as mentioned I was toying with just skipping this rc entirely. But
  better safe than sorry.
  
  Please do go give the tires a final few kicks before the expected 5.4
  release next weekend.
  
  Thanks,
  
  Linus
  
  

• Linux 5.4-rc8 Released - Things Are Calm For Linux 5.4's Debut Next Week

  As expected, Linus Torvalds opted for doing a 5.4-rc8 kernel release today rather than going straight to Linux 5.4 stable. However, he says he could have just as well done the stable kernel release thanks to the cycle settling down. Linus decided to release Linux 5.4-rc8 and then ship Linux 5.4.0 next Sunday to allow for extra testing. But he wouldn't mind if kernel maintainers begin sending in their Linux 5.5 pull requests early especially since the week after next is the US Thanksgiving week.

• The Exciting Linux 5.4 Changes From exFAT Support To Intel Tiger Lake Graphics

  It's possible this afternoon Linus Torvalds will release Linux 5.4 stable but considering his communications in recent weeks and many changes still flowing in this week, it's more than likely he will divert and release Linux 5.4-rc8 today and then ship this next stable kernel update on the next Sunday.

• Linux 5.5 Should Bring Another Power Management Improvement For Intel Ice Lake

  The upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel cycle should bring an improvement for power management on Intel's latest-generation Ice Lake processors. With my Dell XPS 7390 Ice Lake Core i7 testing the power management has been quite good, but it looks like Linux 5.5 will be even better. On Saturday this commit was staged as part of USB testing code ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 merge window.

New challenges for Free Software business models

This year the FSFE community meeting was combined with the “South Tyrol Free Software Conference” (SFScon) in Bolzano. For me this was a special event because the first international FSFE community meeting ever happened as well at the SFScon in 2006. Back then I met many people from FSFE in person for the first time. For me this was the starting point for getting more and more involved in the Free Software Foundation Europe. At this years conference I gave a talk about the “New challenges for Free Software business models” at the FSFE track. A few weeks ago I published a article about this topic in the German Linux Magazine. As many of you may know, Free Software as such is not a business model but a license model which can be combined with many different business and development models.