Linux 5.12-rc8

Ok, so it's been _fairly_ calm this past week, but it hasn't been the
kind of dead calm I would have taken to mean "no rc8 necessary".

So here we are, with an extra rc to make sure things are all settled
down. It's not _that_ rare: this is the fifth time in the 5.x series
we've ended up with an rc8, but I have to admit that I prefer it when
a release doesn't end up needing that extra week.

Because let's keep it to just one extra week, ok? We have occasionally
done rc9's too, but I really don't expect that this time around.

About half of this is once more networking, with driver and bpf
verifier fixes standing out. Other than that it's mostly other driver
updates (gpu, dmaengine, HID, input, nvdimm) and arch updates (mainly
arm and arm64).

And a number of one-liner build fixes for unusual configurations.

So it's not tiny, but it's all small enough that you can easily scan
through the shortlog below and get a fair sense of what's going on.

Let's plan on a final 5.12 release next weekend - but please do give
it one last test to check that it is all solid. Ok?

                  Linus

9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: April 18th, 2021

This has been a very interesting week as we saw new releases of the LXQt desktop environment, Nuvola Player web-based music player for popular music streaming services, as well as the Escuelas Linux and EndeavourOS Linux distributions. In addition, the OpenMandriva team teased us with their upcoming OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 release and openSUSE Tumbleweed devs added the latest GNOME 40 desktop environment in their repos. Linux hardware vendors System76 and Star Labs also teased us with their upcoming COSMIC desktop environment for Pop!_OS Linux and the Coreboot Configurator tool, and the Metro Exodus FPS game arrived on Steam for Linux. Security-wise, there were new Linux kernel updates for all supported Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 releases, as well as for CentOS Linux 7.

Tales of the KDE Network Kerala

Kerala is a fertile ground for Free/Libre Software. If you want to know a more detailed history, please see the article by Sasi Kumar. Though KDE couldn’t get the momentum it deserves there. Yet, various KDE products are well integrated into the curriculum of public schools, such as GCompris, Kpaint, Kstars etc. Apart from those, Kdenlive is used as a tool in the creative works of school children, Krita is getting famous in universities and Plasma desktop is used by a daily newspaper. Our strategy to reach out to more users and spread the community is through the already famous applications. But we felt that we are not equipped enough to reach out to more people. So in the first half of the year 2021, we decided to fix that. We are making Plasma workspace localization as good and complete as we can. And we decided to do GCompris and Krita tutorials in Malayalam. But our work is not restricted to it. We didn’t miss any occasion where we can talk and spread the news about KDE and its products.