GNOME 40 Alpha Released for Public Testing with New Activities Overview Design

After about four months since it entered development, the upcoming GNOME 40 desktop environment series, due for release at the end of March 2021, now has an initial development release that anyone can test it to get an early taste of the new features and improvements. The biggest new feature in GNOME 40 looks to be a reimagined Activities Overview that promises better overview spatial organization, improved touchpad navigation, more engaging app browsing and launching, as well as better boot performance.

Graphics: GPUOpen, Vulkan, and NVIDIA

• AMD Celebrates Five Years Of GPUOpen

  Today marks five years since AMD began the GPUOpen initiative for providing more open-source Radeon GPU code projects, code samples, and more for better engaging GPU/game developers in the open. As any longtime Phoronix reader will know, AMD's open-source Linux driver initiative is going on for more than a decade while the celebration today is just over their GPUOpen initiative turning five years old. The three principles that continue to guide GPUOpen are providing code and documentation to PC developers to exert more control on the GPU, a commitment to open-source software, and a collaborative engagement with the developer community.

• Vulkan 1.2.168 Released With Two New Extensions

  Today's Vulkan 1.2.168 specification update brings the usual specification corrections/clarifications while also introducing two new KHR extensions.

• VKD3D-Proton Begins Working On DirectX 12 Ray-Tracing Atop Vulkan

  Those working on VKD3D-Proton as the Direct3D 12 implementation atop the Vulkan API are beginning to work on DirectX Ray-Tracing support but it isn't yet ready for gamers. Hans-Kristian Arntzen has opened the initial pull request for enabling ray-tracing extensions with VKD3D-Proton.

• NVIDIA release the Vulkan Beta Driver 455.50.03, new extensions supported

  Need to be on the bleeding edge of what NVIDIA have to offer? They just released driver version 455.50.03, as part of their Vulkan Beta Driver series. This is actually the second driver released this month, with 455.50.02 appearing on January 19. Here's a look over all that's new in them together.

Security Leftovers

• Security updates for Monday

  Security updates have been issued by Debian (crmsh, debian-security-support, flatpak, gst-plugins-bad1.0, openvswitch, python-bottle, salt, tomcat9, and vlc), Fedora (chromium, python-pillow, sddm, and xen), Gentoo (chromium, dnsmasq, flatpak, glibc, kdeconnect, openjdk, python, thunderbird, virtualbox, and wireshark), Mageia (blosc, crmsh, glibc, perl-DBI, php-oojs-oojs-ui, python-pip, python-urllib3, and undertow), openSUSE (gdk-pixbuf, hawk2, ImageMagick, opera, python-autobahn, viewvc, wavpack, and xstream), Red Hat (dnsmasq), Slackware (seamonkey), SUSE (hawk2, ImageMagick, mutt, permissions, and stunnel), and Ubuntu (pound).

• Apache Software Foundation Security Report: 2020

  Synopsis: This report explores the state of security across all Apache Software Foundation projects for the calendar year 2020. We review key metrics, specific vulnerabilities, and the most common ways users of ASF projects were affected by security issues.

• Apache Software Foundation Saw Assigned CVEs Up 24%, Security Issues Up 53% For 2020

  The Apache Software Foundation that oversees 340+ Apache projects saw a measurable rise in security related issues during the course of 2020.

• This new botnet is targeting Linux servers running enterprise apps [Ed: TechRadar foolishly perpetuating ZDNet garbage]