Linus Announces Linux 4.16 rc, KDE's New Slimbook II, Damn Cool Editor Project and More

News briefs for February 12, 2018.

Linus Torvalds announced yesterday that Linux 4.16 rc1 is "out there", the merge window has closed and things "look a lot better than with 4.15". He went on to describe some changes: "Drivers may be the bulk (GPU, networking, staging, media, sound, infiniband, scsi and misc smaller subsystems), but we have a fair amount of arch updates (spectre and meltdown fixes for non-x86 architectures, but also some further x86 work, and just general arch updates). And there's networking, filesystem updates, documentation, tooling....There's a little bit for everybody, in other words."

KDE announced its new Slimbook last week. The new Slimbook II "comes with a choice between an Intel i5: 2.5 GHz Turbo Boost 3.1 GHz - 3M Cache CPU, or an Intel i7: 2.7 GHz Turbo Boost 3.5 GHz with a 4M Cache. This makes the KDE Slimbook II 15% faster on average than its predecessor. The RAM has also been upgraded, and the KDE Slimbook now sports 4, 8, or 16 GBs of DDR4 RAM which is 33% faster than the DDR3 RAM installed on last year's model." The full list of specs is available here.

Damn Cool Editor project announced version 0.13 last week: "It's a cool combination of an old fashioned tool and clever stuff for advanced users thinking that modern IDEs are just bloated toys with far too little focus on the main thing: your code."

Scheduled for November 13–14, 2018, the Linux Plumbers Conference (in Vancouver) is already asking for networking-related proposals. More info is available here.

Note that SourceForge and Slashdot are switching over to a new data center this week (February 12–15) for a hardware refresh, and although they don't anticipate issues, they want the community to be aware just in case.

Thanks to Petros Koutoupis for his contribution to this article.

Jill Franklin is an editorial professional with more than 17 years experience in technical and scientific publishing, both print and digital. As Executive Editor of Linux Journal, she wrangles writers, develops content, manages projects, meets deadlines and makes sentences sparkle. She also was Managing Editor for TUX and Embedded Linux Journal, and the book Linux in the Workplace. Before entering the Linux and open-source realm, she was Managing Editor of several scientific and scholarly journals, including Veterinary Pathology, The Journal of Mammalogy, Toxicologic Pathology and The Journal of Scientific Exploration. In a previous life, she taught English literature and composition, managed a bookstore and tended bar. When she’s not bugging writers about deadlines or editing copy, she throws pots, gardens and reads.

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