News briefs for January 7, 2019.

Linux 5.0-rc1 was released yesterday. Linus Torvalds wrote: "The numbering change is not indicative of anything special. If you want to have an official reason, it's that I ran out of fingers and toes to count on, so 4.21 became 5.0. There's no nice git object numerology this time (we're _about_ 6.5M objects in the git repo), and there isn't any major particular feature that made for the release numbering either. Of course, depending on your particular interests, some people might well find a feature _they_ like so much that they think it can do as a reason for incrementing the major number. So go wild. Make up your own reason for why it's 5.0."

MIT recently released Scratch 3, the latest version of its visual programming language. The Raspberry Pi blog announced it has upgraded to make this a smooth transition for those who use its free project resources, "whether that be at a Code Club, CoderDojo, Raspberry Jam, or at home, so we've been busy upgrading our resources to work with Scratch 3". In addition, "Scratch 3 versions of all projects in the Code Club Scratch Modules 1–3 and the CoderDojo Scratch Sushi Cards are already live!" See the post for more details related to Scratch 3 on RPi.

Phoronix Test Suite 8.6-Spydeberg Milestone 1 is out. This is the first development snapshot for the "open-source, cross-platform benchmarking software release due out later in Q1". New features for the Phoronix Test Suite include updates for Microsoft Windows Server 2019 (and it'll be a fully supported platform as well), a new "new phoronix-test-suite compare-results-to-baseline sub-command for comparing two result files with treating the first argument as the performance baseline and providing various statistics off that", a "new ShowPostRunStatistics user configuration" and more. You can get the first development snapshot of Phoronix Test Suite 8.6 at GitHub.

Elteria Adventures is "an open-world RPG MMO with world-building features and it's coming to Linux". GamingOnLinux reports that the developer confirmed it will run on Linux, simply saying ""Yes it will. Also on Mac :)" Evidently the Steam page doesn't give many details on what the game will be like, but GamingOnLinux says "it sounds a bit like Minecraft mixed with an RPG and it has a bunch of platforming as the world is built across many floating islands".

The Chromium web browser in Fedora now has Video Acceleration API (VAAPI) support, making "video playback much smoother while using significantly less resources". Fedora is now the second distribution to include the VAAPI patch in its official Chromium package. See the Fedora Magazine post for more info.