OpenSUSE: Tumbleweed and Marina Latini

January was a fruitful month for the openSUSE Tumbleweed developers, which managed to cram quite a bunch of updates in a handful of snapshots released through the main archives of the rolling operating system.
The biggest news, is, of course, the addition of the latest kernel series, Linux 4.20, which adds lots of goodies to OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, including support for the upcoming AMD Radeon Picasso and Raven 2 GPUs, stable support for AMD Radeon Pro Vega 20 GPUs, a new C-SKY CPU architecture, and support for Hygon Dhyana x86 CPUs.

Linux kernel 4.20 also adds stronger mitigations for the Spectre Variant 4 vulnerability on ARM64 (AArch64) CPUs, better Spectre Variant 2 userspace-userspace protection, a new "Early Departure Time" model for TCP, improvements to virtualized graphics, as well as numerous updated and new drivers for better hardware support.

Apart from the Linux 4.20 kernel, openSUSE Tumbleweed received all the latest KDE apps that are distributed as part of the recently released KDE Applications 18.12.1 and Frameworks 5.54.0 software suites, along with a minor update to GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 8 system compiler to include a backport of asm inline.

Hello, I’m Marina, and I was born in Italy, in a sunny July about 35 years ago. When I was a kid, I was always curious to discover how things are made, and my sister was always the victim of my curiosity. I broke a countless number of toys due to my need to know! Apart from some justified issues with her, this passion guided me to study computer science, and, in the same period, I finally discovered the FLOSS world.