News briefs for June 30, 2018.
Dell's XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS preinstalled is now available. According to Canonical's blog post[1], this launch marks the "the first availability of Ubuntu's latest LTS on a major OEM's hardware since its release in April. Canonical and Dell have worked together to certify Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on the XPS 13 to ensure a seamless experience from first use." You can purchase one in the US via Dell.com[2], and they will be available in Europe in early August.
The GCC conversion from Subversion to Git is not going well, and the problem is more complex than Eric S. Raymond needing more RAM as he originally thought. According to the story on Phoronix[3] regarding the conversion, Raymond said, "that light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be an oncoming train." He went on to say "The GCC repo is just too large and weird...My tools need to get a lot faster, like more than an order of magnitude faster, before digging out of the bad situation the conversion is now in will be practical. Hardware improvements won't do that. Nobody knows how to build a machine that can crank a single process enough faster than 1.3GHz. And the problem doesn't parallelize."
The Lubuntu Linux distro is shifting from being an OS for older PCs to a modular and modern one. Softpedia News[4] quotes Lubuntu developer Simon Quigley as saying "We decided that going forward, we need to adapt for the current state of the market." He also stated that Lubuntu would be a "functional yet modular distribution focused on getting out of the way and letting users use their computer".
The OpenMW team announces the release of version 0.44.0[5] of the "free, open source and modern" Morrowind engine.