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.