News briefs for March 18, 2019.

Khronos today released the OpenXR 0.90 provision specification. From the press release: "OpenXR is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides high-performance access to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)—collectively known as XR—platforms and devices. The new specification can be found on the Khronos website and is released in provisional form to enable developers and implementers to provide feedback at the OpenXR forum." And following the release of the OpenXR 0.09 provision specification, Collabora announced Monado: "at the center of Monado is a fully open source OpenXR runtime for Linux. It is the component in the XR software stack that implements the hardware support, it knows how to process non standard input from HMD devices and controllers, it knows how to render to those devices and it provides this functionality via the standard OpenXR API."

Solus 4 Fortitude is now available. This new major release "delivers a brand new Budgie experience, updated sets of default applications and theming, and hardware enablement". Visit the download page to install.

Geary 3.32 was released yesterday. This is a feature release of the GNOME email application and aims to "align Geary's interface better with GNOME 3.32". It has "a new icon, the application menu has been moved to a burger menu in the main window, sender images in conversations are now taken from the the desktop address-book, and those without a custom photo are given a personalised image with initials and background colour based on their name", along with the usual bug fixes and other improvements. To install, visit here.

Linux kernel 5.1-rc1 is out. Linus Torvalds writes, "The merge window felt fairly normal to me. And looking at the stats, nothing really odd stands out either. It's a regular sized release (which obviously means "big" - , but it's not bigger than usual) and the bulk of it (just over 60%) is drivers. All kinds of drivers, the one that stands out for being different is the habanalabs AI accelerator chip driver, but I suspect we'll be starting to see more of that kind of stuff. But there are all the usual suspects too - gpu, networking, block devices etc etc."

Opera recently announced that Opera 60 has entered the beta stream. "Opera 60 beta brings a refreshed interface with light and dark themes inspired by high- and low-key lighting photography, respectively. It will also include a Crypto Wallet in the sidebar." This version is actually merging with Opera 59, and the two versions are being called Reborn 3, which will be in the stable channel soon. See the Opera 60 changelog for more details on the changes.