News briefs for November 20, 2018.

Mitigation for Spectre variant 2 is causing significant slowdowns in the new 4.20 kernel, and Linus Torvalds posted to the LKML, "When performance goes down by 50 percent on some loads, people need to start asking themselves whether it was worth it. It's apparently better to just disable SMT entirely, which is what security-conscious people do anyway". See Phoronix, which originally posted the benchmarks showing the slowdown, and this ZDNet article for more info on this issue.

Feral Interactive announced this morning that Shadow of the Tomb Raider is coming to Linux in 2019. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the conclusion of Laura Croft's origin story; the previous two installments are available for Linux now from Feral Interactive. You can view the Shadow of the Tomb Raider trailer here.

Kdenlive is holding a bug-squashing day on December 2, 2018 in preparation for an April 2019 major release. A list of proposed bugs to solve is available here. Contact Kdenlive via IRC: #kdenlive on Freenode.

Guillaume Debray has launched a Kickstarter campaign for a Diskio Pi, "the Ultimate Open Source Tablet". Diskio Pi is a kit tablet that you assemble with your nano computer of choice. According to the project description, it's an "ideal open solution" to use as an extra computer, a learning code machine, a media center, for home automation or for your vehicle.

Android Central reports on which phones will receive Android Pie. Android Pie is slated to come to the Asus ZenFone 5 series in early 2019, and in some markets, the Motorola One and One Power already have received it. See the post on Android Central for the full roundup.