News briefs for May 29, 2018.

Emacs 26.1 was released yesterday. New features include limited form of concurrency with Lisp threads, support for optional display of line numbers in the buffer, use of double buffering to reduce flicker on the X Window System, redesign of Flymake, support for 24-bit colors on text terminals and lots more.

Linus Torvalds had these remarks over the weekend on Linux 4.17-rc7: "This week we had the whole 'spectre v4' thing, and yes, the fallout from that shows up as part of the patch and commit log. But it's not actually dominant: the patch is pretty evenly one third arch updates, one third networking updates, and one third "rest". He also mentioned "The bulk of it is really pretty trivial one-liners, and nothing looks particularly scary. Let's see how next week looks, but if nothing really happens I suspect we can make do without an rc8."

The GNOME Foundation recently received a pledge for $1,000,000 over the next two years from an anonymous donor. The Foundation plans to use the funds "to increase staff to streamline operations and to grow its support of the GNOME Project and the surrounding ecosystem."

KDE Connect Development Sprint took place last week, and the developers worked on the ability to send SMS from the desktop, making the Run Commands interface more discoverable, improving the functionality of multimedia controls ("now it's possible to display album art from your desktop on your Android devices") and more.

A new desktop environment option has arrived. The Jade Desktop is built on Python, HTML5, CSS and JavaScript and uses GTK with WebKit2, Phoronix reports. For more info, see Sparky Linux, which is offering the new desktop to its users.

The Korora Project and BackSlash Linux are ceasing development due to time constraints and financial issues, respectively, It's FOSS reports. The Korora project is taking a sabbatical (the developers aren't saying how long that will be), and the BackSlash Linux distro is asking for donations to help get started again.