News highlights for January 16, 2018.

Set your calendars for January 23, 2018, to download the latest Firefox 58 release packed with performance/bottleneck and bug fixes, an even better site source code debugger and more.

The open-source Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) virtualization platform may see a new life as developer Olivier Lambert plans out its future. XCP is the free equivalent of XenServer (Citrix’s commercial distribution). Project goals and updates are now posted on its official GitHub repository.

The KDE project is offering users the opportunity to pilot the latest beta to its upcoming Plasma 5.12 LTS (Long-Term Support) release. Not only is it more stable than its predecessors, it is also optimized for speed (with improved start-up times, lower CPU and memory usage and so on). It also offers better integration with the Wayland display server. The official release date is February 6, 2018. You can find more feature and improvement details here.

Attention all Linux hackers and hobbyists: the Raspberry Pi Foundation just announced a new variant to its Zero W board. Dubbed the Zero WH, where the “H” stands for “header", the new design provides exactly that by coming with a soldered header over its GPIO pins. The RPi Zero W was a perfect solution for small configurations. Now that it ships with a header, there is less of a reason to pull out that good ol’ soldering iron. Prices will vary by distributor, but expect to pay between $15–$20 USD. More info is available here.

Yesterday, Ubuntu community member, Nathan Haines, announced wallpaper and preinstalled media contests in the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase for the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) release. Submissions must be made between January 15 and March 15, 2018. All artists are welcome. See his original post for details.