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All going well, the stable release should appear sometime in August.
Introducing the release candidate, Torvalds said it was "right up there with v4.9, which has long been our biggest release by quite a bit in number of commits." That said, the 4.9 kernel was "artificially big" because of a couple of special factors, whereas 5.8 is a "more comprehensive release."
Torvalds said: "The development is really all over the place: there's tons of fairly fundamental core work and cleanups, but there is also lots of filesystem work and obviously all the usual driver updates too. Plus documentation and architecture work." He added: "We have modified about 20 per cent of all the files in the kernel source repository. That's really a fairly big percentage, and while some of it _is_ scripted, on the whole it's really just the same pattern: 5.8 has simply seen a lot of development."
While the code for the kernel is large, only a small part of it ends up in any individual system, since the kernel source contains code for every chip architecture and hardware it supports. In early 2018, maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman said that "an average laptop uses around 2 million lines of kernel from 5,000 files to function properly." At the time, there were 25 million lines of code in the kernel, whereas now there are over 28 million.
See also: Linux 5.8 Kernel Features Include New Intel/AMD Capabilities, Security Improvements, Optimizations.
(Score: 2) by FunkyLich on Tuesday June 16 2020, @08:20PM
I am also Linux only when at home, now for some good 6 years. At work I use Windows, but that is because the laptop that was given to me is a Win10 and the documents that people generate are of the MS Office kind. Apart from opening natively the .docx and .xlsx files that come sometimes in email attachment, there is also a Debian VM in which I spend most of the time working, but also to do most anything else that is not dealing with the mentioned above files.
I don't really stress much whether is this the year that the call the Linux Desktop Year, or not. But I do know that such a thing has existed on my computer for some 10 years now. And also on my parent's computer for the last 4 years. They use that computer for mostly browsing around, reading emails, generating simple documents for their own use through OpenOffice and printing them if needed.