Microsoft Solitaire has turned 30, and Microsoft is marking the occasion with a world-record breaking attempt for the most games played in a single day. Microsoft estimates that Solitaire is still being played by 35 million people a month, with 100 million games played daily.

Every day I Programmer has new material written by programmers, for programmers. This digest gives a summary of the latest content, which this week includes an exploration of Canvas in WebGL mode in JavaScript by Ian Elliot and a Programmer's Guide to Chaos from Mike James.

Windows and Linux are natural enemies, but they have been growing closer together recently. Build 2020 sees them join at the GUI. Could this be the year of the Linux desktop at long last? If it is, who would have predicted that it would be all because of Microsoft.

Java celebrates its 25th birthday on May 23rd 2020. It is a class-based, object-oriented, strongly-typed language known for its "write once run anywhere" philosophy. It is also regarded as the most widely used "professional programming" language with nine million Java developers worldwide in 2017, according to an estimate from Oracle.

The open-source raster graphics editor, GIMP, gets a big creative boost with brand new Machine Learning extensions dubbed GIMP-ML.

Microsoft has unexpectedly announced a new package manager for Windows. The announcement was made at Build 2020, Microsoft's conference for developers that's being held virtually this year.

BUILD is underway and it's not so much developers, developers developers as it used to be, but it is still of interest. Perhaps the most important announcement is project Reunion, an initiative that could repair the long-term damage to the Windows development environment and community.

A survey from Pluralsight into workplace skill development has revealed key disparities between the upskilling needs of employees and the approaches taken by employers.

Flutter 1.17 includes Metal support for faster iOS performance, new Material components, new Network tracking tooling and is full of fixes - with an unprecedented 6,339 issues closed since the previous stable release.

Swift 5.3 is nearing completion, and has been updated with the extension of official platform support to include Windows, along with additional Linux distributions.

Mozilla is calling for applications for three summer programs in its Mozilla Builders Incubator. It has $75,000 each for very early stage startups and $16,000 in funding for projects in its MVP Labs. The third opportunity, its Open Lab, is invite-only among the applicants to the other two and will award ten prizes of $10,000 to the teams that build the most impressive products.

There's a new release of GitHub Desktop with support for tags, meaning developers can create, push, and view tags directly from GitHub Desktop. GitHub Desktop gives developers a way to work with workflows in a desktop environment.

This year's SIGGRAPH is going to be very different for obvious reasons, but 2020 is still going to be a year with lots of new graphics ideas. The technical papers preview trailer is just out and it's unmissable.

If you've not visited the I Programmer webzine (web-based magazine) before, this Weekly Digest gives you a taster. It has links to the latest feature articles and to our wide ranging news with its mix of analysis and comment. It also lists the week's addition to Book Watch Archive and rounds out with the verdict from our Book Review of the Week.

Open source Python projects are invited to join the early access program for the ActiveState Platform.  The early access program is a prelude to offering free access to the Platform for all qualified open source projects.

There's a new release of CockroachDB with improvements for developing apps, along with performance and security enhancements. CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database that is cloud native and offers horizontal scalability with no single points of failure.

The recipient of this year's Knuth Prize is Cynthia Dwork, a computer scientist widely known for the introduction and development of differential privacy, and for her work on non-malleability, lattice-based encryption, concurrent composition, and proofs of work. 

The Linux Foundation has announced that it will host Project OWL’s IoT device firmware effort and is inviting developers worldwide to build mesh network nodes for global emergency communications networks.