The Framework Laptop 16,available for preorder todaystarting at $1,699 prebuilt, is one of themost exciting notebookswe've ever seen. When it ships in Q4, the modular computer company's first gaming laptop will let you swap practically every component - not just memory and storage, but each and every individual port, the motherboard, the battery, the speakers, you name it. Framework seems to be making it, despite the ridicule. There's more and more companies taking repairability seriously, and the EU, too, is flexing its legal muscle in this area. We're getting there. Slowly.
The biggest changes last month were a series of commits by waddlesplash, all related to theuser_mutexAPI and the consumers of it. This API is the kernel portion of the implementation of basically anything related to mutexes or locks in userland, includingpthread_mutex,pthread_cond,pthread_barrier, unnamed semaphores (viasem_open), rwlocks, and more. It bears some resemblance in concept to Linux'sfutexAPI, but is very different in both design and implementation. This month's activity report contains a detailed description of what these commits actually entail, but as OSNews regulars will know, I'm not at all qualified to tell you what it all means. Other changes this month that my limited brain can actually comprehend are work done to make Haiku partially buildable using gcc 13, more RISC-V and ARM improvements, and a whole lot more.
There's a specter looming over the realm of Mastodon, and it's the ghost of computing's past. A loose group of retro computing hobbyists have taken it upon themselves to build Mastodon clients for various operating systems. Developing web clients using the technology of the 80's and 90's is a challenge, but the following projects have proven that their devs are up to the task! Should we find ourselves in the unlikely scenario where an apocalypse happens, people can still post to Mastodon using retro PCs. This is an impressive list, and demonstrates the skill and dedication you can find in the retrocomputing community.
Android 14 introduces a number ofnew features for app stores, including an update ownership" API that lets an app store claim ownership over an app it installs. If any other app store tries to push an update to that app, Android will throw up a dialog asking you what they want to do. The dialog asks you if you want to update this app from " since this app normally receives updates from " and warns that by updating from a different source, you may receive future updates from any source on your phone." You can choose to cancel or update anyway, which is good since it means one app store can't lock you out of getting app updates from somewhere else. When taken in isolation, I think this dialog is a good addition to Android - I personally see no issues with informing users of the very valid risk that come with installing applications from outside the Play Store, especially ones coming from random websites (and not from APKMirror or F-droid or similar, more well-known sources). There are real risks associated with doing so, and it's a good idea to warn people of this in the highly unlikely event they both accidentally download a random APK and open it to install it. However, the when' clause is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Google has been slowly locking Android down for years now, and it's not unreasonable to assume that this is simply yet another stop along the way in that process. I don't think Google will ever fully remove sideloading from Android, but they sure will do whatever they can to make it as hard, cumbersome, annoying, and frustrating as possible.
The availability of support for various apps and drivers (for various hardware and software) is crucial for the general adoption of anygeneral purpose operating systemlike Redox OS. Some of us developers are working on improving thecoreof Redox OS (like the Kernel), which should create a solid base on which high quality native drivers and apps can be created with ease. Some others are working on porting (and adapting) various open source drivers and apps (written for other OSes) such that they can work with Redox OS. This work is super important and helps Redox OS progress forward. But in the meanwhile, there's apotential shortcut to enablingwide driver and app supportfor Redox OS, without having to manually port and adapt drivers to Redox OS. (which can be helpful, both today and in the future). The shortcut, in simple words, is to use our Host machine running Redox OS, to run a Virtual Machine with another OS (Linux/Windows) as the guest, and thencleverly use the drivers and apps that can run on that guest OS to help coverup the missing drivers and apps on Redox OS. This is not a novel solution, but it is quite clever and ingenious. I'm wondering how this would impact performance, and if stability suffers from going through several layers like this. There'll be a more detailed post with technical details of the implementation later on, so keep an eye out for that one.
A year ago, wecompiled a model list of Macs spanning over two decades, complete with their launch dates, discontinuation dates, and all the available information about the macOS updates each model received. We were trying to answer two questions: How long can Mac owners reasonably expect to receive software updates when they buy a new computer? And were Intel Macs being dropped more aggressively now that the Apple Silicon transition was in full swing? The answer to the second question was a tentative yes," and now that we know the official support list for macOS Sonoma, the trendline is clear. The only thing this article makes clear is that if Apple truly cared about its customers, it would post exactly how much longer each Mac is planned to be supported.
Collapse OS (which we talked about 4 years ago) has a successor. Dusk OS is a 32-bit Forth and big brother toCollapse OS. Itsprimary purposeis to be maximally useful during thefirst stage of civilizational collapse, that is, when we can't produce modern computers anymore but that there's still many modern computers still around.
We talked about Chimera Linux before - it's a unique coupling of the Linux kernel with a FreeBSD userland, musl, the package manager from Alpine Linux, and dinit. The project recently entered the alpha stage, and while not ready for everyday use, Wesley Moore still decided to try and give it a go. So far my experience has actually been better than I expected. Since I installed it I have not rebooted back into Arch. This isn'tthe first time I've run a desktop musl systemand I was prepared to encounter incompatible software more often than I did. Flatpak really helps fill the gaps there. As the alpha announcement suggested, I have run into the odd bug here and there but for the most part the system is remarkably polished and stable. I plan to keep using it as the primary OS on my laptop, including itsFramework 13 AMDreplacement that should arrive Q4 2023. That's good news. Chimera is one of the more interesting operating system projects out there, and it's headed by the same person who used to run the Void Linux for POWER hardware project, so there's some real pedigree here.
As a former BeOS user and fan(atic), I consider myself quite knowledgeable on the subject, but as I was watching the latest Micheal MJD video about BeOS, I learned something new I had never heard of before. It's common knowledge that Be actively tried to court x86 OEMs to bundle BeOS alongside Windows in a dual-boot configuration. However, these efforts fell apart as soon as Microsoft caught wind of it and Redmond sent representatives to these OEMs to, shall we say, politely discourage them from doing so. I thought this is where this story ended - the OEMs ghosted Be, and no PC with BeOS preinstalled ever shipped. But in his video, Micheal MJD mentions that at least one OEM did actually ship BeOS preinstalled alongside Windows - Hitachi. However, while the company technically shipped BeOS, it still wanted to appease Microsoft's goons representatives, and so Hitachi just... Disabled the special boot loader that would've allowed users to pick BeOS at boot. BeOS was technically installed and took up a part of the hard drive of every one of these machines shipped, but unless you followed a set of detailed instructions posted by Be online, using a BeOS boot floppy, you wouldn't be able to actually boot into BeOS. Trying to find more information about this, I ended up at the article archive of Scot Hacker, author of, among other things, The BeOS Bible. In 2001, Hacker wrote the post He who controls the boot loader, in response to the news that Be had been acquired by Palm: In the 1998-1999 timeframe, ready to prime the pump with their desktop offering, Be offered BeOSfor freeto any major computer manufacturer willing to pre-install BeOS on machines alongside Windows. Although few in the Be community ever knew about the discussions, Gassee says that Be was engaged in enthusiastic discussions with Dell, Compaq, Micron, and Hitachi. Taken together, pre-installation arrangements with vendors of this magnitude could have had a major impact on the future of Be and BeOS. But of the four, only Hitachi actually shipped a machine with BeOS pre-installed. The rest apparently backed off after a closer reading of the fine print in their Microsoft Windows License agreements. Hitachi did ship a line of machines (the Flora Prius) with BeOS pre-installed, but made changes to the bootloader - rendering BeOS invisible to the consumer - before shipping. Apparently, Hitachi received a little visit from Microsoft just before shipping the Flora Prius, and were reminded of the terms of the license. Be was forced to postdetailed instructions on their web site explaining to customers how tounhidetheir hidden BeOS partitions. It is likely that most Flora Prius owners never even saw the BeOS installations to which they were entitled. So clearly, this information has been out there since at least 2001 - I had just never heard of it. There's countless references to Hacker's article out there as well, so it's not like it's some deeply hidden secret nobody was aware of. I, of course, dove into our own archives and... For the love of KDL, we even linked to Hacker's article. I wasn't working for OSNews at the time - this was about 4-5 years before I came on as Managing Editor - but I find it highly entertaining this was already part of OSNews lore. In any event, I'm wondering if this makes Hitachi the only OEM to have ever shipped a computer with BeOS preinstalled. Several Mac clone makers put a BeOS installation CD in the box of their machines, but I don't think any of them ever shipped machines with BeOS preinstalled. Even if they did, Hitachi would still be the only x86 OEM to have ever shipped BeOS preinstalled, and that, too, is incredibly noteworthy. Of course, I now have to try and find a working example of this Hitachi Flora Prius computer line. They were apparently only sold in Japan, so the odds of finding one anywhere seem slim, at best. It doesn't help that most people who bought one of these had no idea BeOS was installed or what BeOS even was, so the historical significance was lost on them. I also think these weren't particularly noteworthy computers otherwise - most likely one of the many dime-a-dozen beige boxes sold all over the world. Searches on eBay and Japanese auction sites yield no results. We really need to find a working example of a Hitachi Flora Prius with BeOS preinstalled. We need to image its hard drive for posterity on Archive.org, and I want to see it running - either on YouTube or in real life, I don't care. This is a piece of computing history that needs to be preserved.
As you may have noticed, I used the wordcopyrightedfor the title of this story. And it's not without reason. I think this story could have been fairly decent even without the copyright part, so before we get to the nitty gritty stuff - I can 100% confirm that Brave lets you ingest copyrighted material through theirBrave Search API, to which they also assign you rights". Time and time again, Brave gets caught doing slimy things. Just don't use Brave. There are far, far better and more ethical alternatives.
This is a list of software and ideas developed or maintained by the OpenBSD project, sorted in order of approximate introduction. Some of them are explained in detail in our research papers. That's an impressive list.
As some of us learned in the last week, it's easy to uninstall a troublesome Rapid Security Response (RSR). Several naturally asked why that isn't possible with a macOS update, pointing out that it was available and worryingly popular between High Sierra and Catalina 10.15.2, since when the ability has been lost. The answer is as straightforward as you'd expect: the updates themselves, as well as the update process, have become more complicated than they used to be, and rollback would be difficult to implement. As such, the advice for those unhappy with a new macOS version is as simple as it is disruptive: For those who decide that they want to roll back a macOS update on an Apple silicon Mac, by far the simplest procedure is to back the Mac up fully, put it into DFU mode, use Configurator 2 to restore the IPSW image for the previous version of macOS including its firmware, then to migrate the backup to that fresh boot disk. That also caters for all problems that may have arisen with the update. Apple always moves forwards, never backwards - even when you might want to.
Onyx Boox has just done something exciting; they have taken a page from the Hisense playbook and released a dedicated e-reader with the familiar candy bar shape as a smartphone, except it is a dedicated e-reader. You can do phone calls with this unit and talk to people on Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp or WeChat with dual microphones. However, it does not support SIM cards or eSim, and you must be on a WIFI connection to do anything useful. The most significant advantage of the Onyx Boox Palma is carrying an e-reader around with you in your pocket; you can't do this with the vast majority of e-readers on the market. The Palma is available as apre-orderfor $249; when it launches, the price will go up to $279.99.Only a small batch of units are available as a first come, first serve basis and will ship out sometime in August 2023. I don't really have a use for something like this, but the price is interesting, and if it can indeed do smooth scrolling as they claim, I might actually be interested out of sheer curiosity. It's kind of like if Apple released an iPod Touch, but with an e-ink display.
Microsoftended Windows Server 2003's Mainstream Support on July 13, 2010, and Extended Support on July 14, 2015. This means it would no longer provide security updates, technical support, or software updates for this server-based operating system. Windows Server 2003 is probably my favourite Windows release. I never liked Windows XP, and Server 2003, with its updated codebase and various fixes compared to XP, provided a more solid alternative at the time. There was this whole cottage industry of people aiding each other in converting Windows Server 2003 into a more desktop-friendly operating system through reactivating services, installing additional components, applying registry changes, and so on. It was a bit of work post-install, but once done, you had a more stable, more solid, and safer version" of Windows XP. At least, that was the theory. I have no idea if this was actually true, or if a fully updated Windows XP installation was, in fact, functionally equivalent and that Server 2003 provided zero material benefit.
In case you missed it,Red Hat announcedthey will no longer be providing the means for downstream clones to continue to be 1:1 binary copies of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Very quickly, bothJackandI sharedsome initial thoughts, but we intentionally took our time deciding the next right step for AlmaLinux OS. After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible. For a typical user, this will mean very little change in your use of AlmaLinux. Red Hat-compatible applications will still be able to run on AlmaLinux OS, and your installs of AlmaLinux will continue to receive timely security updates. The most remarkable potential impact of the change is that we will no longer be held to the line of bug-for-bug compatibility" with Red Hat, and that means that we can now accept bug fixes outside of Red Hat's release cycle. While that means some AlmaLinux OS users may encounter bugs that are not in Red Hat, we may also accept patches for bugs that have not yet been accepted upstream, or shipped downstream. I wonder just how much consumers care about the strict 1:1 with RHEL. With this change to AlmaLinux, we're about to find out.
Today we begin the final phase of this major change where Aptos will start appearing as the new default font across Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel for hundreds of millions of users. And, over the next few months it will roll out to be the default for all our customers. We can't wait for Aptos to be readily available since it was crafted to embody the many aspects of the human experience. A new default font for Microsoft Office is a huge deal. It doesn't sound like it should be, but it really is - over the coming years, millions and documents changing hands within and between companies, organisations, individuals, and more will be typeset in this new font, and you'll come to see it everywhere. And hate it. It's the natural order of things.
Beyond the dazzling sea of licensed fireworks and thunderclouds lies a cosmic array of ancient stars. It's within our gaze upon these stars where we find the inspiration for COSMIC DE, our new desktop environment created for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros. Let's get into the updates! COSMIC DE is System76's in-progress Rust-based desktop environment. System76 has done some neat tricks while resizing windows in tiled mode, they're splitting up the notifications subsystems into separate threads, they added fractional scaling, and more.
A few weeks ago we reported that the European Union wanted to force device makers to make batteries user-replaceable, and today it's been confirmed and made official. The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should beremovable and replaceableby the end-user, leaving sufficient time for operators to adapt the design of their products to this requirement. This is an important provision for consumers. Light means of transport batteries will need to be replaceable by an independent professional. Excellent.
Today, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has added 802.11bb as a standard for light-based wireless communications. The publishing of the standard has beenwelcomedby global Li-Fi businesses, as it will help speed the rollout and adoption of the data-transmission technology standard. Where Li-Fi shines (pun intended) is not just in its purported speedsas fast as 224 GB/s. Fraunhofer's Dominic Schulz points out that as it works in an exclusive optical spectrum, this ensures higher reliability and lower latency and jitter. Moreover Light's line-of-sight propagation enhances security by preventing wall penetration, reducing jamming and eavesdropping risks, and enabling centimetre-precision indoor navigation," says Shultz. The technology can work using regular lighting points, but you won't see any flicker or strobing, since it uses infrared. I honestly like the idea of every light fixture in your house being a network access point, but I'm also getting flashbacks to using IrDA to sync PDAs to PCs, and what would happen if you obstructed the line of sight.
Are you an Android developer with applications on the Play Store? Well, you might want to know that Google is about to publish your phone number on the Play Store for everyone to see. We're renaming the Contact details" section on your app's store listing to App support" and adding a new About the developer" section to help users learn more about you. This may show verified identity information like name, address, and contact details. Google is doing this in an attempt to build user trust", but to me it seems rife for abuse. Does this really mean every small indie developer is going to have their personal phone number published for all to see? I also wonder what's going to be displayed under Google's own applications - it's notoriously difficult to get anyone at Google on the phone, so will they be excluded from this new policy? Will they be allowed to link to a recording?
The general trend of macOS releases over the past few years is that it has been moving closer and closer to the look and feel of iOS. The icons have become iOS icons, and their shape has become the iOS shape, and you can now use your iPhone as the Mac's webcam, etc. etc. This occasionally comes at the expense of other functionality (ask me how I feel about the new Settings menu), but it is the direction that Apple has clearly been heading in since (arguably) Big Sur. Every so often, other splashy features are announced (Stage Manager, Universal Control, Quick Notes) that I write a lot about and then never end up using ever again. So, good news for Continuity fans: that's basically what's going on with Sonoma. Ventura looked a heck of a lot like iOS, and Sonoma looks even more like iOS. I turned my office's Mac Studio on after installing the developer beta and thought, for a second, that I might be hallucinating my iPhone's lockscreen. It's remarkably reminiscent. It's crazy how Microsoft always seems to be doing things about 10 years before everyone else catches on, for better or worse. I'm not a fan of the iOS look, and it looks whacky and childish to me when ported to the Mac - especially since macOS has also become almost Windows-like by having so many application frameworks, some from iOS, some from macOS, and some a weird combination of the two. It's making macOS far messier and more inconsistent than it used to be, leaving the Linux desktop as the last bastion of people who value a dekstop-first, consistent interface. If you told me this 10-15 years ago, I'd have called you crazy, but we're now living in a world where a GTK or QT desktop is far more consistent and focused on the desktop than Windows and macOS, which both feel lost in the woods at the moment.
Speaking of beta programs and doing it right - here's how things are going at the other end of the spectrum. Today we're bringing you Android 14 Beta 4, continuing our work on polish and performance as we get closer to the general availability release of Android 14. Beta 4 is available for Pixel Tablet and Pixel Fold, in addition to the rest of the supported Pixel family, so you can test your applications on devices spanning multiple form factors and directly experience the work we're doing to improve the large-screen and foldable device experience. The fact Android betas are only available on an incredibly small subset of Android devices stands in such stark contrast to how Apple does their program. Of course, we all know why that's the case, but that doesn't mean Google gets a pass. I have an Android device running Android 13. I should be able to install Android 14 betas. End of story. Rant aside, how far along the development process for Android 14 are we? Beta 4 is our secondPlatform StableAndroid 14 release, which means that the developer APIs and all app-facing behaviors are final for you to review and integrate into your apps, and you can publish apps on Google Play to devices running Android 14 at the official API level. That indicates we're relatively close to release, meaning most Android users can expect to upgrade somewhere halfway 2024, or when they buy a new device, or not at all.
Apple is officially releasing the first public betas of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10, and macOS 14 Sonoma today, a little over a month after releasing the first developer betas at its Worldwide Developers Conference. I have to say, Apple is doing a great job with their public beta access. It's easy enough that it's accessible, but not so easy you've got millions of people running unstable software. Considering the number of platforms they have to support - that's no easy feat.
On behalf of the Thunderbird team,Thunderbird Council, our global community of contributors, and our extended Mozilla family, I am incredibly excited to announce the initial launch of Thunderbird 115 Supernova" for Linux, macOS, and Windows! With this year's version, we're delivering much more than just another yearly release. Supernova represents a modernized overhaul of the software - both visually and technically - while retaining the familiarity and flexibility you expect from Thunderbird. This is a massive release, and modernises this venerable e-mail client considerably. I can't wait to test it out once it hits the Fedora repositories - I never liked Thunderbird all that much, but Supernova seems like something that suits me a little better, so I'm curious to see if it can pull me away from Geary. If you want to quickly gauge the changes to the user interface, the Thunderbird team made a very handy page for that.
TodaySUSE, the company behind Rancher, NeuVector, and SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and a global leader in enterprise open source solutions, announced it is forking publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and will develop and maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution available to all without restrictions. Over the next few years, SUSE plans to invest more than $10 million into this project. The spicy bit here is that the CEO of SUSE, Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, worked at Red Hat for 18 years before joining SUSE. Excellent.
You could put it this way - DisplayPort has all the capabilities of interfaces like HDMI, but implemented in a better way, without legacy cruft, and with a number of features that take advantage of the DisplayPort's sturdier architecture. As a result of this, DisplayPort isn't just in external monitors, but also laptop internal displays, USB-C port display support, docking stations, and Thunderbolt of all flavors. If you own a display-capable docking station for your laptop, be it classic style multi-pin dock or USB-C, DisplayPort is highly likely to be involved, and even your smartphone might just support DisplayPort over USB-C these days. Back when I bought my current 144Hz 1440p monitor with G-Sync for my gaming PC, DisplayPort was the only way to hook it all up, since HDMI wasn't yet supported. Ever since, out of a baseless sense of caution, I've always preferred DisplayPort for all my PC video connection needs, and as it turns out - yes, DisplayPort is definitely better than HDMI, and this article will tell you why.
The Kelly Rowland/Nelly songDilemmafeatures an infamous scene amongst nerds where Kelly Rowland tries to send a message to Nelly using aNokia 9210 Communicator. Unfortunately, she does this using the built in spreadsheet program and receives no reply. People suggested she might be using the =HYPERLINK() function in Excel, but would that even work?
Some huge news today. Intel has started to notify its ecosystem saying that it will stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) business. For the handful of STH readers who are unaware, Intel not only makes chips but they also make systems. Earlier this year, we covered that Intel was exiting the server business and selling it to MiTAC. Now its line of PCs is being sunset as well. Luckily, the market for small, powerful computers is more alive than it's ever been, and there are countless OEMs making both AMD and Intel tiny computers these days. My only concern would be that Intel exiting this market might mean the kinds of parts needed for tiny computers like the NUC also become harder to source, but since you can always use laptop parts, I doubt that's going to be an issue.
Liam Dawe at GamingOnLinux: Well, the results are here. In the USA the FTC was trying to block Microsoft from acquiring Activision Blizzard but Microsoft has won the fight. Now Microsoft are one big step closer to actually properly closing the deal, and a rather big consolidation of the gaming industry given how big Activision Blizzard are. I haven't been keeping up with this case very much, but if history's anything to go by, any form of consolidation at this scale tends to work out worse for consumers and the market.
It's been all over the news, so I can't get around posting about it here: the year of the Linux desktop is finally here. According to the - admittedly, troublesome - figures from StatCounter, the market share of Linux on the desktop has reached 7.23%. Other publications do not count Chrome OS installations as part of the Linux share, but I think that's nonsense - they're both clearly Linux desktop operating systems, and should be added up. In the end, it doesn't really matter, and I've mostly stopped reporting on market share figures ages ago, as all they do is invite pointless flamewars and vitriol. Linux on the desktop is doing just fine, and received a major boost thanks to Valve's Proton. We all have our desktop platform of choice, and each of those choices is valid. Still, more than 7% on the desktop and like 90%+ on mobile is not bad for a project developed by a community.
Today, the European Commission adopted its adequacy decision for theEU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. The decision concludes that the United States ensures an adequate level of protection - comparable to that of the European Union - for personal data transferred from the EU to US companies under the new framework. On the basis of the new adequacy decision, personal data can flow safely from the EU to US companies participating in the Framework, without having to put in place additional data protection safeguards. In 2020, European Union courts struck down the previous agreement between the EU and the US, the Privacy Shield, as the court stated it did not sufficiently protect EU user data from US government surveillance. This was obviously a big problem for companies like Facebook and Google, and ever since, the two blocks have been trying to come up with a replacement that would allow these companies to continue to operate relatively unscathed. In the meantime, though, several European countries handed out large fines to Amazon and Facebook for not taking proper care of EU user data. So, what makes this new agreement stricter than the previous one? The EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework introduces new binding safeguards to address all the concerns raised by the European Court of Justice, including limiting access to EU data by US intelligence services to what is necessary and proportionate, and establishing a Data Protection Review Court (DPRC), to which EU individuals will have access. The new framework introduces significant improvements compared to the mechanism that existed under the Privacy Shield. For example, if the DPRC finds that data was collected in violation of the new safeguards, it will be able to order the deletion of the data. The new safeguards in the area of government access to data will complement the obligations that US companies importing data from EU will have to subscribe to. I'm obviously no legal expert so take this with a grain of salt, but this kind of feels like yes, there are additional protections and safeguards, but if (let's be real here: when) companies like Facebook violate these, don't worry, EU citizen! You can undertake costly, complex, and long legal proceedings in misty business courts so Facebook or whatever can get fined for an amount that Zuckerberg spends on his interior decorator every week. The courts struck down the Safe Harbor agreement in 2015, and the aforementioned Privacy Shield in 2020, so we'll see if this new agreement stands the test of the courts.
RunningOSNews.comis not exactly something that generates loads of income, yet it's taking up a decent amount of time and energy that I have to find somewhere between my wife and kids, translation work, and the rest of my life. While OSNews will always remain free to access, it would mean the world to me if you could support my work financially. There's two ways to do this. First, you canbecome a Patreon, which will grant you access to an advertisement-free version of the website, as well as some comment flair to show off your big spender lifestyle (silver flair, gold flair, or a custom flair for the big ballers among you). Patreons donate a small fee every month. Second, you can donate a one-time amountusing Ko-Fi. Here, you are free to set whatever amount you want (starting at 5), but you won't qualify for any of the extras you get by becoming a Patreon. However, anyone who's crazy enough to make a large-enough donation will still get these extras, of course. Support is support, after all. Thank you! Also, if you wish to help out by donating and/or selling us hardware you really want me to devote time to here on OSNews, I can make that work too. For a few items I'm especially looking for, take a look at my personal website for more information.
So a few years ago, a Ukrainian programmer calledSergii Stoianstarted to build a modern Linux desktop environment based around the GNUstep components running on top of CentOS Linux, which he calledNEXTSPACE. Sadly, development stalled a couple of years ago, before CentOS Linux' premature end-of-life. We are happy to report that Stoian is alive and well, but what with his country being invaded and so on, he's been a bit too busy to work on his project in recent years. This is where Ondrej Florian, also known asOnFlApp, comes in. Florian has put together a collection of GNUstep components, including some drawn from NEXTSPACE, to create theGNUstep Desktop Environment. For now, the project's contains scripts to build it and install it, but only on Debian, although Debian versions 9, 10 and 11 are included. We tried on Debian 11.7 Bullseye", and in a VM, it works perfectly. The process is manual, but not too labour-intensive: install Git, clone the repo, then run three scripts. So, at this stage, GSDE is not very beginner friendly, but it's a substantial improvement over manually finding, installing or compiling, and configuring the various bits of the GNUstep system which are already in the Debian and Ubuntu repositories. The end result is better integrated, more complete, and even includes a working web browser - although you'll need to install the Chromium browser yourself, in order for the GSDE web browser to call it and work. A GNUstep-based desktop has exited in the periphery of the Linux world for decades, but it's always been incomplete, buggy, abandoned, or simply unusable. I really hope that this time around, that might change, because it would be a welcome change from all the QT and GTK-based desktop.
Oracle, who distributes an RHEL clone, has responded to Red Hat's latest source code availability changes. We want to emphasize to Linux developers, Linux customers, and Linux distributors that Oracle is committed to Linux freedom. Oracle makes the following promise: as long as Oracle distributes Linux, Oracle will make the binaries and source code for that distribution publicly and freely available. Furthermore, Oracle welcomes downstream distributions of every kind, community and commercial. We are happy to work with distributors to ease that process, work together on the content of Oracle Linux, and ensure Oracle software products are certified on your distribution. The only good thing about Red Hat's announced changes is that it will make Oracle's life harder. That might make it all worthwhile.
These are my notes from experimenting with building Wayland bits on OpenBSD during g2k23 in Tallinn... Thanks to the OpenBSD foundation for organizing this event. This is still far from a complete running system as there are many issues on the road, but it's a good start and it shows that it's definitely not impossible to get Wayland running on OpenBSD. This is one of the very few valid criticisms of Wayland: it's designed and developed entirely for Linux, with no regard for BSD or other platforms. Now, I find this an entirely valid choice and completely understandable choice to make from the developers' perspectives, but it's still unpleasant that the BSD world is stuck with archaic, unmaintained X.org while the Linux world has moved on. In that light, it's great to see that Wayland may, in fact, not be as married to Linux as we think.
The Video Game History Foundation, in partnership with the Software Preservation Network, has conductedthe first ever studyon the commercial availability of classic video games, and the results are bleak.87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered. This confirms something all of us already suspected or knew: the vast majority of classic games are simply not available in any legal way, shape, or form. If it wasn't for the emulation and preservation scene, many of these games would face certain oblivion in the near future. It's high time some changes are made to intellectual property law to make software and game preservation legal.
Here is a dumb question that you probably never asked yourself: What is the minimal amount of bytes we need to store in a .NET executable to have the CLR print the string "Hello, World!"to the standard output? In this post, we will explore the limits of the .NET module file format, get it as small as possible, while still having it function like a normal executable on a typical Windows machine with the .NET Framework installed. The answer is way, way smaller than I thought".
Today it's been three weeks since my 4th RSoC started, where the main focus this time is to speed up Redox by implementing on-demand paging in the kernel. I don't really understand any of this, but I know OSNews readers love this sort of nitty gritty stuff.
This is a community-based project and is actively updated. This project aims at restoring the legacy Windows Update websites, and allows older operating systems (Windows 95, NT 4.0, 98, Me, 2000, and XP) to obtain updates like they used to. Ever since 2011 when Microsoft pulled the plug on nearly all the Windows Update websites, the Windows Update feature for older Windows operating systems was no longer functional. The only way to install updates after that point was through external third-party installers which didn't cover all the updates that the operating system would fully support. So, with this project, we can now update operating systems as old as Windows 95 all the way through Windows XP RTM like we used to back in the day. IT's still a work-in-progress, as sourcing the various update packages and installers is proving to be quite difficult in some cases, and not all versions of Windows/Microsoft Update have been recreated yet. However, as the ever awesome Michael MJD notes in his video overview of the project, it already works quite well for Windows 95 and Windows 98 and 98SE.
In ourState of the Budgie blog post in May of last year, we emphasized that Budgie 11 would be Wayland-first, with initial expectations being that we would support an X11 fallback mode, as well as mentioning that it is notentirelyout of the realm of possibility to have a Budgie 10 under Wayland". Since that blog post, several key developments have occurred in the Wayland ecosystem. This detailed article about the future of Wayland support in Budgie is a great read. If you're interested in the kinds of considerations and decisions that go into maintaining a Linux desktop environment in 2023.
FreeBSD is still going strong. Its strength comes from having built a strong base in its code, documentation, and culture. It has managed to evolve with the times, continuing to bring in new committers, and smoothly transition through several leadership groups. It continues to fill an important area of support that is an alternative to Linux. Specifically, companies needing redundancy require more than one operating system, since any single operating system may fall victim to a failure that could take out the entire company's infrastructure. For all these reasons, FreeBSD has a bright future. In short, FreeBSD is awesome! Having finally delved a bit deeper into FreeBSD this past year, I have to say it's an incredibly nice operating system to use and maintain. In the end, it's the lack of polish as a desktop and laptop user that prevents me from using it full-time, but the built-in tools are incredibly nice to use, software installation and updates are a breeze, and the documentation is great. It really makes me wish the desktop and laptop was more of a focus for the developers, but I understand why it isn't.
Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux distribution but it's increasingly positioning snaps as the preferred way to get' software. The aim is, eventually, to default to a full-snap experience on the desktop. With that plan in mind you won't be mighty surprised (and if you are, welcome back to planet earth) to hear that showcasing DEB software willnotbe the primary aim of this newUbuntu Softwarereplacement. Ubuntu's Director of Engineering says the new hub will be a snap-first app store" designed around snap metadata. If the same piece of software exists in the Ubuntu repositoryandthe snap store the new store will only make it possible to install the snap version. This is not a surprising move, but one that is sure to alienate at least some - including me. Not that I'd use Ubuntu any time soon anyway, but forcing Snaps down my throat certainly isn't going to draw me back in.
Truth be told, this was the first time I heard of anAddressograph. So what does it do? What was the motivation behind its creation? And how does it work?Let's take a dive into an Addressograph. I had never heard of this machine either - it's designed to imprint things like names, addresses, and other information onto envelopes and forms. It's one of the many, many innovations we've lost along the way in the 20th century that I'd love to see in the real world sometime.
This project brings the Windows 10 or Windows 11 desktop operating system to your Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL. It's the same edition of Windows you're used to on your traditional laptop or desktop computer, but it's the version for ARM64 (armv8a) processors. It can run ARM64, ARM, x86 and x64 applications (the last two via emulation) just fine. This is such a cool project, and is making me want to buy a 950 XL on eBay.
The Intel i960 was a remarkable 32-bit processor of the 1990s with a confusing set of versions. Although it is now mostly forgotten (outside the many people who used it as an embedded processor), it has a complex history. It had a shot at being Intel's flagship processor until x86 overshadowed it. Later, it was the world's best-selling RISC processor. One variant was a33-bit processor with a decidedly non-RISC object-oriented instruction set; it became a military standard and was used in the F-22 fighter plane. Another version powered Intel's short-lived Unix servers. In this blog post, I'll take a look at the history of the i960, explain its different variants, and examine silicon dies. This chip has a lot of mythology and confusion (especially onWikipedia), so I'll try to clear things up. Not even Intel can overcome x86 - and I can guarantee you: neither will ARM. The truth is that x86 simply cannot die.
Wayland is an interesting beast. X11, for all its faults, does a lot for the desktop environment. If you're stretched for time, you could - in theory - just slap a panel onto the default X11 window manager and call it a day. The modern landscape of desktop environments built on top of X11 exists because developers have gotten really good at eschewing X11's built-in crusty junk for their own new and shiny junk, so that things work as you'd expect them to. For the most part, this kinda works - with enough hacks, you can get things like variable refresh rate, fractional scaling, et cetera. The problem here is that X11 definitely was not built for those things. Variable refresh rate works, but only if you're using a single monitor, and mixed refresh rate monitors in a single X session don't work at all outside of the hardware cursor. Fractional scaling is a hack. Compositing in general is optional and is sort of just stapled onto the existing architecture. X11 does do what it needs to do, which is display windows, but it's kinda garbo when you need it to do anything more advanced. Wayland is what happens when issues with the dominant windowing protocol have been festering for decades. It throws away everything and establishes a core set of standards that must be adhered to, along with a (very large) set of extensions that can be optionally implemented. The websitehttps://wayland.app/shows all the protocols worth knowing, and a lot more on top of that. It's kinda like Vulkan, in a sense: the core has the basics, and everything else is extensions that can be queried for by clients. Wayland is such a massive improvement over X11 it absolutely boggles the mind that people try to claim otherwise. I'm glad we're finally at a point where Wayland has clearly won, and developers are finally free to focus their efforts on the clearly superior choice, instead of wasting more time trying to hack X11 into the 21st century.
At the time the KDE Free Qt Foundation was founded, Qt was developed by Trolltech-the company that originally developed the framework. The Foundation has supported Qt through its transitions, first to Nokia, then to Digia, and finally to The Qt Company. It has the right to release Qt, if necessary to ensure that Qt remains open source. This remarkable legal guarantee protects the free software community and creates trust among developers, contributors, and customers. This special deal is well-known, but it's also kind of unique. It's great that KDE has such a solid guarantee in its back pocket in case of an emergency.
Back in May at the Build conference,we introduced Windows Copilot for Windows 11. In today's flight we are offering an early look of Windows Copilot to Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel via a controlled feature rollout. This first preview focuses on our integrated UI experience, with additional functionality coming down the road in future previews. To use Copilot in this flight you must have Windows Build 23493 or higher in the Dev Channel, and Microsoft Edge version 115.0.1901.150 or higher. You can test Windows Copilot for Windows 11 starting today.
Instead,they ended up on eBay, at a bargain-basement price of $59.99 each. And when the modern retro computing community turned them on, what they found was something worth bringing back to life. It took a while for anyone to notice these stylish metal-and-plastic machines from 1983. First, information spread like whispers in the community of tech forums, Discord servers, and Patreon channels where retro tech collectors hid. But then, a well-known tech YouTuber, Adrian Black,did a video about them, and these eBay machines, slapped with the logo of a company called NABU, were anonymous no more. The NABU is an incredibly interesting story, but I would like to take this time to highlight Adrian Black, one of the very finest retro computing YouTubers out there. He's incredibly knowledgeable and capable, kind, calm, and takes his time to fix and showcase the hardware he works on. He's the Mister Rogers of retro computing, and living proof that no, not all YouTubers are flashy, algorithm-chasing airheads.
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