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Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago. Mozilla will also shut down Hubs, the 3D virtual world it launched back in 2018, and scale back its investment in its mozilla.social Mastodon instance. The layoffs will affect roughly 60 employees. Bloomberg previously reported the layoffs. Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing trustworthy AI into Firefox." To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml. Frederic Lardinois for TechCrunch I'd like to remind everyone that I've been warning the Linux world about the precarious, uncertain future of Firefox for years now. The single most important desktop Linux application is in a death spiral and entirely dependent on free Google money. Not a good base to work from. With today's news, I only feel strengthened in my conviction that the major desktop projects in the Linux world need to come together in a serious manner to discuss the establishment of a browser project optimised for Linux. Pick an engine, let the GNOME and KDE developers build a native UI on top, and take matters into your own hands. If you can build the two best desktop environments in desktop computing today, you can build a first-class browser together. This is existential.

Microsoft plans to make Copilot AI inseparable from Windows. After releasing Copilot for Windows 11 and 10 and adding it to Microsoft apps, you can now use Copilot AI in Notepad to get simplified explanations. You can install the Notepad app update via the Microsoft Store to use this feature, but remember, it only works in Dev or Canary channels. Notepad version 11.2401.25.0 adds the Explain with Copilot" option in its context menu. After highlighting a chunk of text (sentences, code snippets, etc), right-click and select the Explain with Copilot" option. Or you can press the Ctrl + E shortcut to invoke this feature. Abhishek Mishra I wonder if you could replace this new, butchered Notepad with a an older, working copy.

FreeBSD is deprecating 32-bit platforms over the next couple of major releases. We anticipate FreeBSD 15.0 will not include the armv6, i386, and powerpc platforms, and FreeBSD 16.0 will not include armv7. Support for executing 32-bit binaries on 64-bit kernels will be retained through at least the lifetime of the stable/16 branch if not longer. (There is currently no plan to remove support for 32-bit binaries on 64-bit kernels.) John Baldwin on freebsd-announce I don't think this is too egregious of a timeline, but there's always someone with some weird edge case that gets bit hard by deprecations like these.

Who wouldn't want to run a UNIX-like operating system on their NES or Famicom? Although there's arguably no practical reason for doing so, decrazyo has cobbled together a working port of Little Unix (LUnix), which was originally written for the Commodore 64 and 128 by Daniel Dallmann. The impetus for this project was initially curiosity, but when decrazyo saw that someone had already written a UNIX-like OS for the 6502 processor, it seemed apparent that the NES was too similar to the C64 to not port it. Maya Posch for Hackaday This is peak computing.

Broadcom's VMware division took a big step today, ending its free VMware vSphere Hypervisor. This is one of those announcements that we were expecting after we coveredVMware End of Availability on Many VMware vSphere Editions andVMware Updates its EOA Plan Providing Guidance for Some Subscription Transition, but it is a big deal for many STH readers. It now sets VMware down the path of mainframes. Patrick Kennedy at ServeTheHome A massive blow for the homelab community.

Graphic design is my passion so naturally I love the vintage, 1990s WordArt. This was a feature in Microsoft Word that allowed you to create timeless 3D" renderings of any text you wanted. It was perfection, but for some reason Microsoft overhauled the feature in the late 2000s, basically ruining it. These are a soulless simulacrum of the WordArt of yore. The true WordArt remains, however, embedded deep in the code of Microsoft Word itself. But some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for twenty years WordArt passed out of all knowledge. But it can be found again. Justin Pot at Popular Science I had no idea this stuff was still in there, but I guess it makes sense - people absolutely adored this stuff, and it was all over the place for a very long time. You would see it in restaurants, hotels, schools, stores, everywhere - from high-end, luxury places to bargain basements. Now that I think about it, I'm not at all surprised it's still accessible.

I grew up primarily with the Commodore 64, where if you wanted to do anything really cool and useful, you had to do it in 6502 assembly language. Today I still write 6502 assembly, plus some Power ISA and even a little TMS9900. I like assembly languages and how in control of the CPU you feel writing in one. But you know what would make me not like an assembly language? One that was contrived and not actually the CPU it was running on. And you know what would make me like it even less? If it were kneecapped, convoluted and limited without even proper I/O facilities. Old Vintage Computing Research Everything you ever wanted to know about CAP-X and COMP-X. Which turns out to be a lot.

The official way to create user interfaces for the Windows operating system changed quite a lot of times during the last years. Microsoft created and (partially or fully) abadoned a lot of APIs which where intended to replace the respective previous ones. They changed names and ways how it's supposed to be done a few times, and left a lof of developers confused. Here is a small historical overview. Nikolaus Gebhardt If you're ever wondering how we ended up at a situation where, on the desktop and in Explorer, context menus have their own context menus, well, this is why.

Wayland and X.org are both part of freedesktop. Whatever maintenance is still happening on X.org is mostly being done by people who primarily work on Wayland. There isn't some kind of holy war going on between The Wayland Developers who want to kill X.org, and The X.org Developers who believe it is great and want to keep it. They're nearly all the same people, and they all want X.org to die. AFAIK there isn't anybody who is actually clamoring to *do the work of maintaining X.org upstream*. There are people who don't want it to die because Wayland doesn't yet have the features they need or the NVIDIA proprietary driver doesn't work well on Wayland or whatever, but AFAIK, none of those people is actually volunteering to maintain X.org long-term. Adam Williamson There's really no clearer summary of the current state of affairs than this.

We are happy to announce the creation of a new family of Fedora Linux spins: Fedora Atomic Desktops! As Silverblue has grown in popularity, we've seen more of our mainline Fedora Linux spins make the jump to offer a version that implements rpm-ostree. It's reached the point where it can be hard to talk about all of them at the same time. Therefore we've introduced a new brand that will serve to simplify how we discuss rpm-ostree and how we name future atomic spins. Joseph Gayoso for Fedora Magazine You can get pretty much any major desktop environment as an rpm-ostree (inaccurately referred to as immutable') version of Fedora, so it makes sense to standardise the naming scheme.

One of the somewhat odd things about my old fashioned X Window System environment is that when I iconify' or minimize' a window, it (mostly) winds up as an actual icon on my root window (what in some environments would be called the desktop), in contrast to the alternate approach where the minimized window is represented in some sort of taskbar. I have strong opinions about where some of these icons should go, and some tools to automatically arrange this for various windows, including the GNU Emacs windows I (now) use for reading email. Chris Siebenmann Iconification should be possible in any modern desktop environment, and it's sad that this paradigm has pretty much entirely vanished. I would love for iconified windows to be treated essentially the same way as files, so you can move them around, drop them inside directories, and even move them from one computer to another (assuming they have the application in question installed). If I'm working on a project, and I have a bunch of LibreOffice documents, spreadsheets, browser tabs, notes in a text editor, some images open, and so on, I should be able to iconify them all, keep them in the project's directory, and de-iconify them as if nothing had ever happened. Right now, you have to use files and application states for that, which is cumbersome and annoying. Sadly, advanced window management is dying. Shame.

Finally, you can run dozens of multiprocessing Multics instances along side your mission-critical IBM AIX (PASE) and IBM i (OS/400) workloads on IBM Power Systems hardware! This is the virtualization solution your IT department has been waiting for... well, perhaps it isn't - but supporting this platform is a great demonstration of both the capabilities of the IBM PASE for i (Portable Application Solutions Environment) runtime for enabling OSS on IBM i, and the excellent compatibility and portability of the DPS8M simulator software. Jeffrey H. Johnson I understand some of this stuff. Some.

Mozilla Corp., which manages the open-source Firefox browser, announced today that Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO to focus on AI and internet safety as chair of the nonprofit foundation. Laura Chambers, a Mozilla board member and entrepreneur with experience at Airbnb, PayPal, and eBay, will step in as interim CEO to run operations until a permanent replacement is found. Baker, a Silicon Valley pioneer who co-founded the Mozilla Project, says it was her decision to step down as CEO, adding that the move is motivated by a sense of urgency over the current state of the internet and public trust. We want to offer an alternative for people to have better products," says Baker, who wants to draw more attention to policies, products and processes to challenge business models built on fueling outrage. What are the connections between this global malaise and how humans are engaging with each other and technology?" Diane Brady for Fortune Mozilla is in such a tough spot. They basically have zero consumer appeal, have no recognisable products other than Firefox, and effectively exist by the grace of Google, of all companies. If Mozilla gets in even more trouble, a lot of OSNews readers are going to feel it - and the internet as whole will feel the repercussions even if they don't realise it. Hearing so much talk about AI" from Mozilla doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

Microsoft Graveyard is the virtual graveyard for all products killed by Microsoft; a free and open source collection of dead Microsoft products built by a passionate and nostalgic community. Our objective as a community is to provide factual, historic information for the products listed here. If something is missing, inaccurate, or you have a suggestion, visit and contribute to the project on GitHub. Victor Frye Heavily inspired by Killed by Google, but definitely incomplete for now, especially the further back in time you go.

For the past few months we have been working hard to provide a fast, reliable and secure KVM backend for VirtualBox. VirtualBox is a multi-platform Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) with a great feature set, support for a wide variety of guest operating systems, and a consistent user interface across different host operating systems. Cyberus Technology's KVM backend allows VirtualBox to run virtual machines utilizing the Linux KVM hypervisor instead of the custom kernel module used by standard VirtualBox. Using KVM comes with a number of benefits. Florian Pester, Markus Partheymuller Excellent news. Dealing with the VirtualBox and VMware kernel modules can be a hassle if you're using newer or custom kernels, and having the VirtualBox UI for kvm instead of things virt-manager is not something I'm unhappy about.

After earlier sightings, Microsoft has now formally announced sudo for Windows. We're excited to announce the release of Sudo for Windows in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26052! Sudo for Windows is a new way for users to run elevated commands directly from an unelevated console session. It is an ergonomic and familiar solution for users who want to elevate a command without having to first open a new elevated console. We are also excited to announce that we are open-sourcing this project here on GitHub! We're working hard to add more information about the project in the GitHub repo and will be sharing more details about our plans in the coming months! If you're looking for additional functionality that Sudo for Windows does not provide, check out Gerardo Grignoli's gsudo which has a number of additional features and configuration options. Jordi Adoumie on the official Windows blog In response to sudo coming to Windows, Theo de Raadt announced that Word is coming to OpenBSD.

What if I told you there is an immensely popular operating system that you likely used it at least once, but did not realise what it was? In fact, it is so popular and important there is an IEEE standard based on it. It is uncanny how immensely popular AND immensely obscure this system is. It is scary that until today I have never even heard of its reference desktop implementation. The system is called TRON". Nina Kalinina This Mastodon thread is OSNews bait. Delicious.

Last month, we covered Julio Merino's article about going from 0 to 1 MB in DOS, and now they're back for breaking beyond that 1 MB barrier. I know I promised that this follow-up article would be about DJGPP, but before getting into that review, I realized I had to take another detour to cover three more topics. Namely: unreal mode, which I intentionally ignored to not derail the post; LOADALL, which I didn't know about until you readers mentioned it; and DOS extenders, which I was planning to describe in the DJGPP article but they are a better fit for this one. So... strap your seat belts on and dive right in for another tour through the ancient techniques that DOS had to pull off to peek into the memory address space above the first MB. And get your hands ready because we'll go over assembly code for a step-by-step jump into unreal mode. Julio Merino What's amazing is that I don't even remember having to deal with any of this while using MS-DOS back in the day. Games tended to use DOS extenders automatically (DOS/4G!), but I don't remember if I ever had to set up any of the DOS above-640k stuff manually.

While there are a lot of Wayland compositors out there that aren't too different from each other in terms of features, one of the more unique ones is Greenfield. The Greenfield Wayland compositor has been out there for a few years now as an in-browser HTML5-based solution that is continuing to prove itself capable and even fast enough for handling Linux gaming. Michael Larabel A rather genius idea for a Wayland compositor.

Windows 10 users started seeing full-screen pop-ups after installing a cumulative update release in May 2023. Now, the pop-up is back again on our Windows 10 PC after installing the optional update released in January 2024, and it gouges the eyes. No one expects a gigantic multi-slide advert using their PCs (web browsers are a different story). Abhishek Mishra Windows is an advertising platform first, operating system second. You should be expecting ads.

As noted by Wired, WhatsApp wants the messaging services it connects with to use the same Signal Protocol to encrypt messages. Meta is also open to apps using alternate encryption protocols so long as companies can prove they reach the security standards that WhatsApp outlines in its guidance." The third-party services will also have to sign a contract with Meta before they plug into WhatsApp, with more details about the agreement coming in March. Emma Roth at The Verge They way this should work is that these megacorporations create free and open APIs any instant messaging application can tap into. I'm not looking to bring other services into WhatsApp; I'm looking to bring all services together in one unified application that respects my platform's conventions and integrates properly with the operating systems I use. I feel like this contractual interoperability Facebook (and Apple) is offering is not interoperability at all, and does not reflect the spirit of the Digital Markets Act.

Since vintage computing is supposed to be a spiritual experience, I point out that today, February 3, 2024, the Torah reading for this week is the Ten Commandments. Regardless of your religious tradition or lack thereof, I think we can all agree on these. Old Vintage Computing Research Amen.

Europe's right-to-repair rules will force vendors to stand by their products an extra 12 months after a repair is made, according to the terms of a new political agreement. Consumers will have a choice between repair and replacement of defective products during a liability period that sellers will be required to offer. The liability period is slated to be a minimum of two years before any extensions. The rules require spare parts to be available at reasonable prices, and product makers will be prohibited from using contractual, hardware or software related barriers to repair, such as impeding the use of second-hand, compatible and 3D-printed spare parts by independent repairers," the Commission said. Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica An excellent set of rules, and once again puts the EU at the forefront of consumer protection. Maybe some of it will trickle down to other places in the world.

I love this quick to-the-point summary of most of the popular browsers out there right now. I'm a Firefox user, of course, since it's the best choice between Chrome (I'd rather choose death), Safari (not cross-platform so utterly pointless), the various Chrome skins, and Firefox (the one independent browser). Still, I'm continuously worried about Firefox' future - specifically on platforms other than Windows or macOS - and strongly believe we need more true alternatives for a healthier browser ecosystem.

In keeping with the Commodore tradition of cost cutting, most consumer models of their Amiga line of computers came with severely watered down documentation. The Amiga 500 was an exception from this rule, but owners of later machines - such as the A1200 - may not have gotten any documentation for the command line part of AmigaOS at all. And, of course, even if this documentation had shipped with the machines, it wouldn't have revealed features that were hidden to anyone without access to official developer documentation or even left completely undocumented or unfinished. This is a quick look at a few of these interesting features, some more obscure than others, but all of them decidedly useful. Most of them only apply to versions 2.x and/or 3.x of the OS. With that said, let's dive right in! Carl Svensson Exactly what it says on the tin.

The migration from the classic Mail and Calendar app to the new Outlook app is in full swing already. Microsoft announced the deprecation of the classic apps in favor of a new Outlook app in June 2023. It introduced the new Outlook app to Insider builds a month later and announced that it would enforce the migration in early 2024. Not all users are migrated at this point. Those who have been migrated already or installed the Outlook app directly, may notice several differences between the new Outlook app and the classic Mail app. One of the main differences turns an ad-free email experience into one with ads. You may see ads in the inbox in the new Outlook. Martin Brinkmann Ads disguised as emails in your inbox. Microsoft will not rest until Windows resembles Times Square. What a trash fire of an operating system.

A number of you will have noticed already that the 64-bit time_t transition is now in progress in Debian experimental. The goal of this transition is to ensure that 32-bit architectures in trixie (whether they are currently release architectures, or out of archive, etc) will be capable of handling current and future timestamps referring to times beyond 2038. Steve Langasek on debian-devel-announce A crucial effort.

In order to be able to choose their own browser, people must be free to download it, easily set it to default and to continue using it - all without interference from the operating system. Windows users do not currently enjoy this freedom of choice. To investigate Microsoft's tactics and the impact on consumers, Mozilla commissioned Harry Brignull and Cennydd Bowles, independent researchers and experts in harmful design. Today, the researchers have published a report detailing how Microsoft prevents effective browser choice on Windows. In the report, they document how Microsoft places its own browser - Edge - at the center of its operating system and weaponizes Windows' user interface design to undermine people selecting rival browsers. Mozilla Research We all already know Microsoft does these things, and of course, a study paid for by Mozilla agreeing with Mozilla is not exactly earth-shattering, but stuff like this is important for aiding in convincing regulators to do something about this stuff. It simply shouldn't be legal to employ all kinds of nasty tricks and dark patterns to force people to use a certain browser.

Niri is a scrollable, tiling window manager for Wayland. What does it mean for a tiling window manager to be scrollable? Windows are arranged in columns on an infinite strip going to the right. Opening a new window never causes existing windows to resize. Every monitor has its own separate window strip. Windows can never overflow" onto an adjacent monitor. Workspaces are dynamic and arranged vertically. Every monitor has an independent set of workspaces, and there's always one empty workspace present all the way down. Niri's GitHub page Definitely an intriguing idea.

SeaweedFS is a simple and highly scalable distributed file system. There are two objectives: to store billions of files!, to serve the files fast! SeaweedFS started as an Object Store to handle small files efficiently. Instead of managing all file metadata in a central master, the central master only manages volumes on volume servers, and these volume servers manage files and their metadata. This relieves concurrency pressure from the central master and spreads file metadata into volume servers, allowing faster file access (O(1), usually just one disk read operation). There is only 40 bytes of disk storage overhead for each file's metadata. It is so simple with O(1) disk reads that you are welcome to challenge the performance with your actual use cases. SeaweedFS's GitHub page It's Apache-licensed and the code is, as usual, on GitHub.

The proposed activity is to evaluate the usage of Rust programming language in space applications, by prototyping an RTOS targeting ARM Cortex-M7 SAMV71 microcontroller together with the required BSP (Board Support Package) and a Demonstration Application. Rust safety features and its growing usage make this programming language a viable option in the space sector. It is proposed to first develop a lightweight real time operating system providing a minimal set of capabilities required for development of flight application software. This system will provide an executor, tasklets mechanisms and BSP for SAMV71. The design of the system will be guided to support potential future qualification activities. Although the project is a study, ECSS software development practices will be used to facilitate potential application in ESA projects. The practical feedback from ECSS application in Rust projects will be reported. In the second part of the activity, a small demonstration application software will be developed, providing a minimal feature-set representative of a CubeSat class project - UART communication, mode management and sensor handling. This application will showcase the viability of the developed RTOS and provide input to a Lessons Learned report, describing the encountered issues, potential problem and improvement areas, usage recommendations and proposed way forward. The European Space Agency Rust, but in space. The code's on GitHub.

Many OSI Affiliates engaged with the European Commission, European Parliament and European Council during 2023. With the welcome coordination of Open Forum Europe, a group met regularly to keep track of progress explaining the issues. Many of us also committed time and travel to meet in-person. As a result of all this effort from so many people, the final text of the CRA mitigated pretty much all the risks we had identified to individual developers and to Open Source foundations. Simon Phipps (yes, the Simon Phipps) Many in the open source community were deeply worried about the EU's Cyber Resiliency Act's impact on open source software, and rightfully so. It's great to hear that the EU communicated and cooperated closely with the open source community to ensure the impact of the CRA on open source would be minimal, and it turns out they listened. Excellent news.

Google has removed links to page caches from its search results page, the company's search liaison Danny Sullivan has confirmed. It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading," Sullivan wrote on X. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it." Jon Porter at The Verge Google Search continues to become ever more useless.

The Redox project has published an overview of the progress made in January, and it's a long list. Redox now supports the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, a few of System76's Cosmic Desktop applications now run on Redox, several more Linux applications haven been ported (most notably for me, nano, my CLI text editor of choice), and much more. The most important change is an overhaul of how Redox handles resource paths: Redox has a microkernel core, with drivers and other resource providers running as tasks and providing schemes". A scheme is the name of a resource provider, and until now, resources have been accessed using URI/URL format. For example, files would be accessed as file:path/to/my_file, and a TCP connection would be accessed as tcp:127.0.0.1. This format, while forward-looking, has not been very backwards-compatible. In order to simplify our efforts to port Linux software to Redox, we have decided to change our resource path format to the Linux-compatible /scheme/scheme_name/path/to/resource. Paths that do not begin with /scheme will be assumed to refer to the file scheme, so /path/to/my_file is treated by the system as /scheme/file/path/to/my_file, but the application will only see the /path/to/my_file portion. Using this format, normal paths now look just like Linux paths, while drivers and other resources can still be addressed without breaking software. Ron Williams The change is an ongoing process, so you might encounter some issues related to it in the coming time.

That was back in August and since then, there has not been anything too noteworthy in terms of Windows bootability support on ReFS. Meanwhile, Microsoft has also not updated the officially supported ReFS version up from 3.10 yet, and as such, trying to run Windows on any newer ReFS version leads to an immediate crash on the newest Canary build 26040. Apparently, the crash is worse than it was on previous builds as it now throws up no recovery messages either. Sayan Sen at NeoWin It seems like NTFS will be with us for quite a while longer.

The ReactOS project is working on a new graphical installer to replace the older, text-mode one. In the first blog post about this effort, from December 2023, developer hbelusca details their work on setupapi, the module that enables reading and processing INF files, moving/copying files from an installation source media to a target, supporting also extraction from compressed .CAB cabinet files", as well as device installation functions. The second post dives into partitioning during installation, which involves a lot of very delicate work, from partitioning to installing the bootloader, and from copying files to modifying the registry. On top of that, this needs a GUI, and preferably one that's better and more versatile than the well-known blue text-mode setup we all know from old versions of Windows. The new GUI presents more options, allows for bootloader settings, and, of course, partitioning in a non-destructive way before committing. In addition, while the blue text-mode setup can only go forward, the new GUI is bidirectional. The third and final post dives into testing all this work and fixing bugs. The post goes into great detail describing a number of bugs and their fixes, and is well worth a read, too.

Microsoft is testing native Sudo command support for Windows 11. The support for native Sudo" command was spotted in a leaked Windows Server preview build, accidentally published to the Windows Update servers over the weekend. Mayank Parmar It's kind of wild that something like sudo doesn't exist in Windows.

A few times a year, a claim will make the rounds that the largest PDF you can make is a square covering about the middle section of Germany - 381 km * 381 km. Turns out, this is only the maximum size Acrobat Reader can display, and not the limit of the format itself at all. So, how big can you go? Very big: If you're curious, that width is approximately the distance between the Earth and the Moon. I'd have to get my ruler to check, but I'm pretty sure that's larger than Germany. I could keep going. And I did. Eventually I ended up with a PDF that Preview claimed is larger than the entire universe - approximately 37 trillion light years square. Admittedly it's mostly empty space, but so is the universe. If you'd like to play with that PDF, you can get it here. Please don't try to print it. Alex Chan Don't worry, I'm out of magenta anyway.

Around late 1986, Sega released the Sega AI Computer". This is one of Sega's least well known and rarest systems. Not much is known about this system apart from a small amount of information in Japanese and American flyers and press articles. The information we have is still piecemeal and may be partly inaccurate. Today we are making public, for the first time: all system roms extracted from the Sega AI Computer, data dumps from 26 my-cards and 14 tapes, many scans and photographs, and in collaboration with MAME developers, an early working MAME driver allowing this computer to be emulated. SMS Power! Incredible. Usually stuff like this is relegated to a YouTube video, with potential archival efforts pushed to the background since it's boring and won't get any views. This is an amazing effort.

Researchers have just unveiled a pre-release, game-changing AI upgrade for Google Messages. But it's one with a serious privacy risk-it seems that Bard may ask to read and analyze your private message history. So how might this work, how do you maintain your privacy, and when might this begin. Zak Doffman As long as this AI" hoovering is an optional feature', I don't really have any issues with it - it's a free world, and if you want to spice up your autocomplete like this, go ahead. The real danger, of course, is that this won't be optional for long, and eventually Google's AI" will just ingest your messages and emails by default, consent or no.

The business arm of Raspberry Pi is preparing to make an initial public offering (IPO) in London. CEO Eben Upton tells Ars that should the IPO happen, it will let Raspberry Pi's not-for-profit side expand by at least a factor of 2X." And while it's an understandable thing" that Raspberry Pi enthusiasts could be concerned, while I'm involved in running the thing, I don't expect people to see any change in how we do things." Kevin Purdy at Ars Technica Expect changes in how they do things.

A number of reviews for Apple's new VR headset have been published, but the only one I think is worth reading is, surprisingly, the one published by The Verge. Both the written and video review are excellent, and go into every possible little detail of the new device. Nilay Patel concludes: The basic gist is that the Vision Pro is simply cumbersome and unpleasant to use, exactly what many people have been suspecting since the day it was unveiled. I've been asking a very simple question on Mastodon nobody has been able to answer yet: is there anything you do on your phone, laptop, or desktop, that the Vision Pro can do better, easier, quicker? Now that the reviews are here, not even the people using it can provide an answer. And think about that last point in the list above. It's a private computer that's always looking at your hands.

Oracle has quietly extended paid support and upgrades for Solaris 11.4 to 2037 - three years past its previous deadline - and did the same for earlier versions of the OS last year. Simon Sharwood at The Register One of the biggest what could have beens" of the past two decades. Had Oracle not closed Solaris up after acquiring Sun, an open source Solaris might've been something more tangible than what it is today. Of course, Oracle gonna Oracle and they were always going to screw things up, open source or not, but had Solaris stayed open we'd have had a more concerted, centralised development effort instead of what we have now, where the open source Solaris community is working off the last OpenSolaris codebase from 14 years ago.

Recently, GTK gained not one, but two new renderers: one for GL and one for Vulkan. Since naming is hard, we reused existing names and called them ngl" and vulkan". They are built from the same sources, therefore we also call them unified" renderers. As mentioned already, the two renderers are built from the same source. It is modeled to follow Vulkan apis, with some abstractions to cover the differences between Vulkan and GL (more specifically, GL 3.3+ and GLES 3.0+). This lets us share much of the infrastructure for walking the scene graph, maintaining transforms and other state, caching textures and glyphs, and will make it easier to keep both renderers up-to-date and on-par. GTK Development Blog This is well above my paygrade, but I'm sure it's still of interest to y'all.

But despite all this chaos and temptation, operating system vendors knew better. To this day, they follow THE convention: checkboxes are square, radio buttons are round. Maybe it was part of their internal training. Maybe they had experienced art directors. Maybe it was just luck. I don't know - it doesn't really matter - but - somehow - they managed to stick to the convention. Until this day. Apple is the first major operating system vendor who had abandoned a four-decades-long tradition. Their new visionOS - for the first time in the history of Apple - will have round checkboxes. Nikita Prokopov Unsightly. A lack of taste always betrays itself.

Last week, I turned on my PC, installed a Windows update, and rebooted to find Microsoft Edge automatically open with the Chrome tabs I was working on before the update. I don't use Microsoft Edge regularly, and I have Google Chrome set as my default browser. Bleary-eyed at 9AM, it took me a moment to realize that Microsoft Edge had simply taken over where I'd left off in Chrome. I couldn't believe my eyes. I never imported my data into Microsoft Edge, nor did I confirm whether I wanted to import my tabs. But here was Edge automatically opening after a Windows update with all the Chrome tabs I'd been working on. I didn't even realize I was using Edge at first, and I was confused why all my tabs were suddenly logged out. Tom Warren at The Verge I would never accept such disregard for users from my computer.

If you know your Windows history, you'll know that the operating system got that name when it moved away from using pure MS-DOS and started using a graphical user interface to show things. As it turns out, you can force Windows 11 back to its legacy roots and reduce it back to a command-line interface. This is what the developer of Tiny11 has achieved, calling their new creation Minwin." The developer of Win11, NTDev, posted a video on YouTube about their project. There's absolutely nothing flashy here; no Copilot, no Start menu, and definitely no UI. It's as graphically complex as the Command Prompt, which meant that NTDev had to resort to fancy 00s-era ASCII logos to announce that Minwin was working. Simon Batt at XDA Definitely a neat proof-of-concept, and it shows just how modular Windows could be if only Microsoft allowed its users to take out the parts they don't need. I wonder how close this is to Nano Server, an installation option for Windows Server you've probably never heard of. I also like the nod to MinWin, the informal codename Microsoft used internally to refer to an effort by a small number of expert Windows kernel engineers to untangle the spaghetti ball of dependencies that had sprouted between the various architectural layers of Windows. This project started around Vista, and eventually made it possible to make broader, sweeping changes to Windows without breaking things all over the place because the spaghetti ball of internal, low-level dependencies wasn't mapped out.

Another month, another pile of improvement to Servo, the rendering engine written in Rust, originally a Mozilla project. This month the proof-of-concept browser UI got forward and backward buttons, making this bare-bones UI just a tiny bit more usable. Of course, the vast majority of changes and improvements are all focused on the actual rendering engine, which makes sense because Servo definitely isn't ready for any prime time use - nor is anyone claiming it is. I'm incredibly curious to see where Servo goes in the future.

One of the problems with Arm-based Windows laptops has been a lack of app support, but there's big news this week as Google Chrome has unexpectedly debuted its first Windows on Arm build. Ben Schoon at 9To5Google Now you can ruin your battery life on Windows on ARM too! We truly live in blessed times.

Six months ago, we launched Project IDX, an experimental, cloud-based workspace for full-stack, multiplatform software development. We built Project IDX to simplify and streamline the developer workflow, aiming to reduce the sea of complexities traditionally associated with app development. It certainly seems like we've piqued your interest, and we love seeing what IDX has helped you build. We're bringing the iOS Simulator and Android Emulator to the browser. Whether you're building a Flutter or web app, Project IDX now allows you to preview your applications without having to leave your workspace. When you use a Flutter or web template, Project IDX intelligently loads the right preview environment for your application - Safari mobile and Chrome for web templates, or Android, iOS, and Chrome for Flutter templates. Google's IDX team I've seen some articles state that this makes it possible to develop for iOS without a Mac, but this isn't really true - as far as I know, you must have a Mac to submit anything to the App Store or Testflight, so while you can write and test code using IDX, you can't actually deploy is in any meaningful way without getting a Mac.