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In October 2023, we published a recap of the top 10 features Windows 11 users want for the redesigned Start menu. Number 6 was the ability to switch from list view to grid view in the All Apps" list, which received over 1,500 upvotes in the Feedback Hub. Six months later, Microsoft finally appears to be ready to give users what they want. PhantomOfEarth, the ever-giving source of hidden stuff in Windows 11 preview builds, discovered that Windows 11 build 22635.3420 lets you change from list to grid view in the All Apps" section. Like other unannounced features, this one requires a bit of tinkering using the ViVeTool app until Microsoft makes it official. Taras Buria I'm still baffled Microsoft consistently manages to mess up something as once-iconic and impactful like the Start menu. It seems like Microsoft just can't leave it well enough alone, even though it kind of already nailed it in Windows 95 - just give us that, but with a modern search function, and we're all going to be happy. That's it. We don't want or need more.

A couple of years ago, I imported a Japanese-market 4*4 van into the US; a 1996 Mitsubishi Delica. Based on the maps I found in the seat pocket and other clues, it seems to have spent its life at some city dweller's cabin in the mountains around Fukushima, and only driven occasionally. Despite being over 25 years old, it only had 77,000 km on the odometer. The van had some interesting old tech installed in it: what appears to be a radar detector labeled Super Eagle 30" and a Panasonic-brand electronic toll collection device that you can insert a smart card into. One particularly noteworthy accessory that was available in mid-90s Delicas was a built-in karaoke machine for the rear passengers. Sadly, mine didn't have that feature. But the most interesting accessory installed in the van was the Avco Maptwin Inter, which I immediately identified as some kind of electronic navigation aid, about which there is very little information available on the English-language internet. When I first saw the Maptwin, I had thought it might be some kind of proto-GPS that displayed latitude/longitude coordinates that you could look up on a paper map. Alas, it's not that cool. It was not connected to any kind of antenna, and the electronics inside seem inadequate for the reception of a GPS signal. The Maptwin was, however, wired into an RPM counter that was attached between the transmission and the speedometer cable, presumably to delivery extremely accurate and convenient display of how many kilometers have been traveled since the display was last reset. What I've been able to learn is that the Maptwin is computer that was mostly used for rally race navigation, precursor to devices still available from manufacturers like Terra Trip. Now, the Mitsubishi Delica is about the best 4*4 minivan you can get, but it's extremely slow and unwieldy at speed, so it would be pretty terrible for rally racing. My best guess is that the owner used this device as a navigation aid for overland exploration, as the name Maptwin" implies, to augment the utility of a paper map. On the other hand, I found an article that indicates that some kinds of rallies were not high speed affairs, but rather accuracy-based navigation puzzles of sorts, so who knows? The Maptwin wasn't working when I got the van, and I don't know if it's actually broken or just needs to be wired up correctly. If any OSNews readers have any additional information about any of the devices I've mentioned, please enlighten us in the comments. If anyone would like to try to get the Maptwin working and report back, please let me know.

NetBSD 10.0 has been released, and it brings a lot of improvements, new features, and fixes compared to the previous release, 9.3. First and foremost, there are massive performance improvements when it comes to compute and filesystem-bound applications on multicore and multiprocessor systems. NetBSD 10.0 also brings WireGuard support compatible with implementations on other systems, although this is still experimental. There's also a lot of added support for various ARM SoCs and boards, including Apple's M1 chip, and there's new support for compat_linux on AArch64, for running Linux programs. Of course, there's also a ton of new and updated drivers, notably the graphics drivers which are now synced to Linux 5.6, bringing a ton of improvements with them. This is just a small sliver of all the changes, so be sure to read the entire release announcement for everything else.

It's the ext2 filesystem driver that will be marked as deprecated in the upcoming 6.9 Linux kernel. The main issue is that even if the filesystem is created with 256 byte inodes (mkfs.ext2 -I 256), the filesystem driver will stick to 32 bit dates. Because of this, the driver does not support inode timestamps beyond 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. Michael Opdenacker Kernel developer Ted T'so did state that if someone wants to add support for 64bit dates to ext2, it shouldn't be too hard. I doubt many people still use ext2, but if someone is willing to step up, the deprecation can be made undone by adding this support.

After observing a few odd symptoms around liblzma (part of the xz package) on Debian sid installations over the last weeks (logins with ssh taking a lot of CPU, valgrind errors) I figured out the answer: The upstream xz repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored. At first I thought this was a compromise of debian's package, but it turns out to be upstream. Andres Freund I don't normally report on security issues, but this is a big one not just because of the severity of the issue itself, but also because of its origins: it was created by and added to upstream xz/liblzma by a regular contributor of said project, and makes it possibly to bypass SSH encryption. It was discovered more or less by accident by Andres Freund. I have not yet analyzed precisely what is being checked for in the injected code, to allow unauthorized access. Since this is running in a pre-authentication context, it seems likely to allow some form of access or other form of remote code execution. Andres Freund The exploit was only added to the release tarballs, and not present when taking the code off GitHub manually. Luckily for all of us, the exploit has only made it way to the most bloodiest of bleeding edge distributions, such as Fedora Rawhide 41 and Debian testing, unstable and experimental, and as such has not been widely spread just yet. Nobody seems to know quite yet what the ultimate intent of the exploit seems to be. Of note: the person who added the compromising code was recently added as a Linux kernel maintainer.

Since the technology industry and associated media outlets tend to focus primarily on the latest and greatest technology and what's right around the corner, it sometimes seems as if the only valid option when you need a new laptop, phone, desktop, or whatever is to spend top euro on the newest, most expensive incarnations of those. But what if you need, say, a new laptop, but you're not swimming in excess disposable income? Or you just don't want to spend 1000-2000 euro on a new laptop? The tech media tends to have an answer for this: buy something like a cheap Chromebook or an e-waste 350 Windows laptop and call it a day - you don't deserve a nice experience. However, there's a far better option than spending money on a shackled Chromebook or an underpowered bottom-of-the-barrel Windows laptop: buy used. Recently, I decided to buy a used laptop, and I set it up how I would set up any new laptop, to get an idea of what's out there. Here's how it went. For this little experiment, I first had to settle on a brand, and to be brutally honest, that was an easy choice. ThinkPads seems to be universally regarded as excellent choices for a used laptop for a variety of reasons which I'll get to later. After weighing some of the various models, options, and my budget, I decided to go for a Lenovo ThinkPad T450s for about 150, and about a week later, the device arrived at my local supermarket for pickup. Before I settled on this specific ThinkPad, I had a few demands and requirements. First and foremost, since I don't like large laptops, I didn't want anything bigger than roughly 14'', and since I'm a bit of a pixel count snob, 1920*1080 was non-negotiable. Since I already have a Dell XPS 13 with an 8th Gen Core i7, I figured going 3-4 generations older seemed like it would give me at least somewhat of a generational performance difference. An SSD was obviously a must, and as long as there were expansion options, RAM did not matter to me. The T450s delivered on all of these. It's got the 1920*1080 14'' IPS panel (there's also a lower resolution panel, so be sure to check you're getting the right one), a Core i5-5300U with 2 cores and 4 threads with a base frequency of 2.30GHz and a maximum boost frequency of 2.90GHz, Intel HD 5500 graphics, a 128GB SATA SSD, and 4GB of RAM. Since 4GB is a bit on the low side for me, I ordered an additional 8GB SO-DIMM right away for 35. This brought the total price for this machine to 185, which I considered acceptable. For that price, it also came with its Windows license, for whatever that's worth. I don't want to turn this into a detailed review of a laptop from 2015, but let's go over what it's like to use this machine today. The display cover is made of carbon-reinforced plastic, and the rest of magnesium. You can clearly feel this laptop is of a slightly older vintage, as it feels a bit more dinkey than I'm used to from my XPS 13 9370 and my tiny Chuwi MiniBook X (2023). It doesn't feel crappy or cheap or anything - just not as solid as you might expect from a modern machine. It's got a whole load of ports to work with, though, which is refreshing compared to the trend of today. On the left side, there's a smartcard slot, USB 3.0, mini DisplayPort, another USB 3.0, and the power connector. On the right side, there's a headphone jack, an SD card slot, another USB 3.0 port, an Ethernet jack, and a VGA port. On the bottom of the laptop is a docking port to plug it into various docking stations with additional ports and connectors. On the inside, there's a free M.2 slot (a small 2242 one). First, I eradicated Windows from the SSD because while I'm okay with an outdated laptop, I'm not okay with an outdated operating system (subscribe to our Patreon to ensure more of these top-quality jokes). After messing around with various operating systems and distributions for a while, I got back to business and installed my distribution of choice, Fedora, but I did opt for the Xfce version instead of my usual KDE one just for variety's sake. ThinkPads tend to be well-supported by Linux, and the T450s is no exception. Everything I could test - save for the smartcard reader, since I don't have a smartcard to test it with - works out of the box, and nothing required any manual configuration or tweaking to work properly. Everything from trackpad gestures to the little ThinkLight on the lid worked perfectly, without having to deal with hunting for drivers and that sort of nonsense Windows users have to deal with. This is normal for most laptops and Linux now, but it's nice to see it applies to this model as well. Using the T450s was... Uneventful. Applications open fast, there's no stutter or lag, and despite having just 2 cores and 4 threads, and a very outdated integrated GPU, I didn't really feel like I was missing out when browsing, doing some writing and translating (before I quit and made OSNews my sole job), watching video, those sorts of tasks. This isn't a powerhouse laptop for video editing, gaming, or compiling code or whatever, but for everything else, it works great. After I had set everything up the way I like, software-wise, I did do some work to make the machine a bit more pleasant to use. First and foremost, as with any laptop or PC that's a little older, I removed the heatsink assembly, cleaned off the crusty old thermal paste, and added some new, fresh paste. I then dove into the fan management, and installed zcfan, a Linux fan control daemon for ThinkPads, using its default settings, and created a systemd

Monogon OS is an open-source, secure, API-driven and minimal operating system unlike any other. It is based on Linux and Kubernetes, but with a clean userland rebuilt entirely from scratch. It is written in pure Go and eliminates decades worth of legacy code and unnecessary complexity. It runs on a fleet of bare metal or cloud machines and provides users with a hardened, production ready Kubernetes, without the overhead of traditional Linux distributions or configuration management systems. It does away with the scripting/YAML duct tape and configuration drift inherent to traditional deployments. Instead, it provides a stable API-driven platform free of vendor lock-in and with none of the drudgery. Monogon OS website This not exactly in my wheelhouse, but I'm pretty sure some of you will be all over this concept.

Since the mid-90's with the P6 micro-architecture for the Pentium Pro as the sixth-generation x86 microarchitecture, Intel has relied on the Family 6" CPU ID. From there Intel has just revved the Model number within Family 6 for each new microarchitecture/core. For example, Meteor Lake is Family 6 Model 170 and Emerald Rapids is Family 6 Model 207. This CPU ID identification is used within the Linux kernel and other operating systems for identifying CPU generations for correct handling, etc. But Intel Linux engineers today disclosed that Family 6 is coming to an end soon-ish". Michael Larabel They should revive the ix86 family name, and call the next generation i786. It sounds so much cooler, even if these names have become rather irrelevant.

The Snap Store, where containerized Snap apps are distributed for Ubuntu's Linux distribution, has been attacked for months by fake crypto wallet uploads that seek to steal users' currencies. As a result, engineers at Ubuntu's parent firm are now manually reviewing apps uploaded to the store before they are available. The move follows weeks of reporting by Alan Pope, a former Canonical/Ubuntu staffer on the Snapcraft team, who is still very active in the ecosystem. In February, Pope blogged about how one bitcoin investor lost nine bitcoins (about $490,000 at the time) by using an Exodus Wallet" app from the Snap store. Exodus is a known cryptocurrency wallet, but this wallet was not from that entity. As detailed by one user wondering what happened on the Snapcraft forums, the wallet immediately transferred his entire balance to an unknown address after a 12-word recovery phrase was entered (which Exodus tells you on support pages never to do). Kevin Purdy at Ars Tecnhica Cryptocurrency, or as I like to call it, MLMs for men, are a scammer's goldmine. It's a scam used to scam people. Add in a poorly maintained application store like Ubuntu's Snap Store, and it's dangerous mix of incompetence and scammers. I honestly thought Canonical already nominally checked the Snap Store - as one of its redeeming features, perhaps its only redeeming feature - but it turns out anyone could just upload whatever they wanted and have it appear in the store application on every Ubuntu installation. Excellent.

In the middle of the 1980s, Apple found itself with several options regarding the future of its computing platforms. The Apple II was the company's bread and butter. The Apple III was pitched as an evolution of that platform, but was clearly doomed due to hardware and software issues. The Lisa was expensive and not selling well, and while the Macintosh aimed to bring Lisa technology to the masses, sales were slow after its initial release. Those four machines are well known, but there was a fifth possibility in the mix, named the Jonathan. In his book Inventing the Future, John Buck writes about the concept, which was led by Apple engineer Jonathan Fitch starting in the fall of 1984. Stephen Hackett So apparently, the Jonathan was supposed to be a modular computer, with a backbone you could slot all kinds of upgrades in, from either Apple or third parties. These modules would add the hardware needed to run Mac OS, Apple II, UNIX, and DOS software, all on the same machine. This is an incredibly cool concept, but as we all know, it didn't pan out. The reasons are simple: this is incredibly hard to make work, especially when it comes to the software glue that would have to make it all work seamlessly. On top of that, it just doesn't sound very Apple-like to make a computer designed to run anything that isn't from Apple itself. Remember, this is still the time of Steve Jobs, before he got kicked out of the company and founded NeXT instead. According to Stephen Hackett, the project never made it beyond the mockup phase, so we don't have many details on how it was supposed to work. It does look stunning, though.

One alternative to ESXi for home users and small organizations is Proxmox Virtual Environment, a Debian-based Linux operating system that provides broadly similar functionality and has the benefit of still being an actively developed product. To help jilted ESXi users, the Proxmox team has just added a new integrated import wizard" to Proxmox that supports importing of ESXi VMs, easing the pain of migrating between platforms. Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica It's of course entirely unsurprising other projects and companies were going to try and capitalise on Broadcom's horrible management of its acquisition of VMware.

After the Windows Server 2025's launch, a Windows insider posted a screenshot on X showing Copilot running on Windows Server 2025, Build 26063.1. The admins discovered the feature in shock and wondered if it was a mistake from Microsoft's part. A month later, the same Bob Pony broke the news that most admins wanted to see: Copilot is gone in Windows Server 2025's Build 26085. Claudiu Andone This reminds of Windows Server 2012, which was based on Windows 8 and launched with a Metro user interface.

Unboxing a new gadget is always a fun experience, but it's usually marred somewhat by the setup process. Either your device has been in a box for months, or it's just now launching and ships in the box with pre-release software. Either way, the first thing you have to do is connect to Wi-Fi and wait several minutes for an OS update to download and install. The issue is so common that going through a lengthy download is an expected part of buying anything that connects to the Internet. But what if you could update the device while it's still in the box? That's the latest plan cooked up by Apple, which is close to rolling out a system that will let Apple Stores wirelessly update new iPhones while they're still in their boxes. The new system is called Presto." Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica That's a lot of engineering for a small inconvenience. Just the way I like my engineering.

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has now signed one of the strongest US right-to-repair bills into law after it passed the state legislature several weeks ago by an almost 3-to-1 margin. Oregon's SB 1596 will take effect next year, and, like similar laws introduced in Minnesota and California, it requires device manufacturers to allow consumers and independent electronics businesses to purchase the necessary parts and equipment required to make their own device repairs. Oregon's rules, however, are the first to ban parts pairing" - a practice manufacturers use to prevent replacement components from working unless the company's software approves them. These protections also prevent manufacturers from using parts pairing to reduce device functionality or performance or display any misleading warning messages about unofficial components installed within a device. Current devices are excluded from the ban, which only applies to gadgets manufactured after January 1st, 2025. Jess Weatherbed at The Verge Excellent news, and it wouldn't be the first time that one US state's strict (positive) laws end up benefiting all the other states since it's easier for corporations to just develop to the strictest state's standards and use that everywhere else (see California's car safety and emissions regulations for instance). As a European, I hope this will make it way to the European Union, as well.

lEEt/OS is a graphical shell and partially posix-compliant multitasking operating environment that runs on top of a DOS kernel. The latest version can be downloaded from this site. lEEt/OS is tested with FreeDOS 1.2 and ST-DOS, but it may also work with other DOS implementations. It can be compiled with Open Watcom compiler. 8086 binaries are also available from this site. lEEt/OS website I had never heard of lEEt/OS before, but it looks quite interesting - and the new ST-DOS kernel the developer is making further adds to its uniqueness. A very cool project I'm putting on my list of operating systems to write short first look' article about for y'all.

Probably the most confused looks I get from other developers when I discuss Windows and ARM64 is when I used the term ARM64EC". They ask is the same thing as ARM64? Is it a different instruction set than ARM64? How can you tell if an application is or ARM64 ARM64EC? This tutorial will answer those questions by de-mystifying and explaining the difference between what can be called classic ARM64" as it existed since Windows 10, and this new ARM64EC" which was introduced in Windows 11 in 2021. Darek Mihocka I'm not going to steal the article's thunder, but the short of it is that the EC' stands for Emulation Compatible', meaning it can call unmodified x86-64 code. ARM64X, meanwhile, is an extended version of Windows PE that allows both ARM64 and emulated x86-64 code to coexist in the same binary (which is not the same as a fat binary, which is an either/or situation). There is a whole lot more to this subject - and I truly mean a lot, this a monster of an in-depth article - so be sure to head on over and read it in full. You'll be busy for a while.

Swift is well-suited for creating user interfaces thanks to the clean syntax, static typing, and special features making code easier to write. Result builders, combined with Swift's closure expression syntax, can significantly enhance code readability. Adwaita for Swift leverages these Swift features to provide an intuitive interface for developing applications for the GNOME platform. The Swift blog It seems the Swift project is actively trying to move beyond being the Apple programming language'.

Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and AMD have all been pushing the idea of an AI PC" for months now as we head toward more AI-powered features in Windows. While we're still waiting to hear the finer details from Microsoft on its big plans for AI in Windows, Intel has started sharing Microsoft's requirements for OEMs to build an AI PC - and one of the main ones is that an AI PC must have Microsoft's Copilot key. Tom Warren at The Verge I lack the words in any of the languages I know to describe the utter disdain I have for this.

In an interview with Microsoft's CEO of Gaming during the annual Game Developers Conference, Spencer told Polygon about the ways he'd like to break down the walled gardens that have historically limited players to making purchases through the first-party stores tied to each console. Or, in layperson terms, why you should be able to buy games from other stores on Xbox - not just the official storefront. Spencer mentioned his frustrations with closed ecosystems, so we asked for clarity. Could he really see a future where stores like Itch.io and Epic Games Store existed on Xbox? Was it just a matter of figuring out mountains of paperwork to get there? Chris Plante at Polygon The answer is yes, Spencer claims. I don't know how realistic any of this is, but to me it makes perfect sense, and the gaming world has been moving towards it for a while now. At the moment, I'm doing something thought unthinkable until very recently: I'm playing a major Sony PlayStation exclusive, Horizon: Forbidden West, on PC, through Steam on Linux. Sony has been making its major exclusives available on Steam in recent years, and while seeing these games on Xbox might be a bit too much to ask, I wouldn't be surprised to see storefronts from companies who don't make game consoles pop up on the Xbox and PlayStation. Games have become so expensive to make that limiting them to a single console just doesn't make any commercial sense. Why limit your audience?

If you read my scoop last week, I bet you've been wondering - how well could a Snapdragon chip actually run Windows games? At the 2024 Game Developers Conference, the company claimed Arm could run those titles at close to x86/64 speed, but how fast is fast? With medium-weight games like Control and Baldur's Gate 3, it looks like the target might be: 30 frames per second at 1080p screen resolution, medium settings, possibly with AMD's FSR 1.0 spatial upscaling enabled. Sean Hollister at The Verge Those are some rough numbers for machines Qualcomm claims can run x86 games at close to full speed.

Hackaday recently published an article titled Why x86 Needs to Die" - the latest addition in a long-running RISC vs CISC debate. Rather than x86 needing to die, I believe the RISC vs CISC debate needs to die. It should've died a long time ago. And by long, I mean really long. About a decade ago, a college professor asked if I knew about the RISC vs CISC debate. I did not. When I asked further, he said RISC aimed for simpler instructions in the hope that simpler hardware implementations would run faster. While my memory of this short, ancient conversation is not perfect, I do recall that he also mentioned the whole debate had already become irrelevant by then: ISA differences were swept aside by the resources a company could put behind designing a chip. This is the fundamental reason why the RISC vs CISC debate remains irrelevant today. Architecture design and implementation matter so much more than the instruction set in play. Chips and Cheese The number of instruction sets killed by x86 is high, and the number of times people have wrongly predicted the death of x86 - most recently, after Apple announced its first ARM processors - is even higher. It seems people are still holding on to what x86 was like in the '80s and early '90s, completely forgetting that the x86 we have today is a very, very different beast. As Chips and Cheese details in this article, the differences between x86 and, say, ARM, aren't nearly as big and fundamental as people think they are. I'm a huge fan of computers running anything other than x86, not because I hate or dislike the architecture, but because I like things that are different, and the competition they bring. That's why I love POWER9 machines, and can't wait for competitive non-Apple ARM machines to come along. If you try to promote non-x86 ISAs out of hatred or dislike of x86, history shows you'll eventually lose.

FuryGpu is a real hardware GPU implemented on a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ FPGA, built on a custom PCB and connected to the host computer using PCIe. Supporting hardware features equivalent to a high-end graphics card of the mid 1990s and a full modern Windows software driver stack, it can render real games of that era at beyond real-time frame rates. FuryGpu A really cool project, undertaking by a single person - who also wrote the Windows drivers for it, which was apparently the hardest part of the project, as the announcement blog post details. Another blog post explains how the texture units work.

About a year ago I came across the Previous emulator - it appeared to be a faithful simulation of the NeXT hardware and thus capable of running NeXTStep. While including it in Infinite Mac would be scope-creep, NeXT's legacy is in many ways more relevant to today's macOS than classic Mac OS. It also helped that it's under active development by its original creator (see the epic threadin the NeXT Computers forums), and thus a modern, living codebase. Previous is the fifth emulator that I've ported to WebAssembly/Emscripten and the Infinite Mac runtime, and it's gotten easier. As I'm doing this work, I'm developing more and more empathy for those doing Mac game ports - some things are really easy and others become yak shaves due to the unintended consequences of choices made by the original developers. Previous is available on multiple platforms and has good abstractions, so overall it was a pretty pleasant experience. Mihai Parparita By porting previous to WebAssembly/Emscripten, Infinite Mac now offers access to a whole slew of NeXTSTEP releases, from the earliest known release to the last one from 1997. There's also a ton of applications added to make the experience feel more realistic. This makes Infinite Mac even more useful than it already was, ensuring it's one of the best and easiest ways to experience old macOS and now NeXTSTEP releases through virtual machines (real ones, this time), available in your browser. I'll be spending some time with these new additions for sure, since I've very little experience with NeXTSTEP other than whatever I vicariously gleamed through Steven Troughton-Smiths toots on the subject over the years. Mihai Parparita is doing incredibly important work through Infinite Mac, and he deserves credit and praise for all he's doing here.

Seven years ago, on 27 March 2017, Apple introduced one of the most fundamental changes in its operating systems since Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah was released 16 years earlier. On that day, those who updated iOS to version 10.3 had their iPhone's storage silently converted to the first release of Apple File System, APFS. Six months later, with the release of macOS 10.13 High Sierra on 25 September, Mac users followed suit. Howard Oakley The migration from HFS+ to APFS is still an amazing feat for Apple to have pulled off. Hundreds of millions devices converted from one filesystem to another, and barely anyone noticed - no matter how you look at it, that's an impressive achievement, and the engineers who made it possible deserve all the praise they're getting.

With KDE's 6th Mega Release finally out the door, let's reflect on the outgoing Plasma 5 that has served us well over the years. Can you believe it has been almost ten years since Plasma 5.0 was released? Join me on a trip down memory lane and let me tell you how it all began. This coincidentally continues pretty much where my previous retrospective blog post concluded. Kai Uwe It took them a few years after the release of Plasma 5.0, but eventually they won me over, and I'm now solid in the KDE camp, after well over a decade of either GNOME or Cinnamon. GNOME has strayed far too much away from just being a traditional desktop user interface, and Cinnamon is dragging its heels with Wayland support, but luckily KDE has spent a long time now clearing up so many of the paper cuts that used to plague them every time I tried KDE. That's all in the past now. They've done a solid job cleaning up a lot of the oddities and inconsistencies during Plasma 5's lifecycle, and I can't wait until Fedora 40 hits the streets with Plasma 6 in tow. In the desktop Linux world, I feel KDE and Qt will always play a little bit of second fiddle to the (seemingly) much more popular GNOME and GTK+, but that's okay - this kind of diversity and friendly competition is what makes each of these desktops better for their respective users. And this is the Linux world, after all - you're not tied down to anything your current desktop environment does, and you're free to switch to whatever else at a moment's notice if some new update doesn't sit well with you. I can't imagine using something like macOS or Windows where you have to just accept whatever garbage they throw at you with nowhere to go.

Following testing in Canary earlier this year, Google today announced that the Arm/Snapdragon version of Chrome for Windows is now rolling out to stable. Google says this version of Chrome is fully optimized for your PC's hardware and operating system to make browsing the web faster and smoother." People that have been testing it report significant performance improvements over the emulated version. Abner Li at 9To5Google A big Windows on Snapdragon Elite X is about to tumble through the tech media landscape, and this Chrome release fits right into the puzzle.

Today, Canonical announced the general availability of Legacy Support, an Ubuntu Pro add-on that expands security and support coverage for Ubuntu LTS releases to 12 years. The add-on will be available for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS onwards. Long term supported Ubuntu releases get five years of standard security maintenance on the main Ubuntu repository. Ubuntu Pro expands that commitment to 10 years on both the main and universe repositories, providing enterprises and end users alike access to a vast secure open source software library. The subscription also comes with a phone and ticket support tier. Ubuntu Pro paying customers can purchase an extra two years of security maintenance and support with the new Legacy Support add-on. Canonical blog Assuming all of this respects the open source licenses of the countless software packages that make up Ubuntu, this seems like a reasonable way to offer quite a long support lifecycle for those that really need it. Such support doesn't come free, and it I think it's entirely reasonable to try and get compensated for the work required in maintaining that level of support for 10 or 12 years. If you want this kind of longevity from your Linux installation without paying for it, you'll have to maintain it yourself. Seems reasonable to me.

Welcome to the 3D era! Well... sorta. Sega enjoyed quite a success with the Mega Drive so there's no reason to force developers to write 3D games right now. Just in case developers want the extra dimension, Sega adapted some bits of the hardware to enable polygon drawing as well. Hopefully, the result didn't get out of hand! Rodrigo Copetti These in-depth analyses by Copetti are always a treat, and the Saturn one is no exception.

I worked for a few years in the intersection between data science and software engineering. On the whole, it was a really enjoyable time and I'd like to have the chance to do so again at some point. One of the least enjoyable experiences from that time was to deal with big CSV exports. Unfortunately, this file format is still very common in the data science space. It is easy to understand why - it seems to be ubiquitous, present everywhere, it's human-readable, it's less verbose than options like JSON and XML, it's super easy to produce from almost any tool. What's not to like? Robin Kaveland I'm not going to pretend to be some sort of expert on this matter, but even as a casual it seems CSV isn't exactly scalable to large data sets. It seems to work great for smaller exports and imports for personal use, but any more complicated matters it seems wholly unsuited for.

Complete desktops contain all operating system components as well as Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Where possible, I have tried to include built in file transfer programs (Web Publishing Wizard, Web Folders), useful system tools (System File Checker, System Restore) and certain wizards (Network Setup Wizard, Internet Connection Wizard). As a result, some of the desktops are quite large and can take some time to load. VirtualDesktop.org These are easily loaded virtual machines inside your browser, for various versions of Windows and macOS. There's more and more of these websites now, and while I don't use them for anything, they're still quite handy in a pinch. And let's face it - it's still kind of magical to see entire operating systems running inside a browser. The website also has several virtual machines without applications, and application-specific virtual machines, too, focused on browsers and mail clients.

In Google's First Tensor Processing Unit - Origins, we saw why and how Google developed the first Tensor Processing Unit (or TPU v1) in just 15 months, starting in late 2013. Today's post will look in more detail at the architecture that emerged from that work and at its performance. The Chip Letter People forget that Google is probably one of the largest hardware manufacturers out of the major technology companies. Sadly, we rarely get good insights into what, exactly, these machines are capable of, as they rarely make it to places like eBay so people can disseminate them.

Most of the Linux world has moved to systemd by now, but there are still quite a few popular other init systems, too. One of those is the venerable SysV init, which saw a brand new release yesterday. The biggest improvement also seems like it'll enable a match made in heaven: SysVinit, but with musl. On Linux distributions which use the musl C library (instead of glibc) we can now build properly. Specifically, the hddown helper program now builds on musl C systems. SysVinit 3.09 release notes It's important init systems like SysV init and runit don't just die off or lose steam because of the systemd juggernaut, as competition, alternatives, and different ideas are what makes open source what it is.

Version 1.06 is a more modest release than 1.05 or 1.04. But I think that's okay. v1.06 includes one new Application, three new Utilities and new features and improvements to several existing Apps and Utilities, and even some new low-level features in the KERNAL and libraries. This latest release makes use of a combination of all of the above to provide a handy new feature for users and a potentially powerful and useful feature for developers, when put to creative uses at a low-level. Discussions of just this nature have already been spurred on in the developer forums on the C64 OS Discord server. That feature is: Hidden Files. Greg Nacu C64 OS is a marvel of engineering, and what the developers are managing to squeeze out of the C64 is stunning. This article delves deep into how hidden files were implemented in the latest release.

Windows 11 has done a lot to update and modernize long-neglected parts of Windows' user interface, including many Settings menus and venerable apps like Notepad and Paint. But if you dig deep enough, you'll still find parts of the user interface that look and work like they did in the mid-'90s, either for compatibility reasons or because no one ever thought to go back and update them. Former Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer shared some history about one of those finely aged bits: the Format dialogue box, which is still used in fully updated Windows 11 installs to this day when you format a disk using Windows Explorer. Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica There's a lot of old stuff left inside Windows, which is basically a layer cake of various user interface themes Microsoft fancied over the years. I delved into the history of another old Windows program 9 years ago: the Character Map.

It turns out Apple, Facebook, and Google were not as clever with their malicious compliance with the European Union's DMA as they thought they were, as the European Commission has opened investigations into their compliance plans. Especially Apple, who has been most public about its malicious compliance, seems to be the target. Today, the Commission has opened non-compliance investigations under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) into Alphabet's rules on steering in Google Play and self-preferencing on Google Search, Apple's rules on steering in the App Store and the choice screen for Safari and Meta's pay or consent model". The Commission suspects that the measures put in place by these gatekeepers fall short of effective compliance of their obligations under the DMA. In addition, the Commission has launched investigatory steps relating to Apple's new fee structure for alternative app stores and Amazon's ranking practices on its marketplace. Finally, the Commission has ordered gatekeepers to retain certain documents to monitor the effective implementation and compliance with their obligations. European Commission press release This is entirely unsurprising. Google's and Facebook's compliance plans were less scrutinised in the press, but all still raised questions about whether they would pass mustard. Apple's plans, meanwhile, were universally seen as deeply malicious and not compliant, and it seems the European Commission agrees. Apple's continuous wild, flailing attacks on the EU and the DMA certainly aren't helping, either. There's no denying Apple's behaviour has been deeply unprofessional and anti-European Union, which contrasts strongly with how Apple and Tim Cook operate in China, where they face much stricter rules than they do in the EU. Tim Cook is currently in China praising and buttering up to the Chinese totalitarian regime, while the company has been attacking the European Union and DMA almost non-stop for months now. It really shows where Apple's priorities lie. Meanwhile, Facebook's pay-for-privacy model was always going to be a hard sell at 10 a month, and as such, the company already announced it was going to cut that cost in half. Google's plans are a bit more nebulous, since it's a bit more difficult to see tangible results from things like search rankings, but it seems here, too, the European Commission has its worries about compliance. The European Commission intends to complete its investigations within a year, and if found in violation of the law, companies can be fined for up to 10% of their worldwide turnover, which can grow up to 20% for repeated infringements.

Update: a short notice on the blog post now reads that Floorp's code is now fully public again." It seems the developer has reversed course, which is good news. The original article continues below. Recently, a few people suggested I give the browser Floorp a try, a Firefox fork with some additional UI changes and additions. Since it was based on Firefox ESR, however, I saw no point in even trying it, because I prefer to be on the latest Firefox release. It seems I accidentally made the right choice, since yesterday the developers behind Floorp decided to take their modifications closed source. The appearance of Floorp forks - which, may I remind you, is a fork itself - seems to be the cause. I know it's not nice of me to say, but Floorp has been in too much demand. It am surprise to me that companies and organizations would fork a fork that I had created when I was still a teenager, and at first I was happy about it, but it was not beneficial to me, and on the contrary, it was mentally draining. There were forks that wanted to hide the fact that they were Floorp forks, forks that did not want to contribute to Floorp at all, forks that used the code for life and just changed the name of Floorp, and many other forks were born. Floorp blog It seems the developer of Floorp is rather young, and started the project as a teenager, and as such, I don't think we should be too harsh on them - I did some dumb things as a teenager - but complaining about forks of your own fork seems a bit disingenuous, regardless of how young and inexperienced you are. I understand seeing your work forked into competing browsers can be frustrating, but it's a core part of the open source world, especially if you yourself owe your product to forking, too.

While app icons will likely remain locked to an invisible grid system on the Home Screen, to ensure there is some uniformity, our sources say that users will be able to arrange icons more freely on iOS 18. For example, we expect that the update will introduce the ability to create blank spaces, rows, and columns between app icons. Joe Rossignol at MacRumors It's 2024 and iOS' Springboard is slowly catching up to the Palm OS launcher. I'm drowning in the innovation here.

For the past week I have been configuring hyprland and using it as my daily driver. Coming from major Desktop Environments like KDE or Gnome, this was definitely quite challanging, specially when implementing features that we take it for granted on these DEs, like screen sharing or screenshot annotating. In this post I will be going through all the tools and scripts I have been creating to configure this amazing Window Manager to my liking. xd1.dev Like I mentioned in my MNT Reform review, I'm not a fan of these build your own desktop environment" window managers and related tools, but there's no denying they're quite popular. This article is a good introduction to hyprland, one of the more popular window managers of this genre.

I saw this on a Linus Tech Tips video today, and it's pretty neat: the Khadas Mind is a tiny computer powered by an Intel Core i5-1340P or Core i7-1360P, but it has a souped-up PCIe connector at the bottom that allows you to hook it up to all kinds of other devices, like a graphics card, a dock, and so on. It looks slick and quite user-friendly, and according to the LTT video, the company intends to release the specs for the connector so that third parties can hook into it as well, but a promise is just that - a promise. It's way too early to tell if this will go anywhere - past attempts would suggest that sadly, it won't - but that doesn't mean it's not an incredibly awesome and seemingly workable implementation of the modular PC idea.

I hope what you take away from this post is that while Apple Pay is a great way to pay for things and that Apple did a great job mainstreaming digital wallets like this, what they do is not unique in the industry. DPANs are great for making it harder to track one person's purchases across multiple merchants and they make customers less at risk in the event of a data breach of payment card info. Matt Birchler The gist of the article is that all the things Apple claims are unique about Apple Pay are really not unique at all, and quite a few things Apple touts are just flat-out lies, such as merchants being unable to know what you buy or people being unable to track you when you use Apple Pay. Other digital wallets, from Google, Samsung, and others, work in the exact same way Apple Pay does, and even banks and similar companies implement their payment systems the way Apple Pay does. It's a case study in how Apple's marketing and PR bloggers manage to perpetuate a myth solely because so many people just assume it must be true. Apple wouldn't lie, right?

I've got two bits of related news that will affect the future of OSNews. The first bit of news kind of led to the second bit of news. You don't have to care much about former, but the latter will be important for where OSNews will be going from here on out. First, after 14 years, I've effectively quit my job as a translator - I am self-employed so there's no dramatic clearing of my desk of being led out by security, which is probably a little bit of a letdown to some of you. The translation industry is in the process of collapsing - you know why - and I've been feeling the squeeze for a while now, and I like going out on my own terms. I've known this day would come, and I'm not sad about it. My motto: it is what it is. Of course, this meant I had to think of what to do next. Well, I have decided to work on OSNews full-time. This is risky, scary, and I'm absolutely terrified of what this will mean. Right now, my OSNews income - ads plus Patreon - does not even remotely come close to what I earned as a translator, and as any translator will tell you, translating isn't exactly a cornucopia either. This means I've got some serious work ahead of me to change that. After talking things over with David, OSNews' owner who takes care of the commercial/advertisement side, we've already taken a few steps. First, we've switched hosting providers and saved considerably on our hosting costs in the process. Second, David changed advertising partners to one that will most likely yield us some better rates, but since I don't know much about that side of OSNews - as it should be - I can't comment much on it. There are two main ways in which I can increase OSNews' revenue, and that is by growing our readership, and by giving people more reasons to become a Patreon, make individual donations, or buy our merch. In other words, you can expect more original articles so that people will want to keep coming back, and possibly support me financially because they like what I do. A third avenue for revenue I'm exploring is sponsorships - this is a longer-term project, and I'm approaching and talking to several (tech) companies about this. If you happen to work for a company who would be a good fit for an OSNews weekly sponsorship, feel free to contact me for more information. The end goal: have OSNews be entirely funded by readers and sponsors, and remove all regular advertising. This all sounds great, but there is a dark side to this news, too. If all of this fails, if I am unable to attract more readers and make my work for OSNews financially sustainable, I'll have to find work elsewhere - and that would mean the end of OSNews. I'm not trying to be alarmist or scare you; I just want to be as honest and realistic as possible about where we stand. Anyway, this is a big deal for me. I've really only ever had one job, and that's being a translator, a job I am trained for with two university degrees to show for it. My only other job was a teenage thing where I worked at a hardware store (think hammers and screws, not computers) for eight years. I don't like taking risks with these sorts of matters, so I'm absolutely terrified, and while I believe there's a sustainable income hiding in this ol' website, it's not always clear how to get at it. Anyway, want to become a Patreon? Or a sponsor? Pretty please? Now would be kind of a really good time to do so.

The foundational tenet of the Cult of Mac" is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur. Call it Apple exceptionalism" - the idea that Apple, alone among the Big Tech firms, is virtuous, and therefore its conduct should be interpreted through that lens of virtue. The wellspring of this virtue is conveniently nebulous, which allows for endless goal-post shifting by members of the Cult of Mac when Apple's sins are made manifest. Cory Doctorow An absolutely brilliant response to the DoJ lawsuit from Cory Doctorow. You notice this Apple exceptionalism" a lot right now because of the new laws in the EU and now the lawsuit by the US DoJ. Apple products being better is posited as a fact, a law of the universe, and as such, any claims, either through lawsuits or legislation, that Apple is doing something wrong, illegal, or anticompetitive are by definition false. Things that, according to them, make Apple products superior" can simply not be illegal. You also notice this a lot when it comes to the existence of Android. People who don't like being locked in or have issues with Apple's behaviour can just switch to Android, right? The thought that there are real, monetary costs to switching from iOS to Android - costs driven up by Apple's very behaviour - is irrelevant to them, because in the eyes of the tech pundit, everyone's rich. What we'll be discovering over the course of the DoJ lawsuit - a course that will take us years - is that the general public cares a lot less about Apple as a company than Apple tech pundits think it does. People have iPhones not because they love Apple, but because their previous phone was an iPhone, because of network effects, or a bit of both. I doubt the average (in this case) American gives a rat's ass about Apple, and are much more worried about the fact they have to live paycheck-to-paycheck in a dysfunctional shell of a democracy while being told the economy is doing just great.

The Department of Justice's antitrust division has come into its own, having filed its third tech monopoly lawsuit in four years. The accumulated experience shows up in the complaint, according to antitrust experts who spoke with The Verge about the complaint filed Thursday accusing Apple of violating antitrust law. The DOJ describes a sweeping arc of behaviors by Apple, arguing that it adds up to a pattern of illegal monopoly maintenance. Rather than focusing on two or three illegal acts, the complaint alleges that Apple engages in a pattern of behaviors that further entrench consumers into their ecosystem and make it harder to switch, even in the face of high prices and degraded quality. Lauren Feiner at The Verge It's been somewhat entertaining seeing Apple fanatics claim the complaint is bad, horrible, has no merit, has no chance in court, and that the DoJ has zero clue what it's doing - while actual experts are actually positively surprised by how the complaint seems better than they expected. I wonder whose judgement to trust more.

Federal investigators have ordered Google to provide information on all viewers of select YouTube videos, according to multiple court orders obtained by Forbes. Privacy experts from multiple civil rights groups told Forbes they think the orders are unconstitutional because they threaten to turn innocent YouTube viewers into criminal suspects. Thomas Brewster at Forbes United States law enforcement has been asking Google who watches certain YouTube videos, covering as many as 30,000 people per video. They wanted names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google accounts who had watched a video within a certain week's timeframe, and the IP addresses of everyone who watched the video without a Google account. That's an absolute crapton of data, all because they suspected one person of a money-laundering scheme. And this is just one example. Forbes could not determine if Google complied with the requests, but it does highlight the dangers of having so much data on one place.

So looking back, it is obvious that neither Atari or Commodore would really be able to succeed in the long-term, although perhaps one of them could have become the 3rd also-ran". For a while, Atari really thought they could be that third choice and some of their late-model computers have some impressive innovations. With that preamble over with, let's talk about the last Atari computer: the Falcon030. Paul Lefebvre In my mind, Atari is a game and console company, not a computer company - I don't have any sale figures, but I feel like the Atari general computers weren't quite as popular in The Netherlands as they were in some other places.

Picotron is a Fantasy Workstation for making pixelart games, animations, music, demos and other curiosities. It has a toy operating system designed to be a cosy creative space, but runs on top of Windows, MacOS or Linux. Picotron apps can be made with built-in tools, and shared with other users in a special 256k png cartridge format. Picotron website Picotron is very similar to PICO-8, but more powerful and with a few additional features - it's actually made by the same people as PICO-8. It also contains a small, toy' operating system to serve as a workspace, everything makes use of Lua, and any applications made with it can be shared using a special 256k PNG cartridge format. It's currently in alpha, and cost $11.99, and uses the early Minecraft model of a one-time purchase for access to all future updates. The FAQ has tons more information. It looks incredibly neat. I don't have much use for it, but I'm interested to see what people with actual skills will make with it.

Android 15 adds UI elements to ensure a consistent user experience across the satellite connectivity landscape." A system-level Auto-connected to satellite" notification conveys how You can send and receive messages without a mobile or Wi-Fi network" with a shortcut to Open Messages" or get more information. Meanwhile, note the status bar icon at the right. Speaking of Google Messages, Android 15 provides support for SMS/ MMS applications as well as preloaded RCS applications to use satellite connectivity for sending and receiving messages." Other apps will also be able to detect when a device is connected to a satellite, giving them more awareness of why full network services may be unavailable." Abner Li at 9To5Google 9To5Google also has a list of all the new features in this Developer Preview with copious amounts of screenshots.

The nonprofit organization that supports the Firefox web browser said today it is winding down its new partnership with Onerep, an identity protection service recently bundled with Firefox that offers to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites. The move comes just days after a report by KrebsOnSecurity forced Onerep's CEO to admit that he has founded dozens of people-search networks over the years. On March 14, KrebsOnSecurity published a story showing that Onerep's Belarusian CEO and founder Dimitiri Shelest launched dozens of people-search services since 2010, including a still-active data broker called Nuwber that sells background reports on people. Onerep and Shelest did not respond to requests for comment on that story. Brian Krebs It's good that Mozilla has immediately responded properly to this discovery, but it does make one wonder - how did this happen in the first place? It seems like a service provider like this would be thoroughly vetted, especially considering Mozilla's stated mission and types of users. My worries about Firefox' future are no secret, and this gaffe certainly doesn't help reduce my worries. It's clear something went horribly wrong here, and my hope is that it's a random fluke, and not a sign of more structural problems in Mozilla's vetting process for potential partners.

Haiku published its latest monthly activity report, and this one is a veritable grab bag of a whole bunch of small fixes, improvements, and changes - there's really no tent pole features or major improvements this month. Going through the list, the items that jump out at me are updated ping and traceroute applications and work on improving FFmpeg, but there's so much more in there, so be sure to read the whole thing. At the end of the report, the Haiku project states about a possible fifth beta release: A few more tickets in the milestone were fixed, including the ICU upgrade" one, but a few were also added (some migrated from HaikuPorts that turned out to be regressions in Haiku or its buildtools, etc.). Haiku Activity and Contract Report, February 2024 So, beta 5 is not quite ready for prime time just yet, but it feels like it's getting closer.

Switch emulator Suyu-a fork of the Nintendo-targeted and now-defunct emulation project Yuzu-has been taken down from GitLab following a DMCA request Thursday. But the emulation project's open source files remain available on a self-hosted git repo on the Suyu website, and recent compiled binaries remain available on an extant GitLab repo. While the DMCA takedown request has not yet appeared on GitLab's public repository of such requests, a GitLab spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the project was taken down after the site received notice from a representative of the rightsholder." GitLab has not specified who made the request or how they represented themselves; a representative for Nintendo was not immediately available to respond to a request for comment. Kyle Orland at Ars Technica Self-hosting the code repository and binaries is probably the only way the Switch emulator can continue to reasonably exist. The issue with Switch emulation seems to be that the device is current, popular, and still makes endless amounts of money for Nintendo; it's very different from SNES or Mega Drive emulation, to name a few examples. While I personally don't think that should make Switch emulation off-limits or any less valid than emulating older systems, I can see how it would draw the ire of Nintendo more readily.