OSnews

We're excited to announce that Windows has taken a significant step forward in accessibility by supporting the use of hearing aids equipped with the latest Bluetooth(R)Low Energy Audio (LE Audio)technology. Customers who use these new hearing aids are now able to directly pair, stream audio, and take calls on their Windows PCs with LE Audio support. This feature is available on Windows devices with our recently announced Bluetooth(R) LE Audio support, which will be a growing market of devices in the coming months. In upcoming flights, we will be introducing additional capabilities to the hearing aids experience on Windows, such as controlling audio presets directly within Windows settings.Stay tuned for more details about these new capabilities as they roll out. Excellent news for people who manage their hearing problems with hearing aids. The fact it's taken the industry this long to realise the potential of connecting hearing aides to computers and phones is surprising, but regulation and Bluetooth's reputation probably played a role in that. Regardless, this is a great step by Microsoft, and I hope other platforms follow suit.

Out of 72 benchmarks ran in total on both operating systems with the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4, Ubuntu 23.10 was the fastest about 64% of the time. If taking the geometric mean of all the benchmark results, Ubuntu 23.10 comes out to being 10% faster than the stock Windows 11 Pro install as shipped by Lenovo for this AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U laptop. I recently bought a laptop, and the stock Windows installation - free of OEM crapware, which was a welcome surprise - opened applications and loaded webpages considerably slower than Fedora KDE did. This has not always been the case, and I'm pleasantly surprised that while the desktop Linux world has focused a lot on performance, Microsoft was busy making Windows even less pleasant than it already was. I wouldn't be surprised if across all price/performance levels, Linux is faster and snapper than Windows - except maybe at the absolute brand-new high-end, since AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA entirely understandably focus on Windows performance first.

Today we're rolling out new accessibility features and updates that make accomplishing daily tasks faster and easier - like taking selfies, getting walking directions or searching the web. We recently launched Lookout image Q&A mode and accessibility updates on Android 14 and Wear OS 4. Now we have even more accessible features across our products that are built with and for people with disabilities. Accessibility is so often overlooked, or underreported, and I hope I can start changing that a little bit by paying more attention to it.

Frasier Fantasy is a loving tribute to the show, Frasier," in turn-based RPG form. Filled with Easter Eggs and callbacks, this is the game for anyone wondering if Eddie ever blinked first. Yes, a fan-made Game Boy Color game where you play as Frasier Crane. I can't believe someone went through the arduous process of making this, but I'm glad they did. This is absolutely brilliant.

Have you ever wanted to read 69 pages of in-depth information about the security frameworks in Android, past to present to future? Now's your chance. To share and document the latest Android security capabilities, we've published an update to the Android Security Paper. The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the platform's built-in, proactive security across hardware, anti-exploitation, Google Security Services and the range of management APIs available for businesses and governments alike. You might want some coffee to prevent dozing off.

Storing data on glass might sound futuristic, but it's a concept that dates back to the 19th century when single photographic negatives were preserved on panes of glass. Fast forward to today, technology has remarkably expanded the storage capabilities of this sustainable material. A small sheet of glass can now hold several terabytes of data, enough to store approximately 1.75 million songs or 13 years' worth of music. Elire, a sustainability-focused venture group, has collaborated with Microsoft Research's Project Silica team to harness this technology for their Global Music Vault in Svalbard, Norway. Using silica-based glass plates, they're creating a durable archive that is not only resistant to electromagnetic pulses and extreme temperatures but also environmentally friendly. This vault will complement repositories like the Global Seed Vault and the Arctic World Archive, offering a comprehensive sanctuary for musical heritage-from classical operas to modern hits and indigenous compositions. Looking to the future, Elire plans to expand this enduring musical repository by establishing accessible locations worldwide, inviting the public to interact with this extensive and ever-growing archive. There are so many avenues of study and research that we haven't fully explored yet, that could lead to revolutions, big and small, in how we do even relatively basic things like store data. This project reminds me of the data rods the Cardassians use, making this yet another example of reality chasing Star Trek.

This is wild.

It doesn't have a name yet, but Qualcomm says it's developing a RISC-V Snapdragon Wear" chip in collaboration with Google. The company says it plans to commercialize the RISC-V based wearables solution globally including the US." For Google and Qualcomm, this chip represents everyone's first swing at a commercial RISC-V Android project, and as far as we can tell, it's the first announced mass-market RISC-V Android chip ever. Qualcomm says the groundwork it and Google lay out will help pave the way for more products within the Android ecosystem to take advantage of custom CPUs that are low power and high performance." This is the biggest endorsement of RISC-V yet, and could catapult the platform to mainstream popularity pretty quickly. I do hope Qualcomm isn't going to wrap their chip in a load of proprietary nonsense making them needlessly complex to support now and in the future, but I won't be surprised if that hope turns out to be futile.

Many developers believe creating apps for Windows on Arm is difficult, but developing for Arm is easier than you think, and Microsoft is here to help! It is my pleasure to announce a new App Assure Arm Advisory Service to help developers build Arm-optimized apps. This service is in addition to our existing promise: your apps will run on Windows on Arm, and if you encounter any issues, Microsoft will help you remediate them. Most apps just work under emulation, and developers can port their apps to run natively with minimal effort. Anything to increase the adoption of ARM by Windows so that we finally get the ARM laptops Linux OEMs seem incapable or unwilling to make.

A new OpenBSD release means a ton of new features, and OpenBSD 7.4 is no different. It adds a VirtIO GPU driver, built-in leak detection for malloc, support for AMD processor microcode updates, and a whole lot more. If you want the really detailed list of changes, hop on over to the changelog, and OpenBSD users will already know how to update.

But thanks to all those other cyberdogs, Apple's own Cyberdog - a seemingly ordinary web browser and Internet suite with some unusual capabilities - has since slid into search engine obscurity. Apple had some big plans for it, though, and even wanted to give developers a way to develop their own components they could run inside of it. Not just plugins, either: we're talking viewers, UI elements and even entire protocol handlers, implemented using Apple's version of OpenDoc embedding. The Apple of the '90s is a treasure trove of weird stuff and random nonsense that never made it anywhere, and I'm always here for it.

The build has added a new separate System Components" section in the Windows 11 Settings under the System" menu. When one launches this System Components option, all the system applications appear under this section. This is a nice change, as it will make it easier to remove some of the garbage that comes with Windows.

In certain versions of Windows 10, you may receive a notification with a warning about Microsoft-verified apps when you run the Firefox installer. This is just so transparently anti-user.

Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: The business model that Google had broke the internet." He said search results had become plagued with clickbait" to keep people addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible". Information online is buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff", Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can sell more adverts", fuelled by Google's technology. Anyone who has tried to find anything on Google in recent years knows that Suleyman is 100% correct. Google's search results have become so bad because website makers play the SEO game, and that means creating content that Google's algorithm likes - but, and here's the kicker, what Google's algorithm likes, is not really what people like. Writing an article to please a computer is entirely different from writing an article to please a human. There are very clear and well-understood and thoroughly studied rules about writing in a way that makes things easy to read, but Google's algorithm doesn't optimise for that. And now AI" is being trained on this crap content, so that they will also produce crap content. We're not far away from a future where bots are writing content for other bots that teach other bots to write content for bots. In fact, that future may already be here, judging by some of the style of writing I've been seeing even on otherwise venerable outlets. This is also why so many websites have started posting basic, simple how-to articles. You see stuff like How do I move my apps on an iPhone?" or How do I delete a folder in Windows?" or The best neckband headphones of 2023" all over the place now, even on websites where they clearly don't belong and don't fit the audience, not just on content farms - these articles are not designed for readers, they're designed to catch Google search queries and generate traffic. It must be absolutely soul-crushing and mind-numbing to write stuff like that and optimise it for SEO, but you know - fish' gotta swim, bird's gotta eat. Here's a little inside hockey for you: on several occasions over the past year or so, both OSNews as a whole, and me individually, have been approached by serious parties to effectively turn OSNews into one of those content farms. Some have even tried to get me to write such content" for their own content farms. Clearly, we've never accepted such offers - I'm no cheap date - but the pressure is there, and not everyone can resist. It's why so many tech websites that used to have a clear identity and tone have become so much more bland and repetitive. They are all tiny cogs in massive content networks now, with their original stated goals and interests shoved to the wayside - all to chase the SEO. We've clearly not yet fallen victim to this - OSNews is still just me posting news - but that also means we're not making any money in the ways other tech websites do, and in fact, why we're not making enough to keep things going without OSNews' owner footing the bill out of his own pocket. That's why I've been more active and persistent in promoting our Patreon, Ko-Fi, merch store, and Liberapay, since it allows us to not worry about the financials as much. It always feels awkward to do, but I also realise that if I want OSNews to keep going for another 25 years, that's really the only thing I can do. Because Google has thoroughly ruined every other avenue for websites like ours to make money. I'm so sorry for the headline.

This is a big shift from the Google of old. People in this industry talk, even when they work for the companies that make these products. Previously, Google was very cautious about doing anything that would create a rift between itself and all the vendors that made Android what it is today. Very little was held back because Google needed to keep Samsung happy, and Samsung wouldn't be happy if a cool new Android thing didn't work on the next Galaxy phone. Now Google is building all these cool things but calling them Pixel features. Features that will probably never come to a Galaxy phone or any other brand of phone. And it's building the hardware to make them even better and to unleash even cooler things in the future. Things that are Pixel features. Things that will never be on a Galaxy phone. You can't even really call Android an open source mobile operating system anymore at this point, and it seems the latest few Pixels are really starting to drive the point home that for Google, Android is not really their mobile brand anymore - it's Pixel. We'll see how far they're willing to take this, but I wouldn't be surprised if they've barely even started. What's the life expectancy of AOSP?

Window Maker Live (wmlive) is an installable Linux live CD/ISO, and is based mostly on the recently released Bookworm" branch of Debian Linux. It relies on the extensively preconfigured Window Maker window manager as its default graphical user interface. It can also be considered as an alternative installation medium for Debian/Bookworm. As such, wmlive is fully compatible with the official Debian/Bookworm repositories for security updates and bug fixes. We're not a Linux distribution website, but I do like to highlight the ones that are doing something different. While Window Maker can be installed on pretty much anything that pulsates electricity, I always prefer to have a preconfigured experience with these less popular environments, if only to get a better idea of what veteran users like. Distributions such as these are an excellent way of doing that. So, if you've always wanted to try Window Maker - here's a good option.

In case you're wondering why you can't download the latest Ubuntu desktop version that was released earlier this week - it seems to have a bit of a rogue translation issue. A community contributor submitted offensive Ukrainian translations to a public, third party online service that we use to provide language support for the Ubuntu Desktop installer. Around three hours after the release of Ubuntu 23.10 this fact was brought to our attention and we immediately removed the affected images. After completing initial triage, we believe that the incident only impacts translations presented to a user during installation through the Live CD environment (not an upgrade). During installation the translations are resident in memory only and are not propagated to the disk. If you have upgraded to Ubuntu Desktop 23.10 from a previous release, then you are not affected by this issue. That's the difference between volunteer translations nobody checks, and proper translations that go through an extensive review process. As a translator - pay for your translations, and shit like this does not happen. Period.

Wayland is all the rage those days. Distributions left and right switch to it, many readers of my previous article on writing a X11 GUI from scratch in x86_64 assembly asked for a follow-up article about Wayland, and I now run Waland on my desktop. So here we go, let's write a (very simple) GUI program with Wayland, without any libraries, this time in C. In case you're bored this weekend.

The primary new feature of this latest release is this one: Block cloning is a facility that allows a file (or parts of a file) to be cloned", that is, a shallow copy made where the existing data blocks are referenced rather than copied. Later modifications to the data will cause a copy of the data block to be taken and that copy modified. This facility is used to implement reflinks" or file-level copy-on-write". Many common file copying programs, including newer versions of /bin/cp on Linux, will try to create clones automatically. There's many more new features and fixes, of course, so head on over to the release page for more information.

Suppose, hypothetically, that you have some DNS servers that are exposed to the Internet behind an OpenBSD PF-based firewall. Since you're a sensible person, you have various rate limits set in your DNS servers to prevent or at least mitigate various forms of denial of service attacks. One day, your DNS servers become extremely popular for whatever reason, your rate limits kick in, and your firewall abruptly stops allowing new connections in or out. What on earth happened? It's a quirk of PF in OpenBSD, and this post provides more details and possible mitigations.

Several years ago, Google introduced Discover as a feature of Google Search on mobile devices. This feature populates content related to a user's interests, based on their Web and App Activity. The Google Discover feed is displayed under the search box in Google's mobile apps and on the left-most pane of the Home screens on some Android devices. However, Google has now begun testing the Discover feed on the desktop version of Google.com for a select group of users. The same feed displayed on mobile devices is now appearing below the search box on desktops. The first thing I do whenever I see anything like this is turn it off, run for the hills, or both. Google's home page has always remained fairly the same over the decades, even though it's some of the most prime real estate on the web. Seeing them fill it up with useless news stories and related nonsense seems like just another step along the path towards full Yahooification of Google.

Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They're pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they're so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don't want you to scroll! Ah", they say, that's what the scroll wheel is for". My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time. Hidden, thin scrollbars are one of the many scourges of modern UI design. I'm glad more and more environments are at least giving users the option of enabling persistent scrollbars again, but more work is needed here to swing that pendulum back.

In the release notes for the latest Windows 11 Insider Build, there's more notes about how Windows in the EU/EEA is diverging more and more from Windows for the rest of the world. In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows will now require consent to share data between Windows and other signed-in Microsoft services. You will see some Windows features start to check for consent now, with more being added in future builds. Without consent to share data between Windows and other signed-in Microsoft services, some functionality in Windows features may be unavailable, for example certain types of file recommendations under Recommended" on the Start menu. No recommendations in the Start menu. O, woe is me.

Patents are thought of by some as hardware focused and used by the big guys to intimidate with petty lawsuits. In reality, of course, patents are used for much more. They are used to help secure financing, attract M&A interest, create partnerships, and more. From 2007 to 2011, a particularly interesting patent lawsuit took place that showcases just how strategic patents can be. i4i Limited, a Canadian company, sued Microsoft over a patent it owned relating to custom XML encoding, which Microsoft used in Word. In the end, Microsoft lost and had to pay $200 million in damages and was nearly restricted from selling Word over a feature used by almost none of its users. It is a fascinating tale of how software patents used to work, especially as they are coming back into vogue. I mean, I won't shed a tear for Microsoft in this case, but it does highlight just how ridiculous software patents are.

This month, more than three dozen victims allegedly terrorized by stalkers using Apple AirTags have joined a class-action lawsuit filed in a California court last December against Apple. They alleged in an amended complaint that, partly due to Apple's negligence, AirTags have become one of the most dangerous and frightening technologies employed by stalkers" because they can be easily, cheaply, and covertly used to determine real-time location information to track victims." Since the lawsuit was initially filed in 2022, plaintiffs have alleged that there has been an explosion of reporting" showing that AirTags are frequently being used for stalking, including a spike in international AirTags stalking cases and more than 150 police reports in the US as of April 2022. More recently, there were 19 AirTags stalking cases in one US metropolitan area-Tulsa, Oklahoma-alone, the complaint said. Consequences have been as severe as possible: multiple murders have occurred in which the murderer used an AirTag to track the victim," their complaint alleged. One plaintiff from Indiana, LaPrecia Sanders, lost her son after his girlfriend allegedly used an AirTag to track his movements and then followed him to a bar and ran him over with her car, killing him at the scene." It's almost as if selling cheap trackers and turning every iPhone into a tracking device was a terrible idea. If only the creators had talked to any woman, ever.

Summarising Ubuntu 23.10 in just one word is tricky, but refinement' feels an apt choice. GNOME 45 brings a bevvy of buffs to the core desktop experience; improved window tiling; a sharper-looking web-browser; a pair of brand-new Flutter-based apps; and a colossal change to the amount of software preinstalled in new Ubuntu installations. Foundationally, Ubuntu 23.04 runs on Linux kernel 6.5, ships Mesa 23.2 graphics drivers (with in-distro access to proprietary NVIDIA drivers for those who need them), and updates the tooling, toolchains, and programming packages devs need. The distribution you won't be using directly.

Linux is an operating system, similar to Windows, but with many different versions due to the nature of being open source and fully customizable. To install Linux, you must choose an install method and choose a Linux distribution. So that's a thing.

System76, the leading US-based Linux computer and keyboard manufacturer, made several new changes to their desktop line in order to optimize AI workloads and other fields reliant on heavy component use. The main focus: An airflow optimization that prevents throttling, putting their desktops at the top of performance charts. A new starter desktop, Thelio Spark, will also debut as a productivity desktop for everyday users. System76 seems to have redesigned the thermal solution on the machines, and judging by the various photos I've seen on Mastodon, they look good. System76 also sells the cases for the Thelio separately - they're slightly different, though - and the company is sending me that case for review, and I'm curious to finally take a closer look. The Thelio Spark, the new kid in town, brings the Thelio line to a more affordable audience, with more affordable specifications. Of course, you're always going to be paying a prebuilt tax, as well as the custom case tax, but if you want to ensure a plug-and-play Linux experience that isn't just parts in a random case you can get anywhere else, there aren't a lot of other options in the market.

Cold War-era computing has a poor reputation. The picture is one of a landscape littered with uninspired attempts to copy American IBM PCs, British ZX Spectrums, and other Western computers. But then there was Yugoslavia's Galaksija, a very inspired bid to put a computer into the hands of regular comrades. The Galaksija is a Z80-based, 8-bit DIY machine, cleverly designed so that its bill of materials meshed exactly with what a Yugoslavian was able to import from Western Europe. During its brief heyday, thousands were built, leading to commercially assembled Galaksijas finding their way into homes and schools across the country. And now you can try this scrappy machine for yourself. There's a huge world of computing to discover in former USSR countries, former USSR satellite states, and other countries that delicately straddled the west and east such as former Yugoslavia, many of which most people in the west have never heard of. While many of them may not have been competitive with what the Americans and Europeans were building, that doesn't mean they're not interesting or that there's nothing to learn from the approaches the engineers took.

Dread' has been featured many times on Indie Retro News, as with every new update the Amiga 500 version looked better than ever with fabulous new textures and new zones to visit. Well if you're looking for more gaming news on this upcoming first person shooter, we have not only been informed that a new demo has been made available, but the latest footage and detailed press release shows that John is true to his word in bringing a Doom-like experience to the Amiga as the holy-grail of Amiga gaming! So without further-ado, here's the latest blurb about this incredible looking game. I can't believe they manage to squeeze this out of an A1200, let alone an A500. This is some serious wizardry.

Jason Snell: It's incredibly frustrating. This is my software, running on my computer, yet there are moments when it feels like Apple thinks it's really in charge. It needs to back off. He's so close.

Microsoft has announced it's removing VBScript from future Windows releases. VBScript is being deprecated. In future releases of Windows, VBScript will be available as a feature on demand before its removal from the operating system. VBScript has been part of Windows for almost 30 years, first shipping in 1996. VBScript has a long history of serving as a vector for malware, which probably explains its removal from Windows.

Debian Bookworm itself is mostly made up of incremental updates of the software that was in the previous Debian Bullseye release. There are a few small changes - have a look here for the list - but they mostly won't affect Raspberry Pi users. So Bookworm itself really hasn't resulted in many changes. However, for the last year or so we have been working on some major architectural changes to the Raspberry Pi Desktop, and these are launched for the first time in the Bookworm release. And this is where you might notice some differences. With this new release, Raspberry Pi OS moves to Wayland and a Wayfire desktop, but it looks and feels exactly the same as what came before with X.Org. It now also comes with Pipewire, as well as an up-to-date version of Firefox that has been modified in cooperation with Mozilla to make better use of the hardware features found in the Pi.

Happy fifth birthday to SerenityOS! The alternative operating system project just posted its fifth birthday summary covering the preceding year, and it's been yet another good one. The number of contributors keeps rising, and interest remains solid. The Serenity browser, spun out as a cross-platform browser project called Ladybird, has picked up considerable funding and even a few employed developers. SerenityOS itself went 64-bit-only this year, and added support for VP9, WebP, JPEG, JPEG XL, and TinyVG. The post also contains several short stories from Serenity developers, so head on over to give it a read.

This means the next time you sign in to your account, you'll start seeing prompts to create and use passkeys, simplifying your future sign-ins. It also means you'll see the Skip password when possible" option toggled on in your Google Account settings. To use passkeys, you just use a fingerprint, face scan or pin to unlock your device, and they are 40% faster than passwords - and rely on a type of cryptography that makes them more secure. But while they're a big step forward, we know that new technologies take time to catch on - so passwords may be around for a little while. That's why people will still be given the option to use a password to sign in and may opt-out of passkeys by turning off Skip password when possible." I just don't know how to feel about this universal, cross-corporate push from tech companies towards passkeys. I feel like when making the switch to passkeys, you're giving something up. Something about it just doesn't sit well with me, and for now, I'm going to be sticking to my trust password manager.

That second agent proved quite capable, not only agreeing that the situation was strange, but also looking into issues on Apple's side. Which led to the somewhat bizarre conclusion of this story: after perhaps 20 minutes on the phone, he seemed to hit on something. I heard him laugh and say something along the lines of that explains it" and then, with my consent, put me on hold. When he came back, he said-and I'm not exactly quoting, but close enough: I'm sorry, I can't tell you any more than this, but all your services should be back up pretty much exactly 12 hours after they went down." Cloud computing is bizarre. Cloud computing at Apple - doubly so.

Last year we wrote about how moving native code in Android from C++ to Rust has resulted in fewer security vulnerabilities. Most of the components we mentioned then were system services in userspace (running under Linux), but these are not the only components typically written in memory-unsafe languages. Many security-critical components of an Android system run in a bare-metal" environment, outside of the Linux kernel, and these are historically written in C. As part of our efforts to harden firmware on Android devices, we are increasingly using Rust in these bare-metal environments too. One day I'm going to wake up to my wife looming over me, and with an expressionless face she'll say our children are now written in Rust".

Nightcap lets you run old Windows screensavers under XScreenSaver, using wine. That's it. That's the Github description.

Today marks the 6th time we are releasing new functionality in the Qt 6 series, with small and large additions that make both UI and backend development more productive and fun. Several of the new features come as technology previews, and we are looking forward to your feedback so that we can get everything in tip-top shape for the next LTS release! Lots of new goodies for Qt developers.

This week, Windows 11 marked its second anniversary and the end of the initial release, version 21H2, which was infamous for its lack of polish and certain features. However, Windows 11 also introduced new things, such as a redesigned File Explorer, which later received tabs support and plenty of modernized UI elements and features. The Windows 11 Moment 4 update Microsoft released to the general public in late September brought one of the biggest updates to File Explorer since the initial release. In February, we published an article detailing the top 10 features and changes Windows 11 users want Microsoft to add to File Explorer. Now, it is time to compare the requests with what Microsoft delivered. It's not looking good.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, Apple's macOS gaming policy of only offering a proprietary, Apple-only API isn't exactly paying off. One of the most popular online games in history, CS:GO, is removing support for macOS, and it won't be coming back. From here on out, the game will only be available on 64-bit Windows and Linux. That cycle played out again in Valve's recent Counter-Strike 2 update, which removed the Mac support already present in the outgoing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Today, a Valve support document for CS2 confirmed that Mac support had been removed and wasn't likely to be re-added, along with support for ancient DirectX 9-class GPU hardware and legacy 32-bit operating systems. Fret not, though, Mac gamers - there's always Super Tux Kart.

ECC support has been standard on Ryzen processors, but with the recent introduction of the Ryzen 7000 series and the new AM5 socket, any mention of ECC was dropped from specification pages and similar documentation. It turns out, though, that there's more to this story. A couple months ago I came across a topic on the ASRock forums talking about ECC support on AM5 motherboards, in which a user called ApplesOfEpicness said that they'd worked with an AMD engineer to get ECC RAM going within AMD's AGESA firmware. They'd claimed to have tested it on an ASRock motherboard with an updated UEFI, by shorting ground and data pins, and seeing errors be reported up to the OS. I was intrigued by this! Even though I didn't have the same motherboard that ApplesOfEpicness did, I had chosen an ASRock board (the B650E PG Riptide)-I had figured that if ECC was possible on any AM5 board at all, it would be supported on ASRock. So based on the forum post, last week I ordered a pair of 32 GB server-grade ECC sticks from v-color. I updated my motherboard's UEFI to the latest version (version 1.28 with AGESA 1.0.0.7b), and then replaced my existing RAM with the new sticks. I started up the system, and after a very long link training process... it booted up! It boots, but does it actually work? This may seem like a simple question to answer, but it turns out it's a lot harder to verify working ECC than you might think. Excellent investigative work by the author, Rain.

A set of merge requests were opened that would effectively drop X.Org (X11) session support for the GNOME desktop and once that code is removed making it a Wayland-only desktop environment. Going along with Fedora 40 looking to disable the GNOME X11 session support (and also making KDE Plasma 6 Wayland-only for Fedora), upstream GNOME is evaluating the prospect of disabling and then removing their X11 session support. This surely won't be controversial.

As many of you will know from personal experience, there is a longstanding issue with VoiceOver on Mac where Safari will frequently become unresponsive with VoiceOver repeatedly announcing the message Safari not responding." When this issue occurs, the user's Mac may become unusable for up to several minutes at a time. Sometimes it can be resolved by switching away from Safari. Sometimes restarting VoiceOver can resolve the issue. However, far too often, the user is unable to switch away from Safari or turn VoiceOver off, instead having to simply wait for their Mac to become responsive again. This Safari not responding" behaviour when using VoiceOver dramatically impacts productivity and overall usability of Macs for blind and low vision users. Furthermore, it appears that the issue extends beyond just Safari - many other common applications that utilise Apple's WebKit browser engine can also be affected by the not responding" problem. I'm not highlighting this to make Apple look bad - for once - or to fill some quota. The fact of the matter is that in the blind and vision-impaired community, the Mac and iPhone are immensely popular for their accessibility features other platforms just cannot match. If you've ever seen a blind person use an iPhone, you know just how different their way of using it is from sighted people. As such, having a major bug like this is a huge deal. It impacts people who really have nowhere else to go, technology-wise, since switching to other platforms really isn't a viable option in most cases. This issue must be fixed, and can't be left by the wayside because it only impacts a relatively small number of people. Blind and vision-impaired folks have placed their trust in Apple because they've got nowhere else to go, and Apple needs to step up and take this seriously. Now.

ZFS was promised, and didn't arrive. In fact, there were about 4 of us on the beta program who saw the original zfs implementation, and it was quite different from what we have now. What eventually landed as zfs in Solaris was a complete rewrite. The beta itself was interesting - we were sent the driver, 3 binaries, and a 3-line cheatsheet, and that was it. There was a fundamental philosophy here that the whole thing was supposed to be so easy to use and sufficiently obvious that it didn't need a manual, and that was actually true. (It's gotten rather more complex since, to be fair.) Peter Tribble - long-time Solaris expert and creator of Tribblix - gives a gimpse into the earliest versions of ZFS, and just how different it was from the shipped release.

Running a 16K page size kernel implies some userspace applications that assume that the page size is 4K will break. While the Asahi Team did an amazing work fixing many of them, there's little anyone can do (at least, at a scale) to fix applications that ship in binary form. And the prime example of this are x86_64 (a 4K page size platform) games. While it's technically possible to run Apple Silicon devices with a 4K page size kernel, that would require a number of (potentially controversial upstream) changes in the kernel and will probably have a significant impact on the performance. A better approach would be running the host with a 16K kernel, and use a 4K kernel in a VM for those problematic workloads, as long the performance of the VM was good enough for the use case. When Eric first asked me about this, my first reaction was well, we would need to import virtio-gpu, but even then the performance wouldn't be good enough for gaming". But, what if we could bring Rob Clark's DRM native context to Asahi? While I'm not a fan of buying locked-down, proprietary hardware that can change its capabilities to run non-approved operating systems at a moment's notice, there's absolutely no denying there's a lot of cool stuff going in the Asahi Linux world, and this is just one of many. Now, can we please - please! - get capable ARM machines from someone other than Apple?

Most MiniDisc aficionados are aware of unit hacking to gain access to new features. The unit that perhaps benefits the most from this is the Sony MZ-N510, which also comes in the N520 and NF610 variants. The 2001 model R700 can be hacked to add many features of its upscale brother, the R900, as well as the Type-R codec, which renders the R700 capable of performing real-time SP recordings with Sony's last evolution of ATRAC1. I bet the market for hacking the best music format of all time is small these days, but this is still incredibly cool.

In this guide, we'll build a very tiny Linux kernel, weighing in at 789 K, and requiring no MMU support. We'll write some userspace code and this will be deployed on a virtual RISC-V 64-bit machine, without MMU, and we'll run some tiny programs of our own. As a reminder, please go through the guide for a micro Linux distro to understand the concepts behind what we're doing today: building the kernel, initramfs, etc. This guide is basically a continuation of that one and an exercise in making an absolutely minimal Linux deployment for (in theory) extremely cheap hardware. This follows up on the mentioned earlier article.

Debian is a large, complex operating system, and a huge open source project. It's thirty years old now. To many people, some of its aspects are weird. Most such things have a good reason, but it can be hard to find out what it is. This is an attempt to answer some such questions, without being a detailed history of the project. The fact that Debian is a relatively slow-acting, complex democracy is probably why it has survived for so long, and why it's become the bedrock for so many derivative distributions.

Little did we realise then that Sierra was going to change all that, and by Mojave we'd be enduring 4,000 and more log entries in a second, when our Macs were feeling loquacious. That was because Apple introduced the Unified log, with its entries written not in plain text but compressed binary format. This was the death-blow for the casual reader of logs: for a start, the replacement Console app was unable to access any log entries made in the past, and its tools were, and remain, woefully inadequate for tackling the increasing torrent of log entries. Despite its many great strengths, the Unified log has suffered two problems that are limiting its usefulness in Sonoma: its diminishing period of coverage, and censorship. This article highlights some real problems with the logs in macOS. Logs are so crucial in finding out why something is happening to a system so having them limited or restricted would drive me nuts.