OSnews

Android’s Accessibility API is an incredibly powerful tool intended for developers to build apps for users with disabilities. The API lets apps read the contents of the screen and perform inputs on behalf of the user, which are essential functions for screen readers and alternative input systems. Unfortunately, these functions are also incredibly useful for malicious apps that want to steal data from users, which is why Google has been cracking down on which apps are allowed to use the Accessibility API. Google has already limited which apps on Google Play can use the Accessibility API, and in Android 13, they’re taking things one step further by heavily restricting API access for apps that the user has sideloaded from outside of an app store. And so, step by step, Google locks down more and more of Android. Some of the most fascinating and unique applications use the Accessiblity APIs, and making it harder for them to do their thing will have a chilling effect on the wild innovation we see in the Android world. For now, this restriction only applies to applications sideloaded outside of application stores (e.g, applications installed through F-Droid are not affected), but I have my doubt slippery slope is suddenly going to even out at this specific point. After all, we must be protected against ourselves at all costs.

In a joint effort, tech giants Apple, Google, and Microsoft announced Thursday morning that they have committed to building support for passwordless sign-in across all of the mobile, desktop, and browser platforms that they control in the coming year. Effectively, this means that passwordless authentication will come to all major device platforms in the not too distant future: Android and iOS mobile operating systems; Chrome, Edge, and Safari browsers; and the Windows and macOS desktop environments. A passwordless login process will let users choose their phones as the main authentication device for apps, websites, and other digital services, as Google detailed in a blog post published Thursday. Unlocking the phone with whatever is set as the default action — entering a PIN, drawing a pattern, or using fingerprint unlock — will then be enough to sign in to web services without the need to ever enter a password, made possible through the use of a unique cryptographic token called a passkey that is shared between the phone and the website. Passwords are a terrible security practice, and while password managers make the whole ordeal slightly less frustrating, using my phone’s fingerprint reader to log into stuff seems like a very welcome improvement.

Ars Technica writes: Back in 1995, the Microsoft Kids division of the company released a program called Microsoft 3D Movie Maker. The same year that the original Toy Story proved that feature-length 3D computer animation was feasible, people could install software on their home computers that could spit out crude-but-creative 3D animated movies at 6 to 8 frames per second. Aside from releasing Doraemon and Nickelodeon-specific versions of Movie Maker later on, Microsoft never really returned to this software… until now. Microsoft Developer Division Community Manager Scott Hanselman announced yesterday that Microsoft was open-sourcing the code for 3D Movie Maker, posting it to Github in a read-only repository under an MIT license. Microsoft made some seriously weird products back in the ’90s, and this is definitely one of them. It’s great to see things like this released as open source – these are not the products that set the world on fire, but the idea to get it to compile and run on modern systems will surely spark the imagination of quite a few developers.

Sculpt OS version 22.04 introduces the concept of service-level sandboxing and features completely new drivers for wireless, graphics, and USB. On the user-visible surface, the new version of Sculpt OS looks and feels familiar to users of the previous version. Under the hood, however, at the nitty-gritty hardware-support level, it features completely revamped device drivers for Intel wireless, Intel graphics, and USB. Get Sculpt OS’ latest release from the download page, and be sure to read the documentation for more detailed information.

The Trinity Desktop Environment, a fork of the KDE 3.x codebase, has released its latest version. This release comes with a new D-Bus based polkit authentication agent, new markdown document viewer, support for HTML5 in Quanta, support for Let’s Encrypt certificates, some improvements to GUI options, better cooperation between tdm and plymouth, fix for ICEAuthority ownership stealing when using sudo, various other bug fixes and improvements. It also adds support for Ubuntu Jammy while it drops support for Debian Jessie and Ubuntu Trusty. C++11 is now allowed in the code base. I doubt the audience for a KDE 3.x desktop is massive, but thanks to the wonders of open source – the people that want it, can have it.

Unity 7.6 will be the first major release of Unity in 6 years (the last release was in May 2016). We have restarted the active development of Unity7 and will be releasing new versions with more features regularly. I was never a fan of Ubuntu’s Unity, but I’ve seen quite a few people over the years who miss it. Your call has been answered – this first release has a a lot of visual touch-ups and updates to make it look a bit more modern, and there’s bugfixes in here, too, of course.

A lot has changed since release 0.6.0! First thing, it is impossible to collect all the changes that happened since December 24, 2020 into one set of release notes, so this will focus on the highlights. It was very important to me that this be a release targeting the foundations of Redox OS. This includes, the bootloader, the filesystem, the package manager, the kernel, the drivers, and much more. The focus was on enabling Redox OS to boot on the widest set of hardware possible. Redox is a Rust-based operating system with a microkernel and a UNIX-like paradigm and an optional GUI. Its lead developer works for System76 as principal engineer.

It’s already April and we’ve been making steady progress refining the features and stability of Android 13, building around our core themes of privacy and security, developer productivity, as well as tablet and large screen support. Today we’re moving into the next phase of our cycle and releasing the first Beta of Android 13. Android 13 development seems to be ahead of the regular schedule.

Today, we’re releasing the first developer preview for the Privacy Sandbox on Android, which provides an early look at the SDK Runtime and Topics API. You’ll be able to do preliminary testing of these new technologies and evaluate how you might adopt them for your solutions. This is a preview, so some features may not be implemented just yet, and functionality is subject to change. See the release notes for more details on what’s included in the release. We’ll see if this initiative will have a material impact on user privacy on Android, but I have my sincerest doubt. Even if does make more applications respect your privacy, I have a feeling this is going to be a classic situation of “rules for thee but not for me” (a phrase far newer and more recent than I realised).

Well color me old! The ZX Spectrum (affectionately known as “Speccy” or just “Spectrum” by its fans), one of the best-selling microcomputers of all time, was released 40 years ago today. Can you believe it still has a large and active community creating new content, archiving old content, and hacking on all sorts of hardware? I have never owned or used one, but the Spectrum is one of those machines everyone is familiar with – like the C64, the Apple II, TRS 80, and so on.

Apple today launched the Self Service Repair Store, allowing iPhone customers in the United States access to parts and manual that they can use to repair their own devices. The new store enables repairs of iPhone SE, iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 components, including display, battery and camera replacements. Apple also said it will launch Mac self-service repairs later this year. A good start.

Microsoft’s upgrade to Windows 11 is largely considered the smoothest we’ve ever had. The Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team was able to upgrade 190,000 employee devices in just five weeks. We learned a lot so, in this post, I’m sharing our learnings with you to help with your deployment journey. Our success was built around several factors: far fewer app compatibility challenges than in the past, not needing to build out a plethora of disk images, and delivery processes and tools already that were greatly improved during the rollout of Windows 10. We divided our upgrade into three stages: plan, prepare, and deploy. It would be pretty pathetic if not even Microsoft itself could smoothly update its employees’ machines to the latest version of Windows, but that being said – I do not envy the people tasked with doing so.

CPUs in Apple Silicon chips are different, as they contain two different core types, one designed for high performance (Performance, P or Firestorm cores), the other for energy efficiency (Efficiency, E or Icestorm cores). For these to work well, threads need to be allocated by core type, a task which can be left to apps and processes, as it is in Asahi Linux, or managed by the operating system, as it is in macOS. This article explains how macOS manages core allocation in all Apple’s M1 series chips, in what it terms asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP, although others prefer to call this heterogeneous computing). This design has now also made its way to x86 with Intel’s 12th Gen processors.

Twitter, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company. Elon Musk is now the founder and inventor of Twitter.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS comes with the latest GNOME 42 desktop environment with the triple buffering patch included, yet it still uses apps from the GNOME 41 stack due to compatibility issues between GTK4 apps included in the upstream release and Ubuntu’s Yaru theme. Apps that weren’t ported to GTK4 are from the GNOME 42 stack, such as the Nautilus (Files) file manager. This is also the first LTS release with Wayland as its default (except for machines with NVIDIA GPUs, which will stick with X.org), which is a major milestone. On top of that, it comes with the latest releases of all the various packages that make up a Linux system, and will serve as the base for countless popular Ubuntu-based distributions. Of course, the countless other Ubuntu flavours also made the jump to 22.04.

OpenBSD 7.1 has been released. The biggest improvement in this point release is support for Apple Silicon, which is now ready for general use. Of course, there’s a lot more in this new release, so head on over to the changelog to get all the details.

QEMU 7.0 is out today as the newest version of this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack. Since QEMU 6.2 at the end of last year, developers at Red Hat and other organizations have been busy working on QEMU 7.0 as this open-source emulator widely used as part of the free software Linux virtualization stack. QEMU 7.0 brings support for Intel AMX, a lot of ongoing RISC-V work, and more. QEMU is one of the great success stories of open source – and one operating system and classic computing enthusiasts benefit from every day.

As of April 21, 2022, Apple has discontinued macOS Server. Existing macOS Server customers can continue to download and use the app with macOS Monterey. The most popular server features—Caching Server, File Sharing Server, and Time Machine Server are bundled with every installation of macOS High Sierra and later, so that even more customers have access to these essential services at no extra cost. I doubt many people are running macOS Server installations at this point, so I don’t think this will impact a great number of people.

Back when I reviewed Windows 11 for Neowin in 2021, I awarded it a score of 6.5/10, while saying that “simplification of UI isn’t a terrible idea but having it there in a half-baked manner doesn’t really make for an enticing user experience”. Although that was my opinion based on the launch version of the OS, unfortunately, it still hasn’t changed more than six months later. Microsoft seems intent on adding new features as we have seen in recent Insider releases, while ignoring all the UI inconsistencies and lack of basic functionalities in the existing release. The goal with Windows 11 was to make the UI more consistent, but as I predicted, it just seems Microsoft added yet another graphical layer atop the vast list of layers going back all the way to Windows 3.x in some places. Coming from the lovely visual and behavioural consistency of a Gtk+ desktop, seeing Windows 11 makes my brain hurt.

Ars Technica reports: In most cases, the release of yet another classic console emulator for the Switch wouldn’t be all that noteworthy. But experts tell Ars that a pair of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulators for the Switch that leaked online Monday show signs of being official products of Nintendo’s European Research & Development division (NERD). That has some industry watchers hopeful that Nintendo may be planning official support for some emulated classic portable games through the Nintendo Switch Online subscription service in the future. It would be so much easier for everyone involved if companies like Nintendo embraced the classic gaming emulation scene instead of fighting it. Imagine if you could easily buy ROMs for classic NES, SNES, Game Boy, and so on, games, without having to resort to shady ROM sites.

Building on the foundation laid by Android 12, described by many as the biggest Android OS update since 2014, this year’s upcoming Android 13 release refines the feature set and tweaks the user interface in subtle ways. However, it also includes many significant behavioral and platform changes under the hood, as well as several new platform APIs that developers should be aware of. For large screen devices in particular, Android 13 also builds upon the enhancements and features introduced in Android 12L, the feature drop for large screen devices. Android 13 is set for release later this year, but ahead of its public release, Google has shared preview builds so developers can test their applications. The preview builds provide an early look at Android 13 and introduces many — but not all — of the new features, API updates, user interface tweaks, platform changes, and behavioral changes to the Android platform. In this article, we’ll document all of the changes that we find so you can prepare your application or device for Android 13. This is a long and detailed article, and both users and developers alike should be able to find some interesting information in here. You might want to set aside a decent amount of time for this one.

LXQt 1.1.0 has been released. As its version number makes clear, this isn’t a major release, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from the changelog – there’s a lot in here. The biggest improvement is better integration of Gtk+ applications into the desktop environment, so that, among other things, applications like Chromium and Firefox can call LXQt’s own file picker. There’s a lot more, so be sure to read the release notes.

One day I thought about the performance gap between the first Intel processor and modern machines. Of course, we can try to do some estimations empirically – we know clock rate and how the pipeline is organized and what features intel 4004 CPU has (but it would not be standard FLOPS, because there was no embedded support for float numbers yet). But there are few details: architecture bit width (only 4 bits in comparison with modern 64 bits!), very limited instruction set (it’s missing even basic logical operators like AND or XOR) and peripheral limitations (ROM/RAM accesses). So I decided to research the subject in practice. After some thinking, I chose π number calculation as a benchmark. After all, even ENIAC did that (in 1949) and achieved a new record for the amount of calculated digits. Silly, perhaps, but still quite illustrative.

This you don’t see every day – Oracle doing something fun and interesting. I’m very happy to announce that today we are releasing a new version of Oracle Solaris 11.4 for free/open source developers and non-production personal use. Today marks the first delivery of our “Common Build Environment” (CBE) releases for the Oracle Solaris 11.4.To enable us to make new features and fixes available quicker and to more systems Oracle Solaris now uses a continuous delivery model of SRU/micro releases rather than much larger minor releases every few years. Now, this isn’t a return to releasing Solaris as an open source product – something Oracle cancelled after acquiring Sun – but at least it provides enthusiasts with the ability to install an up-to-date version of Solaris. It’s all very typical Oracle though – you need an account, and as mentioned, this is only free for non-commercial use, and not open source. The reason for this move is probably to drum up some interest to get developers to port newer versions of popular open source tools to Solaris. Regardless, it might be a fun weekend for some of us.

Public code reviews started this week on Qt platform support for Google’s Chromium open-source browser code. It looks like Google is at least evaluating the prospects of Qt toolkit support for the Chromium/Chrome UI. Chrome might get a Qt-based UI option before it even gets video decoding acceleration on Linux that doesn’t require custom builds or hacks. Possibly good news for KDE users.

The latest Haiku activity report is here – covering the month of March – and it’s a real grab bag of tons of changes, but I’m not seeing any big ticket items. This means there should be something for everybody in here, from improved support for various Intel integrated grahpics chips, to more work on the ARM port, to glibc fixes, to… Well, you get the point.

The Sound Blaster X7 is a DAC (Digital Analog Converter) and amplifier. It allows several inputs to be mixed together toward a single output. Its configuration is maintained directly on the device and can be controlled by either a mobile device over Bluetooth or from a Windows machine over USB. When using my work laptop, I can’t change the X7 volume or output. This is an issue when you need to jump into a quick call as you can’t switch over to headset easily. Since control over Bluetooth works well from the Android application, it is possible to control all the features I need over Bluetooth. There is only one issue: the only thing I’ve ever reversed is a USB msi keyboard to implement support on Linux. I don’t know much about how Bluetooth works, nor about Android and from what I could gather, I can’t live capture the Bluetooth traffic (on my device) like I did for USB. It is nothing that can’t be fixed by a bit of reading and some work, so let’s do this. It’s amazing to me that a lot of more obscure and less popular hardware has Linux support only because some random person in Nowhere, Nebraska, had a need for it.

Known as right angle with downwards zigzag arrow, angle with down zig-zag arrow, \rangledownzigzagarrow, and ⍼, no one knows what ⍼ is meant to represent or where it originated from. Section 22.7 Technical Symbols from the Unicode Standard on the Miscellaneous Technical block doesn’t say anything about it. Who doesn’t love a good what-the-hell-is-this-glyph story?

Raspberry Pi computers require a piece of non-free software to boot — the infamous raspi-firmware package. But for almost as long as there has been a Raspberry Pi to talk of (this year it turns 10 years old!), there have been efforts to get it to boot using only free software. How is it progressing? Turns out a lot better than expected.

EndeavourOS is an Arch-based Linux distribution, and in and of itself not something I’d write about here. However, at the very end of the release notes for its latest release, there’s this: This release is also shipping with a brand-new Window Manager developed by our community editions team member Codic12 and we are more than proud to present you this WM that was developed a little bit under our wing. Codic12 decided to develop this WM to satisfy his need for a lightweight window manager that worked well with both floating and tiling modes and had window decorations with minimise, maximise and close buttons in any layout desired and that could run on a semi-embedded system like the PIZero. Worm is written in Nim and is based on X11, a Wayland version isn’t in the pipeline in the near future, according to him. There’s been a surge of interest in tiling window managers lately, with tons of articles and howtos about things like i3 and Awesome, and System76, too, made tiling a prime feature in Pop!_OS. Heck, even Windows is in on the game. Tiling isn’t for me – I’ll manage and resize my window manually, like an animal, thank you very much – but there’s no denying there seems to be a huge demand for tiling features.

Up until now, all installs of Raspberry Pi OS have had a default user called “pi”. This isn’t that much of a weakness – just knowing a valid user name doesn’t really help much if someone wants to hack into your system; they would also need to know your password, and you’d need to have enabled some form of remote access in the first place. But nonetheless, it could potentially make a brute-force attack slightly easier, and in response to this, some countries are now introducing legislation to forbid any Internet-connected device from having default login credentials. So with this latest release, the default “pi” user is being removed, and instead you will create a user the first time you boot a newly-flashed Raspberry Pi OS image. This is in line with the way most operating systems work nowadays, and, while it may cause a few issues where software (and documentation) assumes the existence of the “pi” user, it feels like a sensible change to make at this point. This is a pretty substantial change that might break some applications that assume the default “pi” user exists.

Word is out there that an individual is trying to develop Pentium III emulation as part of a fork of 86Box, regardless of how slow it is, in the name of “hardware preservation”. But why didn’t we do it in the first place? Why did we, developers of a PC emulator clearly aimed at the preservation of hardware and software, limit ourselves to the Pentium II and an underperforming competitor (the VIA Cyrix III), and why did we do these two knowing they’re already pretty slow to emulate? It’s story time. When I started reading this article I had no idea there was going to be some classic open source/forking drama at the end, but even with that, it’s a good article and definitely worth a read.

Starting on November 1, 2022, existing apps that don’t target an API level within two years of the latest major Android release version will not be available for discovery or installation for new users with devices running Android OS versions higher than apps’ target API level. As new Android OS versions launch in the future, the requirement window will adjust accordingly. This is a very welcome move, since finding incredibly old and abandoned applications is not an uncommon occurrence in the Play Store. Clean-ups like this almost make up for Google removing the “last updated on” field in Play Store listings. Almost.

Graphics card prices remain hugely inflated compared to a few years ago, but the good news is that things finally seem to be getting consistently better and not worse. This is good news. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced something like this before in my life, and I can’t wait for prices to truly reach sane levels again, as both my fiancée and I are due for an upgrade.

I’ve been using Linux exclusively for ~15 yrs. I’ve recently started a fantastic new job – the only wrinkle was that it came with a Windows 10 laptop. This is my first time using Windows after a 15-year break. This is how it’s been going. Hint: not well.

In this post, we’ll look at implementing a simple character device driver as a kernel module in NetBSD. Once it is loaded, userspace processes will be able to write an arbitrary byte string to the device, and on every successive read expect a cryptographically-secure pseudorandom permutation of the original byte string. IF you’ve always wanted to learn how to write a NetBSD driver, here’s a great starting point.

With Fedora 36 working its way towards release later this month, more developer attention and planning is turning to Fedora 37 that will be released this autumn. One of the changes being talked about this week is for signing RPM contents for a means of trusting the files that are executed. The Fedora 37 change proposal is for adding IMA-based signatures to the individual files that are part of shipped RPM packages. This will allow for enforcing run-time policies by system administrators to ensure the execution of only trusted files or similar policies. This is a good idea, and it’s important to underline that this is entirely optional – nothing will change for regular end users who are not interested in such policies. This won’t limit your ability to install whatever rpm you want, nor does it lock down anything any further than it is today – it just gives administrators more options.

We aim for the beautiful Sailfish user experience to bring a similar elegance and simplicity to an otherwise busy and distracting world. But the beauty on the surface has to be backed up with cutting-edge technology underneath which keeps up with modern standards and developments. That’s why in the 4.4.0 Vanha Rauma release we’ve been working hard to improve compatibility across the board, keeping up with recent browser and feature developments. At the same time, we’ve been refining the user interface to allow all the new features to be exposed in a way that doesn’t impact on the simplicity of your device in daily use. I’ve been a Sailfish OS user for years and am now involved in its development, so can’t claim to be an impartial actor. But it means I also have some understanding of the effort and ideas that went into this release. Some of the big new features are the updated Gecko browser engine, all apps Sailjailed by default, NFC Bluetooth pairing, and many nice community-contributed improvements to positioning, calendar and more – and all built on a a strong Linux/glibc foundation.

I’ve extended James Friend’s in-browser Basilisk II port to create a full-featured classic 68K Mac in your browser. You can see it in action at system7.app or macos8.app. However, none of these setups replicated the true feel of using a computer in the 90s. They’re great for quickly launching a single program and playing around with it, but they don’t have any persistence, way of getting data in or out of it, or running multiple programs at once. macintosh.js comes closest to that — it packages James’s Basilisk II port with a large (~600MB) disk image and provides a way of sharing files with the host. However, it’s an Electron app, and it feels wrong to download a ~250MB binary and dedicate 1 CPU core to running something that was meant to be in a browser. I wondered what it would take to extend the Basilisk II support to have a macintosh.js-like experience in the browser, and ideally go beyond it. There’s countless of these, but this is definitely one of the nicer ones. It won’t be long before we move from running classic operating systems in local emulators, to just firing up a tab and booting up whatever we feel like playing around with today. I certainly won’t miss manually creating VMs or fiddling with purpose-built emulators.

Workstation (workstation) is an open source reference design for Fuchsia. Workstation is not a consumer-oriented product. Workstation is a tool for developers and enthusiasts to explore Fuchsia and experiment with evolving concepts and features. Workstation is one of the many “product configurations” Fuchsia can be set up with, and it targets both the Fuchsia emulator as well as an Intel NUC – so real hardware. This configuration’s goal is to be “a basis for a general purpose development environment, good for working on UI, media and many other high-level features. This is also the best environment for enthusiasts to play with and explore.” They’re emphasizing this is not some ploy to desktop dominance, but there’s no denying that with every step Fuchsia takes – from shipping it on Google Home devices to porting and running Chrome – they’re getting it ready for more than just some IoT project.

I have a proclivity to stupid and/or pointless projects. This is one of them. Conceived from a conversation that ended with “Hey, it would technically be possible to…” – sure, let’s do it. DDC, display data channel, is a protocol for reading information about what resolutions and so on a monitor supports. It was later extended to DDC/CI, that lets you set brightness and other parameters, but fundamentally, the original idea was to stick a cheap i2c eeprom on each device with some basic info on it. (Technically, the original idea was even simpler than that, but let’s not get into that.) It began in the VGA days, but has become so entrenched that even modern hardware with HDMI or DisplayPort supports it. That’s right, in an HDMI cable, nestled amongst the high-speed differential pairs, there’s an exceedingly slow i2c bus. Tiny OLED dot-matrix displays often have an i2c controller, so I had the idea to try and plug one directly into an HDMI port. Hilarious! Let’s do it. This is the kind of stuff that just puts a huge smile on my face – something we can use during these trying times.

Believe it or not, not everything is based on C. There are current, shipping, commercial OSes written before C was invented, and now others in both newer and older languages that don’t involve C at any level or layer. There’s tons of examples.

The history of Firefox UI is important because my project compensates for the shortcomings of this Proton UI and inherits the strengths of the existing Firefox UIs. It’s also one of the ways to prevent divisions in the community, given that there have been forks every time the UI changes big. A detailed timeline of the changes to the user interface of Firefox.

In its day QuickTime was bigger than Apple itself, so widely known that many who used it on their PCs weren’t even aware that it was an Apple product. As one of the first extensible frameworks for multimedia, from 1991 onwards it was at the forefront of computer audio and video. When the MPEG-4 format was standardised in 1998, it was based on QuickTime. For several years, sales of QuickTime-based products for Windows far exceeded those for Macs. Then, with the release of Catalina in October 2019, QuickTime was dead, leaving few Mac users now able to name its successor, AV Foundation (or AVFoundation, if you prefer), which had been introduced back in 2011. For all intents and purposes, it died. Good riddance.

And we’re not done yet with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, since it contains another important and very consequential regulation: alternative application stores. “We believe that the owner of a smartphone should have the freedom to choose how to use it,” said European Commission spokesperson Johannes Bahrke in an emailed statement. “This freedom includes being able to opt for alternative sources of apps on your smartphone. With the DMA, a smartphone owner would still be able to enjoy safe and secure services of the default app store on their smart phones. On top of that, if a user so chooses, the DMA would allow a smartphone owner to also opt for other safe app stores.” In addition to allowing third-party stores on its platform, Apple would also be forced to allow users to install apps from third-party sources (a practice known as sideloading) and to allow developers to use the App Store without using Apple’s payment systems. This is great news, and a massive step towards wrangling control over our devices back from big corporations. That being said – expect a coordinated onslaught of fear, uncertainty, and doubt towards this provision and the DMA in particular from US tech companies, their US Senators, and “independent” bloggers. It’s going to be rough out there.

Moving on from interoperability in messaging services, there’s a lot more in the proposed Digital Markets Act. For instance, bloatware and other preinstalled applications on iOS and Android devices must be removable by the user, and users must be given choice of which browser, e-mail application, etc. they want to use by default. This is a complete no-brainer, and something virtually every user will welcome. There’s also a lot of measures regarding data transparency and advertising. For instance, smaller companies that sell goods on e.g. Amazon must be given access to Amazon’s analytics and similar data. In a similar vein, people who buy ads on Google or Facebook must be able to assess the reach of their ads. And, of course, big technology companies will no longer be allowed to give preference to their own services and products. These are all excellent steps in the right direction. Fines for violating the DMA will be massive – up to 10 percent of worldwide annual revenue, 5 percent of average daily turnover, and more.

A new seminal antitrust legislation has been proposed in the EU, which will go up for a final vote in the EU Parliament. There’s a whole boatload of measures in here, many targeting big tech. The first major one: During a close to 8-hour long trilogue (three-way talks between Parliament, Council and Commission), EU lawmakers agreed that the largest messaging services (such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage) will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms, if they so request. Users of small or big platforms would then be able to exchange messages, send files or make video calls across messaging apps, thus giving them more choice. As regards interoperability obligation for social networks, co-legislators agreed that such interoperability provisions will be assessed in the future. This is exactly what should’ve been done ages ago, and I’m glad they’re finally getting to it. Messaging services have become incredibly important and vital communication tools in our modern societies, and they should not be used for lock-in and other anti-competitive practices. This is great news.

After six months of development, GNOME 42 is here and it’s packed with some cool new features and enhancements for fans of the GNOME desktop environment. The biggest change in this major release is the porting of almost all default GNOME apps to the latest GTK4 toolkit and the libadwaita 1.0 library for a more modern look and faster performance. This is a very odd release. There’s tons of great, valuable new features and improvements in here, and if it wasn’t for libadwaita, I’d be quite excited to upgrade my various GNOME installations the moment Fedora 36 becomes available. A new screenshot UI, updates to all the core applications, a ton of performance improvements, and a lot more. Sadly, libadwaita is incredibly problematic. Virtually all of GNOME’s core applications now use libadwaita, which means they cannot be themed. They will all use the default refreshed Adwaita theme, and no matter what Gtk+ theme you install, you can’t change that. What makes matters worse, is that the various applications not yet ported over to libadwaita, such as Nautilus, will still use the old, pre-libadwaita Adwaita theme, meaning that even on a default installation without any custom themes, you’re going to have to deal with a very inconsistent user interface. Even when all of GNOME’s core applications have been ported over to libadwaita, your desktop will still make use of countless regular Gtk+ applications that will look out of place compared to all the GNOME applications. The GNOME team of course hopes that every Gtk+ developer will adopt libadwaita – Cinnamon, Xfce, Cosmic, MATE be damned – but the odds of that happening are slim. Libadwaita knowingly and willingly makes using GNOME a far less pleasurable experience, and the fallout of this boneheaded move will take years to recover from – if at all.

Back in 2020, Google announced that it would require all apps in the Play Store to use its billing system but later delayed that to this month. Google will soon allow Android apps to use their own payment system as long as Play Store billing is an option alongside it, with Spotify notably the first “User Choice Billing” partner. Regulatory pressure is mounting, and it’s clear it’s been working. This is a major concession by Google, and a very welcome one. We’ve still got a long, long way to go, but things are, at least, changing for the better. Slowly.

Some of my recent long-term projects revolve around a little known CPU architecture called ‘Lanai’. Unsurprisingly, very few people have heard of it, and even their Googling skills don’t come in handy. This page is a short summary of what I know, and should serve as a reference for future questions. Deeply fascinating. I love obscure CPU architectures, and they don’t come more obscure than this.