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LXQt 1.2 is here about seven months after LXQt 1.1 and it’s a major update to the lightweight desktop environment that introduces initial support for the Wayland display server in an attempt to keep up with the times and the new technologies most GNU/Linux distributions are adopting these days. Still based on the long-term supported Qt 5.15 LTS open-source application framework, LXQt 1.2 also improves its file manager component with a new search history feature that offers separate lists for name and content searches. Users can search the maximum number of history items in Preferences > Advanced > Search. I’m glad Wayland support is spreading out to smaller, less popular desktop environments too. Once you go Wayland, you stay Wayland.

Microsoft’s PowerToys for Windows 11 and Windows 10 has been updated with a new feature called ‘File LockSmith’. So what exactly is File Locksmith? In technical terms, it is a Windows shell extension that lets you check which files are in use and by which processes. Up until today, it was not possible to find out which particular process is using the file on Windows. While Task Manager lets you eliminate processes, it cannot tell you what’s using your files or preventing file transfer. In fact, File Explorer will block your attempts to delete a file or folder in use by a process or app. I lost count of how many times Windows would just stubbornly refuse to delete a file or directory because it was in use by some process, while not telling me which damn process we’re dealing with. Isn’t it absolutely bananas that it’s 2022 and you have to download some shell extension to get this basic functionality?

Microsoft is exploring a new business model for Windows, according to the company’s job listing for a Principal Software Engineering Manager. Microsoft expects the Program Manager to shape a new future of low-cost Windows 11 PCs powered by advertisements and subscriptions (Windows 365?). Casino ads for children on your desktop. Sounds like a steal.

AMD is gearing up to launch its next-generation Radeon RX 7000-series GPUs next month, and today the company shared more details about the cards’ pricing, performance levels, and the new RDNA 3 GPU architecture that will power all of its graphics cards for the next couple of years. The launch begins at the high end, with the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT. AMD will launch both of these GPUs on December 13, with the 7900 XTX starting at $999 and the XT starting at $899 (cards made by AMD’s partners will surely push these prices upward a bit). Both of these price tags undercut Nvidia’s RTX 4000 series, which starts at $1,599 for the top-tier GeForce RTX 4090 and $1,199 for the RTX 4080. Graphics cards have become insanely expensive. While AMD’s prices undercut NVIDIA, they’re still bonkers expensive. Assuming you’ll be able to even find them at these prices to begin with.

Today, amid a sea of internet companies and products that routinely put profits ahead of people, Mozilla is unveiling an ambitious new venture capital fund to transform technology investment — and the internet more broadly. Yes, this is exactly what the only browser standing between us and complete Chrome dominance needs. Can you taste the sarcasm?

GNU Make 4.4 is here, and it has some interesting – and sad – news for some of the old operating systems we still cover on OSNews. Sadly, support for OS/2 (EMX), AmigaOS, Xenix, and Cray will be dropped from the next release of Make. Now, I’m not entirely sure just how many users of these operating systems even use Make, but for those of you that do – tough cookie right here.

Window outlines! Yet another KDE contribution by yours truly! This was fun. Not easy at all, but fun. I’m pretty happy how they turned out. A small feature, but a fun read to learn how, exactly, it was implemented.

Mastodon is interesting. On the surface it might just seem like a Twitter clone, but it’s based on a federated protocol called ‘ActivityPub’. What this means in practice is that there’s no central server. There’s many instances. Each of these instances is managed by different people, and many of them focus on specific interests. With email, it doesn’t matter which provider you go with Thanks to universal SMTP standards that every server uses, you can exchange messages with everyone else. This is the same with Mastodon. You’re not siloed into a single instance, and you can follow people from any other instance. Unlike email, it appears that with Mastodon you can actually migrate to different instances if you don’t like your current one. I’ve left Twitter behind, too, and am having a much better time on Mastodon ever since. I plan on setting up a proper OSNews account on Mastodon as well, but that requires some coordination with Adam (our admin) and David (OSNews’ owner) that I haven’t gotten round to yet. You can follow me here if you so desire.

This is a 1990 Solbourne Computer S3000 all-in-one workstation based around the 33MHz Panasonic MN10501, irreverently code-named the Kick-Ass Processor or KAP. It is slightly faster than, and the S3000 and the related S4000 and later S4000DX/S4100 directly competed with, the original gangsta 1989 Sun SPARCstation and SPARCstation 1+. Solbourne was an early SPARC innovator through majority owner Matsushita, who was a SPARC licensee in competition with Fujitsu, and actually were the first to introduce multiprocessing to the SPARC ecosystem years before Sun themselves did. To do this and maintain compatibility, Solbourne licensed SunOS 4.x from Sun and rebadged it as OS/MP with support for SMP as well as their custom MMU and fixes for various irregularities in KAP, which due to those bugs was effectively limited to uniprocessor implementations. Their larger SMP systems used Fujitsu (ironically), Weitek and Texas Instruments CPUs; I have a Series5 chassis and a whole bunch of KBus cards Al Kossow gave me that I’ve got to assemble into a working system one of these days. And it turns out that particular computing environment was really the intersection point for a lot of early GUI efforts, which were built and run on Sun workstations and thus will also run on the Solbourne. With some thought, deft juggling of PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH and a little bit of shell scripting, it’s possible to create a single system that can run a whole bunch of them. That’s exactly what reykjavik, this S3000, will be doing. This is by far the coolest thing I’ve read and learned about in a long, long time. This is an amazing source of information and collection of screenshots and explanations.

Thus for many years the possibility of getting memory tagging working on these systems was an interesting possibility, but there was no idea of whether it was actually feasible or whether IBM fused off this functionality in the CPUs it sells to third parties. The POWER CPUs IBM sells to third parties are fused slightly differently to those it uses in most of its own servers, being fused for 4-way multithreading (SMT4) rather than 8-way multithreading (SMT8); it would be entirely plausible that the tagging functionality is fused off in the SMT4 parts, being that IBM i was only ever intended to run on SMT8 systems. While the ISA extension is undocumented, fairly complete knowledge about it has already been pieced together from bits and pieces, so this was not actually the major obstacle. However, there was no idea as to whether use of the memory tagging functionality might require some kind of appropriate initialization of the CPU. In theory, one need simply set a single undocumented bit (“Tags Active”) in the Power Machine State Register (MSR). However, simple attempts to enable Tags Active mode on OpenPOWER systems such as the Talos II did not succeed. This all changed when someone discovered that it was in fact possible to enable Tags Active mode on Talos II and Blackbird systems. This discovery was made by Jim Donoghue and all credit for this discovery goes to him; I publish this finding with his permission. As it turns out, memory tagging is not just limited to IBM’s own proprietary SMT8 POWER processors; it’s hiding in its SMT4 processors too. You can find these processors most notably in the systems built and sold by Raptor Computing Systems, one of which I reviewed not too long ago. Of note is that some of Raptor’s systems can now also be bought in Europe through their partner Vikings Store.

RustyHermit is a unikernel targeting a scalable and predictable runtime for high-performance and cloud computing. Unikernel means, you bundle your application directly with the kernel library, so that it can run without any installed operating system. This reduces overhead, therefore, interesting applications include virtual machines and high-performance computing. The kernel is able to run Rust applications, as well as C/C++/Go/Fortran applications. Exactly as it says on the tin.

In the second article I will show how to install the SDK. Since I unfortunately cannot go into every individual configuration, I assume that AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 2 is already installed. However, it is irrelevant whether further software or the Enhancer 2.2 is installed.’ We mentioned the first part in this series a few weeks ago.

Those who are now beating up on the new 12VHPWR (although I don’t really like the part either) may generate nice traffic with it, but they simply haven’t recognized the actual problem with the supposedly fire-hazardous and melting connections or cables. Even if certain YouTube celebrities are of a different opinion because they seem to have found a willing object of hate in the 12VHPWR once again: This connection is actually quite safe, even if there are understandable concerns regarding the handling. However, the “safe” is only valid if e.g. the used supply lines from the power supply with “native” 12VHPWR connector have a good quality and 16AWG lines or at least the used 12VHPWR to 4x 6+2 pin adapter also offers what it promises. Which brings us directly to the real cause of the cases that occurred: It’s the adapter solution exclusively provided by NVIDIA to all board partners, which has fire-dangerous flaws in its inner construction! GPUs have gotten absolutely insane these last few years, and it was only a matter of time before something like this was going to happen.

You fucked up real good, kiddo. Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies. The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to 10 minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify for a second ad slot in the middle. That’s content moderation, baby — YouTube wants a certain kind of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the business you’re in now. The longer you fight it or pretend that you can sell something else, the more Twitter will drag you into the deepest possible muck of defending indefensible speech. And if you turn on a dime and accept that growth requires aggressive content moderation and pushing back against government speech regulations around the country and world, well, we’ll see how your fans react to that. Fin.

An old article, but since I had no idea Sega made Palm OS games, I find it deeply fascinating. As part of my ongoing efforts to uncover lost gems from Japan, I recovered two exclusive games made by SEGA in their brief flirtation with Palm OS back in 2002. These games were presented by their Smilebit division at PalmSource Japan Forum 2002. This was around the time SEGA were abandoning consoles and Palm OS seems to have been part of an effort to figure out “what next?”. I have to fire up one of my dozens of Palm devices to check these out. Excellent work.

Earlier this week, Apple released a document clarifying its terminology and policies around software upgrades and updates. Most of the information in the document isn’t new, but the company did provide one clarification about its update policy that it hadn’t made explicit before: Despite providing security updates for multiple versions of macOS and iOS at any given time, Apple says that only devices running the most recent major operating system versions should expect to be fully protected. I mean, this seems like typical for Apple, but the vagueness of it seems problematic. If I’m managing a large fleet of devices, I would definitely prefer the more detailed, structured, documented, and defined update and patching policies of professional Linux vendors or Microsoft.

With the release of Chrome 110 (tentatively scheduled for February 7th, 2023), we’ll officially end support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. You’ll need to ensure your device is running Windows 10 or later to continue receiving future Chrome releases. This matches Microsoft’s end of support for Windows 7 ESU and Windows 8.1 extended support on January 10th, 2023. It’s time.

Reading how copy-paste works from the Wayland specification is non-trivial unless you understand a lot of how desktop computing works and Wayland internal. It took me quite a while to figure it all out, though once you get there, it seems quite obvious. Here’s my attempt at explaining how it works for mere mortals. One of those things you do countless times every day, but don’t really know how it works.

It’s “release everything!” day for Apple – virtually every single Apple platform and operating system is getting updates today. Almost all device releases are point releases to address issues in the major versions released in September, with the exception being iPadOS 16, which was delayed and is accompanied today by macOS 13. Ars’ macOS review, is, of course, the definitive resource for this new macOS release. But it does feel like the software side of the Mac is lacking its own unique direction and identity lately. Overwhelmingly, new features for macOS merely help it keep pace with what is happening on the iPhone and iPad. That feels doubly true in Ventura, where a core system app has been rewritten from the ground up to mirror its iOS counterpart, where a new window management feature is being implemented in the same way on the iPad, and where new apps and updates to old ones are increasingly just iPad apps running inside macOS windows. The throughline for all these features is about making the Mac more welcoming and comfortable for people who come to it through one of Apple’s mobile platforms. This makes some sense. The Mac is Apple’s most powerful, extensible computing platform, both in hardware and software. It’s also the smallest. Maybe some of the first iPhone buyers were coming to it from the Mac, but the balance surely flipped years ago. But when was the last time that the Finder, the Dock, or the Menu Bar was given a substantial, non-cosmetic rethink? When did Apple last make major improvements to the way that windows coexist on a given screen? The Mac does get new under-the-hood features that are specific to it, but the headline features are mostly iOS and iPadOS imports, especially this year. You know where you can get the updates.

IceWM was released only a short while ago, and now we’ve got 3.1. IceWM 3.1 introduces a new window option “frame” to automatically group application windows with the same “frame” value as tabs within a single frame. IceWM 3.1 also now shows indicators for the presence of tabs on the title bar, clicking on the title bar tab indicators can change tabs, tray hints are now preserved across restarts, improved Alt + Tab handling, improvements to the CMake build system integration, and a variety of other changes. I’m glad to see development has truly picked up again.

Linus Torvalds has backed the idea of possibly removing Intel 486 (i486) processor support from the Linux kernel. After the Linux kernel dropped i386 support a decade ago, i486 has been the minimum x86 processor support for the mainline Linux kernel. This latest attempt to kill off i486 support ultimately arose from Linus Torvalds himself with expressing the idea of possible requiring x86 32-bit CPUs with “cmpxchg8b” support, which would mean Pentium CPUs and later. I think that would be a fair call. It’s highly unlikely any modern additions to the Linux kernel are usable on a 486 anyway, so existing kernels which still have support for this ancient processor should suffice. On top of that, there’s no doubt in my mind that at least someone or some group of people will step up to maintain a special 486 branch if there is indeed any residual need for it.

Tetris is a classic time-waster, both in and outside of the office. What good is any computing device if it can’t play this game? Tokyo System House certainly thought so, and ported it to the NEC mini5 line of CP/M-based word processors. Let’s preserve it for future generations and then see what it’s like! First, the author had to get their hands on a NEC mini5 word processor. Then, they had to somehow manage to find a copy of the game itself. Then, and only then, could the actual preservation attempt begin.

Dubbed the “Kinetic Kudu,” Ubuntu 22.10 is here with the latest and greatest GNOME 43 desktop environment by default (yes, with support for GTK4 apps), which comes with numerous new features and enhancements for fans of the GNOME/Ubuntu desktop, yet the look and feel remain unchanged from previous releases. The default audio server is PipeWire instead of PulseAudio with WirePlumber as the default session/policy manager. Kinetic Kudu also ships with an up-to-date toolchain and subsystem consisting of GCC 12, GNU C Library 2.36, GNU Binutils 2.39, systemd 251.4, Mesa 22.2, Netplan 0.105, LLVM 15, Poppler 22.08, CUPS 2.4, BlueZ 5.65, Unicode 15, NetworkManager 1.40, as well as debuginfod support and an updated AppArmor component that now lets sysadmins restrict access to unprivileged user namespaces. While I’m personally not really using Ubuntu itself anymore, my gaming PC is still running Linux Mint, meaning I will still benefit from this new release. Ubuntu is still massively popular despite stumbles over the years, and countless popular distributions are all based on it.

OpenBSD 7.2 has been released. The major new features in this release are all concerned with expanding the operating system’s hardware support. This release adds supports for Apple’s M2, the Ampere Altra, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3.

Error messages are part of our daily lives online. Every time a server is down or we don’t have internet, or we forget to add some info in a form, we get an error message. “Something went wrong” is the classic. But what went wrong? What happened? And, most importantly, how can I fix it? I really enjoyed this article detailing a massive project at Wix to go through and rephrase every single error message to make them easier to parse and overall less… Useless. A lot of developers can learn from this article.

The day has finally come! Windows Terminal is now the default command line experience on Windows 11 22H2! This means that all command line applications will now automatically open in Windows Terminal. This blog post will go into how this setting is enabled, the journey of Windows Terminal along with its fan-favorite features, as well as give a huge thank you to our contributors who have helped throughout Terminal’s journey. It’s still kind of surreal that after several decades, cmd.exe will now be relegated to the sidelines.

Arcan, the unique development framework for user interfaces that’s exploring a ton of new and different ideas, has released a new project – Lash#Cat9, a new command line shell. A guiding principle is the role of the textual shell as a frontend instead of a clunky programming environment. The shell presents a user-facing, interactive interface to make other complex tools more approachable or to glue them together into a more advanced weapon. Cat9 is entirely written in Lua, so scripting in it is a given, but also relatively uninteresting as a feature — there are better languages around for systems programming, and better UI paradigms for automating work flows. Another is that of delegation – textual shells naturally evolved without assuming a graphical one being present. That is rarely the case today, yet the language for sharing between the two is unrefined, crude and fragile. The graphical shell is infinitely more capable of decorating and managing windows, animating transitions, routing inputs and tuning pixels for specific displays. It should naturally be in charge of such actions. Another is to make experience self documenting – that the emergent patterns on how your use of command line processing gets extracted and remembered in a form where re-use becomes natural. Primitive forms of this are completions from command history and aliases, but there is much more to be done here. I’m not a heavy shell user, so I’m not going to make any subjective statements here. It at least seems remarkably interesting, and I’m sure there’s quite a few among us who would love to play with this.

To begin collaborating with others, we’ve open sourced several components for our secure operating system, called KataOS, on GitHub, as well as partnered with Antmicro on their Renode simulator and related frameworks. As the foundation for this new operating system, we chose seL4 as the microkernel because it puts security front and center; it is mathematically proven secure, with guaranteed confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Through the seL4 CAmkES framework, we’re also able to provide statically-defined and analyzable system components. KataOS provides a verifiably-secure platform that protects the user’s privacy because it is logically impossible for applications to breach the kernel’s hardware security protections and the system components are verifiably secure. KataOS is also implemented almost entirely in Rust, which provides a strong starting point for software security, since it eliminates entire classes of bugs, such as off-by-one errors and buffer overflows. Another new open source operating system by Google. This time, it seems almost entirely focused on embedded machine learning applications, so it’s definitely a bit outside of my wheel house.

Sculpt OS 22.10 is a maintenance release of our Genode-based general-purpose OS. It imposes a new rigid regime to the management of low-level devices, improves USB hotplug support, and comes with numerous performance optimizations. I should really find the time to sit down with Sculpt.

Change is many things: scary, exciting, inevitable. Android is changing all the time, and for a while now we’ve been anticipating a major shift in terms of software support, one that would see the platform abandon its oldest software — Android will go 64-bit-only, dropping compatibility for old 32-bit apps. The biggest question has been “when?” Would the Pixel Tablet demand 64-bit apps? Could we be sitting around until Android 14 to make the switch? Apparently Google just got tired of waiting, and quietly launched the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro without support for 32-bit apps. The inevitable march of progress. The move to 64bit killed quite a few old games on iOS, and I’m sure the same will happen to Android. However, if an application hasn’t been updated that long, it might be a good idea to search for an alternative, of which there will be many, since application stores are nothing if not filled to the brim with shameless ripoffs.

Swider wasn’t the only Stadia developer blindsided by Google’s late September announcement that the streaming gaming service would be shutting down next January. Game makers who talked to Ars (and some who shared their surprise on social media) all said they had no indication of Google’s shutdown plans before the public announcement. “During correspondence , we are exchanging emails—nothing showed us it could be the end of Stadia,” Swider said. What a shitshow.

My first post-Figma hobby project is a win32 emulator I’ve called retrowin32. It is now barely capable of executing a few unmodified Windows exe files in a browser (see the site for some links). A fun project.

I didn’t expect to be writing about the next version of Windows again so soon, but a handful of viewers watching the Ignite Keynote yesterday noticed an updated version of the Windows UI that was shown in a brief cutaway, which had a floating taskbar along the bottom, system icons in the top right, a floating search box in the top middle, and the weather in the top left. Back when I first began hearing about the Next Valley release, I was also shown preliminary design ideas that were being explored internally. Microsoft is still in the prototyping stages for Next Valley, but my sources tell me that the UI briefly shown off at Ignite yesterday is representative of the design goals that Microsoft is hoping to achieve with the next version of Windows. Microsoft is clearly drawing a lot of inspiration from GNOME and macOS here, and it sure does look nice. However, as with everything Windows, it will most likely just end up as yet another thin veneer atop the countless UI designs from Windows 3.x all the way up to now Windows 11 that you can encounter in Windows to this day. Another layer for this cursed cake.

Microsoft Office was first released in 1990, and aside from Windows, it’s probably the Microsoft product the general public has the most experience with. Individual apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook will all continue to exist, but starting now, the Office brand name these apps have all been grouped under will begin to go away, to be replaced by “Microsoft 365”. I’m fairly certain this will turn out like Facebook calling itself Meta now, or Google technically being a part of Alphabet – everybody will continue to use the old, established name indefinitely.

Well hello friends! Today we celebrate the 4th birthday of SerenityOS, counting from the first commit to the repository, on October 10th, 2018. What follows is a selection of random highlights from the past year, mixed with personal reflections from some of the SerenityOS developers. Just sit down, relax, take a deep breath, forget your day’s troubles, and enjoy a rundown of some of the awesome work being done in the SerenityOS community. There’s few communities that seem so welcoming, friendly, and active like the SerenityOS one, and even reading through this year’s milestones just feels good.

After a break of about half a year, there is a sign of life from Hyperion Entertainment again. The company has made a new SDK available for download. But what is it? And what do you need it for? This and other questions will be answered in this and other articles. If you ever wanted to develop for Amiga OS 4, this seems like a good time to dive in.

Even with a bare-bones installation, Plasma lets you customize your desktop a lot. If you want more, there is always Plasma’s vast ecosystem of widgets. Widgets add features and utilities to the Plasma desktop and today you can find out all the stuff you can do and what’s new for widgets in Plasma 5.26. Widgets are not the only thing to look forward to in Plasma 5.26: check out all the new stuff landing on the desktop designed to make using Plasma easier, more accessible and enjoyable, as well as the two new utilities for Plasma Big Screen, KDE’s interface for smart TVs. KDE is amazing these days, and a joy to use, but they really have an application problem. They still don’t have an e-mail client that doesn’t feel straight out of 2006 (Kmail is a disaster), there’s no modern amenities like Twitter clients, and browsers like Firefox and Chromium clearly feel more at home in a GTK environments than in a Qt environment. Using KDE inevitably means ending up using GTK applications too, at which point I feel like I might as well switch over completely. I wish there was more activity on this front, but I also realise that for the vast majority of KDE users, this isn’t a problem at all.

Samsung Electronics today announced a partnership with leading international ODM (Original Development Manufacturing) companies such as Atmaca, HKC and Tempo — a collaboration that will enable non-Samsung smart TV models to use Tizen OS for the first time. New TVs from Bauhn, Linsar, Sunny, Vispera and other brands will be available in Australia, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, Türkiye and the United Kingdom this year, allowing more consumers to enjoy a premium smart TV experience enabled by Tizen, an open source OS for Samsung Smart TV. Tizen was, at one point, going to kill Android.

Recently we have been working on native Wayland support on Linux. Wayland is now enabled for daily builds and if all goes well, it will be enabled for Blender 3.4 release too. One of the major productivity applications adding Wayland support – especially one such as Blender – is a big deal.

This is a real 133MHz BeBox running otherwise stock BeOS R5, surfing Hacker News and Lobste.rs using a modified, bug-fixed NetPositive wired to offload encryption to an onboard copy of Crypto Ancienne (see my notes on the BeOS port). NetPositive is the only known browser on the PowerPC ports of BeOS — it’s probably possible to compile Lynx 2.8.x with BeOS CodeWarrior, but I’ve only seen it built for Intel, and Mozilla and Opera were definitely Intel/BONE-only. With hacks for self-hosted TLS bolted on, NetPositive’s not fast but it works, and supports up to TLS 1.2 currently due to BeOS stack limitations. This is a modified version of the latest official NetPositive browser from Be, updated to somewhat work on the modern web, specifically for PowerPC machines like the BeBox and BeOS-compatible PowerPC Macs. It can load various modern sites, but as the author notes, OSNews refuses to load (we used to have a complicated system of recognising individual obscure platforms and browsers so we could serve them a limited version of the site, but that became increasingly difficult and time-consuming to maintain, for effectively no benefit other than bragging rights). You can download and run it using the instructions in the post, and more improvements are being considered. Absolutely excellent work.

This Macintosh Classic II wasn’t the best computer of its day, it wasn’t even the best Mac available at the time, but 30 years on and as its second owner it has unexpectedly become one of my favourite computers. The Classic II sits on a desk in the corner of my living room, just beside my main front window. It takes up a small amount of space, is unassuming, and always looks happy, ready to serve me whenever I call on it. There’s definitely something to be said about using an old, disconnected computer for certain tasks. Of course, this imposes a lot of limits that may end up frustrating and annoying, but it may also be calming.

I like to do some retro programming, but SheepShaver, the best Mac emulator out there, has a bug that makes copy and paste not function, so is kind of hard to use. I was recently made aware that there is a tool named mpw (lowercase) that emulates just enough of classic MacOS to run Apple’s MPW compiler suite’s command line tools on MacOS X. So I thought I’d give it a try and set that up. The audience for this is probably quite small, but information and tools like this are vital in keeping old platforms approachable for developers and enthusiasts.

How I built the RGBeeb, a BBC Micro inside a PC case. With RGB Backlight, USB inputs, ATX PSU, and working full-height floppy drives. This project is way more involved than you think it is.

Last year, Google announced plans to phase out Manifest V2-based browser extensions in favor of new Manifest V3 policies. Although Manifest V3 promises increased safety and “peace of mind,” developers argue that the new rules hurt innovations, decrease performance, and cripple content blockers without giving much better security. Google initially wanted to disable Manifest V2 extensions in Chrome in January 2023 but has now decided to revise its plans. In a new Chrome Developers blog post, the company describes an updated timeframe for migrating from Manifest V2 to Manifest V3. Although Google remains on track to ditch old extensions, developers and customers gained one more year for using and supporting Manifest V2-based extensions. According to the revised schedule, Google will remove them from the Chrome Web Store on January 2024. Chrome is an advertising delivery platform first and foremost, and anyone with even a hint of foresight and a disdain for ads should’ve switched to Firefox years ago. At this point, using Chrome is self-inflicted.

System76 has been developing their own COSMIC desktop as the next evolution for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution built atop an Ubuntu base. Interestingly with this big COSMIC desktop undertaking, which is being written in the Rust programming language, they have decided to shift away from using the GTK toolkit to instead make use of Iced-Rs as a Rust-native, multi-platform graphical toolkit. This makes more sense than some might think. One of the engineers over at System76 is also the creator and lead developer of Redox OS, and GTK itself has become more and more insularly focused on GNOME than any of the other GTK-based desktop environments on Linux, BSD, and similar platforms. This is a big bet for what is essentially still a small company, but it sure does show some gusto. My major concerns would be consistency, both visually and behaviourally, since the vast majority of popular applications on Linux are either GTK or at least somewhat trying to integrate with GTK, so there’s a lot of work to do to make everything feels are least somewhat coherent. Still, I’m definitely curious to see what this will look like, what it will feel like, and how it will perform.

The ROMA RISC-V laptop was announced this summer with an unnamed RISC-V processor with GPU and NPU. We now know it will be the Alibaba T-Head TH1520 quad-core Xuantie C910 processor clocked at up to 2.5GHz with a 4 TOPS NPU, and support for 64-bit DDR at up 4266 MT. The TH1520 is born out of the Wujian 600 platform unveiled by Alibaba in August 2022, and is capable of running desktop-level applications such as Firefox browser and LibreOffice office suite on OpenAnolis open-source Linux-based operating system launched by Alibaba in 2020. This is a very important first step into ‘normal’ computing for RISC-V, but availability and pricing are, for now, major barriers here. I’d love to get my hands on one of these, but at these prices, that’s a massive ask.

It’s been nearly 10 years since Windows 8 launched to the world as part of Microsoft’s big tablet push. While we’ve seen two heads of Windows since then, former Windows chief Steven Sinofsky has shared some early concept images for Windows 8 in a new video. The images show concepts for the Start menu, multiple monitor support, File Explorer, Internet Explorer, and lots more. Windows 8 development began in the spring of 2010, and Microsoft held an all-team event for the Windows org (around 5,000 people) at the Seattle Convention Center. “This video was played as the meeting ended and the team departed the Seattle Convention Center,” explains Sinofsky. “It is a highlight or sizzle reel of the many months we spent planning the release and all of the inputs into the Windows 8 project.” Windows 8 would’ve been a fascinating, innovative, fresh, and incredibly interesting operating system and graphical user interface if it hadn’t been Windows 8. Microsoft should’ve split Windows into something like “Windows” and “Windows Classic” over a decade ago. Let the two sides of the coin shine where they should, instead of trying to cram every single Windows interface from 3.1 onward into a single mess.

There’s a new release of the venerable IceWM window manager, version 3.0.0. The major new feature here is tabbed windowing, in which you can drag titlebar over another to combine them into one unit. There are, of course, also the usual bug fixes and translation updates.

Intel’s highest-end graphics card lineup is approaching its retail launch, and that means we’re getting more answers to crucial market questions of prices, launch dates, performance, and availability. Today, Intel answered more of those A700-series GPU questions, and they’re paired with claims that every card in the Arc A700 series punches back at Nvidia’s 18-month-old RTX 3060. After announcing a $329 price for its A770 GPU earlier this week, Intel clarified it would launch three A700 series products on October 12: The aforementioned Arc A770 for $329, which sports 8GB of GDDR6 memory; an additional Arc A770 Limited Edition for $349, which jumps up to 16GB of GDDR6 at slightly higher memory bandwidth and otherwise sports otherwise identical specs; and the slightly weaker A750 Limited Edition for $289. These are excellent prices, and assuming Intel can deliver enough supply to meet demand, I think I may have found my next GPU. If history is anything to go by, these will have excellent Linux support, but of course, we would be wise to let the enthusiasts iron out the bugs and issues. Six to twelve months after launch, these could be amazing allrounders for a very good price.

CDE 2.5.0 is now available on SourceForge. This is a significant release compared to the previous one with, among many other things, a replacement of the build system from ancient Imake to somewhat less ancient Autotools. There’s also a ton of bug fixes, as well as new features and other changes.