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Surprisingly, it looks like Microsoft will not put an upgrade block on installations done on a device using Intel’s Pentium 4 661, which was released in 2006 and obviously doesn’t meet all Windows 11 requirements. As you can see in the above screenshot, Intel Pentium 4 661, which has only one core and 3.6Ghz of clock speed, is listed as a supported processor in the PC Health Check. That’s possibly because Microsoft forgot to update the strings needed to reflect “unsupported status” in the PC Health Check Tool for this particular Intel family. Disregarding artificial barriers, Windows will run on pretty much any x86 processor – and Windows 11 is no different. You really don’t actually want to, but it does form the base of a cottage community of people trying to get modern Windows releases to run on the oldest possible hardware, which is always a fun exercise.

After successfully getting Mesa’s software-based Lavapipe Vulkan implementation building on Haiku last month along with related Mesa code for headless support, a developer independent of AMD has started work on porting the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” to Haiku. Haiku developer “X512” has been spending the past number of weeks so far trying to get the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver stack working on this BeOS-inspired platform. This would be the first major Vulkan driver working for Haiku though there is also interest in getting the open-source Intel Vulkan driver working there too. This is exciting work, but still early days.

After many leaks, official teases, and months of waiting, Google has finally given its latest Pixel phones a formal launch. The new Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro are the latest high-end phones from the company that hasn’t traditionally been able to make much of a dent in the high-end phone market. Both are available for preorder starting today, October 19th, and will begin shipping on October 28th. Google says all the major US carriers, plus retailers such as the Google Store, Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, Costco, and others, will be selling the phones. There are a lot of things to cover with the new Pixels, but the most important place to start is this: $599 and $899. Those are the starting prices for the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro, respectively. That pricing is aggressive compared to similar iPhones, Samsungs, or even OnePlus phones, especially when you consider that Google is providing 128GB of storage in both base models. (The 6 can be equipped with up to 256GB, the 6 Pro has options up to 512GB.) Ars Technica has more on the new Tensor SoC by Google that powers these new Pixels. I’d love to say more about these new Pixels, but Google refuses to actually sell them anywhere, so I’m not even sure Pixel phones even exist in the first place. I’m not into conspiracy theories, but until Google sells these things in more than like 3 countries, I’ll just keep calling them an elaborate hoax.

For the M1 Pro, Apple promises 70 percent better CPU performance and twice the graphics performance compared to the M1. While the basic architecture is still the same on the M1 Pro, Apple is upping the hardware here in a big way, with a 10-core CPU that offers eight performance cores and two efficiency cores, along with a 16-core GPU with 2,048 execution units. The new chip also supports more RAM, with configuration options up to 32GB (although, like the M1, memory is still integrated directly into the chip itself, instead of user-upgradable) with 200GB/s memory bandwidth. In total, the M1 Pro has 33.7 billion transistors, roughly twice the number of transistors that the M1 has. But Apple isn’t stopping there: it also announced the even more powerful M1 Max, which has the same 10-core CPU configuration, with eight performance cores and two efficiency cores. But the M1 Max doubles the memory bandwidth (to 400GB/s), RAM (up to 64GB of memory) and GPU (with 32 cores, 4,096 execution units and four times the GPU performance of the original M1). The M1 Max features 57 billion transistors, making it the largest chip that Apple has made yet. The new chip also means that you can connect up to four external displays to a single device. These are absolutely bonkers chips for in a laptop, and Apple once again puts the entire industry on notice. There’s nothing Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm can offer that comes even close to these new M1 Pro and Max chips, and Apple even seems to have managed to get within spitting distance of a laptop RTX 3080. It’s hard to fathom just how impressive these are. The laptops they come in the new 14″ and 16″ MacBook Pro, with a new design that, for some reason, includes a notch even though there’s no FaceID. Apple is easily the best choice for most people when it comes to laptops now, since anything else will be just as expensive, but far, far less performant with far worse energy use.

First and technically most exciting, the new version enables the use of hardware-accelerated graphics on Intel GPUs, paving the ground for graphics-intensive applications and games. The GPU support is based on the combination of the Mesa library stack with our custom GPU multiplexer as featured in Genode 21.08. Note that this fresh new feature should best be regarded as experimental and be used with caution. Second, our port of the Chromium-based Falkon web browser has become able to present media content like videos and sound. Look out for the browser in the tools menu of cproc’s depot. It is accompanied with a ready-to-use audio driver and a mixer component. In cases where audio output is not desired, the browser – or any other component that requests audio output – can be connected to a new component called black hole, which merely mimics an audio driver without any audible effect. That’s excellent progress for this fascinating operating system that’s been steadily improving for years now. And it’s not even everything that’s in this release – read the announcement for all the details.

More than a century after the artists of the Vienna Secession declared “to every age its art; to art its freedom”, the Austrian capital has found a new site for artistic expression free from censorship: the adults-only platform OnlyFans. Vienna’s tourism board has started an account on OnlyFans – the only social network that permits depictions of nudity – in protest against platforms’ ongoing censorship of its art museums and galleries. Censoring nude paintings from some of the greatest painters in human history is peak pearl-clutching.

25 years ago today, Matthias Ettrich sent an email to the de.comp.os.linux.misc newsgroup explaining a project he was working on. The latest and direct result of that email (plus a quarter of a century of relentless experimentation, development and innovation) has just landed in KDE’s repositories. This time around, Plasma renews its looks and, not only do you get a new wallpaper, but also a gust of fresh air from an updated theme: Breeze – Blue Ocean. The new Breeze theme makes KDE apps and tools not only more attractive, but also easier to use both on the desktop and your phone and tablet. Of course, looks are not the only you can expect from Plasma 25AE: extra speed, increased reliability and new features have also found their way into the app launcher, the software manager, the Wayland implementation, and most other Plasma tools and utilities. Except for 1.0, I’ve used every release of KDE extensively, and its developers have every right to be damn proud of the amazing collection of frameworks and applications they’ve built. As with everything, KDE is not for everyone, but there’s no denying it’s a versatile, attractive, extensible, and fun to use environment.

Ubuntu 21.10 brings a wide variety of improvements, most notably on the desktop side switching to GNOME Shell 40 and offering many improvements there including some theme refinements. There are also many underlying improvements to enjoy with Ubuntu 21.10, like what gets us excited about kernel and compiler upgrades along with other notable package version bumps. Adding Wayland support for NVIDIA drivers is a big improvement, as is the addition of PipeWire. There’s also a big regression in that Ubuntu has moved its Firefox package from deb to a Snap package, something I’d sure manually fix if I were an Ubuntu user.

OpenBSD 7.0 has been released, and it seems a big focus for this release was improving ARM64 support, and adding support for RISC-V. There’s a long list or other improvements and fixes, too, of course. Downloads are where they always are.

Microsoft delivers the latest Windows security and user experiences updates monthly. Updates are modular meaning that, regardless of which update you currently have installed, you only need the most recent quality update to get your machine up to date. With the fast pace of Windows security and quality fixes, distributing this large amount of updated content takes up substantial bandwidth. Reducing this network transfer is critical for a great experience. Moreover, users on slower networks can struggle to keep their machines up to date with the latest security fixes if they cannot download the package. This is the kind of grunt work that doesn’t get flashy slides in a presentation or a mention in a commercial, but it’s awesome work nonetheless.

Shortly after Windows 11 launch, AMD and Microsoft jointly discovered that Windows 11 is poorly optimized for AMD Ryzen processors, which see significantly increased L3 cache latency, and the UEFI-CPPC2 (preferred cores mechanism) rendered not working. In our own testing, a Ryzen 7 2700X “Pinnacle Ridge” processor, which typically posts an L3 cache latency of 10 ns, was tested to show a latency of 17 ns. This was made much worse with the October 12 “patch Tuesday” update, driving up the latency to 31.9 ns. That’s one hell of a regression. It seems fixes are incoming soon, though.

6.0.1 is tagged and available. The major reason for this update is an expired Let’s Encrypt certificate that would cause problems when downloading dpkg binaries. A list of 6.0.1 commits is available. Not a whole lot going on in this release, but still a major bug fix.

The 6502 was the CPU in my first computer (an Apple II plus), as well as many other popular home computers of the late 1970s and 80s. It lived on well into the 1990s in game consoles and chess computers, mostly in its updated “65C02” CMOS version. Here’s a re-implementation of the 65C02 in an FPGA, in a pin-compatible format that lets you upgrade those old computers and games to 100 MHz clock rate! Interesting project.

Another month has passed, so time for another monthly update from the Haiku team. This time around, we get two for the price of one. First, the regular monthly activity report, where we can read that work on the ARM64 and RISC-V ports continues, and while these ports are nowhere near complete, they serve an important function both in discovering bugs and issues, as well as in getting Haiku ready for future architecture transitions. Tracker also received thumbnail support, but this is disabled by default for now, and of course, there’s a lot of low-level work being done, too. The second update comes from waddlesplash, Haiku Inc.’s actual paid full-time developer. In his report, he details his work on fixing two Haiku bugs that caused frequent crashes in WebKit, as well as extensive work on the USB stack – more specifically, improving USB 3.0 support. On top of that, he also details a lot of his low-level work over the month of September.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, you either knew, or were, that kid in grade school. You know. The one who could put games on your graphing calculator. You may be surprised to learn that some of these people didn’t exist totally in a vacuum. There was in fact a thriving scene of hackers who had bent these calculators to their will, writing games, math software, and more generally hacking on the platform just for the sake of it. True to my interests, it’s all deeply embedded, pushing the limits of platforms that were obsolete when they were released. I’ll take you through some of the highlights of Texas Instruments calculator hacking done over the past two and a half decades, along with an explanation of why these projects are so technically impressive. A friend of mine and I at high school bought the data transfer cable for our graphing calculators so we could play multiplayer Bomberman on them in class. Good times.

In the years leading up to that launch, we’ve uncovered signs of the Fuchsia team developing support for a variety of Google devices, including the Nest Hub Max, 2021’s second-gen Nest Hub, and more. Now, it seems, Google is ready to make its next steps more public, in a series of job listings posted this week, some of which reference a “Fuchsia Devices” team. The job listings even make references to working with partners using Fuchsia, so there’s definitely more afoot for Google’s new operating system.

Microsoft’s Xbox and Surface hardware may be getting easier to repair, according to a press release from shareholder advocacy nonprofit As You Sow. According to the announcement, Microsoft has agreed to evaluate and expand the repair options for its products “by the end of 2022.” The promises are a bit vague for now, but hopefully this will have a real-world impact.

Quickly create and run highly optimised desktop virtual machines for Linux, macOS and Windows; with just two commands. You decide what operating system you want to run and Quickemu will figure out the best way to do it for you. Excellent idea.

This is an introduction to getting IBM’s OS/360 operating system loaded and running on the Hercules emulator for the System/370, ESA/390, and z/Architecture systems. It assumes you have some familiarity with the 370, and with OS; in particular, you need to have some understanding of JCL, and of OS/360 (or later versions, like MVS or OS/390) usage and operation. It does not purport to be an introduction to the world of the 370. This is a bit more complicated to set up than just about any other emulator or VM out there. A great weekend project for people with the right skill set and inclination.

For years now, Windows 10’s Windows Subsystem for Linux has been making life easier for developers, sysadmins, and hobbyists who have one foot in the Windows world and one foot in the Linux world. But WSL, handy as it is, has been hobbled by several things it could not do. Installing WSL has never been as easy as it should be—and getting graphical apps to work has historically been possible but also a pain in the butt that required some fairly obscure third-party software. Windows 11 finally fixes both of those problems. The Windows Subsystem for Linux isn’t perfect on Windows 11, but it’s a huge improvement over what came before. Microsoft is doing a decent job making Windows a good platform for Linux system administrators, but is WSL really comparable to the real thing?

On the competitive landscape, Ampere is carving out its niche for the moment, but what happens once AMD or Intel increase their core counts as well? A 50% increase in core counts for next-gen Genoa should be sufficient for AMD to catch up with the M128 in raw throughput, and technologies such as V-cache should make sure the HPC segment is fully covered as well, a segment Ampere appears to have no interest in. Intel now has an extremely impressive smaller core in the form of Gracemont, and they could easily make a large-core count server chip to attack the very segment Ampere is focusing on. Only time will tell if Ampere’s gamble on hyper-focusing on certain workloads and market segments pays out. For now, the new Altra Max is an interesting and very competent chip, but it’s certainly not for everyone. Admit it. You too want a 128-core ARM processor on your desk.

This Atari 1040ST is still in use after 36 years! Frans Bos bought this Atari in 1985 to run his camp site (Camping Böhmerwald). He wrote his own software over the years to manage his camp site, as well as reservations and the registration of the guests. He really likes the speed of the machine compared to newer computers. And 6 months every year the machine is on day and night.

Interview with Miguel de Icaza about his own journey, GNU, Linux, GNOME, and how he ended up working at Microsoft. It’s an interview for a mainstream audience, but with plenty of fun stories that should entertain any OSNews reader. I found it particularly interesting how de Icaza recounts his decades-long obsession to make Linux a great desktop OS, only to see it achieve massive success on server, mobile, and embedded devices, and never really catch on as a mainstream desktop OS. Today, he uses a Mac for his everyday platform while working at Microsoft.

Tracking quantum computing has been a bit confusing in that there are multiple approaches to it. Most of the effort goes toward what are called gate-based computers, which allow you to perform logical operations on individual qubits. These are well understood theoretically and can perform a variety of calculations. But it’s possible to make gate-based systems out of a variety of qubits, including photons, ions, and electronic devices called transmons, and companies have grown up around each of these hardware options. But there’s a separate form of computing called quantum annealing that also involves manipulating collections of interconnected qubits. Annealing hasn’t been as worked out in theory, but it appears to be well matched to a class of optimization problems. And, when it comes to annealing hardware, there’s only a single company called D-Wave. Now, things are about to get more confusing still. On Tuesday, D-Wave released its roadmap for upcoming processors and software for its quantum annealers. But D-Wave is also announcing that it’s going to be developing its own gate-based hardware, which it will offer in parallel with the quantum annealer. We talked with company CEO Alan Baratz to understand all the announcements. I think I understood some of those words because I, too, watch Space Time.

A desktop environment I had never heard of until now has seen its first new release in 611 days – always awesome to read about unknown projects like this, so here we go. Anyway onto the point, yes the project is still alive and there’s been some updates. This release encompasses two main things. First is a collection of minor fixes that have gone into master since 1.6.0 came out, along with some translation updates. This includes two small additional binaries for use by the desktop. Second is that the downstream theme work that we did for Project Trident is now in Lumina as the default theme. Lumina is an open source, lightweight desktop environment written from scratch in C++/Qt5. The related Project Trident is a desktop Linux distribution based on Void Linux – excellent taste, just excellent – that uses Lumina as its desktop environment.

It’s been a busy month! We’ve had a lot of movement in kernel land, as well as some tooling improvements and reverse engineering sessions. At this point, Asahi Linux is usable as a basic Linux desktop (without GPU acceleration)! The ground had been shifting until now, but we’re seeing drivers settle down. Let’s take a look at what’s been going on. Linux on Apple’s M1 Macs is making progress, but I would never buy an Apple computer to run Linux on it. It’s always going to be a moving target without any documentation or support – official or tacit – meaning you’re basically running a perpetual reverse-engineering effort. To make matters worse, Apple can flip the switch and block any non-macOS operating system at any time. The M1 is impressive, but only if you’re into macOS.

It’s a symptom of what insiders say are deeper organizational problems that have left the health group without clear direction and struggling to mesh Apple’s hardware-oriented culture with the practices of the medical business. People at Apple Health said that they saw colleagues face retribution for disagreeing with superiors and that concerns have been expressed on more than one occasion about the way health data is used to develop products. The situation has gotten so serious that some employees have lodged complaints with Apple’s most senior executives, including Cook and Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, who oversees the health effort. Success tends to hide problems.

A day early, Microsoft has decided to release Windows 11. Today marks an exciting milestone in the history of Windows. As the day becomes October 5 in each time zone around the world, availability of Windows 11 begins through a free upgrade on eligible Windows 10 PCs and on new PCs pre-installed with Windows 11 that can be purchased beginning today. This is the first release of Windows I haven’t personally used or even tested, but much like Android 12 that’s also been released today, it seems to be a version heavily focused on giving Windows a fresh coat of paint, while sadly removing features and customisations and adding strict system requirements. As the detailed Ars Technica review concludes: Here’s the thing: I actually like Windows 11 pretty well, and as I’ve dug into it and learned its ins and outs for this review, I’ve warmed to it more. The window management stuff is a big step forward, the new look is appealing and functional, and the taskbar regressions mostly don’t bother me (the more you customized the taskbar and Start menu in Windows 10, though, the more the new version’s lack of flexibility will irritate you). Unfortunately for Microsoft, Windows 11 is going to be starting its life with some of the same public perception problems that made Windows Vista and Windows 8 relatively unpopular. Meanwhile, AnandTech concludes: I’ve only a had a short time with Windows 11, and that is partially due to how short of a public beta that it got compared to Windows 10. Already there are some features that I really enjoy. The new interfaces are well thought out and easy to use. But for me, the true test is using a new version of the OS and then stepping back to an older version. How painful is it? How many of the new features do I miss? There is no single item right now that is a must-have, so swapping between Windows 10 and Windows 11 is not a huge deal. And that’s good because Windows 10 is going to be around for years to come still. Some of the biggest new features announced for Windows 11 won’t even be shipping until next year. Perhaps if and when they arrive that will make the difference. Windows 11 just doesn’t seem like that big of a release to me, and depending on how much you enjoy using Windows, that can be a good thing or a bad thing. To me, it seems like this new UI theme is skin-deep, and underneath it all still lie countless layers of UI cruft dating all the way back to Windows 3.x.

Today we’re pushing the source to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and officially releasing the latest version of Android. Keep an eye out for Android 12 coming to a device near you starting with Pixel in the next few weeks and Samsung Galaxy, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Tecno, Vivo, and Xiaomi devices later this year. The first Android 12 reviews have rolled out too, and the conclusion seems to be that this new release focuses heavily on overhauling the look and feel of Android, without disrupting how you actually use your phone all that much. Android 12 isn’t an update that’s trying to change how you use your phone — not that it needed to be. Instead of just tacking on dozens of new features, Google just wanted to shake things up in the design department for the sake of it. It’s an upheaval of some of Android’s smallest details. It amounts to a more customizable experience, which in turn lets your phone look and feel more unique. If that gets you excited, you probably won’t regret installing. But I wouldn’t buy a Pixel just to experience Android 12. And if you can’t get the update today, I wouldn’t fret too much until more features are added. I’m definitely excited to experience the new look and feel, but it will be a while before any of my devices gets the update.

Apparently, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp experienced a massive outage today – just days after a huge whistleblower report confirmed what we already knew – Facebook is sleazy, destructive, negligent, and as close to actual evil as an inanimate entity can be. Facebook Inc. knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands. That is the central finding of a Wall Street Journal series, based on a review of internal Facebook documents, including research reports, online employee discussions and drafts of presentations to senior management. Time and again, the documents show, Facebook’s researchers have identified the platform’s ill effects. Time and again, despite congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous media exposés, the company didn’t fix them. The documents offer perhaps the clearest picture thus far of how broadly Facebook’s problems are known inside the company, up to the chief executive himself. It really sucks when all your friends and family use WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, since getting entire countries to switch messaging applications simply isn’t going to get you anywhere.

If you think making it harder to change the default browser away from Edge in Windows 11 was the only sleazy tactic Microsoft is employing to shove Edge down Windows users’ throats – think again. The company is using a microsoft-edge: URL scheme everywhere in Windows to bypass the default browser setting altogether, but luckily, competing browsers have caught on. The Brave web browser added support for the microsoft-edge: URL scheme with version 1.30.86, released last week. So, you no longer need to install EdgeDeflector if you’re using Brave as your default browser. It’ll pop up as an option when you click on a microsoft-edge: link. This makes Brave the first web browser to implement support for Microsoft’s anti-competitive URL scheme. However, it’s not the only browser doing so. Mozilla developer Masatoshi Kimura has also written patches to implement the protocol into Firefox. It has yet to pass review and get merged into Firefox, but the ball is rolling. Firefox’s implementation is part of its overall Windows 11 shell integration work. From everything I’ve read and been told, Edge is a good, solid browser in and of itself – it’s just so incredibly sad Microsoft has to stoop this low to force people to use it.

Apple’s iPhone component design seems to be limiting the SoC from achieving even better results, especially the newer Pro models, however even with that being said and done, Apple remains far above the competition in terms of performance and efficiency. Overall, while the A15 isn’t the brute force iteration we’ve become used to from Apple in recent years, it very much comes with substantial generational gains that allow it to be a notably better SoC than the A14. In the end, it seems like Apple’s SoC team has executed well after all. Apple’s SoC still rules the roost, and while there’s performance gains the A15, it’s in efficiency that the new SoC really shines.

Now we’re seeing some of the fruits of that change—Microsoft has announced that major third-party apps like Zoom, Discord, Adobe Reader, the VLC media player, and even the LibreOffice suite are all now available in the Microsoft Store for people using the Windows 11 Insider Preview builds. Web apps like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Tumblr are also available. These PWAs look and work just like the regular websites but can easily be pinned to Start or the Taskbar and can display notification badges and a few other benefits that make them feel a bit more like desktop apps. Microsoft also says it will allow other app stores into the Microsoft Store, starting with Amazon and the Epic Games Store. These will be available “over the next few months.” (When support for Amazon’s Android apps are added to Windows 11 sometime after the official launch, those apps will still be searchable from within the Microsoft Store itself.) If you don’t want to (or can’t) install Windows 11 on your PC, Microsoft says that the new Microsoft Store and the new apps in it will also be coming to Windows 10 “in the coming months.” Windows 11’s rollout officially begins on October 5. Credit where credit is due – these are good moves, and shows that at least at this point in time, Microsoft is not interested in using the Microsoft Store as a stick. As long as their store policies remain like this, and they don’t lock down sideloading, they’re on the right side of this divide.

The FyneDesk project is taking a fresh look at what it means to be a desktop environment. Using the same beautiful and user friendly graphics of the Fyne toolkit you will find it a great place to call home on your computer. We also want to make it easy to update, add to or change your desktop just like you can with any other Open Source software. And so the design of our desktop project has put ease of learning and development in the centre of how we work. Now you can have the desktop of your dreams – and share the result for others as well. That’s some flowery language, but look past it and there’s a number of very interesting projects here. The desktop environment itself seems a bit rough around the edges, but the underlying toolkit is quite fascinating – it’s not yet another Qt or GTK derivative, but instead completely new and written in Go. There’s a number of applications, too.

Fairphone is unique in the world of smartphones. It’s pretty much the only company trying to build a sustainable device that isn’t glued together and hostile to the repair community. Today, Fairphone is announcing a brand-new flagship: the Fairphone 4, which brings an updated design and better specs while still shipping with all the modularity you would expect. A lot of welcome upgrades to this unique smartphone, but the lack of a headphone jack is a bit of a headscratcher.

Apple’s remote work struggle is emblematic of a deeper shift taking place inside the company. Since 1976, the tech giant has operated in largely the same way: executives make decisions about how the company will function, and employees either fall in line or leave. What choice do they have? Apple is currently worth $2 trillion, making it the most valuable company in the world, as well as one of the most powerful. Over the past few months, however, that culture has started to erode. As workers across the tech industry advocate for more power, Apple’s top-down management seems more out of touch than ever before. Now, a growing number of employees are organizing internally for change and speaking out about working conditions on Twitter. Success tends to hide problems.

Like the good (and quickly abandoned) Android tablet interfaces of yore, Android 12.1 sees Google return to dual-pane layouts for various bits of the OS interface. The settings screen is back to a dual-pane configuration, which has the top-level settings list on the left and each individual page of settings on the right. The notification panel takes a similar approach, with the quick settings on the left and the normal list of notifications on the right. Google’s leaked dock interface is here, too. The screenshots all have a pinned black bar at the bottom of the screen, making for a hybrid of the iPad’s new dock UI and the old Honeycomb bar. Of course, everything could change eventually, but for now, the icons at the bottom just seem to be your recent apps. Being able to pin apps to this bar would be nice, too. The dock, assuming it doesn’t auto-hide, will cut into the vertical real-estate apps have access to. Vertical space is currently a big problem for apps on foldables, especially when you aren’t in side-by-side app mode. Some interesting changes here, which are definitely sorely needed for Android tablets and tablet-like devices.

In public, Apple claims it supports legislation to combat climate change. Jackson, now Apple’s VP for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, released a statement asserting that “the urgent threat of climate change is a key priority” for the company. Jackson called on Congress and the Biden administration to take “urgent action” to pass “climate policies that quickly decarbonize our electric grid.” Specifically, Jackson said Apple supports “the enactment of a Clean Energy Standard (CES) that would decarbonize the power sector by 2035.” However, now that said standard is actually on the verge of being implemented, Apple, behind closed doors, is changing its tune. The goal of the Clean Energy Standard in the reconciliation package would be to reduce carbon emissions from the power sector by 80% by 2030 and 100% by 2035. It’s the precise policy that Jackson said Apple supported in her statement. Given this stance, you might be surprised that Apple is part of a “massive lobbying blitz” to kill the reconciliation package and its Clean Energy Standard. Why, then, is Apple now suddenly fighting the very standard it was championing? The ads focus on the funding mechanism for the package, which includes increasing the corporate tax rate by a few percentage points — from 21% to 26.5%. The rate would still be far lower than the 35% corporate tax rate in place prior to the 2017 tax cuts. In 2020, Apple had $67 billion in profits and an effective tax rate of 14.4%. Ah, of course. Apple wants to be regarded as an environmentally responsible company, but only if it’s free and doesn’t cost them anything. Apple’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.

The Verge: Valve promised it would work with anti-cheat software makers EAC and BattlEye to ensure some of the most popular games will run on its upcoming Steam Deck Linux-based gaming handheld, and one of those companies is now officially on board — Epic Games announced today that its Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) now supports Linux and Mac. Not only that, it’s specifically set up to work with the Proton and Wine compatibility layers that Valve’s relying on to bring Windows games to the Deck. BattlEye is coming to Linux, too.

Btrfs—short for “B-Tree File System” and frequently pronounced “butter” or “butter eff ess”—is the most advanced filesystem present in the mainline Linux kernel. In some ways, btrfs simply seeks to supplant ext4, the default filesystem for most Linux distributions. But btrfs also aims to provide next-gen features that break the simple “filesystem” mold, combining the functionality of a RAID array manager, a volume manager, and more. We have good news and bad news about this. First, btrfs is a perfectly cromulent single-disk ext4 replacement. But if you’re hoping to replace ZFS—or a more complex stack built on discrete RAID management, volume management, and simple filesystem—the picture isn’t quite so rosy. Although the btrfs project has fixed many of the glaring problems it launched with in 2009, other problems remain essentially unchanged 12 years later. One of those projects we’ve been hearing about for years. I think most distributions still default to ext4 – except for Fedora.

While we now know that Microsoft will only provide support for the new OS to the processors from both Intel and AMD that are in its list of supported CPUs, the company also stated that users on unsupported systems could still go ahead with an install using ISOs if they are interested. But this in return would leave their systems in an unsupported state. It has been reported that this unsupported state may even mean that such PCs won’t also receive critical security updates. So when a user does want to upgrade to Windows 11 from such existing systems, the following formal agreement, or something similar, would be popping up. The notice basically states that installing Windows 11 on such PCs is “not recommended”, and that they are “not entitled to updates”. I could muster up some respect for Microsoft if their cut-off was a hard cut, but this wishy-washy situation is terrible for consumers.

Microsoft just wrapped up its latest Surface event, and it was packed with news — including the redesigned Surface Pro 8, a camera-equipped Surface Duo 2, and even a new flagship laptop that puts a hinge behind the screen. There’s a lot of cool new hardware in here. I’ve always liked Microsoft’s Surface line of devices, and even own a few of them. They’re not much use to me anymore – Surface Linux support is spotty, at best, especially for newer devices – but for Windows users, they’re definitely worthy to take into consideration.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, has announced plans to force smartphone and other electronics manufacturers to fit a common USB-C charging port on their devices. The proposal is likely to have the biggest impact on Apple, which continues to use its proprietary Lightning connector rather than the USB-C connector adopted by most of its competitors. The rules are intended to cut down on electronic waste by allowing people to re-use existing chargers and cables when they buy new electronics. In addition to phones, the rules will apply to other devices like tablets, headphones, portable speakers, videogame consoles, and cameras. Manufacturers will also be forced to make their fast-charging standards interoperable, and to provide information to customers about what charging standards their device supports. Under the proposal, customers will be able to buy new devices without an included charger. It was the European Union that spearheaded the change from one-charger-per-device to standardising on Micro-USB, which was followed by USB-C later on. There’s a lot of pro-Apple, anti-government, right-wing talking points going around the internet today, especially coming from the United States, but unlike what they want you to believe, laws like this do not stop or even hinder innovation or the arrival of newer charging ports or standards. New charging standards can be rolled into USB-C, and the law can be changed for newer ports if the industry asks for it and there is sufficient consensus. Nobody liked the situation we had where every single device had its own incompatible charger. In fact, I have countless Palm OS devices I have a hard time charging because I lost some of their chargers over time. It was an infuriating time, and it’s thanks to EU pressure that the situation has improved as much as it has. However, due to Apple’s reluctance to play ball, the EU now has to step in and regulate – had Apple been a good citizen and adopted USB-C like everyone else, we probably wouldn’t have needed this law. Too bad for Apple. They most likely won’t be able to buy their way out of this one, and we don’t have historically black colleges Apple can take back promised funding from, either.

The Linux Plumbers Conference is this week, and since Android is one of the biggest distributors of the Linux kernel in the world, Google software engineer Todd Kjos stopped by for a progress report from the Android team. Android 12—which will be out any day now—promises to bring Android closer than ever to mainline Linux by shipping Google’s “Generic Kernel Image” (GKI) to end-users. This is a big issue, and I’m glad Google and the Android team are addressing it. Hopefully, we will eventually end up in a situation where the Android kernel and the mainline Linux kernel are far, far closer to each other than they are now.

A WSL alternative for users who prefer an MS-DOS environment. DOS Subsystem for Linux integrates a real Linux environment into MS-DOS systems, allowing users to make use of both DOS and Linux applications from the DOS command prompt. What is this unholy union.

The open source Panfrost driver for Mali GPUs has now achieved official conformance on Mali-G52 for OpenGL ES 3.1, as seen on the Khronos adopters list. This important milestone is a step forward for the open source driver, as it now certifies Panfrost for use in commercial products containing Mali G52 and paves the way for further conformance submissions on other Mali GPUs. Excellent news, and great progress.

Apple has released new versions of all of its platforms, with only the Mac lagging behind for now. There’s iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, HomePod 15, and tvOS 15. As usual, Apple’s device support for new updates is excellent and stretches back quite far, so pretty much every one of you who is an iOS users will be able to enjoy these new releases. You know where to find them.

Sir Clive Sinclair, the inventor and entrepreneur who was instrumental in bringing home computers to the masses, has died at the age of 81. His daughter, Belinda, said he died at home in London on Thursday morning after a long illness. Sinclair invented the pocket calculator but was best known for popularising the home computer, bringing it to British high-street stores at relatively affordable prices. One of the greatest.

Alphabet’s Google and Apple have removed jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s tactical voting app from their stores, his team said on Friday, after Russia accused the U.S. tech firms of meddling in its internal affairs. Russia goes to the polls on Friday to elect a new parliament in a three-day vote that the ruling United Russia party is expected to win despite a ratings slump after the biggest crackdown on the Kremlin’s critics in years. Apple, only a few weeks ago during the CASM debacle, adamantly told the world it would never bow to government pressure. Unsurprisingly, that was a bold-faced lie. Google publicly commits itself to human rights, but apparently, that does not extend to Putin critics and the Russian opposition.