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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.

Taking NVIDIA into the next generation of server GPUs is the Hopper architecture. Named after computer science pioneer Grace Hopper, the Hopper architecture is a very significant, but also very NVIDIA update to the company’s ongoing family of GPU architectures. With the company’s efforts now solidly bifurcated into server and consumer GPU configurations, Hopper is NVIDIA doubling down on everything the company does well, and then building it even bigger than ever before. The kinds of toys us mere mortals rarely get to play with.

We need to talk about Windows priorities as a product. And I am saying this as someone who wants Windows to succeed – it’s a great OS that, despite it’s naysayers, is still one of the best when it comes to backwards compatibility and richness of functionality. I mean, I can literally run a game written for Windows 95 on Windows 11 without major issues (no, I am not going to open the SafeDisc can of worms this time). I can’t do that on macOS or Linux boxes reliably, and yet Windows is doing a-OK with this task. That being said, I am disappointed to see the direction that the OS is taking lately, and it feels like a very odd misplacement of priorities, especially given the advances that other Microsoft products are going through. A detailed post outlining all the problems on Windows – problems that are only getting worse. Using Windows these days feels like visiting Times Square in New York – it’s a cacophony of lights and colours and advertisements and noise that, while an experience worth having, I didn’t want to stay for much longer than a few minutes. It doesn’t have much to offer besides the lights and colours and advertisements and noise, because those are the very point of Times Square. There’s nothing else of value there. Windows is the same – it isn’t an operating system designed for its users, it’s an operating system designed to increase ad and services revenue. The people in charge at Windows clearly aren’t the people who care about a coherent, welcoming, pleasing, thorough, and well-crafted experience – it’s the advertisement bozos and cloudbros who run the Windows department. And that’s sad.

It’s been a long while since we updated the blog! Truth be told, we wanted to write a couple more progress reports, but there was always “one more thing”… So, instead, we decided to take the plunge and publish the first public alpha release of the Asahi Linux reference distribution! We’re really excited to finally take this step and start bringing Linux on Apple Silicon to everyone. This is only the beginning, and things will move even more quickly going forward! This is an absolutely stunning effort and achievement by the Asahi team, but as a mere user, this whole thing does not exactly instill me with the confidence needed to buy Apple hardware to run Linux on it. There’s no denying M1 hardware is amazing, but the idea of being entirely at the mercy of whatever Apple decides to do with the firmware and boot process seems like a terrible place to be in. That being said, few people will care about that possible issue, and for them, this is great news. It also trickles down to other projects: It has taken a while, but I’m pleased to announce that OpenBSD/arm64 works well enough on Apple M1 systems for some wider testing. A major milestone was reached with the release of the Asahi Linux installer. Both Asahi and OpenBSD are available on all M1 Macs, except the Studio, since it’s too new. Also, quite a few things do not work yet, such as GPU acceleration, sleep, webcams, Thunderbolt, Bluetooth, video acceleration, and a bunch more.

Apple is experiencing a widespread outage today, with a wide range of the company’s services and apps down or experiencing issues currently. Affected services and apps include the App Store, iCloud, Siri, iMessage, iTunes Store, Apple Maps, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+, Apple TV+, Find My, FaceTime, Notes, Stocks, and many others, according to complaints across Twitter and other platforms. Apple’s developer website is also inaccessible due to server issues. Another great day to be a Linux user.

This document is a high level overview of the Fuchsia Interface Definition Language (FIDL), which is the language used to describe interprocess communication (IPC) protocols used by programs running on Fuchsia. This overview introduces the concepts behind FIDL — developers familiar with these concepts already can start writing code by following the tutorials, or dive deeper by reading the language or bindings references. Some light reading going into the weekend. Knowing how Fuchsia works might become quite important for developers over the coming years.

Haiku’s latest activity report is out, and right off the bat, there’s a big ticket item. That’s right, after many years of being requested, Haiku finally has support for USB WiFi devices! (Currently only Realtek controllers are supported, but Ralink and others should follow before too long; Realtek/“RTL” chips are generally the most common, however.). That’s great news. There’s way more in here than just this, of course, so head on over to find out more.

The long-awaited availability of Steam on Chromebooks was just more or less announced (in alpha) at the 2022 Google for Games Developer Summit. That said, Google is light on availability details for the moment. Google specifically said that the “Steam Alpha just launched, making this longtime PC game store available on select Chromebooks for users to try.” That said, no other details appear to be live this morning, but we did reveal the device list last month. I’m sure many Chromebooks are more than powerful enough to play a meaningful number of games.

Microsoft appears to be testing a new type of ad inside File Explorer on Windows 11. Microsoft MVP and Twitter user Florian Beaubois discovered an ad in the latest test build of Windows 11, prompting users to check out the Microsoft Editor. While the ads might have appeared for some Windows 11 users, Microsoft says it was a mistake. “This was an experimental banner that was not intended to be published externally and was turned off,” says Brandon LeBlanc, senior program manager for Windows, in a statement to The Verge. Almost every week there’s a news story about something plain dreadful happening to Windows users, and this is just the latest in a long string of ads Microsoft is plastering all over its operating system. I really don’t understand how users just accept this – they sit back, get bombarded with ads in their operating system, and just… Accept it. Baffling.

Starting today, Windows games can ship with DirectStorage. This public SDK release begins a new era of fast load times and detailed worlds in PC games by allowing developers to more fully utilize the speed of the latest storage devices. In September 2020, we announced DirectStorage would be coming to Windows, and after collecting feedback throughout our developer preview, we are making this API available to all of our partners to ship with their games. Check out the announcement blog for an in-depth exploration of the inspiration for DirectStorage and how it will benefit Windows games. This technology brings the fast storage features of the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X/S to Windows gaming. I’m curious to see if this feature can make its way to Linux, but I wonder how e.g. games running through Proton would possibly make use of it.

In this post we will learn the useful skill of writing a device driver for Unix V6 (released in 1975) and run it on an emulator. The implemented device is fairly trivial: it will open a message box on the host OS. Read this article now. Everybody needs to know how to do this.

The popular Vanced YouTube app is being discontinued, after a legal threat from Google. The creators of Vanced have revealed the project will be shut down in the coming days, with download links set to be removed. While the app will continue to work for anyone who currently has it installed on Android, without any future updates it’s likely to stop working at some point soon. The Vanced owners say they’ve had to discontinue the project “due to legal reasons.” Google sent the Vanced owners a cease and desist letter recently, which has forced the developers to stop distributing and developing the app. “We were asked to remove all references to ‘YouTube’, change the logo, and remove all links related to YouTube products,” says an admin from the Vanced team in a Discord message to The Verge. The most surprising thing for me is not that Google shut Vanced down, but that it took them this long. YouTube with ads is a terrible user experience, so I pay for YouTube Premium to get rid of them, but obviously, not everyone has the means to do so, be it financially or because of some inane Google restriction. Vanced offered a great alternative for these people. With Google trying ever harder to monetise the hell out of YouTube views, it was only a matter of time before it would go after Vanced. In the past few months, I noticed a considerable uptick in mentions of and references to the application, and Google probably noticed too.

ReactOS as the open-source project striving for binary compatibility with Windows applications/drivers is still working away in 2022 on symmetric multi-processing (SMP) support. Proper SMP/multi-core support is obviously critical for today’s hardware or even anything in the past roughly two decades… It’s also been a pain point for ReactOS, but fortunately the situation is improving. We’re still looking at very early code that’s not even merged yet, but once it has – this would be a massive leap forward for the project.

The history of computing could arguably be divided into three eras: that of mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers. Minicomputers provided an important bridge between the first mainframes and the ubiquitous micros of today. This is the story of the PDP-11, the most influential and successful minicomputer ever. A deep dive into the inner workings of the PDP-11, specifically on how to use the machine to do actual computing tasks. I lack the skills to do anything with a machine like this, but they look and feel so incredibly nice.

The MorphOS development team is proud to announce the immediate availability of MorphOS 3.16. This release includes numerous important performance, stability and security improvements. A new version of Wayfarer comes included with the OS and replaces the now obsolete Odyssey Web Browser. We’ve also included the Iris email client, Magic Beacon notifications system and a Command-Tab application switcher. The Synergy Client and Server applications are now compatible with the free Barrier alternative. OpenSSL3 is now available as a shared library. MorphOS is actually a remarkably good and capable operating system – held back by its reliance on outdated Apple PowerPC hardware. It’s got a a robust core, a good browser, a number of great applications, and you can configure and alter every nook and cranny of the operating system (assuming you can get through the thick molasses that is several decades of Amiga-isms that make no sense to anyone who hasn’t been part of the scene for about as long). It’s just sad it’s held back by outdated hardware that’s really becoming ever harder to keep running these days. There have been the occasional rumblings of a port to x86, but as far as I know, nothing has come of it yet. Meanwhile, my 17″ 1.25Ghz PowerBook G4 sees the occasional boot into MorphOS, and with this new release, I feel a few boots incoming.

The comments have pointed out that the person I was linking to is a transphobic bigot, and that deadnaming was taking place. I had no idea this was the case, and was entirely unaware of the situation. Still, that is not an excuse, and I should have done better due diligence to ensure this didn’t happen. Rest assured, there was no ill intent on my part whatsoever – just ignorance of the people involved. My sincerest apologies to everyone involved, and I will strive to do better. elementaryOS was never going to be long for this world. They go years without releases, new releases require fresh installations (often no upgrade path), the only way to install software out of the box is through their virtually empty application store (you need to manually enable things like apt repositories), and so on. A lot of people suggest elementaryOS as a distribution for beginners, but I never understood why – it will leave users locked into an operating system that barely has any applications, requires fresh installations, and requires a ton of manual fiddling and command line work to make more usable and capable. At that point, you might as well jump straight to Mint, pop!_OS, Fedora, or any of the other truly capable, user friendly, foolproof Linux distributions that don’t try to lock users out of all kinds of useful features and applications. It’s no surprise to me that the company behind elementaryOS has been unable to make any money. It always gave me major Lindows/Linspire vibes.

The PipeWire project has made major strides over the past few years, bringing shiny new features, and paving the way for new possibilities in the Linux multimedia scene. With 2021 seeing significant progress made on all fronts, let’s take a moment to look back at what was accomplished, and what lies ahead for 2022. Just one of the many project that make Linux easier to use on the desktop.

Android 12L, the big-screen updated version of Android 12, is now rolling out after months of testing, landing as part of today’s Feature Drop update for Pixels and coming soon to other tablets and foldables from companies like Samsung, Lenovo, and Microsoft. If you haven’t followed along with our Android 12L feature coverage, the very short version is that most of the changes were meant to address issues larger devices face when running Android. That includes UI tweaks covering a range from the notification shade to launcher grid sizing, plus some tweaks to multitasking, as well as a new taskbar that behaves a little more like Chrome OS — Google’s unifying its interfaces across compatible screen sizes. Most of the changes are, as said, for devices with larger screens, so most likely there isn’t much in here for people with regular phones.

Apple is adding “one last chip” to the M1 processor family. The M1 Ultra is a new design that uses “UltraFusion” technology to strap two M1 Max chips together, resulting in a huge processor that offers 16 high-performance CPU cores, four efficiency cores, a 64-core integrated GPU, and support for up to 128GB of RAM. It looks like Apple is using a chiplet-based design for the M1 Ultra, just like AMD is doing for many of its Ryzen chips. A chiplet-based approach, as we’ve written, uses multiple silicon dies to make larger chips and can result in better yields since you don’t need to throw a whole monolithic 20-core chip out if a couple of cores have defects that keep them from working. This is a beast of a chip, and it fits in this neat little new Mac, called the Mac Studio. Apple also unveiled a new, more “affordable” monitor, but I’m not sure a monitor that maxes out at 60Hz in 2022 is worth €1779.

Ntfs2btrfs is a tool which does in-place conversion of Microsoft’s NTFS filesystem to the open-source filesystem Btrfs, much as btrfs-convert does for ext2. The original image is saved as a reflink copy at image/ntfs.img, and if you want to keep the conversion you can delete this to free up space. Neat tool, but probably with a rather limited application.

Writing this article wasn’t easy. At first glance, it’s all about a fairly unentertaining subject (building a calculator, the kind of exercise that every IT student tried at some point of its education), and to make the matter worse, it’s pedantically advertised. But in the end, I believe that this article really brings out valuable features, highlights enjoyable development stories, and offers an interesting experience, so bear with me! I built a desktop calculator called Chalk, which is free and supports macOS 10.9+. Because I had to make unconventional choices and introduce ideas that I never saw anywhere else before, my first task is to convince you that Chalk is more interesting than it looks. Alright, let’s see what the not-at-all critical and discerning OSNews readership thinks of this one.

For the first time ever, all major browser vendors, and other stakeholders, have come together to solve the top browsers compatibility issues identified by web developers. Interop 2022 will improve the experience of developing for the web in 15 key areas. In this article, find out how we got here, what the project focuses on, how success will be measured, and how you can track progress. I’m all for working together in this industry, since working together usually means better experiences for consumers. Making browsers render websites more consistently is a great goal to strive towards, especially when it’s a joint effort.

This article is not intended to convince you to abandon your current antivirus solutions. In this post I would like to share my observations and ways to improve the effectiveness of Defender. But today, let’s focus on Defender for the home user. It does not have additional functions that are offered by other commercial solutions, but what it does is enough. However, it is worth enabling some additional functions that are not available from the graphical interface. Excellent article, and worth a read if you’re still using Windows.

Google’s homegrown Fuchsia operating system has taken another step closer to being broadly usable by gaining the full Google Chrome browser experience. It’s been possible to access the web in a very limited way on Fuchsia for quite some time now via the operating system’s “Simple Browser” app – which was powered by the Chromium engine under the hood. While usable, this “browser” didn’t offer the usual necessities like an address bar or tabs. Mid last year, we reported that Google had begun efforts to bring the full Chrome browser experience to Fuchsia. As first spotted by oldschool-51 of Fuchsia’s Reddit community, these efforts have come to fruition in recent days, with Simple Browser being replaced in Fuchsia’s app list with “Chromium.” It’s steps like these that show that Google is serious about Fuchsia. For whatever that’s worth.

Gadgets are getting too thin, again. These past few weeks saw some of the latest victims of the seemingly unending drive towards making our devices as thin as possible, no matter the consequences. Samsung’s Galaxy S22 and S22 Plus — what will undoubtedly be some of the most popular Android phones of the year — are thinner than last year’s models and held back by disappointing battery life. The new Dell XPS 15 is “exceptionally thin and light” but barely lasts four hours on a charge and runs nearly as hot as the sun. And the OnePlus 10 Pro is a flagship smartphone that can somehow be snapped in half with your bare hands. It seems that despite over a decade of chasing the thinnest, lightest phones and computers around to the detriment of battery life, cooling, and durability, companies still haven’t learned their lessons. I prefer a few more millimeters if it means better heat dissipation, less fan noise, and better battery life. I’m not entirely sure if consumers in general prefer thinness over these other aspects, but I doubt they do.

At 7.7×7.7×1.4 inches, the Mac mini is a tiny desktop. When the form factor debuted in 2010, it was pretty impressive. But 12 years later, with mini PCs like the Intel NUC measuring 4.6×4.4×1.5 inches, the Mac mini doesn’t feel all that mini anymore. As it turns out, the PC is packing some extra baggage, and by getting rid of some of those parts—like an overly powerful internal power supply unit (PSU)—an enthusiast has been able to rebuild the system with a 28 percent reduction in volume while allegedly keeping the same performance as the original machine. Since I’m no archeologist who specialises in prehistoric measurement “systems”, I have no idea what those weird, alien measurements mean, but the pictures and video are clear: this is a really tiny M1 Mac Mini now. And the “enthusiast” is Quinn Nelson, all-around good guy.

Oh, oh, oh Samsung, up to their usual tricks. Samsung phones ship with a Game Optimizing Service app pre-installed as a system app — we confirmed it’s installed on the Galaxy S22+, as pictured below. It cannot be disabled. The app’s exact purpose isn’t described very well anywhere, but its name certainly implies the app is used to improve performance for games. However, as one Twitter user points out, with the backing of a lengthy thread from frustrated Samsung Galaxy owners in Korea (via Android Authority), Samsung seems to be using this app to “optimize” the performance of thousands of non-gaming apps. When an app is in the Game Optimizing Service list, its performance is limited, as demonstrated by a YouTuber who changed the package name of the 3DMark benchmark app to trick Samsung’s software into throttling it, and the results are pretty telling. In and of itself there’s really nothing wrong with managing the performance of various applications in order to preserve battery life. However, it has to be done transparently and openly, so that users can easily see what’s going on and disable any optimisations they’re not interested in. This kind of obfuscation by Samsung is deception, and simply should not be allowed.

This is the first in a series of articles about the history of Java on the Desktop, from my perspective as a developer who started working with Java in the late ‘90’s. I’m writing this, partly as a background for why I created jDeploy, a developer-friendly desktop deployment tool for Java. Despite the ominous tone of this article’s title, I believe that Java is a compelling platform for modern desktop applications. Stick around for the whole series to find out why. Isn’t Java still one of the languages every aspiring programmer learns in school?

The 22.02 release is dominated by three topics, the tightening and restructuring of the code base, device-driver infrastructure, and the transition of Sculpt OS towards a versatile toolkit for building specialized operating-system appliances. Genode’s release notes are always a sight to behold. Detailed, interesting, and always worth a read.

If you’ve already installed Windows 11 on unsupported devices, you might soon notice a new watermark on the desktop. The watermark, which appears above the taskbar clock, is similar to the “Windows is not activated” error, but it won’t affect apps, windows or web browsers. The desktop watermark simply states “system requirements not met” and it may irritate some users, but it should not come as too much of a surprise, as Microsoft previously warned users of possible ‘damage’. You have to feel sad for Windows users. Windows 7 really seems to have been the high point of Windows – ever since then it’s been one mess after another.

Linux themes and icon sets, inspired by other operating systems, have been around for as long as Linux has had a GUI. Some times those themes get pretty close to looking like the original. But… What if — what if — you could make your Linux desktop look almost exactly like Windows 95? It’s damn headerbars in GNOME (and now also Xfce) that mess this utopia up. They looks preposterously bad using these classic operating systems skins.

This blog series creates a small operating system in the Rust programming language. Each post is a small tutorial and includes all needed code, so you can follow along if you like. The source code is also available in the corresponding Github repository. A great way to learn Rust.

Now, a black screen could have multiple causes. The video driver may have crashed. Or the video driver could be working fine, but the compositor has crashed, so that nothing is being given to the video driver. Or the compositor could be working fine, but the shell has crashed, so the compositor has nothing to render. Or the shell could be running, but it simply forgot to put something on the screen. For that last case, the Windows 8 shell created a backstop window that sat at a layer below all of the other layers. If none of the other layers were present, then at least you got a backstop window. And in early debug builds, that backstop window contained an ASCII drawing of cats. That way, if you saw cats, you knew that you were in that last failure case: The shell is running but forgot to put something on the screen. Why cats? I approve of cats.

Neptune OS is a Windows NT personality of the seL4 microkernel. It implements what Microsoft calls the “NT Executive”, the upper layer of the Windows kernel NTOSKRNL.EXE, as a user process under the seL4 microkernel. The NT Executive implements the so-called NT Native API, the native system call interface of Windows upon which the more familiar Win32 API is built. These are exposed to the user mode via stub functions in NTDLL.DLL (a somewhat redundant name if you ask me) with names such as NtCreateProcess. The NT Executive is also responsible for the Windows kernel driver interface (known as the Windows driver model), which includes functions like IoConnectInterrupt and IoCallDriver. On Windows these are loaded into kernel mode and linked with the NTOSKRNL.EXE image. On Neptune OS, we run all the Windows kernel driver in user mode and they communicate with the NT Executive process via standard seL4 IPC primitives. The eventual goal of the Neptune OS project is to implement enough NT semantics such that a ReactOS user land can be ported under Neptune OS, as well as most ReactOS kernel drivers. In theory we should be able to achieve binary compatibility with native Windows executables provided that our implementation of the NT Native API is sufficiently faithful. We should also be able to achieve a high degree of source code compatibility with Windows kernel drivers. The main obstacle of achieving binary compatibility of kernel drivers is that many Windows kernel drivers do not follow the standard Windows driver communication protocol (ie. passing IRPs when you need to call another driver) and instead just pass pointers around and call into other drivers directly. In Neptune OS unless it’s a driver-minidriver pair we always run “kernel” drivers in their separate processes so it is not possible to do that. Very cool idea for a project, and awesome to see that they plan on integrating the work done by the ReactOS team.

We’re fast approaching the 40th birthday of the Sinclair Spectrum in 2022, and to keep myself occupied during COVID lockdowns I decided it would be a lot of fun to go back and re-visit the computer that started it all for me. I set about coding and building the infrastructure for a Spectrum-based community project (website at tnfs.markround.com) incorporating my current-day tools and knowledge, hence the title of this series of posts. The enterprise grew into a curious mix of old and new: Container-based pipelines with Ruby server-side components, all interacting with Spectrum BASIC and z80 assembly code, running on real 1980s hardware with a TCP/IP connection. If you’ve ever wondered how to unit-test Sinclair BASIC programs in GitOps pipelines running on Kubernetes clusters, this is the set of articles for you. I love it when people push these old machines to their limits with modern knowledge.

Late last year, we reviewed Slimbook’s KDE Slimbook, a special version of the Spanish’ Linux OEM’s 15″ laptop made in collaboration with the KDE project. I found it to be an excellent laptop, which left little to be desired for anyone in the market for a laptop of that size. It came with tons of power, unobtrusive fans, a great design, and a fair price tag. That being said – personally, I prefer smaller laptops. The KDE Slimbook’s 15 inches is just a bit too wide for me to be comfortable, and I’d much rather have something in the area of 13-14 inches. Luckily, Slimbook has an offering in this segment too: the Slimbook Executive. I’ve been using and testing one for the last few months, and I can confidently say the KDE Slimbook was not a fluke. Slimbook is running a special deal just for OSNews readers! When ordering your Slimbook Executive, use the promo code executive-laptop-osnews for a €150 discount!Note: OSNews does not receive any percentage of the sales using this promo code (or sales not using this promo code for that matter). The Slimbook Executive is 14″ ultrabook weighing in at a mere 1kg. Like the KDE Slimbook, it is also made from magnesium, which I find much more pleasant to handle than aluminium. I find magnesium more pleasant to touch and hold – it’s not as cold and harsh as aluminium, and it’s lighter too, which makes sense for an ultraportable laptop like this one. Instead of AMD, the Executive is powered by Intel’s Core i7-1165G7, with 4 cores and 8 threads, paired with Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics. It has two RAM slots for a maximum total of 64GB of RAM; my review unit was configured with 16GB of RAM, which is more than enough for a modern Linux distribution on such a portable machine. Despite being relatively small, the laptop has ample room for storage – it comes with two M.2 slots, one at PCIe 4x and one at PCIe 2x, for an out-of-factory configurable total of 4TB of storage. Unlike some of the competition from more established, larger OEMs, there’s no shortage of ports here. It has two USB-A 3.2 Gen1 ports, 1 USB-C 3.2 Gen2 port (with video-out through DisplayPort 1.4), one Thunderbolt 4 port (also with video-out through DisplayPort 1.4a, as well as charging support at 90+W) an SD card reader, a full-size HDMI port, and the usual Kensington lock, barrel plug, and headphone jack. The keyboard is more of a standard affair than the fancy, unique keyboard design found on the KDE Slimbook. This time around, it’s a regular chicklet-style keyboard in its magnesium frame, entirely familiar to anyone who has used an ultrabook in the past five to ten years. It’s excellently boring and familiar, just as you want a keyboard to be. It’s of course also backlit, and luckily does not have the readability issues some of the keys on the KDE Slimbook had. The touchpad feels great, has support for multitouch gestures, but it is of the common diving board design, meaning clicking gets progressively harder the higher you go on the trackpad. I really wish Apple’s fancy force touch trackpads made their way to othe rmanufacturers, too, since it feels nicer to have the same click feeling no matter where you click. The trackpad is huge, but not as over-the-top as Apple’s recent touchpads. The design of the laptop itself is very generic – unlike the KDE Slimbook, there are no flourishes here that set it apart from the rest of the competition (aside from the Slimbook logo, of course). I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing – this segment of the market is very mature, and this general design popularised by the MacBook Air is popular for a reason. Crazy and unique design makes sense on a gaming laptop, but on a small ultrabook, I prefer to keep it simple. The display is the real star of the show. It’s a 14″ screen with a resolution of 2880×1800 (Slimbook calls it 3K), and a refresh rate of 90Hz. Between 4K at 60Hz and 1080p at 144Hz, I think this is an excellent middle ground that avoids the pixelated look of 1080p at 14″, while still giving a decently smooth refresh rate. I definitely prefer this display over the 4K 60Hz panel on my Dell XPS 13, which is saying a lot, since that panel is one of the very best you could get at the time. There is one issue with the display I need to talk about. As it turns out, as soon as you try to install a kernel newer than roughly 5.11 or so, you’re going to see major screen flickering and corruption. After talking to Slimbook about this, it turns out this is because of an issue with panel self-refresh, a powersaving feature in Intel’s driver. This is known to cause issues in some cases, and the solution is to disable the feature using GRUB2 (add i915.enable_psr=0 to the kernel parameters). It’s important to note that you only have to apply this fix if you install a Linux distribution by yourself; the preinstalled Slimbook OS – a slightly modified version of Ubuntu – did not experience this problem, and I’m sure if you select any of the other preinstalled Linux distributions during the order process, Slimbook will also make sure the issue is handled before shipping. Slimbook has also told me they are currently beta testing a BIOS update that will fix this problem at the BIOS level, so once that update is released and installed, this issue will disappear. The battery life is exactly as you’d expect – I’m getting about 8 hours with office-type work, video watching, and some browsing. Using Slimbook’s own applications for managing the battery and processor states, you get some decent control over your performance and battery life, but a Debian-based distribution is required to make installation as easy as possible, since otherwise you’ll

The new FreeDOS 1.3 is now available for download! This contains a bunch of great new features and improvements since the 1.2 release, including: new FreeCOM 0.85a, new Kernel 2043 and an 8086 version with FAT32 support, floppy Edition now uses compression and requires about half as many diskettes, the return of networking, some new programs and games, many many many package updates, some updates and improvements to NLS, improved install process, especially with the MBR, some support to automatically set the COUNTRY.SYS information, improved CD initialization for the boot media and installed system… And much, much more! There’s lot of changes, fixes, and improvements in here, so go get it and play with it.