It’s no secret that a default Windows installation is… Hefty. In more ways than one, Windows is a bit on the obese side of the spectrum, from taking up a lot of disk space, to requiring hefty system requirements (artificial or not), to coming with a lot of stuff preinstalled not everyone wants to have to deal with. As such, there’s a huge cottage industry of applications, scripts, modified installers, custom ISOs, and more, that try to slim Windows down to a more manageable size.

As it turns out, even Microsoft itself wants in on this action. The company that develops and sells Windows also provides a Windows debloat script. Over on GitHub, Microsoft maintains a repository of scripts simplify setting up Windows as a development environment, and amid the collection of scripts we find RemoveDefaultApps.ps1, a PowerShell script to “Uninstall unnecessary applications that come with Windows out of the box”.

The script is about two years old, and as such it includes a few applications no longer part of Windows, but looking through the list is a sad reminder of the kind of junk Windows comes with, most notably mobile casino games for children like Bubble Witch and March of Empires, but also other nonsense like the Mixed Reality Portal or Duolingo. It also removes something called “ActiproSoftwareLLC“, which are apparently a set of third-party, non-Microsoft UI controls for WPF? Which comes preinstalled with Windows sometimes? What is even happening over there?

The entire set of scripts makes use of Chocolatey wrapped in Boxstarter, which is “a wrapper for Chocolatey and includes features like managing reboots for you”, because of course, the people at Microsoft working on Windows can’t be bothered to fix application management and required reboots themselves. Silly me, expecting Microsoft’s Windows developers to address these shortcomings internally instead of using third-party tools.

The repository seems to be mostly defunct, but the fact it even exists in the first place is such a damning indictment of the state of Windows. People keep telling us Windows is fine, but if even Microsoft itself needs to resort to scripts and third-party tools to make it usable, I find it hard to take claims of Windows being fine seriously in any way, shape, or form.

In early 2022 I got several Sun SPARC servers for free off of a FreeCycle ad: I was recently called out for not providing any sort of update on those devices… so here we go!

↫ Sidneys1.com

Some information on booting old-style SPARC machines, as well as pretty pictures. Nice palate-cleanser if you’ve had to deal with something unpleasant this weekend. This world would be a better place if we all had our own Sun machines to play with when we get sad.

Google has gotten a bad reputation as of late for being a bit overzealous when it comes to fighting ad blockers. Most recently, it’s been spotted automatically turning off popular ad blocking extension uBlock Origin for some Google Chrome users. To a degree, that makes sense—Google makes its money off ads. But with malicious ads and data trackers all over the internet these days, users have legitimate reasons to want to block them. The uBlock Origin controversy is just one facet of a debate that goes back years, and it’s not isolated: your favorite ad blocker will likely be affected next. Here are the best ways to keep blocking ads now that Google is cracking down on ad blockers.

↫ Michelle Ehrhardt at LifeHacker

Here’s the cold and harsh reality: ad blocking will become ever more difficult as time goes on. Not only is Google obviously fighting it, other browser makers will most likely follow suit. Microsoft is an advertising company, so Edge will follow suit in dropping Manifest v2 support. Apple is an advertising company, and will do whatever they can to make at least their own ads appear. Mozilla is an advertising company, too, now, and will continue to erode their users’ trust in favour of nebulous nonsense like privacy-respecting advertising in cooperation with Facebook.

The best way to block ads is to move to blocking at the network level. Get a cheap computer or Raspberry Pi, set up Pi-Hole, and enjoy some of the best adblocking you’re ever going to get. It’s definitely more involved than just installing a browser extension, but it also happens to be much harder for advertising companies to combat. If you’re feeling generous, set up Pi-Holes for your parents, friends, and relatives. It’s worth it to make their browsing experience faster, safer, and more pleasant.

And once again I’d like to reiterate that I have zero issues with anyone blocking the ads on OSNews. Your computer, your rules. It’s not like display ads are particularly profitable anyway, so I’d much rather you support us through Patreon or a one-time donation through Ko-Fi, which is a more direct way of ensuring OSNews continues to exist. Also note that the OSNews Matrix room – think IRC, but more modern, and fully end-to-end encrypted – is now up and running and accessible to all OSNews Patreons as well.

Something odd happened to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Dev Kit, an $899 mini PC powered by Windows 11 and the company’s latest Snapdragon X Elite processor. Qualcomm decided to abruptly discontinue the product, refund all orders (including for those with units on hand), and cease its support, claiming the device “has not met our usual standards of excellence.”

↫ Taras Buria at Neowin

The launch of the Snapdragon X Pro and Elite chips seems to have mostly progressed well, but there have been a few hiccups for those of us who want ARM but aren’t interested in Windows and/or laptops. There’s this story, which is just odd all around, with an announced, sold, and even shipped product suddenly taken off the market, which I think at this point was the only non-laptop device with an X Elite or Pro chip. If you are interested in developing for Qualcomm’s new platform, but don’t want a laptop, you’re out of luck for now. Another note is that the SoC SKU in the Dev Kit was clocked a tiny bit higher than the laptop SKUs, which perhaps plays a role in its cancellation.

The bigger hiccup is the problematic Linux bring-up, which is posing many more problems and is taking a lot longer than Qualcomm very publicly promised it would take. For now, if you want to run Linux on a Snapdragon X Elite or Pro device, you’re going to need a custom version of your distribution of choice, tailored to a specific laptop model, using a custom kernel. It’s an absolute mess and basically means that at this point in time, months and months after release, buying one of these to run Linux on them is a bad idea. Quite a few important bits will arrive with Linux 6.12 to supposedly greatly improve the experience, but seeing is believing.

Qualcomm made a lot of grandiose promises about Linux support, and they simply haven’t delivered.

We’ve pulled together all kinds of resources to create a comprehensive guide to installing and upgrading to Windows 11. This includes advice and some step-by-step instructions for turning on officially required features like your TPM and Secure Boot, as well as official and unofficial ways to skirt the system-requirement checks on “unsupported” PCs, because Microsoft is not your parent and therefore cannot tell you what to do.

There are some changes in the 24H2 update that will keep you from running it on every ancient system that could run Windows 10, and there are new hardware requirements for some of the operating system’s new generative AI features. We’ve updated our guide with everything you need to know.

↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica

In the before time, the things you needed to do to make Windows somewhat usable mostly came down to installing applications replicating features other operating systems had been enjoying for decades, but as time went on and Windows 10 came out, users now also had to deal with disabling a ton of telemetry, deleting preinstalled adware, dodge the various dark patterns around Edge, and more. You have wonder if it was all worth it, but alas, Windows 10 at least looked like Windows, if you squinted.

With Windows 11, Microsoft really ramped up the steps users have to take to make it usable. There’s all of the above, but now you also have to deal with an ever-increasing number of ads, even more upsells and Edge dark patterns, even more data gathering, and the various hacks you have to employ to install it on perfectly fine and capable hardware. With Windows 10’s support ending next year, a lot of users are in a rough spot, since they can’t install Windows 11 without resorting to hacks, and they can’t keep using Windows 10 if they want to keep getting updates.

And here comes 24H2, which makes it all even worse. Not only have various avenues to make Windows 11 installable on capable hardware been closed, it also piles on a whole bunch of “AI” garbage, and accompanying upsells and dark patterns, Windows users are going to have to deal with. Who doesn’t want Copilot regurgitating nonsense in their operating system’s search tool, or have Paint strongly suggest it will “improve” your quick doodle to illustrate something to a friend with that unique AI Style™ we all love and enjoy so much?

Stay strong out there, Windows folks. Maybe it’ll get better. We’re rooting for you.

If you read my previous article on DOS memory models, you may have dismissed everything I wrote as “legacy cruft from the 1990s that nobody cares about any longer”. After all, computers have evolved from sporting 8-bit processors to 64-bit processors and, on the way, the amount of memory that these computers can leverage has grown orders of magnitude: the 8086, a 16-bit machine with a 20-bit address space, could only use 1MB of memory while today’s 64-bit machines can theoretically access 16EB.

All of this growth has been in service of ever-growing programs. But… even if programs are now more sophisticated than they were before, do they all really require access to a 64-bit address space? Has the growth from 8 to 64 bits been a net positive in performance terms?

Let’s try to answer those questions to find some very surprising answers. But first, some theory.

↫ Julio Merino

It’s not quite weekend yet, but I’m still calling this some light reading for the weekend.

Earlier this year we talked about Huawei’s HarmonyOS NEXT, which is most likely the only serious competitor to Android and iOS in the world. HarmonyOS started out as a mere Android skin, but over time Huawei invested heavily into the platform to expand it into a full-blown, custom operating system with a custom programming language, and it seems the company is finally ready to take the plunge and release HarmonyOS NEXT into the wild.

It’s indicated that HarmonyOS made up 17% of China’s smartphone market in Q1 of 2024. That’s a significant amount of potential devices breaking off from Android in a market dominated by either it or iOS.

HarmonyOS NEXT is set to begin rolling out to Huawei devices next week. The OS will first come to the Mate 60, Mate X5, and MatePad Pro on October 15.

↫ Andrew Romero at 9To5Google

Huawei has been hard at work making sure there’s no ‘application gap’ for people using HarmonyOS NEXT, claiming it has 10000 applications ready to go that cover “99.9%” of their users’ use case. That’s quite impressive, but of course, we’ll have to wait and see if the numbers line up with the reality on the ground for Chinese consumers. Here in the est HarmonyOS NEXT is unlikely to gain any serious traction, but that doesn’t mean I would mind taking a look at the platform if at all possible.

It’s honestly not surprising the most serious attempt at creating a third mobile ecosystem is coming from China, because here in the west the market is so grossly rusted shut we’re going to be stuck with Android and iOS until the day I die.

Engineers at Google started work on a new Terminal app for Android a couple of weeks ago. This Terminal app is part of the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) and contains a WebView that connects to a Linux virtual machine via a local IP address, allowing you to run Linux commands from the Android host. Initially, you had to manually enable this Terminal app using a shell command and then configure the Linux VM yourself. However, in recent days, Google began work on integrating the Terminal app into Android as well as turning it into an all-in-one app for running a Linux distro in a VM.

↫ Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority

There already are a variety of ways to do this today, but having it as a supported feature implemented by Google is very welcome. This is also going to greatly increase the number of spammy articles and lazy YouTube videos telling you how to “run Ubuntu on your phone”, which I’m not particularly looking forward to.

Internet Archive’s “The Wayback Machine” has suffered a data breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records.

News of the breach began circulating Wednesday afternoon after visitors to archive.org began seeing a JavaScript alert created by the hacker, stating that the Internet Archive was breached.

“Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!,” reads a JavaScript alert shown on the compromised archive.org site.

↫ Lawrence Abrams at Bleeping Computer

To make matters worse, the Internet Archive was also suffering from waves of distributed denial-of-service attacks, forcing the IA to take down the site while strengthening everything up. It seems the attackers have no real motivation, other than the fact they can, but it’s interesting, shall we say, that the Internet Archive has been under legal assault by big publishers for years now, too. I highly doubt the two are related in any way, but it’s an interesting note nonetheless.

I’m still catching up on all the various tech news stories, but this one was hard to miss. A lot of people are rightfully angry and dismayed about this, since attacking the Internet Archive like this kind of feels like throwing Molotov cocktails at a local library – there’s literally not a single reason to do so, and the only people you’re going to hurt are underpaid librarians and chill people who just want to read some books. Whomever is behind this are just assholes, no ifs and buts about it.

I finally seem to be recovering from a nasty flu that is now wreaking havoc all across my tiny Arctic town – better now than when we hit -40 I guess – so let’s talk about something that’s not going to recover because it actually just fucking died: Windows 7.

For nearly everyone, support for Windows 7 ended on January 14th, 2020. However, if you were a business who needed more time to migrate off of it because your CEO didn’t listen to the begging and pleading IT department until a week before the deadline, Microsoft did have an option for you. Businesses could pay to get up to 3 years of extra security updates. This pushes the EOL date for Windows 7 to January 10th, 2023.

Okay but that’s still nearly 2 years earlier than October 8th, 2024?

↫ The Cool Blog

I’d like to solve the puzzle! It’s POSReady, isn’t it? Of course it is! Windows Embedded POSReady’s support finally ended a few days ago, and this means that for all intents and purposes, Windows 7 is well and truly dead. In case you happen to be a paleontologist, think of Windows Embedded POSReady adding an extra two years of support to Windows 7 as the mammoths who managed to survive on Wrangel until as late as only 4000 years ago.

Windows 7 was one of the good ones, for sure, and all else being equal, I’d choose it over any of the releases that cam after. It feels like Windows 7 was the last release designed primarily for users of the Windows platform, whereas later releases were designed more to nickle and dime people with services, ads, and upsells that greatly cheapened the operating system. I doubt we’ll ever see such a return to form again, so Windows 7 might as well be the last truly beloved Windows release.

If you’re still using Windows 7 – please don’t, unless you’re doing it for the retrocomputing thrill. I know Windows 8, 10, and 11 are scary, and as much as it pains me to say this, you’re better off with 10 or 11 at this point, if only for security concerns.

Entirely coincidentally, the KDE team released Plasma 6.2 yesterday, the latest release in the well-received 6.x series. As the version number implies, it’s not a groundbreaking release, but it does contain a number of improvements that are very welcome to a few specific, often underserved groups. For instance, 6.2 overhauls the Accessibility settings panel, and ads, among other things, colourblindness filters for a variety of types of colourblindness. This condition affects roughly 8-9% of the population, so it’s an important new feature.

Another group of people served by Plasma 6.2 are artists.

Plasma 6.2 includes a smorgasbord of new features for users of drawing tablets. Open System Settings and look for Drawing Tablet to see various tools for configuring drawing tablets.

New in Plasma 6.2: a tablet calibration wizard and test mode; a feature to define the area of the screen that your tablet covers (the whole screen or a section); and the option to re-bind pen buttons to different kinds of mouse clicks.

↫ KDE Plasma 6.2 release announcement

Artists and regular users alike can now also enjoy better colour management, more complete HDR support, a tone-mapping feature in Kwin, and much more. Power management has been improved as well, so you can now manage brightness per individual monitor, control which application block going to sleep, and so on. There’s also the usual array of bug fixes, UI tweaks, and so on.

Plasma 6.2 is already available in at least Fedora and openSUSE, and it will find its way to your distribution soon enough, too.

Over the decades, my primary operating system of choice has changed a few times. As a wee child of six years old, we got out first PC through one of those employer buy-a-PC programs, where an employer would subsidize its employees buying PCs for use in the home. The goal here was simple: if people get comfortable with a computer in their private life, they’ll also get comfortable with it in their professional life. And so, through my mother’s employer, we got a brand new 286 desktop running MS-DOS and Windows 3.0. I still have the massive and detailed manuals and original installation floppies it came with.

So, my first operating system of ‘choice’ was MS-DOS, and to a far lesser extent Windows 3.0. As my childhood progressed, we got progressively better computers, and the new Windows versions that came with it – Windows 95, 98, and yes, even ME, which I remarkably liked just fine. Starting with Windows 95, DOS became an afterthought, and with my schools, too, being entirely Windows-only, my teenage years were all Windows, all the time. So, when I bought my first own, brand new computer – instead of old 386 machines my parents took home from work – right around when Windows XP came out, I bought a totally legal copy of Windows XP from some dude at school that somehow came on a CD-R with a handwritten label but was really totally legit you guys.

I didn’t like Windows XP at all, and immediately started looking for alternatives, trying out Mandrake Linux before discovering something called BeOS – and despite BeOS already being over by that point, I had found my operating system of choice. I tried to make it last as long as the BeOS community would let me, but that wasn’t very long. The next step was a move to the Mac, something that was quite rare in The Netherlands at that time. During that same time, Microsoft released Windows Server 2003, the actually good version of Windows XP, and a vibrant community of people, including myself, started using it as a desktop operating system instead.

I continued using this mix of Mac OS X and Windows – even Vista – for a long time, while having various iterations of Linux installed on the side. I eventually lost interest in Mac OS X because Apple lost interest in it (I think around the Snow Leopard era?), and years later, six or seven years ago or so, I moved to Linux exclusively, fully ditching Windows even for gaming like four or so years ago when Valve’s Proton started picking up steam. Nowadays all my machines run Fedora KDE, which I consider to be by far the best desktop operating system experience you can get today.

Over the last few years or so, I’ve noticed something fun and interesting in how I set up my machines: you can find hints of my operating system history all over my preferred setup and settings. I picked up all kinds of usage patterns and expectations from all those different operating systems, and I’d like to enable as many of those as possible in my computing environment. In a way, my setup is a reflection of the operating systems I used in the past, an archaeological record of my computing history, an evolutionary tree of good traits that survived, and bad traits bred out.

Taking a look at my bare desktop, you’ll instantly pick up on the fact I used to use Mac OS X for a long time. The Mac OS X-like dock at the bottom of the screen has been my preferred way of opening and managing running applications since I first got an iBook G4 more than 20 years ago, and to this day I find it far superior to any alternatives. KDE lets me easily recreate a proper dock, without having to resort to any third-party dock applications. I never liked the magnification trick Mac OS X wowed audiences with when it was new, so I don’t use it.

The next dead giveaway I used to be a Mac OS X user a long time ago is the top bar, which shares quite a few elements with the Mac OS X menubar, while also containing elements not found in Mac OS X. I keep the KDE equivalent of a start menu there, a button that brings up my home folder in a KDE folder view, a show desktop button that’s mostly there for aesthetic reasons, KDE’s global menubar widget for that Mac OS X feel, a system tray, the clock, and then a close button that opens up a custom system menu with shutdown/reboot/etc. commands and some shortcuts to system tools.

Another feature coming straight from my days using Mac OS X is KDE’s equivalent of Exposé, called Overview, without which I wouldn’t know how to find a window if my life depended on it. I bind it to the top-left hotcorner for easy access with my mouse, while the bottom-right hotcorner is set to show my desktop (and the reason why I technically don’t really need that show desktop button I mentioned earlier). I fiddled with the hot corner trigger timings so that they fire virtually instantly. Waiting on my computer is so ’90s.

It’s not really possible to see in screenshots, but my stint using BeOS as my main operating system back when that was a thing you could do also shines through, specifically in the way I manage windows. In BeOS, double-clicking a titlebar tab would minimise a window, and right-clicking the tab would send the window to the bottom of the Z-stack. I haven’t maximised a non-video window in several decades, so I find double-clicking a titlebar to maximise a window utterly baffling, and a ridiculous Windows-ism I want nothing to do with. Once again, KDE lets me set this up exactly the way I want, and I genuinely feel lost when I can’t manipulate my windows in this manner.

For the pedantic among us – including myself – I do have to mention that these BeOS window management quirks are, if I have my history straight, originally copied from the classic Mac OS. Be, Inc. was founded by former Apple engineers, after all, and once the AT&T Hobbit processor was cancelled, followed by the failure and cancellation of the BeBox, BeOS positioned itself as a PowerPC Mac OS replacement, before eventually also adding x86 support. However, I never used the classic Mac OS when it was current, so BeOS is where I found and adopted these quirks.

You can also see BeOS represented in a very unexpected place: my terminal colour scheme. BeOS’ terminal had black text on a white background, and while the modern KDE terminal application has additional niceties the BeOS terminal didn’t have – coloured text! – the basic black-on-white is still by far my preferred terminal colour scheme. I definitely unlearned that DOS white-on-black pretty quickly, and thankfully, pretty much any modern terminal emulator allows you to set your own preferred colour scheme.

And yes, there’s some holdovers from Windows in there too. I really like the original, basic Start menu from the Windows 9x days, and I keep that around in my modern KDE desktops; just a simple list of categories with cascading menus, and that’s it. Virtually everything else Microsoft added to the Start menu since has made it worse, and I firmly believe that original design all the way back from 1995 is still an excellent, unobtrusive, yet patently discoverable way of finding applications you don’t use very often. Add in modern tools like KRunner – the always accessible KDE system search tool that prioritises applications – and that’s all I personally need to launch applications that don’t deserve a spot in my dock.

You’ll notice that the red thread running through all of this is KDE Plasma. Out of all the major desktop environments today, KDE is the only one still catering to people who want their graphical user interface to be adaptable to their needs, instead of asking the user to adapt. Windows, macOS, GNOME – they all expect me to mold myself into their predefined shape, whereas I can freely mold KDE to fit my shape.

This goes far beyond just shaping the desktop environment – panels, desktop icons, etc. – itself. One of the most underrated features of KDE is the ability to turn off and edit toolbars, and this feature alone would be enough to draw me towards using KDE. I can’t stress how much I love that I can edit the toolbars of virtually every KDE application to fit my exact needs and wishes, so I don’t have buttons or toolbars I don’t ever use taking up space and distracting me. Add to that the ability to individually turn labels on and off per toolbar item, and you can really make the UI of your applications suit your specific needs and wishes.

Kwrite doesn’t need any toolbars or buttons at all, so all I have enabled are the default window chrome and line numbers. The same applies to my terminal, which just has its window chrome enabled, and nothing else. I changed Dolphin, KDE’s file manager, to move buttons around a bit to better fit my needs, and I added a button to show and hide hidden files, which I weirdly use a lot. Dolphin also allows me to add or remove whatever I want from its context menu, so I remove anything I don’t need to end up with a context menu specifically optimised for me. I extensively modify Kmail and its various sub-windows, since most of the more groupware-like stuff I simply don’t need at all. And so on.

It’s remarkable how KDE has managed to withstand the onslaught of rigid, mobile-inspired UI design with oversized buttons, endless seas of white space, toggles designed for touch instead of cursors, and so on. Whereas all of their competitors seem to be shoehorning touch-optimised UI elements into a cursor-driven environment, KDE still treats the mouse cursor as the primary input, and it shows. KDE still understands that on my desktop or laptop computer, where 99.9% of my input is done with a mouse and keyboard, the UI should reflect that. That means KDE tends to be more dense, show more information, and isn’t afraid to show buttons and other UI elements where it makes sense, as opposed to the trend of hiding everything from the user in favour of oversized buttons and immense amounts of whitespace to accomodate fat fingers that are, in reality, rarely used.

On top of that, KDE doesn’t infantalise its users. It treats its users not as children that need to be protected from themselves, but as grown adults that can make their own informed choices to shape and mold their computers in a way that suits them best. Yes, this means there are a lot of settings panels in KDE, some of which might be quite complex, but KDE trusts its users to be able to handle this responsibility. When using, say, iOS, macOS, or GNOME, I feel like I’m being treated like a child who isn’t yet ready to make their own informed decisions in life, imposing a very “my way or the highway”-style of 1950s parenting. I’m sure this works just fine for millions of people, but I find it condescending, insulting even.

I was reading Carl Svensson’s in-depth critique of GNOME’s file manager recently – a great read – wherein he also linked to one of his earlier articles about the decline of usability in modern software. One part in particular in that article stood out to me; after showing a screenshot of Blender, a by necessity incredibly complex piece of software with a very complex user interface, Svensson nails the problem with, in this case, GNOME’s UI design so well I’m suspecting he’s a carpenter by trade (his emphasis at the end there, not mine):

I honestly can’t see how a program like Blender could possibly be created using Gnome’s guidelines – or indeed toolkit: certain time-tested UI elements aren’t even allowed in Gnome anymore, such as menu bars and hierarchical pull down menus. “Progressive disclosure” and the prevailing interpretation of “navigation structures” means completely replacing certain parts of the interface with others – instead of letting the user decide what’s relevant for them to see at any given moment. “Frequently used actions should be close at hand” – but in a program like Blender, frequently used actions vary profoundly with what kind of project is being worked on and what stage that project is in. I find it unlikely that a developer can make such judgement calls better than a user spending tens of thousands of hours in the program during the span of a career. Then again, “Focus on one situation, one type of experience.” is rather telling. Using software professionally isn’t about having a chic, boutique experience – it’s about getting the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Sometimes, that means working with irreducible complexity.

↫ Carl Svensson

And this hits right at the heart of the problem with the type of modern, minimalist, touch-first UI design embodied by GNOME, Windows, and now even macOS: it doesn’t allow for complexity, because the UI wrongfully assumes it’s running on a device with touch input owned by a child. The fact that your human interface guidelines, ostensibly developed for a mouse-first, desktop interface, do not allow for the kinds of complex applications people use to get work done – whether that be a spreadsheet, something like Blender, or even a word processor – should really make you pause and think about what your goals are, and if you might be heading down the wrong path.

This is why I use KDE. It’s the only major environment that respects me as a user, and fully embraces the input method it knows people are using. I’m genuinely baffled by how much animosity there seems to be among certain UI designers towards the mouse, and how desperately they are trying to embrace touch-first UI ideas that simply have no place on a desktop or laptop with a cursor. It feels like they want to be making a phone or tablet UI so bad that they lose all sight of what people are actually using out here in the real world.

This will sound harsh, but that doesn’t make it any less true: nobody uses GNOME or Windows applications on tablets or smartphones (the macOS situation is more complex, of course). I absolutely respect the hard work and love people are putting into making a GNOME or even Plasma-based smartphone, but the reality of the matter is that as it stands right now, I doubt there’s even more than 10000 people using GNOME or KDE Plasma on a smartphone. So why should the millions of people using GNOME or KDE Plasma be forced to use a UI primarily inspired by touch?

KDE seems to, for now at least, understand this, and that makes it the last popular mouse-first desktop environment that trusts its users with settings, complexity where inevitable, and configurability. Everyone else has either succumbed to the lure of infantilising touch interfaces, or is far too niche to serve as a proper alternative.

And that’s why I use KDE.

Addendum I: Obviously, KDE isn’t perfect

All of this being said, KDE is far, far from perfect, and the various KDE contributors I’ve interacted with will be the first to acknowledge this. I want to bring some balance into this article by discussing some of the things KDE definitely needs to work on, and some worrying trends I’m seeing lately that have me mildly worried about where KDE might be going in the future.

First and foremost, especially newer KDE applications seem to not always respect the variety of choices KDE offers. A great example is the global menubar widget; newer applications like Tokodon, Weather, Spectacle, or even the Settings application, do not have a menubar to export, meaning the widget in the top bar remains eerily empty. I understand they want these applications to not have a menubar visible by default, but I think there’s still enough functionality to populate at least a basic menubar to be displayed for those of us using the global menubar widget or who just want a regular menubar attached to the window. This same group of applications also do not allow their toolbars to be hidden or edited, which is another massive regression from the norm.

This is a worrying trend I hope will be halted.

A second major issue is the messy state of KDE’s various theming options. KDE is well-known for its ability to be themed, but the options for it are confusingly spread out, including the oddity where applications and the Plasma desktop elements use different theming engines. You can end up in a situation where you find a good application theme, but then need to hunt to find the accompanying Plasma theme, assuming it exists at all. It all feels a bit disjointed and chaotic, and I know KDE developers agree, because they are working on greatly streamlining this process, including a unified theming engine called Union. Setting a wallpaper presents a similar issue if you want the same wallpaper applied at your SDDM login screen, desktop, and lock screen – you need to use three distinct settings panels to do this.

It also feels like the powerful Plasma widget engine has been collecting some cobwebs and dust bunnies lately. The first-party, included widgets often feel sparse and limited, quite contrary to the rest of KDE, and the third-party widget offerings are, well, varying in quality, to put it diplomatically, and outdated widgets that don’t even function anymore are still listed in the download new widgets dialog. The widgets activated in a default installation – the system tray, the taskbar, and so on – are often in a good state, but everything else definitely needs some love, and perhaps a development sprint or whatever is needed where experienced KDE contributors take stock of what new widgets people might want and then make them.

Finally, the KDE application ecosystem is not as healthy as it could be. Some KDE staples like Kmail can feel quite outdated, and KDE’s own browser, Falkon, which has the potential to be excellent, needs a lot of TLC to be brought up to speed with what users expect of a browser (something that might be important, for no particular reason at all). It also seems like while the GNOME/libadwaita world gets a steady stream of cool, new small applications, it’s a bit more silent on the KDE front in this regard.

There are smaller issues here and there, as there are with any major, complex software project, but these are some of the what I consider to be big ticket items that I personally would love to see some attention diverted towards. Of course, I’m just a user, and in the end, it’s up the KDE project to allocate what I’m sure are fewer resources than they’d like to have.

Addendum II: Actually, GNOME is great

While I’ve said some harsh words about GNOME in this article, I want to stress that this is just my personal opinion, and reflects nothing but my own preference in how I use my computer. While GNOME is simply not suited to my needs, it is an absolutely outstanding desktop environment, created by a team of people who know what they’re doing, who deeply care, and who more often than not receive an entirely undeserved, very nasty, almost personal kind of abuse that goes far beyond merely stating a dislike for GNOME.

GNOME may not be for me, but the Linux (and BSD) world should be deeply thankful for having such an excellent desktop environment as the face of the desktop segment of the market. GNOME is still kilometres ahead of whatever Windows and macOS are doing, and if KDE didn’t exist, I’d happily use GNOME without so much as a single hesitation. A piece of software not suiting your needs doesn’t mean it’s bad or that the people making it are bad people. It just means you shouldn’t be using it.

Late last year, Google’s Play Store was ruled to be a monopoly in the US, and today the judge in that case has set out what Google must do to address this situation.

Today, Judge James Donato issued his final ruling in Epic v. Google, ordering Google to effectively open up the Google Play app store to competition for three whole years. Google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play, and it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps, unless developers opt out individually.

↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge

On top of these rather big changes, Google also cannot mandate the use of Google’s own billing solution, nor can it prohibit developers from informing users of other ways to download and/or pay for an application. Furthermore, Google can’t make sweetheart deals with device makers to entice them to install the Play Store or to block them from installing other stores, and Google can’t pay developers to only use the Play Store or not use other stores. It’s a rather comprehensive set of remedies that will remain in force for three years.

Many of these remedies are taken straight from the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, but they will be far less effective since they’re only applied to one company, and only for three years. On top of that, Google can appeal, and the company has already stated that it’s going to ask for an immediate stay on these remedies, and if they get that stay, the remedies won’t have to be implemented any time soon. This legal tussling is far from over, and does very little to protect consumer choice. A clear law that simply prohibits this kind of market abuse, like the DMA, is much fairer to everyone involved, and creates a consistent level playing field for everyone, instead of only affecting random companies based on the whims of something as unpredictable as juries.

In other words, I don’t think much is going to change in the United States after this ruling, and we’ll likely be hearing more back and forths in the court room for years to come, all while US consumers are being harmed. It’s better than nothing in lieu of a working Congress actually doing, well, anything, but that’s not saying much.

You have to wonder how meaningful this news is in 2024, but macOS 15.0 Sequoia running on either Apple Silicon or Intel processors is now UNIX 03-certified.

The UNIX 03 Product Standard is the mark for systems conforming to Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification. It is a significantly enhanced version of the UNIX 98 Product Standard. The mandatory enhancements include alignment with ISO/IEC 9989:1999 C Programming Language, IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 and ISO/IEC 9945:2002. This Product Standard includes the following mandatory Product Standards: Internationalized System Calls and Libraries Extended V3,Commands and Utilities V4, C Language V2, and Internationalized Terminal Interfaces.

↫ UNIX 03 page

The questionable usefulness of this news stems from a variety of factors. The UNIX 03 specification hails from the before time of 2002, when UNIX-proper still had some footholds in the market and being a UNIX meant something to the industry. These days, Linux has pretty much taken over the traditional UNIX market, and UNIX certification seems to have all but lost its value. Only one operating system can boast to conform to the latest UNIX specification – AIX is UNIX V7 and 03-certified – while macOS and HP-UX are only UNIX 03-certified. OpenWare, UnixWare, and z/OS only conform to even older standards.

On top of all this, it seems being UNIX-certified by The Open Group feels a lot like a pay-to-play scheme, making it unlikely that community efforts like, say, FreeBSD, Debian, or similarly popular server operating systems could ever achieve UNIX-certification even if they wanted to. This makes the whole UNIX-certification world feel more like the dying vestiges of a job security program than something meaningful for an operating system to aspire to.

In any even, you can now write a program that compiles and runs on all two UNIX 03-certified operating systems, as long as it only uses POSIX APIs.