The general trend of macOS releases over the past few years is that it has been moving closer and closer to the look and feel of iOS. The icons have become iOS icons, and their shape has become the iOS shape, and you can now use your iPhone as the Mac’s webcam, etc. etc. This occasionally comes at the expense of other functionality (ask me how I feel about the new Settings menu), but it is the direction that Apple has clearly been heading in since (arguably) Big Sur. Every so often, other splashy features are announced (Stage Manager, Universal Control, Quick Notes) that I write a lot about and then never end up using ever again. So, good news for Continuity fans: that’s basically what’s going on with Sonoma. Ventura looked a heck of a lot like iOS, and Sonoma looks even more like iOS. I turned my office’s Mac Studio on after installing the developer beta and thought, for a second, that I might be hallucinating my iPhone’s lockscreen. It’s remarkably reminiscent. It’s crazy how Microsoft always seems to be doing things about 10 years before everyone else catches on, for better or worse. I’m not a fan of the iOS look, and it looks whacky and childish to me when ported to the Mac – especially since macOS has also become almost Windows-like by having so many application frameworks, some from iOS, some from macOS, and some a weird combination of the two. It’s making macOS far messier and more inconsistent than it used to be, leaving the Linux desktop as the last bastion of people who value a dekstop-first, consistent interface. If you told me this 10-15 years ago, I’d have called you crazy, but we’re now living in a world where a GTK or QT desktop is far more consistent and focused on the desktop than Windows and macOS, which both feel lost in the woods at the moment.
Speaking of beta programs and doing it right – here’s how things are going at the other end of the spectrum. Today we’re bringing you Android 14 Beta 4, continuing our work on polish and performance as we get closer to the general availability release of Android 14. Beta 4 is available for Pixel Tablet and Pixel Fold, in addition to the rest of the supported Pixel family, so you can test your applications on devices spanning multiple form factors and directly experience the work we’re doing to improve the large-screen and foldable device experience. The fact Android betas are only available on an incredibly small subset of Android devices stands in such stark contrast to how Apple does their program. Of course, we all know why that’s the case, but that doesn’t mean Google gets a pass. I have an Android device running Android 13. I should be able to install Android 14 betas. End of story. Rant aside, how far along the development process for Android 14 are we? Beta 4 is our second Platform Stable Android 14 release, which means that the developer APIs and all app-facing behaviors are final for you to review and integrate into your apps, and you can publish apps on Google Play to devices running Android 14 at the official API level. That indicates we’re relatively close to release, meaning most Android users can expect to upgrade somewhere halfway 2024, or when they buy a new device, or not at all.
Apple is officially releasing the first public betas of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10, and macOS 14 Sonoma today, a little over a month after releasing the first developer betas at its Worldwide Developers Conference. I have to say, Apple is doing a great job with their public beta access. It’s easy enough that it’s accessible, but not so easy you’ve got millions of people running unstable software. Considering the number of platforms they have to support – that’s no easy feat.
On behalf of the Thunderbird team, Thunderbird Council, our global community of contributors, and our extended Mozilla family, I am incredibly excited to announce the initial launch of Thunderbird 115 “Supernova” for Linux, macOS, and Windows! With this year’s version, we’re delivering much more than just another yearly release. Supernova represents a modernized overhaul of the software – both visually and technically – while retaining the familiarity and flexibility you expect from Thunderbird. This is a massive release, and modernises this venerable e-mail client considerably. I can’t wait to test it out once it hits the Fedora repositories – I never liked Thunderbird all that much, but Supernova seems like something that suits me a little better, so I’m curious to see if it can pull me away from Geary. If you want to quickly gauge the changes to the user interface, the Thunderbird team made a very handy page for that.
Today SUSE, the company behind Rancher, NeuVector, and SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and a global leader in enterprise open source solutions, announced it is forking publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and will develop and maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution available to all without restrictions. Over the next few years, SUSE plans to invest more than $10 million into this project. The spicy bit here is that the CEO of SUSE, Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, worked at Red Hat for 18 years before joining SUSE. Excellent.
You could put it this way – DisplayPort has all the capabilities of interfaces like HDMI, but implemented in a better way, without legacy cruft, and with a number of features that take advantage of the DisplayPort’s sturdier architecture. As a result of this, DisplayPort isn’t just in external monitors, but also laptop internal displays, USB-C port display support, docking stations, and Thunderbolt of all flavors. If you own a display-capable docking station for your laptop, be it classic style multi-pin dock or USB-C, DisplayPort is highly likely to be involved, and even your smartphone might just support DisplayPort over USB-C these days. Back when I bought my current 144Hz 1440p monitor with G-Sync for my gaming PC, DisplayPort was the only way to hook it all up, since HDMI wasn’t yet supported. Ever since, out of a baseless sense of caution, I’ve always preferred DisplayPort for all my PC video connection needs, and as it turns out – yes, DisplayPort is definitely better than HDMI, and this article will tell you why.
The Kelly Rowland/Nelly song Dilemma features an infamous scene amongst nerds where Kelly Rowland tries to send a message to Nelly using a Nokia 9210 Communicator. Unfortunately, she does this using the built in spreadsheet program and receives no reply. People suggested she might be using the =HYPERLINK() function in Excel, but would that even work?
This ports DoomGeneric NTNative to kernel-mode driver environment. This is bonkers.
Some huge news today. Intel has started to notify its ecosystem saying that it will stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) business. For the handful of STH readers who are unaware, Intel not only makes chips but they also make systems. Earlier this year, we covered that Intel was exiting the server business and selling it to MiTAC. Now its line of PCs is being sunset as well. Luckily, the market for small, powerful computers is more alive than it’s ever been, and there are countless OEMs making both AMD and Intel tiny computers these days. My only concern would be that Intel exiting this market might mean the kinds of parts needed for tiny computers like the NUC also become harder to source, but since you can always use laptop parts, I doubt that’s going to be an issue.
Liam Dawe at GamingOnLinux: Well, the results are here. In the USA the FTC was trying to block Microsoft from acquiring Activision Blizzard but Microsoft has won the fight. Now Microsoft are one big step closer to actually properly closing the deal, and a rather big consolidation of the gaming industry given how big Activision Blizzard are. I haven’t been keeping up with this case very much, but if history’s anything to go by, any form of consolidation at this scale tends to work out worse for consumers and the market.
It’s been all over the news, so I can’t get around posting about it here: the year of the Linux desktop is finally here. According to the – admittedly, troublesome – figures from StatCounter, the market share of Linux on the desktop has reached 7.23%. Other publications do not count Chrome OS installations as part of the Linux share, but I think that’s nonsense – they’re both clearly Linux desktop operating systems, and should be added up. In the end, it doesn’t really matter, and I’ve mostly stopped reporting on market share figures ages ago, as all they do is invite pointless flamewars and vitriol. Linux on the desktop is doing just fine, and received a major boost thanks to Valve’s Proton. We all have our desktop platform of choice, and each of those choices is valid. Still, more than 7% on the desktop and like 90%+ on mobile is not bad for a project developed by a community.
Today, the European Commission adopted its adequacy decision for the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. The decision concludes that the United States ensures an adequate level of protection – comparable to that of the European Union – for personal data transferred from the EU to US companies under the new framework. On the basis of the new adequacy decision, personal data can flow safely from the EU to US companies participating in the Framework, without having to put in place additional data protection safeguards. In 2020, European Union courts struck down the previous agreement between the EU and the US, the Privacy Shield, as the court stated it did not sufficiently protect EU user data from US government surveillance. This was obviously a big problem for companies like Facebook and Google, and ever since, the two blocks have been trying to come up with a replacement that would allow these companies to continue to operate relatively unscathed. In the meantime, though, several European countries handed out large fines to Amazon and Facebook for not taking proper care of EU user data. So, what makes this new agreement stricter than the previous one? The EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework introduces new binding safeguards to address all the concerns raised by the European Court of Justice, including limiting access to EU data by US intelligence services to what is necessary and proportionate, and establishing a Data Protection Review Court (DPRC), to which EU individuals will have access. The new framework introduces significant improvements compared to the mechanism that existed under the Privacy Shield. For example, if the DPRC finds that data was collected in violation of the new safeguards, it will be able to order the deletion of the data. The new safeguards in the area of government access to data will complement the obligations that US companies importing data from EU will have to subscribe to. I’m obviously no legal expert so take this with a grain of salt, but this kind of feels like yes, there are additional protections and safeguards, but if (let’s be real here: when) companies like Facebook violate these, don’t worry, EU citizen! You can undertake costly, complex, and long legal proceedings in misty business courts so Facebook or whatever can get fined for an amount that Zuckerberg spends on his interior decorator every week. The courts struck down the Safe Harbor agreement in 2015, and the aforementioned Privacy Shield in 2020, so we’ll see if this new agreement stands the test of the courts.
Running OSNews.com is not exactly something that generates loads of income, yet it’s taking up a decent amount of time and energy that I have to find somewhere between my wife and kids, translation work, and the rest of my life. While OSNews will always remain free to access, it would mean the world to me if you could support my work financially. There’s two ways to do this. First, you can become a Patreon, which will grant you access to an advertisement-free version of the website, as well as some comment flair to show off your big spender lifestyle (silver flair, gold flair, or a custom flair for the big ballers among you). Patreons donate a small fee every month. Second, you can donate a one-time amount using Ko-Fi. Here, you are free to set whatever amount you want (starting at €5), but you won’t qualify for any of the extras you get by becoming a Patreon. However, anyone who’s crazy enough to make a large-enough donation will still get these extras, of course. Support is support, after all. Thank you! Also, if you wish to help out by donating and/or selling us hardware you really want me to devote time to here on OSNews, I can make that work too. For a few items I’m especially looking for, take a look at my personal website for more information.
So a few years ago, a Ukrainian programmer called Sergii Stoian started to build a modern Linux desktop environment based around the GNUstep components running on top of CentOS Linux, which he called NEXTSPACE. Sadly, development stalled a couple of years ago, before CentOS Linux’ premature end-of-life. We are happy to report that Stoian is alive and well, but what with his country being invaded and so on, he’s been a bit too busy to work on his project in recent years. This is where Ondrej Florian, also known as OnFlApp, comes in. Florian has put together a collection of GNUstep components, including some drawn from NEXTSPACE, to create the GNUstep Desktop Environment. For now, the project’s contains scripts to build it and install it, but only on Debian, although Debian versions 9, 10 and 11 are included. We tried on Debian 11.7 “Bullseye”, and in a VM, it works perfectly. The process is manual, but not too labour-intensive: install Git, clone the repo, then run three scripts. So, at this stage, GSDE is not very beginner friendly, but it’s a substantial improvement over manually finding, installing or compiling, and configuring the various bits of the GNUstep system which are already in the Debian and Ubuntu repositories. The end result is better integrated, more complete, and even includes a working web browser – although you’ll need to install the Chromium browser yourself, in order for the GSDE web browser to call it and work. A GNUstep-based desktop has exited in the periphery of the Linux world for decades, but it’s always been incomplete, buggy, abandoned, or simply unusable. I really hope that this time around, that might change, because it would be a welcome change from all the QT and GTK-based desktop.
Oracle, who distributes an RHEL clone, has responded to Red Hat’s latest source code availability changes. We want to emphasize to Linux developers, Linux customers, and Linux distributors that Oracle is committed to Linux freedom. Oracle makes the following promise: as long as Oracle distributes Linux, Oracle will make the binaries and source code for that distribution publicly and freely available. Furthermore, Oracle welcomes downstream distributions of every kind, community and commercial. We are happy to work with distributors to ease that process, work together on the content of Oracle Linux, and ensure Oracle software products are certified on your distribution. The only good thing about Red Hat’s announced changes is that it will make Oracle’s life harder. That might make it all worthwhile.
These are my notes from experimenting with building Wayland bits on OpenBSD during g2k23 in Tallinn… Thanks to the OpenBSD foundation for organizing this event. This is still far from a complete running system as there are many issues on the road, but it’s a good start and it shows that it’s definitely not impossible to get Wayland running on OpenBSD. This is one of the very few valid criticisms of Wayland: it’s designed and developed entirely for Linux, with no regard for BSD or other platforms. Now, I find this an entirely valid choice and completely understandable choice to make from the developers’ perspectives, but it’s still unpleasant that the BSD world is stuck with archaic, unmaintained X.org while the Linux world has moved on. In that light, it’s great to see that Wayland may, in fact, not be as married to Linux as we think.
The Video Game History Foundation, in partnership with the Software Preservation Network, has conducted the first ever study on the commercial availability of classic video games, and the results are bleak. 87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered. This confirms something all of us already suspected or knew: the vast majority of classic games are simply not available in any legal way, shape, or form. If it wasn’t for the emulation and preservation scene, many of these games would face certain oblivion in the near future. It’s high time some changes are made to intellectual property law to make software and game preservation legal.
Here is a dumb question that you probably never asked yourself: What is the minimal amount of bytes we need to store in a .NET executable to have the CLR print the string "Hello, World!" to the standard output? In this post, we will explore the limits of the .NET module file format, get it as small as possible, while still having it function like a normal executable on a typical Windows machine with the .NET Framework installed. The answer is “way, way smaller than I thought”.
Today it’s been three weeks since my 4th RSoC started, where the main focus this time is to speed up Redox by implementing on-demand paging in the kernel. I don’t really understand any of this, but I know OSNews readers love this sort of nitty gritty stuff.
This is a community-based project and is actively updated. This project aims at restoring the legacy Windows Update websites, and allows older operating systems (Windows 95, NT 4.0, 98, Me, 2000, and XP) to obtain updates like they used to. Ever since 2011 when Microsoft pulled the plug on nearly all the Windows Update websites, the Windows Update feature for older Windows operating systems was no longer functional. The only way to install updates after that point was through external third-party installers which didn’t cover all the updates that the operating system would fully support. So, with this project, we can now update operating systems as old as Windows 95 all the way through Windows XP RTM like we used to back in the day. IT’s still a work-in-progress, as sourcing the various update packages and installers is proving to be quite difficult in some cases, and not all versions of Windows/Microsoft Update have been recreated yet. However, as the ever awesome Michael MJD notes in his video overview of the project, it already works quite well for Windows 95 and Windows 98 and 98SE.
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