All in all, I’m very impressed with the work the wayland community has done since I last did a serious look at the state of things. I’m still waiting for a stacking window manager that scratches the same itch for me that icewm does, but I’m following labwc with great interest. At this point though, I’ve established that I can live my life on wayland, and for the time being I am. Not everyone can yet though, and there’s still work to be done. Part of why I’m feeling the urge to transition to wayland is performance benefits, but the other part is so that I’ll be able to help solve the unsolved problems to make it viable for more people. I don’t think X is ever going to die. Even if it fades away on Linux, there’s a lot of old video hardware that will probably only ever be well supported with real Xorg, on Linux and other OSes such as NetBSD. That stuff is already seeing support dropped in more recent versions of Xorg, and preservationists will need to do digging to find versions that still take advantage of everything the hardware has to offer. But, I understand now why the wayland folks have been talking so highly of it, and how drastically it simplifies the userland stack, and I’m no longer concerned that I’ll wake up to find my netbook has become unusable for modern software. I’ve been on Wayland on both my laptop and workstation for a long time now, and there’s no way I’m ever going back with just how much better it performs than X.org. Only my main PC (used mostly for gaming) is still on X.org (Linux Mint), but that’s out of a combination of NVIDIA hardware and my satisfaction with Mint. I agree with the author that X.org won’t die, but the arrow of time is pointing in a very clear direction.
For the past decade there were two more or less universally acknowledged truths about digital advertising. First, the rapidly growing industry was largely impervious to the business cycle. Second, it was dominated by the duopoly of Google (in search ads) and Meta (in social media), which one jealous rival has compared to John Rockefeller’s hold on oil in the 19th century. Both of these verities are now being challenged simultaneously. Having giants like Google and Facebook checked and balanced by competition is always a plus, but one has to wonder if this is just going to accelerate the race to the bottom in the online ad business.
Today, Intel introduces a new processor for the essential product space: Intel Processor. The new offering will replace the Intel Pentium and Intel Celeron branding in the 2023 notebook product stack. Those are some old, long-standing brands Intel just put out to pasture. “Intel Processor” will exist next to the Core i product lines as budget processors, just like Pentium and Celeron do today.
Linux command line for you and me is a book for newcomers to command line environment. Exactly as it says on the tin. This is a great, easy to use resource for command line use. Even though I’ve used Linux for more than two decades, and have been Linux-only for a few years now, I rarely use the command line, and having a resource like this in my back pocket for the few times I do dive into the command line is very nice – especially when you need to use some of the less obvious commands.
When BART first carried passengers, the country was sending astronauts to the moon. The Apollo-era trains were symbols of a generation barreling toward a space-age future complete with carpeted floors and a seat promised to every passenger. That was 1972, when BART was state of the art. But half a century later, as the agency celebrates its 50th anniversary this month, many of those same silver-and-blue trains are still chugging through the Bay Area. And keeping them running — even in the country’s technology capital — requires a special breed of ingenuity. BART mechanics rely on Frankensteined laptops operating with Windows 98, train yard scraps and vintage microchips to keep Bay Area commuters on the rails. These stories are a dime a dozen, and serve to illustrate there’s a lot more outdated tech out there in our daily lives than we think. On the flipside, that’s some decent job security for the engineers and maintenance crew involved.
The developer of Pumpkin OS (which we talked about before), a port of the Palm OS to x86-64, has written a very interesting post about dealing with multi-threading. Pumpkin OS is multi-threaded from the start, but several parts of the operating system rely on old parts of Palm OS that were never meant to be multi-threaded – such as the M68K emulator used to run Palm OS applications written for that architecture. The solution I came up with uses something called thread local storage. Each thread has access to a private memory region that the main thread can setup in advance. When a deeply nested function needs to access global state, instead of using a global variable, it gets a pointer to its local storage. Each emulated M68K thread writes to its own M68K state, not interfering with another thread. And no function prototype needs to change. The first step was to identify all global variables used by the M68K emulator, which were surprisingly few. I’m so excited about this project.
Adobe has announced that it’s acquiring Figma, a popular design platform, for around $20 billion in cash and stock. After rumors surfaced early on Thursday about a potential acquisition, Adobe made it official in a press release shortly afterward. It’s big news in the design and development world, particularly as Figma has been competing heavily with Adobe’s XD products in recent years. I had never heard of Figma before, but it seems it’s actually quite popular – for example, Microsoft uses it to design Office and Windows. This seems like a big catch for Adobe, but a competitor less, too, and that’s not exactly great for the market.
Google has lost its latest battle with European Union regulators. This morning, the EU General Court upheld Google’s record fine for bundling Google Search and Chrome with Android. The initial ruling was reached in July 2018 with a 4.34 billion euro fine attached, and while that number has been knocked down to 4.125 billion euro ($4.13 billion), it’s still the EU’s biggest fine ever. The EU takes issue with the way Google licenses Android and associated Google apps like the Play Store to manufacturers. The Play Store and Google Play Services are needed to build a competitive smartphone, but getting them from Google requires signing a number of contracts that the EU says stifles competition. Google breakin’ rocks in the hot sun.
Apple plans to release new ad “placements” as soon as the holiday season, according to a message sent to developers on Tuesday inviting them to an online session to encourage them to buy ads. The new spots represent a significant expansion in Apple’s advertising inventory, which is focused on its App Store. In recent years, Apple’s advertising inventory has been limited to one unit in the Search tab on the App Store and one on the search results page. Let the milking commence.
Since starting the SerenityOS project in 2018, my goal has been “to build a complete desktop operating system to eventually use as my daily driver”. What started as a little therapy project for myself has blossomed into a huge OSS community with hundreds of people working on it all over the world. We’ve gone from nothing to a capable system with its own browser stack in the last 4 years. Throughout this incredible expansion, my own goals have remained the same. Today I’m updating them a little bit: in addition to building a new OS for myself, I’m also going to build a cross-platform web browser. If there is one person who can pull off making a web browser and turning it into a successful-enough open source application, it’s Andreas Kling. His work on SerenityOS is simply stunning and inspirational, attracting hundreds of people to work on a ’90s-inspired alternative desktop operating system. If he can organise the same amount of enthusiasm for Ladybird, it has a real shot at becoming a successful, but niche, browser. For now, it’s very early days, and Kling is open and honest about how much work is still left to do. Since all the code is new – this isn’t a fork or Blink, WebKit, or Gecko – you can imagine this isn’t exactly going to be an easy ride. It’s currently running on Linux, Windows through WSL, macOS, and Android, and Kling states the Linux version if the best tested one. I’m definitely excited for this one.
Tom Persky is the self-proclaimed “last man standing in the floppy disk business.” He is the time-honored founder of floppydisk.com, a US-based company dedicated to the selling and recycling of floppy disks. Other services include disk transfers, a recycling program, and selling used and/or broken floppy disks to artists around the world. All of this makes floppydisk.com a key player in the small yet profitable contemporary floppy scene. While putting together the manuscript for our new book, Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium, we met with Tom to discuss the current state of the floppy disk industry and the perks and challenges of running a business like his in the 2020s. What has changed in this era, and what remains the same? With the amount of legacy systems still running all over the world, there’s probably decent longevity in this business still.
Slovenia being a tiny country with a population of just 2 million, IBM OS/2 Warp 4 was one of the few non-Microsoft operating systems to be localized to Slovenian in the mid-90s and a big deal for the local IT community back then. But nearly 3 decades later, when OS/2 disappeared from the last ATMs in the country, the even rarer Slovenian version was as good as completely gone. Or was it? This is an amazing example of digital archeology, and I hope the other rare OS/2 translations are found as well. It’s difficult for small – but stunningly beautiful! – countries to maintain their digital independence, and properly localised software plays a huge role in that.
iOS 16 brings the biggest update ever to the Lock Screen, the ability to edit and collaborate in Messages, new tools in Mail, and more ways to interact with photos and video with Live Text and Visual Look Up. iOS 16 is available today as a free software update. Unlike in the Android world, every iOS user here on OSNews will most likely be able to install this latest update right away. I’m especially enamoured by the notifications popping in from the bottom instead of the top – this makes a lot more sense, and I hope Android picks it up as well.
In this article, we provide a holistic view of the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) abstractions by a systematic review of their historical evolution. We discuss some of the key factors that drove the evolution and identify the pitfalls that make them infeasible when building modern applications. Some light reading to start the week.
A website containing a vast, vast collection of domestic electrical plugs and sockets from all over the world, including more information and details about them than you knew existed. I’ve been stuck here for hours. Be wary of going in – you’re never coming back out. But you’ll be happier for it, since there’s enough information here to last a lifetime. One of my favourites is this one from Sweden – I was baffled by these at first when emigrating to Sweden a few years ago, but now I appreciate their genius and safety compared to just tying down live wires for ceiling lamps like we do in The Netherlands. Another fun and weird one is the Perilex plug, which is incredibly satisfying to plug into its corresponding socket (I used to work at a hardware store that sold a huge variety of plugs and sockets). I could go on for hours!
TinyClock is a tiny true 5-arch universal Mac OS X single-binary GUI application. Single universal binary, that can be natively executed on every hardware platform Mac OS X was made for (32/64 bit, PowerPC/x86/AppleSilicon). Just fun.
With the AM5 platform from AMD on the horizon, five major motherboard manufacturers have annonced their flagship motherboards with the X670E chipset. Some of them are having fun with this generation’s multi-faceted step into “five”: AM5, PCIe Gen 5.0, DDR5, 5nm process, boost clocks over 5GHz, you catch the drift. But do you know what every single announced motherboard has fewer than five of? PCI Express (PCIe) slots. Other than a GPU and the occasional WiFi card, I haven’t really had any need for my expansion slots in a long time. I just don’t know of anything useful. I doubt they’ll actually go away any time soon though.
FUSE-T is a kext-less implementation of FUSE for macOS that uses NFS v4 local server instead of a kernel extension. The main motivation for this project is to replace macfuse that implements its own kext to make fuse work. With each version of macOS it’s getting harder and harder to load kernel extensions. Apple strongly discourages it and, for this reason, software distributions that include macfuse are very difficult to install. With Apple locking down macOS more and more, developers have to resort to ingenious solutions to maintain the same level of functionality as before. This is an example of that.
Disassembly and enhancements for Apple II DeskTop (a.k.a. Mouse Desk), a “Finder”-like GUI application for 8-bit Apples and clones with 128k of memory, utilizing double hi-res monochrome graphics (560×192), an optional mouse, and the ProDOS 8 operating system. There’s a new version with tons of improvements.
The next generation of USB devices might support data transfer speeds as high as 80 Gbps, which would be twice as fast as current-gen Thunderbolt 4 products. The USB Promotor Group says it plans to publish the new USB4 version 2.0 specification ahead of this year’s USB Developer Days events scheduled for November, but it could take a few years before new cables, hubs, PCs, and mobile devices featuring the new technology are available for purchase. USB4 version 2.0. That’s the name they went with.
