It’s “release everything!” day for Apple – virtually every single Apple platform and operating system is getting updates today. Almost all device releases are point releases to address issues in the major versions released in September, with the exception being iPadOS 16, which was delayed and is accompanied today by macOS 13. Ars’ macOS review, is, of course, the definitive resource for this new macOS release. But it does feel like the software side of the Mac is lacking its own unique direction and identity lately. Overwhelmingly, new features for macOS merely help it keep pace with what is happening on the iPhone and iPad. That feels doubly true in Ventura, where a core system app has been rewritten from the ground up to mirror its iOS counterpart, where a new window management feature is being implemented in the same way on the iPad, and where new apps and updates to old ones are increasingly just iPad apps running inside macOS windows. The throughline for all these features is about making the Mac more welcoming and comfortable for people who come to it through one of Apple’s mobile platforms. This makes some sense. The Mac is Apple’s most powerful, extensible computing platform, both in hardware and software. It’s also the smallest. Maybe some of the first iPhone buyers were coming to it from the Mac, but the balance surely flipped years ago. But when was the last time that the Finder, the Dock, or the Menu Bar was given a substantial, non-cosmetic rethink? When did Apple last make major improvements to the way that windows coexist on a given screen? The Mac does get new under-the-hood features that are specific to it, but the headline features are mostly iOS and iPadOS imports, especially this year. You know where you can get the updates.
IceWM was released only a short while ago, and now we’ve got 3.1. IceWM 3.1 introduces a new window option “frame” to automatically group application windows with the same “frame” value as tabs within a single frame. IceWM 3.1 also now shows indicators for the presence of tabs on the title bar, clicking on the title bar tab indicators can change tabs, tray hints are now preserved across restarts, improved Alt + Tab handling, improvements to the CMake build system integration, and a variety of other changes. I’m glad to see development has truly picked up again.
Linus Torvalds has backed the idea of possibly removing Intel 486 (i486) processor support from the Linux kernel. After the Linux kernel dropped i386 support a decade ago, i486 has been the minimum x86 processor support for the mainline Linux kernel. This latest attempt to kill off i486 support ultimately arose from Linus Torvalds himself with expressing the idea of possible requiring x86 32-bit CPUs with “cmpxchg8b” support, which would mean Pentium CPUs and later. I think that would be a fair call. It’s highly unlikely any modern additions to the Linux kernel are usable on a 486 anyway, so existing kernels which still have support for this ancient processor should suffice. On top of that, there’s no doubt in my mind that at least someone or some group of people will step up to maintain a special 486 branch if there is indeed any residual need for it.
Tetris is a classic time-waster, both in and outside of the office. What good is any computing device if it can’t play this game? Tokyo System House certainly thought so, and ported it to the NEC mini5 line of CP/M-based word processors. Let’s preserve it for future generations and then see what it’s like! First, the author had to get their hands on a NEC mini5 word processor. Then, they had to somehow manage to find a copy of the game itself. Then, and only then, could the actual preservation attempt begin.
Dubbed the “Kinetic Kudu,” Ubuntu 22.10 is here with the latest and greatest GNOME 43 desktop environment by default (yes, with support for GTK4 apps), which comes with numerous new features and enhancements for fans of the GNOME/Ubuntu desktop, yet the look and feel remain unchanged from previous releases. The default audio server is PipeWire instead of PulseAudio with WirePlumber as the default session/policy manager. Kinetic Kudu also ships with an up-to-date toolchain and subsystem consisting of GCC 12, GNU C Library 2.36, GNU Binutils 2.39, systemd 251.4, Mesa 22.2, Netplan 0.105, LLVM 15, Poppler 22.08, CUPS 2.4, BlueZ 5.65, Unicode 15, NetworkManager 1.40, as well as debuginfod support and an updated AppArmor component that now lets sysadmins restrict access to unprivileged user namespaces. While I’m personally not really using Ubuntu itself anymore, my gaming PC is still running Linux Mint, meaning I will still benefit from this new release. Ubuntu is still massively popular despite stumbles over the years, and countless popular distributions are all based on it.
OpenBSD 7.2 has been released. The major new features in this release are all concerned with expanding the operating system’s hardware support. This release adds supports for Apple’s M2, the Ampere Altra, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3.
Error messages are part of our daily lives online. Every time a server is down or we don’t have internet, or we forget to add some info in a form, we get an error message. “Something went wrong” is the classic. But what went wrong? What happened? And, most importantly, how can I fix it? I really enjoyed this article detailing a massive project at Wix to go through and rephrase every single error message to make them easier to parse and overall less… Useless. A lot of developers can learn from this article.
The day has finally come! Windows Terminal is now the default command line experience on Windows 11 22H2! This means that all command line applications will now automatically open in Windows Terminal. This blog post will go into how this setting is enabled, the journey of Windows Terminal along with its fan-favorite features, as well as give a huge thank you to our contributors who have helped throughout Terminal’s journey. It’s still kind of surreal that after several decades, cmd.exe will now be relegated to the sidelines.
Arcan, the unique development framework for user interfaces that’s exploring a ton of new and different ideas, has released a new project – Lash#Cat9, a new command line shell. A guiding principle is the role of the textual shell as a frontend instead of a clunky programming environment. The shell presents a user-facing, interactive interface to make other complex tools more approachable or to glue them together into a more advanced weapon. Cat9 is entirely written in Lua, so scripting in it is a given, but also relatively uninteresting as a feature — there are better languages around for systems programming, and better UI paradigms for automating work flows. Another is that of delegation – textual shells naturally evolved without assuming a graphical one being present. That is rarely the case today, yet the language for sharing between the two is unrefined, crude and fragile. The graphical shell is infinitely more capable of decorating and managing windows, animating transitions, routing inputs and tuning pixels for specific displays. It should naturally be in charge of such actions. Another is to make experience self documenting – that the emergent patterns on how your use of command line processing gets extracted and remembered in a form where re-use becomes natural. Primitive forms of this are completions from command history and aliases, but there is much more to be done here. I’m not a heavy shell user, so I’m not going to make any subjective statements here. It at least seems remarkably interesting, and I’m sure there’s quite a few among us who would love to play with this.
To begin collaborating with others, we’ve open sourced several components for our secure operating system, called KataOS, on GitHub, as well as partnered with Antmicro on their Renode simulator and related frameworks. As the foundation for this new operating system, we chose seL4 as the microkernel because it puts security front and center; it is mathematically proven secure, with guaranteed confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Through the seL4 CAmkES framework, we’re also able to provide statically-defined and analyzable system components. KataOS provides a verifiably-secure platform that protects the user’s privacy because it is logically impossible for applications to breach the kernel’s hardware security protections and the system components are verifiably secure. KataOS is also implemented almost entirely in Rust, which provides a strong starting point for software security, since it eliminates entire classes of bugs, such as off-by-one errors and buffer overflows. Another new open source operating system by Google. This time, it seems almost entirely focused on embedded machine learning applications, so it’s definitely a bit outside of my wheel house.
Sculpt OS 22.10 is a maintenance release of our Genode-based general-purpose OS. It imposes a new rigid regime to the management of low-level devices, improves USB hotplug support, and comes with numerous performance optimizations. I should really find the time to sit down with Sculpt.
Change is many things: scary, exciting, inevitable. Android is changing all the time, and for a while now we’ve been anticipating a major shift in terms of software support, one that would see the platform abandon its oldest software — Android will go 64-bit-only, dropping compatibility for old 32-bit apps. The biggest question has been “when?” Would the Pixel Tablet demand 64-bit apps? Could we be sitting around until Android 14 to make the switch? Apparently Google just got tired of waiting, and quietly launched the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro without support for 32-bit apps. The inevitable march of progress. The move to 64bit killed quite a few old games on iOS, and I’m sure the same will happen to Android. However, if an application hasn’t been updated that long, it might be a good idea to search for an alternative, of which there will be many, since application stores are nothing if not filled to the brim with shameless ripoffs.
Swider wasn’t the only Stadia developer blindsided by Google’s late September announcement that the streaming gaming service would be shutting down next January. Game makers who talked to Ars (and some who shared their surprise on social media) all said they had no indication of Google’s shutdown plans before the public announcement. “During correspondence , we are exchanging emails—nothing showed us it could be the end of Stadia,” Swider said. What a shitshow.
My first post-Figma hobby project is a win32 emulator I’ve called retrowin32. It is now barely capable of executing a few unmodified Windows exe files in a browser (see the site for some links). A fun project.
I didn’t expect to be writing about the next version of Windows again so soon, but a handful of viewers watching the Ignite Keynote yesterday noticed an updated version of the Windows UI that was shown in a brief cutaway, which had a floating taskbar along the bottom, system icons in the top right, a floating search box in the top middle, and the weather in the top left. Back when I first began hearing about the Next Valley release, I was also shown preliminary design ideas that were being explored internally. Microsoft is still in the prototyping stages for Next Valley, but my sources tell me that the UI briefly shown off at Ignite yesterday is representative of the design goals that Microsoft is hoping to achieve with the next version of Windows. Microsoft is clearly drawing a lot of inspiration from GNOME and macOS here, and it sure does look nice. However, as with everything Windows, it will most likely just end up as yet another thin veneer atop the countless UI designs from Windows 3.x all the way up to now Windows 11 that you can encounter in Windows to this day. Another layer for this cursed cake.
Microsoft Office was first released in 1990, and aside from Windows, it’s probably the Microsoft product the general public has the most experience with. Individual apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook will all continue to exist, but starting now, the Office brand name these apps have all been grouped under will begin to go away, to be replaced by “Microsoft 365”. I’m fairly certain this will turn out like Facebook calling itself Meta now, or Google technically being a part of Alphabet – everybody will continue to use the old, established name indefinitely.
Well hello friends! Today we celebrate the 4th birthday of SerenityOS, counting from the first commit to the repository, on October 10th, 2018. What follows is a selection of random highlights from the past year, mixed with personal reflections from some of the SerenityOS developers. Just sit down, relax, take a deep breath, forget your day’s troubles, and enjoy a rundown of some of the awesome work being done in the SerenityOS community. There’s few communities that seem so welcoming, friendly, and active like the SerenityOS one, and even reading through this year’s milestones just feels good.
After a break of about half a year, there is a sign of life from Hyperion Entertainment again. The company has made a new SDK available for download. But what is it? And what do you need it for? This and other questions will be answered in this and other articles. If you ever wanted to develop for Amiga OS 4, this seems like a good time to dive in.
Even with a bare-bones installation, Plasma lets you customize your desktop a lot. If you want more, there is always Plasma’s vast ecosystem of widgets. Widgets add features and utilities to the Plasma desktop and today you can find out all the stuff you can do and what’s new for widgets in Plasma 5.26. Widgets are not the only thing to look forward to in Plasma 5.26: check out all the new stuff landing on the desktop designed to make using Plasma easier, more accessible and enjoyable, as well as the two new utilities for Plasma Big Screen, KDE’s interface for smart TVs. KDE is amazing these days, and a joy to use, but they really have an application problem. They still don’t have an e-mail client that doesn’t feel straight out of 2006 (Kmail is a disaster), there’s no modern amenities like Twitter clients, and browsers like Firefox and Chromium clearly feel more at home in a GTK environments than in a Qt environment. Using KDE inevitably means ending up using GTK applications too, at which point I feel like I might as well switch over completely. I wish there was more activity on this front, but I also realise that for the vast majority of KDE users, this isn’t a problem at all.
Samsung Electronics today announced a partnership with leading international ODM (Original Development Manufacturing) companies such as Atmaca, HKC and Tempo — a collaboration that will enable non-Samsung smart TV models to use Tizen OS for the first time. New TVs from Bauhn, Linsar, Sunny, Vispera and other brands will be available in Australia, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, Türkiye and the United Kingdom this year, allowing more consumers to enjoy a premium smart TV experience enabled by Tizen, an open source OS for Samsung Smart TV. Tizen was, at one point, going to kill Android.
