Microsoft has already made it more difficult to switch default browsers in Windows 11, and now the company is going a step further by blocking apps like EdgeDeflector. Third-party apps like EdgeDeflector and even Firefox have offered workarounds to Microsoft forcing people to use Edge in Start menu search results, even if their default browser is not Edge. Microsoft has been forcing Windows 10 and Windows 11 users into Edge and its Bing search engine in the Start menu search results, and now with the new Widgets panel in Windows 11. It’s a frustrating part of Windows that doesn’t respect your default browser choice. EdgeDeflector lets you bypass these restrictions, and open Start menu search results in your default browser of choice. Clearly, this should be illegal.
The third quarter of 2021 was quite active in lots of different areas, so the report covers a bunch of interesting work including but not limited to boot performance, compile-time analysis, hole-punching support, various drivers, ZFS raidz expansion, an update to the sound mixer, and many more. FreeBSD’s status reports are a great way to keep up to speed with the project’s progress.
This week one of the more interesting WSL mentions is proof-of-concept work on using systemd within Windows Subsystem for Linux. Well known Ubuntu developers Didier Roche and Jean Baptiste Lallement of Canonical’s desktop team mentioned among their WSL work recently was “PoC of systemd on WSL at startup of an instance.“ I’m sure nobody will be unhappy with systemd making its way to WSL.
Welcome to .NET 6. Today’s release is the result of just over a year’s worth of effort by the .NET Team and community. C# 10 and F# 6 deliver language improvements that make your code simpler and better. There are massive gains in performance, which we’ve seen dropping the cost of hosting cloud services at Microsoft. .NET 6 is the first release that natively supports Apple Silicon (Arm64) and has also been improved for Windows Arm64. We built a new dynamic profile-guided optimization (PGO) system that delivers deep optimizations that are only possible at runtime. Cloud diagnostics have been improved with dotnet monitor and OpenTelemetry. WebAssembly support is more capable and performant. New APIs have been added, for HTTP/3, processing JSON, mathematics, and directly manipulating memory. .NET 6 will be supported for three years. Developers have already started upgrading applications to .NET 6 and we’ve heard great early results in production. .NET 6 is ready for your app. It’s available on Linux, Windows, and macOS.
MuditaOS has been released as open source. This mobile operating system is designed specifically for the Mudita Pure e-ink mobile phone, and is based on FreeRTOS. Developing our mobile operating system has been a big challenge in the process of creating Mudita Pure. We came up with a beautifully designed E Ink mobile OS and open-sourced it to fully meet our users’ desire for quality and transparency. This is an interesting take on the minimalist feature phones that enter the market every now and then, but I always wonder what the market is for these things, and how long it takes for users to give in and grab their regular smartphone again. You can find the code on GitHub.
The headline improvement is one that was already trailed by Ville in his recent Sandboxing blog post. From now on, any app that defines an application profile will be automatically sandboxed. This is currently an opt-in process; any app that isn’t updated in this way will still run outside the sandbox. As a user this means you will start to see some third party apps bring up the sandboxing dialogue on first run. You should already be familiar with this from 4.2.0, in which the Jolla apps were already sandboxed. In 4.3.0 Suomenlinna you’ll start to see this more often. Users can of course still run apps however they want, but can feel more confident when running apps inside the sandbox. This is an important security advancement, and follows the roadmap Ville described towards having all apps sandboxed. We’ve been careful to increase security without compromising user-control, and we think you’ll appreciate the extra peace-of-mind that sandboxing brings. That’s a big new feature, and a welcome one, too. As usual, this new version also includes improvements to Sailfish’ Android application support and its web browser, among other things.
Alphabet unit Google lost an appeal against a 2.42-billion-euro ($2.8-billion) antitrust decision on Wednesday, a major win for Europe’s competition chief in the first of three court rulings central to the EU push to regulate big tech. Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager fined the world’s most popular internet search engine in 2017 over the use of its own price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals. The shopping case was the first of three decisions that saw Google rack up 8.25 billion euros in EU antitrust fines in the last decade. Good.
Here, I will try to present another huge benefit of using Flutter desktop: the ability to build an app with a user interface that matches the underlying platform’s design standards. As you can see, Shortcut Keeper is built to be an adaptive app for desktops, boasting a different UI design for macOS and Windows, while using a single codebase. This has always been the holy grail of cross-platform development, and the screenshots here are relatively convincing.
Since AMD’s relaunch into high-performance x86 processor design, one of the fundamental targets for the company was to be a competitive force in the data center. By having a competitive product that customers could trust, the goal has always been to target what the customer wants, and subsequently grow market share and revenue. Since the launch of 3rd Generation EPYC, AMD is growing its enterprise revenue at a good pace, however questions always turn around to what the roadmap might hold. In the past, AMD has disclosed that its 4th Generation EPYC, known as Genoa, would be coming in 2022 with Zen 4 cores built on TSMC 5nm. Today, AMD is expanding the Zen 4 family with another segment of cloud-optimized processors called Bergamo. As part of AMD’s Data Center event today, the company is showcasing that its 4th Generation EPYC roadmap will consist of two segments: Genoa, with up to 96 Zen 4 cores, and Bergamo, with up to 128 Zen 4c cores. Not only are we getting official confirmation of core counts, but AMD is disclosing that Bergamo will be using a different type of core: the Zen 4c core. Imagine how much faster I could translate on one of these.
While at the Linux Foundation Members Summit in Napa, California, I was bemused to find that an open-source savvy intellectual property attorney had never heard of SCO vs. IBM. You know, the lawsuit that at one time threatened to end Linux in the cradle? Well, at least some people thought so anyway. More fool they. But now, after SCO went bankrupt; court after court dismissing SCO’s crazy copyright claims; and closing in on 20-years into the saga, the U.S. District Court of Utah has finally put a period to the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit. I think we first mentioned the lawsuit on OSNews way back in 2003. The then-current version of the Linux kernel was 2.4/2.5.
LXQt, the lightweight desktop environment based on Qt, has hit its 1.0.0 release, with tons of changes and improvements. Going through the changelog, we can see it’s based on the final LTS release of Qt 5, Qt 5.15, and sports new features across all of its components. The file manager has seen a lot of work, there’s now a do-not-disturb mode, there’s the usual Wayland improvements, and a lot more.
System76’s Pop!_OS Linux distribution already has their own “COSMIC” desktop that is based on GNOME, but moving ahead they are working on their own Rust-written desktop that is not based on GNOME or any existing desktop environment. Stemming from a Reddit discussion over the possibility of seeing a KDE flavor of Pop!_OS, it was brought up by one of their own engineers they are working on their “own desktop”. With GNOME curling up on itself more and more, this was inevitable. I’m curious to see what System76’s developer come up with, because interacting with some of them on Twitter has taught me they’re good people with good ideas. Since I’m not a developer I’m not going to make any comments on their use of Rust – I’ll leave that to our readers – but I like that it’s indented to be distribution-independent.
So is the metaverse the next big advance that will revolutionize the way we all connect with each other? Is it just a repackaging of existing technologies into a new catch-all concept? Or is it just the latest buzzword marketing term? The answer to that depends on what you mean by “metaverse”. If there’s ever been a buzzword that truly gets under my skin, it’s this one. It’s clearly manufactured and groomed by corporations, Facebook especially, to distract form that company’s massive problems, lousy reputation, and damaging effects on society, and yet, tech media gobble it all up. The metaverse is nothing. There’s nothing that exists today called “the metaverse” that’s any different from things that existed four years ago, or even eight years ago.
The Soviet-made 1801VM2 CPU (a binary-compatible implementation of the PDP11 instruction set and QBUS interface) was developed in 1982. The 1801VM2 is a further development of the earlier 1801VM1 doubling the original 5MHz clock speed. From a constructive standpoint this CPU is a completely independent development. There’s a wealth of interesting computer technology in the former USSR, and it’s great to see more of it make its way online.
Overall though, it’s no denying that Intel is now in the thick of it, or if I were to argue, the market leader. The nuances of the hybrid architecture are still nascent, so it will take time to discover where benefits will come, especially when we get to the laptop variants of Alder Lake. At a retail price of around $650, the Core i9-12900K ends up being competitive between the two Ryzen 9 processors, each with their good points. The only serious downside for Intel though is cost of switching to DDR5, and users learning Windows 11. That’s not necessarily on Intel, but it’s a few more hoops than we regularly jump through. Competition is amazing.
While playing around with the GUI on OpenVMS I was looking for CDE documentation and I found out CDE is still being developed and can be installed on modern linux. This quick post shows you how to install CDE on Debian 10 and includes a bit on compiling GENERIC TETRIS, the same program I installed on OpenVMS. I will forever stand by my article from 14 years ago and you can put on my gravestone that I truly think CDE is one of the best graphical user interfaces ever conceived. CDE was released as open source software about nine years ago, and is still being developed.
To capture a composite video signal and display it on my computer’s output, I need to use an upscaler that converts to an HDMI signal, then an HDMI capture device which in turn communicates with my PC over USB. Then, I can overlay my stupid face over it and send it to Twitch or something. But what if it was 1984? Of course, Twitch wouldn’t exist, nor would HDMI. So what’s the next best thing? Ah, the MSX. Most people focus on how popular it was in Japan, but they rarely mention that, because of the involvement of the Dutch company Philips, the MSX was also remarkably popular in my country of origin, The Netherlands. Some of my earliest computer memories took place on an MSX at a friends’ place. The particular model of MSX in this article, however, is something entirely different from the kinds of MSX machines I ran into as a kid. This thing has a considerable number of tricks up its sleeves, and now I just know I’ll be spending considerable time on eBay.
A common request is your need for Microsoft Edge to span the breadth of operating systems in your environment. Last October, we made Microsoft Edge available on Linux in preview channels (Dev and Beta channels) and today, the browser is generally available for Linux via the stable channel. This milestone officially rounds out the full complement of major platforms served by Microsoft Edge through stable channel: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and now Linux. To use Microsoft Edge on Linux, users can download it from our website or retrieve it using the command line from a Linux package manager. I hear Edge is a decent browser, but I think it’s safe to assume it does its best to trick you into using Microsoft services. I really see no need for this in my Linux environment, especially since it’s just Chromium, and there are far, far better Google-free Chromium alternatives for Linux.
Today we celebrate the third birthday of SerenityOS, counting from the first commit in the git repository, on October 10, 2018. Previous birthdays: 1st, 2nd. What follows is a list of interesting events from the past year, mixed with random development screenshots and also reflections from other developers in the SerenityOS community. SerenityOS is simply a great project, with a good mindset, good people, and lots and lots of talent. These birthday posts are a great way to check if you’ve missed any of the developments around the project this year.
This release comes with improved support for user sessions on high resolution displays, new TWin styles (SUSE2 and DeKorator), some other new applications, improvements to ffmpeg support and video support in Kopete, a revamped weather bar for Konqueror, a working KNemo backend and various minor improvements and fixes to several long standing annoying bugs and crashes. It also adds support for Debian Bullseye, Ubuntu Impish, Fedora 34 and 35 and Arch distributions. We’ve been talking about Trinity for a while, but for the uninitiated – it’s a fork of the last KDE 3.5.x release, with upgraded bits, fixed bugs, and new features, made to run on modern distributions.
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