macOS Big Sur, the latest version of the world’s most advanced desktop operating system, is now available to Mac users as a free software update. Big Sur introduces a beautiful redesign and is packed with new enhancements for key apps including Safari, Messages, and Maps, as well as new privacy features. And Big Sur has been engineered, down to its core, to take full advantage of all the power of the M1 chip to make the macOS experience even better for the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini. The combination of Big Sur and M1 truly takes the Mac to a whole new level with incredible capabilities, efficiency, and more apps than ever before, while maintaining everything users love about macOS. I’m not entirely sure if I like the new interface with all the big UI elements and excessive whitespace, but other than that, this seems like a solid release. You know where to get it.
I booted the arm64e kernel of macOS 11.0.1 beta 1 kernel in QEMU up to launchd. It’s completely useless, but may be interesting if you’re wondering how an Apple Silicon Mac will boot. You got to love the bluntness.
We’re excited to release .NET 5.0 today and for you to start using it. It’s a major release — including C# 9 and F# 5 — with a broad set of new features and compelling improvements. It’s already in active use by teams at Microsoft and other companies, in production and for performance testing. Those teams are showing us great results that demonstrate performance gains and/or opportunities to reduce hosting costs for their web applications. ASP.NET Core, EF Core, C# 9, and F# 5 are also released today. You can download .NET 5.0 for Windows, macOS, and Linux on both x86 and ARM.
Today, Apple announced its first three ARM-based Macs – a the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro 13″, and the Mac Mini. They are all equipped by the Apple M1 system-on-a-chip, which was, of course, the main focus of the unveiling. Apple made a lot of bold claims about their first ARM-based Mac chip, but sadly, refused to show any real-world use cases, benchmarks, or any other verifiable data, making it very hard to assess the company’s lofty claims about performance and battery life. That being said, AnandTech has done some deep diving into the A14, found in the latest iPhones and iPad Air, and it would seem they boast excellent performance figures. What we do know is that all of these machines – including the MacBook Pro which definitely has Pro in its name – cap out at a mere 16GB of RAM, which seems paltry, especially since that 16GB is shared with Apple’s integrated GPU. This RAM is on-die, and since there’s no SIM slot on any of the new machines, it cannot be expanded. On top of that, the base models of al of these machines only ship with 8GB of RAM, which should be a crime. Just like on the latest iPhones, the two laptop models also do not ship with high-refresh rate displays, so you’re stuck with a paltry 60Hz display – it’s not even available as an option. Much like the 8GB of RAM, shipping such expensive machines with mere 60Hz displays is inexcusable. The MacBook Air is fanless, but the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini are not. This most likely allows the latter two models to sustain their peak performance for longer than the MacBook Air can, which makes sense considering their price points and marketing. The new machines will ship a week from today.
The EU is often at the forefront of consumer protection when it comes to privacy laws like the GDPR. But now it looks like the Council of the European Union might undermine all of this with a move to cancel secure end-to-end encryption as we know it, the ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) reports. The ORF obtained an internal draft in which the Council argues that the motion is meant as a counteract against terrorism, pointing to last week’s Vienna shooting. However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the terror attack could’ve been prevented without further surveillance powers if it wasn’t for egregious mistakes in the Austrian counterterrorism office. It seems like the attack is used as a pretense to gain public support. Throwing babies out with the bathwater under nebulous claims of “but terrorism!” isn’t just an American thing. For now, this is just a proposal by one cog in the EU government machine and it’s unlikely to go anywhere (for now!), but wheels are definitely in motion, and just like our friends in the US, we have to remain vigilant for politicians abusing terrorist attacks to erode our rights and freedoms.
LXQt, the lightweight alternative to KDE, has released version 0.16.0. It’s not a major release with big new changes, but the changelog is still a fairly long list of improvements.
When AMD announced that its new Zen 3 core was a ground-up redesign and offered complete performance leadership, we had to ask them to confirm if that’s exactly what they said. Despite being less than 10% the size of Intel, and very close to folding as a company in 2015, the bets that AMD made in that timeframe with its next generation Zen microarchitecture and Ryzen designs are now coming to fruition. Zen 3 and the new Ryzen 5000 processors, for the desktop market, are the realization of those goals: not only performance per watt and performance per dollar leaders, but absolute performance leadership in every segment. We’ve gone into the new microarchitecture and tested the new processors. AMD is the new king, and we have the data to show it. AMD didn’t lie – these new processors are insanely good, and insanely good value, to boot. If you’re building a new PC today – AMD is the only logical choice. What a time to be alive.
Last month’s news that IBM would do a Hewlett-Packard and divide into two—an IT consultancy and a buzzword compliance unit—marks the end of “business as usual” for yet another of the great workstation companies. There really isn’t much left when it comes to proper workstations. All the major players left the market, have been shut down, or have been bought out (and shut down) – Sun, IBM, SGI, and countless others. Of course, some of them may still make workstations in the sense of powerful Xeon machines, but workstations in the sense of top-to-bottom custom architecture, like SGI’s crossbar switch technology and all the custom architectures us mere mortals couldn’t afford, are no longer being made in large numbers. And it shows. Go on eBay to try and get your hand on a used and old SGI or Sun workstation, and be prepared to pay out of your nose for highly outdated and effectively useless hardware. The number of these machines still on the used market is dwindling, and with no new machines entering the used market, it’s going to become ever harder for us enthusiasts to get our hands on these sorts of exciting machines.
In the latest preview builds, Microsoft has removed all shortcuts that allowed you to access the retired pages of the Control Panel. In other words, you can no longer right-click within the File Explorer and select ‘Properties’ to open the retired ‘System’ page of the Control Panel. Likewise, Microsoft has even blocked CLSID-based IDs and third-party apps. Open Shell and Classic Shell, are also no longer able to launch the hidden System applet of the Control Panel. Now, when a user tries to open the retired Control Panel page, they are brought to the About page instead. This is a good thing. The weird, split-personality nature of Windows is odd, uneccesary, and needlessly complicated, and it’s high time Microsoft fully commits to something for once when it comes to Windows. Whether or not the ‘modern’ path is the one most OSNews readers want Microsoft to take is a different matter altogether.
This release comes with new styles providing better look and feel (Baghira, Domino, Ia Ora), new widgets (KoolDock and TastyMenu), new utilities (KXMLEditor, Mathemagics, Qalculate) and new applications (Codeine, TDEDocker, TDEPacman). It also adds support for Xine 1.2.10, improves compatibility with PulseAudio, fixes various bugs, adds support for brightness control from keyboard and integrates CVE-2020-17507 to prevent buffer overflow in XBM parsers. I both want and do not want to run the Trinity Desktop Environment. It harkens back to simpler times, but I’m not entirely sure that’s what people actually want.
The Wine program for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms can run on a number of different architectures, but Wine doesn’t handle the emulation of running Windows x86/x64 binaries on other architectures like 64-bit ARM or PowerPC. But that’s what the Wine-based Hangover is about with currently allowing those conventional Windows binaries to run on AArch64 (ARM64) and 64-bit POWER too. Hangover started out with a focus on Windows x64 binaries on ARM64 in looking at the possible use-case of running Windows software on ARM mobile devices and more. This year with the help of Raptor Computing Systems there has been Hangover support added for IBM POWER 64-bit. It would be really amazing if Linux on POWER could make use of WINE like regular x86 Linux users can. It’s a long way off, still, but progress is being made.
In 1978, a memory chip stored just 16 kilobits of data. To make a 32-kilobit memory chip, Mostek came up with the idea of putting two 16K chips onto a carrier the size of a standard integrated circuit, creating the first memory module, the MK4332 “RAM-pak”. This module allowed computer manufacturers to double the density of their memory systems and by 1982, Mostek had sold over 3 million modules. The Apple III is the best-known system that used these memory modules. A deep dive into these interesting chips.
Today may be Halloween, but what Intel is up to is no trick. Almost a year after showing off their alpha silicon, Intel’s first discrete GPU in over two decades has been released and is now shipping in OEM laptops. The first of several planned products using the DG1 GPU, Intel’s initial outing in their new era of discrete graphics is in the laptop space, where today they are launching their Iris Xe MAX graphics solution. Designed to complement Intel’s Xe-LP integrated graphics in their new Tiger Lake CPUs, Xe MAX will be showing up in thin-and-light laptops as an upgraded graphics option, and with a focus on mobile creation. With AMD stepping up to the plate with their latest high-end cards, it’s very welcome to see Intel attacking the lower end of the market. They have a roadmap to move up, though, so we might very well end up with three graphics card makers to choose from – a luxury we haven’t seen in about twenty years.
But let’s not bury the lede here: after several days of screaming, ranting and scaring the cat with various failures, this blog post is finally being typed in a fully profile-guided and link-time optimized Firefox 82 tuned for POWER9 little-endian. Although it multiplies compile time by nearly a factor of 3 and the build process intermittently can consume a terrifying amount of memory, the PGO-LTO build is roughly 25% faster than the LTO-only build, which was already 4% faster than the “baseline” -O3 -mcpu=power9 build. That’s worth an 84-minute coffee break! (-j24 on a dual-8 Talos II , 64GB RAM.) This whole post is a ringing endorsement of Firefox and why the technology landscape – especially the alternative operating systems and hardware platforms landscape – needs Firefox. There really isn’t any other viable option. Chromium? Chromium is open source, but a lot of its important functionality is hidden behind a needlessly complex process of setting up and registering API keys that’s about as intuitive as designing an atomic bomb from scratch on a deserted island. On top of that, Chromium is still a Google project, and as Google’s reluctance to support important features on Linux shows, Chromium is designed for Google’s interests – nobody else’s. WebKit? WebKit requires developers to build an entire web browser around it from scratch. While that can lead to awesome applications, it also means replicating every single bit of functionality users have come to expect from their browsers. Things like bookmark and tab sync, extensions, and so on – all have to be built and maintained form scratch. Firefox is the only complete package someone can port to another platform and end up with a complete browser package. Sure, it’s definitely not an easy undertaking to port a program as complex as Firefox, but in a lot of cases, it’s probably easier than porting WebKit/Blink and building a browser around it from scratch.
We talked about the state of X.org earlier this week, and the wider discussion was picked up by Adam Jackson, who works at Red Hat as the X.Org Server release manager, and has been heavily involved with X development for many years. There’s been some recent discussion about whether the X server is abandonware. As the person arguably most responsible for its care and feeding over the last 15 years or so, I feel like I have something to say about that. So, is Xorg abandoned? To the extent that that means using it to actually control the display, and not just keep X apps running, I’d say yes. But xserver is more than xfree86. Xwayland, Xwin, Xephyr, Xvnc, Xvfb: these are projects with real value that we should not give up. A better way to say it is that we can finally abandon xfree86. Seems like a fair and honest assessment.
FreeBSD 12.2 has been released. Changes include updates for the wireless stack for better 802.11n and 802.11ac support, the latest versions of OpenSSL and OpenSSH, and much more. On top of the changes comes an announcement in the release notes of a change for the i386 versions of FreeBSD, starting with FreeBSD 13.0. Starting with FreeBSD-13.0, the default CPUTYPE for the i386 architecture will change from 486 to 686. This means that, by default, binaries produced will require a 686-class CPU, including but not limited to binaries provided by the FreeBSD Release Engineering team. FreeBSD 13.0 will continue to support older CPUs, however users needing this functionality will need to build their own releases for official support. This won’t affect most users, but people with very specific needs should take note.
Preparing to close out a major month of announcements for AMD – and to open the door to the next era of architectures across the company – AMD wrapped up its final keynote presentation of the month by announcing their Radeon RX 6000 series of video cards. Hosted once more by AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, AMD’s hour-long keynote revealed the first three parts in AMD’s new RDNA2 architecture video card family: the Radeon RX 6800, 6800 XT, and 6900 XT. The core of AMD’s new high-end video card lineup, AMD means to do battle with the best of the best out of arch-rival NVIDIA. And we’ll get to see first-hand if AMD can retake the high-end market on November 18th, when the first two cards hit retail shelves. AMD’s forthcoming video card launch has been a long time coming for the company, and one they’ve been teasing particularly heavily. For AMD, the Radeon RX 6000 series represents the culmination of efforts from across the company as everyone from the GPU architecture team and the semi-custom SoC team to the Zen CPU team has played a role in developing AMD’s latest GPU technology. All the while, these new cards are AMD’s best chance in at least half a decade to finally catch up to NVIDIA at the high-end of the video card market. So understandably, the company is jazzed – and in more than just a marketing manner – about what the RX 6000 means. If AMD’s promises and performance comparisons shown today hold up, these new Radeon cards put AMD right back in the game with NVIDIA, going toe-to-toe with NVIDIA’s latest RTZ 30×0 cards – all the way up to the 3090, at lower prices and lower power consumption. Of course, those are just promises and charts, but AMD has proven itself lately to be fairly accurate and fair when announcing new products. If the promises hold up, Dr. Lisa Su and her team will have not only stomped all over Intel, but will also be ready to stomp all over NVIDIA, especially if they manage to follow a similar trajectory as they did with the Zen line of processors. If you are in the market for a new mid to high-end PC, you haven’t had this many viable options in a long, long time.
Speaking of the Amiga: Thirty five years ago I became an Amiga user. One of the first, actually. This is a meandering and reminiscent post of sorts, written to mark the Amiga’s 35th anniversary and the 35 years I have known and loved the system. The Amiga is such an odd platform. Against every single odd ever created, it is still around, it still has an incredibly dedicated community maintaining, upgrading, and expanding both the hardware and software of not only the classic Amiga, but also the ‘modern’ Amiga OS 4 platform. And on top of all that, there’s MorphOS steadily improving every single release, and AROS as the open source alternative. The dedication the loyal Amiga fanbase displays every single day for 35 years now is inspiring. I’ve extensively tested, explored, and used both Amigs OS 4 and MorphOS, and while neither of those click with me in any way, I can’t help but admire the Amiga community as a whole – the usual warts that go with vibrant communities and all. Here’s to another 35 years, you crazy bastards.
Retrohax.net got their hands on an extremely rare motherboard replacement for the Amiga 1000 – the Amiga 1000 Phoenix Enhanced motherboard. It’s difficult to say exactly how many of these were made, but some people claim around 200, while others peg the number at around 2000. Either way, they are rare. They set around to get it to work, which required a lot of work. There’s tons of photos in the article, and you can go to this forum post for another user who came to own one of these rare motherboards for more information.
With the release of Qt 6.0 upcoming, let’s see what has happened since Qt 5.15. It will not be possible to cover every detail of the graphics stack improvements for Qt Quick here, let alone dive into the vast amount of Qt Quick 3D features, many of which are new or improved in Qt 6.0. Rather, the aim is just to give an overview of what can be expected from the graphics stack perspective when Qt 6.0 ships later this year. Exactly what is says on the tin. Especially Qt developers will obviously want to read this.
