Microsoft is beginning what will be a very long and drawn-out process of no longer supporting 32-bit versions of Windows 10. Beginning with Windows 10 version 2004, which is already available to OEMs and developers, the company is no longer offering a 32-bit version of the OS to OEMs for new PCs. The change is indicated on the Minimum Hardware Requirements documentation. Hardly surprising. We’re well past the point where new machines need 32bit Windows.
Ubuntu Touch is the privacy and freedom respecting mobile operating system by UBports. Today we are happy to announce the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-12! OTA-12 is immediately available for many supported Ubuntu Touch devices. It is easily our largest release ever, featuring a number of new features while saying goodbye to some old friends. There’s quite a few changes, but device support is still a bit of a problem. I’d love to test this out though, and I happen to own two of the better supported devices.
This is something that users have been asking for for a long time, and we are proud to be finally able to offer this awesome feature. Groups can be created and block lists, blacklist, and whitelist can be applied to groups. Blocklists, blacklist and whitelist can all be individually enabled/disabled. Pi-hole blocks ads on your entire network – you install it on your own hardware and point your router’s DNS settings to it. I’ve been putting off setting up Pi-hole on my home network out of sheer laziness, but with how easy it is I really have no excuse.
Does anyone remember PC-BSD, the FreeBSD-based distribution aimed at desktop users? After being acquired by iXsystems and renamed to TrueOS, the graphical installer was removed in 2018 because TrueOS served more as a base for iXsystems’ other offerings, such as FreeNAS, And now, in April of this year – we missed it – development has been halted entirely. TrueOS source code will remain available on GitHub for others that may want to continue the work that we started so many years ago. I can’t explain just how much we appreciate you all being loyal fans of TrueOS and PC-BSD in the past. We’re confident that even though this is a hard decision, it’s also the correct decision because of the exciting new projects that we’re all becoming more involved in like TrueNAS CORE. End of an era, but PC-BSD forks such as GhostBSD have taken up the mantle.
Today, we are excited to announce the 0.14 release of xrdesktop, the Open Source project which enables interaction with traditional desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE, in VR. xrdesktop makes window managers aware of VR and is able to use VR runtimes to render desktop windows in 3D space, with the ability of manipulating them with VR controllers and generating mouse and keyboard input from VR. Sponsored by Valve, this latest release brings the largest amount of changes yet, with many new features and architectural improvements. Most importantly, the most exciting improvement is that xrdesktop is now able to run on XR runtimes providing the OpenXR API, which enables running xrdesktop on a full Open Source stack with Monado. One day I’ll get a VR headset, but for now, I feel like the cost of a set that isn’t garbage is simply too high, and whenever I see someone playing a game in VR, it looks clunky and cumbersome both inside the game and outside in the real world. This technology has a while to go.
DragonFly version 5.8 brings a new dsynth utility for building your own binary dports packages, plus significant support work to speed up that build – up to and including the entire collection. Additional progress has been made on GPU and signal support. This release’s been out for a while, but I haven’t highlighted it yet, so here we go. They’re already up to 5.8.1 by now.
The release of Ubuntu 20.04 brings GNOME Shell 3.36 and improved performance in some areas. In this article we will describe the improvements that were contributed by Canonical. As most Ubuntu users tend to stick to LTS releases they mostly will be upgrading from 18.04. If that’s you then you will also notice a larger set of performance improvements introduced in 19.04 2 and especially in 19.10 4. So you might like to read what those are first. Did you know moving the mouse used to involve JavaScript? Well, now you know moving the mouse used to involve JavaScript.
As we’ve shown in the review, this means that we get some CPUs. The Ryzen 3 3300X and Ryzen 3 3100 are odd elements to the Ryzen family, especially the 3100 with its awkward CCX and core configuration, but both parts offer a lot of performance for their pricing. At $120 and $99 respectively, using AMD’s latest Zen 2 microarchitecture and the power efficient 7nm TSMC process, AMD is defining a new base line in budget performance. AMD now leads in budget, mid-range, high-end, crazy server processors, and game consoles.
This release makes great progress in the C++20 language support, both on the compiler and library sides, some C2X enhancements, various optimization enhancements and bug fixes, several new hardware enablement changes and enhancements to the compiler back-ends and many other changes. There is even a new experimental static analysis pass. GCC is already 33 years old. That’s one heck of a legacy.
OpenIndiana Hipster 2020.04 has been released. All OpenIndiana system software was rewritten in Python 3. Installation images now don’t deliver Python 2.7 interpreters or libraries, however some software still requires Python 2.7. We’ve moved to GCC 7 as the default compiler. OpenIndiana Hipster is a rolling release distribution of illumos, which in turn traces its roots back to OpenSolaris. The original intent of illumos was to replace the closed source parts of OpenSolaris with open source ones, but after Oracle discontinued OpenSolaris, illumos grew into a full-blown fork of OpenSolaris.
10 years ago, systemd was announced and swiftly rose to become one of the most persistently controversial and polarizing pieces of software in recent history, and especially in the GNU/Linux world. The quality and nature of debate has not improved in the least from the major flame wars around 2012-2014, and systemd still remains poorly understood and understudied from both a technical and social level despite paradoxically having disproportionate levels of attention focused on it. I am writing this essay both for my own solace, so I can finally lay it to rest, but also with the hopes that my analysis can provide some context to what has been a decade-long farce, and not, as in Benno Rice’s now famous characterization, tragedy. The end of this massive article posits a very interesting question. What init system does Chrome OS use? And Android? Do you know, without looking it up? Probably not. What does that tell you?
Microsoft is confirming today that it’s planning to refocus Windows 10X on single-screen devices. “The world is a very different place than it was last October when we shared our vision for a new category of dual-screen Windows devices,” explains Panos Panay, Microsoft’s Windows and devices chief. “With Windows 10X, we designed for flexibility, and that flexibility has enabled us to pivot our focus toward single-screen Windows 10X devices that leverage the power of the cloud to help our customers work, learn and play in new ways.” Microsoft isn’t saying exactly when single-screen devices like laptops will support Windows 10X, nor when dual-screen devices will launch with the OS. However, Windows 10X will launch on single-screen devices first. “We will continue to look for the right moment, in conjunction with our OEM partners, to bring dual-screen devices to market,” says Panay. If there’s one person that can pull off moving Windows forward, it’s Panay. I feel like this move points towards Windows 10X becoming the default version of Windows people will get when they buy a new PC – a Windows 11, if you will. It will have a new UI, and run Win32 applications inside containers. I’m interested to see if they can finally pull it off.
Adi Robertson at The Verge: The organization that oversees internet domain names has rejected a proposal to transfer management of the .org top-level domain from a nonprofit to a private equity group. ICANN said it wouldn’t approve the sale of .org operator Public Interest Registry because it would create “unacceptable uncertainty” for the domain, citing concerns about debt and the intentions of the for-profit firm Ethos Capital. Good news.
Inkscape 1.0 has been released. A major milestone was achieved in enabling Inkscape to use a more recent version of the software used to build the editor’s user interface (namely GTK+3). Users with HiDPI (high resolution) screens can thank teamwork that took place during the 2018 Boston Hackfest for setting the updated-GTK wheels in motion. This is just the tip of the iceberg of this massive release.
We’ve already talked about snaps on Ubuntu, but it turns out it’s actually way worse than I initially thought. On the latest Ubuntu, if you try to download the .deb version of Chromium using either the Software Store or command line, it acts as an alias to installing the snap version! Essentially, Chromium snap is shoved down your throat even if you explicitly asked for the .deb version. This is not cool Ubuntu – just because Chromium may be easier to maintain as a snap app doesn’t justify this forced behavior. Snap applications auto-update and that’s fine if Ubuntu wants to keep systems secure. But it can’t even be turned off manually. Auto-updating of snaps can only be deferred at best, until at some point, like Windows, it auto-updates anyway. Even on metered connections, snaps auto-update anyway after some time. I only use Ubuntu on my laptop right now – my workstation and main PC run my distribution of choice, Linux Mint with Cinnamon – because the latest version of Ubuntu supports it better than the current Linux Mint release does. As soon as the next version of Mint is out, which will be based on the current Ubuntu version, I’m ditching Ubuntu right away. I don’t like snaps, FlatPaks, AppImage, or any of that other nonsense that do nothing but make a clean .deb/APT-based system more complicated than it needs to be. Debian’s package management system is incredibly robust and easy to fix in the unlikely event something does go wrong, so I simply do not have a need for additional application installation methods that I can’t control through APT. Ubuntu only barely just recovered from the Unity debacle, only for the project to now go down yet another route nobody is asking for.
The ReactOS Build Environment (RosBE), our curated set of compilers and build tools, has just received a major upgrade. After more than 7 years of using the same and now ancient GCC 4.7.2, ReactOS is finally going to be built with the help of a modern compiler (GCC 8.4.0). Among other things, the new version better detects programming mistakes like improperly sized buffers, and comes with improved error messages to pinpoint such mistakes to the corresponding position in code. It also adds support for the latest C and C++ standards, marking a first step towards the introduction of modern C++ concepts into ReactOS. That is one hell of an upgrade, and a much-needed one by the looks of it.
Enlightenment 0.24 Alpha 1 is shipping with an improved screenshot module, support for external monitor backlight/brightness controls, an improved restart experience, a smoother start-up thanks to using an I/O pre-fetch thread, switching over to BlueZ 5 for Bluetooth, and various other changes. Enlightenment was never a massively popular piece of software, but it seems that it has really fallen by the wayside recently. I vividly remember how 15-20 years ago, Enlightement was what you loaded up if you wanted to show off what desktop Linux could do
Valve has announced it’s ending support for macOS for SteamVR. SteamVR has ended OSX support so our team can focus on Windows and Linux. We recommend that OSX users continue to opt into the SteamVR branches for access to legacy builds. Users can opt into a branch by right-clicking on SteamVR in Steam, and selecting Properties… -> Betas. Apple announced SteamVR coming to the Mac at WWDC in 2017, so support from Valve lasted for a mere three years. This shouldn’t come as a surprise though, since the macOS ecosystem simply isn’t geared towards gaming and VR in any way, shape, or form. Most Mac users have to settle for Intel integrated graphics, and even the Mac users with a dedicated video card have to settle for subpar and overpriced AMD cards, since Apple refuses to support NVIDIA. On top of that, Apple has deprecated OpenGL and wants developers to use their proprietary Metal API instead. In a world where most game developers use DirectX or OpenGL/Vulkan, that just doesn’t make a lot of sense. And let’s not forget that the writing is on the wall for macOS as a general purpose operating system anyway, since Apple will most likely use the move to ARM processors in Macs to further lock down macOS, making it more like iOS. While macOS might be more popular than Linux in absolute numbers, the cold and harsh truth is that the Linux userbase simply has a far larger group of skilled developers, programmers, and tinkerers willing to put the effort into making non-native games work on Linux and to improve support for things like VR devices. These are exactly the kind of people Apple seems to have a deep-rooted disdain for. Expect more of these kinds of announcements over the coming years, as game companies (and other developers) have to decide whether or not to support an isolated and locked down platform like macOS on ARM – a platform without first-party OpenGL or Vulkan support, with a steward actively pushing you to use a proprietary API that you can’t use anywhere else.
The big news first: a timeline has been set for Beta 2! If all goes well, it will be released by the end of May. Of course, this means everyone has been scrambling for last minute changes this month instead of stabilizing everything. We are now in “soft freeze”, and the branch will be created on Friday. Yes, an actual almost release date for Haiku’s second beta release.
I am happy to announce the availability of GhostBSD 20.04, but first thanks to all people that gave feedback and reported issues. We fixed a couple of problems that were found in 20.03. This release comes with kernel and OS updates and numerous software applications updates and many improvements like replacing gnome-mount and hald with FreeBSD devd and Vermaden automount which make auto mounting and unmounting of external device way more stable and supports more filesystems. GhostBSD is a desktop-oriented BSD based on FreBSD, running the MATE or Xfce desktop. Linux desktops really take up all the spotlights when it comes to UNIX-like operating systems for average users, and I feel like some honest competition would be a good thing. More focus on desktop-oriented BSD distributions can help.
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