Engadget got to play with Salfish. "Overall, we came away reasonably impressed with Sailfish OS, despite experiencing only a fraction of its functionality. Performance was decent considering the N950's relatively modest single-core underpinnings - then again, MeeGo's no slouch either."

It's sad that we need this, but alas - Matthew Garret has made a list of Linux distributions that boot on Windows 8 PCs with Secure Boot enabled. Tellingly enough, the list is short. Very short. Can someone hack this nonsense into oblivion please?

"The Chinese government issued new rules on Friday requiring Internet users to provide their real names to service providers, while assigning Internet companies greater responsibility for deleting forbidden postings and reporting them to the authorities." The crazy thing is not that China is tightening its control over the internet. No, the crazy thing is that if it were up to our own politicians, western governments should do the same.

"We just licked the stamps and waved a fond farewell to 1200 OUYA Developer Consoles. These are the early versions of OUYA that developers will use to start making games. They're on their way to developers around the globe - by land, air and sea. OK, only by air - we want you to get them quick. Devs, expect them on your doorstep within the next few days." The SDK has been released as well.

"According to Chinese gadget news site Tech.163, Apple may be in the process of developing its own smart watch that connects to your Apple devices via Bluetooth. Based on the report, Intel will be working with Apple to create the smart watch, with a 1.5-inch PMOLED display made by RiTDisplays with ITO-coated glass." It must be the holiday lull. I'm this close to putting this in the joke category.

"So the status now is that the G5 boots to MorphOS and seems to run stable, however only USB and the on-board IDE interfaces are support by MorphOS drivers right now. The next things I will focus on is getting the on-board NIC and fan control working. Hopefully neither of those two will be particularly difficult, so that will likely be done some time this week." MorphOS keeps getting wider hardware support, which is good. Often, it is EOL hardware, which is bad.

Now that the holidays are upon us (happy holidays!) and the year is about to end, we at OSNews thought it time to finally lift the veil a little bit on the next version of OSNews - OSNews 5. I've hinted at this next version of OSNews here and there in the comments, but we think it's time to make it all a little bit more official by taking in some initial feedback.

In the final years of my high school career, more concerned with going out and drinking three times a week than with actually doing anything meaningful at my supposedly posh gymnasium, I rediscovered my love for computing - a love lost during the onset of aforementioned going out and drinking. Realising I would hit university soon, I saved up 2000 guilders, ordered the parts for a brand-new computer, and thanks to this then state-of-the-art computer, old flames were rekindled. Since this pun is burning a hole in my pocket - it was an enlightening experience.

"Engineers at Motorola are hard at work on a sophisticated handset, to be released next year, that parent Google hopes will provide more potent competition for devices like Apple's iPhone, said people familiar with the matter." Well, paint me red and call me a girl scout. This is more fascinating: "Motorola also ran into difficulties when it looked into using a bendable screen and materials such as ceramics that would allow the company to make the X Phone more stress resistant, use more colors and mold into different shapes, these people said." Bendable displays could be a huge turning point for mobile - and not because they allow new shapes. No, the killer 'feature' of bendable displays will be their resilience.

"In a move that has raised eyebrows, Microsoft has submitted a patch to the WebKit project to extend the open source rendering engine with a prototype implementation of the Pointer Events specification that the company is also working on together with Google, Mozilla, and Opera. WebKit is the rendering engine used in Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome browsers, making Microsoft's work a contribution to products that are in direct competition to its own."

"By the time I reached my office, I liked the name. Really liked it. I was committed. I could imagine seeing 'Safari' in the Mac OS X dock. I had to tell the team right away and, if necessary, convince them that they liked it too. Fortunately, and to their credit, they didn't need much convincing." Like I said - I love stories like this. Never liked the name 'Safari', though.

As the Syllable project predicted many years ago, version 3 of the REBOL programming language has finally been open sourced, under the Apache 2 licence (screenshot on Syllable Desktop). Also, the alpha version of the high-level Red programming language, supporting Syllable Desktop, has been released, by now in version 0.3.1 (screenshot, demo program, video at the Science Park in Amsterdam).

"America's broken patent system needs major reform to protect innovators and the public. Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is announcing a major new boost to its patent work: a half-million dollars in funding from entrepreneur Mark Cuban and game developer Markus 'Notch' Persson." Notch putting his money where his mouth is. Classy guy. Even if a creeper literally just blew up the front of my house.

Digia, Qt's new owner, has announced the release of version 5 of the framework. "Key benefits of Qt 5 include: graphics quality; performance on constrained hardware; cross-platform portability; support for C++11; HTML5 support with QtWebKit 2; a vastly improved QML engine with new APIs; ease of use and compatibility with Qt 4 versions."