Apple has been under pressure in the European Union as the Digital Markets Act antitrust legislation requires the company to allow users to sideload apps outside the App Store to increase competition. 9to5Mac has now found evidence in the iOS 17.2 beta code that the company is indeed moving towards enabling sideloading on iOS devices. The meat of the story here is not that Apple is going to allow sideloading – they were always going to if they want to keep operating in the EU/EEA – but that apparently, they intend to region-lock it to countries in the European Union and European Economic Area. This would mean that consumers in the US would, once again, not be able to benefit from consumer protection laws enacted in the EU.

Will SteamOS ever become generally available straight from Valve, instead of the community builds you can try out right now? “We’re hoping soon, though, it is very high on our list, and we want to make SteamOS more widely available. We’ll probably start with making it more available to other handhelds with a similar gamepad style controller. And then further beyond that, to more arbitrary devices. I think that the biggest thing is just, you know, driver support and making sure that it can work on whatever PC it happens to land on. Because right now, it’s very, very tuned for Steam Deck.” Valve also just unveiled a new and updated Steam Deck, with an OLED display, more efficient processor, and a few other nips and tucks, including making the devices easier to repair, not harder – made available for the same price as the previous model it replaces.

It’s about a legal battle between Intel and NEC in the 1980s over the microcode of the 8086 processor. But whilst it may be about events a long time ago, the themes are still familiar today. Whilst writing it, I couldn’t help but think about the ongoing lawsuit between Qualcomm and Arm. About how the future of both companies, and indeed others, including Intel, may be crucially affected by the results of a ruling on intellectual property protection. The court case we’ll discuss today would also have important implications for Intel, the US semiconductor industry, its Japanese competitors and for intellectual property law in general. Lawsuits. Lawsuits never change.

As AMD is now well into their third generation of RDNA architecture GPUs, the sun has been slowly setting on AMD’s remaining Graphics Core Next (GCN) designs, better known by the architecture names of Polaris and Vega. In recent weeks the company dropped support for those GPU architectures in their open source Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK, and now we have confirmation that the company is slowly winding down support for these architectures in their Windows drivers as well. Under AMD’s extended driver support schedule for Polaris and Vega, the drivers for these architectures will no longer be kept at feature parity with the RDNA architectures. And while AMD will continue to support Polaris and Vega for some time to come, that support is being reduced to security updates and “functionality updates as available.” What’s odd is that AMD is still selling these as integrated GPUs to this day, and they, too, are getting this treatment. That’s a pretty shitty deal for people buying these products today.

Eight gigabytes has been the standard RAM load out on new MacBook Pros for the better part of a decade, and in 2023, Apple execs still believe it’s enough for customers. With the launch of Apple’s M3 MacBook Pros last month, a base 14-inch $1,599 model with an M3 chip still only gets you 8GB of unified DRAM that’s shared between the CPU, GPU, and neural network accelerator. In a show of Apple’s typical modesty this week, the tech giant’s veep of worldwide product marketing Bob Borchers has argued, in an interview with machine-learning engineer Lin YilYi, that the Arm-compatible, Apple-designed M-series silicon and software stack is so memory efficient that 8GB on a Mac may equal 16GB on a PC – so we therefore ought to be happy with it. Eight gigabyte of RAM in and of itself isn’t an issue, on a budget machine. Apple is selling incredibly expensive machines labelled as “pro” with a mere 8 GB, and charges €200 for another 8, which is highway robbery, plain and simple. I wonder how many people at Apple – at any level – use Macs with 8 GB of RAM. I have a feeling that number is quite low.

Xiaomi also has bad news for MIUI users who wish to unlock their smartphones, saying they won’t get updated to HyperOS. “Previous operating systems, such as MIUI 14, still retain the ability to unlock, but users will no longer receive any Xiaomi HyperOS updates if they leave their devices in an unlocked state,” the company told us. The Chinese brand clarified in a follow-up email that HyperOS updates won’t be available if you’ve unlocked your phone’s bootloader, regardless of whether you’re on MIUI 14 or HyperOS. However, the company said you’ll receive HyperOS updates if you choose to lock your device again. This applies to all Xiaomi devices outside of China. I rarely say this, but with this new “HyperOS” skin being the most blatant iOS ripoff I’ve ever seen, just get an iPhone if you want that experience that badly.

I cannot pinpoint the source of this misconception, it could have been a vendor, or long-lost blog post, or one of the many webinars I attended in my early days as a program lead. Regardless of the source, I operated under the wild misconception that all I needed to do was train my teams to do accessibility. Developers, QAs, designers, all they needed was training! This model does not work. Especially for an organization with multiple products, multiple platforms, and multiple development teams. Accessibility is so much more complicated than can be summarised in a mere training. It requires experts, capable programmers, users who actually require said accessbility, and so much more. It’s also an ongoing process – it’s not a static “train once, use everywhere” kind of deal.

A new update for Ubuntu Touch is here – adding Ubuntu 20.04 LTS support for new devices (the PinePhone, PinePhone Pro, PineTab and PineTab 2), and containing a whole slew of bug fixes and new features. It’s awesome to see the UBPorts team delivering a steady stream of updates, keeping the Ubuntu Touch platform alive and kicking.

Google is hoping regulators will bail it out of the messaging mess it has created for itself after years of dysfunctional product reboots. The Financial Times reports that Google and a few cell carriers are asking the EU to designate Apple’s iMessage as a “core” service that would require it to be interoperable under the new “Digital Markets Act.” The EU’s Digital Markets Act targets Big Tech “gatekeepers” with various interoperability, fairness, and privacy demands, and while iMessage didn’t make the initial cut of services announced in September, Apple’s messenger is under a “market investigation” to determine if it should qualify. The criteria for gatekeeper services all revolve around business usage. The services the EU wants to include would have more than 45 million monthly active EU users and more than 10,000 yearly active business in the EU, a business turnover of at least 7.5 billion euros, or a market cap of 75 billion euros, with the caveat that these are just guidelines and the EU is open to arguments in both directions. When the initial list was announced back in September, the EU said that iMessage actually met the thresholds for regulation, but it was left off the list while it listens to Apple’s arguments that it should not qualify. The sooner the various messaging services are forced to interoperate – preferably via completely open specifications anyone can build for – the better. These services should not be locking users in.

Fedora Workstation now features GNOME 45, which brings better performance and many usability enhancements, including a new workspace switcher and a much-improved image viewer. If you’re looking for a different desktop experience, our Budgie Special Interest Group has created Fedora Onyx, a Budgie-based “Atomic” desktop in the spirit of Fedora Silverblue.  Of course, that’s not all — we also have updated desktop flavors featuring KDE Plasma Desktop, Xfce, Cinnamon, and more. As with every Fedora release, it comes with the latest and greatest every one of the Linux desktops has to offer, as well as all the newest versions of the various frameworks and underlying layers, down to the kernel. Fedora KDE is my desktop of choice, so I’m definitely a bit biased, but I can’t wait to load up the upgrade and install it.

The ReactOS project has published another newsletter filled with news about their progress, and two things stand out. First, there’s now initial support for booting using UEFI. Work has been underway since the beginning of the year to transition FreeLoader, our default bootloader for ReactOS, to support UEFI on x86 and AMD64, as well as ARM32 and ARM64. Hermès has been developing a system for passing the UEFI framebuffer information in a fashion that allows Windows XP to run on UEFI systems, while Justin Miller (TheDarkFire) has been developing the UEFI freeloader build. On top of supporting booting ReactOS, other features are being built such as EFI chainloading and a bootmgfw-compatible build of FreeLoader. These features would add boot management capabilities and allow modern Windows systems to bootstrap our favorite bootloader. Second, and this is a big one: work has been done to add initial support for running Windows applications targeting newer systems than Windows Server 2003. Up until now, ReactOS was limited to running Windows applications targeting NT 5.2 found in Server 2003, but now work is being done to support appications targeting NT 6.0 and newer, as found in Windows Vista and newer. A group made up of Timo Kreuzer, Justin Miller, and other developers and contributors alike are developing the necessary APIs for compatibility with modern programs. While Timo is still working on implementing a dynamic versioning system for DLLs (#3239) that allows exporting of routines to applications depending on their compatibility settings, he has added the option for ReactOS bot builders to compile builds with NT6 exports which makes it possible to experiment with NT6+ application compatibility. There are also various improvements to the shell and debugger, but a new release is still a ways away, so unless you want to dive into unstable builds, there’s no way to test any of this just yet. Still, hose are some massive projects being undertaken, and makes ReactOS a bit more prepared for the future.

Do you ever sit at your 1981 vintage IBM PC and get the urge to pop onto that newfangled ‘WWW’ to stay up to date on all the goings-on in the world? Fret not, because Al’s Geek Lab has you covered with a new video, which you will unfortunately have to watch on a device that was made at the very least in the late 1990s. What makes this feat possible is a miniscule web browser called MicroWeb, created by jhhoward, that will happily run on an 8088 CPU or compatible, without requiring any fiddling with EMS or similar RAM extensions. Anything is possible, if you just want it hard enough.

OmniOS Community Edition r151048 has been released. For those of us that lost track of the Solaris world – OmniOS is a distribution of illumos, which in turn is a fork of the last release of OpenSolaris before Oracle did what Oracle does and screwed everyone over by taking Solaris closed source again. OmniOS focuses on being a server operating system. For this release, the userland is now built with gcc 13, and it contains various improvements for AMD Zen 4 support. The which command has been replaced by an implementation in C rather than csh, dtrace has seen some improvements on machines with a lot of CPUs, and so, so much more.

LXQt, the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment, version 1.4.0 has been released, and this one marks an important milestone – it’s the last release based on Qt5, before the next release moves to Qt6. LXQt 1.4.0 is based on Qt 5.15, the last LTS version of Qt5. If everything goes as planned, this is the last Qt5-based release – we’ll do our best to port the next release to Qt6, even if we’ll have to delay it. It’s loaded with new features, bugfixes, and improvements, and, as always, will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.