Monthly Archive:: August 2023

Microsoft is testing an incredibly welcome feature in Notepad. With this update, Notepad will start automatically saving your session state allowing you to close Notepad without any interrupting dialogs and then pick up where you left off when you return. Notepad will automatically restore previously open tabs as well as unsaved content and edits across those open tabs. Saved session state does not impact any of your files, though, and it is still your choice whether to save or discard unsaved changes to files anytime you close a tab. You can turn this feature off in app settings if you would prefer to have a fresh start every time you open Notepad. I’m not exactly impressed by Microsoft’s handling of Windows as of late, but the few things they are doing right are the more frequent, sometimes constant updates to core applications like Notepad, the terminal, and so on. Features like these are table stakes in better-managed platforms like GNOME or KDE, but it’s welcome to see Windows play catch-up, if at least when it comes to a notepad application.

X11 is, to put it simply, not at all fit for any modern system. Full stop. Everything to make it work on modern systems are just hacks. Don’t even try to get away with “well, it just works for me” or “but Wayland no worky”. Unless your workflow (and hardware) comes from 20+ years ago, you have almost no reason to stick with Xorg, especially as it continues to get worse and worse when the user experience relies on newer and newer features. Almost everything that didn’t work even two months ago works now, and tons of progress is being made so it works for almost everyone – yes, even you, NVIDIA users. With that being said, let’s get on with it. Expect me to be blunt, and wordy. I’ll also be a bit technical. Probably going to devolve into some crying after seeing just how horrible X is. Sticking to legacy, unmaintained software like X.org because it contains some niche feature not yet working in a Wayland environment is entirely valid. Claiming Wayland is crap and X.org is better? That’s utter nonsense, and this article explains in great detail why that is so. Wayland is better. No ifs and buts about it.

Last month, the European Commission announced that it had opened a formal investigation regarding Microsoft’s bundling of Microsoft Teams with Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites for business customers. As we said at the time, “we will continue to cooperate with the Commission and remain committed to finding solutions that will address its concerns.” Today we are announcing proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way, even while the European Commission’s investigation continues and we cooperate with it. These changes will impact our Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites for business customers in the European Economic Area and Switzerland. They are designed to address two concerns that are central to the Commission’s investigation: (1) that customers should be able to choose a business suite without Teams at a price less than those with Teams included; and (2) that we should do more to make interoperability easier between rival communication and collaboration solutions and Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites. Simply the threat of litigation is enough to get these massive corporations to fall in line. This will once again only benefit customers in the EU/EEA, so consumers in the US and elsewhere will still be forced to pay more for the inclusion of Teams, even if they don’t want it.

The Regolith Desktop 3.0 has been released for Ubuntu Focal, Jammy, Lunar, and Debian Bullseye and Bookworm. A new Wayland-based session is available (for Jammy, Lunar, and Bookworm) as well as the existing X11 session. Regolith Desktop is a keyboard-focused, tiling desktop environment, and this new release comes with tons of new features even aside from the Wayland work. There’s now fractional scaling for resolutions higher than 1920×1080, as well as a whole boatload of fixes and changes.

I wanted to experiment with Non-Unix OS ideas. Exo-kernels are interesting, but it is mostly a theory. This project helps me understand the challenges involved in that pattern. OS development is extremely hard, Rust makes it more bearable. There’s some fascinating ideas in this experimental project.

Haiku developer PulkoMandy has released a new version of the BFS Windows driver, fixing some problems. In case you need to access your BFS (and possibly SkyFS, but I can’t test that) partitions from Windows, I just fixed some problems in and made a binary available. With Haiku becoming increasingly useable on a day-to-day basis, tools like these to make the cross-platform life just a bit easier are essential, so I’m glad the Haiku developers are dedicating some time to things like this as well.

Currently, in Windows 11, links contained in Windows system components, like, say, in the Settings application, are always opened in Edge, completely disregarding your default browser setting. Well, thanks to the European Union’s new Digital Services Act, this is going to change – but only for users in the European Economic Area. The latest Insider Preview changelog states: In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows system components use the default browser to open links. It’s remarkable how quickly things can change when the full might of the EU’s and member states’ legal systems can come bearing down on you if you don’t comply. We’re already seeing the first few signs of users in the EU getting a better experience than users elsewhere.

The Fairphone 5 is official and full of surprises. As you might expect, it’s the usual repairable phone from Fairphone, with parts available to order and easily installable with just a screwdriver. A new phone means faster components and a more modern design. What you might not expect is Fairphone opting entirely out of Qualcomm’s consumer upgrade cycle thanks to its choice of an “industrial IoT” SoC that promises longer support times. With a longer window from Qualcomm and a commitment from Fairphone to keep going even after Qualcomm’s industrial support cycle, Fairphone says this device will end up with a jaw-dropping 8–10 years of OS support. The Fairphone 5 is not for sale in the US. Europeans, though, can get the device for 699 euros (~$753), with preorders starting today and a ship date of September 14. For the basic specs, we have a mid-range loadout, starting with a 6.46-inch, 90 Hz, 2770×1224 OLED display. There’s 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, a side fingerprint reader, and a microSD slot. For rear cameras, it offers a 50 MP Sony IMX800, an anonymous 50 MP wide-angle sensor, and a time-of-flight sensor. The front cam is a 50 MP Samsung JN1. Such a support cycle should be legally mandated for every OEM.

By far, the most popular so-called DOS Extender in the early 1990’s was DOS/4GW. MS-DOS game compatibility occupied a very large portion of my time during Windows 95 development, so I saw a lot of DOS Extender banners, most frequently the DOS/4GW banner. Now, you might wonder, “How did these games even run in Windows 95 if they came with a DOS Extender? Wouldn’t the extender try to enter protected mode and fail, because Windows was already managing protected mode?” When Raymond Chen speaks, we listen. That’s the rules.

From Google’s Workspaces Blog: Today we’re making Duet AI for Google Workspace generally available, and you can get started now with a no-cost trial. With over 3 billion users and more than 10 million paying customers who rely on it every day to get things done, Google Workspace is the world’s most popular productivity tool. Our pioneering technology makes collaborating with people easy, fun, and ubiquitously available. With the introduction of Duet AI, we added AI as a real-time collaborator. Since its launch, thousands of companies and more than a million trusted testers have used Duet AI as a powerful collaboration partner that can act as a coach, source of inspiration, and productivity booster — all while ensuring every user and organization has control over their data. None of this stuff even remotely interests me, but to be fair – I don’t work in a large organisations with dozens of meetings to remember, endless emails to read, and countless shared documents to keep track of. I have no idea if these features make any of those tedious things any easier, or if it’s just something users who do live the office, collaborative life shove to the side as a nuisance.

In this article, I describe my journey creating a barely functional rust backend enabling compilation for the .NET runtime (Usually used to run C# and F#). It is currently in the proof-of-concept stage, but I believe it still may be of some interest. Rust is everywhere.

Turns out that installing the Steam client from the Ubuntu repos on a new Ubuntu 23.04 install doesn’t work – and barely anyone noticed. Which is kind of surprising given the popularity of Steam, but also kind of not — and I’ll get to why in a second. So what’s the rub? This whole saga seems to illustrate that most Steam users on Linux install Steam from Valve itself, instead of using the packaged version. Interesting.

I recently released a big update for my Mac ROM SIMM Programmer software which is written using Qt for cross-platform compatibility. As part of the update I wanted to release the Mac build as a universal x86_64/arm64 binary so that M1/M2 Mac users would be able to run it natively. It doesn’t currently compile for Qt 6, although I think I can fix that in the future without too much effort. However, Qt 5.15.9 and later do support creating universal binaries out of the box, so I decided to figure out how to set it all up. Even though I think I have pretty decent Google-fu, it was difficult to piece everything together to accomplish this goal. I’m hoping this post can serve as a reference for people in the future. These instructions are based on Qt 5.15.10 because that is the latest version that is currently open source. I did this on an M2 Mac Mini running macOS 13.5.1 Ventura. Useful information for those that need it. I’m not one of those, but I’m sure some of you are.

Google officially went online later in 1998. It quickly became so inseparable from both the way we use the internet and, eventually, culture itself, that we almost lack the language to describe what Google’s impact over the last 25 years has actually been. It’s like asking a fish to explain what the ocean is. And yet, all around us are signs that the era of “peak Google” is ending or, possibly, already over. There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was. The rise of massive closed algorithmic social networks like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram began eating the web in the 2010s. More recently, there’s been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users. Google has consistently been getting worse in both user experience and search results for years now, but the frustrating thing is that Google has been – and still is – so incredibly dominant, that there really isn’t any viable competition. DuckDuckGo is nice, I guess, and I use it, but in the end it’s just Bing with extra steps, and it shows in its own rather dismal search results. Everything else barely deserves a mention. While I hear good things about Kagi, their business model just is not suited for someone like me who relies on searching the web more than most people do – I’m a translator, and we have to be effectively experts in so many fields that I almost spend more time searching and cross-referencing terminology in all kinds of fields than I do actually writing down the definitive translations. Add to that the various topics I need to cover for OSNews, and even their 1000 searches a month for $10 is not enough, and paying $25 per month for their unlimited tier – or $300 a year – is absolutely bonkers expensive. And we all know those prices are only going to go up. So, online search is in a bad spot right now, and I don’t think adding “AI” to it is going to make it any better – in fact, it’s probably only going to make it worse. There’s definitely a massive opportunity here for someone to make an actually good, no-nonsense search engine, but crawling and indexing the web is prohibitively expensive, so even the pricey stuff like Kagi relies on Google and others for its results. I wish Google would just focus their search efforts on making a good search engine, sprinkled with some ads in the sidebar or occasionally interspersed inside the results, clearly marked. They have the data, they have the index – why are they making search worse, instead of better? I hate this headline.