Qualcomm quietly demos Baldur’s Gate 3 and Control on Snapdragon X Elite laptops
If you read my scoop last week, I bet you’ve been wondering — how well could a Snapdragon chip actually run Windows games? At the 2024 Game Developers Conference, the company claimed Arm could run those titles at close to x86/64 speed, but how fast is fast? With medium-weight games like Control and Baldur’s Gate 3, it looks like the target might be: 30 frames per second at … ⌘ Read more

Why x86 doesn’t need to die
Hackaday recently published an article titled “Why x86 Needs to Die” – the latest addition in a long-running RISC vs CISC debate. Rather than x86 needing to die, I believe the RISC vs CISC debate needs to die. It should’ve died a long time ago. And by long, I mean really long. About a decade ago, a college professor asked if I knew about the RISC vs CISC debate. I did not. When I asked further, he said RISC aimed for simpler instructions in the hope that simpler hardware imple … ⌘ Read more

FuryGpu: a hardware GPU implemented on an FPGA
FuryGpu is a real hardware GPU implemented on a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ FPGA, built on a custom PCB and connected to the host computer using PCIe. Supporting hardware features equivalent to a high-end graphics card of the mid 1990s and a full modern Windows software driver stack, it can render real games of that era at beyond real-time frame rates. ↫ FuryGpu A really cool project, undertaking by a single person – who also wrote the Windows … ⌘ Read more

Infinite Mac: turning to the dark side
About a year ago I came across the Previous emulator – it appeared to be a faithful simulation of the NeXT hardware and thus capable of running NeXTStep. While including it in Infinite Mac would be scope-creep, NeXT’s legacy is in many ways more relevant to today’s macOS than classic Mac OS. It also helped that it’s under active development by its original creator (see the epic thread in the NeXT Computers forums), and thus a modern, living codebase². Pre … ⌘ Read more

Happy birthday APFS, 7 years old today
Seven years ago, on 27 March 2017, Apple introduced one of the most fundamental changes in its operating systems since Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah was released 16 years earlier. On that day, those who updated iOS to version 10.3 had their iPhone’s storage silently converted to the first release of Apple File System, APFS. Six months later, with the release of macOS 10.13 High Sierra on 25 September, Mac users followed suit. ↫ Howard Oakley The migration from HF … ⌘ Read more

Plasma 5: the early years
With KDE’s 6th Mega Release finally out the door, let’s reflect on the outgoing Plasma 5 that has served us well over the years. Can you believe it has been almost ten years since Plasma 5.0 was released? Join me on a trip down memory lane and let me tell you how it all began. This coincidentally continues pretty much where my previous retrospective blog post concluded. ↫ Kai Uwe It took them a few years after the release of Plasma 5.0, but eventually they won me over, and I’m now … ⌘ Read more

Google launches Arm-optimized Chrome for Windows, teases Snapdragon X Elite boost
Following testing in Canary earlier this year, Google today announced that the Arm/Snapdragon version of Chrome for Windows is now rolling out to stable.  Google says this version of Chrome is “fully optimized for your PC’s hardware and operating system to make browsing the web faster and smoother.” People that have been testing it report significant performance improvem … ⌘ Read more

Canonical expands Long Term Support to 12 years starting with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Today, Canonical announced the general availability of Legacy Support, an Ubuntu Pro add-on that expands security and support coverage for Ubuntu LTS releases to 12 years. The add-on will be available for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS onwards.  Long term supported Ubuntu releases get five years of standard security maintenance on the main Ubuntu repository. Ubuntu Pro expands that commitm … ⌘ Read more

Sega Saturn architecture: a practical analysis by Rodrigo Copetti
Welcome to the 3D era! Well… sorta. Sega enjoyed quite a success with the Mega Drive so there’s no reason to force developers to write 3D games right now. Just in case developers want the extra dimension, Sega adapted some bits of the hardware to enable polygon drawing as well. Hopefully, the result didn’t get out of hand! ↫ Rodrigo Copetti These in-depth analyses by Copetti are always a treat, and the … ⌘ Read more

Friends don’t let friends export to CSV
I worked for a few years in the intersection between data science and software engineering. On the whole, it was a really enjoyable time and I’d like to have the chance to do so again at some point. One of the least enjoyable experiences from that time was to deal with big CSV exports. Unfortunately, this file format is still very common in the data science space. It is easy to understand why — it seems to be ubiquitous, present everywhere, it’s human-r … ⌘ Read more

Run Windows 95 to XP, Mac OS 8.6 to 10.4 in your browser
Complete desktops contain all operating system components as well as Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Where possible, I have tried to include built in file transfer programs (Web Publishing Wizard, Web Folders), useful system tools (System File Checker, System Restore) and certain wizards (Network Setup Wizard, Internet Connection Wizard). As a result, some of the desktops are quite large and can take some time to … ⌘ Read more

Google’s first Tensor processing unit: architecture
In Google’s First Tensor Processing Unit – Origins, we saw why and how Google developed the first Tensor Processing Unit (or TPU v1) in just 15 months, starting in late 2013. Today’s post will look in more detail at the architecture that emerged from that work and at its performance. ↫ The Chip Letter People forget that Google is probably one of the largest hardware manufacturers out of the major technology companies. Sadly, we ra … ⌘ Read more

SysV init 3.09 released
Most of the Linux world has moved to systemd by now, but there are still quite a few popular other init systems, too. One of those is the venerable SysV init, which saw a brand new release yesterday. The biggest improvement also seems like it’ll enable a match made in heaven: SysVinit, but with musl. On Linux distributions which use the musl C library (instead of glibc) we can now build properly. Specifically, the hddown helper program now builds on musl C systems. ↫ SysVinit 3.09 re … ⌘ Read more

C64 OS gets hidden files, here’s how it works
Version 1.06 is a more modest release than 1.05 or 1.04. But I think that’s okay. v1.06 includes one new Application, three new Utilities and new features and improvements to several existing Apps and Utilities, and even some new low-level features in the KERNAL and libraries. This latest release makes use of a combination of all of the above to provide a handy new feature for users and a potentially powerful and useful feature for developers … ⌘ Read more

“Temporary” disk formatting UI from 1994 still lives on in Windows 11
Windows 11 has done a lot to update and modernize long-neglected parts of Windows’ user interface, including many Settings menus and venerable apps like Notepad and Paint. But if you dig deep enough, you’ll still find parts of the user interface that look and work like they did in the mid-’90s, either for compatibility reasons or because no one ever thought to go back and update them. Former Mic … ⌘ Read more

EU opens non-compliance investigations against Alphabet, Apple and Meta under the Digital Markets Act
It turns out Apple, Facebook, and Google were not as clever with their malicious compliance with the European Union’s DMA, as the European Commission has opened investigations into their compliance plans. Especially Apple, who has been most public about its malicious compliance, seems to be the target. Today, the Commission has ope … ⌘ Read more

Floorp Firefox fork makes it modifications closed source due to forks
Recently, a few people suggested I give the browser Floorp a try, a Firefox fork with some additional UI changes and additions. Since it was based on Firefox ESR, however, I saw no point in even trying it, because I prefer to be on the latest Firefox release. It seems I accidentally made the right choice, since yesterday the developers behind Floorp decided to take their modifications closed s … ⌘ Read more

Sources: iOS 18 lets users customize layout of home screen app icons
While app icons will likely remain locked to an invisible grid system on the Home Screen, to ensure there is some uniformity, our sources say that users will be able to arrange icons more freely on iOS 18. For example, we expect that the update will introduce the ability to create blank spaces, rows, and columns between app icons. ↫ Joe Rossignol at MacRumors It’s 2024 and iOS’ Springboard is slo … ⌘ Read more

Hyprland crash course
For the past week I have been configuring hyprland and using it as my daily driver. Coming from major Desktop Environments like KDE or Gnome, this was definitely quite challanging, specially when implementing features that we take it for granted on these DEs, like screen sharing or screenshot annotating. In this post I will be going through all the tools and scripts I have been creating to configure this amazing Window Manager to my liking. ↫ xd1.dev Like I mentioned in my MNT Reform rev … ⌘ Read more

The Mind Khadas: a modular PC
I saw this on a Linus Tech Tips video today, and it’s pretty neat: the Khadas Mind is a tiny computer powered by an Intel Core i5-1340P or Core i7-1360P, but it has a souped-up PCIe connector at the bottom that allows you to hook it up to all kinds of other devices, like a graphics card, a dock, and so on. It looks slick and quite user-friendly, and according to the LTT video, the company intends to release the specs for the connector so that third parties can hook into it … ⌘ Read more

Digital wallets and the “only Apple Pay does this” mythology
I hope what you take away from this post is that while Apple Pay is a great way to pay for things and that Apple did a great job mainstreaming digital wallets like this, what they do is not unique in the industry. DPANs are great for making it harder to track one person’s purchases across multiple merchants and they make customers less at risk in the event of a data breach of payment card info. ↫ Matt Birchler Th … ⌘ Read more

Some personal news
I’ve got two bits of related news that will affect the future of OSNews. The first bit of news kind of led to the second bit of news. You don’t have to care much about former, but the latter will be important for where OSNews will be going from here on out. First, after 14 years, I’ve effectively quit my job as a translator – I am self-employed so there’s no dramatic clearing of my desk of being led out by security, which is probably a little bit of a letdown to some of you. The translation in … ⌘ Read more

Doctorow on the antitrust case against Apple
The foundational tenet of “the Cult of Mac” is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur. Call it “Apple exceptionalism” – the idea that Apple, alone among the Big Tech firms, is virtuous, and therefore its conduct should be interpreted through that lens of virtue. The wellspring of this virtue is conveniently nebulous, which a … ⌘ Read more

‘Even stronger’ than imagined: DOJ’s sweeping Apple lawsuit draws expert praise
The Department of Justice’s antitrust division has come into its own, having filed its third tech monopoly lawsuit in four years. The accumulated experience shows up in the complaint, according to antitrust experts who spoke with The Verge about the complaint filed Thursday accusing Apple of violating antitrust law. The DOJ describes a sweeping arc of behaviors by Apple, arguin … ⌘ Read more

Feds ordered Google to unmask certain YouTube users. Critics say it’s ‘terrifying.’
Federal investigators have ordered Google to provide information on all viewers of select YouTube videos, according to multiple court orders obtained by Forbes. Privacy experts from multiple civil rights groups told Forbes they think the orders are unconstitutional because they threaten to turn innocent YouTube viewers into criminal suspects. ↫ Thomas Brewster at Forbes … ⌘ Read more

Atari Falcon030: impressive, but too late to the party
So looking back, it is obvious that neither Atari or Commodore would really be able to succeed in the long-term, although perhaps one of them could have become the 3rd “also-ran”. For a while, Atari really thought they could be that third choice and some of their late-model computers have some impressive innovations. With that preamble over with, let’s talk about the last Atari computer: the Falcon030. ↫ Paul Lefebvre In my … ⌘ Read more

Picotron: a fantasy workstation for making pixelart games, animations, music, demos and other curiosities
Picotron is a Fantasy Workstation for making pixelart games, animations, music, demos and other curiosities. It has a toy operating system designed to be a cosy creative space, but runs on top of Windows, MacOS or Linux. Picotron apps can be made with built-in tools, and shared with other users in a special 256k png cartridge … ⌘ Read more

Android 15 Developer Preview 2 rolling out to Pixel
Android 15 adds “UI elements to ensure a consistent user experience across the satellite connectivity landscape.” A system-level “Auto-connected to satellite” notification conveys how “You can send and receive messages without a mobile or Wi-Fi network” with a shortcut to “Open Messages” or get more information. Meanwhile, note the status bar icon at the right. Speaking of Google Messages, “Android 15 provides support for SMS/ M … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla drops Onerep after CEO admits to running people-search networks
The nonprofit organization that supports the Firefox web browser said today it is winding down its new partnership with Onerep, an identity protection service recently bundled with Firefox that offers to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites. The move comes just days after a report by KrebsOnSecurity forced Onerep’s CEO to admit that he has founded dozens of people-search netwo … ⌘ Read more

Haiku in February: tons of small fixes and improvements
Haiku published its latest monthly activity report, and this one is a veritable grab bag of a whole bunch of small fixes, improvements, and changes – there’s really no tent pole features or major improvements this month. Going through the list, the items that jump out at me are updated ping and traceroute applications and work on improving FFmpeg, but there’s so much more in there, so be sure to read the whole thing. At t … ⌘ Read more

Switch emulator Suyu hit by GitLab DMCA, project lives on through self-hosting
Switch emulator Suyu—a fork of the Nintendo-targeted and now-defunct emulation project Yuzu—has been taken down from GitLab following a DMCA request Thursday. But the emulation project’s open source files remain available on a self-hosted git repo on the Suyu website, and recent compiled binaries remain available on an extant GitLab repo. While the DMCA takedown request has no … ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm says most Windows games should ‘just work’ on its unannounced Arm laptops
In a 2024 Game Developers Conference session titled “Windows on Snapdragon, a Platform Ready for your PC Games,” Qualcomm engineer Issam Khalil drove home that the unannounced laptops will use emulation to run x86/64 games at close to full speed. Those laptops may be coming fast. Qualcomm has confirmed it will launch Snapdragon X Elite systems this summer, and unannounc … ⌘ Read more

United States files antitrust lawsuit against Apple
For many years, Apple has built a dominant iPhone platform and ecosystem that has driven the company’s astronomical valuation. At the same time, it has long understood that disruptive technologies and innovative apps, products, and services threatened that dominance by making users less reliant on the iPhone or making it easier to switch to a non-Apple smartphone. Rather than respond to competitive threats by offering lower smar … ⌘ Read more

Chuwi MiniBook X (2023): a lot of laptop for very little money
What if the kind of laptop you’re looking for just isn’t available from any of the major or even minor manufacturers? You know exactly what you want out of a laptop, and while quite a few fulfill many of your requirements, the requirement that matters most just isn’t being made. It’s not a case of “too expensive” or “too cheap” – simply nobody will sell it to you. From HP, Dell, Apple, down to smaller and loca … ⌘ Read more

GNOME 46 released
GNOME 46 has been released, and its packs a ton of new features and improvements. One of the headline improvements is the new global search feature. Files comes with a new global search feature in GNOME 46. The feature is simple: activate it by clicking the new search button, or by using the Ctrl+Shift+F shortcut, then enter your query to search all your configured search locations. Global search is a great way to jump directly into search, without having to think about where the items you want … ⌘ Read more

Java 22 released
Java 22 ships the final versions of the Foreign Function and Memory API as well as the Unnamed Variables and Patterns API. Plus Java 22 brings region pinning for the G1 garbage collector, statements before super(…) are in preview phase, a class-file API preview, support to launch multi-file source code programs, the latest work on the Java Vector API, Stream gatherers in preview, the second preview for structured concurrency programming, and various other additions. ↫ Michael Larabel at Phoronix Y … ⌘ Read more

Trusting content on the KDE Store
A global theme on the KDE third party store had an issue where it executed a script that removed user’s data. It wasn’t intended as malicious, but a mistake in some shell parsing. It was promptly identified and removed, but not before doing some damage to that user. This has started a lot of discourse around the concept of the store, security and upstream KDE. With the main question how can a theme have access to do this? ↫ David Edmundson That ‘some damage’ was p … ⌘ Read more

OSNews sponsorships
Did you know we offer sponsorships at OSNews? A weekly sponsorship puts your display ad on our site for a week. We will make an introductory post at the start of the week, and a thank you post at the end of the week, which will both make it to our RSS feed and social accounts. OSNews gets about 450,000 visits per month with more than 32,000 registered users, spread out over North America and Europe. In addition, for any sponsorship you buy, you can opt to give a free weekly sponsorship to an … ⌘ Read more

How to write a QML effect for KWin
In order solve that problem, we started looking for some options and the most obvious one was QtQuick. It’s a quite powerful framework and it’s already used extensively in Plasma. So, in Plasma 5.24, we introduced basic support for implementing kwin effects written in QML and even added a new overview effect. Unfortunately, if you wanted to implement a QtQuick-based effect yourself, you would still have to write a bit of C++ glue yourself. This is not great beca … ⌘ Read more

There is no EU cookie banner law
You know those modal screens that interrupt your groove when you are surfing? There are no laws forcing websites to use them. They use them because they choose to. ↫ Bite code! Cookie banners are not only not required, they’re not even needed, and most implementations you encounter today are illegal anyway. You can use session cookies and anonymous stats cookies without needing any user approval. Companies like to use these cookie banners because they want to make y … ⌘ Read more

TrueNAS CORE 13 is the end of the FreeBSD version
Bad news from BSD land – the oldest vendor of BSD systems is changing direction away from FreeBSD and toward Linux. NAS vendor iXsystems has been busy this year, but apart from some statements in online user communities, it hasn’t been talking about the big news. Back in 2022, we covered TrueNAS CORE 13, the new release of its FreeBSD-based turnkey OS for NAS servers, and in that article we mentioned its new product, the Debian-base … ⌘ Read more

Hackintosh is (almost) dead
It’s true that latest macOS 14 (Sonoma) still supports the latest generations of Intel Macs and it’s very likely that at least one or two major versions will still be compatible. But there’s one particular development that is de-facto killing off the Hackintosh scene. In Sonoma, Apple has completely removed all traces of driver support for their oldest WiFi/Bt cards, namely various Broadcom cards that they last used in 2012/13 iMac / MacBook models. Those Mac models are not sup … ⌘ Read more

Google adds “real-time, privacy-preserving URL protection” to Chrome
For more than 15 years, Google Safe Browsing has been protecting users from phishing, malware, unwanted software and more, by identifying and warning users about potentially abusive sites on more than 5 billion devices around the world. As attackers grow more sophisticated, we’ve seen the need for protections that can adapt as quickly as the threats they defend against. That’s why we’re excited to … ⌘ Read more

Fuzzing Ladybird with tools from Google Project Zero
While Ladybird does an okay job with well-formed web content, I thought it would be useful to throw some security research tools at it and see what kind of issues it might reveal. So today we’ll be using “Domato”, a DOM fuzzer from Google Project Zero, to stress test Ladybird and fix some issues found along the way. The way this works is that Domato generates randomized web pages with lots of mostly-valid but strange HTML, CSS … ⌘ Read more

An actual look at Microsoft OS/2 2.0
This release marks the last time that Microsoft would release an OS/2 beta to developers, instead with the runaway success of Windows 3.0, Microsoft would remove resources from the constrained OS/2, and refocus both on Windows 3.1, and Windows NT. Thanks to one of my Patrons – Brian Ledbetter, the much-sought Microsoft OS/2 2.0 Pre-Release 2 is now available! So obviously the first thing to do was to re-create the original magical screenshot. ↫ neozeed at Vi … ⌘ Read more

Loongson 3A6000: a star among Chinese CPUs
Computing power has emerged as a vital resource for economies around the world. China is no exception, and the country has invested heavily into domestic CPU capabilities. Loongson is at the forefront of that effort. We previously covered the company’s 3A5000 CPU, a quad core processor that delivered reasonable performance per clock, but clocked too low to be competitive. Now, we’re going to look at Loongson’s newer 3A6000 CPU. The 3A6000 is also … ⌘ Read more

Secure by design: Google’s perspective on memory safety
Google’s Project Zero reports that memory safety vulnerabilities—security defects caused by subtle coding errors related to how a program accesses memory—have been “the standard for attacking software for the last few decades and it’s still how attackers are having success”. Their analysis shows two thirds of 0-day exploits detected in the wild used memory corruption vulnerabilities. Despite substantial investments to impr … ⌘ Read more

Nanos: a kernel designed to run one application in a virtualized environment
Nanos is a new kernel designed to run one and only one application in a virtualized environment. It has several constraints on it compared to a general purpose operating system such as Windows or Linux – namely it’s a single process system with no support for running multiple programs nor does it have the concept of users or remote administration via ssh. ↫ Nanos GitHub page The p … ⌘ Read more

MNT Reform review: brutalist hardware, familiar software
There’s a channel on YouTube called The Proper People. It’s two guys who travel all over the United States (and in a few cases, elsewhere too) exploring abandoned buildings, and recording both the exteriors and interiors for posterity, since many of these buildings suffer from massive decay and are often slated for demolition. These buildings have histories and stories that otherwise would be lost to time. They are incre … ⌘ Read more

Intel continues prepping the Linux kernel for X86S
Nearly one year ago Intel published the X86S specification (formerly stylized as “X86-S”) for simplifying the Intel architecture by removing support for 16-bit and 32-bit operating systems. X86S is a big step forward with dropping legacy mode, 5-level paging improvements, and other modernization improvements for x86_64. With the Linux 6.9 kernel more x86S bits are in place for this ongoing effort. ↫ Michael Larabel I doubt we’ll … ⌘ Read more