If you're starting the new year with a new Linux distro, ZDNet just ran an enthusiastic profile of Rhino Linux, calling it "beautiful" with "one of the more useful command-line package managers on the market." Rhino uses a modern take on the highly efficient and customizable Xfce desktop (dubbed "Unicorn") to help make the interface immediately familiar to anyone who logs in. You'll find a dock on the left edge of the screen that contains launchers for common applications, access to the Application Grid (where you can find all of your installed software), and a handy Search Bar (Ulauncher) that allows you to quickly search for and launch any installed app (or even the app settings) you need...

Thanks to myriad configuration options, Xfce can be a bit daunting. At the same time, the array of settings makes Xfce highly customizable, which is exactly what the Rhino developers did when they designed this desktop. For those who want a desktop that makes short work of accessing files, the Rhino developers have added a really nifty tool to the top bar. You'll find a listing of some folders you have in your Home directory (Files, Documents, Music, Pictures, Video). If you click on one of those entries, you'll see a list of the most recently accessed files within the directory. Click on the file you want to open with the default, associated application...

Rhino opts for the Pacstall package manager over the traditional apt-get. That's not to say apt-get isn't on the system — it is. But with Rhino Linux, there's a much easier path to getting the software you want installed... [W]hen you first run the installed OS, you are greeted with a window that allows you to select what package managers you want to use. You can select from Snap, Flatpak, and AppImages (or all three). Next, the developers added a handy tool (rhino-pkg) that makes installing from the command line very simple.
When the distro launched in August, 9to5Linux described it as "a unique distribution for Ubuntu fans who wanted a rolling-release system where they install once and receive updates forever." The theming looks gorgeous and it's provided by the Elementary Xfce Darker icon theme, Xubuntu's Greybird GTK theme, and Ubuntu's Yaru Dark WM theme. It also comes with some cool features, such as a dedicated and full-screen desktop switcher provided by Xfdashboard...

Klaus Zimmermann (a self-described "friendly hacker") recently posted a "State of the Distro" post, choosing his favorite distributions for things like portable installation from a USB drive (Alpine Linux) and for a desktop OS (Debian Linux or Devuan).

But when it comes to a distro for the Raspberry Pi, (at least until the 4), Zimmerman argues that FreeBSD's performance is "unlike any other Linux distribution I've ever seen, even with cpupower activated and overclocking." Nope, no match — FreeBSD's performance on the Pi is still way better, even without overclocking. You can browse a modern web, have things scroll smoothly, watch videos and even play some 3D games like Quake with it! And if you overclock it a little (2GHz) you can even make it run that gargantua MS Teams.

But what about all that lackluster driver support? WiFi drivers still on the 802.11g standard and all? Surely you can't be serious about it when Linux offers all that support out of the box, right? Wrong, actually. For starters, the drivers provided for the Pi's hardware are often half-assed proprietary blobs... I no longer think FreeBSD is really at fault if the driver support for the hardware is not helpful to begin with. Even drivers you find for Linux are shaky at best.

So yes, I will keep using FreeBSD on the Pi. As a desktop. With USB WiFi and audio adapters for those services, because the existing hardware is sort of moot even otherwise. And with those USB adapters — and FreeBSD — the Pi works really well, truly desktop-like.
I'd be curious to hear from Slashdot's readers about their own experiments with Linux (and FreeBSD) on a Raspberry Pi. Zimmerman's final winner, for the "Server" category, was Debian — though of his two servers, one is just an XMPP server set up on a Raspberry Pi. "I found that using Debian on the Pi is a real joy. Easy and simple to set up, familiar environment and all. So I'm keeping it.

"This concept is about to be overshadowed, however, by my growing like of FreeBSD lately..."


Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the article.

Dan Goodin reports via Ars Technica: Software maker Ivanti is urging users of its end-point security product to patch a critical vulnerability that makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to execute malicious code inside affected networks. The vulnerability, in a class known as a SQL injection, resides in all supported versions of the Ivanti Endpoint Manager. Also known as the Ivanti EPM, the software runs on a variety of platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome OS, and Internet of Things devices such as routers. SQL injection vulnerabilities stem from faulty code that interprets user input as database commands or, in more technical terms, from concatenating data with SQL code without quoting the data in accordance with the SQL syntax. CVE-2023-39336, as the Ivanti vulnerability is tracked, carries a severity rating of 9.6 out of a possible 10.

"If exploited, an attacker with access to the internal network can leverage an unspecified SQL injection to execute arbitrary SQL queries and retrieve output without the need for authentication," Ivanti officials wrote Friday in a post announcing the patch availability. "This can then allow the attacker control over machines running the EPM agent. When the core server is configured to use SQL express, this might lead to RCE on the core server." RCE is short for remote code execution, or the ability for off-premises attackers to run code of their choice. Currently, there's no known evidence the vulnerability is under active exploitation. Ivanti has also published a disclosure that is restricted only to registered users. A copy obtained by Ars said Ivanti learned of the vulnerability in October. [...]

Putting devices running Ivanti EDM behind a firewall is a best practice and will go a long way to mitigating the severity of CVE-2023-39336, but it would likely do nothing to prevent an attacker who has gained limited access to an employee workstation from exploiting the critical vulnerability. It's unclear if the vulnerability will come under active exploitation, but the best course of action is for all Ivanti EDM users to install the patch as soon as possible.

From a report: According to Statcounter, which should be taken with a pinch of salt of course like any sampling, the Linux share on the desktop hit nearly 4% in December 2023. Last month was a record too and a clear trend over time, as going back a couple of years, it was rarely coming close to 2% but now it's repeatedly nearing 4% so it's quite a good sign overall.

The latest from Statcounter shows for all of 2023 below:

January - 2.91%
February - 2.94%
March - 2.85%
April - 2.83%
May - 2.7%
June - 3.07%
July - 3.12%
August - 3.18%
September - 3.02%
October - 2.92%
November - 3.22%
December - 3.82%

Looking at December it shows Windows rising too, with macOS dropping down. If we actually take ChromeOS directly into the Linux numbers for December 2023 the overall number would actually be 6.24% (ChromeOS is Linux after all).

Genuine parts for the Google Pixel 8 and 8 Pro are now available on iFixit's Pixel parts store. "The Pixel 8 is the first Google phone with seven years of major OS updates, and Google previously said these parts will be in stock for seven years to match, so the phone sounds like it will be a longevity champion," reports Ars Technica's Ron Amadeo. From the report: The most common replacement will probably be the screen, which costs $160 for the Pixel 8 and $230 for the Pixel 8 Pro. The product described as a "rear case" is the entire aluminum body of the phone, with the rear glass, camera bar, camera cover glass, side buttons, and charging coil. The Pixel 8 version of this will run you $143, while the 8 Pro version is $173. The batteries are both $43.

If your camera breaks, get ready for some serious sticker shock: The Pixel 8 Pro rear camera assembly is $200 for the bundled set of three cameras. Interestingly, the Pixel 8 also has $200 worth of camera parts despite having one less camera by skipping the complicated periscope zoom lens. The Pixel 8 parts come in separate pieces: $143 for the main camera and $63 for the ultra-wide. Along with the $43 front camera, a Pixel 8 is $700 and has $243 worth of camera parts!

Other than that, there are various small adhesive and thermal strips. There's no replacement motherboard available, which is a shame since that's probably the first thing that would break from water damage. (Phone motherboards contain your IMEI number used for things like billing and theft blocklisting, and the industry doesn't have a good solution for repairing these.) Since the USB port is part of the motherboard, there's no official repair method. The Google Pixel 8 Parts store is available here.

TechCrunch reports: Apple's warnings in late October that Indian journalists and opposition figures may have been targeted by state-sponsored attacks prompted a forceful counterattack from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government. Officials publicly doubted Apple's findings and announced a probe into device security.

India has never confirmed nor denied using the Pegasus tool, but nonprofit advocacy group Amnesty International reported Thursday that it found NSO Group's invasive spyware on the iPhones of prominent journalists in India, lending more credibility to Apple's early warnings. "Our latest findings show that increasingly, journalists in India face the threat of unlawful surveillance simply for doing their jobs, alongside other tools of repression including imprisonment under draconian laws, smear campaigns, harassment, and intimidation," said Donncha Ã" Cearbhaill, head of Amnesty International's Security Lab, in the blog post.
Cloud security company Lookout has also published "an in-depth technical look" at Pegasus, calling its use "a targeted espionage attack being actively leveraged against an undetermined number of mobile users around the world." It uses sophisticated function hooking to subvert OS- and application-layer security in voice/audio calls and apps including Gmail, Facebook, WhatsApp, Facetime, Viber, WeChat, Telegram, Apple's built-in messaging and email apps, and others. It steals the victim's contact list and GPS location, as well as personal, Wi-Fi, and router passwords stored on the device...

According to news reports, NSO Group sells weaponized software that targets mobile phones to governments and has been operating since 2010, according to its LinkedIn page. The Pegasus spyware has existed for a significant amount of time, and is advertised and sold for use on high-value targets for multiple purposes, including high-level espionage on iOS, Android, and Blackberry.
Thanks to Slashdodt reader Mirnotoriety for sharing the news.

They create a dedicated desktop icon for your favorite web-based application — a simplified browser that opens to that single URL. Yet while Linux usually offers the same functionality as other operating systems, "Peppermint OS's Ice and its successor Kumo are the only free software versions of Site-Specific Browsers available on Linux," according to Linux magazine.

"Fortunately for those who want this functionality, Peppermint OS is a Debian derivative, and both can be installed on Debian and most other derivatives." Since SSBs first appeared in 2005, they have been available on both Windows and macOS. On Linux, however, the availability has come and gone. On Linux, Firefox once had an SSB mode, but it was discontinued in 2020 on the grounds that it had multiple bugs that were time-consuming to fix and there was "little to no perceived user benefit to the feature." Similarly, Chromium once had a basic SSB menu item, Create Application Shortcut, which no longer appears in recent versions. As for GNOME Web's (Epiphany's) Install Site as Web Application, while it still appears in the menu, it is no longer functional. Today, Linux users who want to try SSBs have no choices except Ice or Kumo.

Neither Ice or Kumo appears in any repository except Peppermint OS's. But because Peppermint OS installs packages from Debian 12 ("bookworm"), either can be installed to Debian or a derivative... To install successfully, at least one of Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, or Vivaldi also must be installed... Because both Ice and Kumo are written in Python, they can be run on any desktop.
The article concludes that Site-Specific Browsers might make more sense "on a network or in a business where their isolation provides another layer of security. Or perhaps the time for SSBs is past and there's a reason browsers have tried to implement them, and then discarded them."

Melbourne-based developer xssfox has championed a unique "diagonal mode" for monitors by utilizing Linux's xrandr (x resize and rotate) tool, finding a 22-degree tilt to the left to be the ideal angle for software development on her 32:9 aspect ratio monitor. As Tom's Hardware notes, Linux is the "only OS to support a diagonal monitor mode, which you can customize to any tilt of your liking." It begs the question, could 2024 be the year of the Linux diagonal desktop? From the report: Xssfox devised a consistent method to appraise various screen rotations, working through the staid old landscape and portrait modes, before deploying xrandr to test rotations like the slightly skewed 1 degree and an indecisive 45 degrees. These produced mixed results of questionable benefits, so the search for the Goldilocks solution continued. It turns out that a 22-degree tilt to the left was the sweet spot for xssfox. This rotation delivered the best working screen space on what looks like a 32:9 aspect ratio monitor from Dell. "So this here, I think, is the best monitor orientation for software development," the developer commented. "It provides the longest line lengths and no longer need to worry about that pesky 80-column limit."

If you have a monitor with the same aspect ratio, the 22-degree angle might work well for you, too. However, people with other non-conventional monitor rotation needs can use xssfox's javascript calculator to generate the xrandr command for given inputs. People who own the almost perfectly square LG DualUp 28MQ780 might be tempted to try 'diamond mode,' for example. We note that Windows users with AMD and Nvidia drivers are currently shackled to applying screen rotations using 90-degree steps. MacOS users apparently face the same restrictions.

An anonymous reader writes: If you've ever performed a fresh reinstall of Windows 11, you'll know how long it takes and how much effort you need to make to get it started. Fortunately, Microsoft is taking note. As spotted in a recent update to the Windows 11 beta branch, the company is working on a way to reinstall your operating system through Windows Update, and no files are lost in the process.

The newest update to the Windows Insider beta branch has added a new feature titled "Fix Problems using Windows Update." The feature is still a work in progress, so it doesn't work as it should right now. However, if you're on the Windows 11 Insider beta branch, you can see the button for yourself on the Recovery page, among the Windows 11 backup settings.

According to Canalys Research, Microsoft's plan to end support for Windows 10 could result in about 240 million computers being sent to landfills. "The electronic waste from these PCs could weigh an estimated 480 million kilograms, equivalent to 320,000 cars," adds Reuters. From the report: While many PCs could remain functional for years post the end of OS support, Canalys warned demand for devices without security updates could be low. Microsoft announced a plan to provide security updates for Windows 10 devices until October 2028 for an undisclosed annual price. If the pricing structure for extended Windows 10 support mirrors past trends, migrating to newer PCs could be more cost-effective, increasing the number of older PCs heading to scrap, Canalys said.

The next version of Android could give you an estimate of your battery's remaining capacity, which naturally degrades over time. "Android 14 laid the initial groundwork for the OS to track battery health information, but Android 15 could actually bring that information in front of users," reports Android Authority. It could also tell you whether your device's battery has been replaced. From the report: The manufacture date and cycle count aren't the only battery-related statistics that Android 14 exposes to apps through new APIs, though. Other battery health details like the date of first use, charging policy, charging status, and state of health are also available. The state of health is particularly interesting because it's an estimate of the battery's current full charge capacity, expressed as a percentage relative to the battery's rated capacity. For example, if your Pixel 8 battery's state of health is measured at 90%, that means its remaining full charge capacity is estimated to be about 4118mAh (compared to the rated 4575mAh).

The Settings app currently doesn't show the battery state of health, but that's set to change in the future, as the latest version of the Settings Services app (an extension to the Settings app on Pixel and other devices) found within Android 14 QPR2 Beta 2 has a new "battery health" page that is set to show the state of health. [...] Strings within the APK suggest this page will show you the "estimated percentage of charge the battery can currently hold compared to when it was new" (i.e. the state of health) before and after "recalibration" of the battery. We don't have the exact details on what "recalibration" entails, but given that one string suggests the "process may take a few weeks," we're guessing that it's simply the system collecting data over a longer period to provide a more accurate estimate of the battery capacity. Meanwhile, the "initial battery health values" are "based on lab results" and hence "may vary from your actual battery state."

[...] We also learned that the Settings app itself will surface "tips" to the user when either the battery capacity is degraded or can't be detected, so the user doesn't have to manually check the "battery health" page. Lastly, we learned that Google is working on exposing more battery-related information to the OS, such as the part status and the serial number. [...] At the very least, we do know that Android will support reading the battery's part status and serial number, provided the battery exposes that information to the OS, and the vendor implements the new version of the Android health HAL. The health HAL is the software responsible for bridging the gap between the OS APIs that read battery/charging information (i.e. everything we talked about before) with the software that controls the battery/charging chips. Version 2.0 of the health HAL needs to be implemented to support all the new Android 14 battery health APIs like state of health, which is why so few devices support that right now.

Microsoft has announced that it is deprecating Windows Mixed Reality, with plans to remove the feature in an upcoming release of the OS. From a report: Windows Mixed Reality was Microsoft's attempt at building out a VR ecosystem for Windows PCs, but unfortunately this effort has been mostly inactive for a number of years. While there have been several VR headsets built for Windows Mixed Reality, most of them launched between 2017 and 2021. It's been a long while since OEMs released new VR headsets for Windows Mixed Reality, likely because SteamVR is a much more successful platform with a much wider selection of games. Unfortunately, Microsoft says the deprecation of Windows Mixed Reality also includes support for using a Windows Mixed Reality headset with SteamVR, along with the dedicated Mixed Reality Portal app which acted as a launch environment for VR apps and games built for Windows Mixed Reality.

Forbes recently published this article by author/speaker Nina Xiang, who reports that Huawei is pushing forward with "an amibitious plan to dethrone Android." Hundreds of technical experts from many of China's biggest state-owned and private companies, including the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China Telecom, Meituan, and Baidu, all gathered in Beijing last month. The purpose behind the meeting was for their staff to receive training so they could be certified as developers on Huawei's Harmony Operation System (OS).

While most observers were looking the other way, Huawei has been quietly building an independent Chinese operating system that isn't subject to U.S. sanctions. In the four years after the telecom giant was banned from using Google apps, the Shenzhen-based company has been making significant strides toward achieving its long-term goal: To dethrone Android and make its HarmonyOS the default operating system in China.

Looking at the data for smartphone sales in China shows that HarmonyOS had the third-largest share with 10% in the second quarter of 2023, thanks to a strong resurgence in sales of Huawei smartphones. Although it's still well below Android's dominant 72%, it's not far from iOS's 17%... Huawei already says more than 700 million devices (including phones, smart devices, computers, and others) were equipped with HarmonyOS as of August this year, with over 2.2 million developers actively building within the ecosystem...

A key moment will come next year, when Huawei says HarmonyOS will no longer be compatible with Android apps.

During a Wells Fargo summit last month, Microsoft Gaming CFO Tim Stuart suggested Xbox is seeking to bring Xbox Game Pass to competing platforms, such as PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. One of the scenarios for Xbox Game Pass expansion may include offering access in exchange for viewing advertisements. Windows Central reports: "For models like Africa, or India, Southeast Asia, maybe places that aren't console-first, you can say, 'hey, do you want to watch 30 seconds of an ad and then get two hours of game streaming?'," Stuart continued. "Africa is, you know, 50% of the population is 23 years old or younger with a growing disposable income base, all with cell phones and mobile devices, not a lot of high-end disposable income, generally-speaking. So we can go in with our own business models and say -- there's millions of gamers we would never have been able to address, and now we can go in with our business models."

Microsoft has previously surveyed Xbox users on the Xbox Insider Program and via other avenues about the possibility of offering Xbox Game Pass time in exchange for viewing advertisements. And recently, security researcher Title_OS shared some code snippets from the Xbox OS that described systems that would provide access to Xbox Game Pass via on an "Earned Time" basis, complete in 15-minute blocks.

Linux magazine interviewed an AlmaLinux official about what happened after their distro pivoted to binary compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux rather than being a downstream build: Linux Magazine: What prompted AlmaLinux to choose ABI over 1:1 compatibility with RHEL?

benny Vasquez, chair of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation: The short answer is our users. Overwhelmingly, our users made it clear that they chose AlmaLinux for its ease of use, the security and stability that it provides, and the backing of a diverse group of sponsors. All of that together meant that we didn't need to lock ourselves into copying RHEL, and we could continue to provide what our users needed.

Moreover, we needed to consider what our sponsors would be able to help us provide, and how we could best serve the downstream projects that now rely on AlmaLinux. The rippling effects of any decision that we make are beyond measure at this point, so we consider all aspects of our impact and then move forward with confidence and intention.

LM: How did AlmaLinux's mission of improving the Linux ecosystem for everyone influence this decision?

bV: We strongly believe that the soul of open source means working together, providing value where there is a gap, and helping each other solve problems. If we participate in an emotional reaction to a business's change, we will then be distracted and potentially hurt users and the Enterprise Linux ecosystem overall. By remaining focused on what is best (though not easiest), and adapting to the ecosystem as it is today, we will provide a better and more stable operating system.

LM: What opportunities does the ABI route offer over 1:1 compatibility?

bV: By liberating ourselves from the 1:1 promise, we have been able to do a few small things that have proven to be a good testing ground for what will come in the future. Specifically, we shipped a couple of smallish, but extremely important, security patches ahead of Red Hat, offering quicker security to the users of AlmaLinux... This also opens the door for other features and improvements that we could add back in or change, as our users need. We have already seen greater community involvement, especially around these ideas.

LM: Does the ABI route pose any extra challenges?

bV: The obvious one is that building from CentOS Stream sources takes more effort, but I think the more important challenge (and the one that will only be solved with consistency over time) is the one of proving that we will be able to deliver on the promise... We will continue on our goal of becoming the home for all users that need Enterprise Linux for free, but in the next year I expect that we will see an expansion in the number of kernels we support and see some new and exciting SIGs spun up around other features or use cases, as the community continues to standardize on how to achieve their goals collectively.
Linux magazine notes that in August AlmaLinux added two new repositories, Testing and Synergy. "Testing, currently available for AlmaLinux 8 and 9, offers security updates before they are approved and implemented upstream. Synergy contains packages requested by community members that currently aren't available in RHEL or Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL, a set of extra software packages maintained by the Fedora SIG that are not available in RHEL or CentOS Stream)."

The article also points out that "On the upside, AlmaLinux can now include comments in their patches for greater transparency. Users will see where the patch comes from, which was not an option before."

Vasquez tells the magazine, "I think folks will be seriously happy about what they find as we release the new versions, namely, the consistency, stability, and security that they've come to expect from us."

Microsoft's Notepad app on Windows 11 is getting a character count at the bottom of the window. "When text is selected, the status bar shows the character count for both the selected text and the entire document," explains Microsoft's Windows Insider team in a blog post. "If no text is selected, the character count for the entire document is displayed, ensuring you always have a clear view of your document's length." The Verge reports: This is the latest addition in a line of changes to Notepad this year, with the app recently getting a new autosave option that lets you close it without seeing the pop-up save prompt every time. Microsoft has also added tabs to Notepad, a dark mode, and even a virtual fidget spinner.

Alongside the Notepad changes in this latest Windows 11 test build, the widgets section of the OS is also getting some improvements. You'll soon be able to just show widgets and hide the feed of news and articles that appear inside the widgets screen.

"Researchers have identified a large number of bugs to do with the processing of images at boot time," writes longtime Slashdot reader jd. "This allows malicious code to be installed undetectably (since the image doesn't have to pass any validation checks) by appending it to the image. None of the current secure boot mechanisms are capable of blocking the attack." Ars Technica reports: LogoFAIL is a constellation of two dozen newly discovered vulnerabilities that have lurked for years, if not decades, in Unified Extensible Firmware Interfaces responsible for booting modern devices that run Windows or Linux. The vulnerabilities are the product of almost a year's worth of work by Binarly, a firm that helps customers identify and secure vulnerable firmware. The vulnerabilities are the subject of a coordinated mass disclosure released Wednesday. The participating companies comprise nearly the entirety of the x64 and ARM CPU ecosystem, starting with UEFI suppliers AMI, Insyde, and Phoenix (sometimes still called IBVs or independent BIOS vendors); device manufacturers such as Lenovo, Dell, and HP; and the makers of the CPUs that go inside the devices, usually Intel, AMD or designers of ARM CPUs. The researchers unveiled the attack on Wednesday at the Black Hat Security Conference in London.

As its name suggests, LogoFAIL involves logos, specifically those of the hardware seller that are displayed on the device screen early in the boot process, while the UEFI is still running. Image parsers in UEFIs from all three major IBVs are riddled with roughly a dozen critical vulnerabilities that have gone unnoticed until now. By replacing the legitimate logo images with identical-looking ones that have been specially crafted to exploit these bugs, LogoFAIL makes it possible to execute malicious code at the most sensitive stage of the boot process, which is known as DXE, short for Driver Execution Environment. "Once arbitrary code execution is achieved during the DXE phase, it's game over for platform security," researchers from Binarly, the security firm that discovered the vulnerabilities, wrote in a whitepaper. "From this stage, we have full control over the memory and the disk of the target device, thus including the operating system that will be started." From there, LogoFAIL can deliver a second-stage payload that drops an executable onto the hard drive before the main OS has even started. The following video demonstrates a proof-of-concept exploit created by the researchers. The infected device -- a Gen 2 Lenovo ThinkCentre M70s running an 11th-Gen Intel Core with a UEFI released in June -- runs standard firmware defenses, including Secure Boot and Intel Boot Guard. LogoFAIL vulnerabilities are tracked under the following designations: CVE-2023-5058, CVE-2023-39538, CVE-2023-39539, and CVE-2023-40238. However, this list is currently incomplete.

"A non-exhaustive list of companies releasing advisories includes AMI (PDF), Insyde, Phoenix, and Lenovo," reports Ars. "People who want to know if a specific device is vulnerable should check with the manufacturer."

"The best way to prevent LogoFAIL attacks is to install the UEFI security updates that are being released as part of Wednesday's coordinated disclosure process. Those patches will be distributed by the manufacturer of the device or the motherboard running inside the device. It's also a good idea, when possible, to configure UEFIs to use multiple layers of defenses. Besides Secure Boot, this includes both Intel Boot Guard and, when available, Intel BIOS Guard. There are similar additional defenses available for devices running AMD or ARM CPUs."

Liam Proven reports via The Register: One of the best FOSS text editors for Windows, Notepad++, is turning 20, while cross platform Geany just hit version 2.0 as it turns 18 years old. Notepad++'s version 8.6 is the twentieth anniversary release of one of the go-to FOSS text editors for Windows. [...] If you use an Arm-powered Windows machine, such as the ThinkPad X13S, there is now a native Arm64 version. It still supports x86-32 as well, and there are portable versions which work without being installed locally -- handy if you don't have admin rights. There is even a usefully recent version for Windows XP if you are still using that geriatric OS. This release adds multi-select, allowing you to manipulate multiple instances of the same text at once, which looks confusing but very powerful.

It is a staple on all of the Reg FOSS desk's Windows partitions, thanks to its inclusion in the essential Windows post-install setup tool Ninite. Ninite will install -- and update -- a whole swath of FOSS and freeware tools for Windows, making setup of a new machine doable in just a couple of clicks. And if you keep the Ninite installer file around, you can re-run it later and it will update everything it installed first time around. Ninite does offer other programmers' editors, such as Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio Code -- but they are behemoths by comparison. VSCode is implemented as an Electron app, meaning that it's huge, embeds an entire copy of Chromium, and scoffs RAM like it's going out of fashion. Notepad++ is a native Win32 app, making it tiny and fast: the download is less than 5MB, one twentieth the size of VSCode.

Sluggish, bloated editors are not just a problem on Windows. Gargantuan Electron apps are distressingly prevalent on Linux and macOS as well. This vulture is guilty of using some, and even recommending them -- because some of them can do things that nothing else can. That's not true in the case of plain text editors, though. You don't have to put up with apps that take a good fraction of a gigabyte for this. Geany is a good example. It straddles the line between a text editor and an IDE: it can manage multi-project files, automatically call out to compilers and suchlike, and parse their output to highlight errors. We last mentioned it nearly a decade ago but the project recently reached voting age -- at least for humans -- and after this milestone in maturity its developers called the latest release version 2.0. It has better support for dark mode, a new tree view in its sidebar, adds a bunch of new supported file types, and can detect if the user changes the type of a file and re-do its syntax highlighting to match.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Valve Software's Steam gaming marketplace and app will drop support for macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and 10.14 (Mojave), according to a support page post. The change will go into effect on February 15, 2024. What will happen exactly? Valve writes: "After that date, existing Steam Client installations on these operating systems will no longer receive updates of any kind including security updates. Steam Support will be unable to offer users technical support for issues related to the old operating systems, and Steam will be unable to guarantee continued functionality of Steam on the unsupported operating system versions."

"The Steam store will stop considering games that offer only 32-bit macOS binaries to be Mac compatible at the end of 2023," Valve writes. The post also notes that fewer than two percent of current Mac users on Steam are running macOS 10.14 or earlier, so this only affects the small number who are holding on to those older versions that supported 32-bit apps. To be clear, lack of support for macOS 10.14 doesn't necessarily mean Steam won't run at all on machines running that OS. It just means Valve won't guarantee it'll work, and won't lift a finger to help if something breaks in the passage of time. It also means users who continue to use the older software could become vulnerable to security risks, disincentivizing continued use.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hackaday: The BBC has a long history of teaching the world about computers. The broadcaster's name was proudly displayed on the BBC Micro, and BBC Basic was the programming language developed especially for that computer. Now, BBC Basic is back and running on a whole mess of modern platforms. BBC Basic for SDL 2.0 will run on Windows, MacOS, x86 Linux, and even Raspberry Pi OS, Android, and iOS. Desktop versions of the programming environment feature a BASIC editor that has syntax coloring for ease of use, along with luxury features like search and replace that weren't always available at the dawn of the microcomputer era. Meanwhile, the smartphone versions feature a simplified interface designed to work better in a touchscreen environment.

It's weird to see, but BBC Basic can actually do some interesting stuff given the power of modern hardware. It can address up to 256 MB of memory, and work with far more advanced graphical assets than would ever have been possible on the original BBC Micro. If you honed your programming skills on that old metal, you might be impressed with what they can achieve with BBC Basic in a new, more powerful context.