The Wall Street Journal reports, citing evidence in the ongoing trial, a few of the tactics that Google has used to keep its default position on some of the world’s most popular devices. That starts with Apple.

Google has been the default search provider on Apple devices for 20 years now, but in 2007 Apple apparently approached Google to change its OS to show users a choice of several different search providers – Android does something similar today in the EU. Google, in response, said that it would stop giving Apple a share of revenue if Google was no longer the default option, something that had been in place for two years. Apple apparently dropped the issue at that point.

Apple’s Eddy Cue said during the trial that Apple’s contract with Google is “substantially the same” today.

In 2013, Apple debuted a feature known as “Suggestions,” the WSJ says, which could offer alternative links for certain searches in the Safari browser. Google, in response, said that Apple couldn’t go any further with the feature under the contract.

Meanwhile, on the Samsung side, Google took issue with the company’s decision to make it easier for users to switch the default search engine of the Samsung Internet browser. Google apparently told Samsung that it had violated its agreement and, in turn, Samsung rolled back the changes.

Another interesting tidbit on the Android side came from economics professor Antonio Rangel, who said that most of Google’s search traffic from Android phones comes from the search widget that is mandated on the homescreen, to which Google’s lawyer cautioned Rangel not to reveal any proprietary data.

Google also argued in the trial that contracts such as those mentioned above leave room for consumer choice and that partners choose Google Search because it is the best business decision. Eddy Cue said that Apple picked Google because it is the superior product. Meanwhile, DuckDuckGo’s CEO argued in the trial that Google’s practice effectively blocked the company’s ability to gain market share, which seems like it would be the case given Google’s aggressive, but ultimately business-forward tactics.

Google’s antitrust trial with the DOJ is ongoing.

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Microsoft began rolling out a huge Windows 11 update this week, and a glance is all you need to tell it’s chock-full of AI. Not only has Microsoft used the refresh to bring Copilot, its AI-powered Bing Chat tool, to the desktop, but it’s also introduced a handful of new AI features that promise to make everyday applications easier to use.

The update, codenamed Windows 11 23H2, became available Tuesday in preview form. This means select users can install the update by visiting Settings, clicking on “Windows Update,” and then switching on “Get the latest updates as soon as they’re available.” Windows 11 23H2 will open to all users in November, so those who can’t see the update must wait until then.

The biggest feature of Windows 11 23H2 is desktop access to Copilot. Though Copilot has technically been available since the beginning of this year, it’s been tethered to Edge, where it hid inside a side panel, and then Bing. Now, Windows 11 users can open Copilot on the desktop, where they can ask it questions, deliver commands, generate text summaries, and more. The tool is considered a refreshing smart assistant upgrade after Microsoft’s sunsetting of the Cortana app.  

The Snipping Tool's new text extraction and redaction features. Credit: Microsoft

Windows 11 23H2 revamps the Snipping Tool, which can now intelligently extract and redact text from documents, screenshots, videos, and more. After snipping their screens, users can select the Snipping Tool’s “Text Actions” mode, which opens a handful of copy, select, and redaction options. File Explorer received a facelift and can now use AI to recommend relevant files to users, speeding up their search. In Photos, users can leverage AI to blur backgrounds, create slideshows, and search for images based on their contents. 

MS Paint is getting an AI boost, from its background removal tool (released earlier this month) and transparency features to its forthcoming AI image generator, “Paint Cocreator.” Windows 11 users who are a part of the Windows Insider program can join a Cocreator waitlist, the members of which will receive access to the text-to-image tool in the coming weeks. 

Among Windows 11 23H2’s non-AI updates are native RGB Dynamic Lighting controls, a new volume mixer, and passkey support. A new Instant Games feature lets you boot up and play “casual games” within the Microsoft Store instead of downloading and installing them.

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With the release of Firefox 118 out the door and making its way into the stable software repositories of various GNU/Linux distributions, the next release, Firefox 119, has now entered public beta testing.

Firefox 119 doesn’t look like it comes with big changes, but only a few improvements here and there. For example, it promises to let you import some of your Chrome extensions (if they’re available for Firefox, of course) when migrating your data from Google Chrome.

It also improves the Firefox View feature with more content, including browsing history, along with the ability to sort it by date or site, recently closed tabs, as well as viewing of all the opened tabs from all windows and all tabs from all of your synced devices.

Other than that, Firefox 119 looks to disable media sniffing for top-level documents that are served as application/octet-stream type to allow them to be downloaded instead of attempting playback and brings support for the Santali (sat) language.

Just like the previous few releases, Firefox 119 beta also carries the Cookie Banner Reduction feature where Firefox automatically tries to reject cookie requests on cookie banners on supported sites, as well as the Quick Actions in address bar feature to more easily and quickly perform certain tasks. At this point, there’s no telling if these features will make it in the final release.

For web developers, the upcoming Firefox release promises credentialless support in Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy, as well as support for ARIA reflection for simple attributes and default Accessibility Semantics for Custom Elements.

Mozilla plans to officially launch the Firefox 119 release on October 24th, 2023. Until then, you can take the latest beta version for a test drive on your personal computer by downloading the binary from the official website, but keep in mind not to use this pre-release version for production work.

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The Document Foundation released today two security updates for its popular LibreOffice open-source office suite, 7.6.2 and 7.5.7, to address a recently disclosed vulnerability in the WebP codec.

Arriving earlier than initially planned, the LibreOffice 7.6.2 and LibreOffice 7.5.7 updates contain a fix for CVE 2023-4863, a heap buffer overflow discovered in the widely used libwebp library, which is used to decode the now popular WebP graphics format.

This security issue affects all applications that use the libwebp library, including major web browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, or Edge. It is marked as critical and it could allow a remote attacker to perform an out-of-bounds memory write via a crafted HTML page.

“Opening a malicious WebP image could lead to a heap buffer overflow in the content process. We are aware of this issue being exploited in other products in the wild,” said the security team at Mozilla in a security advisory.

The WebP vulnerability is now patched in the latest version of the aforementioned apps, and it’s now also patched in the LibreOffice office suite if you update your installations to either LibreOffice 7.6.2 or LibreOffice 7.5.7.

In addition to patching this critical vulnerability, the LibreOffice 7.6.2 release also contains 54 fixes for bugs and regressions, according to the RC1 changelog, while the LibreOffice 7.5.7 carries only 14 bug fixes, according to the RC1 changelog.

As you can imagine, these updates are highly recommended to all LibreOffice users. Both LibreOffice 7.6.2 and LibreOffice 7.5.7 are available for download from the official website as binaries packed by The Document Foundation for DEB or RPM-based distribution, as well as a source tarball.

On this occasion, I would like to remind you to always keep your GNU/Linux systems up to date if you want to be protected from such critical vulnerabilities. These new LibreOffice updates will also arrive in your distro’s stable repositories in the coming days, so make sure that you update on a regular basis.

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In preparation for the launch of the new update, Microsoft has shed light on the new features and changes that are coming to the new update. These features are aimed at developers as Microsoft aims to improve the development experience on Windows 11.

First up, Microsoft has announced a new option that will allow developers to state their intent when setting up a new machine for the first time. Microsoft currently asks users about their use case with the “Let’s customize your experience” page. It will now include a Development option as well which will allow users to take advantage of Dev Home.

Speaking of Dev Home, the feature is a new addition to Windows 11 and will allow developers to manage all their apps and services from a single screen. Dev Home connects with services like GitHub and offers a dashboard that helps you monitor both system and dev projects. The dashboard is customizable and can connect with tools as well as services to fetch the latest data.

Microsoft is also bringing WinGet Configurations to all users with the new Windows 11 update. This was something Microsoft had announced at Build earlier this year and is now making its way to Windows 11. Microsoft has some samples available on its website and the company claims that this will reduce time for developers drastically.

Moving on to Dev Drive, a feature that was also announced earlier this year. Microsoft is finally bringing it to Windows 11 users with the new update. Dev Drive essentially allows users to set up a new storage volume that is tailor-made for developers. It is based on Resilient File System (ReFS) and offers better performance as well as security.

Microsoft is also updating the Windows Defender with new features to aid developers. The company is bringing asynchronous scanning to dev drives, which will offer better performance to developers while offering malware protection. The new options can be controlled from Windows Defender settings.

Microsoft is also bringing the following improvements to Windows 11 starting today, in line with the community feedback:

Starting today, all these improvements will become available in the stable version with the latest Windows 11 update.

You can now quickly identify and access any instance of each app housed in the taskbar with just one click. All instances of the app are ungrouped with labels on the taskbar.

You can now hide your Time and Date with a setting on the taskbar.

You can quickly and easily shut down applications with a simple right-click on the app directly from the taskbar without opening the Task Manager. This setting can be enabled within the Developer settings page to then have “End task” appear within the context menu when you right-click on the icon within taskbar.

For Developers settings page has moved from “Privacy & Security” to System. This provides a quick and easily discoverable entry point to developer settings.

You can now get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows. We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project.

Next up on the list is File Explorer. Microsoft is bringing new features to improve the File Explorer experience as well. With the new update, ItemsView will offer "LinedFlowLayout and Island functionality provides an easy way to adopt WinUI3 look and feel in any part of your app without having to change your entire application". The company has also updated File Expolrer with WebUI3 which unlocks new features and experiences. Microsoft has also introduced multi-threading to File Explorer. The feature will greatly improve functions like copy and paste. Microsoft claims that the new experience show over "40% improvements in bulk delete operations, giving time back to developers."

Lastly, Microsoft has made updates to the Windows Terminal and Windows Subsystem for Linux. Windows Terminal is getting new features like Suggestions UI, Broadcast Input, and Web Search while Windows Subsystem for Linux will come auto-shrinking of VM drive, Hyper-V firewall protection, IPv6 support, and more. WSL features are currently in testing and you can sign up for experimental features to try them out.

Do note that many of these features will be available with the Moment 4 update starting today. However, you may have to wait for 23H2 update to get the rest of the features. We have a consolidated article on what's new with the 23H2 update if you like to get more insights into the upcoming update.

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Here are the highlights of the update:

• Upgraded to Windows App SDK 1.4.1, increasing stability of WinUI3 utilities. Thanks @dongle-the-gadget for starting the upgrade!
• Text Extractor was upgraded to its version 2.0, with a new overlay, table mode and more Quality of Life improvements. Thanks @TheJoeFin!
• Improved FancyZones stability, fixing some layout resets and improving handling of newly created windows on Windows 11.
• Fixed many silent crashes that were reported to Watson and the user's event viewer.

And the full changelog is below:

General

• Turning animations off in Windows Settings will now also turn them off in PowerToys.
• Upgraded the Windows App SDK dependency to 1.4.1. Thanks @dongle-the-gadget for the original 1.4.0 upgrade!
• Show in the thumbnail label and application titles when running as administrator. Thanks @davidegiacometti!
• Upgraded the Win UI Community Toolkit dependency to 8.0. Thanks @niels9001!

Awake

• Added down-sampled variants to the application's icon. Thanks @morriscurtis!

colour Picker

• After adding a new colour in the editor, the history will scroll the new colour into view. Thanks @peerpalo!

Crop and Lock

• Fixed a Crop and Lock crash that would occur when trying to reparent a window crashes the target application. An error message is shown instead.

FancyZones

• Set the process and main thread priority to normal.
• Fixed handling newly created windows on Windows 11.
• Fixed scenarios where opening the FancyZones Editor would reset the layouts.

File Explorer add-ons

• Optimized CPU usage for generating SVG thumbnails.
• Improved handling of Gcode Thumbnails, including JPG and QOI formats. Thanks @pedrolamas!
• Better handled errors when sending telemetry, which were causing reported crashes.
• Fixed some thumbnails not being shown centered like before the optimization.

File Locksmith

• Shows files opened by processes with PID greater than 65535. Thanks @poke30744!
• Fixed a GDI object leak in the context menu which would crash Explorer.

Find My Mouse

• Added new activation methods, including by hotkey. Thanks @davidegiacometti!

Hosts File Editor

• Ignore the default ACME sample entries in the hosts file. Thanks @davidegiacometti!
• Improved save error handling and added better error messages. Thanks @davidegiacometti!
• Corrected a check for an error when signaling the application to start as administrator.
• Refactored the context menu. Thanks @davidegiacometti!
• Fixed dialogs overlapping the title bar after the upgrade to Windows App SDK 1.4. Thanks @davidegiacometti!

Keyboard Manager

• Distinguish between the regular minus key and the numpad minus key.

Mouse Without Borders

• Fixed a crash when trying to restart the application.

Peek

• Using Peek on HTML files will show a white background by default, similar to a browser's default behavior.
• Fix a white flash on Dark theme when switching file and improved the development file preview detection and adjustments.

PowerRename

• Fixed a crash caused by big counter values on the new enumeration method.

PowerToys Run

• It's now possible to select which shell is used by the Shell plugin.
• A combobox option type was added to the plugin options.
• Fixed a bug in the Calculator plugin that was causing decimal numbers to be misinterpreted on locales where the dot (.) character isn't used as a decimal or digit separator.
• Improved the Program plugin stability when it fails to load a program's thumbnail at startup.
• The use of Pinyin for querying some plugins can now be turned on in Settings. Thanks @ChaseKnowlden!
• Refactored option types for plugin and added number, string and composite types to be used in the future. Thanks @htcfreek!
• Fixed the entry for searching for Windows updates in the Settings plugin. Thanks @htcfreek!

Quick Accent

• The "All languages" character set is now calculated by programmatically querying the characters for every available language. Thanks @dannysummerlin!
• Added é to the Norwegian and Swedish languages. Thanks @Aaron-Junker!
• Added a runtime cache to the "All languages" character set, to only calculate accents once per key.

Registry Preview

• Fixed focusing issues at startup.
• Improved the data visualization to show data in a similar way to the Windows Registry Editor. Thanks @dillydylann!

Runner

• Fixed hanging when a bug report was generated from the flyout. Thanks @davidegiacometti!

Settings

• Improved the way the OOBE window reacts to Windows theme change.
• Fixed an issue that made it impossible to change the "Switch between windows in the current zone" "Next window" shortcut for FancyZones.
• Fixed a crash when entering a duplicate name for a colour in the colour Picker page and improved clean up when cancelling a colour edit. Thanks @davidegiacometti!

Text Extractor

• Text Extractor 2.0, with a new overlay, table mode and more Quality of Life improvements. Thanks @TheJoeFin!

Documentation

• SECURITY.md was updated from 0.0.2 to 0.0.9. Thanks @Aaron-Junker!
• Improved the README and main development document for clarity and completeness. Thanks @codeofdusk and @aprilbbrockhoeft!

Development

• Fixed PowerToys Run DateTime plugin tests that were failing depending on locale, so that they can be run correctly on all dev machines.
• Fixed PowerToys Run System plugin tests that were failing for certain network interfaces, so that they can be run correctly on all dev machines. Thanks @snickler!
• Fixed a markdown bug on the GitHub /helped command.
• Switched build pipelines to a new agent pool. Thanks @DHowett!
• New .cs files created in Visual Studio get the header added automatically. Thanks @davidegiacometti!

You can download PowerToys from the Microsoft Store, winget (Command Prompt as Administrator and enter the command: winget install --id Microsoft.PowerToys, or its repository on GitHub.

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CD Projekt RED released the highly-anticipated Phantom Liberty expansion to Cyberpunk 2077 earlier today, injecting a lengthy spy-thriller adventure into the RPG. AMD recommends anyone returning to Night City to install this driver beforehand for an optimal experience.

Meanwhile, Payday 3, the Starbreeze Studios-developed cooperative heisting game, released last week. While the game is currently having some major server issues, this driver is also a recommended install for anyone able to jump in and unjam some drills.

Unfortunately, AMD has not given any data on what sort of optimizations or bug fixes are included in this driver for these two titles. Being that no bug fixes are listed for this release as well, those from the red team not looking to jump into either game should be able to skip 23.9.3 without worrying too much.

The release notes also mention "MeanVarianceNormalization (MVN) and Stable Diffusion variants optimizations," though it does not go into any details on these changes.

Here are the known issues AMD is working on resolving:

• Performance Metrics Overlay may report N/A for FPS on various games.
• Audio may intermittently become out of sync with video when recording from AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition with AV1 codec.
• The display may intermittently freeze after changing the encoding format while streaming select games using AMD Link. Users experiencing this issue are suggested to select the desired encode format before streaming as a temporary workaround.

The AMD Adrenalin Edition 23.9.3 driver can now be upgraded to via the Radeon Settings app on Windows. Standalone download links can be found on the release notes page here.

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What is new in Skype Insider 8.105.76.205?

A post on the official Microsoft Community forum contains the following:

What’s new?

Skype's Chat Organization Gets a Facelift!

Ready to navigate your chats with flair and precision? We're bidding adieu to the old titles and introducing a sleeker, more intuitive layout. Here’s what’s fresh:

• Pinning Perfected: Spot the 'Pin' icon for your beloved Bing bot chat. Bing's never been easier to access!

• Favorites at a Glance: Your fav chats now boast a 'Fav' icon, making them instantly recognizable at the top of your chat list.

• Hide & Seek with Favs: Opt to hide favorites? The 'Fav' icon vanishes too, when you tap 'Hide Favorites' in the chats filter, for a clutter-free view.

Out with the "Your AI Copilot", "Favorites" and "Chats" titles, and in with an organized, streamlined chat experience. Navigate with nuance, and let the conversations flow!

Stability improvements & Bug fixes:

• App crashing when dragging one user into another chat to create a new group chat and then removing user, on Desktop & Web.

• Call recording banner disappears when changing orientation on Android.

• Conversation title is cropped when too long in landscape mode on iOS.

Please let us know what you think about the latest changes, either here in the community or through the Skype app. You can always go to the Skype’s User Feedback channel to submit and vote for new features and ideas. 

If you use Skype and do not mind trying early updates before the public rollout, head to the official Skype Insider website to enroll in the program. Skype previews are available on Windows 10 and 11, macOS, Linux, and Android.

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Microsoft is now working on offline support for the new Outlook for Windows as well, which was recently released to the public. This is one of the several new features Microsoft had in store for us for the 23H2 feature update but has instead been released early.

On the Microsoft 365 roadmap, under the feature ID 178030, Microsoft has added this new item which will allow users to view mail, calendar events, and contacts as they will be stored offline locally on your device automatically. Additionally, mail actions like composing, flagging, moving, and deleting will work too.

The feature was added earlier today and it is set to start rolling out next month. On the description of the new item it says:

Outlook: The new Outlook for Windows - Offline support for mail actions and compose

The first set of offline capabilities in the new Outlook for Windows. Mail, calendar events, and contacts will be stored on your device, so you can view them even when you're not connected to the internet. Additionally, you can perform key actions on your mail, including flag, move, and delete, and compose messages, to stay productive even when you're not connected to the internet.

The option will be a welcome addition since Microsoft 365 services including Outlook often experience outages, with the most recent one being earlier this month.

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The Patch Tuesday update brings this change unannounced as the release notes did not mention such a thing. The issue was brought to the attention by a Reddit user Esky013, who is presumably an IT administrator, on the Intune subreddit. They explained:

After applying the September CU for Windows 10 22H2 (KB5030211), there is a shiny new Start Menu shortcut for Windows Backup. It doesn't work in any of the environments we look after ("This feature is not supported by your organisation") due to policies applied, and we don't want or need it in the Start Menu. If it's not there it will save the questions from users, too.

It looks like it's part of the "Windows Feature Experience Pack" and as such the shortcut seems to be a bit "magic". There isn't anything in the usual %ProgramData% or %AppData% locations for Start Menu shortcuts, and it's not an appx package that I can remove.

The executable is "%windir%\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows\.Client.CBS.cw5n1h2txyewy\WindowsBackupClient.exe".

And - no surprises here - there isn't a policy to hide this shortcut. We have The Intune Windows Spotlight policy set to completely blocked in some customers, "Block third party suggestions" and "Block consumer specific features" in others, and the Windows Backup shortcut still appears.

Another user on the thread managed to workaround the issue by removing the Windows feature Experience pack via the DISM (Deployment Image Servicing and Management)/Remove-Package command line option. They write:

I did remove this package on 2 systems and the Windows Backup icon was removed successfully from Windows 10 Pro 22H2 without breaking anything else here.

this is what I did:

dism /online /get-packages

Remove-WindowsPackage -Online -PackageName "Microsoft-Windows-UserExperience-Desktop-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.19041.3393"

For those who have not been following, Microsoft debuted the new Windows Backup app on the Dev channel earlier this year. The app later received improvements in a future build. While this was initially planned for Windows 11, it was also released on Windows 10 as well.

Source: Reddit

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Did you know that you can set temporary environment variables on the Linux operating system? With these variables, you can more easily work with scripts or even systemwide programs. And for developers, setting environment variables can come in handy.

For example, you might want to set a temporary variable for the version of your distribution you use, so downloading the correct application to install is much easier. Or, maybe you want to set a URL as an environment variable to work with a script. You could set the MY_SITE variable as, say, techrepublic.com, and use the variable in a bash script. Next, you might want that variable to change, so you could reset the temporary variable to a different site, which means you don’t have to edit your script. And if you set the environment variable, it will work with any script needing to call that variable.

So, how do you set an environment variable in Linux? Let me show you.

First, log into your Linux desktop or server and open a terminal window. Let’s set MY_SITE to techrepublic.com. For that, the command would be

export MY_SITE='techrepublic.com'

You can verify the variable was set properly by issuing the command

echo $MY_SITE

and you should see techrepublic.com printed. When you need to change that variable, run the export command with a different option in place of techrepublic.com. And that’s all there is to it.

This is a great way of setting variables that can be used by any type of script or application. As always, it’s best to work smarter and not harder.

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Open Source Summit  This year's Kernel Report at the Open Source Summit in Bilbao revealed the long-term support releases of the Linux kernel will soon not be that long at all.…

Referring back to the list of stable kernels, which goes back about six years, Linux Weekly News editor Jonathan Corbet said:

When 4.19 reaches its end of life, so will 5.4, leaving the end-of-2020 kernel 5.10 the oldest longterm release. This change was discussed at the time, but now it looks like what is essentially the worst-case outcome has been chosen.

Since the big enterprise players don't use the existing long-term releases, maintaining their own instead, and as is now clear in the case of the 800-pound gorilla of the Linux world, keeping that kernel and its source code reserved for customers only, the kernel developers are dropping the very considerable maintenance burden of keeping those old releases alive.

For techie types tired of PowerPoint presentations and words like "synergy" and "leverage," Corbet's Kernel Report is one of the highlights of what used to be called LinuxCon.

This year's presentation [PDF] led in gently with some statistics, and held the big reveal about shortening support cycles back until later in the talk.

There have been five releases in version 6 so far, and they are all of comparable size, with some 15,000 commits in each. Each point release has seen some 2,000 individual developers contributing, of whom around 250 to 300 are newcomers. As Corbet put it:

He noted that those are "mainline" releases, the ones Linus Torvalds himself puts out before moving on to the next new version. But, he said, "these are not the kernels that most of us are actually running. Most people are smarter than that and try to run something else; usually, something based off the stable kernel updates."

At present, there are six releases under long-term maintenance: versions 6.1, 5.15, 5.10, 5.4, 4.19, and 4.14 from back in November 2017. The number of commits into each of these long-term kernels increases for each older version, with the oldest having over 300 updates and by now about 28,000 commits.

So which should you choose? Corbet – himself a kernel maintainer – says that one answer to this is simple:

Manager of the stable kernels Greg Kroah-Hartman's explanation is:

Corbet went on to point out that the oldest long-term kernel is now approaching two full development cycles' worth of commits: "An awful lot of development is going on after our stable kernel is released." Many of the fixes are for bugs that appeared in earlier kernel releases – his analysis goes back to the beginning of the history in Git, back with kernel 2.6.12 in 2005.

And this goes both ways: bugs discovered and fixed in later kernel versions must be back-ported and fixed in older, stable releases.

This, he pointed out, is the other way to choose which kernel to run: pick an old, stable kernel, and backport all the fixes that you consider important to it. It's the "enterprise" kernel model, and leads to old kernels with thousands and thousands of fixes applied to them. "We've seen an awful lot of fuss recently about what certain enterprise vendors are doing with regard to access to their code and their distributions, and the fuss around Red Hat Enterprise Linux in general. This here is what that fuss is about," he said.

It's a lot of work, and although it applies across the whole distribution, a huge amount is at the kernel level. What you're left with are old kernels, but with tens of thousands of fixes, leaving them very unlike what was originally released. The result, Corbet said, is that it cuts their users off from community support.

In a way, this is the flip side of Red Hat's view, which we described back in June. Red Hat considers that the levels of testing and quality control in its enterprise kernels exceed that of the community ones. As a result, it maintains its own stable versions, and it doesn't use the upstream long-term releases.

That's when Corbet dropped his LTS bombshell.

There was a lot more in the talk, and we recommend watching it in full if you want to know where things are going. He discussed the new extended Berkeley Packet Filters (eBPF) subsystem, where it was going, and importantly, where it isn't – such as vendor-specific kernel schedulers. There was also discussion of security, confidential computing, and more.

The much-vaunted new Rust support, discussed in last year's Kernel Report, was intended to be experimental. Experiments can fail, and failure for the Rust module support would mean that it could be removed from the kernel again. It's already imposing a significant extra load, inasmuch as subsystem maintainers must be able to read code submissions in order to approve them or not, and that means reading Rust code, which Corbet described as sometimes resembling line noise to C programmers.

However, substantial work is already going into Rust kernel modules. Notably, as we described at the end of 2022, the drivers that the Asahi Linux team are working on for Apple's new on-die GPUs are being built in Rust. Corbet noted that the decision point where an experiment is considered a success is when the kernel developers merge the first feature that users depend on. As such, that point for Rust in the kernel is coming very soon. If the Apple Silicon GPU support does get merged, that's a quite significant user-facing function. It means that if Rust support were to be removed again, anyone running Linux on Apple Silicon Macs would lose their graphics drivers. As such, the Rust support would thereby cease to be experimental.

The closing words were on the subject of the ongoing maintainer crisis. The kernel team is understaffed, and there are no members of the team devoted to documentation, for one critical example. He quoted the former maintainer of the XFS filesystem, Darrick Wong, who stepped down in August:

Corbet continued:

From this vulture's perspective, it seems like despite the corporate feel of the Open Source Summit these days, with big companies from around the world proudly talking about their use of open source and their large-scale adoption of Linux, the core project behind it all, the kernel itself, is under-resourced and under-funded. If there are around a couple of thousand developers working on any given release of the kernel, and about 10 percent of those are newbies for each point release, that implies that as many again are leaving the project each release, burning out and quitting, or perhaps simply being redeployed to other areas by their employers.

As in so many things, although there is lots of good news, these are worrying times. ®

Source

Microsoft is now working on offline support for the new Outlook for Windows as well, which was recently released to the public. This is one of the several new features Microsoft had in store for us for the 23H2 feature update but has instead been released early.

On the Microsoft 365 roadmap, under the feature ID 178030, Microsoft has added this new item which will allow users to view mail, calendar events, and contacts as they will be stored offline locally on your device automatically. Additionally, mail actions like composing, flagging, moving, and deleting will work too.

The feature was added earlier today and it is set to start rolling out next month. On the description of the new item it says:

Outlook: The new Outlook for Windows - Offline support for mail actions and compose

The first set of offline capabilities in the new Outlook for Windows. Mail, calendar events, and contacts will be stored on your device, so you can view them even when you're not connected to the internet. Additionally, you can perform key actions on your mail, including flag, move, and delete, and compose messages, to stay productive even when you're not connected to the internet.

The option will be a welcome addition since Microsoft 365 services including Outlook often experience outages, with the most recent one being earlier this month.

Source

The Mozilla Firefox 118 web browser is now available for download ahead of its official release on September 26th, when it will be rolling out to various of the supported platforms.

I consider Firefox 118 a major release because it finally brings the built-in translation feature for websites. Previously planned for Firefox 117, the new translation feature will let you automatically translate websites from one of the supported languages to another.

The translation feature can be accessed from a new “Translate page” menu entry in the application menu (the hamburger menu on the far right side of the window). When clicked, a pop-up dialog will open in place to let you choose the languages you want to translate from and to.

The built-in site translation feature is accompanied by a settings panel that you can access either from the pop-up dialog or from Settings. There, you can set the default languages for the automatic translation, as well as to install more languages or remove the ones that have already been installed by default.

The translation feature is based on the Bergamot project, which provides a privacy-aware translation engine where the translation is done locally using machine learning. Translations are never sent to a third party and are optimized for consumer hardware, according to Mozilla.

For Linux users, Firefox 118 ships with support for fractional scaling on Wayland. This feature tells Firefox the optimal fractional scale to use with the already existing fractional scaling settings for your Linux system when using the Wayland session.

However, this feature is disabled by default and you will have to manually enable it by setting the widget.wayland.fractional-scale.enabled option in about:config from false to true with a double click.

Among other changes, Firefox 118 switches to the FDLIBM math library for web audio on all supported systems to improve anonymity with Fingerprint Protection and restricts the visibility of fonts to websites to system fonts and language pack fonts, thus mitigating font fingerprinting in Private Browsing windows.

For Android users, Firefox 118 adds support for printing page content from the browser or the share menu, the ability to open pinned user shortcuts in an existing tab if it already has the same URL, as well as the ability to clear website data from the “Cookies and site data” menu item.

Last but not least, web developers get support for ten new CSS math functions, including round, mod, rem, pow, sqrt, hypot, log, exp, abs, and sign, as well as OpaqueResponseBlocking support by default.

As mentioned before, Mozilla will officially announce Firefox 118 tomorrow, September 26th, 2023. Until then, you can download the final release right now from the official download server or from the stable software repositories for your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.

Downtown links available on the FP

Source

• Jupiter Broadcasting: Organization producing podcasts and videos on various aspects of the Linux ecosystem, offering valuable content and weekly news updates.

• freeCodeCamp.org: Provides highly technical tutorials for coding on Linux and improving sysadmin skills, with playlists for Python, PyTorch, and various programming languages.

To many users, Linux is more than an operating system. It's a lifestyle and a hobby, and if you're not careful, you'll find yourself not only using Linux to work, manage your files, and play games, but also consuming all the Linux-related media you can get your hands on.

While there are plenty of Linux podcasts and articles online, YouTube channels dedicated to Linux can keep you abreast of what's going on in the Linux world, as well as teach you new and valuable skills. Here are five of the best YouTube channels every Linux enthusiast should follow.

1. DistroTube

Linux is open source, which means that if you want to make your own distro, you can. You can start a project from scratch, create a fork of an existing distro, or work on a lightly modified spin.

Some of these distros stick around for the long haul, while others are published as a single release, and never heard from again.

As a result, there are several hundred actively developed Linux distros available today, and when you're choosing what to install next, or which distro to try out in a virtual machine, it can be confusing.

The DistroTube YouTube channel is dedicated to reviewing and showcasing new and interesting distros. From the initial installation, through setup, and usage. If there are any oddities, quirks, exceptional features, or things you need to know, Derek, the presenter, will show and tell you about them.

Because he's installing these distros for the first time, he's running up against issues and surprises in the same way you would when exploring a new distro, so his observations are especially valuable.

2. Jupiter Broadcasting

Jupiter Broadcasting is an organization that produces several shows related to all aspects of the Linux ecosystem.

Although YouTube is primarily a video hosting platform, Jupiter Broadcasting produces podcasts. Most of these have an accompanying video of the audio waveform.

You can stare, transfixed, at the hypnotizing undulations, or play the podcasts in the background as you work on something else. Some others have talking heads and demonstrate the features under discussion.

Although some of the podcast series, such as "Choose Linux", "Women's Tech Radio", "BSD Now", and TechSnap, have been discontinued, the content is still valuable—although not as up-to-date as it could be.

The current series includes LINUX Unplugged—covering news, opinion, developments, and Linux philosophy; "Self-hosted", if you run your own servers at home; and Linux Action news—the channel's weekly take on the free and open-source world.

3. freeCodeCamp.org

This channel isn't dedicated to Linux but will be immensely valuable to you if you're pursuing coding on Linux, or attempting to further your Linux sysadmin skills.

freecodecamp.org offers wide-ranging, highly technical tutorials for just about everything you could ever do on Linux. Want a full university Python3 course? You can find it on the freecodecamp.org YouTube channel. Thinking about dipping a toe into PyTorch for deep learning and machine learning? You'll find a solid 25-hour playlist in the same place.

The most popular freecodecamp.org Linux playlist is a five-hour dive into "The 50 Most Popular Linux & Terminal Commands", and if you're in a hurry, you'll find videos that can teach you C++ in four hours, JavaScript in three hours, and HTML in two hours.

If you're skeptical, check out the comments section on each video, and you'll find glowing testimonials from viewers, such as, "You taught me more in 4 hours than my professor did in an entire semester."

4. Wolfgang's Channel

Wolfgang's Channel is a bit more clickbaity, with thumbnail images usually featuring the creator's face, bold, colorful lettering, and provocative titles, such as "Why I Switched to Mac (as a Linux user)", and "Why I use a paid terminal font".

Nonetheless, Wolfgang's channel is worth following. While the previous entries on this list are either wide-ranging, or something to follow if you have a very specific interest, Wolfgang's Channel offers entertaining reviews, takes, projects, and whimsy.

Videos are usually between four and 30 minutes long, making them perfect for a tea break.

Some of my favorites include, "Tiling Window Managers suck. Here's why", with which I fundamentally disagreed, and "ASMR Installing Gentoo Linux (No Talking, Mechanical Keyboard, 4K)".

5. Learn Linux TV

Learn Linux TV does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a channel dedicated to helping you learn Linux through its regular releases and explains topics newcomers will want to see.

A quick look at the most recent videos at the time of writing shows SEO-optimized topics including "How to Use the rsync Command to Transfer Files", "Easy Terminal Commands for Inspecting Hardware", and "Debian 12 Net Install Installation Walkthrough".

The narrator has a clear and concise way of explaining technical concepts, and while we wouldn't necessarily recommend following Learn Linux TV for entertainment, it's worth following if you want to, well... learn Linux.

There Are Lots of Linux YouTube Channels Worth Following!

YouTube is an excellent source of content, regardless of your interests, and if Linux is your passion, these are the channels we recommend.

Whether you're learning the basics, on the road to becoming an expert, in search of entertainment, or want to keep up with the latest open-source happenings, this list should have you covered.

Source

The feature allowed those testers to disable Bing Chat's connection to search the web for answers to questions. This offers some benefits for certain tasks, such as the ability for the chatbot to solve complex math problems, do some coding for users, or even for people to just have casual conversations with Bing Chat.

Since this post was made, there's been no word on whether the "No Search" feature will be expanded to more Bing Chat users. When someone asked Parakhin who is now the head of Windows and Web Devices, about the status of this feature on X (formerly Twitter), Parakhin revealed that the feature will now become "a plugin, UX-wise, and it is waiting for the general plugin rollout."

There's no word yet on when the promised general plugin support for Bing Chat will launch. It was first announced in May as part of Microsoft's Build 2023 developers conference. Windows enthusiast Leopeva64 posted on X this weekend that Adobe Express, MathSolver, and Spotify plugins were in his Bing Chat pane, but keep in mind that this appears again to be for a very limited percentage of Bing Chat users.

Speaking of updates, Parakhin announced earlier today on X that there's been a "pretty big update in our Precise mode of Bing Chat". There have been no new features added, according to Parakhin, but users can now expect "better answers" when using the Precise mode. Hopefully, we will get even more updates on Bing Chat this week with the launch of the major Windows 11 update on Tuesday.

Source

ExplorerPatcher developer Valinet published not one but two consecutive updates. The releases were tested on Windows 11 build 22621.1992, which happened to be the July 2023 Patch Tuesday.

Following that, a couple of days ago, ExplorerPatcher received a new update, version 22621.2283.57.2, that fixes several File Explorer and Taskbar-related bugs. From the version name itself, you may have figured out that the update was tested on the latest Windows 11 Patch Tuesday.

Since then, another pre-release update arrived, fixingbugs related to the never-combine Taskbar mode. The full changelog for the two updates is given below:

22621.2361.58.1

Tested on OS builds 22000.2416, 22621.1, 22621.2134, 22621.2361, 22631.2338, and 23545.1000.

Details

1

• Taskbar10: Fixed Windows 10 taskbar not showing up on Windows 11 builds with "Never combine" on the new taskbar. (bc3bbc7)

• Taskbar10: Fixed pen menu crashing explorer.exe on 22621.2134+. (1977d78)

• Taskbar11: Fixed a bug that crashed explorer.exe when right clicking the new taskbar on Windows 11 builds with "Never combine" on the new taskbar. (6023718)

• File Explorer: EP now tries to avoid crashes related to the new Windows App SDK views. (b426d2c)

• On OS builds 22621+, fixed a bug that crashed explorer.exe when required functions in twinui.pcshell.dll (for Win+X and Windows 10 Alt+Tab) could not be found using the fallback method. (6023718)

22621.2283.57.2

Tested on OS build 22621.2283. Installer requires Internet connectivity.

Details

1

• Taskbar10: Fixed Action Center, Control Center, and notification toasts placements on OS builds 22621.2134+ (thanks @Amrsatrio).

• Taskbar10: Fixed a bug that prevented Task View and/or the window switcher (Alt+Tab) from working on OS builds 22621.2134+ (thanks @Amrsatrio).

• Taskbar10: Fixed a bug that prevented the volume and brightness flyouts from displaying (thanks @Amrsatrio).

• Taskbar10: Fixed a bug that prevented the Win+A (Action Center), Win+N (Control Center), and Win+B (Focus on tray overflow button) shortcuts from working on OS builds 22621.2134+ (thanks @Amrsatrio).

• Taskbar10: Fixed the context menu of the new IME button OS builds 22621.2134+ (thanks @Amrsatrio).

• Taskbar11: Fixed a bug that crashed explorer.exe when right clicking the taskbar on OS builds 22621.2134+.

• Quality of life improvements regarding symbol data (thanks @Amrsatrio).

2

Fixed a bug that crashed explorer.exe on OS builds lower than 22621 (Windows 11 22H2). (dfee1ae)

In case you want to download the latest final version, head over to the Neowin software page or GitHub. On the latter, you can also find the pre-release versions.

Source

You may recall that Microsoft tested ads on Windows 11’s Settings page in an insider build back in May. It wasn’t the one and only time: they once showed huge banner ads promoting Edge on Chrome‘s download site, and the list goes on. 

So, if you’re tired of it, you may want to stick to reading for a while. Here’s how you can disable ads in Windows 11 for good.

How to disable ads in Windows 11

1. Open the Settings app

2. Go to Notifications and scroll down to Additional settings

3. Turn all three checkboxes off

4. If that’s not enough, go back to Personalization

5.  Click Device usage and untick all the boxes in this category.

For non-EU users, it can be worse, as this pushy tactic is prohibited EU’s Digital Market Act (DMA).

If you’ve successfully gotten rid of those annoying notifications and pop-up ads, do let us know in the comments!

Source

What you need to know

• Plugin support for Bing Chat has begun rolling out to users.
• The feature is currently limited to Edge Canary users and is still in A/B testing.
• Microsoft quietly added three new plugins to Bing Chat's pane on Microsoft Edge: Adobe Express, MathSolver, and Spotify.
• The company announced plugin support for Bing Chat during Build 2023.

Microsoft celebrated Bing Chat's six-month birthday last month, and within this period, the AI-powered assistant has evolved in many ways. The company has continuously shipped new updates and features to Bing Chat within this period and continues to do so to enhance its user experience.

Plugin support for Bing Chat is arguably one of the most requested features by users. During Microsoft's annual conference for developers, Build 2023, we learned that several new plugins were on their way to Bing Chat. Ultimately allowing developers to create plugins with one platform that work with ChatGPT, Bing, Dynamics 365 Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Windows Copilot. 

Bing Chat's pane on Microsoft Edge ships with a plethora of plugins including Zillow, Wolfram, and more, but as spotted by Leo Varela on X (formerly Twitter), Microsoft quietly rolled out three new plugins to the platform: Adobe Express, MathSolver, and Spotify. 

Bing Chat gets plugin support, but it's limited

(Image credit: Microsoft)

The recent additions affirm Microsoft's commitment to boosting Bing Chat's performance and overall user experience. However, the experience won't be available to everyone immediately, as it is in A/B testing and is limited to a few Edge Canary users. 

Based on the Spotify plugin's vague and short description label, it will help users find and play content on the streaming platform within Bing Chat. The MathSolver plugin is in place to help users tackle complex math problems and equations. And finally, the Adobe Express plugin will help users design logos and more.

Wladimir Kirianov, took to X to announce that he had access to plugins on Bing Chat, further citing the addition of a new tab next to the "Recent activity" tab called "Plugins". At the time, only five plugins were available: Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, OpenTable, and Shop.

Users can use up to three plugins simultaneously while in a conversation. However, you can't change the plugins once you start engaging in a conversation until you change the topic.

Source

The fortune command is generally considered one of the just-for-fun commands that you’ll find on linux systems, but it can prove useful in some interesting ways.

How it works

Probably most Linux users run the fortune command only when they’re bored, though I’ve known a few who added the fortune command to the end of their .bashrc files so that every login would provide a little quote or a saying that they’d ponder for as much as 30 seconds before proceeding to more serious work.

The fortune command is, however, more versatile than many Linux users realize. In fact, most of the responses to typing “fortune” are not really fortunes at all. Rather than predicting your future or even just the outcome of your day, they provide quotes or lighthearted comments.

By default, the responses to typing “fortune” come from any of a fairly large series of files. On my fedora system, there are 48 such files that my “fortune” can be drawn from.

What you can do with the fortune command

If you want your fortune to be derived from a file related to a particular subject area, you can provide it as an argument like this:

$ fortune food
A waist is a terrible thing to mind.
                -- Ziggy

To do this, however, it’s good to know what subject areas are available. On my systems, these are my options:

$ cd /usr/share/games/fortune; ls *.dat | sed "s/.dat//" | column
art             food              law             people               sports
ascii-art       fortunes          linux           perl                 startrek
bofh-excuses    goedel            literature      pets                 tao
computers       hitchhiker        love            platitudes           translate-me
cookie          humorists         magic           politics             wisdom
definitions     humorix-misc      medicine        pratchett            work
disclaimer      humorix-stories   miscellaneous   riddles              zippy
drugs           kernelnewbies     news            rules-of-acquisition
education       kids              osfortune       science
ethnic          knghtbrd          paradoxum       songs-poems

Once you know the topic areas, you can use any of them to get a fortune which aligns with your mood.

$ fortune politics
The time for action is past!  Now is the time for senseless bickering.

Creating your own fortunes

If the topic areas don’t meet your needs, don’t fret. You can make your own! In fact, it’s quite easy to do so. You need to create a file with a particular format and then run one command to make the data compatible with the fortune command’s requirements.

To test this out, I created a file with a few happy quotes. I need a daily dose of happiness and thought these quotes would be nice to work with. I referred to my file as “happy quotes” and added this content:

$ cat happy_quotes
You're never fully dressed without a smile.
%
Let a smile be your umbrella.
%
Happiness depends upon ourselves.
%
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

Notice that I used % signs to separate the lines of text. None are needed at the bottom.

The next thing I did was run the command below to create the quotes.dat file that the fortune command requires.

$ strfile -c % happy_quotes happy_quotes.dat

When I run a command like fortune happy_quotes, I get a response like this:

$ fortune happy_quotes

You're never fully dressed without a smile.

Of course, with only four happy quotes, I’m going to quickly get tired of the responses. And I’m afraid that no one else who uses my system will see any of my happy quotes because the file is in my home directory, not the /usr/share/games/fortune directory, though I could change that.

Other uses for “fortunes”

In addition to its entertainment or enlightenment value, the fortune command offers a few more uses that might not be immediately obvious. I use the fortune command to create random text files that I use for testing various commands and scripts. A command like this generates a small file of that variety:

$ fortune > file1
$ ls -l file1
-rw-r--r--. 1 shs shs 244 Sep 22 13:53 file1

If you need a larger randomly generated text file, just run the command just shown and then follow it with additional commands of this variety:

$ fortune >> file1
$ fortune >> file1

The file should soon be large enough.

You can also use the responses from the fortune command to generate random numbers. The -c argument to the wc command yields the count of characters in each fortune.

$ fortune | wc -c
107
$ fortune | wc -c
226
$ fortune | wc -c
86

If the resultant numbers are not sufficiently large or sufficiently random for your purpose, create an alias with as many calls to fortune as you might need.

$ alias randnum='expr `fortune | wc -c` \* `fortune | wc -c` \* `fortune | wc -c`'
$ randnum
1793660
$ randnum
878292

Of course, you’re not going to get any small numbers by multiplying the number of characters in each of three text files.

Another option is to use the fortune command to randomize data for some other use. For example, put all your friends’, coworkers’ or contest participants’ names into a file and use the fortune command to pick a winner.

Once you’ve got the names in a text file with lines separated by % characters, you can create your.dat file and do a drawing that depends on the randomness of the fortune command to play fair.

$ strfile -c % friends friends.dat
"friends.dat" created
There were 15 strings
Longest string: 12 bytes
Shortest string: 4 bytes

$ fortune friends
Rebecca

How many fortunes are available?

Out of curiosity, I wrote a script to count the number of fortunes available in the /usr/share/games/fortune directory on my system. The script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

total=0

for file in `ls /usr/share/games/fortune | grep -v "\."`
do
  num=`grep % $file | wc -l`
  num=`expr $num - 1`
  total=`expr $total + $num`
done

The grep command ensures that only the fortune source files (those without file extensions) are used to collect the tally. I was pleased by the number available as it makes it unlikely that you’ll see any particular fortune more than once.

$ count_all_fortunes
16139

Wrap-up

The fortune command can be mildly entertaining or quite useful. Since the fortune I pulled out of my fortune cookie at lunch time provided this fortune, I’m going to assume that at least a few of you enjoyed this post. 😉

They’ll definitely remember all your efforts.

Source

There are new special icons for installed, blacklisted, and upgradable packages. The app now also comes digitally signed so Microsoft Defender and other anti-malware products should no longer block it. You can find the full release notes below:

• .NET Tool package manager is now fully supported in WingetUI

• WingetUI can now filter packages depending on their source

• Chocolatey installed packages have been fixed

• Notifications will be shown again if enabled

• WingetUI can now be installed on a local environment

• Winget does now support custom sources

• WingetUI is now digitally signed

• Arm systems will automatically use arm64 winget versions.

• Packages won't be outdated anymore on the discover packages section

• Theme switching won't require restarting WingetUI. Instead, the new theme will be applied instantaneously.

• Installed, blacklisted and upgradable packages will show special icons to distinguish them from regular packages.

• The package importer is now much faster.

• Winget will handle locales properly

• Chocolatey will be added to path automatically if certain conditions are met

• Command-line outputs are more responsive

• Improved package parsing

• Interface appearance and behaviour improvements

• Custom icon databases will be configurable

• Markdown parsing has been improved

• Lots of other bugfixes and improvements

   

What's Changed

• Fix typo by @HorridModz in #1252
• Change Winget Releaser job to ubuntu-latest by @sitiom in #1286
• Update lang_zh_CN translations by @adfnekc in #1290
• Support markdown on scoop by @BastianKamp in #1317
• [NPM] manage updates for global installed packages and fix uninstall command by @joguarino in #1318
• Allow custom icon data base by @BastianKamp in #1319
• Bump actions/checkout from 3 to 4 by @dependabot in #1338
• Fix typo in licenses section by @reima in #1343
• Automatically change theme when system theme changes by @marticliment in #1345
• Finish Implement winget sources by @marticliment in #1352
• Add an interface to filter packages by source by @marticliment in #1353
• Add base structure of new filtering options by @marticliment in #1361
• Center PackageInfoPopupWindow Position when Opened by @raghavdhingra24 in #1370
• Reorganize code by @marticliment in #1375
• Add support for .Net Tool by @marticliment in #1382
• Update translations from Tolgee by @github-actions in #1390
• Update icons and screenshots from the excel file by @github-actions in #1391

To download the latest WingetUI update, head over to the Neowin software section page, or visit GitHub.

Source

Interestingly, such speculation was seemingly put to rest by Intel as it listed its first Wi-Fi 7 modules (BE200 and BE202) which denote support for Windows 11 as well as Windows 10 on their spec sheet. The sheet does not mention much else though and the latest drivers from Intel also do not support these modules either which means some more compatibility-related questions will remain for the time being.

However, despite Intel officially listing Windows 10 on the supported OS list for these devices, there is a very good chance that full support for Wi-Fi 7 on Windows 10, just like with Wi-Fi 6E, may not be officially available. Right off the bat, we know that the BE200 and BE202 will not work with Wi-Fi 7's ultra-wide 320MHz channel as the highest listed frequency on it is 160MHz on the 6GHz band. This means these new modules won't potentially be able to support extremely high throughputs (EHT) of 46Gbps, assuming the Intel spec sheet is not incorrect.

The table below shows the comparison between the new Wi-Fi 7, Wi-Fi 6/6E, and Wi-Fi 5:

Besides the lack of 320MHz mention, it is known that Windows 10 does not support Wi-Fi 6E's 6GHz band which means it is unlikely for the OS to support Wi-Fi 7's 6GHz. An Intel support article notes:

All Intel® Wi-Fi 6E (Gig+) products support the new 6GHz band for Wi-Fi. Usage of the 6GHz band relies on Microsoft Windows* (Windows® 11) Operating System support .

Meanwhile, a Netgear knowledge base (KB) article says:

The 6 GHz wireless band was introduced with the WiFi 6E standard and is exclusive to devices that support WiFi 6E and newer standards, including WiFi 7 and successive future WiFi versions.

Microsoft Windows PCs must use the latest Windows 11 operating system release and have a 6 GHz WiFi-capable network adapter with the latest drivers installed to access the 6 GHz wireless band.

NOTE: Microsoft recently announced that they are not backporting 6 GHz support to Windows 10. Even if you have a 6 GHz-capable network adapter, if your PC uses Windows 10, you can't use 6 GHz WiFi until you upgrade to Windows 11.

The rather bizarre thing is that there seems to be a way to work around the 6GHz limitation on Windows 10. Although Intel claims that the Wi-Fi drivers must be version 22.70.0 or newer for 6GHz to work, an older driver version 22.45.1.1 apparently removes this block. This unofficial workaround was discovered by XenuIsWatching on Intel forums.

Wi-Fi 7-based routers are landing next year in 2024 as confirmed recently by EE and Qualcomm which means the new technology could likely become one of the selling points for the next major Windows OS (also seemingly happening next year), which is casually referred to as "Windows 12" by the community.

Edit: Incorrectly stated that the BE200 does not support 320MHz. Thanks to d5aqoëp for pointing it out.

Source

Outlook - Dictation support for the web app and more

The new Outlook for Windows app may have hit the GA stage for individual users, but Microsoft still has plans to add new features in the coming weeks. One listed on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap shows that users will be able to dictate emails in the web version soon:

Dictation lets you use speech-to-text to author messages in Outlook with a microphone and reliable internet connection. It's a quick and easy way to draft emails, send replies, and capture the tone you're going for.

The web version of Outlook will also get a new feedback experience:

The feedback entry point for Outlook for Web will be moving from the bottom of the Help pane to the Help tab of the ribbon, for ease of discovery. A streamlined experience, diagnostics log collection and the ability to add screenshots and video make it easier and quicker for users to describe their feedback and helps Microsoft act on it. Also, users can search for information related to their feedback, including updates on features under development, workarounds for problems and how-to from Help. This change obeys the general Feedback policy.

Also, the iOS version of Outlook will soon be able to expand or collapse its nested mail folders and the Android version will soon add a notification if your get an "@mention" in an email, document or loop. All of these features will begin to roll out in October.

Teams - Branded launcher screen support for Premium users and more

If your company has a Microsoft Teams Premium subscription, they will be able to launch their own Teams launcher screen on the Desktop and Mac starting in November.

The Teams Join Launcher web page will now support the brand logo and brand image uploaded for branded meetings. This is a Teams Premium feature.

Premium users on the desktop and Mac will also get some new meeting controls in October:

We are launching an out-of-the-box template that can be useful when meeting with external participants. The controlled-content meeting template has preset defaults for meeting options to provide tight controls over lobby bypass, who can present, allowing chat in lobby/in-meeting, and who can record.

The new Teams 2.0 version will add a new error message in November:

Microsoft Teams Meeting users will be notified directly through the error message for why they cannot access meeting chats when their chat access is limited by policy or due to system limitations and unexpected errors.

Sharepoint List templates

The Sharepoint app will get a new feature in October:

We are bringing the goodness of List templates to SharePoint document libraries. Creating document libraries will now be a breeze with our ready-made templates with scenario relevant content, structure, metadata, and content types - all to save you time and maintain broader consistency across your content management organization.

Stay tuned as we will post major Microsoft 365 Roadmap updates every Sunday.

Source

First, let's take a look at the official list that Apple has published before releasing the update. The following Macs are eligible for the OS upgrade.

• iMac 2019 and later
• Mac Pro 2019 and later
• iMac Pro 2017
• Mac Studio 2022 and later
• MacBook Air 2018 and later
• Mac mini 2018 and later
• MacBook Pro 2018 and later

That list is not very informative, so allow us to elaborate with a more extensive list of Macs that are compatible with macOS 14.

List of Macs that support macOS 14 Sonoma

• iMac Retina 4K 2019
• iMac Retina 5K 2019
• iMac Retina 5K 2020
• iMac M1 2021
• iMac Pro 2017
• Mac Pro 2019
• Mac Pro Rack 2019
• Mac Pro 2023
• Mac Pro Rack 2023
• MacBook Air Retina 2018
• MacBook Air Retina 2019
• MacBook Air Retina 2020
• MacBook Air M1 2020
• MacBook Air M2 2022
• MacBook Air M2 15-inch 2023
• MacBook Pro 13-inch 2018
• MacBook Pro 15-inch 2018
• MacBook Pro 13-inch 2019
• MacBook Pro 15-inch 2019
• MacBook Pro 16-inch 2019
• MacBook Pro 13-inch 2020
• MacBook Pro M1 13-inch 2020
• MacBook Pro M1 14-inch 2021
• MacBook Pro M1 16-inch 2021
• MacBook Pro M2 13-inch 2022
• MacBook Pro M2 14-inch 2023
• MacBook Pro M2 16-inch M2 2023
• Mac mini 2018
• Mac mini M1 2020
• Mac Mini M2 2023
• Mac Mini M2 Pro 2023
• Mac Studio 2022 M1 (M1 Ultra and M1 Max)
• Mac Studio 2023 (M2 Ultra and M2 Max)

Basically, if you have a Mac that was launched in 2018 or later, your machine will get the macOS 14 Sonoma update. The only exception to this is the iMac Pro 2017, which also supports the new operating system. Speaking of which, there are a few computers that won't get the update.

List of macOS 13 Ventura Macs that will not get the macOS 14 Sonoma Update

Six Mac models that were compatible with macOS 13 Ventura will not receive the macOS 14 Sonoma update.

• iMac 21.5-inch 2017
• iMac Retina 4K 21.5-inch 2017
• iMac Retina 5K 27-inch 2017
• MacBook Retina 12-inch 2017
• MacBook Pro 13-inch 2017
• MacBook Pro 15-inch 2017

The list is not as long as the one we saw last year. It is quite rare for Apple to end OS updates for Macs that are less than 6 years old, only one model from 2017 suffered a worse fate last year. The MacBook Air 13-inch 2017 was not updated to Ventura. It is rather strange that Apple has ditched the above devices, considering that Sonoma and Ventura are quite similar in terms of performance.  Only a handful of Intel Macs remain in the company's favor, and I wouldn't be surprised if the company ends OS updates for these in the next year or two.

Of course, just because Apple has decided not to support your old Mac does not necessarily mean that you cannot upgrade to macOS 14 Sonoma. You can use third-party tools like Open Core Legacy Patcher to sideload the update on your machine. We recommend taking a backup of your computer using Time Machine, before trying to install the update, if anything goes awry or if you're unhappy with the performance, you can restore the old OS. Want to learn more about the features in macOS 14 Sonoma, read our previous coverage to find out all about it.

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