As spotted by @PhantomOfEarth on Twitter, Windows 11 build 23440 and 25346 have several enhancements for the virtual desktop experience. The discovered feature IDs enable the previously abandoned transition animation and even add a neat indicator that shows the name of your current desktop after switching.

The restored animations are a bit jarring and raw, but you should not give Microsoft a hard time for that. After all, those improvements are hidden inside the operating system and not ready for public use. If you want to try the changes before Microsoft starts rolling them out officially, here is how to do that using the ViveTool app.

The new virtual desktop indicator showing your current desktop's name.

Those unwilling to risk installing preview builds and tinkering with undercooked features can download one of the two virtual desktop-enhancing apps we recently mentioned in our "Top 10 apps to fix Windows 11's inconveniences" article.

Caution: Unannounced features are often raw, unstable, or borderline unusable. Back up important data before enabling them. Remember that using stable Windows 11 builds is the best way to ensure your system remains as bug-free as possible.

How to enable the updated virtual desktops experience in Windows 11 build 23440 or 25346?

Note: The following IDs do not work in the latest Canary update, build 25352.

1. Download ViveTool from GitHub and unpack the files in a convenient and easy-to-find folder.
2. Press Win + X and select Terminal (Admin).
3. Switch Windows Terminal to the Command Prompt profile with the Ctrl + Shift + 2 shortcut or by clicking the arrow-down button at the top of the window.

    

   
4. Navigate to the folder containing the ViveTool files with the CD command. For example, if you have placed ViveTool in C:\Vive, type CD C:\Vive.
5. Type vivetool /enable /id:42354458,34508225,40459297 and press Enter.
6. Restart your computer.

Feature IDs responsible for the virtual desktop indicator seem related to the Cloud PC feature as implied by their names: CloudPCSwitch and CloudPCFastSwitchDiscovery. However, you do not need access to Windows 365 to benefit from the convenient indicator and the improved virtual desktop experience.

Finally, did you know Windows 11 has a similar privacy indicator that can show when you turn on or off your camera? Check out our guide describing how to enable it.

Microsoft is finally improving virtual desktops in Windows 11, here is how to test them

If you are in a Microsoft Teams meeting, you likely know you can do more than just chat with your fellow employees online. You can choose to chat in a meeting via a 3D avatar, or put on a fun Snapchat filter, among other things. Today, Microsoft is launching a way for Teams meetings to actually accept payments during a session.

Microsoft's blog post has announced that its new Teams Payment app is now available in a public preview version. Users can view of payments they receive in the app, or even future payments that might still be owed. If you are wondering what this new app could be used for, Microsoft has some ideas:

For example, a lawyer or financial advisor can collect payments for consultative appointments, a real estate instructor can do the same for license-renewal sessions, or a teacher for tutoring classes—all while the customer is engaging with them.

The Payments app is now available in the Teams store for download. At the moment, it's only for residents in the United States and Canada and for subscribers to Teams Essentials and Microsoft 365 business users. The app currently supports online payments via PayPal and Stripe but will expand to support GoDaddy sometime in the near future.

Microsoft Teams launches its new Payments app in public preview

Two core Unix-like utilities, sudo and su, are getting rewrites in Rust

Disclaimer: Reports from Statcounter and other companies are never 100% accurate, and the idea is to provide average values and pinpoint general trends. You can learn how Statcounter gathers its data in the official FAQ.

Statcounter says Safari is now in second place with a market share of 11.87%, a 0.95 points uplift compared with the previous month. Edge is now third, struggling to surpass an 11% mark for almost a year. In April 2023, Microsoft Edge lost 0.15 points. As for Chrome, it holds 66.13%, with a 0.36 points month-over-month increase.

Here are the most popular desktop browsers per Statcounter's latest findings:

1. Google Chrome - 66.13% (+0.36 points)
2. Apple Safari - 11.87% (+0.95 points)
3. Microsoft Edge - 11% (-0.15 points)
4. Firefox - 5.65% (-0.82 points)
5. Opera - 3.09% (-0.08 points)

Most things have stayed the same on the mobile side of the market. Chrome and Safari continue holding almost 90% of all users, leaving a little less than 5% to Samsung, 2% to Opera, and the rest to less-known browsers.

1. Google Chrome - 61.96% (-2.66 points)
2. Apple Safari - (+1.73 points)
3. Samsung Internet - 4.8% (+0.31 points)
4. Opera - 1.88% (+0.08 points)
5. UC Browser - 1.71% (+0.18 points)

You can learn more about the April 2023 browser report from Statcounter on the official website.

Statcounter: Microsoft Edge is no longer world's second desktop browser

With Microsoft winding down support for Windows 10, the OS will continue to receive monthly updates bringing security patches and minor improvements, but there is going to be no version "23H2" or any other feature update until the OS loses support altogether on October 14, 2025.

While Microsoft is actively working on improving Windows 11 already, rumors have already begun to swirl about the next major operating system update, which we refer to as "Windows 12" for now, though it could end up being called anything really (remember the missing Windows 9?).

However, one thing that has become abundantly clear since Windows 11's release is that Microsoft's customers (including maybe even myself) are resistant to change. Microsoft overhauled Windows' general interface and UX in a major way with Windows 11, and let's just say, not every change has been been responded to favorably by its customers. This isn't only about a change in interface either, there have been lots of complaints about reduced functionality in the name of simplicity. While the Redmond tech firm has been adding back some functionality, it's obvious that people have become accustomed to, and even prefer, lots of aspects of Windows 10 and are not ready to switch over just because Microsoft says that Windows 11 is more secure.

With Windows 12 expected to arrive next year - merely three years after the release of Windows 11 -, this behavior isn't going to change. People aren't just going to migrate from an OS that they have come to love just because the new one has some shiny AI and cloud features that they may not even use.

In a way, I find it a bit funny. I remember that when Windows 10 released, there was massive backlash against forced updates and telemetry functionalities that Microsoft introduced to the OS. While the tech firm eventually managed to iron out those issues, it took time, and now its apparently the most beloved current version of Windows.

Remember that Windows 10 became available in 2014, which means that it enjoyed almost seven years in the spotlight before Windows 11 took its place. People had time to get used to Windows 10, they haven't experienced the same with Windows 11 and now, we are already hearing about Windows 12 and a three-year upgrade cycle between major OS versions.

The general populace haven't warmed to the idea of Windows 11 within the past two years. According to StatCounter, Windows 10 enjoys nearly 75% of the Windows market share while Windows 11 is at a distant 20%. Of course, this will change with time but it will be a matter of months, not years. And with the operating system becoming even more fragmented with Windows 12 and then again with new versions every three years, I believe people will stick to a stable OS that they like (i.e. Windows 10) rather than upgrading and familiarizing with a new version every three years. Then there's also the issue of the relatively poor quality of Windows updates being pushed out and there just not being enough confidence that Microsoft is going to give feature updates enough time in the (development) oven.

I have a strong feeling that Microsoft is going to end up in yet another situation where a significant amount of its customer base is using an unsupported OS (Windows 10), à la Windows 7, and it will be years before a newer version of Windows grabs a majority market share. I don't think this is an ideal situation for a firm which seems intent on using security as the major reason to get people to update. Microsoft doesn't want to be pushing out-of-band security updates to Windows 10 just because its customer base refuses to move on.

Only time will tell how eager people are to switch from Windows 10, and to a seemingly turbulent Windows update process where we have new releases every three years and multiple major versions are being supported in parallel. I wouldn't be surprised at all if we find out that people have decided to stick to Windows 10 - just like they did with Windows 7 - just because familiarity trumps every new thing Microsoft could introduce with its next operating systems. For the majority, it doesn't matter if Windows 11, 12, or 13 offer new functionalities, it's more about how the human mind works in terms of inertia and resistance to change. And while that's understandable to me, I don't think it's a desirable situation for Microsoft.

Source

In a blog post, Brave said that prior to this week's announcement, the Bing Search API generated about seven percent of the answers in Brave Search. Besides the desire to completely be free of using info from third parties, Brave said that there were also some concerns about the future of the Bing Search API, due to Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI and the use of its ChatGPT technology in Bing Chat. It stated:

We feared for the continuity of the Bing service, which turned out to be a prescient concern, as Microsoft recently announced an unprecedented increase in its API pricing. This created undue pressure for search engines that rely partly or fully on the Bing Search API. The consequences of their reliance on Bing will play out in the following months when their long term contracts expire.

Brave has also announced that it will release the Brave Search API for developers and companies who want to access its search technology. More details on this new business model will be revealed in the future.

Source

If you were thinking about installing Debian 11 on your computer and have already downloaded one of the older point releases, just install that. As long as you do post-install updates you’ll be on Debian 11.7, so there’s no need to create new installation media. If you are trying to install it on an offline device, then it’s worth grabbing the latest ISO.

Some of the packages that have received fixes in Debian 11.7 include Flatpak, LibreOffice, the Linux Kernel, MariaDB, NVIDIA graphics drivers, systemd, Firefox ESR, Thunderbird, Chromium, Emacs, Java, Git, Rails, and many more. For a full list, check out the announcement.

Debian 12 “Bookworm” is slated for release in mid-2023. It will jump from Linux 5.10 to Linux 6.1, bringing support for more hardware. It should get security updates until July 2026 before being maintained by the LTS team which will keep it alive until June 2028.

Debian 11.7 releases with the latest security updates

China has again signalled its intention to shape IPv6 standards and encourage more uptake of the standards within its borders – but may not have succeeded with its past ambitions.

The nation's Central Network Information Office, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and a couple of other agencies on Thursday issued a 2023 Work Arrangement for Further Promoting Large-scale IPv6 Deployment and Application that sets a goal for 750 million users to actively employ IPv6 by the end of 2023, with 300 million Internet of Things devices using the protocol. Fifteen percent of fixed networks and 55 percent of mobile network traffic are expected to run over IPv6 by year's end.

Those numbers represent an increase on 2022's targets that called for 700 million users and 180 million IoT devices by the end of 2023, while the 55 percent mobile-over-IPv6 goal supersedes a previous goal of 45 percent.

The new goals may also be unrealistic. Akamai's State of the Internet report suggests IPv6 adoption rates fell from 28.1 percent in August 2022 to 23.3 percent in April 2023, with a brief spike to 28.7 percent in January 2023.

China won't allow new IPv4 services as of 2024, so it's conceivable the decline in IPv6 prevalence is attributable to a last gasp of IPv4 adoption.

Whatever the cause of the dip Akamai detected, Beijing has plenty of plans to accelerate IPv6 adoption – among them ensuring that clouds, content delivery networks, smartphone apps, and commercial websites make the move to the protocol.

Government websites will also be encouraged do better, while government agencies will be urged to update their applications to IPv6 despite utterly failing to make such targets in 2022.

A reminder: in 2022 China called for 85 per cent IPv6 adoption by government and major commercial websites. Clearly much work remains to be done.

The plan also calls for China to "promote the construction of innovation ecology and standard system. Including improving the 'IPv6+' technology industry ecosystem, strengthening innovative research on new internet architecture, coordinating the formulation and implementation of IPv6 standards, and actively participating in the formulation of international standards for the next generation internet."

China's tried to formulate such standards before, with a plan for "New IP" that it tried to push through the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) despite that body not overseeing development of the Internet Protocol standard.

New IP, which has its roots at Huawei, included features that would allow governments greater control over the internet. Russia and China backed a candidate for ITU secretary-general who supported the idea that nations should have more control over the internet within their jurisdictions.

A rival candidate backed by the US and other nations was elected to the post, making it less likely that New IP would be endorsed.

China's efforts to influence standards have since been rated ineffectual and amateurish by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Beijing's latest IPv6 update makes it plain that China has not given up on its ambition to shape the standard – probably in ways that reflect its own preference for state control of the local internet.

Chinese citizens last week had a horrible taste of that control at work: news of a fire in a Beijing hospital that killed at least 20 patients was scantily reported on social and news media – a seemingly intentional act of preventing bad news from reaching the populace. ®

Source

Microsoft’s Edge has started rolling out address bar adverts when developer browser users are on Google’s Bard site that encourages users to try their Bing AI chatbot instead.

According(Opens in a new window) to developer and Twitter user Vitor de Lucca, a new developer version of Edge now displays an advert for Bing next to the Google Bard URL. It is also showing up on the current Mac (version 114.0.1807.1) and PC versions of Microsoft Edge developer.

As The Verge notes(Opens in a new window), anyone that goes onto bard.google.com while using Edge will spot a new animated slide that reads “compare answers with the AI-powered new Bing in the upper-right corner of the address bar. The text then slides to the right before revealing a Bing icon, which once clicked, launches Microsoft Edge’s new split view which allows users to compare Bing AI answers with Google’s Bard.

According to Neowin(Opens in a new window), the banner was also spotted in Microsoft Edge Canary Channel.

The Bing AI ad isn’t exactly new territory for Microsoft. For years, Bing users searching for Chrome have received a banner at the top of the results promoting Edge. That banner reads: “Microsoft Edge is powered by the same open source technology as Google Chrome, providing best in class web and extension compatibility.”

In February this year, Microsoft briefly took its ads even further by injecting two ads on the Chrome website(Opens in a new window) before swiftly removing them. The first was a tiny pop-up telling users to stick with Edge while the second full-size advertisement appeared when users start downloading Chrome.

Source

Let's get this part out of the way: Mosaic was not the first web browser ever released. That honor belongs to WorldWideWeb, which was launched a few years before in 1990 by developer Tim Berners-Lee when he worked at CERN. Later other browsers like Viola and Cello were launched. However, Mosaic was different.

The browser was first developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina when they were graduate students at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Unlike earlier web browsers, which showed text and images in separate windows, Mosaic's biggest innovation was that it was capable of showing both text and images in the same window. It made looking at websites like you were reading a magazine page.

Mosaic also let users click on hyperlinks to go to other pages or sites, instead of manually typing a URL address It had a user interface design that was easy to understand. The now familiar buttons for going back or forward through sites, or refreshing a page, were in place with Mosaic.

While originally launched for Unix systems, Mosaic versions were released later in 1993 for Windows and Macintosh. The need for a closed internet service like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, and the other online services that popped up in the 1980s started to slowly go away. All you needed to access the internet was an ISP and Mosaic installed. The NCSA's official Mosaic website states that by December 1993 "more than 5,000 copies of the browser were being downloaded a month and the center was receiving hundreds of thousands of email inquiries a week."

Keep in mind this is an era where most homes could only connect to the internet with a 28.8k phone modem.

Starting in 1994, the US National Science Foundation started funding for further development of Mosaic. However, even then the writing was on the wall for the web browser's shutdown. Later that year, Mosaic's co-creator Marc Andreessen left NCSA and helped to found Mosaic Communications Corporation.

That company released its first browser, called Mosaic Netscape, in late 1994. The NCSA threatened legal action at the new company for using the Mosaic brand for the browser and company. The browser was finally named Netscape Navigator, and the company was renamed Netscape Communications Corporation.

Netscape quickly became the browser of choice for most Internet users, which meant Mosaic was being downloaded and used less and less. As a result, in January 1997, the NCSA shut down the development of the web browser. Of course, Netscape soon had to deal with Microsoft's efforts with its own Internet Explorer browser, but that is a whole different story that we may write about another day. Netscape met its eventual end in 2008.

While the NCSA did shut down its development, the organization continues to be proud of Mosaic. 10 years after its official launch, it held a birthday party of sorts for the browser. Rick Rashid, the founder of Microsoft Research was one of the event's guests.

While Mosaic was ultimately a short-lived computer application, it certainly had a massive influence on the internet in general, and the entire world as a whole. Even in this world of apps and social networks, websites continue to be the primary way we get information online. Mosaic's features of combining words and images on one web page, its use of embedded hyperlinks, and its standard UI are the basics for all web browsers released afterwards. The National Science Foundation's article on Mosaic, posted in 2004, sums up its impact.

"Without Mosaic, Web browsers might not have happened or be what they are today," said Peter Freeman, NSF assistant director for CISE. "The growth of the Web and its impact on daily life shows the kind of dramatic payoff that NSF investments in computer science research can have for all areas of science and engineering, education and society as a whole."

That impact remains true in 2023, and it will likely continue to be felt for years to come.

Source

WingetUI, which is a third-party GUI utility tool for managing CLI package managers like Winget or Scoop, has received its latest update today. The new update, version 1.7.0, adds a new interface that allows users to ignore updates, pin packages, among other things. There is also caching improvements in this release which means loading times of packages are much faster. There are many more improvements in this release.

You can find the full changelog below:

New features:

• A new interface is available to ignore updates. It allows:
  • Pinning packages
  • Skipping a version of a package.
  • Viewing and removing single packages from the blacklist
• The Package Details window has a new section that allows to customize the install:
  • All the options are under a collapsable widget
  • User can modify:
    • Architecture to install
    • Installation environment (user or machine, local or global, etc.)
    • Version to install (can automatically blacklist packages when installed, so older versions don't get updated when installed manually)
    • Custom parameters to pass to the installer. There is now a textbox to be able to do that
  • The Command label has been improved to adapt to the new options and toggles.
• Notifications have been reworked:
  • Notifications will now show buttons on them, to make quick actions easier to reach.
  • Notifications can now be enabled/disabled depending on their category.
• A new, system-integrated share popup has been implemented
• Administrator preferences have been reworked:
  • Package managers can be automatically elevated.
  • The user has the option to cache administrator rights.

Improvements

• WingetUI Interface has been improved:
  • Context menus have more options, and more organized
  • Toolbars show more relevant actions, removing some redundancies with the context menus
  • Scrolling has been improved, featuring:
    • Smooth mouse scrolling
    • Better support for keyboard scrolling
    • Reurn to top buttons
  • The launch popup has been improved.
  • TreeWidgets StyleSheets have been improved to use more efficiently the space available on the window
  • Transparencies have been reworked across the interface, in a way where the interface is now much more responsive
• Chocolatey support has been improved:
  • Installations won't show a 20-second delay anymore
  • More information is available in the details window
• Scoop support has been improved:
  • Packages are now cached, so loading times are notably faster.
  • More information is available in the details window
  • Error handling has been improved on already-installed updates.
  • Auto-elevation has been improved on uninstalls
• Winget support has been improved:
  • Packages are now cached, so loading times are notably faster.
  • Error handling has been improved on already-installed updates.
  • "Unknown" updates are now properly handled (thanks to the new version skipping feature)

You can download WingetUI version 1.7.0 from Neowin or from its GitHub page.

Latest WingetUI gets new UI, faster loading performance, and lots more

Now, Thunderbird users may also install the popular content blocker uBlock Origin directly. The change was revealed yesterday on the official GitHub repository of the project.

Thunderbird users may select Tools > Add-ons and Themes in the application to open the Add-ons Manager. There, they may select Add-ons, if not selected already, and use the search to find uBlock Origin.

The extension has no users currently as it is brand new. A click on it and then another on the install option starts the installation process. It should be listed under add-ons afterwards.

Thunderbird users find the uBlock Origin button in the mail toolbar afterwards. It is not active all the time, but that is understandable, considering that an email program works differently than browsers.

Emails are not touched right now by the content blocker. The maker of uBlock Origin, Gorhill, explained this here. According to Gorhill, uBlock Origin does not have access to emails at this stage and that it may be used to process feeds displayed in the email client currently only.

Thunderbird may be used to display RSS feeds in the client. It is not the best RSS Feed reader, but it may work for users who subscribe to a small number of feeds. These feeds are downloaded when accessed and they may contain elements that users may not want to see.

To view RSS feeds, Thunderbird users need to create a Feed account in the Account Manager. This account is then listed in the sidebar, and feeds may either be imported from another supported program, or added manually.

Most Thunderbird users, every user who does not read feeds in the email client, may not need to install the current version of uBlock Origin. This may change in the future, especially if functionality such as tracker blocking could be implemented for emails.

You may now install uBlock Origin in Thunderbird

The adjective, Mantic, "relating to divination or prophecy", comes from the Greek word mantikos and mantis which means prophet. So you could read Mantic Minotaur as Prophetic Minotaur.

The disclosure of the codename for Ubuntu 23.10 comes nearly a month after the cycle’s calendar was published in which it states that a beta will be made available on 21st September and the final release due on 12th October. The beta will give the public an opportunity to try it out and report any last-minute bugs that developers may have missed.

Similar to the just-released Ubuntu 23.04, Ubuntu 23.10 will be a non-LTS release and will only be supported for nine months. For those who are more focused on getting work done, it’s probably better to stick with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS until Ubuntu 24.04 LTS comes out next April. If you want to test out the latest features, then Ubuntu 23.10 could be a good choice for you.

It isn’t clear yet what new features will come with the Mantic Minotaur but if you haven’t already, check out Neowin’s coverage of the Lunar Lobster to see what was added.

Ubuntu 23.10 goes all-in on the mythical creature theme with Mantic Minotaur codename

Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Linux is also getting some improvements to Rust. The latest Linux patches reveal that kernel version 6.4 is getting more optimizations which will help to reduce the need for "unsafe" code. The patch says:

More additions to the Rust core. Importantly, this adds the pin-init API, which will be used by other abstractions, such as the synchronization ones added here too:

- pin-init API: a solution for the safe pinned initialization problem. This allows to reduce the need for 'unsafe' code in the kernel when dealing with data structures that require a stable address.

There are many more additions in the pipeline and they can be viewed in the pull request here.

Aside from Rust, both Windows 11 and Linux are also getting some decent improvements in terms of file system performance. While there is ReFS to look forward to on the Windows side, Linux is getting some good improvements on F2FS, Btrfs, EXT4, as well as unofficial NTFS.

Source: LKML via Phoronix

It's not just Microsoft's Windows 11, Linux is also getting more Rust-y

Windows 11 Development Environment includes everything a developer may need to start creating apps for Microsoft's latest operating system. The virtual machines come prebuilt for four virtualization services: VMWare, second-gen Hyper-V, VirtualBox, and Parallels (the official method to run Windows on ARM-powered Macs), and they include the following:

• Windows 11 Enterprise edition build 22621.1555 (Moment 2 Update)

• Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition with UWP, .NET Desktop, Azure, and Windows App SDK for C# workloads enabled

• Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 enabled with Ubuntu installed

• Windows Terminal installed

• Developer mode enabled

   

Microsoft's virtual machines are free during the evaluation period. On July 18, 2023, the operating system will prompt you to enter a valid Enterprise license key to continue using it. The desktop background will turn black, and the OS will power off every hour.

You can download the latest Windows 11 Development Environment from the official website. Make sure you have at least 23GB of free disk space, and your PC can allocate 8GB of RAM to run the WDE.

Microsoft releases new free Windows 11 evaluation virtual machines

In case you haven't received the Windows Update Health Tools, it can also be manually downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center for commercial customers. On the support document, Microsoft writes:

Microsoft Update Health Tools is offered to devices through Windows Update as update KB4023057. This update is applicable for both Windows consumer and commercial devices, with a slightly different purpose and functionality.

• On Windows consumer devices, this update helps remediate smooth functioning of Windows Update.

• For commercial devices, this update is recommended for Windows Update for Business (WUfB) Deployment Service for managing Feature and Quality Updates.

The Microsoft Update Health Tools is required for Expediting security updates through Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Graph.

In order to verify if the Microsoft Update Health Tools are working, users can migrate to the installation files (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Update Health Tools). Likewise, commercial customers can check if the Update Health service is running on their devices.

You can find more details regarding the update in the official support article.

KB4023057: Microsoft slightly improves Windows Update on Windows 11 and 10, again

Here is the changelog:

Starting with today’s build, Windows Insiders in the Canary Channel will notice that the name of the branch shown in the desktop watermark has changed to ZN_RELEASE. Just like we have done in the past, we can change which branch we flight builds from. As our engineers work in development cycles internally, we may prioritize work being done in a specific branch and may need to move Insiders between branches. We are treating these builds the same as we would treat builds from the RS_PRERELEASE branch. As a result of this change, Insiders will notice that some features have been removed temporarily. We look to bring these features back to Insiders in the future. And builds from the ZN_RELEASE branch should not be viewed as being matched to a specific Windows 11 release.

Changes and Improvements

[Widgets]

We are beginning to roll out a new widget picker experience to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels with an image that gives a visual preview of the widget before pinning, a deep linking ability that allows users to jump directly to the picker from the provider app/service as well as a link to the widgets Store collection page where users can discover more apps with widgets.

Updated widgets picker

You can check out the full blog post here.

Windows 11 Insider Canary Preview Build 25352 released with new widget picker experience

Phoronix tested the 8-core, 16-threaded Ryzen 7 7800X3D recently on Ubuntu and compared it against Windows 11. While it was a close-fought battle overall, Ubuntu managed to come out on top. Following that, it was time to look at the performance of Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) to see how well it did against Ubuntu.

Just like when it was tested back in 2021 with original Windows 11 21H2, WSL put up a decent show as it mostly traded blows did fall behind in some scenarios. For example, in x265 video encoding, it was far behind native Ubuntu, both 22.04.2 LTS and 23.04. A similar situation was seen in MariaDB database benchmark. However, it was also faster in memcaching tests.

Here's how Phoronix concluded the comparison:

For many different practical workloads, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) performance continues looking quite nice on Microsoft Windows 11. Overall it was a fairly pleasant experience with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on WSL2 with the latest Windows 11. For many workloads there is similar performance to running bare metal Linux if due to corporate protocols or other reasons you are otherwise stuck to be using a Windows host. Plus Microsoft continues extending WSL2 functionality for supporting graphical/3D applications, video acceleration, and other functionality too.

You can find more details on Phoronix's website.

Windows 11's WSL 2 does fairly well against native Ubuntu, most of the time

A new change list from Microsoft on Chromium Gerrit (via) suggests a "minimal set of code change" to equip Chromium with an opaque tab bar (or title bar) on systems running Windows 11 version 22H2:

This CL demonstrates a minimal set of code changes to enable the Mica
Alt titlebar material in Chromium using Windows 11 22H2's new
DWMWA_SYSTEMBACKDROP_TYPE DWM attribute. It should be launched with the
--disable-windows10-custom-titlebar CLI argument for the effect to show.

This CL is for demonstration purposes only. It assumes Windows 11 22H2
or later, dark mode, and the default Chromium colour scheme are in use,
and that high contrast mode and accent-coloured titlebars are not.

Here is how Chrome may look with the Mica Alt effect applied to its tab bar:

Chromium with the Mica Alt (darker) effect.

Chromium with the Mica (lighter) effect.

It might take a while before we see Chrome offering a better-looking user interface on Windows 11. Still, it is great to see Microsoft contributing to Chromium with user-favorite design changes. Meanwhile, developers can learn how to implement Mica in the apps using the official documentation and code samples from the recently updated WinUI Gallery app.

Windows 11's Mica effect may soon come to Chrome

Here is the changelog:

What’s new?

Bing rebranded: Introducing the new 'GPT AI Co-pilot' conversation header across all platforms. Continue to enjoy AI-powered real-time answers and insights, along with improvements to your Bing chat experience in both 1:1 and group conversations. Download the latest Skype update here.

Desktop Today tab: Keep your finger on the pulse with the latest news and trends as we bring the Today tab experience from mobile to desktop platforms. Discover more about the Skype Today tab. Currently only available in the US.

Bug fixes:

• Skype chat translation (1:1) in a translated conversation was only working one-way on Windows.
• On tapping a notification, it didn’t navigate you directly to the message on which that reaction was made on iPhone.
• The Share button shared the link twice on iOS.
• Not receiving missed calls notifications on iOS.
• UI is broken when bookmarking your own message on Web on Mac.
• Could not enter into a chat group when clicking a non Bing url link on Web on Windows.

You can check out the full blog post here.

The latest Skype Insider build adds the Today tab to desktop users and more

The new feature is similar to the one that was added in Excel and PowePoint editions of Windows. Microsoft's blog post states:

The Accessibility ribbon brings together all the tools you need to make your message accessible in one place. It is contextual and appears at the same time as the Accessibility Checker pane.

Users can bring up the new ribbon when they start writing an email by clicking on the Message option on top, and then clicking on the Check Accessibility icon. An alternative way is to search for "accessibility" in Outlook's Search bar. You can then pick Accessibility Checkerunder the Best Action selection. Finally, if you are writing an email that's labeled as "high importance" and there's a colour contrast issue in the email body, it will bring up the Review accessibility issues link in the MailTip.

Right now the Outlook accessibility ribbon is available to members of the Office Insider program in the Beta channel with version 2304 (Build 16321.20000) or above. There's no word yet on the general availability date for this feature in Outlook.

Microsoft adds Excel and PowerPoint's Accessibility ribbon to Outlook for Windows

Alongside these, it looks like NTFS on Linux is also getting some optimizations and improvements with the NTFS3 driver. This Linux implementation of Microsoft's NTFS file system is developed by the Paragon Software Group. You can find details about Paragon's NTFS3 here.

Coming back to the patch itself, it has some improvements for NTFS3 like optimizations, some fixed logic errors, code cleanups, as well as removal of a couple of features that don't work:

Added:

• add missed "nocase" in ntfs_show_options;
• extend information on fails\errors;
• small optimizations.

Fixed:

• some logic errors;
• some dead code was removed;
• code is refactored and reformatted according to the new version of clang-format.

Removed:

• noacsrules option. Currently, this option does not work properly. Its use leads to unstable results. If we figure out how to implement it without errors, we will add it later;
• writepage.

These changes are meant to land in the Linux kernel version 6.4.

Source: LKML via Phoronix

Following F2FS, Btrfs, EXT4 performance boosts, Linux is also getting some NTFS improvements

Brave Search's journey began in 2021 with the acquisition of Tailcat's search engine and development team. Brave Software planned to evolve it into a fully independent search engine that would not rely on content provided by Microsoft's Bing Search or Google's Google Search engine.

Brave Search Beta launched in June 2021 and Brave Software started to make it the default search engine in its browser Brave a few months later.

Several new features were added to Brave Search ever since. The company added Discussions to search results, to add "real-human conversations" to Brave Search. Brave Search Goggles was designed to boost or downrank sites to customize results, and Brave Search Summarizer added AI-powered quick results to the search engine.

Brave Search reached a milestone this week. All results provided by the search engine come from its own index now. About 7% of queries came from Bing Search until recently, but all connections to the Bing API have been cut according to the announcement.

The improvement was achieved through rapid growth and "broad adoption of the Web Discovery Project". Brave Search averages 22 million queries per day, according to Brave Software. The Web Discovery Project allows users to contribute browsing data anonymously to grow the index of the search engine.

Brave Software admits that uncertainty regarding Bing's API access were a major concern and driving factor in becoming fully independent. Microsoft did increase Bing API pricing recently, in some cases by up to 1000%.

All search results on Brave Search are now powered by the search engine's own index. The Google Fallback option remains available for the time being. It was introduced to give Brave Search users an option if the returned results did not provide the answers or information the user was looking for.

Full independence gives Brave Software full control over its search engine, and it reduces costs for the company, as calls to Bing's API do not have to be made anymore.

Brave Software plans to launch an API soon, the Brave Search API, which gives access to the API to developers and companies. Brave Software did not reveal information on pricing at this point or whether there will be a free option available.

Internet users have now another fully independent search option at their disposal.

Now You: have you tried Brave Search?

Brave Search reaches full independence

While most people are familiar with VPNs and their use cases, only a few know about VPN's more powerful and secure software brother, VPS.

VPS or Virtual Private Server is a virtual computer that you can use for a variety of online purposes, such as software development, gaming, trading, and more. To understand VPS, imagine a big storage room located in another country, which we'll name the Main Vault. In the Main Vault, you can store up to 5 Exabytes (EB), which is equivalent to one billion gigabytes (GB).

If your company doesn't have this much data to store, you can lend the enormous storage space to other entities by setting up strong and secure separators to divide the Main Vault into, for example, 100 isolated departments.

But with virtualization technology, you can divide the Main Vault into isolated mini vaults, which we'll call VVaults. A VVault (V is for virtual) is a virtual server originating from the main physical server, the Main Vault, but has its operating system. This means that although all VVaults use the Main Vault's hardware to function, they are 100% independent of each other.

Linux VPS OS vs Windows VPS OS

When it comes to choosing the right VPS OS, there are two options to consider: Linux VPS and Windows VPS. Linux VPS is a VPS running on the Linux operating system, while Windows VPS runs on the Windows operating system. To determine which OS is best for you, you need to learn about their features.

Linux is a free and open-source operating system renowned for its agility in software development. Its open-source nature makes it the safest and most flexible operating system. The Linux community consists of expert developers who can detect and block malicious attacks in minutes. While some believe that using Linux requires knowledge of command lines, that's not entirely true. It depends on your daily tasks. You don't have to open the Linux terminal to surf the web, send emails, or complete your work projects. But if you need to test and compile new software or want to tweak OS setups and configurations, you need to know basic coding to use a Linux terminal.

Windows, on the other hand, is a closed-source operating system that's popular for its easy-to-use Graphical User Interface (GUI). Most companies use Windows OS because of its compatibility with robust, productive software such as Office 365, Dropbox, Microsoft OneNote, OneDrive, etc. Regarding speed and performance, Windows comes in second compared to Linux. Windows OS is high-maintenance software that doesn't perform well on old hardware. However, you don't have to learn a single command line to navigate through its interface. You can use Windows without much direction, even if you're a complete tech beginner. And if you run into any technical issues, you can contact Microsoft's 24/7 expert support team.

The only drawback to Windows OS is that because it's widely used, it has become the perfect target for hackers. But installing a powerful antivirus can protect your data against cybercrooks. Regarding pricing, Windows is not free, but when you purchase a Windows VPS, the OS is already installed and ready to go.

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, Linux is generally cheaper than Windows. Linux is open-source software, which means it's free to use and distribute. However, if you need commercial support for your Linux VPS, you may have to pay for it. On the other hand, Windows is not free, but when you purchase a Windows VPS, the OS is already installed and ready to go, which can save you time and effort.

Security considerations

One thing to keep in mind is that while Linux VPS is generally more secure than Windows VPS, it requires more technical knowledge to operate. If you're not comfortable with command-line interfaces and programming, you may find Linux challenging to use. Windows VPS, on the other hand, is more user-friendly and easier to operate, but it's also more vulnerable to security threats.

In addition to Linux and Windows, there are other VPS OS options available, such as FreeBSD and Solaris. However, these are less commonly used and may not offer the same level of support and compatibility as Linux and Windows.

At the end of the day, choosing the best VPS OS for beginners requires careful consideration of your specific needs and priorities. By weighing the pros and cons of each option and evaluating their features and compatibility with your applications, you can choose the right VPS OS that meets your requirements and helps you achieve your online goals.

Which operating system is best for a VPS OS, Linux or Windows?

Rust is now beginning to reach Windows developers as Microsoft looks to safeguard some of its most important core code.

Windows Director of OS Security David Weston explained that Windows would boot with Rust in the “next several weeks or months,” and true to his word, the company has been rewriting core libraries in the memory-safe code.

He continued to explain the company’s goal of converting C++ data types into their Rust equivalents, proclaiming “very few calls to unsafe code” in a nod to the company’s success.

Rust for Windows

Memory-safe code has been a growing topic for discussion in recent years, given the potential for bugs in code to affect any electronic device running software or firmware. Rust is designed to help prevent exploitable code from being shipped in the first place, making Windows, in this case, more secure.

Microsoft’s commitment to Rust isn’t unique, with Google already having announced its readiness for the coding language two years ago in Android, stating that “memory safety bugs in C and C++ continue to be the most-difficult-to-address source of incorrectness.” Rust joined Kotlin and Java in the Android Open Source Project.

DWriteCore in Windows 10 and above has already been part of the Rust revolution, and now has substantially more lines of Rust code than C++.

The move to Rust is one that sees the company’s developers tackling the OS’s oldest challenges, according to Weston, who hinted at a more secure future for Windows.

At the Tel Aviv presentation (opens in new tab), he explained that “as much as we love Rust, we know it’s probably not the solution to rewrite the last 40 years of C and C++ code in Rust,” indicating that “broader approaches” may spell out a future whereby Rust may not be the be-all-and-end-all solution.

Source