News: Software News

Amazon Linux 2022 Launched, Completely Re-based with Fedora

Sat, 27 Nov 2021 14:29:03 +0000

Amazon Linux 2022 to be based upon Fedora Linux and available via AWS AMIs. We wrap up the announcement and express our views about this change in terms of FOSS ecosystem.

Amazon Linux 2022 – image credit: Amazon

What is Amazon Linux 2022

Code named AL2022, this is the next generation of Amazon Linux that is offered via AWS. It is developed by Amazon by rebasing upstream Fedora Linux. This Linux is available via AWS control panel as AMIs. Using this Linux, you can develop and run all types of cloud and enterprise applications. And it is available at no additional cost.

Amazon Linux 2022 – Features and Schedule

The AL2022 is tightly integrated with AWS-specific tools and capabilities. It also features immediate access to new Amazon innovations and single window support from Amazon.

The good news is at somewhere else. Think about a scenario where you manage, deploy or plan for large space cloud infra instances. Planning for patches, upgrades, compatibility can be really a pain if you do not have a proper release cadences of your applications with underlying operating system.

So, Amazon promises that Amazon Linux 2022 will have two year standard support followed by three years maintenance support. During the two-year standard support period, you get quarterly minor updates. And During maintenance support, you get critical security updates as soon as they are available.

Amazon Linux 2022 Release Cadence – image credit: Amazon

For example, Amazon Linux 2022 will have standard support until 2023. And maintenance support with EOL at 2027. This is really impressive support from Amazon considering their offerings.

However, it is not clear to me how Fedora releases are combined with this. Because Fedora have two major releases per year, and not sure whether new Fedora Linux releases are patched downstream to Amazon Linux as part of standard quarterly updates.

Feature wise, Amazon Linux 2022 will have SELinux enabled by default that makes it easier to manage security policies for the customers. This reduces time, effort and costs.

How to Get Started?

If you plan to buy or have a test run, you definitely need an AWS account and then refer to the how-to guide in link, which requires an AWS account.

https://github.com/amazonlinux/amazon-linux-2022#how-to-get-started

What it means to Linux, in general?

Fedora Linux is like “Alpha” test bed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora is always “leading-edge” + “bleeding-edge” distro. In my opinion, when a cloud dominating company like Amazon adopts Fedora as their commercial offering, the quality of Fedora Linux as a whole definitely going to be improved.

Think about a scenario for a moment. AWS is creating millions of Fedora Linux instances for various industry workloads. And there might be some bugs, or additional packages, or performance tweaks suggested by Amazon. Now, Amazon may consult Fedora Official team for possible fixes to the upstream. And that eventually helps the entire community.

Also, another context is also in play. With Canonical upping their game on Ubuntu Cloud offerings, this might a larger push from Red Hat to bring Fedora into the Cloud Market. So, Red Hat will have more control in Cloud space eventually with multiple offerings.

Furthermore, other Cloud players such as Google Cloud, Azure – may start considering Fedora as their additional offerings for industry work-loads.

That said, I believe, this announcement is a win-win for Amazon and Open Source Linux as a whole. On the contrary, Microsoft has a long term plan. The entire WSL and Ubuntu friendship is eventually boils down to moving Linux Server market share to Windows server via WSL. And that has not much benefit to the core FOSS ecosystem, I believe.

What do you think about this announcement with respect to FOSS as a whole? Let me know your opinion in the comment box below.

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How to turn off "Search the Web" results in Windows 11

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 23:10:33 +0000

When you run searches on Windows 11 from the operating system's Start Menu, you will get local results as well as web-based results powered by Bing by default. Microsoft introduced web search functionality in Windows 10 and has kept the feature in Windows 11.

Many Windows 11 users see web searching as a way for Microsoft to promote its Bing search engine, and not as something that adds value to the search functionality. Web Search integration broke Windows Search at least once on Windows 10, and there is the chance that this is going to happen again.

Disable Search the Web on Windows 11

Windows 11 comes with an official option to turn off web searching in the Start Menu. It is not an option in the Settings application. While there is an option to manage cloud content search in the Settings application, it does not affect Internet search in the Windows 11 Start Menu but content of the Microsoft Account, e.g. form OneDrive, that may be returned.

Just turn off the options on the page and run a search; you will notice that results from Bing web searches are still included.

The official option is available in the Group Policy Editor and Registry. The Group Policy Editor is only available in professional and Enterprise editions of Windows 11. Home users need to make the change in the Registry to get rid of "Search the web" in the Start Menu.

The Group Policy option

Open Start, type gpedit.msc and select the Group Policy Editor item to launch the Local Group Policy Editor. Note that you need elevated rights to access the tool.
Use the sidebar on the left to navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search.
Double-click on the policy "Do not allow web search".
Set the status of the policy to Enabled.
Click ok.
Double-click on the policy "Don't search the web or display web results in Search".
Set the status of the policy to Enabled.
Click ok.
Restart the PC.

Note that it is possible that you may still web-based results after making the change. If that is the case, you will need to make the edits in the Registry to stop web search results in Windows 11's Start Menu.

The Registry option

Select Start, type regedit.exe and select the Registry Editor to launch it. Accept the UAC prompt that is displayed.
Navigate to Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search
Right-click on Search and select New > Dword (32-bit) Value.
Name the value BingSearchEnabled.
Double-click on the new Dword and set data to 0.

The change should be visible right away. Just run a search from the Start Menu to verify that no web search results are displayed anymore on the Windows 11 PC.

Just delete the Dword value again if you want to restore the default functionality.

How to turn off "Search the Web" results in Windows 11

WhatsApp Web gets a Custom Sticker Maker; Desktop version to follow next week

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 23:33:23 +0000

WhatsApp has announced a new way that allows you to personalize your chats. One feature that has grown quite popular among IMs is stickers. Today, the Meta-owned messaging service has released a Custom Sticker Maker tool for its service.

The option is currently live for WhatsApp Web users. When you access the page, you will be prompted to update the web app, following which the sticker creation tool will be ready to use.

How to create a custom sticker in WhatsApp Web

1. Open WhatsApp Web in your computer's browser, and switch to any chat.

2. Click the attachment button (paperclip icon) to the left of the text box, and a number of options will pop up on the screen. Select the penultimate one, that's the Create Sticker button.

3. The web app will prompt you to select an image from your computer. Make your choice and WhatsApp Web will display an image editor, that you can use to personalize the picture.

4. The toolbar at the top of the screen has various options that you could find helpful. The first tool is called, Outline, and lets you draw a freehand or straight outline that determines the shape of your sticker.

The next button, you know what this does, it can be used to add emojis to your sticker. Or, you can add existing WhatsApp stickers too. That's a bit wacky.

Use the text tool to add a message or a cool caption to your sticker. The web app allows you to change the text color, font type, and the alignment.

If you are skilled at free hand drawing, you can get creative with the pen tool. It has a few color options, and 4 brush sizes that you can choose from. Adjust the angle of your sticker or resize it with the crop and rotate tool.

Made a mistake while editing the sticker? The Undo and Redo buttons will take you a step back or forward, as required.

When you are done editing your sticker, send it to your contact, and it will appear in the conversation, like a normal sticker does, i.e., tapping the image will not cause it to open in the picture viewer, so you can't zoom in either. You can find your created stickers in WhatsApp's stickers panel, for future use. Oddly, the Custom Sticker Maker does not allow you to edit saved stickers, so you will need to start over in case you want to make some changes to it. The tool does not support animated GIFs, so you'll have to make do with JPG, PNG, etc.

The Custom Sticker Maker is not available in WhatsApp Desktop yet, but according to The Verge, the feature will arrive sometime next week. It is unclear if the option will be added to WhatsApp Beta for Windows 10 and 11, there is no reason it shouldn't, but my point is we don't have an ETA for it. If you haven't tried it already, try the new app from the Microsoft Store. It's a lot snappier than the old desktop client, and displays notifications even when the program is closed.

What do you think about the WhatsApp Web Custom Sticker Maker? I think it might be useful to import stickers from other services, though it will undoubtedly be used for creating memes.

WhatsApp Web gets a Custom Sticker Maker; Desktop version to follow next week

Microsoft makes Windows 11 Enterprise virtual machine images available for VMWare, Hyper-V, VirtualBox and Parallels

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 23:43:57 +0000

Microsoft is making things a little bit easier for enterprise network admins.

The company has made Windows 11 Enterprise images available for a variety of virtual machines including VMWare, Hyper-V, VirtualBox and Parallels.

The images include:

Window 11 Enterprise (evaluation)
Windows 10 SDK, version 2004 (10.0.19041.0)
Visual Studio 2019 (latest as of 10/09/21) with the UWP, .NET desktop, and Azure workflows enabled and also includes the Windows Template Studio extension
Visual Studio Code (latest as of 10/09/21)
Windows Subsystem for Linux enabled with Ubuntu installed
Developer mode enabled
Windows Terminal installed

The 20 GB download is available now and expires on the 9th of January 2022.

Find it at Microsoft here.

via the WC

Microsoft makes Windows 11 Enterprise virtual machine images available for VMWare, Hyper-V, VirtualBox and Parallels

Windows 10 KB5007253 update released with network printing fixes

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 23:42:15 +0000

Microsoft has released the optional KB5007253 Preview cumulative update for Windows 10 2004, Windows 10 20H2, Windows 10 21H1, and Windows 10 21H2.

Microsoft claims this update fixes network printing issues causing 0x000006e4, 0x0000007c, or 0x00000709 error codes to be displayed.

The KB5007253 cumulative update preview is part of Microsoft's September 2021 monthly "C" update, allowing admins to test fixes coming as part of the December 2021 Patch Tuesday.

However, unlike Patch Tuesday updates, the "C" preview updates are optional and do not include any security updates.

Windows users can install this update by going into Settings, clicking on Windows Update, and manually performing a 'Check for Updates.'

As this is an optional update, you will be asked whether you wish to install it by clicking on the 'Download and install' link, as shown in the image below.

Windows 10 users can also manually download and install the KB5007253 preview update from the Microsoft Update Catalog.

Microsoft claims to fix networking printing errors

After Microsoft modified the Windows printing experience to deal with PrintNightmare vulnerabilities, users began experiencing errors when attempting to print to network printers.

Print jobs would fail when attempting to print to a network printer, and Windows would display a 0x000006e4, 0x0000007c, or 0x00000709 error, as shown below.

Windows 0x0000007c error when adding a new printer
Source: Microsoft Forums

Last month, Microsoft began privately sharing printing fixes using ADMX installers that manually added Known Issue Rollback (KIR) fixes to the Windows Registry.

These installers fixed the Windows 0x0000007c printing errors but did not help with the other error codes people were receiving. However, Microsoft told Windows admin in private support chats that the fixes would formally be released as part of the December 2021 Patch Tuesday updates.

These fixes are now being released as part of this week's Windows 10 KB5007253 update and allegedly fix the 0x000006e4, 0x0000007c, or 0x00000709 printing errors.

BleepingComputer has not tested this update to see if it resolves this error. If you install the update, please share whether it resolved your network printing problems.

What's new in Windows 10 KB5007253

After installing this update, Windows 10 2004 will be updated to build 19041.1387, Windows 10 20H2 will be updated to build 19042.1387, Windows 10 21H1 will be updated to build 19043.1387, and Windows 10 21H2 will be updated to build 19044.1387

The Windows 10 KB5007253 cumulative update preview includes thirty-three improvements or fixes, with eleven highlighted fixes below:

Updates an issue that that causes some variable fonts to display incorrectly.
Updates an issue that might cause the 32-bit version of Microsoft Excel to stop working on certain devices when you export to PDF.
Updates an issue that displays letters or characters at the wrong angle when you use the Meiryo UI font and other vertical fonts. These fonts are frequently used in Japan, China, or other countries in Asia.
Updates an issue that causes Internet Explorer to stop working when using the Input Method Editor (IME) to insert elements.
Updates an issue that causes the Settings page to unexpectedly close after you uninstall a font.
Updates an issue that affects your ability to rename a file using folder view in File Explorer when you use the new Japanese IME.
Updates an issue that turns off screen capture and recording functionalities on the Windows Game Bar after a service failure.
Updates an issue that prevents the applications that you use often from appearing on the Start menu as they should.
Updates an issue that causes Internet Explorer to stop working.
Addresses a known issue that causes error codes 0x000006e4, 0x0000007c, or 0x00000709 when connecting to a remote printer that is shared on a Windows print server.
Addresses a known issue that might prevent apps, such as Kaspersky apps, from opening after you attempt to repair or update the apps using the Microsoft Installer (MSI).

You can find a complete list of fixes in the KB5007253 support bulletin.

Windows 10 KB5007253 update released with network printing fixes

Native Microsoft OneDrive for ARM-based Windows and Apple M1 devices rolling out soon

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 08:40:16 +0000

At Ignite 2021, Microsoft announced that OneDrive will natively support ARM-based Windows and Apple M1 devices, saying:

ARM support

We are thrilled to announce OneDrive support for ARM-based Windows devices Join us in the Insiders Ring to opt-in for the ARM preview by end of this year.

M1 support

We recently announced that OneDrive will be natively compiled for M1 and will be releasing a preview for the Insiders Ring in December. You can take full advantage of the performance improvements on M1 by early next year

Now Microsoft has announced some detail of the rollout of a Preview of the ARM client to devices in the Current Channel (Preview). Following the preview release to Current Channel (Preview), it will release for General Availability.

Both the Windows ARM client and the Apple Silicon client will begin rolling to the Current Channel (Preview) in early December and is expected to complete rollout mid-December. Standard users will begin receiving the update between late January and mid-February.

To enable the preview, users will need to have joined the Current Channel (Preview) and enabled the preview in OneDrive Settings > About. Users can also opt out in OneDrive Settings > About. The functionality of the clients are the same, but the ARM client may perform better.

Native Microsoft OneDrive for ARM-based Windows and Apple M1 devices rolling out soon

Here is what is new in Microsoft Edge 96

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 08:36:24 +0000

Microsoft released Microsoft Edge 96 last week and a small bug fix and performance update on November 23, 2021. The new version of Microsoft Edge includes several improvements for users of the stable channel.

Existing users may check the installed version on edge://settings/help. Opening the page checks for updates; any update found will be downloaded and installed automatically. Edge is set up to update automatically by default.

Edge improvements can be divided into consumer and administrative groups. Consumers get a number of new features in Edge 96, including the ability to view Office documents directly in the browser.

Edge opens the Office document in a new tab in the browser when you click on supported Office documents, e.g. an Excel XLSX spreadsheet file or a Microsoft Word document. It is still possible to download the files, either by right-clicking on the link and selecting the save option, or by selecting the "download file" option on the Office Apps website that Microsoft Edge opens when Office documents are accessed.

Edge users who don't want the functionality can turn off the feature in the following way:

Load edge://settings/downloads in the browser's address bar.
Toggle "Open Office files in the browser" so that it is set to off.

The following screenshot shows the setting. Note that it is enabled on the screenshot.

Here is the list of the other improvements in Microsoft Edge 96:

Math Solver is now available in Microsoft Edge. It helps solve "a wide range of mathematical concepts", including elementary arithmetic, quadratic equations and calculus. It supports taking pictures of math problems to get them solved with step-by-step instructions provided by Edge.
Edge's Immersive Reader feature has a new Dictionary icon. It may be used to look up word definitions and spelling information.
New warning if so-called Typosquatting sites are accessed (sites that look similar to legitimate sites). Typosquatting sites usually use an URL that is very similar to another, often by changing a single letter or number, or making use of typos.
Progressive Web Apps can be launched via protocol links now.
The built-in PDF Reader supports Freeform highlighting.
Control-flow Enforcement technology, which makes the browsing mode safer according to Microsoft. Only supported on Intel 11th Gen or AMD Zen 3).

The following administrative improvements are made in Edge 96:

Cloud Site List Management for IE mode in Public Preview. Option to manage IE mode site lists in the cloud, instead of "eeding an on-premises infrastructure to host your organization's site list".
Handoff between Microsoft Edge and IE Mode has been improved. Form data and additional HTTP headers are now included. The new policy InternetExplorerIntegrationComplexNavDataTypes can be used to define the data types that should be included.
Microsoft Edge WebView2 can be updated using WSUS.
Microsoft Edge WSUS updates for Server, including Server 2022.
New AutoLaunch Protocols component that " contains lists of scheme-origin dictionaries to automatically allow or block".

New polices:

ApplicationGuardUploadBlockingEnabled Prevents files from being uploaded while in Application Guard
AudioProcessHighPriorityEnabled Allow the audio process to run with priority above normal on Windows
AutoLaunchProtocolsComponentEnabled AutoLaunch Protocols Component Enabled
BrowserLegacyExtensionPointsBlockingEnabled Enable browser legacy extension point blocking
CrossOriginWebAssemblyModuleSharingEnabled Specifies whether WebAssembly modules can be sent cross-origin
DisplayCapturePermissionsPolicyEnabled Specifies whether the display-capture permissions-policy is checked or skipped
EfficiencyMode Configure when efficiency mode should become active
ForceSyncTypes Configure the list of types that are included for synchronization
InternetExplorerIntegrationComplexNavDataTypes Configure whether form data and HTTP headers will be sent when entering or exiting Internet Explorer mode
InternetExplorerModeToolbarButtonEnabled Show the Reload in Internet Explorer mode button in the toolbar
InternetExplorerIntegrationWindowOpenHeightAdjustment Configure the pixel adjustment between window.open heights sourced from IE mode pages vs. Edge mode pages
InternetExplorerIntegrationWindowOpenWidthAdjustment Configure the pixel adjustment between window.open widths sourced from IE mode pages vs. Edge mode pages
IntranetFileLinksEnabled Allow intranet zone file URL links from Microsoft Edge to open in Windows File Explorer
NewSmartScreenLibraryEnabled Enable new SmartScreen library
PrintPostScriptMode Print PostScript Mode
PrintRasterizePdfDpi Print Rasterize PDF DPI
RendererAppContainerEnabled Enable renderer in app container
ShadowStackCrashRollbackBehavior Configure ShadowStack crash rollback behavior
SharedLinksEnabled Show links shared from Microsoft 365 apps in History
TyposquattingCheckerEnabled Configure Edge TyposquattingChecker
VisualSearchEnabled Visual search enabled

Here is what is new in Microsoft Edge 96

Windows 10 KB5007253 optional update now available in Windows Update

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 23:43:42 +0000

Microsoft has released a new Windows 10 optional update that bumps up the corresponding versions to build 19041.1382 (2004) 19042.1382 (20H2) 19043.1382 (21H1) and 19044.1382 (21H2). This is a tiny update in the sense that it only contains a single fix, albeit a notable one, and adds to the previous builds released last week under the same KB5007253. Hence, the long list of fixes Microsoft brought can be viewed here. The update fixed remote printer issues, resolved a 32-bit Excel bug, and more.

As a reminder, this update fixed a problem plaguing Windows 10 PCs that use Windows Hello for Business service on Azure Active Directory (AD) servers when accessing on-premises resources, such as file shares, among other things, and was likely causing user authentication problems and perhaps other inconveniences.

Here are some other highlights from the KB5007253 update:

Updates an issue that that causes some variable fonts to display incorrectly.
Updates an issue that might cause the 32-bit version of Microsoft Excel to stop working on certain devices when you export to PDF.
Updates an issue that displays letters or characters at the wrong angle when you use the Meiryo UI font and other vertical fonts. These fonts are frequently used in Japan, China, or other countries in Asia.
Updates an issue that causes Internet Explorer to stop working when using the Input Method Editor (IME) to insert elements.
Updates an issue that causes the Settings page to unexpectedly close after you uninstall a font.
Updates an issue that affects your ability to rename a file using folder view in File Explorer when you use the new Japanese IME.
Updates an issue that turns off screen capture and recording functionalities on the Windows Game Bar after a service failure.
Updates an issue that prevents the applications that you use often from appearing on the Start menu as they should.
Updates an issue that causes Internet Explorer to stop working.

Microsoft also notes that Windows 10, version 2004 will reach end of servicing on December 14, 2021. In order to continue to receive updates, users will have to update to a newer version of Windows 10.

In addition, next month there will be no preview release (known as a “C” release) thanks to the holiday season, this will resume as normal again in January. If you don't install this today you'll get it come next Patch Tuesday in December anyway, but to get this update right now, head to Windows Update settings (Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update) and select Check for updates. Upon installing, the update will require a reboot.

If you prefer to download the offline installer for this update, you can find KB5007253 here on the Microsoft Catalog. You may find more details in the original press release linked here.

Windows 10 KB5007253 optional update now available in Windows Update

How to enable file delete confirmations on Windows 11

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 23:40:49 +0000

Files that you delete on Windows 11 PCs are deleted without a delete confirmation prompt. The default configuration sends the selection of files to the Recycle Bin. Users may restore accidentally deleted files from the Recycle Bin, unless it is has been emptied already manually or automatically.

Windows 11 comes with options to enable delete confirmation dialogs. These are displayed whenever files or folders get deleted by the user, e.g. by right-clicking on files in File Explorer and selecting the delete option, or by using the Delete-key on the keyboard while files or folders are selected.

Some users may prefer these confirmation dialogs to avoid deleting files or folders accidentally. It is a second safeguard that can be enabled, with the Recycle Bin being the first.

Tip: some users prefer to disable the Recycle Bin completely, or use the Shift-Delete shortcut to bypass it manually.

Enable Delete Confirmations on Windows 11 using the Recycle Bin

The process of enabling confirmation prompts when files get deleted is identical to the process on previous versions of Windows, including Windows 10.

Step 1: Right-click on the Recycle Bin icon that is displayed on the desktop by default and select the Properties context menu option.

Step 2: The Recycle Bin Properties window displays all Recycle Bin locations and the available space on each. Locate and check the "Display delete confirmation dialog" option at the bottom of the window. Select Apply and then OK to complete the process. Note that the setting is a global setting, meaning that prompts will be displayed for all delete actions on all connected drives from that moment on.

Step 3: Test the new functionality. Just open File Explorer and delete a file, e.g. by right-clicking on it and selecting the Delete icon or by using the Delete-key on the keyboard.

You may undo the change at any time by removing the checkmark from the preference again in the Recycle Bin properties.

Enable Delete Prompts on Windows 11 using the Group Policy Editor

The Group Policy Editor is only available on professional and Enterprise versions of Windows 11. Here is how you enable delete confirmation dialogs on systems for users.

Here is the description of the policy:

Allows you to have File Explorer display a confirmation dialog whenever a file is deleted or moved to the Recycle Bin.

If you enable this setting, a confirmation dialog is displayed when a file is deleted or moved to the Recycle Bin by the user.

If you disable or do not configure this setting, the default behavior of not displaying a confirmation dialog occurs.

Step 1: Open Start, type gpedit.msc and select open from the menu; this loads the Group Policy Editor on the system.

Step 2: Use the left sidebar tree to navigate to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > File Explorer.

Step 3: Double-click on the policy "Display confirmation dialog when deleting files".

Step 4. Set the state of the policy to Enabled. Select Apply and the OK to complete the process and close the policy window again.

The PC needs to be restarted before the change takes effect.

You may undo the change at any time by setting the policy to Disabled or Default.

Turn on delete prompts on Windows 11 using the Registry

If the Recycle Bin icon is not displayed on the desktop or if you prefer using the Registry or need to use it, e.g. on Home editions of the Windows 11 operating system.

Step 1: Select Start, type regedit.msc, and select the open options from the menu. Windows displays an UAC prompt that you need to accept. The Registry Editor is started afterwards.

Step 2: Paste the following path into the address field at the top: Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Step 3: Right-click on Explorer and select New > Dword (32-bit) Value from the context menu.

Step 4: Name the new Dword ConfirmFileDelete.

Step 5. Double-click on the new Dword and set its value to 1. A value of 1 means that file deletion prompts are displayed.

A restart is required before the change takes effect.

You may undo the change at any time by deleting the Dword Value in the Registry.

How to enable file delete confirmations on Windows 11

Windows Update KB5007262 Preview for Windows 11 brings a ton of fixes and Fluent 2D Emoji style

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 23:35:18 +0000

Microsoft is rolling out Windows Update KB5007262 for Windows 11 users. This is a preview update for the stable version of the operating system, you don't need to be in the Insider Preview Program to test it.

This is not a security update, instead it brings a boatload of fixes for problems reported by users.

What's new in Windows Update KB5007262 Preview for Windows 11

File Explorer

A bug that prevented the File Explorer and Desktop menu from appearing has been patched. The change log says that the issue was more noticeable when files were set to open with a single-click.

The update also fixes an issue that caused File Explorer to stop working after an Explorer window was closed. I'm not really sure what this is supposed to mean, from the wording I can only assume that Explorer wouldn't open after an instance was closed, but I've never encountered the issue. File Explorer's performance is still flaky, everything seems to take a split-second more than it should take to open.

On the other hand, the Taskbar icon animation performance has been improved. From what I can see, the mouse-over indicator, and the fly-out context menus seem to be snappier, as in they appear instantly.

Display

Users with high contrast themes should no longer experience flickering problems when hovering over icons on the taskbar. Task View, Alt-Tab and Snap Assist will display the keyboard focus rectangle correctly. An issue that removed the Serbian (Latin) language from Windows has been fixed.V ideos should no longer display incorrect closed-caption shadows.

If you changed the screen resolution after installing many apps, the Start Menu would not display the icons. This update fixes the issue, and also improves the display of the Start Menu with multiple monitors and mixed resolutions.

Audio

Bluetooth audio devices should no longer have volume control issues. The latest Windows Update Preview sorts out a bug that was causing temporary loss of audio. The audio performance of Xbox One and Xbox Series Audio peripherals with spatial audio has been improved, and audio distortion with these devices should no longer be an issue.

Input

Internet Explorer will no longer freeze or stop working, when you use the Input Method Editor (IME), and copy and paste text. The firmware patches an annoyance that was causing some apps to not responding to input properly, this affects devices with a touchpad. A new option is available that will allow you to enable Focus Assist for the first hour automatically, after a Windows feature update has been installed. A display problem that was preventing variable fonts from rendering correctly has been solved.

Vertical fonts such as Meiryo UI font that were displaying letters or characters at the wrong angle prior to this update, will now work correctly. The icon for the iFLY Simplfied Chinese input will display the correct background in the notification are.

Devices

If you plugged in a printer, but Windows 11 didn't recognize it, you may want to install this update as it fixes the bug. Windows Mixed Reality was starting automatically when users put on a headset, even though the option to start the portal was disabled. The option will now respect the user's preference.

Devices which had problems waking from hibernation, should now work correctly. This bug affected some processors. Volmgr.sys will not cause a stop error when you delete a volume. Users should not no longer see an unexpected “bad image” error message dialog at startup. The update addresses an issue that was causing Searchindexer.exe to stop responding while accessed via remote desktop. An issue related to SearchFilterHost.exe opening has also been fixed. Enabling Hyper-V caused some systems to stop working, this update resolves the issue.

Remote Printers shared on Windows Print Server will no longer experience connection errors 0x000006e4, 0x0000007c, or 0x00000709. USB Printers which support Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) Over USB can be installed, after a problem that was preventing the installation was found and patched. Likewise, the devices will now be detected when you plug them in, Microsoft Defender for Endpoints has been enhanced to identify and intercept ransomware and advanced attacks.

Fluent 2D Emoji style replaces Segoe UI Emoji font

Fans of emojis will be glad to know that the KB5007262 Update brings the Fluent 2D emoji style to the OS, including Emoji 13.1. It also introduces for Emoji search in all supported languages.

That was a long list of fixes, but I haven't included all of them. For the full list of improvements and fixes, please refer to the official patch notes. The announcement says that Microsoft is not aware of any known issues in this release, which is to be expected, since this is a Preview release. This should change once users start using the latest build, run into bugs and provide feedback about it.

The update bumps the firmware version from Build 22000.318 to Build 22000.348. Windows Update KB5007262 will be the final preview release of 2021, a security release will be made available next month, as Microsoft will have minimal operations during the holiday season. The company aims to resume normal monthly servicing for preview releases in January 2022.

You may download KB5007262 for Windows 11 from the Microsoft Update Catalog. Alternatively, you can use the Settings app > Update & Security > Windows Update, and choose the Optional Updates option to download the update. It will appear as a Cumulative Update. You will need to restart the computer to install the patch.

I have been using the new version for a few hours, and have not run into any issues. Hopefully, it stays that way.

Windows Update KB5007262 Preview for Windows 11 brings a ton of fixes and Fluent 2D Emoji style

No More Microsoft! This German State Plans to Switch 25,000 Windows PCs to Linux and LibreOffice

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 16:08:34 +0000

A German state plans to start using Linux & LibreOffice replacing Microsoft Windows & Office in their administration and schools.

Schleswig-Holstein is the northernmost German state that has planned to switch to open-source solutions in its administration and schools.

And, it is not about a couple of systems; as per the report by The Document Foundation, all 25,000 PCs associated with administration and school will be moving from Windows to Linux.

Not just limited to that, the switch also involves replacing Microsoft Office with LibreOffice.

The digital minister, Jan Philipp Albrecht, shared more details in an interview with a local news outlet.

Focusing on LibreOffice Transition

The Document Foundation was invited to a meeting to discuss the integration of LibreOffice

The plan to rely more on an open-source solution is a massive step to promote FOSS.

And, considering the transition to LibreOffice by giving up Microsoft’s Office, the German state will end up integrating the use of FOSS for most of their work.

LibreOffice has been a great free and open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. Even though it is still a hit-and-miss for some scenarios, many users haven’t even given it a try, fearing it would break their workflow with documents/sheets.

But, now that it will be used in schools and government administration, more users will get to experience what it offers and how it can replace Microsoft Office.

Switching to Open Source Tools

They are ready to adopt open-source tools and solutions for everything viable. For instance, they have plans to power up their cloud infrastructure.

And, this is not an entirely new preference for them. The digital minister also shared details on how they scaled up their video-conferencing network using a Jitsi-based open-source system.

In case you did not know, Jitsi is one of the most popular open-source video conferencing tools.

Auf Wiedersehen (Goodbye) Microsoft!

Microsoft is undoubtedly a dominant force globally for its software products, including the Office suite and Windows itself.

Privacy enthusiasts and FOSS appreciators have been using Linux and other products to fight back against a monopoly and make open-source solutions a viable alternative for a long time.

However, with an open-source model being chosen as a priority by governments, it should considerably influence the people in power to embrace open-source.

Many users get the freedom and do not have to depend on vendor specific products like Microsoft’s.

Deja vu!

Some of the readers might remember the Munich debacle. German city Munich switched to their custom distribution LiMux from Windows for several years. It successfully saved them millions of Euro. However, they went back with Windows and their decision coincided with the opening of Microsoft’s regional headquarters in Munich. This gave a wave of allegations, despite the then Mayor Dieter Reiter denying any such coincident.

Only time will tell when the switch happens and if they stick with Linux. A successful transition may influence other government bodies to take a similar decision.

Source

Also: A German State is Switching Its 25,000 Computers From Windows to Linux (documentfoundation.org)

AWS is making a major commitment to Linux

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 15:50:57 +0000

Latest release is based on Fedora and is currently available as a preview release

Amazon’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has put out a preview of its custom Amazon Linux distro (AL2022), while committing to refreshing the distro every two years.

Amazon Linux is popular with AWS users for its tight integration with AWS tools, and no license costs. The service also ensures that its new features work as advertised with the distro.

The distro has had two major releases till now; the first in 2010, and the second in 2017. However, with the third AL2022 release the service is committing to a two year release cycle, with each release supported for a period of five years.

“Today, we are announcing the public preview of Amazon Linux 2022 (AL2022), Amazon's new general purpose Linux for AWS that is designed to provide a secure, stable, and high-performance execution environment to develop and run your cloud applications,” shared AWS.

Based on Fedora

According to the announcement, AL2022 is based on the popular Fedora distro, and ships with the Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) kernel security module enabled and enforced by default.

AWS argues that the two year major release cycle, with updates shipped quarterly via minor releases, will help keep the software current, while the five year support commitment for each major release will give customers the stability they need to manage long project lifecycles.

“AL2022 combines the benefits of our current Amazon Linux products with a predictable, two year release cycle, so customers can plan for operating system upgrades as part of their product lifecycles,” reasons AWS.

AL2022 is now available in preview in all commercial regions and is provided at no additional charge.

Source

Also: AWS commits to update its own Linux every other year.

Flatpak Is Not the Future

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 15:35:14 +0000

Original date: 2021-11-18
Last updated: 2021-11-23

Deploying apps for the Linux desktop is hard. A major problem has historically been library compatibility. Different Linux distributions, and even different versions of the same distribution, have had incompatible libraries. Unfortunately, there hasn’t always been a culture of backwards compatibility on the Linux desktop.

This is finally changing. The stability of the Linux desktop has dramatically improved in recent years. Core library developers are finally seeing the benefits of maintaining compatibility. Despite this, many developers are not interested in depending on a stable base of libraries for binary software. Instead, they have decided to ignore and override almost all libraries pre-installed on the user’s system.

The current solutions involve packaging entire alternate runtimes in containerized environments. Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, Docker, and Steam: these all provide an app packaging mechanism that replaces most or all of the system’s runtime libraries, and they now all use containerization to accomplish this.

Flatpak calls itself “the future of application distribution”. I am not a fan. I’m going to outline here some of the technical, security and usability problems with Flatpak and others. I’ll try to avoid addressing “fixable” problems (like theming) and instead focus on fundamental problems inherent in their design. I aim to convince you that these are not the future of desktop Linux apps.

Size

Suppose you want to make a simple calculator app. How big should the download be?

At the time of this writing, the latest KCalc AppImage (if you can even figure out how to download it) is 152 MB. For a calculator.

A screenshot of KCalc, a calculator app.

This is uncompetitive with Windows on its face. If I ship an app for Windows I don’t have to include the entire Win32 or .NET runtimes with my app. I just use what’s already on the user’s system.

Other solutions like Flatpak or Steam download the runtime separately. Your app metadata specifies what runtime it wants to use and a service downloads it and runs your app against it.

So how big are these runtimes? On a fresh machine, install KCalc from Flathub. You’re looking at a nearly 900 MB download to get your first runtime. For a calculator.

        ID                                      Branch    Op   Remote    Download
 1.     org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default     20.08     i    flathub   < 106.4 MB
 2.     org.freedesktop.Platform.VAAPI.Intel    20.08     i    flathub    < 11.6 MB
 3.     org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264       2.0       i    flathub     < 1.5 MB
 4.     org.kde.KStyle.Adwaita                  5.15      i    flathub     < 6.6 MB
 5.     org.kde.Platform.Locale                 5.15      i    flathub   < 341.4 MB (partial)
 6.     org.kde.Platform                        5.15      i    flathub   < 370.1 MB
 7.     org.kde.kcalc.Locale                    stable    i    flathub   < 423.1 kB (partial)
 8.     org.kde.kcalc                           stable    i    flathub     < 4.4 MB

Note that the app package itself is only 4.4 MB. The rest is all redundant libraries that are already on my system. I just ran the kcalc binary straight out of its Flatpak install path unsandboxed and let it use my native libraries. It ran just fine, because all of the libraries it uses are backwards compatible.

Flatpak wants to download 3D drivers, patented video codecs, themes, locales, Qt 5, KDE 5, GTK 3, ICU, LLVM, ffmpeg, Python, and everything else in org.kde.Platform, all to run a calculator. Because unlike AppImage, the runtime isn’t stripped down to just what the app needs. It’s got every dependency for any app. It’s an entire general-purpose OS on top of your existing OS.

Sharing Runtimes?

Flatpak says this is so that apps can share runtimes. But the whole point of their runtime system is to let apps use different runtimes. Each branch of a runtime (representing, say, a different base version of Ubuntu) is a completely independent runtime image.

They claim that they deduplicate runtimes. I question how much can really be shared between different branches when everything is recompiled. How much has /usr changed between releases of Ubuntu? I would guess just about all of it.

Steam at least fares somewhat better. The Soldier runtime is a 610 MB download, still large. But Steam only publishes a couple of official runtimes, so most games do actually share runtimes.

Flatpak allows anyone to define their own runtimes. freedesktop.org publishes some Flatpak runtimes for common use, but these aren’t necessarily the ones apps are using. For example Fedora publishes apps with its own runtimes, and these are the ones available by default in its Software store.

If you install GIMP in Fedora 34’s Software store, it defaults to Fedora’s Flatpak of GIMP. This pulls in Fedora 35’s 650 MB runtime, not any freedesktop.org runtime. Nothing will be shared with our freedesktop runtime KCalc we installed from Flathub earlier. On my machine /var/lib/flatpak is using over 3 GB of disk space for just these two apps.

This is apparently working as intended. They want runtimes to be a free-for-all, filling your hard drive with gigabytes of custom junk for every app. I can’t imagine what system updates will be like in the future when you have a few dozen apps storing tens of gigabytes of runtimes that all want to be kept up to date.

“Disk space is cheap!”

They say disk space is cheap. This is not true, not for the root devices of modern computers. Built-in storage has in fact been shrinking.

Software has gotten so much slower and more bloated that operating systems no longer run acceptably on spinning rust. Laptop manufacturers are switching to smaller flash drives to improve performance while preserving margins.

Budget laptops circa 2015 shipped with 256 GB or larger mechanical drives. Now in 2021 they ship with 120 GB flash. NVMe drives are around $100/TB and laptop manufacturers inflate these prices 500% or more so upgrading a new laptop can be pricey.

Chromebooks are even smaller as they push everything onto cloud storage. Smartphones are starting to run full-fledged Linux distributions. The Raspberry Pi 4 and 400 use an SD card as root device and have such fantastic performance that we’re on the verge of a revolution in low-cost computing. Surely Flatpak should be usable on these systems! There is no reason why a 16 GB root device shouldn’t fit every possible piece of non-game software we could want. Flatpak isn’t part of the revolution; it’s holding it back.

Why shouldn’t storage shrink anyway? Software should be getting more efficient, not less. Even if bandwidth were free and hard drives grew on trees, it would not excuse such drastic bloat. The waste involved in these app packaging solutions is downright offensive. Apollo landed on the moon with 4 kB of RAM and 72 kB of ROM, yet we can’t run a calculator with less than 150 MB. Any engineer worth his salt should be optimizing for efficiency, not dismissing it as irrelevant, especially when it so clearly impacts the user experience.

Memory Usage, Startup Time

The penalties of huge alternate runtimes aren’t just in storage and bandwidth.

Each app with a new runtime adds another hundred megs or more of RAM usage. This adds up fast. Most computers don’t have enough RAM to run all their apps with alternate runtimes. The Raspberry Pi 400 has only 4 GB of RAM. Low-end Chromebooks have only 2 GB. Budget laptops tend to have 8 GB, mostly thanks to the bloat of Windows 10, but these app packaging solutions are catching up to it.

A bigger problem is that these apps can actually take several seconds to start up. They have to load all their own libraries from disk instead of using what’s already on the system, already in memory.

Snap is the slowest of all, largely because it stores all its data in squashfs images. Snap mounts all registered snaps at startup instead of just extracting the metadata they need beforehand, possibly in an effort to mitigate this slowness. They’re just moving part of the slow startup time to the boot time of your computer. All sorts of snap crap now shows up in mount and fdisk -l. The more snaps you have installed, the slower your computer will start, even if you don’t use them.

Today, on my machine, the KCalc Snap takes a full seven seconds to start up. Not just the first time after boot; every time, without fail. Seven seconds to start a calculator.

Canonical started converting their basic desktop apps like the GNOME Calculator to Snap in Ubuntu 18.04. The user experience was so terrible that they quietly converted them back to normal apps in Ubuntu 20.04. If these technologies are not even good enough for their own apps, those as basic as a calculator, why would they be good enough for yours?

Drivers

A major problem with alternate runtimes is drivers. New graphics hardware needs new graphics libraries which have a ton of dependencies. Mesa depends on LLVM for compiling shaders. The NVidia driver depends on a kernel module whose version must exactly match that of the library. All of these libraries have their own transitive dependencies like libdrm, libstdc++ and glibc. If you want new hardware to work, you need to be using new versions of all of these libraries.

Linux distributions, especially those with rolling releases or hardware enablement packages, do a great job of keeping these libraries up-to-date for new hardware. Bundled runtimes do not.

Take a look at the pain Steam has to go through to get drivers working in the Steam Runtime. They use various heuristics to determine whether to override each library in the runtime with that of the host system, so each app is running on a Frankenstein hodge-podge of libraries. This is not the way to build stable software.

Flatpak recognizes that mixing libraries with the host system is a mess. Instead, they want to bundle their own graphics drivers in the runtimes, keeping them regularly updated for new hardware. But they can’t control the most important part, the kernel, so they can’t directly package drivers that depend on specific kernel versions or proprietary kernel modules. So the runtime is broken into extensions, and extensions can go the Steam route of pulling in the native driver or even download specific NVidia drivers on-the-fly to match the kernel module.

AppImage mixes host libraries with the runtime as well, but not dynamically; they just decide what to exclude at packaging time so it’s even less reliable than Steam. Docker has an NVidia toolkit that must be installed on both the host system and the containerized runtime to get drivers working. Snap is doing who knows what. None of these are proper solutions.

Drivers are supposed to be the responsibility of the operating system. This is what it’s good at. Why are we working so hard to get around what the operating system offers by default for native apps?

This isn’t an issue specific to video games by the way. Lots of modern apps are now directly using hardware accelerated graphics, even terminals and text editors. Many apps need the GPU for background computation. Productivity apps like video editors, apps that use machine learning, scientific tools like space/astronomy visualization, anything that does 3D like Google Earth… All of these need access to modern video hardware. This will only grow as apps get faster and provide more features and richer user interfaces.

Security

Flatpak allows apps to declare that they need full access to your filesystem or your home folder, yet graphical software stores still claim such apps are sandboxed. This has been discussed before. Here’s what happens when I search GIMP in the Software app on a fresh install of Fedora 34:

Fedora claims GIMP is sandboxed. If you click “High” next to “Permissions”, you see a little exclamation mark saying it has “File system” permissions.

Such an app can drop a malware executable anywhere in your home folder and add a line to your ~/.profile or a desktop entry to ~/.config/autostart/ to have it auto-started on your next login. Not only will it run outside of any container, it will even persist after the app is uninstalled.

This is exactly what a nefarious app would do to break out of its sandbox. This is also what a virus would do that exploited a security vulnerability in a sandboxed app.

Suppose libjpeg has a zero-day remote code execution vulnerability. You open a seemingly innocuous JPEG in Flatpak GIMP and it drops its payload set to autostart in your home folder. How did the sandbox help here? The behaviour of this virus is identical regardless of whether GIMP is sandboxed. The only differences are that a) the libjpeg in the alternate runtime is likely to stay out-of-date longer than the one from your Linux distribution; and b) the virus is more likely to work against the sandboxed app because all installations will be using the exact same binary of libjpeg.

The Snap Store app, to its credit, displays a warning: “This application is unconfined. It can access all personal files and system resources.” Which apps display this warning, you ask? All of them. KCalc has it. All of the Editor’s Picks have it. In my testing for this blog post I could not find an app that does not display the warning.

“It’s better than nothing!”

Flatpak and Snap apologists claim that some security is better than nothing. This is not true. From a purely technical perspective, for apps with filesystem access the security is exactly equal to nothing. In reality it’s actually worse than nothing because it leads people to place more trust than they should in random apps they find on the internet.

Take a look at this writer complaining about the security of AppImages while praising Flatpak and Snap:

I install applications via source, apt, Snap and Flatpak–I don’t discriminate. As long as an application will install and run as expected, I’ll install it, regardless of the package format.

With one exception: AppImages.

[…]

On the rare occasion I’m willing to use an AppImage, I will only do so when I absolutely trust the developer. Why? Remember, an AppImage is an application you simply download and run. Anyone can build an AppImage, proclaim it a must-have piece of software, roll something nefarious into it, and make it available for download.

He expresses deep skepticism of AppImages, but not of Flatpaks or Snaps, because he believes their security measures keep him safe. This is the danger of lying about sandboxing.

Permissions and Portals

Flatpak is working on a fine-grained permission system to improve the security of its sandbox. Permissions are things like whether the app is allowed to access the microphone or the printer. Portals are things like a file open dialog that runs outside the sandbox, so the app in the sandbox gets only the file the user chose.

Flatpak documents these portals and provides libportal, a client library to access them. However this isn’t really intended for individual apps. It’s all meant to be integrated in the toolkits. From the documentation:

Interface toolkits like GTK3 and Qt5 implement transparent support for portals, meaning that applications don’t need to do any additional work to use them (it is worth checking which portals each toolkit supports).

Apparently, developing client APIs for apps themselves is antithetical to Flatpak’s mission. They want the apps running on Flatpak to be unaware of Flatpak. They would rather modify the core libraries like GTK to integrate with Flatpak. So for example if you want to open a file, you don’t call a Flatpak API function to get a file or request permissions. Instead, you call for an ordinary GTK file open dialog and your Flatpak runtime’s GTK internally does the portal interaction with the Flatpak service (using all sorts of hacks to let you access the file “normally” and pretend you’re not sandboxed.)

This is the most complicated and brittle way to implement this. It’s also not at all how other sandboxed platforms work. If I want file access permissions on Android, I don’t just try to open a file with the Java File API and expect it to magically prompt the user. I have to call Android-specific APIs to request permissions first. iOS is the same. So why shouldn’t I be able to just call flatpak_request_permission(PERMISSION) and get a callback when the user approves or declines?

This is why. Fedora is auto-converting all of their rpm apps to Flatpak. In order for this to work, they need the Flatpak permission system and Flatpak in general to require no app changes whatsoever.

Why on Earth would they do a mass automatic conversion of apps? Your guess is as good as mine. The video claims that Fedora’s apps are higher quality than upstream, and Fedora makes their Flatpaks available on older distributions. I think it’s more likely they just want huge numbers of auto-converted apps to make it look like Flatpak is useful. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that this requirement has influenced many of their poor design decisions.

Identifier Clashes

So Fedora auto-converts all its apps to Flatpak. Does it at least namespace them to something specific to Fedora?

No, it doesn’t. Fedora publishes its Flatpak of GIMP as org.gimp.GIMP. This conflicts with the official org.gimp.GIMP published by the GIMP developers on Flathub. On a fresh install of Fedora 34, if you add the Flathub repository and type flatpak install org.gimp.GIMP, you get prompted for which one to install:

[nick@fedora active]$ flatpak install org.gimp.GIMP
Looking for matches…
Remotes found with refs similar to ‘org.gimp.GIMP’:

1) ‘fedora’ (system)
2) ‘flathub’ (system)

Which do you want to use (0 to abort)? [0-2]:

If you choose option 1, you get a build of GIMP with Fedora’s patches that uses the 650 MB Fedora 35 runtime. If you choose option 2, you get a different build of GIMP that uses the 1.8 GB freedesktop.org GNOME runtime.

Isn’t the whole point of reverse DNS that the org.gimp prefix is reserved for people who actually own the gimp.org domain? How can Fedora justify publishing apps while masquerading as the upstream developers? If major Linux distributions won’t even respect DNS, who will?

Flathub doesn’t enforce DNS ownership either by the way. They let anyone publish anything; they merely prefer that apps are controlled by their authors. A sane security strategy would be to require a DNS challenge to allow a publisher to use a specific app prefix.

Complexity

Endless articles have been written about the importance of simplicity in software design. Worse is Better is perhaps the earliest example. A modern refrain is “software complexity is killing us”. The state of software development is downright miserable in 2021.

You would think that these packaging mechanisms would embrace simplicity if they want to attract software developers. In fact they are doing the opposite. The driver, sandboxing, and permission/portal issues we’ve discussed barely scratch the surface of the complexity involved in making this all work. In “worse is better” terms, they’re not even “the right thing” anymore. At this point they’re just pushing complexity for its own sake.

Proponents of containerization believe it is the solution to every problem, the hammer for every nail. We now have multiple Linux distributions based on containerizing everything (e.g. Fedora CoreOS, MocaccinoOS.) We have a major movement to adopt Docker and Snap on embedded (e.g. balenaOS, Ubuntu Core.) Docker may soon be running on your fridge and in your car.

Keep watching the video linked earlier to see the descent into madness: Steam nested in a Flatpak; the Scout runtime nested in the Soldier runtime pulling in drivers from the Freedesktop runtime; Steam making IPC calls to its Flatpak container to make parallel containers with yet more runtimes.

Various combinations of Steam and Flatpak containers and runtimes. Not pictured: Steam and the game running directly on the user’s native environment, like they do on every other OS.

The complexity gets far worse than the above video even shows. Flatpak uses libostree to store all its data in a content-addressible deduplicated layer above the filesystem. Steam now uses libcapsule which uses dlmopen() namespaces so that game executables and driver libraries can load different versions of libstdc++ into the same process. We haven’t even talked about Wine/Proton which is a whole other layer of crazyness.

This is a vivid example of software complexity taking us to the brink of collapse. This is the most complicated way imaginable to distribute software. What will happen when large numbers of apps have been shipped that depend on this scaffolding? How will this ever be maintained? How many people on Earth will truly understand how this all works?

Services

All of these app packaging systems require that the user have some service installed on their PC before any packages can be installed.

AppImage, to its credit, technically does not require a service to run apps, but it doesn’t integrate with the desktop without it. I needed to use an AppImage app for a while and my solution was to just leave it in my ~/Downloads folder and double click it from my file manager to run it. This is a terrible user experience.

All of the desktop integration (launcher entries, mimetypes, icons, updates) is provided by either appimaged or AppImageLauncher, one of which must be installed by the user for any of this to work. So in practice, AppImage is no different than any of our other solutions: it requires a service to be usable.

If a user doesn’t have the service, well that’s another hoop they have to jump through to install an app. A few distributions, notably Fedora, pre-install Flatpak. A few distributions, notably Ubuntu, pre-install Snap. SteamOS pre-installs Steam. Other than these special cases, users have to install the correct service before installing an app. Developers have to teach them to do so and lose all of the users who can’t figure it out or can’t be bothered.

App Stores

A major goal of most of these technologies is to support an “app store” experience: Docker Hub, Flathub, the Steam Store, Snapcraft, and AppImageHub (but not AppImageHub?) These technologies are all designed around this model because the owners want a cut of sales revenue or fees for enterprise distribution. (Flathub only says they don’t process payments at present. It’s coming.)

This is the real reason Ubuntu wants everyone to use Snap instead of helping us build apps that run natively on Ubuntu. This is also why they keep the Snap server source code closed. They want it to be “open” the way Android is “open”, where there is only one official store and sideloading apps is as annoying as possible.

This is very far from the traditional Windows experience of just downloading an installer, clicking Next a few times, and having your app installed with complete desktop integration. This is true freedom. There are no requirements, no other steps, no hoops to jump through to install an app.

This is why the Windows Store and to some extent even the macOS App Store are failing. They can’t compete with the freedom their own platforms provide.

I know free software and privacy people don’t want to allow proprietary apps this level of freedom on their PCs. But the vast majority of users and independent software vendors don’t care. What users want is easy (and efficient!) installation. What the biggest software vendors want is the freedom to ship software directly to customers, without the intervention of a service or hub.

This is indeed possible on the Linux desktop. Let’s talk about that in the next section.

The Current State of Backwards Compatibility

There seems to be a collective trauma in the Linux community in depending on libraries to remain binary compatible across distributions and version upgrades. These alternate runtime tools are clearly built by people who refuse to consider using anything on the user’s system (in the case of Flatpak, not even driver libraries.) It’s true that in the past, open source library ABIs were flaky. I’m here to tell you that you no longer have to be afraid.

The backwards compatibility situation has gotten much better in recent years. The Linux kernel has been slowly exporting its legendary culture of backwards compatibility up the stack. Core libraries like glibc (since 2.1) and libstdc++ (since GCC 5) are intending to remain backwards compatible indefinitely. freedesktop.org has made huge progress standardizing runtime environments across distributions. Debian and others have mostly stopped making ABI-breaking customizations to their packages. Websites like ABI Laboratory track ABI changes to provide early warnings of breaks. The Linux Standard Base (LSB), though now seemingly defunct, made significant progress in standardizing capabilities and preventing ABI breakage.

Just in the past week, I’ve used several Linux apps distributed as plain binary tarballs that run on my native environment. The generic Linux binary releases of DevilutionX and OpenTTD use my native SDL for graphics, sound and input. Master PDF Editor uses a long list of native libraries including Qt 5. The QNX Software Center was compiled for the LSB and uses my native GTK 3. These run perfectly, no alternate runtime needed. Why? Because most libraries today are actually decently backwards compatible.

GOG.com’s strategy for Linux support is just about the opposite of Steam’s, and works just like traditional installers for Windows. Each game is built for a particular Ubuntu LTS release: 14.04, 16.04, 18.04. As long as your libraries are at least that new, the game will run. They ship self-extracting install wizards built with mojosetup, which is a bit like the Windows-based WISE or InstallShield installers of old (except they don’t require root access.) You download and run the installer as your normal user, hit Next->Next->Next and your game is installed. Full desktop integration, no giant alternate runtimes, no service required. Any ISV can ship software this way: just a self-installing executable shipped directly to users.

It’s not perfect. In particular mojosetup doesn’t install missing dependencies (yet) and GOG doesn’t totally follow the XDG specs for install paths (yet). These are minor, fixable problems, nothing on the scale of Flatpak. This is simple, this is true freedom, and the contrast in user experience is striking. I would take a mojosetup installer over an AppImage or Flatpak or Steam any day of the week.

For developers, yes, this may be harder than making an AppImage. There will still be occasional bugs that crop up between library versions. There will still be occasional differences between distributions. These are things you can work around. It may be painful at first but it will be worth it: you will provide a much superior user experience by working around the issues with your users’ libraries rather than attempting to replace them.

Forcing Distributions to Maintain Compatibility

The backwards compatibility situation will continue to get better with time. The more proprietary software is shipped for the native Linux desktop, the less likely major distributions will accept upstream breakage. Imagine if millions of office workers used Excel on Ubuntu. How loudly do you think businesses would complain if a distribution upgrade broke it?

In 2014, Linus Torvalds suggested that Valve could save the Linux desktop. He hoped they would publish a large volume of proprietary games that depended on the Linux desktop core libraries, finally forcing distributions to preserve their ABI. Unfortunately, as he predicted, that didn’t happen. Instead of relying on the native runtime libraries Steam replaced most of them with its own.

Steam needed to replace some libraries to make games work back in 2012. Today this is no longer necessary. So why are they still pushing their runtimes? How much progress could we make if Steam deprecated their runtimes, abandoned containerization for new games, and let all new games just use the native system libraries? How loudly do you think gamers would complain if a distribution upgrade broke their favourite game?

A few years ago Canonical decided to drop 32-bit libraries from Ubuntu 19.10. After much outrage, including Wine and Steam threatening to drop support for Ubuntu, they reversed their decision. Imagine how stable Ubuntu could be if Steam games depended on even more of the system libraries.

To any library developers reading this, it’s hard to over-emphasize how important backwards compatibility is to the popularity of a platform. Backwards compatibility is a major part of why Windows is still the dominant desktop OS. Microsoft has managed to keep the Win32 API stable for over 25 years. GUI apps built for Windows 95 still work out of the box on Windows 10. Businesses actually care about this! They use ancient proprietary software that is critical to their business whose source code has long been lost to the sands of time. A platform that breaks their software is no platform at all.

The GTK problem

There is one glaring exception to my claims regarding Linux library stability. That exception is GTK. GTK famously breaks their libraries with reckless abandon. This has historically been one of the biggest problems with shipping a binary app for Linux.

I believe this is partly due to a militant position on free software. Some advocates believe so strongly that users should be able to recompile their software that they force them to do so. They break libraries seemingly on purpose just to say, “Recompile! Oh you can’t? That’ll teach you to use binary software!” Of course users don’t want to recompile their software, but what users actually want is usually lost on GNOME developers.

With the recent release of GTK 4, there is little reason to believe the situation will improve. At one point they proposed bumping the soname on all major and minor releases. Thankfully they have reversed course, but their latest versioning scheme still indicates their desire to accelerate the pace of major releases, allowing them to more frequently make breaking changes and remove deprecated functions. They do at least intend to remain ABI stable within a major release series, but given their track record, by the time anyone trusts GTK 4 to remain stable it will be obsolete.

This sounds like bad news, but there is a silver lining here: while they’re mucking about with GTK 4, they aren’t breaking GTK 3.

The ongoing transition to GTK 4 gives us an opportunity here. The GTK 3 ABI is finally a stable target, and it’s still pre-installed in most distributions because lots of built-in apps haven’t upgraded yet. If we can get a sufficient number of binary apps depending on it, distributions will be forced to maintain it and even pre-install it “forever”, the same way Microsoft maintains the Win32 API “forever”.

I strongly recommend that all app developers (open source or otherwise) delay upgrading to GTK 4 as long as possible. The longer we can delay the switch, the more stable GTK 3 will be. If the GTK team want us to use GTK 4, they will need to prove its stability over many years, not simply replace it with GTK 5.

I’m not saying GTK 3 is good. All I’m saying is it exists. No other toolkit can claim to be practical for desktop apps and relatively stable and pre-installed on the vast majority of Linux desktops. We all hope something better will come along one day but in the meantime GTK 3 is what we’ve got.

There has never been a better time to ship a binary app that targets the Linux desktop. And I don’t mean targets its own bundled runtime; I mean truly targets the user’s runtime environment. The time is now.

Is Flatpak Fixable?

Here’s the thing. I actually think Bubblewrap, the sandboxing tool used by Flatpak (and now Steam), is pretty good. It’s the key technology to make app sandboxing good enough to compete with Android or iOS. If it was used to hide sensitive stuff like /home but otherwise just mounted the native /usr straight into the sandbox, it could be great. Unfortunately, Flatpak does the exact opposite.

If the Flatpak developers truly want an app distribution system that rivals Android and iOS, the sandbox, permissions and portal system should be the only focus.

They should:

Abandon everything related to runtimes, and instead mount the native /usr (or a restricted set of core libraries from /usr) read-only into each container;

Add metadata to Flatpaks to declare library dependencies that the Flatpak service will install with the host distribution’s package manager (perhaps with generated meta-packages that can be cleanly removed);
Build a fine-grained user-interactive runtime permission system that requires the app to make Flatpak-specific API calls to activate permission dialogs; and
Deprecate install-time permissions (especially filesystem access) and remove all apps from Flathub that use them.

Under this system, apps would be encouraged to statically link many of their dependencies, but use the system GTK/Qt/SDL, OpenGL/Vulkan, OpenSSL/curl, and other large or security-critical libraries. The community could maintain guidelines and wrappers to make apps that dynamically link against the system libraries cross-version and cross-distribution. Apps would be expected to make changes to run sandboxed and request permissions directly through a Flatpak client API.

This is much more akin to how iOS and Android work. But it means abandoning like 95% of Flatpak. It would be such a drastic change that they might as well start over under a different name. I don’t see it happening.

An app store based on a sandboxing technology for native apps is a reasonable idea. I certainly don’t think it should be used for everything though. I don’t think it’s at all necessary for software like Excel or Photoshop. Users do not care about sandboxing those sorts of apps and their vendors will refuse to be sandboxed anyway.

But for small apps and games from independent developers, a proper sandboxed app marketplace can in theory increase their reach. It can eliminate much of the trust that would otherwise be necessary to run them on your computer and can bring native apps closer to the ease of use of web apps.

It’s certainly not easier for developers, but good native apps still provide such a vastly better user experience than web apps that it’s possible a proper sandboxed app store can create a resurgence in native apps. Microsoft obviously failed with their attempt, but macOS kind of didn’t. Maybe there is a way Linux can succeed as well.

Conclusion

Snap and Flatpak in their current incarnations have been around for at least five years. AppImage, Steam and Docker have been around even longer. None of the above is new. The problems with alternate runtimes were known from the very beginning, yet little progress has been made in fixing them. I don’t believe these are growing pains of a new technology. These are fundamental problems that are mostly not fixable.

All of these technologies are essentially building an entire OS on top of another OS just to avoid the challenges of backwards compatibility. In doing so, they create far more problems than they solve. Problems of compatibility are best solved by the OS, the real one, not some containerized bastardization on top. We need to make apps that run natively, that use the system libraries as much as possible. We need to drastically simplify everything if we have any hope of attracting proprietary software to Linux.

If you are a Linux distribution maintainer, please understand what all of these solutions are trying to accomplish. All your hard work in building your software repository, maintaining your libraries, testing countless system configurations, designing a consistent user experience… they are trying to throw all of that away. Every single one of these runtime packaging mechanisms is trying to subvert the operating system, replacing as much as they can with their own. Why would you support this?

I implore you, do not use these packaging tools. Don’t add their services to your Linux distributions, don’t use apps packaged this way, and don’t ship apps that use them. Mass containerization and alternate runtimes cannot possibly be the future of desktop apps on Linux. If this is really the direction it’s going, the future will be so shitty that we’ll all end up back on macOS or Windows.

Personally, I’m much more interested in how to get Excel and Photoshop on Linux rather than untrustworthy drive-by apps and games, so I don’t really care about sandboxing, permissions, portals, app stores, alternate runtimes or really any of the stuff Flatpak does. Those are all counter-productive to convincing Microsoft and Adobe to port their software suites to Linux. Attracting these vendors will only happen by empowering them with a stable platform, not locking them in a box.

In future posts I’ll be going over some of the problems with targeting desktop Linux directly, presenting some of the stuff I’m working on, and hopefully coming up with real solutions that don’t depend on alternate runtimes.

Updates: A link to libportal was added, a reference to AppImageLauncher was added, and the description of GTK 4’s versioning scheme was corrected.

Source

Windows 11 KB5007262 Cumulative Update Preview Released

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 00:50:10 +0000

Microsoft has released the optional KB5007262 Preview cumulative update for Windows 11 with 70 fixes or improvements.

This Windows 11 cumulative update is part of Microsoft's November 2021 monthly "C" update, allowing users to test the upcoming updates and fixes in the December 2021 Patch Tuesday.

Unlike cumulative updates released on Patch Tuesday, preview updates do not contain security updates and only includes bug fixes and performance improvements.

Windows users can install this update by going into Settings, clicking on Windows Update, and selecting 'Check for Updates.' As this is an optional update, you will be prompted to click on the download and install button before Windows 10 will install the update.

After installing this update, Windows 11 will be updated to build 22000.348.

Windows 10 users can also download and manually install the KB5007262 update from the Microsoft Update Catalog.

What's new in Windows 10 KB5007262

The Windows 10 KB5007262 cumulative update preview includes 70 improvements or fixes, with the highlighted ones listed below:

Updates an issue that causes Internet Explorer to stop working when you copy and paste text while using the Input Method Editor (IME).
Updates an issue that displays the incorrect background for the iFLY Simplified Chinese IME icon in the notification area.
Updates an issue that prevents the display of File Explorer and desktop shortcut menus. This issue often occurs when you choose to use a single click to open an item.
Improves the animation performance of icons on the taskbar.
Updates volume control issues that affect Bluetooth audio devices.
Updates an issue that causes File Explorer to stop working after you close a File Explorer window.
Updates an issue that displays incorrect closed-caption shadows for some videos.
Updates an issue that automatically removes the Serbian (Latin) Windows display language from a device.
Updates an issue that causes flickering when you hover over icons on the taskbar; this issue occurs if you’ve applied a high contrast theme.
Updates an issue that, under certain conditions, prevents the keyboard focus rectangle from being visible when you use Task View, Alt-Tab, or Snap Assist.
Updates an issue that might cause Windows Mixed Reality to start when you put on a headset. This issue occurs even when you’ve turned off the option “Start Mixed Reality Portal when my headset's presence sensor detects that I'm wearing it”.
Updates an issue that might cause your device to report that it doesn't detect a printer after you plug it in.
Updates an issue that might cause a temporary loss of audio on your device.
Updates an issue that that causes some variable fonts to display incorrectly.
Updates an issue that displays letters or characters at the wrong angle when you use the Meiryo UI font and other vertical fonts. These fonts are frequently used in Japan, China, or other countries in Asia.
Updates an issue that causes certain apps to stop responding to input. This issue occurs on devices that have a touchpad.
Adds an option for you to choose whether to automatically turn on Focus Assist for the first hour after a Windows feature update.
Updates an audio distortion issue that affects Xbox One and Xbox Series Audio peripherals and occurs when you use them with spatial audio.
Updates several aspects of Windows emoji. As part of an iterative and ongoing work, we have made the following improvements for this release

When cumulative updates are released, Microsoft also shares the known issues or conflicts with the update.

Microsoft says that there are "not currently aware of any issues with this update."

You can find a complete list of improves and fixes and detailed explanations of the known issues in the KB5007262 support bulletin.

Windows 11 KB5007262 Cumulative Update Preview Released

Microsoft Edge 96 Stable with Duper Secure Mode now available (changelog)

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 22:55:27 +0000

Today Microsoft released Microsoft Edge Build 96.0.1054.29 as part of their regular 4-weekly update cycle.

The update brings Webview improvements, new PWA features and Quick Links for Office apps, but the most interesting is probable a new Super Dooper Secure Mode which users can enable on dodgy sites.

The Super Duper Secure Mode in Edge disables the JIT and enables new security mitigations. These include enabling the new Controlflow Enforcement Technology (CET) in Edge render process and in the future adding support for Web Assembly, Arbitrary Code Guard (ACG), and other new security mitigations.

Microsoft hopes Super Duper Secure Mode will be ”something that changes the modern exploit landscape and significantly raises the cost of exploitation for attackers”.

See the full changelog below:

Feature updates

Cloud Site List Management for IE mode in Public Preview. Cloud Site List Management lets you manage your site lists for IE mode in the cloud without needing an on-premises infrastructure to host your organization’s site list. You can access the Cloud Site List Management feature using the Microsoft Edge Site Lists experience in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. To learn more, see the Cloud Site List Management for IE mode (Public Preview) article.
Improved handoff between IE mode and the modern browser. Starting with this version of Microsoft Edge, navigations between Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer mode will include form data and additional HTTP headers. Referrer headers, post data, forms data, and request methods will be forwarded correctly across the two experiences. You can specify which data types should be included using the InternetExplorerIntegrationComplexNavDataTypes policy. For more information, see this FAQ: My application requires transferring POST data between IE mode and Microsoft Edge. Is this supported?
Update Microsoft Edge WebWiew2 using WSUS. IT Admins using Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) to update Microsoft Edge will also be able to update Microsoft Edge WebView2 using WSUS. This capability gives admins an easier servicing process for offline devices.
WSUS updates for Server. WSUS and Catalog updates for Microsoft Edge channels (Stable, Beta, and Dev) will now apply to Windows Server SKUs that have Microsoft Edge installed, including Windows Server 2022. For more information on how to configure WSUS updates for Microsoft Edge, see Update Microsoft Edge.
Microsoft Edge AutoLaunch Protocols Component. Microsoft Edge 96 introduces the AutoLaunch Protocols Component that contains lists of scheme-origin dictionaries to automatically allow or block. This protects customers from dangerous schemes (for example, a protocol handler with a 0-day) while eliminating prompts from known-safe pairings (for example, the Teams website can open the Teams client app). If for some reason, you don’t want Microsoft Edge to block vulnerable protocol handlers and allow known-safe pairings, use the toggle in edge://settings/content/applicationLinks, or set the AutoLaunchProtocolsComponentEnabled policy to False.
Launch Progressive Web App (PWA) directly via protocol links. Let installed PWAs handle links that use a specific protocol for a more integrated experience.
Quickly view Office files in the browser. Users can now view Office files including documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that they come across while browsing on Microsoft Edge right in the browser without needing to download the file and then open it in a different application. There will be no changes in the file open experience for Office files that are hosted on OneDrive or SharePoint.
Freeform highlighting on PDFs. The PDF viewing and markup experience is improved with the addition of freeform highlighters. You can highlight sections in PDFs that you don’t have access to, and scanned documents.
New warning dialog for typosquatting sites. The browser will show a warning on some sites with URLs that look very similar to other sites. This UI uses client-side heuristics to warn users about sites that might be spoofing popular web sites. For more information, see What is typosquatting?.
Dictionary added to mini-toolbar in Immersive Reader. We’re adding dictionary functionality to the mini-toolbar to assist in your reading and research. You’ll be able to look up the spelling and definitions of words more quickly and easily in the Immersive Reader experience.
Learn how to solve math problems with Math Solver. We’re excited to announce that you can use Math Solver in Microsoft Edge to get help with a wide range of mathematical concepts. These concepts range from elementary arithmetic and quadratic equations to trigonometry and calculus. Math Solver lets you take a picture of a handwritten or printed math problem and then provides an instant solution with step-by-step instructions to help you learn how to reach the solution without help. Math Solver also comes with a mathematical keyboard that you can use to easily type math problems. This keyboard eliminates the need to search around a traditional keyboard to find the math characters you need. After solving your problem, Math Solver provides options to continue learning with quizzes, worksheets, and video tutorials.

Policy updates

New Policies

ApplicationGuardUploadBlockingEnabled Prevents files from being uploaded while in Application Guard
AudioProcessHighPriorityEnabled Allow the audio process to run with priority above normal on Windows
AutoLaunchProtocolsComponentEnabled AutoLaunch Protocols Component Enabled
BrowserLegacyExtensionPointsBlockingEnabled Enable browser legacy extension point blocking
CrossOriginWebAssemblyModuleSharingEnabled Specifies whether WebAssembly modules can be sent cross-origin
DisplayCapturePermissionsPolicyEnabled Specifies whether the display-capture permissions-policy is checked or skipped
EfficiencyMode Configure when efficiency mode should become active
ForceSyncTypes Configure the list of types that are included for synchronization
InternetExplorerIntegrationComplexNavDataTypes Configure whether form data and HTTP headers will be sent when entering or exiting Internet Explorer mode
InternetExplorerModeToolbarButtonEnabled Show the Reload in Internet Explorer mode button in the toolbar
InternetExplorerIntegrationWindowOpenHeightAdjustment Configure the pixel adjustment between window.open heights sourced from IE mode pages vs. Edge mode pages
InternetExplorerIntegrationWindowOpenWidthAdjustment Configure the pixel adjustment between window.open widths sourced from IE mode pages vs. Edge mode pages
IntranetFileLinksEnabled Allow intranet zone file URL links from Microsoft Edge to open in Windows File Explorer
NewSmartScreenLibraryEnabled Enable new SmartScreen library
PrintPostScriptMode Print PostScript Mode
PrintRasterizePdfDpi Print Rasterize PDF DPI
RendererAppContainerEnabled Enable renderer in app container
ShadowStackCrashRollbackBehavior Configure ShadowStack crash rollback behavior
SharedLinksEnabled Show links shared from Microsoft 365 apps in History
TyposquattingCheckerEnabled Configure Edge TyposquattingChecker
VisualSearchEnabled Visual search enabled

The latest version of the Edge browser can be installed simply by restarting your browser.

Microsoft Edge 96 Stable with Duper Secure Mode now available (changelog)

Five things I hate about Windows 11 (Editorial)

Sun, 21 Nov 2021 23:34:47 +0000

Windows 11 has been out for over a month, but due to its staggered rollout, it's not available to everyone just yet. While Microsoft recently stated that it's speeding up the pace of availability due to "positive" feedback regarding the OS, that doesn't mean that Windows 11 is perfect. Far from it, in fact. If you've read my review on the OS, you know that I find it to be a mixed bag overall.

Last week, I talked about the top five things I love about Windows 11, but today, I'm going on the opposite extreme and will be talking about five things I hate about Microsoft's latest operating system. As usual, this is a purely personal perspective so feel free to disagree with it. Another few things I'd like to emphasize are that this list is in no particular order and the OS possibly has other problems apart from the ones I mention too, I just don't feel that strongly about them. With that out of the way, let's begin!

1 - Taskbar

I know that this list is in no particular order, but let's start with the most glaring feature first. The Taskbar in Windows 11 is extremely stripped down, so much so that it actually ditches some very useful functionalities that were present in Windows 10 for no apparent reason other than simplification. And that's because it borrows from the now-defunct Windows 10X, a simplified OS that was being designed for dual-screen devices. This results in a Taskbar that is arguably aesthetic but crippled for a lot of use-cases.

You can't drag and drop apps to pin them to the Taskbar, which means that you have to rely on context menus. The context menu for the Taskbar is essentially gone too, but you can still use its capabilities by right-clicking on the Windows/Start icon. Then there's the Taskbar clock, which has seemingly lost the ability to display time to the accuracy of settings based on Microsoft's whims. In the same vein, the Taskbar is locked to the bottom for some weird reason as well. You can't adjust its height, show labels and never combine apps, or even change the size of app icons. Even the Agenda view for the Calendar in the system tray is absent.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I'm sure that there are lots of other capabilities that I don't actively use but are likely missing as well. There's hope that Microsoft will eventually listen to all the negative feedback with thousands of upvotes in its beloved Feedback Hub and restore at least some functionality, but the fact that it thought that the launch version is good enough is just unacceptable. You can read more of my thoughts in the dedicated Closer Look piece here.

2 - Default apps settings

Oh boy, if you thought this list was going to go easier on Microsoft, you couldn't have been more wrong. Default apps settings is yet another change in Windows 11 that I highly despise. In Windows 10, Microsoft allowed you to set default apps for categories like Email, Maps, Music player, Photo viewer, Video player, and Web browser. This is no longer the case in Windows 11.

Microsoft actually wants you go through a painful process where you set the default app for each extension protocol. You don't have a category called "Web browser" where you can just set Chrome as the default browser and be done with it, you have to manually set it for each extension. Check the screenshot above to get an idea of what I'm talking about if you haven't gotten around to using Windows 11 yourself.

Granted that it's a one-time activity, but it's so much extra effort just to change your default browser or any other app, really. Microsoft's sheer audacity to implement such an anti-competitive tactic in an OS that is used by millions is just infuriating. While third-party developers and firms are attempting workarounds to bypass Microsoft's restrictions, it does seem like that they'll face a difficult time. You can read more of my rant on this topic in the dedicated piece here.

3 - Context menus

This is a bit of an odd duckling, and that's because "hate" is a bit of a strong word for this. The new context menu (or the right-click menu depending on what you call it) is an interesting experiment into making a UI element more accessible and simplified while still retaining all functionalities via workarounds.

Essentially, as you can see in the screenshot above, Microsoft has grouped some common items such as cut, copy, rename, share, and delete to the toolbar at the top of the context menu while some other functionalities are at the bottom. But you'll notice that many third-party apps that gave you an "open with" option or other similar to that are not visible by default. You actually have to click on the "Show more options" at the bottom of the context menu to get the Windows 10 version back which will have all the verbs.

In an effort to organize the context menu a bit better, Microsoft now expects developers to update their apps according to a new integration mechanism through which their app's verbs will be grouped neatly in the taskbar. I don't see a fault in the approach itself, but the issue is that this puts way too much responsibility on an app developer to update all their old apps to integrate with Windows 11. So if a developer has moved on to newer projects or abandoned their software completely, you as a user will be out of luck unless you implement some workarounds to integrate verbs to the native context menu.

You could use the "Show more options" button to just utilize the old context menu, but it obviously requires an extra click that is not good for a streamlined user experience, and there's actually no knowing if Microsoft eventually decides to do away with it completely and leave old apps and their consumers out in the cold. There's just too much uncertainty at this point for it to be enforced upon developers, and more importantly, consumers in this way.

I actually like the look of the updated context menu, but given that Microsoft seems to have sacrificed functionality for aesthetics in so many elements of the UI already, I fear that the old context menu will get the ax soon as well, which makes the updated context menu a very difficult sell for me. Check out more of my thoughts on this topic here.

4 - Start menu

Ah, yet another core part of the OS that did not get the treatment it deserved. When I initially talked about the Start menu in my Closer Look piece several weeks ago, I mentioned that since I don't use it much, its deficiencies don't bother me a lot. However, I don't know why, but I have been using the Start menu considerably more in Windows 11 compared to Windows 10. I don't know if it's something to do with the centered position of the Taskbar which encourages me to click on the Start menu more than usual, or if it's something else, but that's just how it is.

The problem with the Start menu in Windows 11 is the same. Aesthetically, it's very pleasing to look at but in terms of user experience, it leaves a lot to be desired. There's no love lost for the absent Live Tiles, but I do miss the functionality that went away with it. There is no way to group apps which means that you'll potentially have to scroll a lot if you have lots of apps pinned that you actively use.

The other downer is that "Recommended" section that takes up the bottom section of the Start menu to show you files that you recently used. While you can disable it if you have privacy concerns, especially when sharing your screen online, the problem is that all that space is wasted. Microsoft doesn't extend the Start menu's app list to utilize all the whitespace, it's just left unutilized, which seems like a major design and engineering oversight.

But perhaps the worst culprit is the search bar that has been integrated into the Start menu. You would expect that if you click on it, you'll be able to quickly fire in some search queries, but it actually has a massive jitter as it stutters and opens up Windows Search, which is actually a separate interface. The integration is so jarring that you can only gaze in wonder about how Microsoft thought that it was good enough to ship.

5 - Widgets

Let's get one thing out of the way: I don't hate the idea of Widgets, I just hate how Microsoft has implemented them in Windows 11. I do use Widgets occasionally, but I find it extremely annoying that rather than opening up in a pop-up window at some corner of your screen, it takes up almost the full height and 40% of the width of my 15.6-inch display with a resolution of 1920x1080.

What this means is that if you're on a single display, you can either view your Widgets or use your primary window, there's absolutely no concept of multitasking. If you click on the primary window, the Widgets flyout closes, it's super-annoying.

While you can customize it to your liking, to show you topics that interest you, I do have to talk about the integration between Calendar and Widgets. You can only sync your calendar agenda to Widgets if you use an Outlook.com account. If you're using any other email provider, you're out of luck. Given the lack of integration of the Agenda view with the Calendar flyout in the system tray, what this means is that if you want to view your daily agenda with a third-party email provider, you necessarily have to open the dedicated Calendar app because Microsoft has decided that it's not going to help you out. Long live simplification!

Five things I hate about Windows 11

7-Zip 21.05: first stable version of 2021 released

Sun, 21 Nov 2021 23:29:12 +0000

The developer of the open source archiver 7-Zip, Igor Pavlov, released the first stable version of the application of 2021, 7-Zip 21.05.

The new version is already available on the official website. You can check the installed version by selecting Help > About 7-Zip in the application interface.

7-Zip 21.05

7-Zip 21.05 is the first major stable version in a while. The last release dates back to version 19.00, released in February 2019. Several alpha and beta versions have been released since then, but 21.05 is the first new stable version of the archiver. Alpha builds for Linux and Mac OS X were released.

Here is the list of important changes when compared to the last stable version, 7-Zip 19.00:

Support for unpacking b64 files (Base64 encoding).
7-Zip supports new hardware instructions for SHA-1 and SHA-256 which new AMD Ryzen and Intel CPU's support; this improves the performance of certain operations, including encrypting and decrypting ZIP AES, hash value calculations, and the speed of key derivation for encryption and decryption in 7z, ZIP and RAR archives.
ZIP AES encryption and 7z, RAR and ZIP AES decryption improved.
Improved compression ratio for fast and fastest compression levels.
Default number of LZMA2 chunks per solid blocks increased in 7z archives, which improves the compression speed for large 7z archives on devices with a large number of CPU cores and threads.
The -ssp command line switches prevents that the system modifies the "last access time" property of source files for archiving and hashing operations.
ARM64 version speed improvements for AES, CRC-32, SHA-1 and SHA-256.
Maximum dictionary size for LZMA/LZMA2 compression operations was increased to 4 Gigabytes.
Decompression speed of LZMA and LZMA2 archives in ARM64 versions for Mac OS and Linux improved by 20-60%.
7-Zip writes an additional field for the filename in UTF-8 encoding in ZIP archives.
The number of working CPU threads is removed for compression if the RAM size is not enough for compression operations with large LZMA2 dictionaries.
7-Zip may create the text file file.sha256, which contains all file names and SHA-256 checksums. The program may also check the file to verify files.
Add to Archive window supports setting a memory usage limit.

Interested users can check out the full changelog here.

7-Zip 21.05: first stable version of 2021 released

News & Updates: 7-Zip 21.05

Microsoft releases Windows 11 Cumulative Update Build 22504.1010 (KB5008697) for Insiders

Fri, 19 Nov 2021 23:54:33 +0000

Early this week, Microsoft announced the release of Windows 11 Preview Build 22504 to the Dev Channel Insiders. This new build expanded the touch keyboard themes to other input experiences, including IMEs, the emoji panel, and voice typing. Today, Microsoft announced the roll out of Windows 11 Cumulative Update Build 22504.1010 (KB5008697). This is a minor update and does not include anything new. This update is designed to test Microsoft’s servicing pipeline for builds in the Dev Channel.

What’s new in Windows 11 Build 22504:

Changes and Improvements

To further personalize your Windows text input experience, we have expanded the 13 themes for the touch keyboard to now apply to our other input experiences, including IMEs, the emoji panel, and voice typing. Also available for all themed experiences is the theme engine that allows you to create a fully customized theme including background images. You can find all this under the new “Text Input” section under Settings > Personalization. This isn’t available to all Insiders just yet as we plan to monitor feedback and see how it lands before pushing it out to everyone.

We have expanded the 13 themes for the touch keyboard to more input methods, including the IME, emoji panel, and voice input.

We have added the ability for personalized combinations of emoji based on face and skin tones of family members, couples with heart, kissing, and people holding hands. Just open the emoji panel (WIN + . ) and try these combinations out by typing the following in the search box: family, couple, holding hands, or kissing. This isn’t available to all Insiders just yet as we plan to monitor feedback and see how it lands before pushing it out to everyone.

We have added the ability for personalized combinations of emoji based on face and skin tones of family members, couples with heart, kissing, and people holding hands.

You can now use the WIN + Alt + K keyboard shortcut to toggle the new mute icon in the Taskbar when it’s showing.
Based on feedback, we’re making emoji search in Portuguese and Polish a little more flexible with keywords containing diacritics.
Introducing .NET Framework 4.8.1 our latest .NET Framework that will bring native ARM64 support for the .NET Framework runtime.
As Settings > System > Sound in Windows 11 shows a warning when microphone access has been restricted in your privacy settings, we’re removing the notification to alert you about this.
Added support for the cancellation of daylight savings time for the Republic of Fiji for 2021.
We’re making a change so that going forward on new installs the touch indicator option will now be turned off by default under Settings > Accessibility > Mouse pointer and touch. As part of this change, we’ve added a link to this Settings page from Settings > Bluetooth & Devices > Touch and made it so that the press and hold visual is now always displayed regardless of the setting state.
Apps will now launch maximized by default when in the tablet posture on small devices (11-inch screens diagonal and under).

Fixes

[Start]

Fixed an issue believed to be the root cause of icons not displaying correctly in the Recommended section of Start (showing the wrong or a generic icon) sometimes.
If you open Start and immediate press Shift + F10 or the context menu key, the context menu should be aligned with the search box now.

[Taskbar]

Fixed an issue leading to an explorer.exe crash in recent builds if there were issues loading the battery icon in the Taskbar.
Made some changes to help the clock in the Taskbar update more reliably, including addressing a recent issue where it wasn’t updating at all over Remote Desktop.
Mitigated a positioning issue that could cause the date and time to get clipped off the end of the Taskbar.
If you’ve updated the critical and low battery level notification definitions, the battery icon in the Taskbar will now align with that, rather than using the default values to show a warning.
Right clicking the date and time in the Taskbar will now dismiss the Notification Center if it’s open, so that you can see the context menu options.

[Input]

Keyboard lights (for example, for caps lock) should work properly again now with this build.
We’ve made a few more tweaks to our emoji search keywords based on feedback, including improving results for day, night, and face with raised eyebrow. Please continue sharing feedback with us about this under Input and Language > Emoji Panel in the Feedback Hub.
Fixed an issue that was causing the kaomoji list in WIN + . to be blank when accessed while using a Chinese IME.
Fixed an issue with the emoji panel search results that could lead to a single gif being displayed repeatedly with certain queries.
Mitigated an issue resulting in IMEs not working with certain games.
Addressed an issue where the options under Settings > Personalization > Typing to change the settings “Show text suggestions & add a spacebar after I choose a text suggestions” for the touch keyboard might unexpectedly not display.
If you make a long pause while using voice typing (WIN + H), it should be able to resume listening more reliability now.
Fixed some inconsistencies between actual listening status and the microphone visual in voice typing.
Text should no longer be unexpectedly duplicated if the caret is moved while using voice typing.

[Windowing]

Selecting snap layout options should no longer randomly put windows on your other monitor sometimes.

[Settings]

The brightness and volume sliders in Quick Settings should no longer randomly become invisible.
Fixed an issue preventing Adjusting active hours from being set to manually.
Addressed an issue which could result in the touch keyboard occluding the password entry field when connecting to a network in Quick Settings.

[Other]

Fixed a scaling issue that was causing the update prompt dialog (and other dialogs of that style) to get cut off and not draw correctly after the DPI changed.
Improved the positioning of the context menu when right clicking the bottom corner of the desktop.
Mitigated an issue related to TCPIP which could result in bug checks when waking a device.
Fixed an issue where high priority notifications (such as an alarm) would sometimes unexpectedly dismiss without you engaging with it, leading to it randomly reappearing the next time a normal priority notification came in.

NOTE: Some fixes noted here in Insider Preview builds from the active development branch may make their way into the servicing updates for the released version of Windows 11 that became generally available on October 5th.

Known issues

[General]

Users updating from Builds 22000.xxx, or earlier, to newer Dev Channel builds using the latest Dev Channel ISO, may receive the following warning message: The build you are trying to install is Flight Signed. To continue installing, enable flight signing. If you receive this message, press the Enable button, reboot the PC, and retry the update.
We’re investigating an issue where some PCs are unable to install new builds, or other updates. The PC may report an error code 0x80070002. If you are experiencing this issue, please reboot your PC and try again.
Some devices may bugcheck with error code 0xc1900101-0x4001c when installing this build. If you hit this, after the device rolls back to the previous build, you may want to pause updates until we release a fix.

[Start]

In some cases, you might be unable to enter text when using Search from Start or the Taskbar. If you experience the issue, press WIN + R on the keyboard to launch the Run dialog box, then close it.

[Taskbar]

The Taskbar will sometimes flicker when switching input methods.

[Windowing]

Hovering your mouse back and forth between different desktops in Task View will result in the displayed thumbnails and content area unexpectedly shrinking.

[Search]

After clicking the Search icon on the Taskbar, the Search panel may not open. If this occurs, restart the “Windows Explorer” process, and open the search panel again.

For developers

You can download the latest Windows Insider SDK at aka.ms/windowsinsidersdk.

SDK NuGet packages are now also flighting at NuGet Gallery | WindowsSDK which include:

.NET TFM packages for use in .NET apps as described at ms/windowsinsidersdk
C++ packages for Win32 headers and libs per architecture
BuildTools package when you just need tools like MakeAppx.exe, MakePri.exe, and SignTool.exe

These NuGet packages provide more granular access to the SDK and better integrate in CI/CD pipelines.

Your Phone’s new look begins to roll out

The Your Phone app is evolving with an updated design that puts notifications at the center. Keep your phone in your pocket while staying on top of your life. The Your Phone app brings you an organized feed of your real-time notifications across all your most used apps. In this new view, you’ll always have access to your messages, calls, and photos with the added benefit to stay on top of important messages and other notifications more efficiently with this glanceable view. The app also adopts the beauty of Windows 11 design to tie together your seamless experience on your Windows desktop.

Your Phone app on Windows 11 showing apps.

The updated design is gradually rolling out to Windows Insiders.

Source: Microsoft

Microsoft releases Windows 11 Cumulative Update Build 22504.1010 (KB5008697) for Insiders

New Windows 11 build fixes Microsoft Installer issue breaking apps

Fri, 19 Nov 2021 23:48:59 +0000

Microsoft has fixed a recently confirmed Windows 11 issue in a newly released build for Windows Insiders in the Beta and Release Preview channels.

This issue would prevent apps from opening on multiple client and server Windows versions after being repaired or updated using the Windows Installer system tool (previously known as Microsoft Installer).

Systems affected by this bug include those where Windows users have installed the KB5007215 cumulative update issued during this month's Patch Tuesday.

The fix issued today with Windows 11 Build 22000.348 (KB5007262) only for Windows Insiders is also expected to roll out to all impacted Windows 11 customers during the December 2021 Patch Tuesday.

"We fixed a known issue that might prevent apps, such as Kaspersky apps, from opening after you attempt to repair or update the apps using the Microsoft Installer (MSI)," the Windows Insider Program Team said.

Systems running older Windows versions waiting for a fix

While Microsoft is now providing Windows Insiders running the latest Windows 11 beta build with a fix, users of all other Windows versions impacted by this issue will have to wait for a future update.

The complete list of Windows versions impacted by this known issue includes:

Client: Windows 11, version 21H2; Windows 10, version 21H2; Windows 10, version 21H1; Windows 10, version 20H2; Windows 10, version 2004; Windows 10, version 1909; Windows 10, version 1809; Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019; Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2016; Windows 10, version 1607; Windows 10 Enterprise 2015 LTSB; Windows 8.1; Windows 7 SP1
Server: Windows Server 2022; Windows Server, version 20H2; Windows Server, version 2004; Windows Server, version 1909; Windows Server, version 1809; Windows Server 2019; Windows Server 2016; Windows Server 2012 R2; Windows Server 2012; Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1; Windows Server 2008 SP2

The list of November cumulative updates that break Windows Installer's functionality includes:

Windows 7: KB5007233, KB5007236
Windows 8.1: KB5007247, KB5007255
Windows 10: KB5007206, KB5007207, KB5007186, KB5007189, KB5007192
Windows 11: KB5007215
Windows Server 2008: KB5007246, KB5007263
Windows Server 2008 R2: KB5007233, KB5007236
Windows Server 2012: KB5007245, KB5007260
Windows Server 2012 R2: KB5007247, KB5007255
Windows Server 2016: KB5007192
Windows Server 2019: KB5007206
Windows Server 2022: KB5007205

Workaround available

While not all impacted Windows versions have a fix ready, Microsoft provides a workaround for customers experiencing difficulties launching apps after deploying one of the problematic updates.

"To mitigate this issue, you will need to uninstall the affected app, then install the latest version of the app," Microsoft said.

Redmond's engineers are working to address this issue for all other Windows customers, which will be released with a future update.

Microsoft is also readying an update to address another issue impacting Windows 11 customers that can trigger blue screens of death (BSODs) on systems with Intel Smart Sound Technology (SST) audio DSP drivers.

New Windows 11 build fixes Microsoft Installer issue breaking apps

Microsoft: Windows Installer breaks apps after updates, repairs

Fri, 19 Nov 2021 23:46:32 +0000

Microsoft has confirmed a new known issue impacting client and server Windows versions that breaks apps after updating or repairing them using the Windows Installer (previously known as Microsoft Installer).

This issue affects systems where Windows users have installed cumulative updates released during this month's Patch Tuesday.

After installing one of these updates, "Microsoft Installer (MSI) might have issues repairing or updating apps," the company says on the Windows Health dashboard.

"Apps that are known to be affected include some apps from Kaspersky. Affected apps might fail to open after an update or repair has been attempted."

The complete list of Windows versions affected by this known issue includes:

Client: Windows 11, version 21H2; Windows 10, version 21H2; Windows 10, version 21H1; Windows 10, version 20H2; Windows 10, version 2004; Windows 10, version 1909; Windows 10, version 1809; Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019; Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2016; Windows 10, version 1607; Windows 10 Enterprise 2015 LTSB; Windows 8.1; Windows 7 SP1
Server: Windows Server 2022; Windows Server, version 20H2; Windows Server, version 2004; Windows Server, version 1909; Windows Server, version 1809; Windows Server 2019; Windows Server 2016; Windows Server 2012 R2; Windows Server 2012; Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1; Windows Server 2008 SP2

Microsoft also provides a workaround for customers experiencing difficulties when launching apps after deploying one of the problematic updates.

"To mitigate this issue, you will need to uninstall the affected app, then install the latest version of the app," Microsoft says.

The company's engineers are currently working on a fix to address this issue which will be released with a future update.

Windows 11 known issues and safeguards

Microsoft is also working on a resolution for another issue impacting Windows 11 customers that leads to blue screens of death (BSODs) on affected systems.

The new issue is caused by compatibility issues between integrated Intel Smart Sound Technology (SST) audio DSP drivers and Windows 11, version 21H2.

Redmond has also added an update block to prevent devices with impacted Intel SST drivers from being offered the Windows 11 upgrade.

Right now, there're only two Windows 11 compatibility holds, with the other one blocking the upgrade from being offered to eligible systems running Oracle VirtualBox when Hyper-V or Windows Hypervisor are also installed.

Microsoft: Windows Installer breaks apps after updates, repairs

Firefox may soon paint all sites in dark or light mode, if you want

Fri, 19 Nov 2021 23:43:17 +0000

Mozilla is working on a new feature in the organization's Firefox web browser that may be used to force a specific color scheme on sites you visit.

Most browsers support light and dark modes already, but the functionality is limited to painting the chrome of the browser using the color scheme. Website content remains unmodified when the feature is enabled or configured.

The latest Firefox Nightly version, version 96.0a1, comes with a new feature that extends the functionality. Once activated, sites will also be displayed in the selected color scheme.

Here is how the feature looks on Ghacks. Dark Mode was enabled on the Windows 10 system and Firefox picked it up to display the browser UI and the content of the webpage using the color scheme.

All sites are displayed using the selected mode and color scheme. Firefox includes options to change some parameters, including text and background colors.

Here is how you configure the feature in Firefox Nightly:

Select Menu > Settings.
Scroll down to the Language and Appearance section.
Activate the "Colors" button on the page.

Here you get the following options:

To configure the force color feature on websites, set "Override the colors specified by the page with your selections above" to Always.
Change the text and Background colors to your liking.
Change the visited and unvisited links colors as well.
Select OK to save the new configuration.

Websites will be painted using the selected mode of the operating system, light or dark, and the colors selected in Firefox's preferences.

The feature was announced by Mozilla employee Morgan on Twitter. According to the information posted there, users should expect that some content may not look perfect when the forced colors mode is enabled. Users are encouraged to report bugs and issues on Bugzilla.

The functionality to override text, background and link colors on sites has been part of Firefox for a long time. The new feature takes this a step further by adding the color mode of the operating system to the site as well; this paints every item on the site using the selected color mode.

Firefox users had to use browser extensions such as Midnight Lizard before to achieve something similar. Mozilla's implementation is bare bones at the time: there is no override option or option to customize the color scheme of a specific site using native options. Since it is been released in Nightly only at the time, it is possible that missing functionality will be added to improve the feature's usability.

Firefox may soon paint all sites in dark or light mode, if you want

Microsoft promises it's focusing on improving Windows 11 performance come 2022

Fri, 19 Nov 2021 06:54:30 +0000

Microsoft released the 1.0 stable version of Windows App SDK a couple of days ago and the Windows developer team decided to conduct an AUA (Ask Us Anything) about it on the Windows 11 subreddit. During the session, when some users complained about some of the sluggish UI performance instances on Windows 11, the Windows developer team confirmed that it is indeed working to address such issues in 2022. This means next year's Windows 11 22H2 feature update could bring a faster overall UI interaction response and performance if things do indeed pan out as Microsoft claims.

Performance will be an area of focus for us in 2022. A lot of that focus will go into startup/launch perf; in terms of UI elements rendering on the screen (after the framework is loaded), we've tested the scalability of doing things like putting 10k buttons on the screen, etc. Most of the UI elements render pretty quickly already, but it would be good to understand if there are specific UI element scaling/slowness issues you're experiencing and we could take a look into that specific scenario.

[...] Internally, in addition to wanting to focus some of our our UX framework's time on perf in 2022, we also have a dedicated team formed recently to tackle this topic more holistically. So there's multiple things we're collectively doing here to try and make sure we have a good perf story.

Microsoft seems to be taking user feedback pretty seriously now, at least for some of the aspects. For example, the firm announced just yesterday that it is rolling back to the previous UWP-based Whiteboard due to poor feedback related to performance and reduced features on the new Whiteboard.

Also, this isn't the first time that Microsoft has mentioned performance improvements when talking about Windows 11. Like back in September, the company explained how the OS was designed to get the best performance out of available hardware.

Source: windowsdev_team (Reddit) (1),(2)

Update: Added additional quote from the Windows Developer team to explain the focus on overall Windows 11 performance aspect too.

Microsoft promises it's focusing on improving Windows 11 performance come 2022

Microsoft release Windows 10 Build 19044.1381 / 19043.1381 to the Release Preview Channel

Fri, 19 Nov 2021 01:57:29 +0000

Today Microsoft released Windows 10 Cumulative Update KB5007253 to Windows 10 Insiders in the Release Preview channel.

The update takes Windows 10 21H1 to Build 19044.1381 and Windows 10 21H2 to Build 19044.1381.

The update this additional fix plus all the improvements previously noted here:

Microsoft fixed an issue that might affect devices that use Windows Hello for Business and are joined to Azure Active Directory (AD). These devices might experience issues when they access on-premises resources, such as file shares or websites.
Microsoft fixed an issue that affects the opening of the SearchFilterHost.exe process.

Microsoft fixed an issue that causes searchindexer.exe to keep handles to the per user search database in the path below after you sign out: “C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\\” As a result, searchindexer.exe stops working and duplicate profile names are created.
Microsoft added support for the cancellation of daylight savings time for the Republic of Fiji for 2021.
Microsoft fixed an issue that prevents the enrollment status page (ESP) from displaying the error message or remediation options after a failure.
Microsoft added the –cd argument to wsl.exe to specify a Windows or Linux path as a starting directory for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
Microsoft fixed an issue that fails to apply machine Group Policy objects automatically at startup or in the background to devices on a domain that have certain processors.
Microsoft added the option to configure an Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) maximum transmission unit (MTU) that is less than 576 bytes on an interface.
Microsoft fixed an issue that fails to provide an event description for the System Center – Operations Manager.
Microsoft fixed an issue that incorrectly renders some variable fonts.
Microsoft fixed an issue that might cause the 32-bit version of Microsoft Excel to stop working on devices that have certain processors when you export to PDF.
Microsoft fixed an issue that displays glyphs at the wrong angle when you use the Meiryo UI font and other vertical fonts. These fonts are frequently used in Japan, China, or other countries in Asia.
Microsoft enabled onunload events to create pop-up windows in Microsoft Edge Internet Explorer mode.
Microsoft fixed an issue that affects predictive pre-rendering in Microsoft Edge Internet Explorer mode.
Microsoft fixed an issue that causes Internet Explorer to stop working.
Microsoft fixed an issue that causes Internet Explorer to stop working when using the Input Method Editor (IME) to insert elements.
Microsoft fixed an issue that causes the Settings page to unexpectedly close after you uninstall a font.
Microsoft fixed an issue that affects the UI for renaming files when using folder view in File Explorer. The UI fails to properly handle inline composition when using the new Japanese IME.
Microsoft fixed a memory leak in ctfmon.exe that occurs when you switch between different edit clients.
Microsoft fixed a known issue that causes error codes 0x000006e4, 0x0000007c, or 0x00000709 when connecting to a remote printer that is shared on a Windows print server.
Microsoft fixed an issue that turns off screen capture and recording functionalities on the Windows Game Bar because of a service failure.
Microsoft fixed an issue that might cause the return value of GetCommandLineA() to be lowercase in some developer scenarios.
Microsoft fixed an issue that might cause the decryption of a file that is on a remote server to fail. This issue occurs when using the Encrypted File System (EFS) on the remote server and the error message is, “ERROR_DECRYPTION_FAILED”.
Microsoft fixed an issue that prevents you from enabling BitLocker on a thinly provisioned virtual machine (VM). The error is “A device attached to the system is not functioning” and the system logs, “STATUS_UNSUCCESSFUL”.
Microsoft fixed an issue that causes Windows Defender Application Control to incorrectly compare two file version numbers.
Microsoft enabled credentials for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) users in Quick Assist.
Microsoft fixed an issue that sometimes prevents Quick Assist users from using full screen view after they start a remote assistance session.
Microsoft fixed an issue that prevents the applications that you use often from appearing on the Start menu and prevents you from configuring them to appear on the Start menu using a Group Policy.
Microsoft fixed an issue that causes the syncing of desktop settings to fail when you use the built-in User Experience Virtualization (UE-V) template.
Microsoft fixed an issue that prevents Failover Clustering from updating Domain Name Server (DNS) records.
Microsoft fixed an issue that prevents your device from starting up, and it becomes unresponsive because of licensing API calls.

Windows 10 Insiders in the Release Preview Channel can download the update by Checking for Updates in Settings.

Microsoft release Windows 10 Build 19044.1381 / 19043.1381 to the Release Preview Channel

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021: here are the major changes

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 is now available. windows-10-enterprise-ltsc-2021 The new Long Term Servicing Channel version of Windows 10 is not available as a retail version. The new release "builds on Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019" and its feature set is equivalent to Windows 10 version 21H2, which Microsoft released this week.

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 includes changes found in the Windows 10 versions 1903, 1909, 2004, 21H1 and 21H2, when compared to Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019.

One core difference between the two Enterprise versions is that the support lifecycle has been reduced by Microsoft. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 gets 5 years of support, that is 5 years less than the support lifecycle of Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019. The only exception is Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 IoT, which still gets 10 years of support.

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 will be supported until 2026 by Microsoft, that is three years less than the support lifecycle of Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019.

Microsoft highlights the following core improvements in the new LTSC 2021 version of Windows 10:

System Guard: Improved SMM Firmware Protection feature, which is built on top of System Guard Secure Launch. It is designed to "reduce the firmware attack surface". Windows Defender "enables an even higher level of System Management Mode (SMM) Firmware Protection" to detect a higher level of SMM compliance. Microsoft notes that there are three versions of SMM Firmware Protection. Devices that support version 3, the strongest protection, will be released soon as they require new hardware, according to Microsoft.
Windows Security app: includes Protection history, including Controlled Folder Access blocks, and Windows Defender Offline Scanning tool actions.
Bitlocker and Mobile Device Management (MDM) with Azure Active Directory: better protection against accidental password disclore though a "new key-rolling feature" which "securely rotates recovery passwords on MDM-managed devices".
Windows Defender Firewall: includes several new features.
- Reduce the attack surface of a device through rules that restrict or allow traffic using properties such as IP addresses, ports, or program paths.
- Integrated Internet Protocol Security (IPsec), to enforce "authenticated, end-to-end network communications".
- Easier to analyze and debug. IPsec integrated into Packet Monitor.
- Enhanced Windows Defender Firewall event logs.
- Support for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
Attack surface area reduction: administrators may configure advanced web protections to set allow and deny lists for URLs and IP addresses.
Next Generation protection: extended to protect against ransomware, credential misuse, and removable storage attacks.
Integrity enforcement capabilities: runtime attestation of Windows 10.
Tamper-proofing capabilities: Virtualization-based security that isolates Microsoft Defender for Endpoint security from the OS and potential attackers.
Emergency outbreak protection: updates devices automatically with "new intelligence" when outbreaks are detected.
Improved support for non-ASCII file paths.
Geolocation support of sample data.
Certified ISO 27001 compliance.
Windows Sandbox support.
Microsoft Defender Application Guard enhancements:
- Ability to change Windows Defender Application Guard settings without having to change Registry key settings.
- Application Guard extension for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
- Application Guard supports Microsoft Office.
- Dynamic navigation support "to navigate back to their default host browser from the Application Guard Microsoft Edge".
Application Control:
- WDAC supports multiple simultaneous code integrity policies.
- Path based rules.
- Allow COM object registration.
Windows Hello improvements:
- Official FIDO2 support across all major browsers, Microsoft Account and Azure AD.
- Passwordless sign-in for Microsoft Accounts.
- Safe Mode supports Windows Hello PIN sign-in.
- Windows Hello for Business supports Hybrid Azure Active Directory.
- Added support for virtualization-based security to secure "a user's biometric authentication data".
- Multi-camera support added.
- Remote Desktop with biometrics support.
Windows Defender Credential Guard supports ARM64.
Microsoft privacy settings: new notification icon when apps use the microphone.
Microsoft Intune supports Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 (except for Windows Update Rings in device profiles).
Mobile Device Management policies extended with "new Local Users and Groups settings".
New Key-rolling and Key-rotation features that enable "secure rolling of Recovery passwords on MDM-managed AAD devices on demand from Microsoft Intune/MDM tools or when a recovery password is used to unlock the BitLocker protected drive.
SetupDiag command line tool to analyze why the installation of updates failed.
Support for Reserved Storage.
Microsoft Edge Kiosk Mode support.
Windows Subsystem for Linux is available in-box.
Support for WPA3 H2E standard.

You can check out Microsoft's What's New support article here.

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021: here are the major changes

Winamp prepares a relaunch, new beta version almost ready

Thu, 18 Nov 2021 23:43:59 +0000

Winamp is getting closer to release with a redesigned website, logo, and a new beta signup allowing users to soon test the upcoming version of the media player.

Before we streamed our music, users would rip their albums or download MP3s to listen on their computer using media players.

One of the most popular media players to play MP3s was Winamp, with its retro skins and animated visualizers that moved along with the music you were playing. However, Winamp had not seen any further development after its version 5.5 release in 2007.

In October 2018, after Winamp 5.8 was leaked online, the developers decided to publish the leaked version on their website Winamp.com to allow everyone to use it in all its nostalgic glory. Unfortunately, while Radionomy, the owners of Winamp, said they had big plans for Winamp, no further versions have been released since then.

The only new Winamp development we have seen has been by the Winamp Community Update Project (WACUP ) who released Preview version 1.0.20.7236 with bug fixes and improvements.

Winamp 5.8

Winamp beta test starting soon

As first reported by Vosveteit, the lack of official development is about to change as the Winamp.com site received a redesign and a new logo was revealed for the media player this week.

Additionally, you can now visit winamp.com and sign up for a Winamp beta test, which should become available soon.

New Winamp logo

While it is unknown what version will be released for testing and what bugs have been fixed, the Winamp Head of Product development, Jeremy Scheppers, told BleepingComputer that they are excited for the relaunch of the application.

BleepingComputer has contacted Winamp with further questions and will update the article when we receive a reply.

H/T vosveteit.sk

Winamp prepares a relaunch, new beta version almost ready