Gentoo Linux posted its 2025 project retrospective this week. Some interesting details: Mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories, Gentoo currently considers and plans the migration of our repository mirrors and pull request contributions to Codeberg. Codeberg is a site based on Forgejo, maintained by a non-profit organization, and located in Berlin, Germany. Gentoo continues to host its own primary git, bugs, etc infrastructure and has no plans to change that... We now publish weekly Gentoo images for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), based on the amd64 stages, see our mirrors. While these images are not present in the Microsoft store yet, that's something we intend to fix soon... Given the unfortunate fracturing of the GnuPG / OpenPGP / LibrePGP ecosystem due to competing standards, we now provide an alternatives mechanism to choose the system gpg provider and ease compatibility testing... We have added a bootstrap path for Rust from C++ using Mutabah's Rust compiler mrustc, which alleviates the need for pre-built binaries and makes it significantly easier to support more configurations. Similarly, Ada and D support in gcc now have clean bootstrap paths, which makes enabling these in the compiler as easy as switching the useflags on gcc and running emerge. Other interesting statistics for the year: Gentoo currently consists of 31,663 ebuilds for 19,174 different packages.For amd64 (x86-64), there are 89 GBytes of binary packages available on the mirrors.Gentoo each week builds 154 distinct installation stages for different processor architectures and system configurations, with an overwhelming part of these fully up-to-date.The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2025, with a slight decrease from 123,942 to 112,927.The number of commits by external contributors was 9,396, now across 377 unique external authors. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Heraklit for sharing the 2025 retrospective.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget: If you received a bunch of password reset requests from Instagram recently, you're not alone. As reported by Malwarebytes, an antivirus software company, there was a data breach revealing the "sensitive information" of 17.5 million Instagram users. Malwarebytes added that the leak included Instagram usernames, physical addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and more. The company added that the "data is available for sale on the dark web and can be abused by cybercriminals." Malwarebytes noted in an email to its customers that it discovered the breach during its routine dark web scan and that it's tied to a potential incident related to an Instagram API exposure from 2024.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"China recently placed a supercritical carbon dioxide power generator into commercial operation," writes CleanTechnica, "and the announcement was widely framed as a technological breakthrough." The system, referred to as Chaotan One, is installed at a steel plant in Guizhou province in mountainous southwest China and is designed to recover industrial waste heat and convert it into electricity. Each unit is reported to be rated at roughly 15 MW, with public statements describing configurations totaling around 30 MW. Claimed efficiency improvements range from 20% to more than 30% higher heat to power conversion compared with conventional steam based waste heat recovery systems. These are big numbers, typical of claims for this type of generator, and they deserve serious attention. China doing something first, however, has never been a reliable indicator that the thing will prove durable, economic, or widely replicable. China is large enough to try almost everything. It routinely builds first of a kind systems precisely because it can afford to learn by doing, discarding what does not work and scaling what does. This approach is often described inside China as crossing the river by feeling for stones. It produces valuable learning, but it also produces many dead ends. The question raised by the supercritical CO2 deployment is not whether China is capable of building it, but whether the technology is likely to hold up under real operating conditions for long enough to justify broad adoption. A more skeptical reading is warranted because Western advocates of specific technologies routinely point to China's limited deployments as evidence that their preferred technologies are viable, when the scale of those deployments actually argues the opposite. China has built a single small modular reactor and a single experimental molten salt reactor, not fleets of them, despite having the capital, supply chains, and regulatory capacity to do so if they made economic sense... If small modular reactors or hydrogen transportation actually worked at scale and cost, China would already be building many more of them, and the fact that it is not should be taken seriously rather than pointing to very small numbers of trials compared to China's very large denominators... What is notably absent from publicly available information is detailed disclosure of materials, operating margins, impurity controls, and maintenance assumptions. This is not unusual for early commercial deployments in China. It does mean that external observers cannot independently assess long term durability claims. The article notes America's Energy Department funded a carbon dioxide turbine in Texas rated at roughly 10 MW electric that "reached initial power generation in 2024 after several years of construction and commissioning." But for both these efforts, the article warns that "early efficiency claims should be treated as provisional. A system that starts at 15 MW and delivers 13 MW after several years with rising maintenance costs is not a breakthrough. It is an expensive way to recover waste heat compared with mature steam based alternatives that already operate for decades with predictable degradation..." "If both the Chinese and U.S. installations run for five years without significant reductions in performance and without high maintenance costs, I will be surprised. In that case, it would be worth revisiting this assessment and potentially changing my mind." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader cusco for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember that re-discovered computer tape with one of the earliest versions of Unix from the early 1970s? This week several local news outlets in Utah reported on the find, with KSL creating a video report with shots of the tape arriving at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum, the closet where it was found, and even its handwritten label. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that the closet where it was found also contained "old cords from unknown sources and mountains of papers that had been dumped from a former professor's file cabinet, including old drawings from his kids and saved plane ticket stubs." (Their report also includes a photo of the University of Utah team that found the tape — the University's Flux Research Group). Professor Robert Ricci believes only 20 copies were ever produced of the version of Unix on that tape: At the time, in the 1970s, Ricci estimates there would have been maybe two or three of those computers — called a PDP-11, or programmed data processor — in Utah that could have run UNIX V4, including the one at the U. Having that technology is part of why he believes the U. got a copy of the rare software. The other part was the distinguished computing faculty at the school. The new UNIX operating system would've been announced at conferences in the early 1970s, and a U. professor at the time named Martin Newell frequently attended those because of his own recognized work in the field, Ricci said. In another box, stuffed in under manila envelopes, [researcher Aleks] Maricq found a 1974 letter written to Newell from Ken Thompson at Bell Labs that said as soon as "a new batch comes from the printers, I will send you the system." Ricci and Maricq are unsure if the software was ever used. They reached out to Newell, who is now 72 and retired, as well as some of his former students. None of them recalled actually running it through the PDP-11... The late Jay Lepreau also worked at the U.'s computing department and created the Flux Research Group that Ricci, Maricq and [engineering research associate Jon] Duerig are now part of. Lepreau overlapped just barely with Newell's tenure. In 1978, Lepreau and a team at the U. worked with a group at the University of California, Berkeley. Together, they built their own clone of the UNIX operating system. They called it BSD, or Berkeley Standard Distribution. Steve Jobs, the former CEO of Apple, worked with BSD, too, and it influenced his work. Ultimately, it was Lepreau who saved the 9-track tape with the UNIX system on it in his U. office. And he's why the university still has it today. "He seems to have found it and decided it was worth keeping," Ricci said... The U. will also get the tape back from the museum. Maricq said it will likely be displayed in the university's new engineering building that's set to open in January 2027. That's why, the research associate said, he was cleaning out the storage room to begin with — to try to prepare for the move. He was mostly just excited to see the floor again. "I thought we'd find some old stuff, but I didn't think it'd be anything like this," he said. And Maricq still has boxes to go through, including more believed to be from Lepreau's office. Local news station KMYU captured the thoughts of some of the University researchers who found the tape: "When you see the very first beginnings of something, and you go from seed to sapling, that's what we saw here," [engineering research associate Jon] Duerig said. "We see this thing in the moment of flux. We see the signs of all the things changing — of all the things developing that we now see today." Duerig also gave this comment to local news station KSL. "The coolest thing is that anybody, anywhere in the world can now access this, right? People can go on the internet archive and download the raw tape file and simulate running it," Duerig said. "People have posted browsable directory trees of the whole thing." One of the museum's directors said the tape's recovery marked a big day for the museum "One of the things that was pretty exciting to us is that just that there is this huge community of people around the world who were excited to jump on the opportunity to look at this piece of history," Ricci said. "And it was really cool that we were able to share that." Duerig said while there weren't many comments or footnotes from the programmers of that time, they did discovery more unexpected content having to do with Bell Labs on the tape. "There were survey results of them actually asking survey questions of their employees at these operator centers," he said. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scifi author/tech activist Cory Doctorow has decried the "enshittification" of our technologies to extract more profit. But Saturday he also described what could be "the beginning of the end for enshittification" in a new article for the Guardian — "our chance to make tech good again". There is only one reason the world isn't bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US's defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an "anti-circumvention" law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product to make it work better for its users (at the expense of its manufacturer)... Post-Brexit, the UK is uniquely able to seize this moment. Unlike our European cousins, we needn't wait for the copyright directive to be repealed before we can strike article 6 off our own law books and thereby salvage something good out of Brexit... Until we repeal the anti-circumvention law, we can't reverse-engineer the US's cloud software, whether it's a database, a word processor or a tractor, in order to swap out proprietary, American code for robust, open, auditable alternatives that will safeguard our digital sovereignty. The same goes for any technology tethered to servers operated by any government that might have interests adverse to ours — say, the solar inverters and batteries we buy from China. This is the state of play at the dawn of 2026. The digital rights movement has two powerful potential coalition partners in the fight to reclaim the right of people to change how their devices work, to claw back privacy and a fair deal from tech: investors and national security hawks. Admittedly, the door is only open a crack, but it's been locked tight since the turn of the century. When it comes to a better technology future, "open a crack" is the most exciting proposition I've heard in decades. Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nous en avons parlé plusieurs fois, une hausse sur les prix des processeurs, notamment sur les modèles d'Intel d'ancienne gen et cela se confirme encore un peu plus ce jour avec des 14000 qui grimpent encore et encore. Ainsi, le 14600K fait + 5 euros, le 14700K fait + 15 euros et le 14900K augmente de 18 euros. Arrow Lake ne bouge pas de son côté. […]

Lire la suite

Les enceintes Bose SoundTouch étaient sur la liste des espèces d’enceintes menacées par leur constructeur. Cette gamme de solutions connectées se retrouvait confrontée à un problème très classique. Vendues depuis des années, remplacées par de nouvelles gammes, les marges qu’elles avaient générées se transformaient en pertes au fil du temps.

Bose coupe le son

Pour Bose, les « vieilles » SoundTouch ne rapportaient plus un centime alors que le coût des serveurs nécessaires à la prise en charge des services connectés qu’elles proposaient continuait de s’additionner. Les constructeurs sont toujours confrontés à ce dilemme : sans frais mensuels d’utilisation, ce type de produit est forcément voué à disparaitre car il finira forcément par couter trop cher. Avec des frais mensuels, les clients ne se bousculent pas pour les acheter. Au final, la solution retenue par Bose pour les SoundTouch est la même que pour beaucoup d’autres appareils de ce type. La marque « offre » des services en ligne à ses clients et, un jour ou l’autre, se décide de les arrêter.

C’est dans ces conditions que Bose a indiqué en octobre 2025 à ses clients qui avaient activé leurs services en ligne pour leurs SoundTouch, que celui-ci allait être stoppé en février 2026. Transformant les enceintes connectées en enceintes Bluetooth beaucoup plus banales. La suite de l’histoire est classique, une levée de boucliers des utilisateurs qui ne comprennent pas forcément pourquoi Bose a décidé de leur faire perdre l’intérêt spécifique de leur matériel. Bose, qui compte beaucoup sur son image, a donc décidé de revoir sa copie.

Bose remet le son

D’abord, la fermeture annoncée en février est repoussée au mois de mai 2026. Ce qui laisse un peu plus de temps aux utilisateurs. Mais ensuite et surtout, Bose va libérer le code des SoundTouch pour que des internautes puissent s’en emparer et développer des solutions alternatives aux services de la marque. En clair, ouvrir le code pour que des petits génies puissent transformer les SoundTouch en solutions plus autonomes : on imagine des intégrations dans un usage local en réseau mais également la possibilité d’aller piocher du contenu sur des serveurs alternatifs.

Le délai supplémentaire accordé aux clients devant servir de tampon pour que ces développeurs puissent proposer aux internautes les solutions adaptées à la survie de leur enceinte. On imagine que lorsqu’un service libre sera disponible, la marque s’empressera de communiquer dessus pour que ses clients puissent basculer leur SoundTouch de leurs serveurs à ces nouvelles fonctionnalités.

De son côté, Bose a assuré faire le travail nécessaire pour que les fonctions de streaming depuis Spotify Connect soient toujours disponibles, confirmé que la fonction AirPlay sera conservée et proposé des solutions allternatives pour continuer à exploiter ses enceintes. Il s’engage à maintenir l’application de contrôle SoundTouch sur smartphone. Même si elle ne proposera plus l’ensemble des fonctions actuelles.

Les Bose SoundTouch se retrouvent du bon côté de la barricade

Ces histoires d’abandon de logiciels qui tuent littéralement des produits matériels qu’ils supportent sont assez fréquentes. Du côté des enceintes connectées, on se souvient de la volonté de Sonos de briquer volontairement ses produits. Méthode ô combien contestable que la marque avait fini par abandonner quelques mois plus tard suite au tollé provoqué sur la toile. Plus récemment, le Car Thing de Spotify a eu droit à sa pure et simple mise à mort logicielle. Sauvée de justesse par des internautes mais sans l’aide de l’entreprise.

Google a également eu droit à son sabordage de produit avec sa manette Stadia, mais il a beaucoup mieux encadré la situation en proposant de lui-même une méthode pour ne pas la rendre inopérante. 

Avec la SoundTouch, Bose semble faire les bons choix. Mais il aura tout de même fallu tordre le bras à la société pour qu’elle se décide à considérer ses anciens clients et l’impact écologique de sa décision. Si personne n’avait protesté, la SoundTouch aurait été désactivée. C’est d’ailleurs la norme depuis longtemps dans beaucoup de domaines. Des constructeurs qui lancent des produits en assurant une grande compatibilité dans le temps, un format totalement propriétaire et qu’on assure comme totalement évolutifs. Des promesses de disponibilité de pièces détachées et autres assurances d’exploitation dans le temps long. Constructeurs qui s’empressent de ne pas respecter leurs engagements un ou deux ans plus tard. Laissant dans la panade l’acheteur qui comptait bien faire évoluer son produit. La méthode est connue et se répète très régulièrement depuis les années 80.

Aujourd’hui cependant le législateur a fait évoluer les choses. Obligeant par exemple les fabricants à proposer pendant des années des pièces détachées pour leurs matériels, une obligation de proposer un indice de réparabilité pour certains appareils. Mais du côté des promesses d’usages ? Des fonctionnalités en ligne qui sont les arguments essentiels d’un achat comme une enceinte connectée ? Rien. Il faut faire confiance à un constructeur qui peut décider à la vue d’un bilan comptable que de tirer un trait sur un serveur qui pilote des dizaines de milliers d’appareils sera bien plus rentable.

Un label et une méthode de développement pour les appareils connectés ?

Pourquoi ne pas créer un label pour ce type d’appareil connecté ? On le sait, financièrement, il est impossible pour une marque de continuer à fournir un service en ligne qui lui coute de l’argent s’il n’y a pas d’entrées à proposer en face. Pourtant, ce genre de produit est mis en vente régulièrement sur le marché. Aujourd’hui Bose propose d’autres enceintes que la SoundTouch qui vont se retrouver exactement dans la même situation dans quelques années. 

La solution serait donc de proposer aux constructeurs une autre méthode de développement qui consisterait à penser en amont dans le temps long. Demander aux ingénieurs de chaque marque de suivre un protocole de désengagement technique dès la conception des produits. Avoir une solution clés en main à fournir aux internautes pour cette phase de désengagement inévitable qui suivra la commercialisation du produit.

Et, au terme de cet investissement originel, profiter d’un label qui indiquera aux acheteurs intéressés que leur appareil ne finira pas à la déchetterie locale suivant l’évolution de service de son fabricant. Celui-ci pouvant décider à tout moment de basculer sur la méthode alternative à ses propres serveurs. Dès l’origine en ouvrant cette possibilité lors de la vente. Ou au moment de la fin de service de son offre. Loin de paralyser un client éventuel, ce label pourrait au contraire l’inciter à choisir le produit.

Un label qui entrerait en synergie avec ceux mettant en valeur le côté « vert » des entreprises. A quoi bon proposer un produit dans un emballage recyclé ou avec une supposée neutralité carbone si on le dirige dès sa conception vers une obsolescence programmée ?

Source : ArsTechnica

Bose va libérer le code de ses enceintes connectées SoundTouch pour leur éviter la déchetterie © MiniMachines.net. 2025

Increasingly complex RISC-V cores aren't magically immune to the speculative execution / side-channel vulnerabilities that have rattled the x86_64 and ARM64 landscape for years. Following recent work on Spectre V1 handling for RISC-V in the Linux kernel, merged this weekend for Linux 6.19-rc5 is another RISC-V attack vector safeguard...

A new project trying to get off the ground and currently in an "exploratory phase" is GYESME that describes itself as a "design-led" downstream of GNOME with plans ot only fork when needed that is "minimal by default."..

In addition to Linus Torvalds' recent comments around AI tooling documentation, it turns out in fact that Linus Torvalds has been using vibe coding himself. Over the holidays Linus Torvalds has been working on a new open-source project called AudioNoise that was started with the help of AI vibe coding...

Et c'est reparti pour une deuxième saison de montage et de watercooling en tout genre. Comme l'année dernière, nous ne parlons pas forcément de mode, mais surtout de beaux montages. Cette année, nous n'en ferons plus qu'un par semaine, le rythme fut parfois délicat à tenir. Comme toujours, n'hésitez pas à envoyer vos montages à Lucas. Ce dimanche, nous vous proposons de découvrir le Arc Raiders par LiquyidHaus : […]

Lire la suite

For a quarter century, the TIOBE Index has attempted to rank the popularity of programming languages by the number of search engine results they bring up — and this week they had an announcement. Over the last year the language showing the largest increase in its share of TIOBE's results was C#. TIOBE founder/CEO Paul Jansen looks back at how C++ evolved: From a language-design perspective, C# has often been an early adopter of new trends among mainstream languages. At the same time, it successfully made two major paradigm shifts: from Windows-only to cross-platform, and from Microsoft-owned to open source. C# has consistently evolved at the right moment. For many years now, there has been a direct battle between Java and C# for dominance in the business software market. I always assumed Java would eventually prevail, but after all this time the contest remains undecided. It is an open question whether Java — with its verbose, boilerplate-heavy style and Oracle ownership — can continue to keep C# at bay. While C# remains stuck in the same #5 position it was in a year ago, its share of TIOBE's results rose 2.94% — the largest increase of the 100 languages in their rankngs. But TIOBE's CEO notes that his rankings for the top 10 highest-scoring languages delivered "some interesting movements" in 2025: C and C++ swapped positions. [C rose to the #2 position — behind Python — while C++ dropped from #2 to the #4 rank that C held in January of 2025]. Although C++ is evolving faster than ever, some of its more radical changes — such as the modules concept — have yet to see widespread industry adoption. Meanwhile, C remains simple, fast, and extremely well suited to the ever-growing market of small embedded systems. Even Rust has struggled to penetrate this space, despite reaching an all-time high of position #13 this month. So who were the other winners of 2025, besides C#? Perl made a surprising comeback, jumping from position #32 to #11 and re-entering the top 20. Another language returning to the top 10 is R, driven largely by continued growth in data science and statistical computing. Of course, where there are winners, there are also losers. Go appears to have permanently lost its place in the top 10 during 2025. The same seems true for Ruby, which fell out of the top 20 and is unlikely to return anytime soon. What can we expect from 2026? I have a long history of making incorrect predictions, but I suspect that TypeScript will finally break into the top 20. Additionally, Zig, which climbed from position #61 to #42 in 2025, looks like a strong candidate to enter the TIOBE top 30. Here's how TIOBE estimated the 10 most popularity programming languages at the end of 2025 PythonCJavaC++C#JavaScriptVisual BasicSQLDelphi/Object PascalR

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"We will make the new ð algorithm...open source in 7 days," Elon Musk posted Saturday on X.com. Musk says this is "including all code used to determine what organic and advertising posts are recommended to users," and "This will be repeated every 4 weeks, with comprehensive developer notes, to help you understand what changed." Some context from Engadget: Musk has been making promises of open-sourcing the algorithm since his takeover of Twitter, and in 2023 published the code for the site's "For You" feed on GitHub. But the code wasn't all that revealing, leaving out key details, according to analyses at the time. And it hasn't been kept up to date. Bloomberg also reported on Saturday's announcement: The billionaire didn't say why X was making its algorithm open source. He and the company have clashed several times with regulators over content being shown to users. Some X users had previously complained that they were receiving fewer posts on the social media platform from people they follow. In October, Musk confirmed in a post on X that the company had found a "significant bug" in the platform's "For You" algorithm and pledged a fix. The company has also been working to incorporate more artificial intelligence into its recommendation algorithm for X, using Grok, Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot... In September, Musk wrote that the goal was for X's recommendation engine to "be purely AI" and that the company would share its open source algorithm about every two weeks. "To the degree that people are seeing improvements in their feed, it is not due to the actions of specific individuals changing heuristics, but rather increasing use of Grok and other AI tools," Musk wrote in October. The company was working to have all of the more than 100 million daily posts published to X evaluated by Grok, which would then offer individual users the posts most likely to interest them, Musk wrote. "This will profoundly improve the quality of your feed." He added that the company was planning to roll out the new features by November.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An R&D lab under America's Energy Department annnounced this week that "Neuromorphic computers, inspired by the architecture of the human brain, are proving surprisingly adept at solving complex mathematical problems that underpin scientific and engineering challenges." Phys.org publishes the announcement from Sandia National Lab: In a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, Sandia National Laboratories computational neuroscientists Brad Theilman and Brad Aimone describe a novel algorithm that enables neuromorphic hardware to tackle partial differential equations, or PDEs — the mathematical foundation for modeling phenomena such as fluid dynamics, electromagnetic fields and structural mechanics. The findings show that neuromorphic computing can not only handle these equations, but do so with remarkable efficiency. The work could pave the way for the world's first neuromorphic supercomputer, potentially revolutionizing energy-efficient computing for national security applications and beyond... "We're just starting to have computational systems that can exhibit intelligent-like behavior. But they look nothing like the brain, and the amount of resources that they require is ridiculous, frankly," Theilman said.For decades, experts have believed that neuromorphic computers were best suited for tasks like recognizing patterns or accelerating artificial neural networks. These systems weren't expected to excel at solving rigorous mathematical problems like PDEs, which are typically tackled by traditional supercomputers. But for Aimone and Theilman, the results weren't surprising. The researchers believe the brain itself performs complex computations constantly, even if we don't consciously realize it. "Pick any sort of motor control task — like hitting a tennis ball or swinging a bat at a baseball," Aimone said. "These are very sophisticated computations. They are exascale-level problems that our brains are capable of doing very cheaply..." Their research also raises intriguing questions about the nature of intelligence and computation. The algorithm developed by Theilman and Aimone retains strong similarities to the structure and dynamics of cortical networks in the brain. "We based our circuit on a relatively well-known model in the computational neuroscience world," Theilman said. "We've shown the model has a natural but non-obvious link to PDEs, and that link hasn't been made until now — 12 years after the model was introduced." The researchers believe that neuromorphic computing could help bridge the gap between neuroscience and applied mathematics, offering new insights into how the brain processes information. "Diseases of the brain could be diseases of computation," Aimone said. "But we don't have a solid grasp on how the brain performs computations yet." If their hunch is correct, neuromorphic computing could offer clues to better understand and treat neurological conditions like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Is there a trend? This week four different articles appeared on various tech-news sites with an author bragging about switching to Linux. "Greetings from the year of Linux on my desktop," quipped the Verge's senior reviews editor, who finally "got fed up and said screw it, I'm installing Linux." They switched to CachyOS — just like this writer for the videogame magazine Escapist: I've had a fantastic time gaming on Linux. Valve's Windows-to-Linux translation layer, Proton, and even CachyOS' bundled fork have been working just fine. Of course, it's not perfect, and there's been a couple of instances where I've had to problem-solve something, but most of the time, any issues gaming on Linux have been fixed by swapping to another version of Proton. If you're deep in online games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, Destiny 2, GTAV or Battlefield 6, it might not be the best option to switch. These games feature anti-cheats that look for versions of Windows or even the heart of the OS, the kernel, to verify the system isn't going to mess up someone's game.... CachyOS is thankfully pre-packed with Nvidia drivers, meaning I didn't have to dance around trying to find them.... Certain titles will perform worse than their counterparts, simply due to how the bods at Nvidia are handling the drivers for Linux. This said, I'm still not complaining when I'm pushing nearly 144fps or more in newer games. The performance hit is there, but it's nowhere near enough to stave off even an attempt to mess about with Linux. Do you know how bizarre it is to say it's "nice to have a taskbar again"? I use macOS daily for a lot of my work, which uses a design baked back in the 1990s through NeXT. Seeing just a normal taskbar that doesn't try to advertise to me or crash because an update killed it for some reason is fantastic. That's how bad it is out there right now for Windows. "I run Artix, by the way," joked a senior tech writer at Notebookcheck (adding "There. That's out of the way...") I dual-booted a Linux partition for a few weeks. After a Windows update (that I didn't choose to do) wiped that partition and, consequently, the Linux installation, I decided to go whole-hog: I deleted Windows 11 and used the entire drive for Linux... Artix differs from Arch in that it does not use SystemD as its init system. I won't go down the rabbit hole of init systems here, but suffice it to say that Artix boots lightning quick (less than 10 seconds from a cold power on) and is pretty light on system resources. However, it didn't come "fully assembled..." The biggest problem I ran into after installing Artix on the [MacBook] Air was the lack of wireless drivers, which meant that WiFi did not work out of the box. The resolution was simple: I needed to download the appropriate WiFi drivers (Broadcom drivers, to be exact) from Artix's main repository. This is a straightforward process handled by a single command in the Terminal, but it requires an internet connection... which my laptop did not have. Ultimately, I connected a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, plugged the laptop directly into my router, and installed the WiFi drivers that way. The whole process took about 10 minutes, but it was annoying nonetheless. For the record, my desktop (an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H-based system) worked flawlessly out-of-the-box, even with my second monitor's uncommon resolution (1680x1050, vertical orientation). I did run into issues with installing some packages on both machines. Trying to install the KDE desktop environment (essentially a different GUI for the main OS) resulted in strange artifacts that put white text on white backgrounds in the menus, and every resolution I tried failed to correct this bug. After reverting to XFCE4 (the default desktop environment for my Artix install), the WiFi signal indicator in the taskbar disappeared. This led to me having to uninstall a network manager installed by KDE and re-linking the default network manager to the runit services startup folder. If that sentence sounds confusing, the process was much more so. It has been resolved, and I have a WiFi indicator that lets me select wireless networks again, but only after about 45 minutes of reading manuals and forum posts. Other issues are inherent to Linux. Not all games on Steam that are deemed Linux compatible actually are. Civilization III Complete is a good example: launching the game results in the map turning completely black. (Running the game through an application called Lutris resolved this issue.) Not all the software I used on Windows is available in Linux, such as Greenshot for screenshots or uMark for watermarking photos in bulk. There are alternatives to these, but they don't have the same features or require me to relearn workflows... Linux is not a "one and done" silver bullet to solve all your computer issues. It is like any other operating system in that it will require users to learn its methods and quirks. Admittedly, it does require a little bit more technical knowledge to dive into the nitty-gritty of the OS and fully unlock its potential, but many distributions (such as Mint) are ready to go out of the box and may never require someone to open a command line... [T]he issues I ran into on Linux were, for the most part, my fault. On Windows or macOS, most problems I run into are caused by a restriction or bug in the OS. Linux gives me the freedom to break my machine and fix it again, teaching me along the way. With Microsoft's refusal (either from pride or ignorance) to improve (or at least not crapify) Windows 11 despite loud user outrage, switching to Linux is becoming a popular option. It's one you should consider doing, and if you've been thinking about it for any length of time, it's time to dive in. And tinkerer Kevin Wammer switched from MacOS to Linux, saying "Linux has come a long way" after more than 30 years — but "Windows still sucks..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A founder of Twitter and a founder of Pinterest are now working on "social media for people who hate social media," writes a Washington Post columnist. "When I heard that this platform would harness AI to help us live more meaningful lives, I wanted to know more..." Their bid for redemption is West Co. — the Workshop for Emotional and Spiritual Technology Corporation — and the platform they're testing is called Tangle, a "purpose discovery tool" that uses AI to help users define their life purposes, then encourages them to set intentions toward achieving those purposes, reminds them periodically and builds a community of supporters to encourage steps toward meeting those intentions. "A lot of people, myself included, have been on autopilot," Stone said. "If all goes well, we'll introduce a lot of people to the concept of turning off autopilot." But will all go well? The entrepreneurs have been at it for two years, and they've scrapped three iterations before even testing them. They still don't have a revenue model. "This is a really hard thing to do," Stone admitted. "If we were a traditional start-up, we would have probably been folded by now." But the two men, with a combined net worth of at least hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, had the luxury of self-funding for a year, and now they have $29 million in seed funding led by Spark Capital... [T]he project revolves around training existing AI models in "what good intentions and helpful purposes look like," explained Long Cheng, the founding designer. When you join Tangle, which is invitation-only until this spring at the earliest, the AI peruses your calendar, examines your photos, asks you questions and then produces "threads," or categories that define your life purpose. You're free to accept, reject or change the suggestions. It then encourages you to make "intentions" toward achieving your threads, and to add "reflections" when you experience something meaningful in your life. Users then receive encouragement from friends, or "supporters." A few of the "threads" on Tangle are about personal satisfaction (traveler, connoisseur), but the vast majority involve causes greater than self: family (partner, parent, sibling), community (caregiver, connector, guardian), service (volunteer, advocate, healer) and spirituality (seeker, believer). Even the work-related threads (mentor, leader) suggest a higher purpose. The column includes this caveat. "I have no idea whether they will succeed. But as a columnist writing about how to keep our humanity in the 21st century, I believe it's important to focus on people who are at least trying..." "Quite possibly, West Co. and the various other enterprises trying to nudge technology in a more humane direction will find that it doesn't work socially or economically — they don't yet have a viable product, after all — but it would be a noble failure."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study "compared how well top AI systems and human workers did at hundreds of real work assignments," reports the Washington Post. They add that at least one example "illustrates a disconnect three years after the release of ChatGPT that has implications for the whole economy." AI can accomplish many impressive tasks involving computer code, documents or images. That has prompted predictions that human work of many kinds could soon be done by computers alone. Bentley University and Gallup found in a survey [PDF] last year that about three-quarters of Americans expect AI to reduce the number of U.S. jobs over the next decade. But economic data shows the technology largely has not replaced workers. To understand what work AI can do on its own today, researchers collected hundreds of examples of projects posted on freelancing platforms that humans had been paid to complete. They included tasks such as making 3D product animations, transcribing music, coding web video games and formatting research papers for publication. The research team then gave each task to AI systems such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude. The best-performing AI system successfully completed only 2.5 percent of the projects, according to the research team from Scale AI, a start-up that provides data to AI developers, and the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit that works to understand risks from AI. "Current models are not close to being able to automate real jobs in the economy," said Jason Hausenloy, one of the researchers on the Remote Labor Index study... The results, which show how AI systems fall short, challenge predictions that the technology is poised to soon replace large portions of the workforce... The AI systems failed on nearly half of the Remote Labor Index projects by producing poor-quality work, and they left more than a third incomplete. Nearly 1 in 5 had basic technical problems such as producing corrupt files, the researchers found. One test involved creating an interactive dashboard for data from the World Happiness Report, according to the article. "At first glance, the AI results look adequate. But closer examination reveals errors, such as countries inexplicably missing data, overlapping text and legends that use the wrong colors — or no colors at all." The researchers say AI systems are hobbled by a lack of memory, and are also weak on "visual" understanding.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Budgie 10.10 desktop has been officially released in marking the open-source project's transition from X11 to Wayland...

Amazon "has submitted plans for a large-format store near Chicago that would be larger than a Walmart Supercenter," reports CNBC: As part of the plans, Amazon has proposed building a one-story, 229,000-square-foot building [on a 35-acre lot] in Orland Park, Illinois, that would offer a range of products, such as groceries, household essentials and general merchandise, the city said on Saturday. By comparison, Walmart's U.S. Supercenters typically average 179,000 square feet... The Orland Park Plan Commission approved Amazon's proposal on Tuesday, and it will now proceed to a vote from the full village board. That meeting is scheduled for January 19. In a statement cited by CNBC, an Amazon spokesperson called it "a new concept that we think customers will be excited about."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Scientists in China have made a breakthrough with fusion energy that could finally overcome one of the most stubborn barriers to realising the next-generation energy source," reports the Independent: A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said its experimental nuclear reactor, dubbed the 'artificial Sun', achieved a plasma density that was previously thought impossible... Through a new process called plasma-wall self organisation, the CAS researchers were able to keep the plasma stable at unprecedented density levels. By pushing plasma density well past long-standing empirical limits, the researchers said fusion ignition can be achieved with far higher energy outputs. "The findings suggest a practical and scalable pathway for extending density limits in tokamaks and next-generation burning plasma fusion devices," said Professor Ping Zhu from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, who so-led the research. Professor Zhu's team now plan to apply this new method on the EAST reactor to confirm that it will work under high-performance plasma conditions. The latest breakthrough was detailed in the journal Science Advances in a study titled 'Accessing the density-free regime with ECRH-assisted ohmic start-up on EAST'.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.