Right after the latest release of the KDE Frameworks comes the Plasma Desktop 5.25 plus the default desktop for the forthcoming Linux Mint 23.
Plasma 5.25 has a funky new floating taskbar option, very much like the one in the Deepin Desktop
KDE Plasma 5.25 is the latest version of the oldest FOSS desktop around, with new and improved features that will particularly benefit trackpad and touchscreen users and people with convertible laptops.
It appears right after version 5.95 of the KDE Frameworks, but to be honest, this won't be especially visible unless you're a developer. The KDE organization itself describes the Frameworks as "a set of 83 add-on libraries for programming with Qt."
The latest version includes bugfixes and fresh features, but new releases appear monthly so it's not a dramatic list of changes.
We looked at KDE Plasma 5.24 in February. As per KDE's release schedule, 5.24 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release: "The 5.24 LTS release will receive bugfix updates until we start Plasma 6 development (timetable unsure). Around that time, a final Plasma 5 release will be made. That last Plasma 5 release will be an LTS release, too."
This allows version 25 of Plasma 5 to be slightly more experimental. Many of the new features involve multi-finger gesture support, which will be very welcome if you use a trackpad or other multi-touch input device (as opposed to a mouse, trackball or trackpoint.)
One set of gestures uses four fingers: a pinch activates the overview screen, a swipe upwards takes you to the overview of all virtual desktops (which KDE calls the "desktop grid"), and a four-finger swipe downwards tiles miniature versions of all the windows on the current desktop (which KDE calls "Present Windows", and to us looks like the original Mac OS X Exposé feature.) Meanwhile, three-finger swipes up, down, left or right switch between virtual desktops.
Similarly, if you have a touchscreen, you can configure these four-finger actions to be triggered when you swipe in from the edges of the screen. Plasma 5.25 can also transition smoothly between trackpad and touchscreen operation on convertible laptops. There are demonstration videos of all these effects in the Plasma 5.25 announcement.
Regular readers may have by now worked out that your correspondent is a grumpy old git, and as such, next to his extremely loud early-1990s mechanical keyboard sits a very basic three-button mouse, and not a single PC he owns has a touchscreen, rendering him unable to try any of these exciting features.
Saying that, he does have friends who manipulate their Macbooks thusly using gestures, in ways bewildering and baffling to this jaded old hack. It's genuinely very good to see a Linux desktop engaging with the new input functionality of modern hardware, especially since Ubuntu killed off its touch-driven efforts years ago.
Older Microsoft Surface fondleslabs and… MacBooks Air, or MacsBook Airs, or MacBook Airs, whatever they might be called, either struggle with more recent OS releases or aren't supported at all. As always, Linux gives old kit a further lease of life, and with Plasma 5.25, owners will be able to control them with flicks and taps and other mystic mudras.
There's also a new version, 5.4, of Linux Mint's Cinnamon desktop. It's nearly a year since Cinnamon 5.0 appeared as part of Mint 20.2, and 5.2 debuted with Mint 20.3. Cinnamon 5.4 will be the default desktop in the forthcoming Linux Mint 21 "Vanessa", based on Ubuntu 22.04. For now, version 5.4 is only some source code on GitHub, but it will start to appear in rolling release distros very soon.
The upgrade to version 5.4 is partly to keep up with the changing basis of the GNOME environment from which it forked.
The Muffin window manager has been rebased on a newer version of the Mutter window manager, 5.4 uses a newer version of GJS, the GNOME JavaScript interpreter and so on.
Version 5.4 has better multi-monitor support, including the ability to change which is the primary screen of a multi-head machine. Keyboard navigation has also been improved, as has the volume control applet, the terminal emulator and other components.
The Reg FOSS desk will take a more in-depth look at the new desktop when Mint 21 appears, which is expected to be in the next few weeks. ®
Science fiction is littered with fantastic visions of computing. One of the more pervasive is the idea that one day computers will run on light. After all, what’s faster than the speed of light?
But it turns out Star Trek’s glowing circuit boards might be closer to reality than you think, Ayar Labs CTO Mark Wade tells The Register. While fiber optic communications have been around for half a century, we’ve only recently started applying the technology at the board level. Despite this, Wade expects, within the next decade, optical waveguides will begin supplanting the copper traces on PCBs as shipments of optical I/O products take off.
Driving this transition are a number of factors and emerging technologies that demand ever-higher bandwidths across longer distances without sacrificing on latency or power.
QNAP is warning users about another wave of DeadBolt ransomware attacks against its network-attached storage (NAS) devices – and urged customers to update their devices' QTS or QuTS hero operating systems to the latest versions.
The latest outbreak – detailed in a Friday advisory – is at least the fourth campaign by the DeadBolt gang against the vendor's users this year. According to QNAP officials, this particular run is encrypting files on NAS devices running outdated versions of Linux-based QTS 4.x, which presumably have some sort of exploitable weakness.
The previous attacks occurred in January, March, and May.
A US task force aims to prevent online harassment and abuse, with a specific focus on protecting women, girls and LGBTQI+ individuals.
In the next 180 days, the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse will, among other things, draft a blueprint on a "whole-of-government approach" to stopping "technology-facilitated, gender-based violence."
A year after submitting the blueprint, the group will provide additional recommendations that federal and state agencies, service providers, technology companies, schools and other organisations should take to prevent online harassment, which VP Kamala Harris noted often spills over into physical violence, including self-harm and suicide for victims of cyberstalking as well mass shootings.
A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Inverse Finance has been robbed of cryptocurrency somehow exchangeable for $1.2 million, just two months after being taken for $15.6 million.
"Inverse Finance’s Frontier money market was subject to an oracle price manipulation incident that resulted in a net loss of $5.83 million in DOLA with the attacker earning a total of $1.2 million," the organization said on Thursday in a post attributed to its Head of Growth "Patb."
And Inverse Finance would like its funds back. Enumerating the steps the DAO intends to take in response to the incident, Patb said, "First, we encourage the person(s) behind this incident to return the funds to the Inverse Finance DAO in return for a generous bounty."
UK Home Secretary Priti Patel today signed an order approving the extradition of Julian Assange to America, where he faces espionage charges for sharing secret government documents.
Assange led WikiLeaks, a website that released classified files including footage of US airstrikes and military documents from the Iraq and Afghanistan war that detailed civilian casualties.
It also distributed secret files revealing the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and sensitive communications from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, during the 2016 US presidential election.
A group of senators wants to make it illegal for data brokers to sell sensitive location and health information of individuals' medical treatment.
A bill filed this week by five senators, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), comes in anticipation the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling that could overturn the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing access to abortion for women in the US.
The worry is that if the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade – as is anticipated following the leak in May of a majority draft ruling authored by Justice Samuel Alito – such sensitive data can be used against women.
A Russian operated botnet known as RSOCKS has been shut down by the US Department of Justice acting with law enforcement partners in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. It is believed to have compromised millions of computers and other devices around the globe.
The RSOCKS botnet functioned as an IP proxy service, but instead of offering legitimate IP addresses leased from internet service providers, it was providing criminals with access to the IP addresses of devices that had been compromised by malware, according to a statement from the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of California.
It seems that RSOCKS initially targeted a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as industrial control systems, routers, audio/video streaming devices and various internet connected appliances, before expanding into other endpoints such as Android devices and computer systems.
Interview 2023 is shaping up to become a big year for Arm-based server chips, and a significant part of this drive will come from Nvidia, which appears steadfast in its belief in the future of Arm, even if it can't own the company.
Several system vendors are expected to push out servers next year that will use Nvidia's new Arm-based chips. These consist of the Grace Superchip, which combines two of Nvidia's Grace CPUs, and the Grace-Hopper Superchip, which brings together one Grace CPU with one Hopper GPU.
The vendors lining up servers include American companies like Dell Technologies, HPE and Supermicro, as well Lenovo in Hong Kong, Inspur in China, plus ASUS, Foxconn, Gigabyte, and Wiwynn in Taiwan are also on board. The servers will target application areas where high performance is key: AI training and inference, high-performance computing, digital twins, and cloud gaming and graphics.
The US could implement a law similar to the EU's universal charger mandate if a trio of Senate Democrats get their way.
In a letter [PDF] to Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, two of Massachusetts' senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, along with Bernie Sanders (I-VT), say a proliferation of charging standards has created a messy situation for consumers, as well as being an environmental risk.
"As specialized chargers become obsolete … or as consumers change the brand of phone or device that they use, their outdated chargers are usually just thrown away," the senators wrote. The three cite statistics from the European Commission, which reported in 2021 that discarded and unused chargers create more than 11,000 tons of e-waste annually.
Microsoft is extending the Defender brand with a version aimed at families and individuals.
"Defender" has been the company's name of choice for its anti-malware platform for years. Microsoft Defender for individuals, available for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers, is a cross-platform application, encompassing macOS, iOS, and Android devices and extending "the protection already built into Windows Security beyond your PC."
The system comprises a dashboard showing the status of linked devices as well as alerts and suggestions.
Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC has revealed details of its much anticipated 2nm production process node – set to arrive in 2025 – which will use a nanosheet transistor architecture, as well as enhancements to its 3nm technology.
The newer generations of silicon semiconductor chips are expected to bring about increases in speed and will be more energy efficient as process nodes shrink and the tech industry continues to fight to hang onto Moore's Law.
The company is due to go into production with the 3nm node in the second half of this year.
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