linux

Microsoft Windows is the most used operating system in the world, at least when talking about desktop and laptop computers. In addition to the usual consumer and enterprise customers, it is also used in government offices and computers. That may have been the status quo but more and more governments are looking to other solutions for one reason or another. The latest to start that journey is South Korea, whose government is planning to migrate its computers to the open source operating system Linux.

Continue Reading

There's a flaw in the vast majority of Intel chips from here back to the year 2011 called ZombieLoad. That's what security researchers are calling it, anyway. The name refers to data a processor cannot handle, a "zombie load" which can be exploited thanks to a code vulnerability in Intel hardware.

Continue Reading

Gone are the days when Chrome OS felt simply like a glorified web browser limited to Google's apps and services. Google says it designed the platform around speed, simplicity, and security but, to be honest, only two of those probably still hold. Chrome OS has grown up to be quite the complicated beast and now Google is revealing what it was all for: Web and Android app development.

Continue Reading

Nintendo dislikes emulators. Except for the ones it uses and ships itself, that is. It also dislikes people hacking into its consoles to make them do things the gaming giant could have never imagined nor permitted. Those two don'ts, however, have collided on the Nintendo Switch, as hacker and modder Voxel9 demonstrated the handheld gaming console running an Xbox game played with a PlayStation controller via an emulator running on the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Let that sink in for a while.

Continue Reading

Google has been promoting Chrome OS and Chromebooks as the platform to use to get real work done but even its fans will admit it's not there yet. Juggling three platforms in one probably isn't easy so when Google does make strides in all of them, there's reason for Chrome OS users to celebrate. The latest major release, version 74, won't immediately make it the OS to finally beat Windows and macOS but at least now it can be more useful especially for Linux users.

Continue Reading

Samsung's latest flagships are so powerful you could almost use them as a portable PC. Actually, you already can if you don't mind running Android in Samsung's special DeX mode. But if you really wanted desktop applications, you're mostly out of luck. Not unless you're comfortable using Linux via Samsung's still beta Linux on DeX. Fortunately, the company is now expanding support of that platform to its latest flagship smartphones and, surprisingly, its mid-range tablet as well.

Continue Reading

Linux runs the computing world. It is by far the most used operating system on servers and perhaps the only OS on supercomputers. It has taken over much of the mobile world thanks to Android and is on the cusp of taking a majority share in education via Chrome OS.

The one area where it has had difficulty expanding year after year is the desktop. Not because it's terrible at it but because it needs a few missing pieces that will stop the Year of the Linux desktop from being a running joke.

Continue Reading

Had enough of Windows 10's hassles? Unless you plan to install Windows 7, which is going to lose support from Microsoft on January 14, 2020, or have the cash to spare for an Apple device, there aren't many other options for a computer operating system except some flavor of Linux.

Continue Reading

The dream of a smartphone also acting as your PC has mostly been hampered by the unavailability of the desktop software we've come to expect from our computers. There have been a couple of attempts to address this limitation, most of them revolving around Linux. Before Samsung came with its Samsung DeX, there was the open source Maru OS project and, after a long period of silence, it has returned to lay down the foundations for future expansion on more Android phones.

Continue Reading

It's a "good news, bad news" kind of thing over at Purism. The small company that continues to deliver privacy and security-focused "ethical" Linux laptops have generated quite a lot of hype, interest, and support for the promise of a similar device in phone form factor. The Purism Librem 5 is still coming, or at least there doesn't seem to be any more major obstacles in sight. But while the company has finally settled on what CPU to use, it has also announced that, for the second time, the phone will be delayed by another quarter.

Continue Reading

This week the creators of postmarketOS came out of the shadows to show what they've been making for the past year. The software system they've created takes old Android devices - and some new - and boots an alternate operating system. This is a Linux distro that boots working software to Android devices that would otherwise be long outside their final official software update.

Continue Reading

You have probably had your fill of Surface Go reviews that seem to split the tech world in two. You’ve also most likely seen the brawls between the Surface Go and the iPad Pro, especially those revolving around the rhetoric of real PCs. So why not have yet another Surface Go review? This time, however, we’ll take a rather different spin and highlight one aspect that really does make the Surface Go a “real PC”: being able to install other operating systems like Linux. And in that regard, it is near perfect as an on-the-go Linux digital notepad.

Continue Reading