fidzu : computers

A year ago the Steam Survey showed a 2.29% marketshare for Linux. Last May it reached 2.69%, its highest level since 2018. November saw another all-time high of 3.2%. But December brought a surprise, reports Phoronix: Back on the 1st Valve published the Steam Survey results for December 2025 and they put the Linux gaming marketshare at 3.19%, a 0.01% dip from November. But now the December results have been revised... [and] put the Linux marketshare at 3.58%, a 0.38% increase over November. Valve didn't publish any explanation for the revision but occasionally they do put out monthly revised data. This is easily an all-time high... both in percentage terms and surely in absolute terms too.

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12 Jan 2026 12:34pm GMT

Ubisoft announced Wednesday it will close its studio in Halifax, Nova Scotia - two weeks after 74% of its staff voted to unionize. This means laying off the 71 people at the studio, reports the gaming news site Aftermath: [Communications Workers of America's Canadian affiliate, CWA Canada] said in a statement to Aftermath the union will "pursue every legal recourse to ensure that the rights of these workers are respected and not infringed in any way." The union said in a news release that it's illegal in Canada for companies to close businesses because of unionization. That's not necessarily what happened here, according to the news release, but the union is "demanding information from Ubisoft about the reason for the sudden decision to close." "We will be looking for Ubisoft to show us that this had nothing to do with the employees joining a union," former Ubisoft Halifax programmer and bargaining committee member Jon Huffman said in a statement. "The workers, their families, the people of Nova Scotia, and all of us who love video games made in Canada, deserve nothing less...." Before joining Ubisoft, the studio was best known for its work on the Rocksmith franchise; under Ubisoft, it focused squarely on mobile games. Ubisoft Halifax was quickly removed from the Ubisoft website on Wednesday...

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12 Jan 2026 8:44am GMT

An anonymous reader shared this report from It's FOSS: Jenny Guanni Qu, a researcher at [VC fund] Pebblebed, analyzed 125,183 bugs from 20 years of Linux kernel development history (on Git). The findings show that the average bug takes 2.1 years to find. [Though the median is 0.7 years, with the average possibly skewed by "outliers" discovered after years of hiding.] The longest-lived bug, a buffer overflow in networking code, went unnoticed for 20.7 years! [But 86.5% of bugs are found within five years.] The research was carried out by relying on the Fixes: tag that is used in kernel development. Basically, when a commit fixes a bug, it includes a tag pointing to the commit that introduced the bug. Jenny wrote a tool that extracted these tags from the kernel's git history going back to 2005. The tool finds all fixing commits, extracts the referenced commit hash, pulls dates from both commits, and calculates the time frame. As for the dataset, it includes over 125k records from Linux 6.19-rc3, covering bugs from April 2005 to January 2026. Out of these, 119,449 were unique fixing commits from 9,159 different authors, and only 158 bugs had CVE IDs assigned. It took six hours to assemble the dataset, according to the blog post, which concludes that the percentage of bugs found within one year has improved dramatically, from 0% in 2010 to 69% by 2022. The blog post says this can likely be attributed to: The Syzkaller fuzzer (released in 2015) Dynamic memory error detectors like KASAN, KMSAN, KCSAN sanitizers Better static analysis More contributors reviewing code But "We're simultaneously catching new bugs faster AND slowly working through ~5,400 ancient bugs that have been hiding for over 5 years." They've also developed an AI model called VulnBERT that predicts whether a commit introduces a vulnerability, claiming that of all actual bug-introducing commits, it catches 92.2%. "The goal isn't to replace human reviewers but to point them at the 10% of commits most likely to be problematic, so they can focus attention where it matters..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12 Jan 2026 5:44am GMT

We all knew this was going to happen, so let's just get it over with. Microsoft is testing a new feature that integrates Copilot into the File Explorer, but it's not going to be another 'Ask Copilot' button in the right-click menu. This time, Copilot will live inside File Explorer, likely in a sidebar or Details/Preview-pane-like interface, according to new references in Windows 11 preview builds. ↫ Mayank Parmar at Windows Latest What am I even supposed to say at this point? Who wants this? Why utterly destroy what little reputation and goodwill Windows has left? Has the hype bubble become this clouded and intoxicating? Even system administrators who want to turn off Copilot in their organisations or device fleets in an official, supported way are getting punched in the face by Microsoft. The company rolled out a new Group Policy to disable Copilot, but it's such a useless mess it might as well not be there at all. This essentially means that IT admins will only be able to uninstall the Copilot app for customers where their device has both Copilot apps installed by either a clean install or by the IT team itself, as long as the Copilot app has not been opened in a month. So, even if you accidentally open the Copilot app for a second because it's there in your Windows taskbar, the Copilot app won't be uninstalled. ↫ Usama Jawad at Neowin You shouldn't be using Windows.

11 Jan 2026 10:02pm GMT

Posh, GNOME's mobile shell, published a look back on the project's 2025. The Phosh developers focus from day one was to make devices running Phosh daily drivable without having to resort to any proprietary OSes as a fallback. This year showed improvements in some important areas people rely on like cell broadcasts and emergency calls, further improving usability and starting some ground work we'll need for some upcoming features. ↫ Phosh developers In 2025, Posh gained support for cell broadcasts - like the emergency messages regarding storms, or alerts about missing persons, that sort of stuff - which is a pretty important feature in this day and age. Posh also improved its support for per-source audio volumes and one source of audio muting another, its on-screen keyboard, its compositor, and much more. Of course, the main problem for shells like Phosh is hardware support, which is handled by the underlying operating system, like PostmarketOS. These Linux mobile operating systems are fighting an uphill battle when it comes to hardware support, and while Android application support can fill some of the application shortcomings, you're going to be making pretty significant concessions by switching to mobile Linux at the moment. When even Android ROMs not sanctioned by Google are having issues with banking applications or government ID stuff, using mobile Linux will be even more of a problem. None of this is the fault of any of the people dedicating their free time to things like Phosh or PostmarketOS, of course - it's just a sad reality of a market we once again just gave up to a few megacorporations, with our governments too cowardly to stand up and fix this issue.

11 Jan 2026 9:42pm GMT

Footage of the 2024 discovery appears in NatGeo's new documentary series Pole to Pole with Will Smith

11 Jan 2026 8:35pm GMT

For the eighth year in a row, the world's oceans absorbed a record-breaking amount of heat in 2025.

11 Jan 2026 12:00pm GMT

Budgie has fallen a bit by the wayside in recent years, but it's still in development and making steady progress. The project's just released Budgie 10.10, the final release in the 10.x series which also marks the end of the transition to Wayland. Budgie 10.10 is a brand new release series for Budgie Desktop, marking our first release to migrate Budgie from X11 to Wayland. This release series brings to a close just over a decade of Budgie 10 development; we are formally putting Budgie 10 into maintenance mode to focus our efforts on Budgie 11. ↫ Joshua Strobl Budgie is taking a very interesting approach for its move to Wayland; instead of writing every single component of their desktop environment from scratch or porting their X11 tools, the project opted to reuse and implement a ton of established, well-tested, and popular Wayland tools like swaybg, swayidle, labwc, and so on. This obviously saves on development time, but also ensures the transition to Wayland is relatively smooth. Things like the panel, applets, the Budgie Control Center, and so on, have been updated or rewritten. There's also some new features, as well as a ton of bug fixes and smaller improvements. As noted, this release marks the end of the road for the 10.x series, with development now shifting to Budgie 11. Upcoming releases of major distributions will have Budgie 10.10 in their repositories.

11 Jan 2026 11:05am GMT

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

Half the country has enacted age-verification laws to prevent minors from viewing porn.

10 Jan 2026 12:00pm GMT

In 2024 the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) started funding work on the ALPM project, which provides a Rust-based framework for Arch Linux Package Management. Refer to the project's FAQ and mission statement to learn more about the relation to the tooling currently in use on Arch Linux. The funding has now concluded, but over the time of 15 months allowed us to create various tools and integrations that we will highlight in the following sections. We have worked on six milestones with focus on various aspects of the package management ecosystem, ranging from formalizing, parsing and writing of …

10 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

Did you know you can have newlines in pathnames? The design is very human and this absolutely doesn't have any unforeseen consequences! Also a friendly reminder that you can store anything on a nameserver if you try hard enough.

Originally posted by me on donotsta.re (2025-12-23)

09 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT