fidzu : geek

Gartner says some VMware customers may find it cheaper to move certain Linux VM workloads to IBM mainframes than to adopt Broadcom's new VMware licensing, especially for fleets of hundreds of Linux VMs and mission-critical apps needing long-term stability. The Register reports: Speaking to The Register to discuss the analyst firm's mid-April publication, "The State of the IBM Mainframe in 2026," [Gartner Vice President Analyst Alessandro Galimberti] said some buyers in many fields are comparing mainframes to modern environments and deciding Big Blue's big iron comes out ahead. "I can build a multi-region cloud application, but things like data synchronization and high availability are things I need to build into application logic," he said. "The mainframe has that in the platform, which shields developers from complexity." He also thinks mainframes are ideally suited to workloads that need many years of transactional consistency and backward-compatibility. That said, Galimberti doesn't recommend the mainframe for all applications. He said mission-critical applications that are unlikely to change much for a decade are best-suited to the machines, as are Linux applications because the open source OS runs on IBM's hardware. IBM also offers the z/VM hypervisor, which he says can make Linux "even better and more enterprise-ready." Which is why Galimberti thinks IBM's ecosystem is attractive to VMware users, especially those who operate a fleet of 500 to 700 Linux VMs. [...] Committing to mainframes therefore means planning "to spend time negotiating price and renewal protections, rather than prioritizing the business value these solutions can deliver." Another downside is that mainframes pose clear lock-in risk, so users may hold back on useful customizations out of fear they make it harder to extricate themselves from the platform. Access to skills remains an issue, too, as kids these days mostly don't contemplate a career working with big iron. Galimberti sees more service providers investing in their mainframe programs, which might help. So does the availability of Linux.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 May 2026 8:00pm GMT

Daemon Tools users: It's time to check your machines for stealthy infections, stat.

05 May 2026 7:46pm GMT

Kennedy has made-and continues to make-many false claims about SSRIs.

05 May 2026 7:32pm GMT

A new Internet Matters survey suggests the UK's Online Safety Act age checks are easy for many children to bypass. Reported workarounds include fake birthdays, borrowed IDs, video game characters, and even drawing on a fake mustache. The Register reports: The group surveyed over 1,000 UK children and their parents, and while it did report some positive effects from changes made under the OSA, many children saw age verification as an easy-to-bypass hurdle rather than something that kept them genuinely safe. A full 46 percent of children even said that age checks were easy to bypass, while just 17 percent said that they were difficult to fool. The methods kids use to fool age gates vary, but most are pretty simple: There's the classic use of a video game character to fool video selfie systems, while in other instances, children reported just entering a fake birthday or using someone else's ID card when that was required. The report even cites cases of children drawing a mustache on their faces to fool age detection filters. Seriously. While nearly half of UK kids say it's easy to bypass online age checks (and another 17 percent say it's neither hard nor easy), only 32 percent say they've actually bypassed them, according to Internet Matters. Like scoring some booze from "cool" parents, keeping age-gated content out of the hands of kids under the OSA is only as effective as parents let it be, and a quarter of them enable their kids' online delinquency. More specifically, Internet Matters found that a full 17 percent of parents admitted to actively helping their kids evade age checks, while an additional 9 percent simply turned a blind eye to it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 May 2026 7:00pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A severe security vulnerability affecting almost every version of the Linux operating system has caught defenders off-guard and scrambling to patch after security researchers publicly released exploit code that allows attackers to take complete control of vulnerable systems. The U.S. government says the bug, dubbed "CopyFail," is now being exploited in the wild, meaning it's being actively used in malicious hacking campaigns. [...] Given the risk to the federal enterprise network, U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA has ordered all civilian federal agencies to patch any affected systems by May 15.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 May 2026 6:00pm GMT

Google's smart home ecosystem is getting its biggest update since the AI-fueled 2025 revamp.

05 May 2026 5:17pm GMT

Earlier this year, Mac OS and Windows NT-capable ROMs were discovered for Apple's unique AIX Network Server. Cameron Kaiser has since spent more time digging into just how capable these ROMs are, and has published another one of his detailed stories about his efforts. Well, thanks to Jeff Walther who generously built a few replica ROM SIMMs for me to test, we can now try the "2.0" MacOS ROMs on holmstock, our hard-working Apple Network Server 700 test rig (stockholm, my original ANS 500, is still officially a production unit). And there are some interesting things to report, especially when we pit the preproduction ROMs and this set head-to-head in MacBench, and even try booting Rhapsody on it. ↫ Cameron Kaiser A great read, as always.

04 May 2026 10:52pm GMT

With Windows being as old and long-running as it is, there's a ton of old and outdated bits and pieces lurking in every nook and cranny. I have always found these old relics fascinating, especially now that over the past few years, Microsoft has attempted to replace some of those bits and pieces with modern replacements (not always to great success, but that's another story). One of those parts of the UI that's been virtually unchanged since the release of Windows 95 is the Run dialog, but that's about to change: Microsoft has released a completely new Run dialog to early testers. Windows Run, also known as the Run dialog, is a surface that has been around for over 30 years. It has become a heavily relied upon tool for developers and advanced users alike. Users have decades of muscle memory where they hit Win+R, navigate through their Run history, and hit Enter to quickly access various paths and tools. We all have our favorite tool we launch there as well. For us, some of our favorites are wt (Windows Terminal), mstsc (Remote Desktop) and winword (Microsoft Word). But it's more than jUsT a TeXt BoX tHaT rUnS tHiNgS. The Run dialog can handle navigating both local and network file paths as well. And everything it does, it does fast. Win+R opens the run dialog seemingly instantly. If we wanted to modernize the Run Dialog to fit the modern Windows 11 design style, we had to make sure it did everything just as well as before. We needed to maintain the same performance while also keeping the user interface minimal, just as Windows 95 intended. ↫ Clint Rutkas at the Microsoft Dev Blogs The new Run dialog looks like it belongs in Windows 11, which is a nice improvement, but the most important part is that they actually seem to have made it a little faster. Sure, they may have only shaved off a few milliseconds from its opening time, but considering virtually everything else they've touched in Windows over the years got considerably slower, that's a good showing for Microsoft. The new feature they've added is that by typing ~\, you can open your home directory. The one casualty is the browse button, which according to Microsoft's data, literally nobody ever used. I know it's just a small thing and in the end not even a remotely consequential one, but with an operating system as old and storied as Windows, replacing these ancient parts that millions of people rely on every day absolutely fascinates me. There must be a considerable amount of pressure on the people developing something like this new Run dialog, especially with Windows' reputation being at one of its lowest points, so it's good to see them being able to deliver. The new Run dialog is available today for testers, and if you're on the Windows Insider Experimental Channel, you can enable it in Settings > System > Advanced. Coincidentally, on my Windows 11 machine that I use for just one stupid video game, this Advanced page displays a loading spinner for five minutes and then just dies. Also, Notepad won't start (one time it showed this dialog), and using the terminal to load it causes the old Win32 version of Notepad to open after 5 minutes of waiting, which then hangs and crashes. People pay money for this.

04 May 2026 9:19pm GMT

While I'm normally a KDE user, I do keep close tabs on various other desktop environments, and install and set them up every now and then to see how they're fairing, what improvements they've made, and ultimately, if my preference for KDE is still warranted. This usually means setting up a nice OpenBSD installation for Xfce, Fedora for GNOME, and less often others for some of the more niche desktop environments. Since GNOME 50 was just released, guess who's time in the round is up? Since everybody's already made up their mind about their preferred desktop eons ago, with upsides and downsides debated far past their expiration date, I'm not particularly interested in reviewing desktop environments or Linux distributions. However, after asking around on Fedi, it seemed there was quite a bit of interest in an article detailing how I set up GNOME, what changes I make to the defaults, which extensions I use, what tweaks I apply, and so on. Of course, everything described in this article is highly personal, and I'm not arguing that this is the optimal way to tweak GNOME, that the extensions I use are the best ones, or that any visual modifications I make are better than whatever defaults GNOME uses. No, my goal with this article is twofold: one, to highlight that GNOME is a lot more configurable, extensible, and malleable than common wisdom on the internet would have you believe. It's not KDE or one of those cobbled-together tiling Wayland desktops, but it's definitely not as rigid as you might think. And two, that GNOME is good, actually. Tools of the trade The first thing I do is install a few crucial tools that make it easier to modify and tweak GNOME. I really dislike lists in articles, but I will begrudgingly use one here: After installing all of these tools, the actual tweaking can commence. Visual tweaks I didn't use to like GNOME's Adwaita visual style, but over the years, it started growing on me to the point where I don't actively dislike it anymore. With the arrival of libadwaita, it has also become effectively impossible to theme modern GNOME applications, so even if you do change to something else, many of your applications won't follow along. If consistency is something you care about, you'll stick to Adwaita, but that leaves one problem unresolved: applications that still use GTK3. These applications will follow a much older version of Adwaita, making them stand out like eyesores among all the modern GTK4 stuff. Luckily, since GTK3 applications are still properly themable, this is easily fixed: just install the adw-gtk3 theme, either by hand, or through your distribution's repositories. To enable it, first install the user themes extension through Extension Manager, and then enable the theme in GNOME Tweaks for "Legacy Applications". Any potential GTK3 applications you still use will now integrate nicely with modern libadwaita applications. The one part of GNOME I really do deeply dislike is its icon theme. I can't quite explain why I dislike this icon set so much, but it runs deep, so one of the very first things I do is replace the default GNOME icon set with my personal favourite, Qogir. This is a popular icon set, so it's usually available in your distribution's repositories, but I always install it from its GitHub page. Changing GNOME's icon set is as simple as selecting it in GNOME Tweaks. You can't get much more personal taste than an icon set, and there are dozens of amazing sets to choose from in the Linux world. Changing them out and trying out new ones is stupidly easy, and it's definitely worth looking at a few that might be more pleasing to you than GNOME's (or KDE's) default. Lastly, I open Add Water and enable the amazing GNOME theme for LibreWolf. Add Water basically makes this as easy as flipping a switch, so there's no need to copy any files into your LibreWolf profile or whatever. The application also provides a few more small tweaks to fiddle with, like enabling standard tab widths so tabs don't grow and shrink as you close and open tabs, moving the bookmarks bar below the tab bar, and many more. Extensions Since the release of GNOME 3 in 2011, extensions have been the most capable way to modify GNOME's look, behaviour, and feature set. As far as I can tell, while the extension framework is an official part of the GNOME Shell, the extensions themselves are all third-party and not part of a vanilla GNOME installation. By now, there are over 2800 listed extensions, but that number includes abandoned extensions so it's hard to determine the actual number of currently-maintained ones. Whatever the actual number is, there's bound to be things in there you're going to want to use. Here are the extensions I have installed. Let's just start at the top and work our way down. I guess I'm forced to do another list. There are countless more extensions to choose from, and you're definitely going to find things you never even thought could be useful. Miscellaneous tweaks There's a few other things I modify. In GNOME Tweaks, I make it so that double-clicking a window's titlebar minimises it while right-clicking it lowers it; two features I picked up during my years as a BeOS user that I absolutely refuse to give up. I configure the dock from Dash to Dock so that it always remains on top and never hides itself, no matter the circumstances. In Settings, I disable virtual desktops entirely (I don't like virtual desktops), and I make sure tap-to-click is disabled (if I'm on a laptop). GNOME is good, actually After making all of these changes, I feel quite comfortable using GNOME, at least on my laptop. It's a nice, coherent experience, and offers what is probably the most polished graphical user interface you can find on Linux, even if it isn't the most full-featured. The third-party application ecosystem, through modern

03 May 2026 8:15pm GMT

Break the pattern today or the loop will repeat tomorrow.

18 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

My thoughts on AI-assisted programming.

11 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

I have discovered and shared ~800 open source Rust CLI projects over the past 3 years.

03 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT