fidzu : geek

The blog Linuxiac reports: Linux has crossed a major milestone in North America, with the open-source operating system now accounting for 10.65% of desktop usage in the region, according to Statcounter's latest figures for July 2026. The result places Linux firmly in double-digit territory for the first time in Statcounter's North American desktop operating system statistics. For comparison, Statcounter recorded Linux at 5.52% in June 2026, so the share nearly doubled in one month... However, the sharp monthly increase needs context. Statcounter's June figures included an "Unknown" category that accounted for 9.24% of North American desktop usage. Its reduction seems to have coincided with Linux's rise, possibly indicating better identification of previously unclassified traffic... Statcounter is not the only major web measurement platform showing Linux with a substantial presence on North American desktops. Cloudflare Radar data, filtered to desktop HTTP traffic from North America over the previous 28 days, also places Linux at a notably high level [9.4%]. StatCounter's data also shows Linux with an even larger market share of 11.87% in just the United States - and a 14.73% market share in India. Linux's market share in other world regions: Asia 7.17% Africa 5.71% Europe 5.49% South America 4.35% China 2.12% And here's how the Linux market share on other countries compare to India and the U.S. India 14.73% United States 11.87% Germany 7.24% UK 6.18% Canada 3.83% Australia 3.55% Linux's surge could be due to its use in automation or headless browser workloads, Linuxiac points out. But another possibility is "growing frustration with Windows hardware requirements, advertising, account integration, telemetry, and forced interface changes has pushed some users to explore alternatives..." "For now, the safest conclusion is that Linux has surpassed 10% of measured desktop web usage in North America according to Statcounter, not necessarily 10% of the region's installed desktop computer base."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Aug 2026 2:04pm GMT

The Hill published the thoughts of Gleb Tsipursky, Ph.D., who serves as the CEO of the future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts: A recent EnhancV survey of 1,000 full-time U.S. workers subject to new or stricter return-to-office policies found that 72% suspect these mandates are really a voluntary attrition strategy - a strategy by their own employers to make them quit their jobs. A full 46% admit to the practice of coffee-badging. Thirty-six percent have applied for a new job while sitting at their current office desk. Thirty-six percent have started a side hustle since the mandate was announced, in anticipation of being let go or quitting. Those numbers do not prove that employees reject collaboration. They show that many employees no longer trust the official story... The central mistake in many in-office mandates is the assumption that proximity automatically produces commitment. It does not. A worker who spends two hours commuting to sit on video calls with colleagues in other cities is not experiencing culture. That worker is experiencing theater. When executives describe the office as a cure-all, many employees experience lost time, higher costs and lower autonomy. The policy's defining feature becomes its credibility gap. Research keeps undercutting the belief that more office time automatically means better performance. A University of Pittsburgh analysis of S&P 500 firms found that return-to-office mandates reduced employee satisfaction without improving firm performance or firm value.... Baylor University's reporting on office mandates and brain drain found that firms with mandates faced greater turnover among women, senior employees, managers and high-skilled workers, while job vacancy duration increased and hiring rates declined. In other words, the people with the most options are often the first to leave. The employees who remain may not be the most committed - they may simply be the least mobile... Attendance can be mandated, but commitment cannot. When leaders confuse the two, they do not rebuild workplace culture. They create a room full of people planning their exit.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Aug 2026 11:34am GMT

New York has finalized new rules that will govern social media apps in the state starting on January 25, 2027. The law prohibits social media platforms from sending notifications to minors between midnight and 6 a.m. without parental consent. And minors "will only be shown content from other accounts they follow or otherwise select in a set sequence, such as chronological order," rather than "the default algorithmically personalized feeds... unless they get parental consent for an addictive feed." (Social media companies "must offer at least one alternative method for age assurance besides providing a government-issued ID," the announcements points out, and any information used to determine age "must not be used for any other purpose and must be deleted or de-identified immediately after its intended use.") But meanwhile, the EFF writes that a committee in the U.S. Senate is considering the SCREEN ACT, "a sweeping age-verification bill that would require online services to verify users' ages before they can access any sexually explicit content. If this bill passes, it will force millions of adult internet users to give up their anonymity, privacy, and security before they access lawful speech." Unlike many state-age verification laws - which have been harmful in their own right - the SCREEN Act has no requirement that a significant portion of the website consist of sexually explicit content that is harmful to minors. The bill requires nearly any service hosting even a single piece of sexually explicit content to verify the ages of its users. The result is that the bill would apply not only to adult content sites like PornHub or OnlyFans, but also streaming services like Netflix, and social media platforms like Reddit, Discord, or Bluesky, if they host any adult content... Under the SCREEN Act, the "bouncer" will be a digital age-verification service that captures your personal information and saves it to a database for an unspecified amount of time. The consequences of the bill won't be limited to minors. If websites and apps are expected to reliably identify teenagers, adults will be asked to prove they are adults. Even worse, the SCREEN Act is a privacy and data security nightmare. One provision of the bill requires services to take reasonable steps to protect the data collected and to not maintain for longer than is necessary. But these are terribly weak protections that impose no meaningful collection, use, or retention limits on services collecting people's private information... The SCREEN Act also targets virtual private network (VPN) users and providers. The bill requires covered websites to verify users' ages based on their IP addresses unless the service can determine that the user is outside the United States, and specifically requires age verification on traffic coming from known VPN addresses. In practice, this discourages the use of VPNs and proxy servers, which millions of people rely on for legitimate purposes such as protecting personal privacy, securing public Wi-Fi connections, safeguarding journalists and activists, and preventing data tracking... The SCREEN Act creates onerous age-verification rules that will block adults from accessing lawful speech, curtail their ability to be anonymous, and jeopardize the data security and privacy of all internet users.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Aug 2026 7:34am GMT

NetBSD, the operating system specifically designed to run on anything from a supercomputer to a toothpick, just released version 11.0. There's a ton of changes and improvements here, such as a brand new port to RISC-V, which supports a number of the more popular RISC-V SoCs (sadly, not the one I have just yet). NetBSD 11.0 also adds initial support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite platform, as well as a port to the virt68k platform, which means the Motorola 68000 port in QEMU using paravirtualized devices. Speaking of virtualisation, they're also introducing a new MICROVM kernel for x86: New MICROVM kernel for x86, supporting both i386 and amd64, NetBSD 11.0 introduces a dedicated MICROVM kernel designed for extremely fast virtual machine boot, leveraging PVH boot, VirtIO MMIO, and multiple kernel optimizations, it can boot in about 10 ms on 2020-era x86 CPUs. ↫ NetBSD 11.0 release notes There's also improved support for Linux system calls in compat_linux, the npf firewall, and much more. Of course, the list of other improvements, buigfixes, and smaller changes is long, including many changes for old, outdated, or otherwise odd architectures and platforms, as is the NetBSD way. Which other operating system proudly lists substantial improvements to their PA-RISC, Motorola 68000, and Alpha ports, among others?

01 Aug 2026 9:14pm GMT

I have a policy to effectively never link to YouTube videos. I'll gladly make an exception for this one. Reflection is one of the most powerful concepts in Computer Science. Unfortunately, not every programming language is blessed enough to have it. In the 1980s, one company, Symbolics took the concept to the logical extreme. By representing EVERYTHING as objects; they created the most powerful (and inadvertently) least private operating system ever created! The company collapsed, but the ideas live on. Some modern languages got a full dose of reflection. Some…weren't so lucky. I ranked them all, and in the end I'll show you how I dragged C++ up a tier with my brand new runtime reflection library, CallMeMaybe! ↫ Laurie Wired The GitHub description of CallMeMaybe: CallMeMaybe (CMM) is a C++ runtime reflection library built on top of P2996 static reflection introduced in C++26. CMM purposefully mirrors many of the std::meta functions to provide a uniform interface, but allows runtime introspection, dynamic invocation, and instantiation by building a runtime reflection registry. Class members can be automatically traversed and reflected by simply adding ] as an annotation. CMM implements a custom type system to completely avoid RTTI requirements. ↫ CallMeMaybe GitHub page My YouTube linking policy will remain in place.

01 Aug 2026 9:05pm GMT

"We believe that a capture of Swift, an attempted capture of Swift, is very much in the cards."

01 Aug 2026 6:20pm GMT

Christopher Nolan's impressionistic remix of Homer's epic poem finds the man behind the myth.

01 Aug 2026 3:19pm GMT

Reddit may still be considering ending its licensing deal with Google.

01 Aug 2026 12:30pm GMT

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Tcl, or the "Tool Command Language", created and released by John Ousterhout in 1990, deserves a place among the greatest products of the human mind. Especially when combined with its better known graphical user interface Toolkit - Tk. In 1997 Ousterhout was awarded the ACM Software System Award for Tcl/Tk, an award given to institutions or individuals recognized for developing software systems with a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both. ↫ Armen Barsegyan Everything you could ever possibly want to know about Tcl/Tk. There's nothing to add here; if this is up your alley - and you know if it is - just go ahead and read it, and stop wasting time here.

31 Jul 2026 10:44pm GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

Just trying to answer one simple question: What if the terminal was 3D?

11 May 2026 12:00am GMT