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Submission + - Windows 10: Charms Bar Removed, No Start Screen for Desktops (neowin.net)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Late last week, Microsoft pushed out a new build (9926) of Windows 10 to those of you who are running the Technical Preview. The latest version comes with many new features, some easily accessible, others bubbling under, but two big changes are now certain: the Charms bar is dead, and Start Screen for large devices is no more. Replacing the Charms bar is the Action Center, which has many of the same shortcuts as the Charms bar, but also has a plethora of other information too. Notifications are now bundled into the Action Center and the shortcuts to individual settings are still easily accessible from this window. The Start Screen is no longer present for desktop users, the options for opening it are gone. Continuum is the future, and it has taken over what the Start Screen initiated with Windows 8.

Comment Re:DirectX is obsolete (Score 1) 135

by jones_supa (#48903071) Attached to: DirectX 12 Lies Dormant Within Microsoft's Recent Windows 10 Update
Now you expanded the discussion to the GPU driver running on the CPU. The original claim was that "shaders are programs that run on your GPU at kernel level with full DMA access to your computer". But other than that, sure, I agree with you: the OpenGL stack and the GPU driver are a potential minefield.

Comment Re:Why do Windows programs just run? (Score 2) 126

by jones_supa (#48893577) Attached to: Linus Fixes Kernel Regression Breaking Witcher 2

Do you mind if I ask what flavor of Linux you were running, what the desktop(s) were and what were the issues you were getting?

That is usually followed by "ah yes, that particular distro is known to be broken, no wonder you were having problems". :)

There have been various issues like the GP comment described, but I won't write a long rant about them. Right now, if I sent a letter to Santa Claus and wanted to have just one issue solved, it would be the problem where the laptop brightness goes in multiple steps under Debian-based distros such as Mint and Ubuntu. Apparently this is because there can be multiple listeners to the backlight event (GPU driver, ACPI driver, OS, BIOS...) and they all do the adjustment without consuming the event. Anyone can observe this problem on a laptop. This is so basic stuff that it cannot be consistently broken like this.

Fix the brightness adjustment. Doooo it. No, I won't do the engineering work to fix it. I have other problems to solve than personally fixing my OS bugs. Windows works fine.

Submission + - Linus Fixes Kernel Regression Breaking Witcher 2

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: There has been quite a debate around the Linux version of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and the fact that it wasn't really a port. A special kind of wrapper was used to make the Windows version of the game run on Linux systems, similar to Wine. The performance on Linux systems took a hit and users felt betrayed because they thought that they would get a native port. However, after the game stopped launching properly at some point, the reason was actually found to be a Linux regression. Linus quickly took care of the issue on an unofficial Witcher 2 issue tracker on GitHub: "It looks like LDT_empty is buggy on 64-bit kernels. I suspect that the behavior was inconsistent before the tightening change and that it's now broken as a result. I'll write a patch. Serves me right for not digging all the way down the mess of macros." This one goes to the bin "don't break userspace". Linus also reminds of QA: "And maybe this is an excuse for somebody in the x86 maintainer team to try a few games on steam. They *are* likely good tests of odd behavior.."

Submission + - EISA Support Not Removed From Linux, A User Still Found

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: A patch was proposed to Linux Kernel Mailing List to drop support for the old EISA bus. However a user chimed in: "Well, I'd like to keep my x86 box up and alive, to support EISA FDDI equipment I maintain if nothing else — which in particular means the current head version of Linux, not some ancient branch."

Linus Torvalds was friendly about the case: "So if we actually have a user, and it works, then no, we're not removing EISA support. It's not like it hurts us or is in some way fundamentally broken, like the old i386 code was (i386 kernel page fault semantics really were broken, and the lack of some instructions made it more painful to maintain than needed — not like EISA at all, which is just a pure add-on on the side)."

In addition to Intel 80386, recent years have also seen MCA bus support being removed from the kernel. Linux generally strives to keep support even for crusty hardware if there provably is still user(s) of the particular gear.

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