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Will You Be Able To Run a Modern Desktop Environment In 2016 Without Systemd? 785

Posted by samzenpus from the let-the-flamewar-begin dept.
New submitter yeupou writes: Early this year, David Edmundson from KDE, concluded that "In many cases [systemd] allows us to throw away large amounts of code whilst at the same time providing a better user experience. Adding it [systemd] as an optional extra defeats the main benefit". A perfectly sensible explanation. But, then, one might wonder to which point KDE would remain usable without systemd?

Recently, on one Devuan box, I noticed that KDE power management (Powerdevil) no longer supported suspend and hibernate. Since pm-utils was still there, for a while, I resorted to call pm-suspend directly, hoping it would get fixed at some point. But it did not. So I wrote a report myself. I was not expecting much. But neither was I expecting it to be immediately marked as RESOLVED and DOWNSTREAM, with a comment accusing the "Debian fork" I'm using to "ripe out" systemd without "coming with any of the supported solutions Plasma provides". I searched beforehand about the issue so I knew that the problem also occurred on some other Debian-based systems and that the bug seemed entirely tied to upower, an upstream software used by Powerdevil. So if anything, at least this bug should have been marked as UPSTREAM.

While no one dares (yet) to claim to write software only for systemd based operating system, it is obvious that it is now getting quite hard to get support otherwise. At the same time, bricks that worked for years without now just get ruined, since, as pointed out by Edmunson, adding systemd as "optional extra defeats its main benefit". So, is it likely that we'll still have in 2016 a modern desktop environment, without recent regressions, running without systemd?
Firefox

Mozilla Is Removing Tab Groups and Complete Themes From Firefox (venturebeat.com) 316

Posted by Soulskill from the feature-de-creep dept.
An anonymous reader writes: As part of Mozilla's "Go Faster" initiative for Firefox, the company is removing features that aren't used by many and require a lot of technical effort to continually improve. VentureBeat learned that the first two features to get the axe are tab groups and complete themes. Dave Camp, Firefox’s director of engineering, said, "Tab Groups was an experiment to help users deal with large numbers of tabs. Very few people chose to use it, so we are retiring it because the work required to maintain it is disproportionate to its popularity."
Firefox

Mozilla Has 'No Plans' To Offer Firefox Without Pocket (venturebeat.com) 199

Posted by Soulskill from the they-go-together-like-peanut-butter-and-pocket dept.
An anonymous reader writes: In June, Mozilla integrated Pocket into Firefox, garnering a mixed response from the browser's community. This week, VentureBeat stumbled upon a Bugzilla ticket (bug 1215694) to "move Pocket to a built-in add-on" and immediately reached out to the company. "There are currently no plans to offer a version of Firefox that doesn't include Pocket," said Dave Camp, Firefox's director of engineering.
Mozilla

Big Changes From Mozilla Mean Firefox Will Get Chrome Extensions 192

Posted by timothy from the can't-please-everyone-all-the-time dept.
Mozilla announced yesterday a few high-level changes to the way Firefox and Firefox extensions will be developed; among them, the introduction of "a new extension API, called WebExtensions—largely compatible with the model used by Chrome and Opera—to make it easier to develop extensions across multiple browsers." (Liliputing has a nice breakdown of the changes.) ZDNet reports that at the same time, "Mozilla will be deprecating XPCOM and XUL, the foundations of its extension system, and many Firefox developers are ticked off at these moves."
Operating Systems

People Are Obtaining Windows 7 Licenses For the Free Windows 10 Upgrade 172

Posted by Soulskill from the cheap-is-relative dept.
jones_supa writes: Windows 7 has quickly started increasing its market share of desktop operating systems, nearing 61%. If you're wondering why this is happening when Windows 10 is almost here, the reason is this: Windows 10 will be available as a free upgrade for those running Windows 7 and 8, and the new OS will have the exact same hardware requirements as its predecessor, so the majority of PCs should be able to run it just as well. Because Windows 7 was launched in 2009, a license is more affordable than for Windows 8, so many users are switching to this version to take advantage of the Windows 10 free upgrade offer.
Encryption

NIST Updates Random Number Generation Guidelines 64

Posted by Soulskill from the of-barn-doors-and-horses dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Encryption weighs heavily on the public consciousness these days, as we've learned that government agencies are keeping an eye on us and a lot of our security tools aren't as foolproof as we've thought. In response to this, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has issued a formal update to its document on how to properly generate a random number — crucial in many types of encryption. The update (as expected) removes a recommendation for the Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm. It also adds extra options for CTR_DRBG and points out examples for implementing SP 800-90A generators. The full document (PDF) is available online.
Open Source

Reasons To Use Mono For Linux Development 355

Posted by samzenpus from the best-tools-for-the-job dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes: In the eleven years since Mono first appeared, the Linux community has regarded it with suspicion. Because Mono is basically a free, open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, some developers feared that Microsoft would eventually launch a patent war that could harm many in the open-source community. But there are some good reasons for using Mono, developer David Bolton argues in a new blog posting. Chief among them is MonoDevelop, which he claims is an excellent IDE; it's cross-platform abilities; and its utility as a game-development platform. That might not ease everybody's concerns (and some people really don't like how Xamarin has basically commercialized Mono as an iOS/Android development platform), but it's maybe enough for some people to take another look at the platform.
Mozilla

Mozilla Plans To Build Virtual Reality APIs Into Firefox By the End of 2015 91

Posted by timothy from the just-goggle-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla's VR research team is hard at work making virtual reality native to the web. The group wants more than a few experimental VR-only websites, they want responsive VR websites that can adapt seamlessly between VR and non-VR, from mobile to desktop, built with HTML and CSS . Experimental work is already underway, and now the team says that they 'aim to have support for the WebVR API shipping with our release channel builds of Firefox Desktop by end of this year.' Those with the Oculus Rift developer kit can already try out a few native WebVR experiences using Firefox Nightly.
DRM

Firefox 38 Arrives With DRM Required To Watch Netflix 371

Posted by timothy from the chinese-finger-trap dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from VentureBeat: Mozilla today launched Firefox 38 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Notable additions to the browser include Digital Rights Management (DRM) tech for playing protected content in the HTML5 video tag on Windows, Ruby annotation support, and improved user interfaces on Android. Firefox 38 for the desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. Note that there is a separate download for Firefox 38 without the DRM support. Our anonymous reader adds links to the release notes for desktop and Android.
Education

Imagination To Release Open MIPS Design To Academia 63

Posted by samzenpus from the some-strings-attached dept.
DeviceGuru writes: Imagination Technologies has developed a Linux-ready academic version of its 32-bit MIPS architecture MicroAptiv processor design, and is giving it away free to universities for use in computer research and education. As the MIPSfpga name suggests, the production-quality RTL (register transfer level) design abstraction is intended to run on industry standard FPGAs. Although MIPSfpga is available as a fully visible RTL design, MIPSfpga is not fully open source, according to the announcement from Robert Owen, Manager of Imagination's University Programme. Academic users can use and modify MIPSfpga as they wish, but cannot build it into silicon. "If you modify it, you must talk to us first if you wish to patent the changes," writes Owen.

Comment Re:Dear Debian (Score 1) 442

by Uncle Warthog (#49559921) Attached to: Debian 8 Jessie Released

For me startup is very quick with systemd, it's the shutdown that's slow. About three minutes to shutdown.

Mine is actually slower but not by a huge amount, somewhere between 5 and 10%, varying from one boot to the next. The shutdown is either quite a bit faster, enough so that I worry whether things are being shut down correctly, or a whole lot slower, with no rhyme or reason as to why or which one I'll get on any particular shutdown. Systemd's "improved" logging system is, of course, no use in figuring it out.

Comment Re:systemd sux (Score 1) 442

by Uncle Warthog (#49559687) Attached to: Debian 8 Jessie Released

All other "things" in the systemd project (as opposed to the systemd daemon) are configurable as to whether they are used or not.

Indeed. Could you please point me to the section in the documentation on how to configure not to use journald?
Microsoft

Mono 4 Released, First Version To Adopt Microsoft Code 223

Posted by timothy from the licenses-mean-things dept.
jones_supa writes: Version 4.0.0 of Mono, the FOSS implementation of the .NET Framework, has been released. This is the first release of Mono that replaces various components of Mono with code that was released by Microsoft under the MIT license. Microsoft itself is working towards .NET Core: a redistributable and re-imagined version of .NET, which has two code drops: CoreFX and CoreCLR. Mono at this point continues to provide an API that tracks the .NET desktop/server version. This means that most of the Mono code that has been integrated from Microsoft comes from the ReferenceSource code drop. Mono's C# compiler now also defaults to C# 6.0.
Mozilla

Firefox To Mandate Extension Signing 196

Posted by samzenpus from the changing-things-up dept.
First time accepted submitter x0ra writes In a recent blog post, Mozilla announced its intention to require extensions to be signed in Firefox, without any possible user override. From the post: "For developers hosting their add-ons on AMO, this means that they will have to either test on Developer Edition, Nightly, or one of the unbranded builds. The rest of the submission and review process will remain unchanged, except that extensions will be automatically signed once they pass review. For other developers, this is a larger change. For testing development versions, they’ll have the same options available as AMO add-on developers. For release versions, however, we’re introducing the required step of uploading the extension file to AMO for signing. For most cases, this step will be automatic, but in cases where the extension doesn’t pass these tests, there will be the option to request a manual code review."

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