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Fudzilla's Latest on GNU/Linux and Microsoft
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Fudzilla ☛ Windows PCs are becoming an endangered species
Microsoft admits 400 million Windows devices have disappeared
Microsoft exec Yusuf Mehdi probably didn’t think anyone would notice when he claimed that Windows now runs on “over a billion monthly active devices.” The trouble is, the last time Voles in Redmond bragged about such things, the number was 1.4 billion. That was in 2022. Meaning 400 million devices have quietly exited stage left.
The whole admission was buried deep in a turgid 2,400-word blog post about extended support for Windows 10. Once the "over a billion" line was spotted, Microsoft scrambled to update it, insisting it wasn't a precise figure, but rather a vague nod to their “user base.”
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Fudzilla ☛ German state expels Microsoft
Schleswig-Holstein doesn’t want teams
The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is revolting and ditching the software King of the world, Microsoft, from its public sector.
Civil servants, coppers, and judges will soon find themselves typing away on LibreOffice instead of Word and pinging messages with Open-Xchange rather than Teams.
The digitalisation minister Dirk Schroedter told France24 : “We're done with Teams!"
By September, approximately 30,000 public employees will have abandoned Redmond's products. The state plans to drag the other half of its 60,000 staff, including thousands of teachers, into the open-source fold in the coming years. LibreOffice is replacing Word and Excel, Open-Xchange is taking Outlook’s spot, and Windows is eventually being binned in favour of Linux.
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Fudzilla ☛ Too much VRAM gives Linux insomnia
AMD engineer Samuel Zhang has flagged a Linux bug that causes servers to refuse hibernation because they’ve too much VRAM and Instinct accelerators.
Instinct cards are designed for AI and high-performance number crunching in data centres, and they pack silly amounts of VRAM, 192GB each in some models. Toss eight of them into a server and you’re sitting on around 1.5TB of video memory, which is apparently enough to break Linux's bedtime routine.
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Fudzilla ☛ Torvalds ditches soft keyboard for clackety clack
IT's Mr Sweary, Linus Torvalds has binned his low-profile keyboard and rejoined the noisy mechanical brigade.
The penguin emperor said he had wasted the last six months trying to love a “quieter low-profile keyboard” but had given up and gone back to the glorious racket of Cherry blue switches.
Torvalds admitted: I gave it half a year thinking I'd get used to it, but I'm back to the noisy clackety-clack of clicky blue Cherry switches. It seems I need the audible (or perhaps tactile) feedback to avoid the typing mistakes that I just kept doing.".
Torvalds questioned why he bothered torturing himself in the first place, since working from home means nobody else is around to complain about his personal symphony of clacks.