news
Google Betrayal, Microsoft Favouritism, and Microsoft's Back Doors ('Secure' Boots) Vandalise Choice Again
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Desktop/Laptop
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Android Authority ☛ Googlebooks have a Linux app problem that even budget Chromebooks solved years ago
Google may promote Googlebooks as the evolution of its Chromebooks, but the limitations of an Android-based interface are already peeking through. While Googlebooks easily runs Android apps, the early crop of laptop devices lacks proper support for Linux apps, a crucial feature ChromeOS has supported for years.
ChromeOS lets you enable a “Linux development environment” in Settings, which sets up a container for installing Debian packages and running them straight from the app drawer. However, while digging around in Googlebook OS, members of the Android Authority team discovered that they couldn’t replicate the same straightforward way of installing Linux apps as they could on a Chromebook. Furthermore, even though there are plenty of new support pages for Googlebooks talking about their new features, there’s limited information on how to install or run Linux apps.
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WINE or Emulation
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Linux Magazine ☛ Office 365 Available for Testing on GNU/Linux via Bottles
Linux users can now test the official Office 365, thanks to Mirko Brombin's work on Bottles.
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Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)
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Kentaro Hayashi: Testing Japanese IMEs on virtual desktops with virt-japanese-desktop
Japanese input method editors (IMEs) such as Mozc are essential for typing Japanese (yes, skk, anthy and more, but it's out-of-scope in this article). Testing them is a surprisingly fiddly job: an IME behaves differently depending on the desktop environment (GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Budgie), the input framework (ibus, fcitx5, uim), and the Wayland or X11 session. Setting up a fresh VM for every combination from scratch is slow and repetitive, and breaking your host's environment while experimenting is no fun.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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OMG Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu 26.10 drops Btrfs, XFS & ZFS /boot with Secure Boot [Ed: Conflating a lack of choice/diversity with "security", where by "security" they mean Microsoft kill switches]
Canonical has changed how Ubuntu 26.10 boots on system with Secure Boot enabled, in an effort to reduce the attack surface of the boot process.
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