Linux, Open Source, & anti Microsoft news

Microsoft may love Linux these days, but it isn’t yet shipping a Linux build. Edge is currently available for macOS, Windows (7, 8, 8.1, 10), iOS and Android. Windows consumer users can expect to get the latest Edge via Windows Update, eventually.

The PinePhone is an inexpensive smartphone designed to run Linux-based operating systems. Developed by the folks at Pine64, the $150 smartphone was first announced about a year ago — and this week the first units will ship.

The National Security Agency alerted Microsoft in recent weeks to a significant issue affecting its Windows 10 operating system, ubiquitous within corporations and among consumers, two senior federal cybersecurity officials told CNBC.

Microsoft is replacing its Edge browser with the updated, Chromium-based version on January 15. Windows 10 users will be automatically transitioned over.

Linux kernel jockey, Linus Torvalds, has taken time out to remind open source loyalists that he is no fan of the ZFS file system due, in part, to the sometimes tortuous nature of open source licensing.

Microsoft will no longer support Windows 7, the 10-year-old operating system, as of 14 January 2020. However, computers will still function, but the company will not provide technical support for any issues, software updates, and security updates or fixes, Microsoft said in a statement.

“Well, it seems to me that the organization is rather enthusiastically headed toward accepting a license that isn’t freedom respecting,” Perens wrote in a missive to the OSI’s license review mailing list on Thursday. “Fine, do it without me, please.”

Windows 10 begins 2020 hoping to turn a page on a bug-ridden 2019. Problems ranged from frustrating to limiting, chaotic to simply bizarre and Microsoft was even hit by a whistle-blower exposing the reasons for the increase in instability. But now 2020 is off to a rocky start as well.

Microsoft has once again begun including advertisements in both their mail and calendar apps that are built into Windows 10 and they can’t be removed.

Bing is expanding its visual search features, allowing the features to be accessed in more places throughout Microsoft Windows. Visual search lets users conduct a search using an image to find other, visually-similar images. This feature was previously only accessible from Bing’s image search results. Now, Windows users can access Bing’s visual search capabilities from wherever they are. Whether that’s browsing a website or looking at photos saved to a computer.