Linux, Open Source, & anti Microsoft news

Microsoft Corp. is planning to release a line of lower-cost Surface tablets as soon as the second half of 2018, seeking a hit in a market for cheaper devices that Apple Inc. dominates with the iPad, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Windows 10 April 2018 Update is not proving to be the smoothest of installations for PCs containing certain Intel SSDs.

Developers of consumer apps (not including games) for PC, Windows Mixed Reality, Windows Phone or Surface Hub will now receive 85 percent of revenue from downloads — as opposed to 70 percent — when the app is tracked down through the Microsoft Store. What’s more interesting is that Microsoft is bumping this figure up to 95 percent when the app is deep-linked externally from somewhere like the app developer’s site.

Redmond emitted 68 patches alone, 21 rated critical and at least two being actively exploited in the wild. There are browser and kernel patches you should look into first, check out an Office 365 email filter bypass that isn’t addressed, then Hyper-V if you’re using that, and then the rest.

Windows Notepad users, rejoice! Microsoft’s text editing app, which has been shipping with Windows since version 1.0 in 1985, has finally been taught how to handle line endings in text files created on Linux, Unix, Mac OS, and macOS devices.

In the space of less than a week in late April, two events made one thing very clear about Microsoft: The company is now pursuing a cloud-first strategy, with Windows taking a back seat. And that will continue as far into the future as the eye can see.  A close look shows that cloud revenue has become the company’s driving force, outpacing money the company gets from its onetime cash cow, Windows.

SQL Server running on Linux, with embedded R and Python, is Microsoft’s most successful server product ever, said JG “John” Chirapurath, general manager of Azure Data, in an interview with The Register at Build 2018.

Microsoft says it’s looking into reports that apps including “Hey Cortana” and Google Chrome hang or freeze for those who have installed the recent Windows 10 April 2018 Update.

Microsoft’s given users of its collaboration apps on Windows Phone under a month’s warning of their demise. A support note from late last week advises that “Windows phone apps for Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, and Yammer are retiring on May 20, 2018.” “Retiring” means all three will vanish from the Microsoft store on May 20, with differing results.

Windows 10 Springwatch participants got a treat last night in the form of a bumper update to Windows 10 1709 (aka the Fall Creators Update). The patch (KB4093105) landed a week after older versions of Windows 10 (1703 and 1609) got their own variety of Microsoft’s secret sauce. The patch included a truckload of what Redmond likes to call “Quality Improvements”, fixes for the functionality that was broken following the 10 April Patch Tuesday.