This. The X1 Elite laptops came out 2+ years ago, but you still need to use a special Ubuntu remix to get everything* working, and support is very dependent on which laptop you bought. You could say it’s not Qualcomm’s job to make audio or the camera work on every Lenovo/Dell/HP, but someone needs to do it…
*: I’m sure there’s some features that still aren’t working right.
Completely predictable. They’ll likely dodge a lawsuit in this case (since the car that was hit was an unoccupied police car) but it will inevitably happen.
Gerbils! is a demo app for QuickDraw 3D where gerbils are racing on a roller coaster track (or similar…it’s been a few decades). It existed for classic Mac OS too (I remember playing it on a 6100)
> A potential concern is that when jumping between x86 emulation and ARM code, that the ARM code will pay unnecessary overhead due to all its accesses being TSO now. While this is a reasonable concern, the amount of ARM native code executing under emulation approaches 0%.
This may be true when FEX is executing as a usermode whole-process emulator on Linux, but it is not true when FEX is built for Windows(/Wine)'s ARM64EC mode. With ARM64EC a thread could be running a very small amount of emulated code while everything else is native.
I believe Microsoft Office is built as ARM64EC in order to support x86_64 plugins, in this case the entire suite itself (along with all the system DLLs) are native ARM64EC code and the only emulation would be for plugins. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 has an ARM64EC build where the main game EXE is small and x86_64, but the actual game engine is in an ARM64EC DLL.
I don't know of a good solution for this though, enabling/disabling TSO needs a kernel syscall so is too slow to be doing constantly when entering/leaving emulation. With cases like KCD2 where the game itself is ARM64EC, maybe it could be faster to not use hardware TSO.
That’s possible (never underestimate the bad decision-making of phone makers), but what would they have done instead? Windows Mobile 6 was the only licensable alternative, but it was a known quantity and obviously a generation behind Android and iOS.
Windows Phone was pretty nice, too bad Microsoft didn't follow their DOS and Windows strategy of getting it preinstalled on every consumer PC sold. There was really only the Nokia Lumia line that I recall, but everyone I knew who had one loved it.
Windows Phone 7 didn’t ship until 2 years after Android. 2 more years later Windows Phone 8 was released and it was a legitimate option but just too late.
Pre-7 was just not an operating system that anyone except the geekiest of geeks wanted to use.
I don’t have visibility into what happened with the Windows Phone team, but Android from what I understand saw immediately that they needed to follow Apple’s lead and pivoted (originally they were building something closer to a BlackBerry). The Windows Phone team either didn’t believe they need to pivot initially or they just took too long to do so.
Windows Phone is a case study of missed opportunity.
I remember trying phones in stores (shortly before Windows phone died). On Android you'd touch the phone and get instant reactions, on Windows you'd touch and wait for a slow woosh animation, until a few seconds later a text only app would finally launch. embarrassing.
Symbian and LiMo were both available at the time. It is hard to say they were good alternatives though. Windows 7 - even with the weight of Microsoft behind it - wasn't able to attract enough hardware manufacturers.
There were several credible competitors: WebOS, Symbian, Maemo/MeeGo, Palm OS 6, and of course Windows Mobile. But they required cooperating with a single vendor and/or a lot of work to adapt.
Android won because it was available "right now" and easy to hack. Vendors could get a BSP (Board Support Package) from a chip manufacturer, slap Android userspace on top of it, and ship a phone within half a year. It was a glorious mess for a while.
Google then slowly tightened the reins and made the ecosystem more ordered.
Not even wearing rose tinted glasses right now, for having daily driven them back in the days, maemo and then WebOS had touch ergonomics and multitasking abilities which took Android/iOS decades to incompletely mimic. Maemo/Nokia N900's design principle seems to have been "let's provide the user with desktop-level productivity tools, and shrink the desktop into their pocket", the package was massive for the era's standards, but is tiny for today's, and those dumb-down/low density ergonomics we have now give us less capabilities for more screen estate and weight (even something like an iPod pro is a "dumb" content consumption device in comparison). WebOS on the other hand was not about "producing/delivering on the go" so much as it was about getting your digital must haves (booking an appointment, updating a contact details, moving a meeting, ...) done and out of the way with just a couple key presses and finger flips as so distract as little as possible from the present. Only some advanced Android launchers get close, but it's never the focused, well polished and distraction-free experience it was back then (and for the same reason, Android/iOS are addictive content delivery vehicules meant to sink your eyeballs and time as to sell you stuff or collect and merchandise your data).
I'm interested and wishing to see a future mobile OS that does not pander to the "attention economy" like Android/iOS are, but with billions now addicted and trapped by it, I'm realistic that it won't be an overnight success.
Yup, I would love to try it in-hands (I looked it up on emulator many years ago, and that was frankly underwhelming). I'm also not sure about their open source situation, which was the premise of this thread.
Yeah, they really did some stupid decisions initially on not open sourcing some apps int eh OS. Thankfully they are now finally reversing that decision.
AFAIK they still aren't shipping an actual ARM64 version of Steam, making it difficult to actually use those (unsupported) ARM builds of Proton. That article is 5 months old.
You can use it really easily on Android devices through apps like Game Native and some of the more powerful Android gaming handhelds have support for Steam through Linux distros like Rocknix and Armada OS.
The illustration that Chrome uses Mach ports is a counterexample to an (implied) insinuation that nothing in running in macOS user space uses Mach ports. Outlier or not, the fact there is at least one (albeit also very useful and very popular) application that uses them ties back to the conversation about how they're a kernel feature worth having for Mac compatibility.
Especially since the Linux kernel dropping support usually happens years after distributions already have, so it would be quite difficult to run actual software on such hardware anyway. Whereas NetBSD is an entire OS.
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