Software

The ability to run Android apps natively in a Linux desktop environment is a step closer to realization, thanks to Anbox, a new open source project. Simon Fels, who is the lead software engineer at Canonical, last week debuted a pre-alpha release of the Anbox platform, which he has been working on i...

Kingsoft on Tuesday announced that it has expanded its WPS Office suite to include WPS Cloud. The upgrade enables users to work in a cross-platform office suite environment with added storage, file roaming and sharing capabilities. The cloud-enhanced version is available for PCs and mobile as a full...

Canonical's long and winding quest for a unified user experience came to a sudden halt on Wednesday, as founder Mark Shuttleworth announced the firm's decision to stop investing in its struggling Unity8 shell and revert to Gnome for its Ubuntu 18.04 LTS desktop OS release. The Unity plan was to crea...

Fatdog64 has the potential to serve as an alternative lightweight OS to Linux distros such as Puppy Linux, Knoppix and Zephyr. However, it has some critical usability issues that need to be fixed first. Fatdog64 seems to have lost its performance edge over earlier versions that made it more appealin...

Who's afraid of the Linux terminal? Not you, if you've learned the basics of navigating your system. But how will these newly acquired skills help improve your computing life? To give you a sense of the terminal's everyday usefulness, here are some examples of tasks the terminal is well-disposed to ...

There are more than three dozen previously unknown flaws that pose a potential threat to consumers using some Samsung TVs, watches and phones, a security researcher has reported. Hackers could exploit the vulnerabilities found in Samsung's Tizen OS to gain remote access and control of a variety of t...

In a move that caps off its gradual embrace of open source in a bear hug, Microsoft last week announced that it would shutter its nearly 11-year-old CodePlex project site and migrate its library of work to GitHub. Microsoft has invested in Visual Studio Team Services as its "One Engineering Project"...

Zephyr Linux, a newcomer to the Linux scene, is still morphing from developmental releases. However, it takes an interesting approach to removing desktop clutter and default software bloat. Zephyr is a collaboration between Leonard Ashley and other developers. Ashley built this distro on Devuan, a f...

The Cloud Foundry Foundation has announced the launch of a worldwide cloud-native developer certification initiative. The foundation created the program to fill the widening gap of trained programmers for cloud apps and services. The Linux Foundation -- which has trained and certified more developer...

Red Hat on Monday announced a new Application Platform Partner Initiative at its North America Partner Conference in Las Vegas. The goal is to provide a more robust ecosystem for companies engaging in digital transformation. The company has started conducting tests in a pilot program with a small nu...

OpenSuse Leap 42.2 goes a long way toward maintaining Suse's reputation for reliability and stability. That said, new users might need a push to take the leap from their familiar distros to this latest OpenSuse release. Business users can remain confident that upgrading to the latest edition won't p...

The new OS is designed to improve on battery life and interactive performance of devices, according to Dave Burke, vice president of engineering (Android) at Google.

If you've begun to tinker with your desktop Linux terminal, you may be ready to take a deeper dive. You're no longer put off by references to "terminal," "command line" or "shell," and you have a grasp of how files are organized. You can distinguish between a command, an option and an argument. You'...

Google on Thursday announced Guetzli, a new contribution to its evolving set of tools for the open source community. Guetzli is an encoder that allows JPEG files to be compressed as much as 35 percent, resulting in much faster Web page loading. "Guetzli," which means "cookie" in Swiss German, allows...