Zvyozdochka

Incredible things are happening in Yemen

Long story short: That pop-up you get when you open Firefox (or whatever other browser) for the first time asking you if you want to make it your default browser won't work anymore. They're forcing you to go through their convoluted control panel where you have to change it like 20 times for each file extension.

LoongArch will win

Rough Weixin post translation by DeepL:

Recently, the Hebi Municipal Government joined hands with the Municipal Education Bureau and other departments to introduce nearly 10,000 units of Longxin 3A5000 computers into the classrooms of nearly 50 primary and secondary schools in Hebi Municipal Direct and Hebi Qibin District. These computers are based on the independent Dragon architecture of the Longxin 3A5000 processor, equipped with a domestic UOS operating system, installed WPS office software, Extreme Domain teaching (operation and maintenance) management software and a full set of genuine licensed software, and through the classroom management to the teaching, programming, national/provincial and municipal management platforms and a total of 104 applications, to help the city in the realization of the education industry in the education industry, the basic hardware equipment as well as education and teaching The company has taken a solid step forward in realizing the independent control of basic hardware equipment and educational teaching and learning applications in the education industry.

Edit: Someone posted this already, oh well. This won't stop me from

Just a big silly forest dog if you really think about it

https://cve.circl.lu/cve/CVE-2023-6246

The news about this specific vulnerability is a bit old by now, but it doesn't hurt to drop a reminder that you should update your BIOS frequently to prevent yourself from falling victim to other vulnerabilities later down the line. BIOS updates can also improve performance as well (or make it worse, cough, Spectre mitigations) in a few scenarios.

If you have a laptop, it's probably as easy as just downloading your manufacturer's tool from their website, clicking a few buttons, restarting, and you should be set or your manufacturer might provide these updates thru Windows' update system which in that case you don't need to download any additional software.

If you're on a desktop however, most of the time this involves you downloading a file, throwing it on a USB stick, and updating it from the BIOS screen or by pressing a button on the back of the motherboard.

Either way, you're probably only a [insert search engine name here] search away from finding a guide on how to do it for your specific motherboard/device.

A few words of caution though: If you're on a desktop without a battery backup it's probably wise to only do these updates when you have high confidence that your power isn't going to drop during the update. If you lose power during one of these updates, recovery is not a fun task (unless your motherboard is fancy and has a button to recover from these kinds of scenarios) and your motherboard basically becomes a cool looking paper weight unless you want to flash the chip manually, which is possible but is kind of annoying to do and requires the right tools (but they're pretty cheap from Alibaba or whatever)

Anyway, rant over. Make sure you keep your computers up-to-date comrades, it's always worth spending the half an hour or so it takes to update everything on your computer so you can have some extra peace of mind.

Notable features: https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-67-features

I'm curious as to what everyone's reasons are! The Linux desktop has came quite a far ways in the last few years and is improving every day. I'd say for most people, Linux could easily replace Windows as their daily driver nowadays.