Category Archives: News

Source: Hacker News

Source: Ars Technica

After ditching the traditional Dell XPS laptop look in favor of the polarizing design of the XPS 13 Plus released in 2022, Dell is killing the XPS branding that has become a mainstay for people seeking a sleek, respectable, well-priced PC.

This means that there won't be any more Dell XPS clamshell ultralight laptops, 2-in-1 laptops, or desktops. Dell is also killing its Latitude, Inspiron, and Precision branding, it announced today.

Moving forward, Dell computers will have either just Dell branding, which Dell’s announcement today described as “designed for play, school, and work,” Dell Pro branding “for professional-grade productivity,” or be Dell Pro Max products, which are “designed for maximum performance." Dell will release Dell and Dell Pro-branded displays, accessories, and "services," it said. The Pro Max line will feature laptops and desktop workstations with professional-grade GPU capabilities as well as a new thermal design.

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Source: Published articles

Source: Ars Technica

Over the holiday weekend, all but one member of the editorial board of Elsevier's Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned "with heartfelt sadness and great regret," according to Retraction Watch, which helpfully provided an online PDF of the editors' full statement. It's the 20th mass resignation from a science journal since 2023 over various points of contention, per Retraction Watch, many in response to controversial changes in the business models used by the scientific publishing industry.

"This has been an exceptionally painful decision for each of us," the board members wrote in their statement. "The editors who have stewarded the journal over the past 38 years have invested immense time and energy in making JHE the leading journal in paleoanthropological research and have remained loyal and committed to the journal and our authors long after their terms ended. The [associate editors] have been equally loyal and committed. We all care deeply about the journal, our discipline, and our academic community; however, we find we can no longer work with Elsevier in good conscience."

The editorial board cited several changes made over the last ten years that it believes are counter to the journal's longstanding editorial principles. These included eliminating support for a copy editor and a special issues editor, leaving it to the editorial board to handle those duties. When the board expressed the need for a copy editor, Elsevier's response, they said, was "to maintain that the editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting."

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Source: Slashdot

Hackers have compromised several different companies' Chrome browser extensions in a series of intrusions dating back to mid-December, according to one of the victims and experts who have examined the campaign. From a report: Among the victims was the California-based Cyberhaven, a data protection company that confirmed the breach in a statement to Reuters on Friday. "Cyberhaven can confirm that a malicious cyberattack occurred on Christmas Eve, affecting our Chrome extension," the statement said. It cited public comments from cybersecurity experts. These comments, said Cyberhaven, suggested that the attack was "part of a wider campaign to target Chrome extension developers across a wide range of companies." Cyberhaven added: "We are actively cooperating with federal law enforcement." The geographical extent of the hacks was not immediately clear.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: OSNews

After two years of intense development, the third major Linux desktop environment has released a new version: Xfce 4.20 is here. The major focus of this release cycle was getting Xfce ready for Wayland, and they’ve achieved quite a bit of that goal, but support for it is still experimental.

Thanks to Brian and Gaël almost all Xfce components are able to run on Wayland windowing, while still keeping support for X11 windowing.

This major effort was achieved by abstracting away any X11/Wayland windowing specific calls and making use of Wayland/Wlroots protocols. A whole new Xfce library, “libxfce4windowing” was introduced during that process. XWayland will not be required to run any of the ported Xfce components.

↫ Xfce development team

A major gap in Xfce’s Wayland support is the fact that Xfwm4 has not been ported to Wayland yet, so the team suggests using Labwc or Wayfire instead if you want to dive into using Xfce on Wayland. While there are plans to port Xfwm4 over to Wayland, this requires a major restructuring and they’re not going to set any timelines or expectations of when this will be completed. Regardless, this is an excellent achievement and solid progress for Xfce on Wayland, which is pretty much a requirement for Xfce (and other desktop environments) te remain relevant going forward.

Of course, while Wayland is a major focus this release, there’s a lot more here, too – and that’s not doing the Xfce developers justice. Xfce 4.20 comes packed with so many new features, enchancements, and bug fixes across the board that I have no idea where to start. I like the large number of changes to Thunar, like the ability to use symoblic icons int he sidebar, optimising it for small window sizes, automatically opening folders when dragging and dropping, and so much more. They’ve also done another pass to update any remaining icons not working well on HiDPI displays, removing any instances where you’d encounter fizzy icons.

I can’t wait to give Xfce 4.20 a go once it lands in Fedora Xfce.