The Hot Take: "Hey look an OS we can't control all of the users data or track and monitor them, ATTACK!"
GrapheneOS is defending its duress-password feature after an environmental activist used it to wipe his Pixel phone during a U.S. Customs search and was later indicted for allegedly destroying property under government control. The nonprofit says the operating system is "completely legal," cannot recover the erased data, and should not be weakened with encryption backdoors. Meanwhile, the activist faces up to five years in prison if found guilty. PCMag reports: In a post on Saturday, the Canadian nonprofit behind the operating system, theâŚ
New Outlook is âpainful and drives me crazy,â one user told me as their organization prepared to ditch Outlook Classic. But does that mean Microsoft will hold off on its plans to force New Outlook? Certainly not. According to Microsoftâs roadmap, it still plans to move all Classic Outlook users to New Outlook starting in March 2027, and weâre not that far away now.
New Outlook for Windows has been around for almost three years, as it was first rolled out to testers in 2023. Fast-forward to 2024, and Microsoft released New Outlook forâŚ
The Hot Take: M$ is the only one to give us Ads on Windows 11....
LG is removing a McAfee pop-up ad from its LG Monitor App Installer after criticism that some LG monitors were silently installing the app through Windows Update and showing ads on every boot. Microsoft says LG agreed to disable the McAfee pop-up, but the broader issue remains: Windows allows certain peripheral companion apps to install automatically without notifying users. Ars Technica reports: Following Gamers Nexus' video, a Microsoft representative stated that the LG Monitor App Installer will no longer show pop-up ads for McAfee. InâŚ
The Hot Take: Well now, lets see if they get back into a competitive place where they better compete and pull more people.
Firefox releases will soon get even closer together â but not ESR ones, which remain annual, with the next one due out soon. The change was announced last week on the dev-platform@mozilla.org mailing list by Mozillaâs director of engineering Sylvestre Ledru: âWe are planning to move Firefox Desktop and Android from a 4-week release cadence to a 2-week release cadence starting in September 2026. âThis will be an experiment⌠This does not mean that all work needs to ship twice as fast. Work that is not ready should not be rushed, and featuresâŚ
For a long time, Pi-hole was the go-to option for anyone that wanted to use DNS filtering on their home network. It is easy enough to set up on any old laptop, PC, or even a low-power Pi and then connect it to your network.
Microsoft is acting further on its promise to fix some of Windows 11's worst annoyances. The company is rolling out changes in the Windows Insider Experimental channel that promise a less cluttered search box that largely eliminates ads, although you'll need to tweak settings to get the best results.
The Hot Take: Linux seems to be hovering and Windows is apparently listening to it's end users Finally. We'll see where this goes.
StatCounter's June 2026 data shows Windows made up 56.55% of global desktop OS usage, dropping Microsoft's share below 60% for the first time in years. Linux, meanwhile, reached 4.39%, "one of its strongest recent showings in the company's desktop OS statistics," reports Linuxiac. From the report: Apple's desktop platforms also remain a major part of the picture. StatCounter lists OS X at 11.89% and macOS at 4.48% for June 2026, meaning Apple's combined desktop presence remains comfortably ahead of Linux in the global chart. Chrome OS followsâŚ
The Hot Take: Nice, but all to push cloud storage I'm assuming.
Microsoft has announced another new recovery method for Windows 11 PCs that will allow users to reinstall the OS using the cloud. The new recovery tool is called Cloud Rebuild which will restore a PC to a "clean, known-good state by performing an entire OS reinstall."The new Cloud Rebuild feature will download the Windows OS along with your devices drivers, and seamlessly install them during the recovery process so that your device is fully functional once the OS reinstalled, all without needing an external USB install drive."Unlike Reset thisâŚ
The Hot Take: Unix trying to come back from the grave? Or just a patent troll wanting another pay day?
The ancient dispute over ownership of UNIX, and perhaps Linux too, has returned to court. Again. As The Register has explained many, many, times since this matter first went to court in 2003, the roots of the case are the 1998 alliance between IBM and a company called the Santa Cruz Operation which sold a version of UNIX for x86 CPUs. Those two companies, plus Intel and Sequent, created âProject Monterreyâ â an effort to create a unified version of UNIX that could run on multiple processors. By 2001, Project Monterrey was close to delivering aâŚ
The Hot Take: Nore more docker on Windows? Interesting.
Windows 11 can now build, run, and manage Linux containers on its own, without Docker Desktop in the background. Microsoft calls this WSL Containers, and after installing the preview and running a few real workloads through it, here is what works, what still needs Docker, and how to get it running on your own PC.
WSL Container should not be confused with the next version of WSL 2, as we already covered how Microsoft shut down the WSL 3 rumors. It has now shipped as a public preview, so we installed it, built a custom container image fromâŚ