Episode Details

It’s Wednesday! So let’s talk about the normal computer news. You know. Big Tech stuff. Popular stuff. (Come back on Sunday for the weird computer news…)

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EU forcing Apple to change iPhone hardware (and maybe software)

The European Union has made passed a law that will force Apple to change to use a USB-C charging port by 2024.

But they aren’t stopping there. According to Wired, one EU official is quoted as saying:

“If you have an iPhone, you should be able to download apps not just from the App Store but from other app stores or from the internet.”

The law behind this is the “Digital Markets Act”, which was passed by EU Parliament back in July. And, clearly, the EU would like to use it to force Apple to allow third party software stores (and, thus, non-App Store installation of software).

I have an awful lot of thoughts on this. I like flexibility of installing software. I like standard hardware ports. But I dislike governments telling tech companies how to make their hardware and software. My feelings here are complex. Tune into today’s podcast to hear me wrestle with this.

GNOME is closing all mailing lists

E-Mail lists are a mainstay of the open source world. Every major project seems to have a long-standing mailing list, and GNOME is no exception.

That is… until now. GNOME is closing down their mailing lists (all of them) in favor of a forum hosted on Discourse.

The GNOME Infrastructure Team told The Register:

“Since we introduced Discourse, GNOME's Mailman instance has seen a decline in utilization over the past years. The new platform offers way more features than Mailman, including gamification which newer generations, in general, appreciate, but also markdown support, RSS feeds, proper spam support, multiple authentication types and so on and so forth.”

The part that stuck out at me: The GNOME project wants to “gamify” communication within their community. Which. That just feels weird.

The GNOME executive director blamed Python:

“Like many other projects which use Mailman, we are finding that relying on a Python 2 program is not sustainable.”

Ubuntu 23.04 to be… “Lunar Lobster”