Lenovo has released a security advisory to inform customers that more than 70 of its laptops are affected by a UEFI/BIOS vulnerability that can lead to arbitrary code execution. SecurityWeek reports: Researchers at cybersecurity firm ESET discovered a total of three buffer overflow vulnerabilities that can allow an attacker with local privileges to affected Lenovo devices to execute arbitrary code. However, Lenovo says only one of the vulnerabilities (CVE-2022-1892) impacts all devices, while the other two impact only a handful of laptops. "The vulnerabilities can be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution in the early phases of the platform boot, possibly allowing the attackers to hijack the OS execution flow and disable some important security features," ESET explained. "These vulnerabilities were caused by insufficient validation of DataSize parameter passed to the UEFI Runtime Services function GetVariable. An attacker could create a specially crafted NVRAM variable, causing buffer overflow of the Data buffer in the second GetVariable call," it added.

Lenovo has also informed customers about Retbleed, a new speculative execution attack impacting devices with Intel and AMD processors. The company has also issued an advisory for a couple of vulnerabilities affecting many products that use the XClarity Controller server management engine. These flaws can allow authenticated users to cause a DoS condition or make unauthorized connections to internal services.

Alex Battaglia from the YouTube channel "Digital Foundry" was able to use the "RetroArch" software emulator to run Windows 98 on the Xbox Series X, along with several PC games of the era. "Technically, you're supposed to be an Xbox developer to access this, and you will need to sign up to the paid Microsoft Partner program and turn on 'Developer Mode' for your system to activate it," notes Pure Xbox. "In DF's case, rather than directly playing emulated games through RetroArch, they used the program to install Windows 98 software." From the report: Beyond the novelty of actually booting up Win98 on a modern console the channel then decided to test out some games, running through the older version of Windows. Playthroughs of Turok, Command & Conquer, Quake 2 and more were all pretty successful, although the act of loading them onto the software requires a bit of messing about (you have to create ISO files and transfer them over -- sadly, Xbox's disc drive can't read the original discs). Of course, this wouldn't be a Digital Foundry video without some performance comparisons, so the team did just that. The video compares hardware of the era with Xbox Series X's emulation, and while the console often lags behind due to the fact that it's literally emulating an entire version of Windows, and then a game on top of that, it fares pretty well overall. You can watch Digital Foundry's video here.

We're a couple of months out from Apple officially rolling out the next major versions of its various operating systems. However, you can try out iOS 16, iPadOS 16, watchOS 9, macOS Ventura and tvOS 16 right now. Apple has released a public beta, a few weeks after it offered up the first developer betas. To access them, you'll need to sign up for the Apple Beta Software Program and follow the directions.

Google is testing a method to boost the battery life of Chromebooks by changing how they work with the Chrome web browser. It's shaping up to be a potentially attractive update for users who leave a lot of tabs open on their Chromebooks. From a report: Google Chrome currently cuts the CPU time and throttles the CPU load for any tab you haven't touched or looked at for five minutes. Google calls this "intensive throttling of JavaScript timer wake up," and it's supposed to help conserve system battery life. The feature also makes the page wake up once every 60 seconds to check if you're actively using the tab again. It seems Google is interested in pushing the idea even further, at least for Chromebook users. About Chromebooks this week spotted a new flag in Chrome OS 105, currently being tested in the dev channel, that changes this five-minute period to 10 seconds.

System76, the Colorado-based Linux laptop, desktop, and server specialist, has announced a new highly portable laptop with an Intel Alder Lake processor inside. Tom's Hardware reports: The new Lemur Pro(opens in new tab) is a "lighter than Air" 14-inch form factor laptop with excellent battery life and attractions such as open firmware (powered by Coreboot) and a 180-degree hinge. In addition, buyers can choose to go with Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS or Ubuntu 22.04 LTS pre-installed. The new Lemur Pro has many attractive modern features you might see advertised in many rival mainstream thin and light designs. However, the special sauce here is the "System76 Open Firmware with Coreboot." Coreboot, known initially as LinuxBIOS, is significant as it is an open-source BIOS implementation embraced by Linux users. It is lightweight, flexible, and feature-rich. [...]

System76 has designed the Lemur Pro with monitor-based docking in mind. It envisions users connecting to a big screen using the USB-C connection to benefit from the more expansive workspace and laptop charging. Like Windows, Linux had to have some serious tinkering under the hood to prepare for the mix of Performance and Efficiency cores in Alder Lake chips. However, rest assured, efficient hybrid scheduling is taken care of with the two OS options that can be pre-installed on the Lemur Pro.

System76 allows customers to configure and buy Lemur Pro laptops right now. There are many RAM and storage configurations to pick through, and you can add external keyboards and monitors to the bundle. The entry price with an Intel Core i5-1235U, 8GB RAM, 240GB of storage, and no extras is $1,149. However, the Core i7-1255U model is a bit of a stretch, adding $200 to the base price for the faster CPU clocks.

Yesterday, Phoronix reported that the lead developer of systemd, Lennart Poettering, left Red Hat. "It turns out he had joined Microsoft and [is] continuing his work on systemd," writes Phoronix's Michael Larabel in a new report. He continues: While some may not always align with his views or approaches to handling some things, there is no overstating his enormous contributions to the Linux/open-source world and his dedication to advancing the ecosystem over the years. This may take many by surprise but let's not forget Microsoft has over time employed a number of Linux developers and other prominent open-source developers... Microsoft currently employs Python creator Guido van Rossum, GNOME creator Miguel de Icaza had been employed by Microsoft from 2016 when they acquired Xamarin to earlier this year when he left, Nat Friedman as part of Xamarin-Microsoft served as GitHub CEO following Microsoft's acquisition, Gentoo Linux founder Daniel Robbins was previously employed by Microsoft, Steve French as the Linux CIFS/SMB2/SMB3 maintainer and Samba team member works for Microsoft, and Microsoft employs/previously-employed a large number of upstream Linux developers like Matteo Croce, Matthew Wilcox, Shyam Prasad N, Michael Kelley, and many others beyond just the usual immediately recognizable names to Linux enthusiasts/developers. It was also just earlier this year that Christian Brauner as another longtime Linux kernel developer joined Microsoft. Christian Brauner is Berlin-based like Lennart and moved on to Microsoft after the past half-decade at Canonical working on the Linux kernel, LXC, systemd, and more.

One of the GNOME developers has suggested that the next major release of Gtk could drop support for the X window system. The Register reports: Emmanuele Bassi opened a discussion last week on the GNOME project's Gitlab instance that asked whether the developers could drop X.11 support in the next release of Gtk. At this point, it is only a suggestion, but if it gets traction, this could significantly accelerate the move to the Wayland display server and the end of X.11.

Don't panic: Gtk 5 is not imminent. Gtk is a well-established toolkit, originally designed for the GIMP bitmap editing program back in 1998. Gtk 4 arrived relatively recently, shortly before the release of GNOME 40 in 2021. GNOME 40 has new user-interface guidelines, and as a part of this, Gtk 4 builds GNOME's Adwaita theme into the toolkit by means of the new libadwaita library, which is breaking the appearance of some existing apps.

Also, to be fair, as we recently covered, the X window system is very old now and isn't seeing major changes, although new releases of parts of it do still happen. This discussion is almost certain to get wildly contentious, and the thread on Gitlab has been closed to further comments for now. If this idea gains traction, one likely outcome might well be a fork of Gtk, just as happened when GNOME 3 came out. [...] A lot of the features of the current version, X.11, are no longer used or relevant to most users. Even so, X.12 is barely even in the planning stages yet.

This week, BMW confirmed that some of its future models would run on a next-gen version of its in-house operating system built on top of Android Automotive. Android Polic reports: It's a big change from previous Linux-based versions, though the company says some of its cars will stay on its legacy build. So far, the automaker has yet to confirm which of its models will get Automotive support, though work on supporting it won't begin until March of 2023.

Automotive's biggest selling point for car manufacturers is its flexibility and customization options. Outside of some built-in Google apps -- Assistant, Maps, the Play Store -- don't expect to notice these BMW cars running Android immediately. Instead, the company will almost certainly rely on a skin to make the experience feel more in line with previous vehicles, as well as that Linux-based OS the company plans to keep developing.

The Windows 11 22H2 update is working its way through Microsoft's Windows Insider testing channels, and we'd expect it to begin rolling out to Windows 11 PCs at some point in the next few weeks or months. But Microsoft has had almost nothing to say about the next major update to Windows 10 beyond the fact that the operating system will keep getting yearly updates for the foreseeable future. From a report: And the Windows 10 22H2 update is actually already out there for those who know how to install it. Neowin has published a list of commands that can be typed into the Command Prompt or Windows Terminal to turn a fully updated Windows 10 21H2 install into a 22H2 install. The commands use Microsoft's Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool to make tweaks to your Windows install and require the optional KB5014666 update for Windows 10 to be installed first. The catch is that enabling Windows 10 22H2 doesn't actually seem to do much beyond incrementing the version number on the "About Windows" screen.

williamyf writes: Today, Mozilla released Firefox 102.
New features include:
* Tired of too many windows crowding your screen? You can now disable automatic opening of the download panel every time a new download starts. Read more.
* Firefox now mitigates query parameter tracking when navigating sites in ETP strict mode.
* Subtitles and captions for Picture-in-Picture (PiP) are now available at HBO Max, Funimation, Dailymotion, Tubi, Disney+ Hotstar, and SonyLIV. This allows you to view video in a small window pinned to a corner of the screen while navigating between apps or browsing content on the main screen.

But do not get fooled, the most important feature is that this release is an ESR, this is super-important of a host of reasons:

* Firefox ESR is the basis for KaiOS (an evolution of BootToGecko), an OS for Semi-Smart Phones very popular in India (100milion+), SE Asia + Africa (~60Milion), so, whatever made the cut in 102 will define the base capabilities for KaiOS for the next year.

* Firefox ESR is the basis for Thunderbird, so, if you use Thunderbird or a derivative, whatever made the cut in 102 will underpin Thunderbird for the next year.

* Many popular Linux distros (like Debian or Kali) use Firefox ESR as the default browser.

* Many companies and organizations use Firefox ESR as their default browser, and many SW development companies certify Firefox ESR as an alowed browser for their SW.

So, 102 is a very important release, becuase it brings a year of advances to ESR.

slack_justyb shares a report from ZDNet: For over three decades, Linux has been written in the C programming language. Indeed, Linux is C's most outstanding accomplishment. But the last few years have seen a growing momentum to make the Rust programming language Linux's second Linux language. At the recent Open Source Summit in Austin, Texas, Linux creator Linus Torvald said he could see Rust making it into the Linux kernel as soon as the next major release. "I'd like to see the Rust infrastructure merging to be started in the next release, but we'll see." Linux said after the summit. "I won't force it, and it's not like it's going to be doing anything really meaningful at that point -- it would basically be the starting point. So, no promises."

Now, you may ask: "Why are they adding Rust at all?" Rust lends itself more easily to writing secure software. Samartha Chandrashekar, an AWS product manager, said it "helps ensure thread safety and prevent memory-related errors, such as buffer overflows that can lead to security vulnerabilities." Many other developers agree with Chandrashekar. Torvalds also agrees and likes that Rust is more memory-safe. "There are real technical reasons like memory safety and why Rust is good to get in the kernel." Mind you, no one is going to be rewriting the entire 30 or so million lines of the Linux kernel into Rust. As Linux developer Nelson Elhage said in his summary of the 2020 Linux Plumber's meeting on Rust in Linux: "They're not proposing a rewrite of the Linux kernel into Rust; they are focused only on moving toward a world where new code may be written in Rust." The three areas of potential concern for Rust support are making use of the existing APIs in the kernel, architecture support, and dealing with application binary interface (ABI) compatibility between Rust and C.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Another strike against use of Google Analytics in Europe: The Italian data protection authority has found a local web publisher's use of the popular analytics tool to be non-compliant with EU data protection rules owing to user data being transferred to the U.S. -- a country that lacks an equivalent legal framework to protect the info from being accessed by US spooks. The Garante found the web publisher's use of Google Analytics resulted in the collection of many types of user data, including device IP address, browser information, OS, screen resolution, language selection, plus the date and time of the site visit, which were transferred to the U.S. without adequate supplementary measures being applied to raise the level of protection to the necessary EU legal standard.

Protections applied by Google were not sufficient to address the risk, it added, echoing the conclusion of several other EU DPAs who have also found use of Google Analytics violates the bloc's data protection rules over the data export issue. Italy's DPA has given the publisher in question (a company called Caffeina Media Srl) 90 days to fix the compliance violation. But the decision has wider significance as it has also warned other local websites that are using Google Analytics to take note and check their own compliance, writing in a press release [translated from Italian with machine translation]: "[T]he Authority draws the attention of all Italian managers of websites, public and private, to the illegality of transfers made to the United States through GA [Google Analytics], also in consideration of the numerous reports and questions that are being received by the Office, and invites all data controllers to verify the compliance of the methods of use of cookies and other tracking tools used on its websites, with particular attention to Google Analytics and other similar services, with the legislation on the protection of personal data." A Google spokesperson issued the following statement: "People want the websites they visit to be well designed, easy to use, and respectful of their privacy. Google Analytics helps publishers understand how well their sites and apps are working for their visitors -- but not by identifying individuals or tracking them across the web. These organizations, not Google, control what data is collected with these tools, and how it is used. Google helps by providing a range of safeguards, controls and resources for compliance."

Google is reviewing the Italian DPA's decision, according to the spokesperson.

RISC OS, the operating system of the original Arm computer, the Acorn Archimedes, is still very much alive -- and doing relatively well for its age. The Register reports: In June 1987, Acorn launched the Archimedes A305 and A310, starting at $982 and running a new operating system called Arthur. At the time, it was a radical and very fast computer. In his review (PDF) for Personal Computer World, Dick Pountain memorably said: "It loads huge programs with a faint burping noise, in the time it takes to blink an eye." Arthur was loosely related to Acorn's earlier MOS, the BBC Micro operating system but looked very different thanks to a prototype graphical desktop, implemented in BBC BASIC, that could charitably be called "technicolor." Renamed RISC OS, version 2 followed in 1989 -- the same year that Sun started selling its new SPARCstation 1 (a snip at $9,200) and DEC launched the MIPS R2000-chipset-based DECstation 3100 (for $10,800).

RISC OS has had a rather convoluted history, partly due to Acorn spinning out Arm, eventually pulling out of the computer market, rebranding as Element 14 and being acquired by Broadcom, where Arm co-designer Sophie Wilson still works today. And partly due to drama over the ownership of the OS post-Acorn at one point. One fork of RISC OS still supports Acorn-era Arm's odd 26-bit mode, meaning that today it mostly runs on the commercial Virtual Acorn emulator. The other branch, designed for the 32-bit mode of more recent Arm chips, is now owned by RISC OS Developments, which made it fully open source back in 2018. Development and maintenance is done by the team at RISC OS Open Ltd -- ROOL for short -- which offers downloads for a variety of current Arm hardware, such as the Titanium desktops. [...]

RISC OS Developments are still working on new functionality for the OS. Notably, it recently released a new TCP/IP stack, derived from OpenBSD. Right now, the main benefit is IPv6 support. A feature more significant to most users is still in development: Wi-Fi support. Also still under development, but available to paid backers, is a new RISC OS web browser, Iris. RISC OS does come with a choice of browsers -- NetSurf and Otter -- but the plan is that the new Iris browser will be a native app, with the RISC OS look and feel, but using the WebKit engine for better compatibility with the modern web. The main remaining limitation is SMP. As an OS from the 1980s, long before the 21st-century technology of mainstream multicore processors, RISC OS practically only supports a single CPU core. Various experimental efforts are under way to address this. One has got NetBSD running on another core, and another has the experimental Genode OS running alongside RISC OS. Another effort is working on adding SMP support into the RISC OS kernel itself.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Embedded and internet of things (IoT) devices are a growing category of computing, and with that growth has come expanded needs for security and manageability. One way to help secure embedded and IoT deployments is with a secured operating system, such as Canonical's Ubuntu Core. The Ubuntu Core provides an optimized version of the open-source Ubuntu Linux operating system for smaller device footprints, using an approach that puts applications into containers. On June 15, Ubuntu Core 22 became generally available, providing users with new capabilities to help accelerate performance and lock down security.

Ubuntu Core 22 is based on the Ubuntu 22.04 Linux operating system, which is Canonical's flagship Linux distribution that's made available for cloud, server and desktop users. Rather than being a general purpose OS, Ubuntu Core makes use of the open-source Snap container technology that was originally developed by Canonical to run applications. With Snaps, an organization can configure which applications should run in a specific IoT or embedded device and lock down the applications for security. Snaps provide a cryptographically authenticated approach for application updates.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an opinion piece via The Register, written by longtime technology reporter and Linux enthusiast Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Recently, The Register's Liam Proven wrote tongue in cheek about the most annoying desktop Linux distros. He inspired me to do another take. Proven pointed out that Distrowatch currently lists 270 -- count 'em -- Linux distros. Of course, no one can look at all of those. But, having covered the Linux desktop since the big interface debate was between Bash and zsh rather than GNOME vs KDE, and being the editor-in-chief of a now-departed publication called Linux Desktop, I think I've used more of them than anyone else who also has a life beyond the PC. In short, I love the Linux desktop. Many Linux desktop distros are great. I've been a big Linux Mint fan for years now. I'm also fond, in no particular order, of Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and MX Linux. But you know what? That's a problem right there. We have many excellent Linux desktop distros, which means none of them can gain enough market share to make any real dent in the overall market.
[...]
Besides over 200 distros, there are 21 different desktop interfaces and over half-a-dozen different major ways to install software such as the Debian Package Management System (DPKG), Red Hat Package Manager (RPM), Pacman, Zypper, and all too many others. Then there are all the newer containerized ways to install programs including Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage. I can barely keep them all straight and that's part of my job! How can you expect ordinary users to make sense of it all? You can't. None of the major Linux distributors -- Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE -- really care about the Linux desktop. Sure, they have them. They're also major desktop influencers. But their cash comes from servers, containers, the cloud, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The desktop? Please. We should just be glad they spend as many resources as they do on them.

Now, all this said, I don't want you to get the impression that I don't think the conventional Linux desktop is important. I do. In fact, I think it's critical. Microsoft, you see, is abandoning the traditional PC-based desktop. In its crystal ball, Microsoft sees Azure-based Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) as its future. [...] That means that the future of a true desktop operating system will lie in the hands of Apple with macOS and us with Linux. As someone who remembers the transition from centrally controlled mainframes and minicomputers to individually empowered PCs, I do not want to return to a world where all power belongs to Microsoft or any other company. "The Linux desktop will never be as big as Windows once was," writes Vaughan-Nichols in closing. "Between DaaS's rise and the fall of the desktop to smartphones, it can't be. But it may yet, by default, become the most popular true conventional desktop."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: The next generation of CarPlay will be compatible with a variety of aspect ratios -- from portrait to landscape -- and can even adapt to multidisplay dashboards, including vehicles with digital instrument clusters or with ultrawide pillar-to-pillar displays. CarPlay will be more integrated with all the host vehicle's systems. Beyond its current navigation and media consumption functionalities, Apple CarPlay will handle traditional instrumentation like speedometer, tachometer, temperature gauges and fuel or EV battery level displays. Users will be able to adjust their climate controls, activate seat heaters, monitor air quality and even tie into Apple's smart home technologies directly from the CarPlay interface.

As with the next generation of iOS on the phone, Apple is also giving CarPlay users the ability to customize how CarPlay looks with selectable themes, backgrounds and widgets. From loud pink analog-style gauges to slick numerical displays and bar graphs, CarPlay will be able to match a wide range of vehicle interior designs and personal aesthetic tastes. Perhaps most interestingly, Apple says that this new full-fat approach to CarPlay as a complete vehicle interface will continue to be powered entirely by the connected iPhone, giving Apple an unprecedented amount of control over the vehicle's operation as well as access to data generated by each host vehicle. According to Apple, the first vehicles to support the new CarPlay update should be announced in late 2023. It lists Acura, Audi, Ford, Honda, Jaguar-Land Rover, Lincoln, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Porsche, Volvo and Polestar as partners that are "excited to bring this new vision of CarPlay to customers."

As expected, Apple has used the stage at its WWDC 2022 keynote to reveal the features and changes coming to macOS in the next major software update for the platform, macOS 13 Ventura. From a report: Ventura's headlining feature is a new multitasking interface called Stage Manager. It's being billed as a way to fight window clutter on a busy desktop -- enter Stage Manager mode, and one of your windows floats to the center of the screen, pushing your other windows into a compressed navigation column on the left of the screen. Click a different app window on the left, and it will fly to the center of the screen, knocking the app you were using before into the navigation column. Spotlight also gets some handy quality-of-life updates, adding the ability to Quick Look search results directly from the Spotlight window, and the ability to run Shortcuts from within Spotlight.

Safari picks up the ability to share groups of tabs with other users, letting all users add and remove tabs. The browser is also adding a FIDO-compliant security technology called PassKeys, which aim to replace passwords with cryptographically generated keys that sync between devices using iCloud Keychain. Sites that support PassKeys can be opened using TouchID or FaceID. Apple's cross-device Continuity features were also updated. FaceTime calls can be handed off seamlessly between different Macs and iDevices, while Continuity Camera allows you to use an iPhone as a webcam (your iPhone's LED can even be used as a makeshift ring light). Continuity Camera supports Center Stage and Portrait Mode effects, too, though presumably they will require newer iPhones with hardware that supports those features.

The Register has unveiled their "cynic's guide to desktop Linux," which they ultimately concede is a snarky yet affectionate list of "the least bad distros."

For those who are "sick of Windows but can't afford a Mac," the article begins by addressing people who complain there's too many Linux distros to choose from. "We thought we'd simplify things for you by listing how and in which ways the different options suck." - The year of Linux on the desktop came and went, and nobody noticed — maybe because it doesn't say "Linux" on it. ChromeOS only runs on ChromeBooks and ChromeBoxes, but they outsold Macs for a while before the pandemic. "Flex" is the version for ordinary PCs... ChromeOS Flex works great, because it only does one thing: browse the web. You can't install apps, not even Android ones: only official kit does that. You can run Debian containers: if you know what that means, go run Debian. If you don't know what that means, trust us, you don't want to.

- Ubuntu is an ancient African word that means I can't configure Debian....

- Mint is an Ubuntu remix with knobs on. It was an also-ran for years, but when Ubuntu went all Mac-like it saw its chance and grabbed it — along with the number one spot in the charts. It dispenses with some of the questionable bits of recent Ubuntu, such as GNOME and Snaps, but replaces them with dodgy bits of its own, such as a confusing choice of not one, not two, but three Windows-like desktops, and overly cautious approaches to updates and upgrades.

- Debian is the daddy of free distros, and the one that invented the idea of a packaging tool that automatically installs dependencies. It's easier than it used to be, but mired in politics. It's sort of like Ubuntu, but more out of date, harder to install, and with fewer drivers. If that sounds just your sort of thing, go for it.
There's 10 snarky entries in all, zinging Fedora, openSUSE, Arch Linux, and Pop!_OS — as well as the various spinoffs of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. (The article calls Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux "RHEL with the serial numbers filed off.")

And there's also one final catch-call entry for "Tiny obscure distros. All of them."

Thanks to Slashdot reader AleRunner for sharing the link...

Older iPads with the Apple A7- and A8-based chips may soon be able to run Linux. "Developer Konrad Dybcio and a Linux enthusiast going by "quaack723" have collaborated to get Linux kernel version 5.18 booting on an old iPad Air 2, a major feat for a device that was designed to never run any operating system other than Apple's," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The project appears to use an Alpine Linux-based distribution called "postmarketOS," a relatively small but actively developed distribution made primarily for Android devices. Dybcio used a "checkm8" hashtag in his initial tweet about the project, strongly implying that they used the "Checkm8" bootrom exploit published back in 2019 to access the hardware. For now, the developers only have Linux running on some older iPad hardware using A7 and A8-based chips -- this includes the iPad Air, iPad Air 2, and a few generations of iPad mini. But subsequent tweets imply that it will be possible to get Linux up and running on any device with an A7 or A8 in it, including the iPhone 5S and the original HomePod.

Development work on this latest Linux-on-iDevices effort is still in its early days. The photos that the developers shared both show a basic boot process that fails because it can't mount a filesystem, and Dybcio notes that basic things like USB and Bluetooth support aren't working. Getting networking, audio, and graphics acceleration all working properly will also be a tall order. But being able to boot Linux at all could draw the attention of other developers who want to help the project.

Compared to modern hardware with an Apple M1 chip, A7 and A8-powered devices wouldn't be great as general-purpose Linux machines. While impressive at the time, their CPUs and GPUs are considerably slower than modern Apple devices, and they all shipped with either 1GB or 2GB of RAM. But their performance still stacks up well next to the slow processors in devices like the Raspberry Pi 4, and most (though not all) A7 and A8 hardware has stopped getting new iOS and iPadOS updates from Apple at this point; Linux support could give some of these devices a second life as retro game consoles, simple home servers, or other things that low-power Arm hardware is good for. Further reading: Linux For M1 Macs? First Alpha Release Announced for Asahi Linux

Mike Bouma writes: Version 1.7 of AROS One for x86 has just been released and it's a distro of the "AROS Research Operating System," originally "Amiga Research Operating System." It's a standalone, free and open-source multi-media centric operating system that's designed to be portable, flexible, efficient and lightweight and can be seen dual booting with Windows 10 on an Acer laptop here. The most popular AROS specific community portal is AROS Exec.

Parts of AROS were used to create the commercial PowerPC based Amiga-like operating system MorphOS, which has recently seen a new release as well, version 3.17. The most popular MorphOS specific community portal is MorphZone.