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After the Crowdstrike incident shone a light on Windows’ utter dominance across enterprise in late July 2024, users may be relieved to hear perennial up-and-comer Linux may be on course to hit 5% market share by 2025.

While new data from StatCounter, providing data for July 2024, shows that Windows is still the stalwart favourite with 72% market share, Linux was recorded as having reached 4.5% market share.

This could be welcome news for anyone not already in or looking to get out of the Apple ecosystem, or displeased with Microsoft’s interminable attempts to turn Windows into a service.

Linux and your small business

As our sister site Tom’s Hardware has addressed - Linux’s rise hasn’t been smooth sailing. Though it reached 4% in late February 2024, it then slipped back to a 3.9% share in April and May. This latest result, however, shows that progress is happening thick and fast, and if the alternative operating system’s current market share trajectory holds, it will hit 5% by February 2025.

Windows and MacOS are the ubiquitous household names in the OS space, and Crowdstrike has, in the case of the former, shown that many enterprises also reach for brand recognition and, more pertinently, interoperability with existing Windows client systems.

However, Linux does offer several advantages over either of these that are pertinent to a smaller business environment, should you be up to the task of convincing your sysadmin to acknowledge that it exists. The first and foremost one is price: an overwhelming majority of Linux distributions (popular ones including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Zorin OS) are free, or offer modestly priced versions bundled with additional productivity tools (Zorin OS Pro, for $47.99/£47.99, is one example). 

Meanwhile, legal use of MacOS requires purchasing premium hardware well into the hundreds if not thousands of dollars, and Windows 11 Pro, before you even get into being pushed into buying into the subscription-based Microsoft 365 collaboration tools, is $199.

That will help drive adoption in the future, but for now, a key factor in Linux’s immediate rise is the popular distributions that are leaning heavily into features and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that are not only intuitive, but pointedly resemble the ‘big two’. 

Ubuntu - the operating system this writer is running - combines a Windows-like taskbar with MacOS’ ‘Launchpad’ for apps, as well as an ‘app store’ serving cross-distro apps (‘flatpaks’) from popular app distribution platform Flathub. The average user or employee can get by without ever touching the command line, and that’s been the case for a handful of years now. 

In truth, even 5% market share won’t shatter any records or expectations, but it’s no wonder that Linux is having its day, when its competitors seem committed to ‘walled garden’ philosophy. If you’re not convinced, consider Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps, the increasing dependence on Microsoft accounts to set up Windows in the first place, and Apple since the beginning of recorded time, 2007 AD.

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We’ve heard before that Windows 11 could be getting a ‘hot-patching’ feature with version 24H2, arriving later this year, whereby (some) future cumulative updates won’t require a reboot – and we’ve just been treated to another clue that this might come to fruition.

Windows Latest reports that PhantomOfEarth on X flagged up a new support article for hot-patching in Windows 11, though there’s a twist here in that it was evidently accidentally published – and swiftly yanked down by Microsoft.

It's gone. RIP https://t.co/MNX9PDXWKgAugust 23, 2024

The post can still be viewed using the Wayback Machine but as you’ll see if you take a look, the article is just a copy-and-paste of guidelines for crafting a support document (which, as mentioned, has clearly been mistakenly published).

The key part here is that Microsoft beavering away in the background with content relating to hot-patching for Windows Ge or Germanium – which is Windows 11 24H2, with Germanium being the codename of the new platform it’s built on – is a heavy hint that this is indeed inbound. If not, why be working on any material pertaining to hot-patching at all, at this point?

A seamless way of updating Windows 11

Given the date mentioned in the now-retracted article, which is 2024.08, this suggests we might see some kind of update from Microsoft on hot-patching functionality incoming for Windows 11 before the end of August.

Of course, all this could still come to nothing – but this does seem to be a feature Microsoft is planning, according to previous info from Zac Bowden, a reliable leaker on all things Windows.

Indeed, Bowden claimed that it’s planned for the 24H2 update, and he explained a bit more about how hot-patching would work in an info dump early this year. The long and short of it is that only some cumulative updates (the monthly patches that arrive for Windows 11) would be applied without a reboot – two in a row – before the third baseline cumulative update is pushed out that does need a reboot. Meaning two-thirds of updates would be hot-patched, but do note that the big annual updates for Windows 11 – like 24H2 – always necessitate a reboot, as these are far larger in scope, naturally.

It’d be pretty cool to have some of Windows 11’s monthly patches downloaded and installed on your PC seamlessly, with no need to reboot, so you can just keep on working (or gaming, or whatever you’re doing).

It’ll also remove that small amount of danger involved every time you reboot for an update on a desktop PC, where you pray that a power cut won’t strike. As if your PC is switched off during an update of any kind, that might be bad news, and could result in corrupted files – and maybe the OS not booting up at all, if you’re really unlucky.

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AI image generators are having a moment right now with a recent rush of upgrades to many of the options out there. Ideogram is the latest synthetic image developer to join the trend this week with the launch of Ideogram 2.0. The new iteration of the image generator promises to outshine its predecessor as well as its competitors with several new and improved features, as well as a new iOS app and searchable library of the more than a billion images generated by users over the past year.

Ideogram 2.0 's text-to-image engine gives the user much more control over shaping the AI-generated image. That includes a collection of several distinct styles to choose from. The Realistic style is undeniably the most interesting, as it produces images that closely resemble real photographs. The skin, hair, and other details are much better than those of the earlier Ideogram model. 

The Design style, on the other hand, focuses on text accuracy within images, a notoriously difficult area for AI models to master. With Ideogram 2.0, users can generate graphic designs with long, stylized text that is still readable. The other options are fairly self-explanatory, with 3D making three-dimensional objects that could be rotated in real space, while Anime goes for that distinctive animated style and General avoids slanting the image to any particular look. 

Ideogram on the go

Ideogram 2.0 has also improved upon its Magic Prompt and Describe tools. Magic Prompt expands upon an initial prompt from a user, while Describe reverses the usual setup and creates a text prompt from an image. They are now better at working out how to fill in details from an initially short text prompt and at explaining an image using words, respectively. 

Ideogram paired its new model with the launch of its iOS app. The app allows users to create and customize images directly from their mobile devices. An Android version is also in the works. In addition to the mobile app, Ideogram AI has introduced the beta version of its API so that you might open another app or website that has an AI image generator and actually be using Ideogram's model. It's similar to how Microsoft uses OpenAI's DALL-E or how X embedded Flux into the Grok AI chatbot. All of them and more are Ideogram's rivals, and while there's no sense of which, if any, will win out in the space, there's no denying the final picture will be crisp and photorealistic, with words anyone can read.

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Google will have to answer in court allegations of collecting users’ private information inside its Chrome browser without their permission following a new ruling.

A US federal appeals court has reversed a previous dismissal of the case Calhoun v. Google LLC on the basis that the lower court should have assessed “whether a reasonable user reading [Google’s privacy disclosures would think that he or she was consenting to the data collection].

Per The Verge, at the heart of the case is the allegation that Google harvested data on users of Chrome without opting into Chrome Sync - a feature designed to sync bookmarks, passwords and tabs across multiple Chrome clients.

Google back in court on appeal

The plaintiffs in the case assert that Chrome sent Google their browsing history, IP addresses, and identifying cookies without their say-so. This was previously dismissed on the basis of Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers noting that this behaviour was established in Chrome’s privacy policy, and finding users’ continued use of the web browser enough to establish agreement with that policy.

However, on appeal, Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. wrote users may not have understood these disclosures thanks to conflicting customer-facing information provided by Google.

“Google had a general privacy disclosure yet promoted Chrome by suggesting that certain information would not be sent to Google unless a user turned on sync.”

Google, naturally, aren’t happy with this, with a spokesperson for the company telling The Verge that it intends to fight the case. And in the midst of all this is the announcement that passwords will soon sync across Android and Desktop Chrome clients without Chrome Sync, so long as users are signed into the browser with their Google account. 

So, data is still being synced to a Google account without express permission being given via Chrome Sync, but at least it’s just passwords, and a presumably optional measure designed to be convenient for users. It’s also not an entirely new feature, with the change having arrived on iOS in November 2023

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AMD has announced it will acquire AI infrastructure provider ZT Systems in a $4.9 billion cash and stock deal, marking a major milestone in the chipmaker’s plan to challenge Nvidia in the AI data center market.

The company says the deal will help accelerate the deployment of its AI solutions and strengthen its position in the growing AI accelerator market, which it predicts will be worth $400 billion by 2027.

Buying ZT Systems will also mean AMD will acquire over a thousand design engineers to help boost scale.

AMD uses ZT Systems to edge closer to Nvidia

AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su emphasized the strategic importance of the deal, noting it would enable the company to integrate its AI hardware, including the Instinct line of AI accelerators and EPYC CPUs, with ZT Systems’ expertise in system design.

The goal, she says, is to, "deliver end-to-end data center AI infrastructure at scale with [AMD’s] ecosystem of OEM and ODM partners.”

ZT Systems has been a critical player in building custom AI infrastructure for global tech giants like Microsoft, Meta and Amazon over the past few years. The company also has an existing partnership with Nvidia, which is set to continue.

The transaction is expected to close during the first half of 2025, certain to customary closing conditions and regulatory approval, and marks the latest in a series of AI-focused investments including more than $1 billion to expand the AMD AI ecosystem and strengthen the company’s AI software capabilities in the last year.

The company also acquired Finnish AI startup Silo AI last month for $665 million.

After a month of decline, AMD stock is on the rise again, up 4.5% following the ZT Systems announcement. However, while AMD’s market cap of $251.31 billion is comfortably ahead of Intel’s, at $92.01 billion, the company lags behind Nvidia, currently the world’s second-most valuable company with a cap of $3.197 trillion.

Earlier this year, AMD also acquired Europe's largest private AI lab, Silo AI, in a $700 million deal signalling a strategic expansion into the AI tools eco-system, alongside its acquisitions of Mipsology and Nod.ai. 

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