The Hot Take: Linux appears to be getting more Rust by the day.
BrianFagioli writes: Canonical has joined the Rust Foundation as a Gold Member, signaling a deeper investment in the Rust programming language and its role in modern infrastructure. The company already maintains an up-to-date Rust toolchain for Ubuntu and has begun integrating Rust into parts of its stack, citing memory safety and reliability as key drivers. By joining at a higher tier, Canonical is not just adopting Rust but also stepping closer to its governance and long-term direction. The move also highlights ongoing tensions in Rust's ecosystem. While Rust can reduce entire classes of bugs, it often depends heavily on external crates, which can introduce complexity and auditing challenges, especially in enterprise environments. Canonical appears aware of that tradeoff and is positioning itself to influence how the ecosystem evolves, as Rust continues to gain traction across Linux and beyond. "As the publisher of Ubuntu, we understand the critical role systems software plays in modern infrastructure, and we see Rust as one of the most important tools for building it securely and reliably. Joining the Rust Foundation at the Gold level allows us to engage more directly in language and ecosystem governance, while continuing to improve the developer experience for Rust on Ubuntu," said Jon Seager, VP Engineering at Canonical. "Of particular interest to Canonical is the security story behind the Rust package registry, crates.io, and minimizing the number of potentially unknown dependencies required to implement core concerns such as async support, HTTP handling, and cryptography -- especially in regulated environments."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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By ckasprzak | TkOut
| March 26, 2026 |
Hardware
The Hot Take: US domestic job market appears to be expanding in tech.
The Trump administration is targeting $4 trillion Pax Silica investment for semiconductors. Itâs not currently clear how the Trump administration arrived at the $4 trillion figure, or how it will ultimately materialize.
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By ckasprzak | TkOut
| March 26, 2026 |
Hardware
The Hot Take: I'm thinking more Ai slashing.
The Grey Box Shifter Dell is still swinging the axe through FY26, chopping 11,000 roles and shrinking its workforce by 27 per cent from FY23 to FY26.
This latest trim was flagged in US Securities and Exchange Commission filings, with Reuters first clocking the move and the paperwork doing the grim confirmation.
In its 10-K filed on 16 March 2026, Dell said its FY26 headcount was 97,000 employees.
That is down 10 per cent from 108,000 a year earlier, which is a tidy slide for a company that sells itself on stability and long-term relationships.
Stretch the view out, and the cuts look even less like a one-off ârestructureâ and more like a habit.
SEC filings show that Dell had 133,000 employees in FY23, then ended up at 97,000 by FY26, which is how you get to that 27 per cent drop.
The money trail is there in the severance charges, which the Grey Box Shifter listed as roughly $569m (ÂŁ426.4m, about âŹ492m) in FY26.
Dell booked $693m in FY25 and $648m in FY24, so the cost of sending staff packing has turned into its own chunky line item.
The headcount numbers tell customers and staff the same thing: the box-shifting machine is being tuned to run leaner, whether the workload agrees or not.
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The Hot Take: This with Ai scare me, but I'm sure it's inevitable at this point...
The partnership between the U.S. and the U.K. is a key advantage, as it was during World War II.
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The Hot Take: I wonder why given that Windows has gotten bashed for the lack of performance vs Linux.
Microsoft has blocked the registry trick that allowed Windows 11 users to enable a native NVMe driver on their PCs. However, third-party tools can still help with a workaround.
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The Hot Take: Interesting place to put an Ai Data-Center, giving it's probably hardened against military attacks.
10GW server farm, 10GW of new generation, and $4.2bn grid upgrade. And someone else is paying for the uranium cleanup Softbank's SB Energy is redeveloping Department of Energy (DoE) land in Ohio for a massive datacenter campus, adding extra generation facilities and power infrastructure alongside it.âŚ
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The Hot Take: I'm wondering if Intel is holding out on the 290K to drop after AMD's price drops in response to these chips. They're getting good response from what I've been seeing.
Intel has shared official benchmarks of its Core Ultra 7 270K Plus & Core Ultra 5 250K Plus in gaming, apps, and more, against AMD Ryzen CPUs. Core Ultra 200S Plus Are Now The Fastest Gaming CPUs From Intel, Surpassing the Core i9-14900K. For performance comparisons, Intel is pitting the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus against the Ryzen 7 9700X and the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus against the Ryzen 5 9600X. Both of these CPUs are valid comparisons based on their prices. The company also compares the performance against existing Core Ultra 200S "Non Plus" & 14th Gen CPUs [âŚ]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-core-ultra-7-270k-plus-core-ultra-5-250k-plus-official-gaming-app-benchmarks/
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The Hot Take: Did they set the goal AFTER stating 32GB ram is more than enough for windows 11? I'm sorry loving my 64GB and would double it if I didn't have to sell a kidney.
A recent X post by Mikhail Parakhin, who was the former boss of Windows and Bing, revealed that years ago, Microsoft engineers had an internal â20/20 projectâ that had a goal of reducing Windowsâs idle RAM usage and installation size.
Parakhin, who had several titles at Microsoft, was replying to a post by the present Windows President, Pavan Davuluri, about Microsoftâs commitment to Windows quality, which, if you havenât heard already, is the companyâs attempt at fixing Windows 11 from the ground up.
Mikhail Parakhin talking about 20/20 project that couldâve reduced RAM usage by 20%
The then Microsoft executive expressed appreciation that Pavan Davuluri was ârestartingâ a push he and Jeff Johnson (present-day CTO at Microsoft) had started many years ago, called the â20/20 project,â which aimed to reduce Windowsâ idle memory consumption and the fresh install size on disk, both by 20 percent.
If it worked out, the idle Windows 11 RAM usage wouldâve been around 4.8GB, but unfortunately, as Prakhin said, âWe never got to finishâ.
Now, fast forward to 2026, and Microsoft is once again talking about improving performance, responsiveness, and memory efficiency. Itâs the same problem Microsoft tried to solve years ago.
Which brings up the obvious question. If Microsoft couldnât complete something as fundamental as reducing RAM usage back then, what has changed now? And more importantly, can Windows 11 become efficient, or is this just another attempt that may run into the same challenges?
Why is Windows 11 RAM usage high?
Windows 11 runs more background services than all previous versions, including telemetry systems, indexing, and security features. Components like Windows Defender run continuously, search indexing is always active, and features such as Widgets and feeds keep refreshing content in the background. Add cloud integration like OneDrive syncing, and the system is constantly doing something even when it appears idle.
Everything is preloaded, pre-indexed, and always available, which improves perceived responsiveness but increases baseline memory usage.
Web-based apps are inflating memory usage in Windows 11
Even if Microsoft optimizes Windows itself, there is a much bigger problem sitting on top of it.
A large number of popular apps today are built using Chromium-based frameworks like Electron or on WebView2 inside Windows. Apps like WhatsApp Desktop and Discord are well-known examples.
âWhatsAppâ is new version and âWhatsApp Betaâ is old UPW/WinUI in the screenshot
Even Microsoftâs own apps, including Teams, Clipchamp, and Widgets, are already using WebView2, and these come built in.
Whatâs surprising is that despite pushing AI like itâs the most important technology in the world, Microsoft is apparently ditching the native Copilot app in favour of a web wrapper.
Web apps like thus runs its own instance of a Chromium engine, along with multiple processes for rendering, scripting, and background tasks. So, a single app can easily consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM. Now imagine using them togetherâŚ
Fragmented UI stack increases overhead
Windows 11 is not based on a single unified UI framework. Instead, it uses a mix of legacy Win32 components, UWP elements, modern WinUI layers, and web-based technologies like WebView2 and React.
Microsoft developers explaining the use of React Native in Windows 11 Start menu in 2023
This hybrid approach gives Microsoft flexibility, but when different parts of the OS rely on different rendering pipelines and system resources, it leads to additional memory usage.
Microsoft has already acknowledged this problem and is now moving more components toward WinUI3, which, being a native framework, will have lower latency and better efficiency. However, this transition will take time because Microsoft developers have to rewrite core parts of the OS.
Why the original 20/20 project likely stalled
Mikhail Parakhin hasnât mentioned why the 20/20 project never got finished, but itâs safe to assume that it needed more time and resources. Reducing RAM usage in Windows requires some deep architectural changes.
To cut memory usage, Microsoft would have had to remove or rethink background services, simplify its UI stack, and potentially limit the expansion of web-based components. But at the same time, the company was adding more features, integrating cloud services, and later pushing AI experiences into the OS.
You cannot aggressively reduce system overhead while simultaneously expanding platform capabilities.
The 20/20 project likely ran into these trade-offs and became impractical without sacrificing features or slowing down development. And instead of making those compromises, Microsoft chose to continue expanding Windows.
Can Microsoft fix Windows 11 RAM usage in 2026?
In its latest Windows Insider communication, Microsoft says itâs working to lower the baseline memory footprint of Windows, which should make more available RAM for apps and smoother day-to-day usage.
Windows 11 PCs are getting a performance boost in 2026. Source: Microsoft
At the same time, Microsoft is targeting responsiveness under load. Instead of Windows slowing down when multiple apps are open, the goal is to keep interactions consistent throughout the day. That also includes improving multitasking behavior so switching between apps feels instant.
Microsoft is focusing on reducing interaction latency, improving the shared UI infrastructure, and moving more components toward native frameworks like WinUI3.
Why 2026 might be different for Windows 11
Windows is facing more public scrutiny than it has in years. Performance complaints have become mainstream conversations. Microsoft cannot afford to ignore that anymore.
Then thereâs the hardware and market pressure. Appleâs efficiency-focused chips have reshaped expectations, and the MacBook Neo has brought RAM usage into the limelight. Add to that the global rise in memory prices, and Windows 11 performance improvements become a business priority.
For the first time in years, user expectations, competitive pressure, and Microsoftâs internal priorities are all pointing in the same direction.
The post Microsoft once tried to cut Windows 11 RAM usage, install size by 20%, now itâs trying again in 2026 appeared first on Windows Latest
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