Lilbits: Meta Portal’s slow demise, Microsoft’s Fall 2023 Surface hardware event, KDE goes double-click by default, and Bodhi Linux 7.0 released

The Meta Portal line of products are smart displays that launched in 2018 when Meta was still called Facebook. With support for Amazon’s Alexa voice service, they were kind of the company’s answer to an Amazon Echo, but with the added bonus of Facebook Messenger support, making them one of the easiest ways to place quick calls to friends of family.

But they never really took off in a big way, and Meta stopped selling Portal devices last year. According to the company’s website, Meta is “committed to providing ongoing support for Meta Portal Owners,” but “supported features will change over time.” And net week the company could be ending support for one of the key features that made the Portal stand out: messaging.

Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.

Meta Portal is losing a key feature next week [The Verge]

Less than a year after Meta stopped selling its Portal smart display, it looks like the company is preparing to end support for share photos and videos in Messenger from Portal… in fact the somewhat ambiguously worded alert users are seeing suggests that Facebook Messenger support might be going away altogether, which would mean that Meta is pulling the plug on one of the Portal’s primary functions

KDE Goes and Does It (Double-Click By Default, That Is) [OMG! Linux]

KDE Plasma 6 will default to double-clicking on files and folders to open them by default, matching the default behavior of GNOME (and Windows, macOS, and ChromeOS). Users who prefer a single-click can still change the setting though. One big reason for the change? Some popular GNU/Linux distributions that shipped with KDE Plasma were already enabling double-click-to-open by default.

Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update [LinMOB]

Maemo Leste celebrates its fifth birthday, and a whole bunch of updates (and progress updates) related to KDE, Sailfsih OS, Ubuntu Touch, GNOME, and Sailfish OS, among other things.

Introducing Bodhi Linux 7.0: A Landmark Release [Bodhi Linux]

Bodhi Linux 7.0 released two years after version 6.0. It’s an Ubuntu-based operating system with the Moksha desktop environment (formed from Enlightenment). There’s a new s76 release with cutting-edge kernel and many other updates.

Microsoft to hold ‘special event’ in September [The Verge]

Microsoft is holding an event on September 21, and it’s likely that the company will use it to launch a Surface Laptop Go 3, Surface Go 4, and Surface Laptop Studio 2.

First look at Android’s Find My Device Network [@MishaalRahman]

First look at the Find My Device network coming to Android, which can be enabled for high-traffic areas only, all areas, or not at all (you can optionally still locate offline devices using most recent stored locations).

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