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There's some bad news for Windows users who want to use all of the built-in features of the operating system and its integrated apps. Going forward, Microsoft is restricting features in two iconic apps, which you'll need to unlock with a paid subscription. The two apps in question? Notepad and Paint. Windows Insiders were previously able to use these app features free of charge. However, Microsoft is now making it necessary to have a Microsoft 365 subscription for full use of these apps. You'll see a new overlay that informs you of this before use. In our case, however, the respective features were simply grayed out. Laura Pippig at PCWorld It's only the AI" features that are being paywalled here, so I doubt many people will care. What does feel unpleasent, though, is that the features are visible but greyed out, instead of being absent entirely until you log into Windows with an account that has a Microsogt 365 subscription with the AI" stuff enabled. Now it just feels like the operating system you paid good money for - and yes, you do actually pay for Windows - is incomplete and badgering you for in-app purchases. The gameification of Windows continues. There's also a y in the day, so we have another Ars Technica article detailing the long list of steps you need to take to make Windows suck just a little less. The article is long, and seems to grow longer every time Ars, or any other site for that matter, posts an updated version. I installed Windows 11 on my XPS 13 9370 a few weeks ago to see just how bad things had gotten, and the amount of work I had to do to make Windows 11 even remotely usable was insane. Even the installation alone - including all the updates - took several hours, compared to a full installation of, say, Fedora KDE, which, including updated, takes like 10 minutes to install on the same machine. I personally used WinScript to make the process of unfucking Windows 11 less cumbersome, and I can heartedly recommend it to anyone else forced to use Windows 11. Luckily for me, a brand new laptop is being delivered today, without an operating system preinstalled. Can't wait to install Fedora KDE and be good to go in like 20 minutes after unboxing the thing.

Lets start with some context, the project consists of implementing, shipping and maintaining native Wayland support in the Chromium project. Our team at Igalia has been leading the effort since it was first merged upstream back in 2016. For more historical context, there are a few blog posts and this amazing talk, by my colleagues Antonio Gomes and Max Ihlenfeldt, presented at last year's Web Engines Hackfest. Especially due to the Lacros project, progresses on Linux Desktop has been slower over the last few years. Fortunately, the scenario changed since last year, when a new sponsor came up and made it possible to address most of the outstanding missing features and issues required to move Ozone Wayland to the finish line. Nick Yamane There still quite a bit of work left to do, but a lot of progress has been made. As usual, Nvidia setups are problematic, which is a recurring theme for pretty much anything Wayland-related. Aside from the usual Nvidia problems, a lot of work has been done on improving and fixing fractional scaling, adding support for the text-input-v3 protocol, reimplementing tab dragging using the proper Wayland protocol, and a lot more. They're also working on session management, which is very welcome for Chrome/Chromium users as it will allow the browser to remember window positions properly between restarts. Work is also being done to get Chromium's interactive UI tests infrastructure and code working with Wayland compositors, with a focus on GNOME/Mutter - no word on KDE's Kwin, though. I hope they get the last wrinkles worked out quick. The most popular browser needs to support Wayland out of the box.

There's a number of backups of old DECtapes from Dennis Ritchie, which he gave to Warren Toomey in 1997. The tapes were eventually uploaded, and through analysis performed by Yufeng Gao, a lot of additional details, code, and software were recovered from them. A few days ago, Gao came back with the results from their analys of two more tapes, and on it, they found something quite special. Getting this recovered version to run was a bit of a challenge, and only aap's PDP-11 emulator is capable of running it. To even get it to run in the first place, Gao had perform quite some intricate steps, but eventually he managed to build an image that can be downloaded and booted on aap's PDP-11 emulator. The image in question, as well as some more details, can be found on the GitHub page.

We've recognized that Mozilla faces major headwinds in terms of both financial growth and mission impact. While Firefox remains the core of what we do, we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term; and creating online fundraising campaigns that will draw a bigger circle of supporters over the long run. Mozilla's impact and survival depend on us simultaneously strengthening Firefox AND finding new sources of revenue AND manifesting our mission in fresh ways. That is why we're working hard on all of these fronts. Mark Surman on the Mozilla blog None of this is new to anyone reading OSNews. I've been quite vocal about Mozilla's troubles and how it intends to address those troubles, and I'm incredibly worried and concerned about the increasing efforts by Mozilla to push advertising and AI" to somehow find more revenue streams. I think this is the wrong direction to take, and will not make up for the seemingly inevitable loss of the Google search deal - and my biggest fear is that Firefox will get a lot worse before Mozilla realises advertising and AI" just aren't compatible with their mission and the morals and values of the last few remaining Firefox users. I don't have any answers either, of course. Making a competitive browser is hard, and clearly requires a lot of people and a lot of time. Donations are fickle, nobody will pay for a browser, and relying on corporate sponsoring in other forms than the Google search deal will just mean Firefox will become like Chrome even faster, with more and more exceptions for allowed" ads and additional roadblocks for adblockers to try and work around. In essence, I strongly believe that it is impossible to both earn money from online ads and make a good browser. It's one or the other - not both. There's basically no competition in the browser space, and if we lose Firefox, the only other option is Chrome and its various skins. Not a future I'm looking forward to.

The goal of this project is to emulate an Intel 8086 processor and supporting PC hardware well enough to run the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset (ELKS), including a shell and utilities. It should be possible to run other x86 software as long as it doesn't require more than a simple serial terminal. NES86 GitHub page Is this useful in any meaningful sense? No. Will this change the word? No. Does it have any other purpose than just being fun and cool? Nope. None of that matters.

Everywhere you look, the media is telling you that OpenAI and their ilk are the future, that they're building advanced artificial intelligence" that can take human-like actions," but when you look at any of this shit for more than two seconds it's abundantly clear that it absolutely isn't and absolutely can't. Despite the hype, the marketing, the tens of thousands of media articles, the trillions of dollars in market capitalization, none of this feels real, or at least real enough to sustain this miserable, specious bubble. People like Marc Benioff claiming that today's CEOs are the last to manage all-human workforces" are doing so to pump up their stocks rather than build anything approaching a real product. These men are constantly lying as a means of sustaining hype, never actually discussing the products they sell in the year 2025, because then they'd have to say what if a chatbot, a thing you already have, was more expensive?" Edward Zitron Looking at the data and numbers, as Zitron did for this article, the conclusions are sobering and harsh for anyone still pushing the AI" bubble. Products aren't really getting any better, they're not making any money because very few people are paying for them, conversion rates are abysmal, the reported user numbers don't add up, the projections from AI" companies are batshit insane, new products they're releasing are shit, and the media are eating it up because they stand to benefit from the empty promises. Generative AI is a financial, ecological and social time bomb, and I believe that it's fundamentally damaging the relationship between the tech industry and society, while also shining a glaring, blinding light on the disconnection between the powerful and regular people. The fact that Sam Altman can ship such mediocre software and get more coverage and attention than every meaningful scientific breakthrough of the last five years combined is a sign that our society is sick, our media is broken, and that the tech industry thinks we're all fucking morons. This entire bubble has been inflated by hype, and by outright lies by people like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, their lies perpetuated by a tech media that's incapable of writing down what's happening in front of their faces. Altman and Amodei are raising billions and burning our planet based on the idea that their mediocre cloud software products will somehow wake up and automate our entire lives. Edward Zitron In a just world, these 21st century snake oil salesmen would be in prison.

Broadcom has been closely examining Intel's chip-design and marketing business, according to people familiar with the matter. It has informally discussed with its advisers making a bid but would likely only do so if it finds a partner for Intel's manufacturing business, the people said. Nothing has been submitted to Intel, the people cautioned, and Broadcom could decide not to seek a deal. Separately, TSMC has studied controlling some or all of Intel's chip plants, potentially as part of an investor consortium or other structure, according to people familiar with the discussions. Asa Fitch, Lauren Thomas, and Yang Jie at The WSJ The vultures continue to circle, but considering Intel isn't actually dead yet, it does all feel a little bit premature. The company needs time to right the ship, but with its current non-technical, finance-oriented leadership it might already be too late for such time to be given to the company. For all we know, they're already working on a big payday through divestment or wholesale selling of the company, and they're just waiting on the right offer. I don't think it's a good idea to let Intel be stripped for parts and looted by the ultra-wealthy, but with the United States hurdling towards a massive constitutional crisis and experiencing utter destruction of government institutions, I don't think anyone's left to stop it or think things through properly.

Humane is selling most of its company to HP for $116 million and will stop selling AI Pin, the company announced today. AI Pins that have already been purchased will continue to function normally until 3PM ET on February 28th, Humane says in a support document. After that date, Pins will no longer connect to Humane's servers." As a result, AI Pin features will no longer include calling, messaging, AI queries / responses, or cloud access." Humane is also encouraging users to download any pictures, videos, and notes stored on their Pins before they are permanently deleted at that shutdown time. Jay Peters at The Verge I can't think of a better example of AI" being a planet-cooking hype bubble than the Humane failure everybody saw coming from a mile away. HP can add this useless acquisition next to the Palm one.

AIDA64, the popular benchmarking tool for Windows, released a new version today. I don't particularly care about benchmarking - even less so benchmarking on Windows - but this new release comes with an interesting line in the release notes. Discontinued support for Windows 95, 98, Me AIDA64 v7.60 release notes Seeing a widely-used, popular piece of software drop support for Windows 95, 98, and ME only in this, the year of our lord, 2025, is kind of amazing.

It's been two years since the release of ArcaOS 5.1, which was a hugely important release because it brought UEFI support to this continuation of IBM's OS/2, ensuring longevity for the project for years to come. Since I don't think much is known about what, exactly, Arca Noae, and eComStation before it, has access to within the licensing agreement with IBM, it's difficult to ascertain just how much room they actually have to make changes to the code at the core of the old OS/2. Regardless, I tested ArcaOS 5.1 before and during its release, and the support for UEFI and GPT partition layouts was excellent on my machines. Almost 18 months later comes the next release in the 5.1 branch, ArcaOS 5.1.1, and as the version number implies, this isn't another major release on the scale of 5.1. Looking at the list of changes, it mostly contains a ton of upgraded versions of various programs and tools included in ArcaOS. After some digging into some of those upgraded versions, I think I can safely say we're looking at a ton of small bugfixes, but there are also a few other things that stand out to me as welcome changes. For instance, the changelog mentions various improvements to the installer and related tools, such as an improved method of determining the right screen resolution and font scaling during the installation. Considering I had to deal with some issues there - I think the installer UI elements were grossly oversized - this is a welcome fix. There are also refreshed" Firefox and Thunderbird builds, although I don't know if that means an update to the latest ESR releases, or just a rebuild of what was already shipping with ArcaOS 5.1. I never found the time around the 5.1 release to do a proper review - I was knee-deep in baby and toddler care overload at the time - but if Arca Noae is willing to provide me with a 5.1.1 copy, I should be able to actually review it now that I'm only ankle-deep in baby and toddler care overload.

What might be somewhat more surprising though considering its research origins is that Unix almost since the very beginning had a comprehensive set of online reference documentation for all its commands, system calls, file formats, etc. These are the the manual- or man-pages. On Unix systems used interactively, the man-pages have historically always been installed, space permitting. The way the manual pages have evolved and how they are used has changed over the decades. This set of posts is intended to give people unfamiliar with them an overview, as well as offer a review to seasoned users. Alex Bochannek Right in this first article in the series there's an interesting observation I never stopped and thought about: because the original creators of UNIX were writing the content of man pages with the very tools they were creating for UNIX, it led to a virtuous cycle. Unix tools were used to document Unix, improving the documentation tools themselves as well." I tend to use the internet now to learn how specific tools and commands work, but having such detailed man pages built right into the operating system was a huge deal pre-internet.

One of the reactions to my discussion of why Windows 95 setup used three operating systems (and oh there were many) was my explanation that an MS-DOS based setup program would be text-mode. But c'mon, MS-DOS could do graphics! Are you just a bunch of morons? Yes, MS-DOS could do graphics, in the sense that it didn't actively prevent you from doing graphics. You were still responsible for everything yourself, though. There were no graphics primitives aside from a BIOS call to plot a single pixel. Everything else was on you, and you didn't want to use the BIOS call to plot pixels anyway because it was slow. If you wanted any modicum of performance, you had to access the frame buffer directly. Raymond Chen And with everything the Windows 95 setup program needs that you'd have to create, you'd end up just... Developing a custom operating system in the first place. Since Microsoft already had Windows 3.x lying around, why not reuse parts of that to aid in the Windows 95 installation process? Honestly, all of it makes perfect sense, and I really don't understand why anyone would seriously advocate for building a separate, entirely custom operating system just to install Windows 95 when Windows 3.x was right there. Of course, these days things are a little different, but Windows still loads a different operating system during its installation. It's called the Windows Preinstallation Environment, but it's no longer based on Windows 3.x, obviously, and instead is a cut-down version of the Windows version you're actually installing. The latest version of Windows PE is 10.0.26100.1, and it's built from Windows 11 24H2. Windows PE also powers the Windows Recovery Environment, the menu you can boot into to perform various analyses, maintenance, and repair of your Windows installation. Since Microsoft does not want Windows PE to be used a general purpose operating system, it comes with a few interesting limitations you can't really circumvent. It has a non-configurable 72-hour time bomb, after which if will just shut off, and since PE runs entirely in memory, no changes are saved - unless you make any changes during the creation of the PE image. It also makes use of FAT32, so there's a whole host of limitations there, and there's a few other things Microsoft disabled. Since you an add drivers to a PE image, though, I wonder if you could sneak in a file system driver and circumvent FAT32's limitations that way?

JotaleaOS is an open source, minimalistic, experimental operating system made by Jotalea, designed for extreme low-resource environments. It does not support external programs or games, as it lacks a standard application execution environment. The system is entirely self-contained, running only its built-in commands. JotaleaOS website Exactly what is says on the tin: a tiny operating system created entirely as a learning experience. That's it.

Unlike most (all?) other distributions with built-in Flatpak support, Fedora maintains its own repository of Flatpak applications. Everyone else defaults to using Flathub, where developers of applications themselves tend to publish their Flatpaks. Fedora's shadow Flathub' sometimes leads to problems, with Fedora-made Flatpaks containing bugs and brokenness, while presenting themselves as official, developer-made Flatpaks. In turn, users complain to the developers, while the issues they experience are actually caused by Fedora making its own Flatpaks. One of the applications this happened to is OBS, and over three weeks ago the OBS project requested that either the broken, unofficial Fedora Flatpak be removed, or that it be made clear that the Flatpak was third-party. This request seems entirely reasonable to me, and it would be fairly trivial for Fedora to do this. In fact, I think respecting this request is merely common decency. Sadly, the Fedora project thought differently, and just... Ignored the request. And so the OBS project escalated the issue. This is a formal request to remove all of our branding, including but not limited to, our name, our logo, any additional IP belonging to the OBS Project, from your distribution. Failure to comply may result in further legal action taken. We expect a response within the next 7 business days (By Friday, February 21st, 2025). Joel Bethke It seems this caught the attention of the Fedora project, as within less than 24 hours, a formal request was made by the maintainer of Fedora's OBS RPM package to have the broken OBS Flatpak removed. It seems there's no official process to follow for making such a request, but I hope it gets through and honoured, if only because, like I said above, it would be common decency to do so. I do wish to go back to the original OBS complaint, though, as it poses the question most of you are asking yourselves at this point. I would also like some sort of explanation on why someone thought it was a good idea to take a Flatpak that was working perfectly fine, break it, and publish it at a higher priority to our official builds. We spend an enormous amount of effort on our official Flatpak published to Flathub to ensure everything is working as well as it can be. Joel Bethke Why does Fedora maintain its own shadow-Flathub, set at a higher priority than the real Flathub? There's a few reasons, as detailed in this Fedora Magazine article from 2022. There's the obvious stuff like Fedora only allowing free and open source software, whereas Flathub also allows proprietary software, meaning that if Fedora ships with the Flathub repository enabled and prioritised, it would violate Fedora's policies. You can argue back and forth about this, but Fedora's policy being what it is, I can see where they're coming from. The article mentions Flathub will split proprietary applications from free and open source ones, but I can't find any word on if this has happened already. A second big difference are the sources where the Flatpaks are drawn from. While Flathub allows and all sources, with their packages reusing Debian packages, Ubuntu Snaps, tarballs, AppImages, and more, Fedora exclusively reuses its own RPM packages when creating its Flatpak packages. Furthermore, Fedora Flatpaks use the Docker-like OCI format to publish applications (which ties into the Fedora Registry), while Flathub uses OSTree. Lastly, Fedora Flatpaks use one, single, big underlying runtime, while Flathub has a number of different, smaller runtimes. The issue here seems to be that the motivations for maintaining a Flatpak repository differ greatly between Flathub and Fedora, but one has to wonder how much of that actually matters to users. Maintaining your own, separate Flatpak repository that effectively duplicates the work developers do when publishing to Flathub is not only wasteful, but also prone to cause bugs, issues, and outdated Flatpaks - which in turn causes strife with the original developers of the applications who have to deal with problems causes not by their own work, but by Fedora - problems that they can't even fix. I don't think this situation makes any sense to perpetuate, and it's high time Fedora defaults to Flathub for Flatpak applications. It will reduce the workload on package maintainers, prevent needless packaging bugs, improve the experience for users, and make developers happier. It's a no-brainer at this point.

Speaking of KDE, Plasma 6.3 has been released. It brings with it a ton of improvements aimed at digital artists, such as much improved management and configuration of drawing tablets. You can now map an area of the tablet's surface to a part of the screen, change the functions of stylus buttons, customise the pressure curve and range of a stylus, and much more. The entire settings panel for drawing tablets has also been redesigned to make it easier to find what you're looking for. Plasma 6.3 also completely overhauls KWin's fraction scaling. Fractional scaling in KWin will not try to snap everything to your display's pixel grid, to reduce blurriness and make everything look sharper. KWin's zoom effect also makes use of these improvements, making for a pixel-perfect zoom feature with a pixel grid overlay, which is great for artists and designers. This will be a very welcome improvement for people using e.g. 125% or 150% scaling on their displays. Hardware monitoring is much improved too, with System Monitor showing more information while using fewer resources, and KDE users on FreeBSD can now see GPU statistics too. There's also a ton of small additions that are still quite welcome, like opening the menu editor instead of a properties dialog when clicking on Edit Application in a launcher menu's context menu, the ability to clone panels, an option to turn of symbolic icons in Kickoff, a Show Target" option in the context menu of symbolic links, and a lot more. KDE Plasma 6.3 will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.

One of the major issues with KDE's styling system is the fact that over the year, it has accumulated four ways of styling applications - which makes themeing and changing aspects of the default theme far more cumbersome than it should be. In fact, with the current version of KDE, it's effectively impossible to consistently theme the entire KDE desktop, as several parts of it, like Kirigami applications, only inherit parts of the theme you're applying. It's a bit of a mess, and KDE is well aware of this. This problem is not new; we already identified it several years ago. Unfortunately, it also is not easy to solve. Some of the reasons it got to this state are simply inertia. Some things like Plasma's SVG styling were developed as a way to improve styling in an era where a lot of the technologies we currently use did not exist yet. The solutions developed in those days have now existed for a pretty long time so we cannot suddenly drop them. Other reasons are more technical in nature, such as completely different rendering stacks. Arjen Hiemstra These different rendering stacks form the core of the problem, as they can't use the same rendering code for everything. Currently, KDE tries to address the problem through a compatibility layer to tie everything together, but it's not perfect, it has to be maintained, and it means they're not utilising their rendering stacks to their fullest potential. The solution KDE is working on is called Union. However, there is another option, which is to take a step back and realise that we actually may not even want to share the rendering code, given that they are quite different. Instead, we need a description of what the element should look like, and then we can have specific rendering code that implements how to render that in the best way for a certain technology stack. Arjen Hiemstra Basically, an input layer will interpret file formats with style descrpitions, while an intermediate layer consists of a library that converts that interpretation into a more abstract description of what needs to be rendered. The final output layer then uses the data from the intermediate layer to tell the rendering stacks what to do. By standardising on the input format, say CSS, it'll be much easier to impement themes or make changes. This effort is still far from done, but they're making good progress. It ties into the Plasma Next initiative, which is, as the name implies, an effort to make changes to Plasma's default look and feel.

You might think the world of Linux distributions is a rather boring, settled affair, but there's actually a ton of interesting experimentation going on in the Linux world. From things like NixOS with its unique packaging framework, to the various immutable distributions out there like the Fedora Atomic editions, there's enough uniqueness to go around to find a lid for every pot. Oasis Linux surely falls into this category. One of its main unique characteristics is that it's entirely statically linked. All software in the base system is linked statically, including the display server (velox) and web browser (netsurf). Compared to dynamic linking, this is a simpler mechanism which eliminates problems with upgrading libraries, and results in completely self-contained binaries that can easily be copied to other systems. Oasis GitHub page That's not all it has to offer, though. It also offers fast and 100% reproducible builds, it's mostly ISO C conformant, and it has minimal bootstrap dependencies - all you need is a POSIX system with git, lua, curl, a sha256 utility, standard compression utilities, and an x86_64-linux-musl cross compiler". The ISO C-comformance is a crucial part of one of Oasis' goals: to be buildable with cproc, a small, very strict C11 compiler. It has no package manager, but any software outside of Oasis itself can be installed and managed with pkgsrc or Nix. Another important goal of the project is to be extremely easy to understand, and its /etc directory is honestly a sight to behold, and as the project proudly claims, the most complex file in there is rc.init at a mere 16 lines. The configuration files are indeed incredibly easy to understand, which is a breath of fresh air compared to the archaic stuff in commercial UNIX or the complex stuff in modern Linux distributions that I normally deal with. I'm not sure is Oasis would make for a good, usable day-to-day operating system, but I definitely like what they're putting down.

The Redox project has posted its usual monthly update, and this time, we've got a major milestone creeping within reach. Thanks to Anhad Singh for his amazing work on Dynamic Linking! In this southern-hemisphere-Redox-Summer-of-Code project, Anhad has implemented dynamic linking as the default build method for many recipes, and all new porting can use dynamic linking with relatively little effort. This is a huge step forward for Redox, because relibc can now become a stable ABI. And having a stable ABI is one of the prerequisites for Redox to reach Release 1.0". Ribbon and Ron Williams A major step forward for Redox, and one of those things not everyone might think about when they consider the state of an operating system. This wasn't all of the news this month, though, as Redox also received a port of the LOVE game engine, which powers quite a few successful indie games, like the recent hit Balatro. Thanks to this port, you can now play Balatro on Redox, which is pretty cool - and highlights just how far Redox has already come. On top of these major two headlines, there's a ton of improvements all over the operating system, mostly at the lower levels.

During a weekend of tidying up - you know, the kind of chore where you're knee-deep in old boxes before you realize it. Digging through the dusty cables and old, outdated user manuals, I found something that I had long forgotten: an oldPlan 9distribution. Judging by the faded ink and slight warping of the disk sleeve, it had to be from around 1994 or 1995. I couldn't help but wonder: why had I kept this? Back then, I was curious about Plan 9. It was a forward-thinking OS that never quite reached full potential. Holding that disk, however, it felt more like a time capsule, a real reminder of computing's advancements and adventurous spirit in the 1990s. Bill Dyer at It's FOSS As the article notes, 9front is the way to go if you want to try Plan 9 today. Plan 9/9front appeals to a very specific type of person, but when you dive into the excellent - and incredibly entertaining - documentation, it really seems quite easy to grasp and get started with. There's definitely things you'll need to unlearn and some compromises you'll need to make, but I think you'll be able to get a lot more work done than you might think. Also, if you start adding software to 9front, you get to use the best GitHub alternative of all time: shithub. That alone makes it worth it to try 9front.

Acomplete guide toconfiguring FreeBSD asanaudiophile audio server: setting upsystem and audio subsystem parameters, real-time operation, bit-perfect signal processing, and the best methods for enabling and parameterising the system graphic equalizer (equalizer) and high-quality audio equalization with FFmpeg filters. Linux users will also find useful information, especially inthe context ofconfiguring and personalising the MPD player and filters. Marcin Szewczyk-Wilgan FreeBSD is a much more capable desktop and workstation operating system than it gets credit for, especially with the Linux world sucking all the air out of the room, but you do often need to do a little more and dive a little deeper into the operating system to get it to do what you want. In the case of audio, Szewczyk-Wilgan explains that he thinks it's even ahead of Linux, due to being able to precisely track the parameters of the audio device along with the system kernel parameters and modify them", as well as FreeBSD having better support for real-time operation. This guide is an incredibly detailed explanation of which options and configurations you should use in FreeBSD to turn it into an audio server. This clearly isn't for everyone, and I assume most audio experts won't be considering FreeBSD, but what this article demonstrates is that it's very, very much possible to do so.

We had a bit of a bug caused by changes we made to make quotes look better, but we've fixed it now, so we're back on track (you may need to do a force-reload in your browser). Sorry for the disruption - and if you want to stay up-to-date on such issues next time it (inevitably) happens, you should follow the OSNews Fedi account (or just bookmark it without following it, if you're not interested in social media). Anyway, back to the news! Fresh OS installs are bliss. But the joy fades quickly as installing and uninstalling programs leave behind a trail of digital debris. Even configuration management and declarative systems like NixOS miss crucial bits, like the contents of /var/lib or stray dotfiles. This debris isn't just unsightly. It can be load-bearing, crucial to the functioning of your system, but outside of your control, and not preserved on rebuilds. Full system backups merely preserve this chaos. I wanted a clean slate, automatically, every boot. Erase your darlings" inspired an idea in the NixOS community: allowlisting files and directories that persist across reboots. Anything not on the list gets wiped. The simplest implementation involves mounting / as a tmpfs (i.e.in RAM), and then bind-mounting or symlinking the allowlisted items to a disk-backed filesystem. Tuxes.uk I dabbled in NixOS over the past week or so, and while I find it intriguing and can definitely see a use for it, I also found it rather needlessly cumbersome and over-engineered for something as simple as a desktop system. I felt like I was taking a whole bunch of additional steps to do basic things, without needing any of the benefits Nix and NixOS bring. This doesn't mean Nix and NixOS are bad - just that for me, personally, it doesn't fill any need I have. Taking the Nix concept as far as starting with a completely fresh installation on every boot sounds absolutely insane to me. Of course, it's not entirely fresh on every reboot, as several applications and important configuration elements do survive the reboot, but it's still quite drastic compared to what everyone else is doing. Unsurprisingly, there are a few issues; it's hard to know what really needs and doesn't need saving, there might be some unexpected issues because software doesn't expect to be wiped, and so on. Overall though, it seems to work susprisingly well, and for a specific type of person, this is definitely bliss.

Cassette is a GUI application framework written in C11, with a UI inspired by the cassette-futurism aesthetic. Built for modern POSIX systems, it's made out of three libraries: CGUI, CCFG and COBJ. Cassette is free and open-source software, licensed under the LGPL-3.0. Cassette GitHub page Upon first reading this description, you might wonder what a cassette-futurism aesthetic" really is, but once you take a look at the screenshots of what Cassette can do, you immediately understand what it means. It's still in the alpha stage and there's lot still to do, but what it has now is already something quite unique I don't think the major toolkits really cater to or can even pull off. There's an example application that's focused on showing some system stats, and that's exactly the kind of stuff this seems a great fit for: good-looking, small widget-like applications showing glanceable information.

It kind of goes by under the radar, but aside from HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX, there's another traditional classic UNIX still in active development today: UnixWare (and its sibling, OpenServer). Owned and developed by Xinuos, UnixWare and other related code and IP was acquired by them when the much-hated SCO crashed and burned about 15 years ago or so, and they've been maintaining it ever since. About a year ago, Xinuos released Update Pack 1 and Maintenance Pack 1 for UnixWare 7 Definitive 2018, followed by similar update packs for OpenServer 6 later in 2024. These update packs bring a bunch of bugfixes and performance improvements, as well as a slew of updated open source components, like new versions of SAMBA, sendmail, GCC and tons of other GNU components, OpenSSH and OpenSSL, and so, so much more, enabling a relatively modern and up-to-date build and porting environment. They can be installed through the patchck update utility, and while the Maintenance Pack is free for existing registered users, the Update Pack requires a separate license. UnixWare, while fully capable as a classic UNIX for workstations, isn't really aimed at individuals or hobbyists (sadly), and instead focuses on existing enterprise deployments, where such licensing costs are par for the course. UnixWare runs on x86, and can be installed both on real hardware as well as in various virtualised environments. I contacted Xinuos a few days ago for a review license, and they supplied me with one so I can experiment with and write about UnixWare. I've currently got it installed in a Linux kvm, where it runs quite well, including the full X11R6 CDE desktop environment and graphical administration tools. Installing updates is a breeze thanks to patchck automating the process of finding, downloading, and installing the correct ones. I intend to ask Xinuos about an optimal configuration for running UnixWare on real hardware, too.

Late last year, the MaXX Interactive Desktop, the Linux (and BSD) version of the IRIX desktop, sprung back to life with a new release and a detailed roadmap. Thanks to a unique licensing agreement with SGI, MaXX' developer, Eric Masson, has been able to bring a lot of the SGI user experience over to Linux and BSD, and as promised, we have a new release: the final version of MaXX Interactive Desktop 2.2.0. It's codenamed Octane, and anyone who knows their SGI history will chuckle at this and other codenames MaXX uses. Like last year's alpha release, 2.2.0 brings an Expose-like overview features, initial freedesktop.org integration, tons of performance improvements and bug fixes, desktop notifications, and much more. For the next release, 2.3.0 they're planning a new file manager, support for .desktop files, a ton of new preference panes, a quick search feature, and a whole bunch of lower-level stuff. With how serious the renewed development effort seems, I hope that some day, the project will consider building MaXX out to a full Linux distribution, to gain more control over the experience and ensure normal users don't have to perform a manual installation.

Upstart was an event-based replacement for the traditional System V init (sysvinit) system on Ubuntu, introduced to bring a modern and more flexible way of handling system startup and service management. It emerged in the mid-2000s, during a period when sysvinit's age and limitations were becoming more apparent, especially with regard to concurrency and dependency handling. Upstart was developed by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, with the aim of reducing boot times, improving reliability, and making the system initialization process more dynamic. Though at first it seemed likely to become a standard across many distributions, Upstart eventually lost mindshare to systemd and ceased to be Ubuntu's default init system. Andre Machado I think it's safe to say systemd won the competition to become the definitive successor to sysvinit on Linux, but Canonical's Upstart made a valiant effort, too. However, with a troublesome license, it was doomed from the start, and it didn't help that virtually every other major distribution eventually adopted systemd. These days, systemd is the Linux init system, and I personally quite like it (and the crowd turns violent). I find it easy to use and it's never given me any issues, but I'm not a system administrator dealing with complex setups, so my experience with systemd is probably rather limited. It just does its thing in the background on my machines. None of this means there aren't any other init systems still being actively developed. There's GNU Shepard we talked about recently, runit, OpenRC, and many more. If you don't like systemd, there's enough alternatives out there.

After doing more digging than I feel like I should have needed to, I found my answer: it appears that due to concerns about the fact that acknowledging the existence of certain countries can be perceived as a nominally political stance, Microsoft has opted to just avoid the issue altogether by not including country flag emojis in Windows' system font. Problem solved! Can you imagine if, *gasp*, your computer could render a Taiwanese or Palestinian flag? The horror! Ryan Geyer Silicon Valley corporations are nothing if not massive cowards, and this is just another one of the many, many examples that underline this. Firefox solves this by including the flags on its own, but Google refuses to do the same with Chrome, because, you guessed it, Google is also a cowardly organisation. There are some ways around it, as the linked article details, but they're all clumsy and cumbersome compared to Microsoft just not being a coward and including proper flag emoji, even if it offends some sensibilities in pro-China or western far-right circles. Your best bet to avoid such corporate cowardice is to switch to better operating systems, like any desktop Linux distribution. Fedora KDE includes both the Taiwanese and Palestinian flags, because the KDE project isn't made up of cowards, and I'm sure the same applies to any GNOME distribution. If your delicate snowflake sensibilities can't handle a Palestinian or Taiwanese flag emoji, just don't type them. Bitter sidenote: it turns out WordPress, what OSNews uses, doesn't like emoji, either. Adding any emoji in this story, from basic ones to the Taiwanese or Palestinian flag, makes it impossible to save or publish the story. I have no idea if this is a WordPress issue, or an issue on our end, since WordPress does mention they have emoji support.

Geico, an American insurance company, is building a live-patching solution for the Linux kernel, called TuxTape. TuxTape is an in-development kernel livepatching ecosystem that aims to aid in the production and distribution of kpatch patches to vendor-independent kernels. This is done by scraping the Linux CNA mailing list, prioritizing CVEs by severity, and determining applicability of the patches to the configured kernel(s). Applicability of patches is determined by profiling kernel builds to record which files are included in the build process and ignoring CVEs that do not affect files included in kernel builds deployed on the managed fleet. Presentation by Grayson Guarino and Chris Townsend It seems to me something like live-patching the Linux kernel should be a standardised framework that's part of the Linux kernel, and not several random implementations by third parties, one of which is an insurance company. There's a base core of functionality for live-patching in the Linux kernel since 4.0, released in 2015, but it's extremely limited and requires most of the functionality to be implemented separately, through things like Red Hat's kpatch and Oracle's Ksplice. Geico is going to release TuxTape as open source, and is encouraging others to adopt and use it. There are various other solutions out there offering similar functionality, so you're not spoiled for choice, and I'm sure there's advantages and disadvantages to each. I would still prefer if functionality like this is a standard feature of the kernel, not something tied to a specific vendor or implementation.

Since a number of GTK developer came together at FOSDEM, the project figured now was as good a time as any to give an update on what's coming in GTK. First, GTK is implementing some hard cut-offs for old platforms - Windows 10 and macOS 10.15 are now the oldest supported versions, which will make development quite a bit easier and will simplify several parts of the codebase. Windows 10 was released in 2015 and macOS 10.15 in 2019, which are fair cut-off points, in my book. GTK 4.18 will also bring major accessibility improvements with the AccessKit backend, giving GTK accessibility features on Windows and macOS for the first time, which is great news. Another major new feature is the new Android backend, which, while not yet complete, will allow you to run GTK applications on Android. Do note that this is experimental, so don't expect everything to work without any issues quite yet. Lastly, the news that everyone was freaking out about over the weekend: the X11 backend has been deprecated, and will be removed in GTK 5. This freaked a lot of people out, but note that this doesn't mean you magically can't use GTK 4 applications on X11 anymore - it merely means that X11 support will be removed in GTK 5, which doesn't even exist yet, and with GTK 4 being supported until GTK 6 is released, people using legacy windowing systems like Xorg will be fine for a long time to come. As the GTK project notes on Fedi: The X11 backend being deprecated mainly means that we're not going to spend time implementing new features, like dmabuf, graphics offloading, or Vulkan support. X11 support will still exist until GTK4 is EOL, which will happen once GTK *6* is released. We're talking about a 20 years horizon, at this point... Of course, somebody could show up tomorrow, and implement everything that the Wayland backend does, but for X11. We can always undeprecate things. We are not holding our breath, though... The GTK project on Fedi This is the right move, and I'm glad the GTK project is doing this, and is giving everyone ample time to prepare. A lot of people will still freak out, get mad, and scream bloody murder at certain individuals in the wider Linux community, and those people are, of course, free to start working on Xorg. Like the GTK developers, though, I'm not holding my breath, because despite years of excessive Wayland hate, not a single person has stood up to do the work required to keep Xorg going.

You might expect PDF files to only be comprised of static documents, but surprisingly, the PDF file format supports Javascript with its own separate standard library. Modern browsers (Chromium, Firefox) implement this as part of their PDF engines. However, the APIs that are available in the browser are much more limited. The full specfication for the JS in PDFs was only ever implemented by Adobe Acrobat, and it contains some ridiculous things like the ability to do 3D rendering, make HTTP requests, and detect every monitor connected to the user's system. However, on Chromium and other browsers, only a tiny subset of this API was ever implemented, due to obvious security concerns. With this, we can do whatever computation we want, just with some very limited IO. LinuxPDF GitHub page I'm both impressed and concerned.

GNU Guix is a package manager for GNU/Linux systems. It is designed to give users more control over their general-purpose and specialized computing environments, and make these easier to reproduce over time and deploy to one or many devices. GNU Guix website Guix is basically GNU's approach to a reproducible, functional package manager, very similar to Nix because, well, it's based on Nix. GNU also has a Linux distribution built around Nix, the GNU Guix System, which is fully libre' as all things GNU are, and also makes use of the GNU Shepard init system. Both Shepard and Guix make use of Guile. The last release of the GNU Guix System is a few years old already, but it's a rolling release, so that's not much of an issue. It uses the Linux kernel, but support for GNU Hurd is also being worked on, for whatever that's worth. There's also a third-party distribution that is built around the same projects, called rde. It focuses on being lightweight, ready for offline use, and minimal distractions. It's probably not suitable for most normal users, but if you're a power user and you're looking for something a little bit different, this could be for you. While it's in active development, it's considered usable and stable by its creators. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm definitely intrigued by what it has to offer. Nix sucks up a lot of the attention in this space, so it's interesting to see some of the alternatives that aim for similar goals.

We talk about the Genode project and Sculpt OS quite regularly on OSNews, but every time I've tried using Sculpt OS, I've always found it so different and so unique compared to everything else that I just couldn't wrap my head around it. I assume this stems from nothing but my own shortcomings, because the Genode project often hammers on the fact that Sculpt OS is in daily-driver use by a lot of people within and without the project, so there must be something here just not clicking for me. Well, it seems I'm actually not the only one with difficulties getting started with Sculpt OS' unique structure and interface, because Norman Feske, co-founder of Genode Labs, has published a lengthy, detailed, but very interesting and easy to follow screencast explaining exactly how to use Sculpt OS and its unique features and characteristics. Even though Sculpt OS has been in routine daily use for years now, many outside observers still tend to perceive it as fairly obscure because it does not follow the usual preconceptions of a consumer-oriented operating system. Extensive documentation exists, but it leaves a fairly technical impression at a cursory glance, which may scare some people away. The screencast below aims at making the system a little bit more approachable. It walks you through the steps of downloading, installing, booting the system image, navigating the administrative user interface, and interactively extending and customizing the system. The tour is wrapped up with the steps for creating your personal sculpted OS on a bootable USB stick. Norman Feske After watching this, I genuinely feel I have much better grasp of how to use Sculpt OS and just how powerful it really is, and that it's really not as difficult to use as it may look at first glance. The next time I set some time aside for Sculpt OS, I feel I'll have a much better grasp of what to do and how to use it properly.

If you have type 1 diabetes, you need to keep track of and manage your blood glucose levels closely, as if these levels dip too low, it can quickly spiral into a medical emergency. Andrew Childs' 9 year old son has type 1 diabetes, and Childs was unhappy with any of the current offerings on the market for children to keep track of their blood glucose levels. Most people suggested an Apple Watch, but he found the Apple Watch too much device" for a kid, something I personally agree with. It ships with so many shiny features and apps and notifications. It's beautifully crafted. It's also way too distracting for a kid while they're at school. Secondly, it doesn't provide a good, reliable view of his CGM data. The Dexcom integration is often backgrounded, doesn't show the chart, only the number and an arrow. People use hacks like creating calendar events just to see up-to-date data. And the iOS settings, Screen Time, and notification systems have ballooned into a giant ball of complexity. What we need is something simple. Andrew Childs And so Childs set out to design and prototype a smartwatch just for his son to wear, trying to address the shortcomings of other offerings on the market along the way, and possibly even bring it to market for other people in similar situations. After six months, he managed to create several prototypes, with both the software and hardware designed from the ground up, that he and his son still wear to this day, to great satisfaction. Since Childs didn't really know where to go from there and how to turn what he had into an actual product people could be, he decided to document his effort online. In the process, he had to overcome a ton of hurdles, from iOS' strict BLE limitations, difficult-to-reach soldering points that can't be moved due to the small size of the PCB, optimising the battery life, dealing with glass manufacturing, and many other issues, big and small. Oh and also, he was a software engineer, not a hardware one, so he had to learn a lot of new skills, from working with 3D modeling to PCB design. In the end, though, he's now got a few devices that look quite professionally made, that are incredibly easy to repair, and that are focused solely on those things he and his son need. This project has increased the quality of life for his son, and that's genuinely all that really matters here.

Since its inception, Let's Encrypt has been sending expiration notification emails to subscribers that have provided an email address to us. We will be ending this service on June 4, 2025. Josh Aas on the Let's Encrypt website They're ending the expiration notification service because it's costly, adds a ton of complexity to their systems, and constitutes a privacy risk because of all the email addresses they have to keep on file just for this feature. Considering there are other services that offer this functionality, and the fact many people automate this already anyway, it makes sense to stop sending out emails. Anyway, just a head's up.

Update: there's a fork called heirloom-ng that is actually still somewhat maintained and contains some more changes and modernisations compared to the old version. The Heirloom Project provides traditional implementations of standard Unix utilities. In many cases, they have been derived from original Unix material released as Open Source by Caldera and Sun. Interfaces follow traditional practice; they remain generally compatible with SystemV, although extensions that have become common use over the course of time are sometimes provided. Most utilities are also included in a variant that aims at POSIX conformance. On the interior, technologies for the twenty-first century such as the UTF-8 character encoding or OpenType fonts are supported. The Heirloom Project website I had never heard of this before, but I like the approach they're taking. This isn't just taking System V tools and making them work on a modern UNIX-like system as-is; they're also improving by them adding support for modern technologies, without actually changing their classic nature and the way old-fashioned users expect them to work. Sadly, the project seems to be dead, as the code hasn't been altered since 2008. Perhaps someone new is willing to take up this project? As it currently stands, the tools are available for Linux, Solaris, Open UNIX, HP-UX, AIX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, but considering how long the code hasn't been touched, I wonder if they still run and work on any of those systems today. They also come in various different versions which comply with different variants of the POSIX standard.

Regardless, the fact that Android's Linux Terminal can run graphical apps like Doom now is good news. Hopefully we'll be able to run more complex desktop-class Linux programs in the future. I tried running GIMP, for example, but it didn't work. Eventually, Android should be able to run Linux apps as well as Chromebooks can, as I believe one of the goals of this project is to help the transition of Chrome OS to an Android base. Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority It was of course inevitable that someone would run Doom on Android's new Debian container, and it's pretty cool to see it work without much issue already, even if the new terminal and container setup are still in such heavy development. Like many other people, I love the idea of my smartphone being both my, well, smartphone, as well as a full desktop PC once you connect it to a display and some input devices. As wireless technology keeps advancing, we soon might not even need to plug anything into the phone at all, and just having it in our pocket is good enough, which would be amazing. That being said, I would want such functionality to come from a traditional Linux setup, not Android's idea of a Linux setup. Running a Debian virtual machine on top of Android is probably preferable for a lot of people for a variety of reasons, but I'm a Linux user and want plain, regular Linux running directly on my smartphone, not some virtual machine on Android, which, while being a Linux distribution, is not the most pleasant variant of Linux to run and use.

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a someone mentioning macOS is a UNIX approaches 1. In fact, it was only late last year that The Open Group announced that macOS 15.0 was, once again, certified as UNIX, continuing Apple's long-standing tradition of certifying macOS releases as real" UNIX(R). What does any of this actually, mean, though? Well, it turns out that if you actually dive into Apple's conformance statements for macOS' UNIX certification, it doesn't really mean anything at all. First and foremost, we have to understand what UNIX certification really means. In order to be allowed to use the UNIX trademark, your operating system needs to comply with the Single UNIX Specification (SUS), which specifies programming interfaces for C, a command-line shell, and user commands, more or less identical to POSIX, as well as the X/Open Curses specification. The latest version is SUS version 4, originally published in 2008, with amendments published in 2013 and 2016, which were rolled up into version 4 in 2018. The various versions of the SUS that exist, in turn, correspond to a specific UNIX trademark. In table form: Trademark SUS version SUS published in: SUS last amended in: UNIX(R) 93 n.a. n.a. n.a. UNIX(R) 95 Version 1 1994 n.a. UNIX(R) 98 Version 2 1997 n.a. UNIX(R) 03 Version 3 2002 2004 UNIX(R) V7 Version 4 2008 2016 (2018 for roll-up) When you read that macOS is a certified UNIX, which of these versions and trademarks do you assume macOS complies with? You'd assume they would just target the latest trademark and SUS version, right? This would allow macOS to carry the UNIX(R) V7 trademark, because they would conform to version 4 of the SUS, which dates to 2016. The real answer is that macOS 15.0 only conforms to version 3 of the SUS, which dates all the way back to the ancient times of 2004, and as such, macOS is only UNIX(R) 03 (on both Intel and ARM). However, you can argue this is just semantics, since it's not like UNIX and POSIX are very inclined to change. So now, like the UNIX nerd that you are, you want to see all this for yourself. You use macOS, safe in the knowledge that unlike those peasants using Linux or one of the BSDs, you're using a real UNIX(R). So you can just download all the tests suites (if you can afford them, but that's a whole different can of worms) and run them, replicating Apple's compliance testing, seeing for yourself, on your own macOS 15 installation, that macOS 15 is a real UNIX(R), right? Well, no, you can't, because the version of macOS 15 Apple certifies is not the version that's running on everyone's supported Macs. To gain its much-vaunted UNIX certification for macOS, Apple cheats. A lot. The various documents Apple needs to submit to The Open Group as part of the UNIX certification process are freely available, and mostly it's a lot of very technical questions about various very specific aspects of macOS' UNIX and POSIX compliance few of us would be able to corroborate without extensive research and in-depth knowledge of macOS, UNIX, and POSIX. However, at the end of every one of these Conformance Statements, there's a text field where the applicant can write down additional, explanatory material that was provided by the vendor", and it's in these appendices where we can see just how much Apple has to cheat to ensure macOS passes the various UNIX(R) 03 certification tests. In the first of these four documents, Internationalised System Calls and Libraries Extended V3, Apple's additional, explanatory material" reads as follows: Question 27: By default, core file generation is not enabled. To enable core file generation, you can issue this command: sudo launchctl limit core unlimited Testing Environment Addendum: macOS version 15.0 Sequoia, like previous versions, includes an additional security mechanism known as System Integrity Protection (SIP). This security policy applies to every running process, including privileged code and code that runs out of the sandbox. The policy extends additional protections to components on disk and at run-time, only allowing system binaries to be modified by the system installer and software updates. Code injection and runtime attachments to system binaries are no longer permitted. To run the VSX conformance test suite we first disable SIP as follows: - Shut down the system.- Press and hold the power button. Keep holding it while you see the Apple logo and the message Continue holding for startup options"- Release the power button when you see Loading startup options"- Choose Options" and click Continue"- Select an administrator account and enter its password.- From the Utilities menu in the Menu Bar, select Terminal.- At the prompt, issue the following command: csrutil disable"- You should see a message that SIP is disabled. From the Apple menu, select Restart". By default, macOS coalesces timeouts that are scheduled to occur within 5 seconds of each other. This can randomly cause some sleep calls to sleep for different times than requested (which affects tests of file access times) so we disable this coalescing when testing. To disable timeout coalescing issue this command: sudo sysctl -w kern.timer.coalescing_enabled=0 By default there is no root user. We enable the root user for testing using the following series of steps:- Launch the Directory Utility by pressing Command and Space, and then typing Directory Utility"- Click the Lock icon in Directory Utility and authenticate by entering an Administrator username and password.- From the Menu Bar in Directory Utility:- Choose Edit -> Enable Root User. Then enter a password for the root user, and confirm it.- Note: If you choose, you can later Disable Root User via the same menu. Apple's appendix to Internationalised System Calls and Libraries Extended V3 The second conformance statement, Commands and Utilities V4, has another appendix, and it's a real doozy (the indicate repeat remarks from the previous appendix; I've removed them for brevity): Testing Environment Addendum: The third and fourth conformance statements have

With the Linux 6.13 kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman described the level of Rust support as a tipping point" for Rust drivers with more of the Rust infrastructure having been merged. Now for the Linux 6.14 kernel, Greg describes the state of the Rust driver possibilities as almost at the write a real driver in rust" stage now, depending on what you want to do. Michael Larabel Excellent news, as there's a lot of interest in Rust, and it seems that allowing developers to write drivers for Linux in Rust will make at least some new and upcoming drivers comes with less memory safety issues than non-Rust drivers. I'm also quite sure this will anger absolutely nobody.

OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company's proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property. Cristina Criddle and Eleanor Olcott for the FT This is more ironic than writing a song called Ironic that lists situations that aren't actually ironic. OpenAI claims it's free to suck up whatever content and data it can find on the web without any form of permission or consent, but throws a tamper tantrum when someone takes whatever they regurgitate for their own use without permission or consent? Cry me a river.

Google, on its Google Maps naming policy, back in 2008: By saying common", we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage. Google, today, in 2025: Google has confirmed that Google Maps will soon rename the Gulf of Mexico and Denali mountain in Alaska as the Gulf of America" and Mount McKinley" in line with changes implemented by the Trump Administration, but users in the rest of the world may see two names for these locations. Nothing is worth less than the word of a corporation.

Long-time readers will know that my first video game love was the text-mode video game slash creation studio ZZT. One feature of this game is the ability to play simple music through the PC speaker, and back in the day, I remember that the format ZZM" existed, so you could enjoy the square wave tunes outside of the games. But imagine my surprise in 2025 to find that, while the Museum of ZZT does have a ZZM Audio section, it recommends that nobody use the format anymore; because nobody's made a player that doesn't require MS-DOS. Let's fix that by making a player with way higher system requirements, using everyone's favorite coding environment: Javascript. Nicole Branagan ZZM's history and Branagan's journey to make this work without having to rely on DOS took a lot more work than I expected, and is quite interesting, too. Very niche, for sure, but that's kind of what we're here for.

A bug in the ROM for the Macintosh II was recently discovered that causes a crash when booting in 32-bit mode. Doug Brown discovered and documented the bug while playing with the MAME debugger. Why did it never show up before? It seems a quirk in Motorola's 68030 CPU inadvertently fixes it when executing an illegal instruction that shouldn't have been executed in the first place. What follows is his process for investigating the room on emulated hardware, and then testing it on actual hardware.

Eric Migicovsky, founder of Pebble, the original smartwatch maker, made a major announcement today together with Google. Pebble was originally bought by Fitbit and in turn Fitbit was then bought by Google, but Migicovsky always wanted to to go back to his original idea and create a brand new smartwatch. PebbleOS took dozens of engineers working over 4 years to build, alongside our fantastic product and QA teams. Reproducing that for new hardware would take a long time. Instead, we took a more direct route - I asked friends at Google (which bought Fitbit, which had bought Pebble's IP) if they could open source PebbleOS. They said yes! Over the last year, a team inside Google (including some amazing ex-Pebblers turned Googlers) has been working on this. And today is the day - the source code for PebbleOS is now available at github.com/google/pebble (see their blog post). Eric Migicovsky Of course, this is amazing news for the still-thriving community of Pebble users who have kept the platform and their devices going through sheer force of will, but it also means Pebble is going to making a comeback in a more official capacity: alongside the announcement of PebbleOS becoming open source, there's also the unveiling of rePebble, a brand new Pebble watch that retains all of the popular features and specifications of the original devices. It'll run the open source PebbleOS, of course, and will be compatible with the existing ecosystem of applications. I've never had a Pebble, but there's no denying the company hit on something valuable, and I know people who still rock their original Pebble devices to this day. The excitement about this announcement is palpable, and I'm pleasantly surprised Google cared enough to work on making an open source PebbleOS a reality (I know of quite a few other companies sitting on deeply loved code and IP rotting away in obscurity). I can't wait to see what the new device will look like!

Speaking of AI", the Chinese company DeepSeek has lobbed a grenade dead-centre into the middle of the AI" bubble, and it's been incredibly entertaining to watch. DeepSeek has released several new AI" models, which seem to rival or even surpass OpenAI's latest ChatGPT models - but with a massive twist: DeepSeek, being Chinese, can't use NVIDIA's latest GPUs, and as such, was forced to work within very tight constraints. They've managed to surpass ChatGPT's best models with a fraction of the GPU horsepower, and thus a fraction of the cost, and a fraction of the energy requirements. But unlike ChatGPT's o1, DeepSeek is an open-weight" model that (although its training data remains proprietary) enables users to peer inside and modify its algorithm. Just as important is its reduced price for users - 27 times less than o1. Besides its performance, the hype around DeepSeek comes from its cost efficiency; the model's shoestring budget is minuscule compared with the tens of millions to hundreds of millions that rival companies spent to train its competitors. Ben Turner at LiveScience The fallout has been disastrous for NVIDIA, in particular. The company's stock price tumbled 17% today, and more entertaining yet, the various massive investments of hundreds of billions of dollars into western AI" seem like a huge waste of money. The DeepSeek models are also nominally open source, and are clearly showing that most likely, there simply isn't a huge AI" market worth hundreds of billions of dollars dollars at all. On top of that, the US is clearly not ahead in AI" at all, as was the common wisdom pretty much until yesterday. Of course, DeepSeek is Chinese, and that means censorship - the real kind - is a thing. Asking the latest DeepSeek model about the massacre at Tiananmen Square returns nothing, suggesting the user ask about other topics instead. I'm sure over the coming weeks more and more or these kinds of censorship will be discovered, but hopefully its open source nature will allow the models to be adapted and changed to remove such censorship. Do note that all of these AI" models are all deeply biased because they're trained on content that is itself deeply biased, thereby perpetuating and amplifying damaging stereotypes and inaccuracies, especially since people have a tendency to assume computers can't be biased. Whatever may happen, at least OpenAI losing its job to AI" is hilarious.

Apparently, since the beginning of the year, AI bots have been ensuring that websites can only respond to regular inquiries with a delay. The founder of Linux Weekly News (LWN-net), Jonathan Corbet, reports that the news site is therefore often slow to respond. The AI scraper bots cause a DDoS, a distributed denial-of-service attack. At times, the AI bots would clog the lines with hundreds of IP addresses simultaneously as soon as they decided to access the site's content. Corbet explains on Mastodon that only a small proportion of the traffic currently serves real human readers. Dirk Knop at Heise.de I'm sure someone will tell me we just have to accept that a large percentage of our bandwidth is going to overpriced bullshit generators, and that we should just suck it up and pay for Sam Altman's new house. I hope these same people realise AI" is destroying the last vestiges of the internet that haven't fallen victim to all the other techbro fads so far, and that sooner rather than later there won't be anything left to browse to. The coming few years are going to be fun.

The Linux kernel has become such an integral, core part of pretty much all aspects of the technology world, and corporate contributions to the kernel make up such a huge chunk of the kernel's ongoing development, it's easy to forget that some parts of the kernel are still maintained by some lone person in Jacksonville, Nebraska, or whatever. Sadly, we were reminded of this today when the sole maintainer of a few DRM (no, not the bad kind) announced he can no longer maintain the gud, mi0283qt, panel-mipi-dbi, and repaper drivers. Remove myself as maintainer for gud, mi0283qt, panel-mipi-dbi and repaper. My fatigue illness has finally closed the door on doing development of even moderate complexity so it's sad to let this go. Noralf Tronnes There must be quite a few obscure parts of the Linux kernel that are of no interest to the corporate world, and thus remain maintained by individuals in their free time, out of some personal need or perhaps a sense of duty. If one such person gives up their role as maintainer, for whatever reason, you better hope it's not something your workflow relies, because if no new maintainer is found, you will eventually run into trouble. I hope Tronnes gets better soon, and if not, that someone else can take over from him to maintain these drivers. The gud driver seems like a really neat tool for homebrew projects, and it'd be sad to see it languish as the years go by.

Basically, this seems to mean applications will no longer be allowed to limit themselves to phone size when running on devices with larger screens, like tablets. Other tidbits in this first beta include predictive back support for 3-button navigation, support for the Advanced Professional Video codec from Samsung, among other things. It's still quite early in the release process, so more is sure to come, and some things might not make it to the final release at all.

Snowdrop OS was born of my childhood curiosity around what happens when a PC is turned on, the mysteries of bootable disks, and the hidden aspects of operating systems. It is a 16-bit real mode operating system for the IBM PC architecture. I designed and developed this homebrew OS from scratch, using only x86 assembly language. I have created and included a number of utilities, including a file manager, text editor, graphical applications, BASIC interpreter, x86 assembler and debugger. I also ported one of my DOS games to it. After all, what kind of an operating system doesn't have games? Snowdrop OS' website It seems like every talented programmer will, at some point, think to themselves: I should write my own operating system. Most of these efforts strand pretty quickly - and that's fine! - but Sebastian Mihai's effort did not, and it has grown into a very capable operating system, especially given the constraints stemming from the chosen architecture - 16bit realmode x86 - and programming language - x86 assembly. Snowdrop OS is an incredibly impressive labour of love, and comes with a unique extra I haven't seen before: a daily development log covering over 600 days of development. No, this won't take over the world, but I love that is exists. More of this, please.

NixBSD is an attempt to make a reproducible and declarable BSD, based on NixOS. Although theoretically much of this work could be copied to build other BSDs, all work thus far has been focused on building a FreeBSD distribution. NixBSD GitHub page Look, it's my job to make sure I use and am familiar with as many operating systems and related tools as possible. As much as you guys support OSNews on Patreon or Ko-Fi, it's going to take a lot of you to push me to dive into Nix and NixOS, because every time I hear anything about it, people seem entirely in over their heads and spending way, way too much time trying to properly use it. I have a wife and two little children, and as much as Nix intrigues and fascinates, I'm not going to lose my sanity to it. Anyway, combining NixOS with FreeBSD seems like a fun project and a great idea, and also kind of an inevitability - any cool technology eventually makes its way to BSD in one way or another, after all. The project is in flux, and they're not at the stage where you can just download an ISO and get going, but if you're already knee-deep in Nix and want a new challenge, this might be right up your alley. Me, I'm not learning a programing language just to manage my packages. Or should I? For the memes?

SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer, has released version 3.2.0 of its development library. In case you don't know what SDL is: Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware via OpenGL and Direct3D. It is used by video playback software, emulators, and popular games including Valves award winning catalog and many Humble Bundle games. SDL website This new release has a lot of improvements and changes, and going through the changelog, you'll notice that they've massively improved the documentation, made the API naming conventions more consistent, added a ton of features for better platform integration, added camera and pen APIs, improved HiDPI support, and a ton more.

The operating system I'm not cool enough to run has pushed out a new release: 9front THIS TIME DEFINITELY" is now available. 9front is a fork of plan9, created after plan9 languished at Bell Labs. This release enables gefs, the new file system, in the installer, ip/ipconfig now support dhcpv6 dynamic allocations and handles prefix expirations", and it comes with some smaller changes, too, of course. Despite every piece of evidence to the contrary, I am simply not cool enough to run 9front. Maybe one day they'll notice me, and I get invited to the cool table where the Puffs eat lunch. Who doesn't want to ring a bell in the headmaster's office at midnight?