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With the current, rapidly deteriorating state of the Windows operating system, you have to take the small wins you can get: Microsoft is now offering the option of removing AI" actions from Windows 11's context menus. buried deep in the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7344 release notes, there's this nugget: If there are no available or enabled AI Actions, this section will no longer show in the context menu. Windows Insider Preview release notes If you then go to Settings > Apps > Actions and uncheck all the AI" actions, the entire submenu in Windows 11's context menus will vanish. While this is great news for those Windows users who don't want to be bothered by all the AI" nonsense, I wish Microsoft would just give users a proper way to edit the context menu that doesn't involve third party hackery. KDE's Dolphin file manager gives me full control over what does and does not appear in its context menu, and I can't imagine living without this functionality - there's so many file-related operations I never use, and having them clutter up the context menu is annoying and just slows me down. There's more substantial and important changes in this Insider Preview Build too, most notably the rollout of the Update Orchestration Platform, which should make downloading and installing application updates less cumbersome, but since it's a new feature, application won't support it right away. This release also brings the new Windows MIDI Services, and Microsoft hopes this will improve the experience for musicians using MIDI 1.0 or MIDI 2.0 on Windows. There's a slew of smaller changes, too, of course. I'm not exactly sure when these new features will make their way to production installations - who does, honestly, with Microsoft's convoluted release processes - but I hope it's sooner rather than later.

When Mac OS X was designed, it switched to the bundle structure inherited from NeXTSTEP. Instead of this multitude of resources, apps consisted of a hierarchy of directories containing files of executable code, and those with what had in Mac OS been supporting resources. Those app bundles came to adopt a standard form, shown below. Howard Oakley A short, but nonetheless informative overview of the structure of a macOS application. I'm sure most people on OSNews are aware that a macOS application is a bundle, which is effectively a glorified directory containing a variety of files and subdirectories that together make up the application. I haven't used macOS in a while, but I think you can right-click on an application and open it as a folder to dig around inside of it. I'm trying to remember from my days as a Mac OS X user - 15-20 years ago - if there was ever a real need to do so, but I'm sure there were a few hacks you could do by messing around with the files inside of application bundles. These days, perhaps with all the code-signing, phoning-home to Apple, and other security trickery going on, such acts are quite frowned upon. Does making any otherwise harmless changes inside an application bundle set off a ton of alarm bells in macOs these days?

The end of an era, perhaps. Applets are officially, completely removed from Java 26, coming in March of 2026. This brings to an official end the era of applets, which began in 1996. However, for years it has been possible to build modern, interactive web pages in Java without needing applets or plugins. TeaVM provides fast, performant, and lightweight tooling to transpile Java to run natively in the browser. And for a full front-end toolkit with templates, routing, components, and more, Flavour lets you build your modern single-page app using 100% Java. Andrew Oliver As consumers, we don't really encounter Java that much anymore unless we play Minecraft, but that doesn't mean Java no longer has a place in this world. In fact, it still consistently ranks in the top three of most popular programming languages, so any tools to make using Java easier, both for programmers and users, are welcome.

OSNews is funded entirely by you, our readers. There are no ads on OSNews, we are not part of a massive corporate publishing conglomerate like virtually every other technology news website, there are no wealthy (corporate) benefactors - it's just whatever funds you, our readers, send our way. As such, I sometimes need to remind everyone about this, and December, the holiday month, seems as great a time as any to do this. If you want to support a truly independent technology news website, free from the corrupting influences of corporate interests, advertising companies, managers pushing AI", and all the other nonsense destroying the web we once loved, you can do so by donating to keep OSNews alive. This gives me the time and means to write 9000 words about dead computer ecosystems, and I'm already working on an article about the next final UNIX workstation. Every single donation, large or small, is deeply appreciated and keeps the lights on around here. There aren't many websites like OSNews left, especially not independent ones that answer to nobody. Your support keeps OSNews going, with June 2026 marking a special moment for me: it will mark twenty years since I took over this place. I'm not expecting a party - you're paying me to work, not to party - but it is still a meaningful anniversary for me personally.

Some of you may be aware of rePalm, a project by Dmitry Grinberg to port the PalmOS to various devices it was never supposed to run on. We covered rePalm back in 2019 and again in 2023. His latest project involved porting PalmOS to a set of digital toys that were never intended to run PalmOS in any way. Fisher-Price (owned by Mattel) produced some toys in the early 2000 under the Pixter brand. They were touchscreen-based drawing toys, with cartridge-based extra games one could plug in. Pixter devices of the first three generations (classic", plus", and 2.0") featured 80*80 black-and-white screens, which makes them of no interest for rePalm. The last two generations of Pixter (color" and multimedia") featured 160*160 color displays. Now, this was more like it! Pixter was quite popular, as far as kids' toys go, in USA in the early 2000s. A friend brought it to my attention a year ago as a potential rePalm target. The screen resolution was right and looking inside a Pixter Color" showed an ARM SoC - a Sharp LH75411. The device had sound (games made noises), and touch panel was resistive. In theory - a viable rePalm target indeed. Dmitry Grinberg Considering the immensely limited ARMv7 implementation he had to deal with - no cache, no memory management unit, no memory protection unit - it's a miracle Grinberg managed to succeed. To make matters even harder, the first revision boards of the color" model only had 1MB of flash, which is incredibly small even for PalmOS 5, so he had to rewrite parts of it to make it fit. Implementing communication over infrared was also a major difficulty, but that, too he managed to get working - on a device that doesn't have IrDA SIR modulation. Wild. Grinberg went above and beyond, making sure the buttons on the devices work, developing and building a way to put PalmOS on a game" cartridge, reverse-engineering the display controller to make sure things like brightness adjustment works, adding screen type detection for that one small run of Pixter Color devices that came with a TFT instead of an STN screen, and so, so much more. Until you read the article, you have no idea how much work Grinberg put into this project. I continue to be in awe of Grinberg's work every time I come across it.

Now this is a great initiative by the Haiku team: highlight a number of stale commits that've been without interaction for years, explain why they've stalled, and then hope renewed interest might grow (part 1 and part 2). Recently some discussions on the forum led to asking about the status of our Gerrit code review. There are a lot of changes there that have been inactive for several years, with no apparent interest from anyone. To be precise, there are currently 358 commits waiting for review (note that Gerrit, unlike Github and other popular code review tools, works on a commit-by-commit basis, so each commit from a multiple-commit change is counted separately). The oldest one has not seen any comments since 2018. Today, let's have a look at some of these changes and see why they are stalled. Hopefully it will inspire someone to pick up the work and help finishing them up. Pulkomandy at the Haiku website Browsing through the highlighted stalled commits, there's a few that seem quite interesting and relatively easy for a (new?) contributor to seek their teeth into. For instance, there's a stalled commit to remove GCC from Haiku images built with clang/llvm, which stalled mostly because there are still other issues when building Haiku with clang/llvm. For a more complex problem, there's the issue of how every menu in BeOS/Haiku is also a window, including its own thread, which means navigating deeply nested menus creates and destroys a lot of threads, that all need to be synchronised, too. If you want to get really ambitious, there's the stalled commit to add initial 64bit PowerPC support. There's more of these, of course, so if you have the skills and will to contribute to a project like Haiku, this might be a great place to start and get your feet wet. Now that these commits are back in the spotlight, there's sure to be team members and regular contributors lined up to lend an extra hand, as well.

Oracle has released Solaris 11.4 SRU 87, which brings with it a whole slew of changes, updates, and fixes. Primarily, it upgrades Firefox and Thunderbird to their latest ESR 140.3.0 releases, and adds GCC 15, alongside a ton of updated other open source packages. On more Solaris 11-specific notes, useradd's account activation options have been changed to address some issues caused by stricter enforcement introduced in SRU 78, there's some preparations for the upgrade to BIND 9.20 in a future Solaris 11 release, a few virtualisation improvements, and much more. If you're unclear about the relationship between this new release and the Common Build Environment or CBE release of Solaris 11.4 for enthusiasts, released earlier this year, the gist is that these SRU updates are only available to people with Oracle Solaris support contracts, while any updates to the CBE release are available to mere mortals like you and I. If you have a support contract and are using the CBE, you can upgrade from the CBE to the official SRU releases, but without such a contract, you're out of luck. A new CBE release is in the works, and is planned to arrive in 2026 - which is great news, but I would love for the enthusiast variant of Solaris 11.4 to receive more regular updates. I don't think making these SRU updates available to enthusiasts in a non-commercial, zero-warranty kind of way would pose any kind of threat to Oracle's bottom line, but alas, I don't run a business like Oracle so perhaps I'm wrong.

This is the website for APL9, which is an APL implementation written in C on and for Plan 9 (9front specifically, but the other versions should work as well). Work started in January 2022, when I wanted to do some APL programming on 9front, but no implementation existed. The focus has been on adding features and behaving (on most points) likeDyalog APL. Speed is poor, since many primitives are implemented in terms of each other, which is not optimal, but it helped me implement stuff easier. APL9 website I honestly have no idea what to say.

Microsoft has lowered sales growth targets for its AI agent products after many salespeople missed their quotas in the fiscal year ending in June, according to areportWednesday from The Information. The adjustment is reportedly unusual for Microsoft, and it comes after the company missed a number of ambitious sales goals for its AI offerings. Benj Edwards at Ars Technica I'm sure this is fine and not a sign of anything at all.

I would think most of us here at OSNews are aware of VisiOn, the graphical multitasking operating system for the IBM PC which was one of the first operating systems with a graphical user interface, predating Windows, GEM, the Mac, and even the Apple Lisa. While VisiOn was technically an open" platform anybody could develop an application for, the operating system's SDK cost $7000 at the time and required a VAX system. This, combined with VisiOn failing in the market, means nobody knows how to develop an application for it. Until now. Over the past few months, Nina Kalinina painstakingly unraveled VisiOn so that she she could recreate the SDK from scratch. In turn, this allowed developer Atsuko to develop a clean-room application for VisiOn - which is most likely the very first third-party application ever developed and released for VisiOn. I've been following along with the pains Kalinina had to go through for this endeavour over on Fedi, and it sure was a wild ride few would be willing (and capable) to undertake. It took me a month of working 1-2 hours a day to produce a specification that allowed Atsuko to implement aclean-roomhomebrew application for VisiOn that is capable of bitmap display, menus and mouse handling. If you're wondering what it felt like: this project is the largest Sudoku puzzle" I have ever tried to solve. In this note, I have tried to explain the process of solving this puzzle, as well as noteworthy things about VisiOn and its internals. Nina Kalinina The article contains both a detailed look at VisiOn, as well as the full process of recreating its SDK and developing an application with it. Near the end of the article, after going over all the work that was required to get here, there's a sobering clarification: This reverse-engineering project ended up being much bigger than I anticipated. We have a working application, yes, but so far I've documented less than 10% of all the VisiHost and VisiOp calls. We still don't know how to implement keyboard input, or how to work with timers and background processes (if it is possible). Nina Kalinina I'd love for more people to be interested in helping this effort out, as it's not just an extremely difficult challenge, but also a massive contribution to software preservation. VisiOn may not be more than a small footnote in computing history, but it still deserves to be remembered and understood, and Kalinina and Atsuko have done an amazing amount of legwork for whomever wants to pick this up, too.

Did you know thatBG3players exploit children? Are you aware thatQi2 slows older Pixels? If we wrote those misleading headlines, readers would rip us a new one - but Google is experimentally beginning to replace the original headlines on stories it serves with AI nonsense like that. Sean Hollister at The Verge I'm a little teapot, short and stout. Here is my handle, here is my spout. When I get all steamed up, hear me shout. Tip me over and pour me out!

You may have noticed that due to AI" companies buying up all literally all the RAM in the world, prices for consumer RAM and SSDs have gone completely batshit insane. Well, it's only going to get worse, since Micron has announced it's going to exit the market for consumer RAM and is, therefore, retiring its Crucial brand. The reason? You know the reason. The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments," said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron Technology. Micron's press release First it was the crypto pyramid scheme, and now it's the AI" pyramid scheme. These MLMs for unimpressive white males who couldn't imagine themselves out of a wet paper bag are ruining not just the environment, software, and soon the world's economy when the bubble pops, but are now also making it extraordinarily expensive to buy some RAM or a bit of storage. Literally nothing good is coming from these techbro equivalents of Harlequin romance novels, and yet, we're forced to pretend they're the next coming of the railroads every time some guy who was voted most likely to die a middle manager at Albertsons in Casper, Wyoming, farts his idea out on a napkin. I am so tired.

An exciting tidbit of news from Redox, the Rust-based operating system. Its founder and lead developer Jeremy Soller has merged the first changes for a modesetting driver for Intel graphics. After a few nights of reading through thousands of pages of PRMs I have finally implemented a modesetting driver for Intel HD graphics on Redox OS. There is much more to do, but there is now a clear path to native hardware accelerated graphics! Jeremy Soller Of course, all the usual disclaimers apply, but it's an important first step, and once again underlines that Redox is turning into a very solid platform that might just be on the cusp of becoming something we can use every day.

It's always a bit sad and a little awkward when reality starts hitting long-time fans and users of an operating system, isn't it? I feel like I'm at least fifteen years ahead of everyone else when it comes to macOS, at least. Over the last few weeks I've beendiscovering problemsthat have been eroding confidence in macOS. From text files that simply won't show up in Spotlight search, to Clock timers that are blank and don't function, there's one common feature: macOS encounters an error or fault, but doesn't report that to the user, instead just burying it deep in the log. When you can spare the time, the next step is to contact Apple Support, who seem equally puzzled. You're eventually advised to reinstall macOS or, in the worst case, to wipe a fairly new Apple silicon Mac and restore it in DFU mode, but have no reason to believe that will stop the problem from recurring. You know that Apple Support doesn't understand what's going wrong, and despite the involvement of support engineers, they seem as perplexed as you. Howard Oakley I remember when Mac OS X was so far ahead of the competition it was honestly a little tragic. Around the late PowerPC and very early Intel days, when the iPhone hadn't yet had the impact on the company it has now, the Mac and its operating system were the star of the company's show, and you felt it when you used it. Even though the late PowerPC hardware was being outpaced left, right, and centre by Intel and AMD hardware in virtually every sense, Mac OS X more than made up for it being being a carefully and lovingly crafted operating system designed and developed by people who clearly deeply cared. I used nothing but Macs as a result. These days, everything's reversed. By all accounts, Macs are doing amazing hardware-wise, with efficient, powerful processors and solid design. The operating system, however, has become a complete and utter mess, showing us that no, merely having great hardware does not make up for shit software in the same way the reverse was true two decades ago. I'd rather use a slower, hotter laptop with great software than a faster, cooler laptop with terrible software. I'm not sure we're going to see this trend reversed any time soon. Apple, too, is chasing the dragon, and everything the company does is designed around their cash cow, and I just don't see how that's going to change without a complete overhaul of the company's leadership.

What if you have a Risc PC, but aside from RISC OS, you also want to run Linux? Well, then you have to jump through a lot of hoops, especially in 2025. Well, this was a mess. I don't know why Potato is so crashy when I install it. I don't know why the busybox binary in the Woody initrd is so broken. But I've got it installed, and now I can do circa-2004 UNIX things with a machine from 1994. Jonathan Pallant The journey is definitely the most rewarding experience here for us readers, but I'm fairly sure Pallant is just happy to have a working Linux installation on his Risc PC and wants to mostly forget about that journey. Still, reading about the Risc PC is very welcome, since it's one of those platforms you just don't hear about very often between everyone talking about classic Macs and Commodore 64s all the time.

OK I promised computers, so let's move to the Tek 4051 I got! Released in 1975, this was based on the 4010 series of terminals, but with a Motorola 6800 computer inside. This machine ran, like so many at the time, BASIC, but with extra subroutines for drawing and manipulating vector graphics. 8KB RAM was standard, but up to 32KB RAM could be installed. Extra software was installed via ROM modules in the back, for example to add DSP routines. Data could be saved on tape, and via RS232 and GBIP external devices could be attached! All in all, a pretty capable machine, especially in 1975. BASIC computers where getting common, but graphics was pretty new. According to Tektronix the 4051 was ideal for researches, analysts and physicians, and this could be yours for the low low price of 6 grand, or around $36.000 in 2025. I could not find sales figures, but it seems that this was a decently successful machine. Tektronix also made the 4052, with a faster CPU, and the 4054, a 19'' 4K resolution behemoth! Tektronix continued making workstations until the 90s but like almost all workstations of the era, x86/Linux eventually took over the entire workstation market. Rik te Winkel at Just another electronics blog Now that's a retro computer you don't see very often.

The FreeBSD team has released FreeBSD 15.0, and with it come several major changes, one of which you will surely want to know more about if you're a FreeBSD user. Since this change will eventually drastically change the way you use FreeBSD, we should get right into it. Up until now, a full, system-wide update for FreeBSD - as in, updating both the base operating system as well as any packages you have installed on top of it - would use two separate tools: freebsd-update and the pkg package manager. You used the former to update the base operating system, which was installed as file sets, and the latter to update everything you had installed on top of it in the form of packages. With FreeBSD 15.0, this is starting to change. Instead of using two separate tools, in 15.0 you can opt to deprecate freebsd-update and file sets, and rely entirely on pkg for updating both the base operating system as well as any packages you have installed, because with this new method, the base system moves from file sets to packages. When installing FreeBSD 15.0, the installer will ask you to choose between the old method, or the new pkg-only method. Packages (pkgbase / New Method): The base system is installed as a set of packages from the FreeBSD-base" repository. Systems installed this way are managed entirely using the pkg(8) tool. This method is used by default for all VM images and images published in public clouds. In FreeBSD 15.0, pkgbase is offered as a technology preview, but it is expected to become the standard method for managing base system installations and upgrades in future releases. FreeBSD 15.0 release announcement As the release announcement notes, the net method is optional in FreeBSD 15 and will remain optional during the entire 15.x release cycle, but the plan is to deprecate freebsd-update and file sets entirely in FreeBSD 16.0. If you have an existing installation you wish to convert to using pkgbase, there's a tool called pkgbasify to do just that. It's sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation, so it's not some random script. Of course, there's way more in this release than just pkgbase. Of note is that the 32bit platforms i386, armv6, and 32-bit powerpc have been retired, but of course, 32bit code will continue to run on their 64bit counterparts. FreeBSD 15.0 also brings a native inotify implementation, a ton of improvements to the audio components, improved Intel Wi-Fi drivers, and so, so much more.

On its own, the title of this post is just a true piece of trivia, verifiable withthe built-insubsttool(among other methods). Here's an example creating the drive+:\as an alias for a directory atC:\foo: The+:\drive then works as normal (at least in cmd.exe, this will be discussed more later): However, understandingwhyit's true elucidates a lot about how Windows works under the hood, and turns up a few curious behaviors. Ryan Liptak Fascinating doesn't even begin to describe this article, but at the same time, it also makes me wonder at what point maintaining this drive letter charade becomes too burdensome, clunky, and complex. Internally, Windows NT does not use drive letters at all, but for the sake of backwards compatibility and to give the user what they expect, a whole set of abstractions has been crafted to create the illusion that modern versions of Windows still use the same basic drive letter conventions as DOS did 40 years ago. I wonder if we'll ever reach a point where Windows no longer uses drive letters, or if it's possible today to somehow remove or disable these abstractions entirely, and run Windows NT without drive letters, as Cutler surely intended. Vast swaths of Windows programs would surely curl up in fetal position and die, including many core components of the operating system itself - as this article demonstrates, very few parts of Windows can handle even something as mundane as a drive letter outside of A-Z - but it'd make for a great experiment. Someone with just the right set of Windows NT skills must've tried something like this at some point, either publicly or inside of Microsoft.

What do you do if you develop a lightweight browser that doesn't support JavaScript, but you once chose GitHub as the home for your code? You're now in the unenviable position that your own browser can no longer access your own online source repository because it requires JavaScript, which is both annoying and, well, a little awkward. The solution is, of course, obvious: you move somewhere else. That's exactly what the Dillo browser did. They set up a small VPS, opted for cgit as the git frontend for its performance and small size, and for the bug tracker, they created a brand new, very simple bug tracker. To avoid this problem, I created my own bug tracker software,buggy, which is a very simple C tool that parses plain Markdown files and creates a single HTML page for each bug. All bugs are stored in agit repositoryand a git hook regenerates the bug pages and the index on each new commit. As it is simply plain text, I can edit the bugs locally and only push them to the remote when I have Internet back, so it works nice offline. Also, as the output is just an static HTML site, I don't need to worry about having any vulnerabilities in my code, as it will only run at build time. Rodrigo Arias Mallo There's more considerations detailed in the article about Dillo's migration, and it can serve as inspiration for anyone else running a small open source project who wishes to leave GitHub behind. With GitHub's continuing to add more and more complexity and AI" to separate open source code from its licensing terms, we may see more and more projects giving GitHub the finger.

Landlock is a Linux API that lets applications explicitly declare which resources they are allowed to access. Its philosophy is similar to OpenBSD'sunveil()and (less so)pledge(): programs can make a contract with the kernel stating, I only need these files or resources - deny me everything else if I'm compromised." It provides a simple, developer-friendly way to add defense-in-depth to applications. Compared to traditional Linux security mechanisms, Landlock is vastly easier to understand and integrate. This post is meant to be an accessible introduction, and hopefully persuade you to give Landlock a try. prizrak.me blog I had no idea this existed, even though it seems to plug a hole in the security and sandboxing landscape on Linux by not requiring any privileges and by being relatively simple and straightforward to use. There's even an additional supervisor" proposal that would bring Android-like permissions not just to, say, desktop applications (see Flatpak), but to every process trying to access anything for the first time. I'm not knowledgeable enough to make any statements about Landlock compared to any other options we have for securing desktop Linux in a user-friendly, non-intrusive manner, but I definitely like its simplicity.

Only a few weeks ago, the CHRP variants of Mac OS 7.6 and 8 were discovered and uploaded to the internet for posterity, but we're already seeing the positive results of this event unfold: Mac OS 7.x can now run on the Mac Mini G4 - natively. The very short of it is as follows. First, the CHRP release of Mac OS 8 contains a ROM file that allows Mac OS 8 to boot on the G4 Mac Mini. Second, the CHRP release of 7.6 contains a System Enabler that allows 7.6 earlier versions to run by using the aforementioned ROM file. Third, the ROM has been modified to add compatibility with as many Mac models as possible. There's a lot more to it, of course, but the end result is that quite a few more older, pre-9.x versions of Mac OS can now run on G4 and G3 Macs, which is quite cool. Of course, there are limitations. Note that, although I describe many of these as stable", I mean you can use much of it normally (sound/video/networking aside) without it crashing or misbehaving, at least not too hard, but that is not to say everything works, because that is just not the case. For example, when present, avoid opening the Apple System Profiler, unless you want a massive crash as it struggles trying to profile and gather all the information about your system. Some other apps or Control Panels might either not work, or work up to a certain point, after which they might freeze, requiring you to Force Quit the Finder to keep on going. And so on. Jubadub at Mac OS 9 Lives Issues or no, this is amazing news, and great work by all involved.

The release 25.11 wraps up our year of rigidity, clarity, performance" with a bouquet of vast under-the-hood improvements. Genode's custom kernel received special tuning of its new CPU scheduler for Sculpt-OS workloads, and became much more scalable with respect to virtual-memory management. Combined, those efforts visibly boost the performance of Sculpt OS on performance-starved hardware like the PinePhone or the i.MX8-based MNT Reform laptop. On account of improving clarity, our new configuration format - now named human-inclined data (HID) - proliferates throughout Genode's tooling. We are also happy to report that almost all Genode components have become interoperable with both XML and HID by now. Genode OS Framework 25.11 release notes The Genode Framework 25.11 also brings a major change to how important shared components that aren't strictly part of the framework are handled, such as ports like libSDL, sqlite, or gnutls. Before, these could only be built with the Genode build system, which was suboptimal because this isn't designed for building individual components. Several changes have been made to now enable the use of multiple build systems and the Goa SDK, which should make it a lot easier to these crucial components to become the responsibility of wider parts of the community. There's way more, of course, such as the usual driver improvements, including the addition of support for serial-to-USB adapters.

During a Dell earnings call, the company mentioned some staggering numbers regarding the amount of PCs that will not or cannot be upgraded to Windows 11. We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven't been upgraded," said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on aQ3 earnings callearlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell's slice of machines. And we have another 500 million that are four years old that can't run Windows 11." He sees this as an opportunity to guide customers towards the latest Windows 11 machines and AI PCs, but warns that the PC market is going to be relatively flat next year. Tom Warren at The Verge The monumental scale of the Windows 10 install base that simply won't or cannot upgrade to Windows 11 is massive, and it's absolutely bonkers to me that we're mostly just letting them get away with leaving at least a billion users out in the cold when it comes to security updates and bug fixes. The US government (in better times) and the EU should've 100% forced Microsoft's hand, as leaving this many people on outdated, unsupported operating system installations is several disasters waiting to happen. Aside from the dangerous position Microsoft is forcing its Windows 10 users into, there's also the massive environmental and public health impact of huge swaths of machines, especially in enterprise environments, becoming obsolete overnight. Many of these will end up in landfills, often shipped to third-world countries so we in the west don't have to deal with our e-waste and its dangerous consequences directly. I can get fined for littering - rightfully so - but when a company like Microsoft makes sweeping decisions which cause untold amounts of dangerous chemicals to be dumped in countless locations all over the globe, governments shrug it off and move on. At least we will get some cheap eBay hardware out of it, I guess.

So my love for the Common Desktop Environment isn't exactly a secret, so let's talk about the project's latest release, CDE 2.5.3, released a few days ago. As the version number suggests, this first new version in two years is a rather minor release, containing only a few bug fixes. For instance, CDE's window manager dtwm picked up support for more mouse buttons, its file manager dtfile now uses sh to find files instead of ksh, and a few more of these rather minor, but welcome, changes and bugfixes. Ever since CDE was released as open source over thirteen years ago, and while considerable work has been done to make it build, install, and run on modern platforms, that's kind of where the steam ran out. CDE isn't being actively developed to build upon its strengths and add new and welcome features and conveniences, but is instead kept in a sort of buildable stasis. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this - it keeps CDE accessible on modern platforms, and that's a huge amount of work that deserves respect and gratitude - but it'd be nice if we lived in a world where there was enough interest (and time and money) to have people work on actually improving it. Of course, the reality is that there'd be very little interest in such an improved CDE, and that's exactly why it isn't happening. On top op the current work the CDE team is doing, you'd need to not only develop new features, but also improve the Motif toolkit to make such new features possible, and make sure such improvements don't break anything else. With such an old codebase, that can't possible be an easy task. Still, I will continue to daydream of a slightly more modernised CDE with some additional niceties we've come to expect over the past 30 years, even if I know full well it's futile.

Mossis a Unix-like, Linux-compatible kernel written in Rust and Aarch64 assembly. It features a modern, asynchronous core, a modular architecture abstraction layer, and binary compatibility with Linux userspace applications (currently capable of running most BusyBox commands). Moss' GitHub page I mean, hobby operating systems and kernels written in Rust aren't exactly the most unique right now, but that doesn't make them any less interesting for the kinds of people that frequent a site called OSNews. Moss has quite a few things going for it, including support for enough Linux system calls to run most BusyBox commands, complex memory and process management, use of Rust's async/awaitmodel in the kernel, and much more.

I love my job. I make a great salary, there's a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five days a week, from morning to night, outside work, I'm actually a really good person. Emily Bressler at McSweeney's The tech industry is full of people like this.

The KDE project has made the call. Well folks, it's the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included. The Plasma Team They're following in the footsteps of the GNOME project, who will also be leaving the legacy windowing system behind. What this means in practice is that official KDE X11 support will cease once KDE Plasma 6.7 is no longer supported, which should be somewhere early 2027. Do note that the KDE developers intend to release a few extra bugfix releases in the 6.7 release cycle to stabilise the X11 session as much as possible for those people who are going to stick with KDE Plasma 6.7 to keep X11 around. For people who wish to keep using X11 after that point, the KDE project advises them to switch to LTS distributions like Alma Linux, which intend to keep supporting Plasma X11 until 2032. Xwayland will handle virtually all X11 applications running inside the Wayland session, including X11 forwarding, with similar functionality implemented in Wayland through Waypipe. Also note that this only applies to Plasma as a whole; KDE applications will continue to support X11 when run in other desktop environments or on other platforms. As for platforms other than Linux - FreeBSD already has relatively robust Wayland support, so if you intend to run KDE on FreeBSD in the near future, you'll have to move over to Wayland there, as well. The other BSD variants are also dabbling with Wayland support, so it won't be long before they, too, will be able to run the KDE Plasma Wayland session without any issues. What this means is that the two desktop environments that probably make up like 95% of the desktop Linux user base will now be focusing exclusively on Wayland, which is great news. X11 is a legacy platform and aside from retrocomputing and artisanal, boutique setups, you simply shouldn't be using it anymore. Less popular desktop environments like Xfce, Cinnamon, Budgie, and LXQt are also adding Wayland support, so it won't be much longer before virtually no new desktop Linux installations will be using X11. One X down, one more to go.

With all the problems Windows is facing, I think one area where Microsoft can make some easy, quick gains is by drastically improving Explorer, Windows' file manager. It seems that in the latest developer releases, they're doing just that. The most impactful change - possibly - is that Microsoft is going to preload Explorer. We're exploring preloading File Explorer in the background to help improve File Explorer launch performance. This shouldn't be visible to you, outside of File Explorer hopefully launching faster when you need to use it. If you have the change, if needed there is an option you can uncheck to disable this called Enable window preloading for faster launch times" in File Explorer's Folder Options, under View. Windows Insider Program Team Microsoft is also reordering the context menu in Explorer, and while this may seem like a small set of changes, the new context menu does look much tidier and less busy. They achieve this by moving a few top-level items to a submenu, and reordering some other elements. Sadly, the context menu still retains its own context menu (Show more options"), which is a traditional Win32 menu - which I still think is one of the most Windows of Windows things of all time. Regardless, I hope these small changes make Explorer more bearable to use for those of you still using Windows, because we all know you need it.

Google has made it very clear that it's intending to bring Android to laptops and desktops, and replace Chrome OS with Android in the process. We now have a codename, and some more information about what this will look like in practice. Over the weekend, a tipster on Telegram named Frost Core shared a link to an intriguing Google job listing for a Senior Product Manager, Android, Laptop and Tablets.' While we already know Google is bringing Android to the PC, the listing explicitly states that the role involves working on a new Aluminium, Android-based, operating system.' This effectively confirms that Aluminium is the codename for the new unified platform. The name appears to be a nod to the project's roots: like Chromium (the open-source version of ChromeOS), Aluminium is a metal ending in -ium.' The choice of the British spelling - emphasizing the Al' prefix - likely pays homage to Android serving as the project's foundation." Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority So we have the codename, and of course, what we also have is a strong focus on AI", which will be at the core" of desktop Android. Further details uncovered in job openings include a focus not just on entry-level hardware, but also midrange and premium laptops and desktops, as well as Chrome OS being replaced by this new desktop Android variant. I somehow doubt existing Chrome OS devices will be updated to this new desktop Android variant, so Chrome OS will continue to exist as a product for at least quite a few years to come. I still have a considerable amount of doubt that Google would be able to pull this off in a successful way. It's already hard enough to get anyone to buy any laptop that isn't running Windows or macOS, and I doubt the Android operating system has the kind of pull with consumers to make them consider switching to it on their laptops or desktops. Enthusiasts will surely eat it up - if only to try - but without any clear, massive success, this desktop Android thing runs the real risk of ending up at Google's graveyard. These Android laptops can be incredible products, but even if they are, I just won't trust Google to remain interested in it.

You may have noticed a sharp increase in problems and issues in Windows recently - following the rise of the AI" hype cycle, entirely coincidentally, I'm sure - and it seems Microsoft is finally starting to acknowledge just how bad Windows has become. On the positive side though, following all that backlash, Microsoftacknowledged Windows has issues, and as if on cue, the company in a new support article has admitted that there are problems on almost every major Windows 11 core feature. The issues are related to XAML and this impacts all theShell componentslike the Start Menu, Taskbar, Explorer, and Windows Settings. Sayan Sen at Neowin It's wild how many core components like this have apparently been broken due to these problems since July of this year. This means countless Windows users have been experiencing weird issues on a daily basis in multiple components for four months now, which is absolutely wild. On top of all the more structural problems in Windows, I wonder how people can get anything done at all - only a few days ago, I had to manually clean out the Installer folder in the Windows folder on my wife's gaming PC, because for some inexplicable reason, Windows decided to permanently store 18GB's worth (!) of past Adobe Acrobat updates and installers in there. It's impossible to reliably say that Microsoft's incessant focus on crypto NFTs AI" lies at the root of all of these problems, but if 30% of new" code in Microsoft is indeed regurgitated by AI", it's hard not to conclude as such.

I suspect that many people who take an interest in Internet privacy don't appreciate how hard it is to resist browser fingerprinting. Taking steps to reduce it leads to inconvenience and, with the present state of technology, even the most intrusive approaches are only partially effective. The data collected by fingerprinting is invisible to the user, and stored somewhere beyond the user's reach. On the other hand, browser fingerprinting produces only statistical results, and usually can't be used to track or identify a user with certainty. The data it collects has a relatively short lifespan - days to weeks, not months or years. While it probably can be used for sinister purposes, my main concern is that it supports the intrusive, out-of-control online advertising industry, which has made a wasteland of the Internet. Kevin Boone My view on this matter is probably a bit more extreme than some: I believe it should be illegal to track users for advertising purposes, because the data collected and the targeting it enables not only violate basic privacy rights enshrined in most constitutions, they also pose a massive danger in other ways. This very same targeting data is already being abused by totalitarian states to influence our politics, which has had disastrous results. Of course, our own democratic governments' hands aren't exactly clean either in this regard, as they increasingly want to use this data to stop terrorists" and otherwise infringe on basic rights. Finally, any time such data ends up on the black market after data breaches, criminals, organised or otherwise, also get their hands on it. I have no idea what such a ban should look like, or if it's possible to do this even remotely effectively. In the current political climate in many western countries, which are dominated by the wealthy few and corporate interests, it's highly unlikely that even if such a ban was passed as lip service to concerned constituents, any fines or other deterrents would probably be far too low to make a difference anyway. As such, my desire to have targeted online advertising banned is mostly theory, not practice - further illustrated by the European Union caving like cowards on privacy to even the slightest bit of pressure. Best I can do for now is not partake in this advertising hellhole. I disabled and removed all advertising from OSNews recently, and have always strongly advised everyone to use as many adblocking options as possible. We not only have a Pi-Hole to keep all of our devices at home safe, but also use a second layer of on-device adblockers, and I advise everyone to do the same.

We need to consume. The average American now holds onto their smartphone for 29 months, according to arecent survey by Reviews.org, and that cycle is getting longer. The average was around 22 months in 2016. While squeezing as much life out of your device as possible may save money in the short run, especially amid widespread fears about the strength of the consumer and job market, it might cost the economy in the long run, especially when device hoarding occurs at the level of corporations. Kevin Williams at CNBC Line must go up. Line must go up.

For the past 18 months, the Linux OEM Tuxedo Computers has been working on bringing a Snapdragon X Elite ARM laptop to market, but now they cancelled the project due to complications. Development turned out to be challenging due to the different architecture, and in the end, the first-generation X1E proved to be less suitable for Linux than expected. In particular, the long battery runtimes-usually one of the strong arguments for ARM devices-were not achieved under Linux. A viable approach for BIOS updates under Linux is also missing at this stage, as is fan control. Virtualization with KVM is not foreseeable on our model, nor are the high USB4 transfer rates. Video hardware decoding is technically possible, but most applications lack the necessary support. Given these conditions, investing several more months of development time does not seem sensible, as it is not foreseeable that all the features you can rightfully expect would be available in the end. In addition, we would be offering you a device with what would then be a more than two-year-old Snapdragon X Elite (X1E), whose successor, the Snapdragon X2 Elite (X2E), was officially introduced in September 2025 and is expected to become available in the first half of 2026. Tuxedo's announcement Back when Qualcomm was hyping up these processors, the company made big claims about supporting Linux equally to Windows, but those promises have turned out to be absolutely worthless. Tuxedo already highlighted the problems it was dealing with half a year ago, and now it seems these problems have become impossible to overcome - at least for now. This is a shame, bu also not entirely unexpected, since there's no way a small Linux OEM can do the work that Qualcomm promised it would do for its own chip. All this sadly means we still don't really have proper Linux support for modern ARM laptops, which is a crying shame. The problem isn't so much Linux itself, but the non-standardised world of ARM hardware. Large OEMs are willing to do the work to make Windows work, but despite recent successes, desktop Linux is nowhere near as popular as Windows, so there's little incentive for OEMs (or Qualcomm) to step up their game. It is what it is.

The CHESSmate was demonstrated at the January 1978 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as a prototype in order to assess customer interest in the product. It was available for order at the June 1978 CES in Chicago and the first units, manufactured in Hong Kong, shipped later that year. It was a big seller in Germany from the beginning. Peter R. Jennings There's no way I can summarise this story.

Blasts from the pasts are often fun, and in the case of feature removals from Windows, it's often accompanied by surprise that the feature in question still existed. Case in point: This article provides essential information about the deprecation and planned removal ofWindows Internet Name Service (WINS)from future Windows Server releases. Microsoft has announced that WINS will be removed from all Windows Server releases after Windows Server 2025 and will remain under thestandard support lifecyclethrough November 2034. Organizations using WINS are strongly encouraged to migrate to modern DNS-based name resolution solutions. Microsoft knowledge base article WINS was introduced with Windows NT 3.5 back in 1994, and maps NetBIOS to IP addresses in much the same way DNS maps domains names to IP addresses. Nobody should be using WINS anymore, and Microsoft has been discouraging its use for a long time now. With the ubiquity of DNS, WINS serves very little purpose, so it makes sense Microsoft is removing it from Windows.

LionsOS is an operating system based on theseL4 microkernelwith the goal of making the achievements of seL4 accessible. That is, to provide performance, security, and reliability. It is not a conventional operating system, but contains composable components for creating custom operating systems that are specific to a particular task. Components are joined together using theMicrokittool. LionsOS website The project is under active research and development, led by theTrustworthy Systemsresearch group atUNSW Sydneyin Australia. The source code is available on GitHub.

Inter-corporation bullshit screwing over consumers - a tale as old as time. Major laptop vendors have quietly removed hardware decode support for the H.265/HEVC codec in several business and entry-level models, a decision apparently driven by rising licensing fees. Users working with H.265 content may face reduced performance unless they verify codec support or rely on software workarounds. Hilbert Hagedoornn at The Guru of 3D You may want to know how much these licensing fees are, and by how much they're increasing next year, making these laptop OEMs remove features to avoid the costs. The HEVC licensing fee is $0.20 per device, and in 2026 it's increasing to $0.24. Yes, a $0.04 increase per device is forcing" these giant companies to screw over their consumers. Nobody's coming out a winner here, and everyone loses. We took a wrong turn, but nobody seems to know when and where.

LisaGUI is an amazing project that recreates the entire user interface of the Apple Lisa in the browser, using nothing but CSS, a bit of HTML, and SVG files, and it's an absolute joy to use and experience. Its creator, Andrew Yaros, has published a blog post diving into the why and how of LisaGUI. I had been trying to think of a good project to add to my programming portfolio, which was lacking. Finding an idea I was willing and able to execute on proved harder than expected. Good ideas are born from necessity and enthusiasm; trying to create a project for its own sake tends to be an uphill battle. I was also hoping to think of a specific project idea that hasn't really been tried before. As you may have guessed by the title of this post,LisaGUIended up being that project, although I didn't really set out to make it as much as I stumbled into it while trying to accomplish something else. Andrew Yaros I'm someone who prefers to run the real thing on real hardware, but in a lot of cases, that's just not realistic anymore. Hardware like the Apple Lisa are not only hard to find and expensive, they also require considerable knowledge and skill to maintain and possibly repair, which not everyone can do. For these types of machines, virtualisation, emulation, and recreation are much better, more accessible options, especially if it involves hardware and software you're not interested enough in to spend time and money on them.

In my detailed article about the Sun Microsystems ecosystem of the late 2000s, I mentioned an issue I ran into with the latest (leaked) patchset for Solaris 10, the one from 2020, available on Archive.org. Sun does not make Solaris 10 patches and patchsets from 2014 and later freely available online, restricting them to big enterprise customers with expensive support contracts. The same restrictions apply to mere support documents for Solaris 10, so that issues documented by Oracle, including causes and possible solutions, are only accessible to those with support contracts. The specific issue I ran into is that after installing the 2020 patchset, the Solaris Management Console, a GUI application written in Java with which you can manage certain aspects of your system, would no longer work. It would start up, but any settings panel you tried to load would throw up an RMI_ERR: error unmarshalling return, rendering the SMC effectively non-functional. This problem is documented in Oracle Doc ID 1559490.1, but of course, the Cause and Solution sections are hidden. I like weird commercial UNIX configuration GUIs, so even though you can do all of the SMC's tasks with command-line tools, I still want it to work. Judging by the error and the countless references to Java updates, it's easy to figure out that the root cause is an updated version of Java installed by the patchset that the SMC doesn't like. You'd think uninstalling any relevant patches would solve the problem, but I tried that and it didn't make a difference, so I was hoping Oracle perhaps had a later patch to fix the issue, or perhaps a proper workaround to get the SMC working again. Well, a screenshot of the remainder of that Oracle Doc ID mysteriously materialised on my Ultra 45 this morning, and it turns out that Oracle just... Doesn't care. Honestly, I can't blame them. Solaris 10 is old, outdated, pure legacy, and the very small number of organisations still using it are probably using it in Solaris Zones on servers anyway, and definitely not as a workstation/desktop operating system. There is zero incentive for Oracle to waste any time trying to fix this issue that, let's be honest, really only affects one person in the entire world: me. Still, I wanted it fixed, and so I brute-forced a solution. It's pretty straightforward: just change your default Java version back to one that the Solaris Management Console can work with. While I have Java 1.6.0 and 1.8.0 installed on the Ultra 45, with 1.6.0 being the default, the SMC will only work when 1.5.0 is set as your default Java version. There's a wide variety of ways to do this, ranging from hatchets to scalpels, but considering nothing else on Solaris 10/SPARC on the Ultra 45 relies on 1.6.0 or later (as far as I can tell, at least), I took a hatchet approach and just changed the /usr/java symlink so that it pointed to 1.5.0 again. It's that simple. Like I said, there are far more elegant ways of doing this, down to various scripts and other things to force only the SMC to use this specific Java version, but it's not worth the effort to figure that out, and this works just as well. So, just in case there's ever going to be a second person looking to fix this problem, here you are. You weird, weird person.

Microsoft has just announced a whole slew of new AI" features for Windows, and this time, they'll be living in your taskbar. Microsoft is trying to transform Windows into a canvas for AI," with new AI agents integrated into the Windows 11 taskbar. These new taskbar capabilities are designed to make AI agents feel like an assistant in Windows that can go off and control your PC and do tasks for you at the click of a button. It's part of a broader overhaul of Windows to turn the operating system into an agentic OS." Microsoft is integrating a variety of AI agents directly into the Windows 11 taskbar, including its own Microsoft 365 Copilot and third-party options. This integration isn't just about adding agents; it's about making them part of the OS experience," says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri. Tom Warren at The Verge These AI" agents will control your computer, applications, and files for you, which may make some of you a little apprehensive, and for good reason. AI" tools don't have a great track record when it comes to privacy - Windows Recall comes to mind - and as such, Microsoft claims this time, it'll be different. These new AI" agents will run in what are essentially dedicated Windows accounts acting as sandboxes, to ensure they can only access certain resources. While I find the addition of these AI" tools to Windows insufferable and dumb, I'm at least glad Microsoft is taking privacy and security seriously this time, and I doubt Microsoft would repeat the same mistakes they made with the entirely botched rollout of Windows Recall. in addition, after the Cloudstrike fiasco, Microsoft made clear commitments to improve its security practices, which further adds to the confidence we should all have these new AI" tools are safe, secure, and private. But wait, what's this? Additionally, agentic AI applications introduce novel security risks, such as cross-prompt injection (XPIA), where malicious content embedded in UI elements or documents can override agent instructions, leading to unintended actions like data exfiltration or malware installation. Microsoft support document about the new AI" features Microsoft's new AI" features can go out and install malware without your consent, because these features possess the access and privileges to do so. The mere idea that some application - which is essentially what these AI" features really are - can go out onto the web and download and install whatever it wants, including malware, on your behalf", in the background, is so utterly dystopian to me I just can't imagine any serious developer looking at this and thinking yeah, ship it". I'm living in an insane asylum.

The contents of this repository allow older versions ofUNIX(ancient UNIX) to run easily on modernUnix-likesystems (Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, among others). Run ancient UNIX GitHub page With the guides in this repository, you can easily run Versions 1/5/7 UNIX and 2.11BSD UNIX for the PDP-11 and Version 7 UNIX for x86 (ported to x86 by Robert Nordier in 1999, with patches in 2006-2007). That's it.

Google has been using Rust in Android more and more for its memory safety characteristics, and the results on that front were quite positive. It turns out, however, that not only does using Rust reduce the number memory safety issues, it's also apparently a lot faster to code in Rust than C or C++. We adopted Rust for its security and are seeinga 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density compared to Android's C and C++ code. But the biggest surprise was Rust's impact on software delivery. With Rust changes havinga 4x lower rollback rateand spending25% less time in code review, the safer path is now also the faster one. Jeff Vander Stoep at the Google Security Blog When you think about it, it actually makes sense. If you have fewer errors of a certain type, you'll spend less time fixing those issues, time which you can then spend developing new code. Of course, it's not that simple and there's a ton more factors to consider, but on a base level, it definitely makes sense. Spellcheck in word processors means you have to spend less time detecting and fixing spelling errors, so you have more time to spend on actually writing. I'm sure we'll all be very civil about this, and nobody will be weird about Rust at all.

Another month, another Haiku activity report, and this time we've got a major change under the hood: a brand new guarded heap. The old guarded heap was suboptimal and had started to lag behind, so the new one attempts to rectify some of these shortcomings. So, to rectify these limitations, I rewrote the kernel guarded heap more or less from scratch, taking the old code into account where it made sense but otherwise creating entirely new bookkeeping structures, interacting directly with the page table and virtual memory systems, and more. This new guarded heap implementation frees physical pages when not in use, meaning that the virtual memory reuse disabled" mode now runs for quite long periods of time (indeed, I could successfully boot to the desktop and run compile jobs.) It also prints more diagnostics when kernel panics due to memory faults inside the heap happen, which the old kernel guarded heap didn't (but the userland one has always done). Haiku's activity report for October The new guarded heap is optional for now, but Haiku is planning on releasing some pre-built test builds so users can start testing it out. Of course, this isn't the only change or improvement from this past month - the list of changes is long, but there's no real tentpole features here. Haiku's development pace is still very much on track.

Only a few months ago, Google announced it was going to require that all Android applications - even those installed outside of the Play Store - had to be verified. This led to a massive backlash, and it seems our protests and complaints have had effect: the company announced a change in plans today, and will, in fact, not require certification for installing applications outside of the Play Store. Based on this feedback and our ongoing conversations with the community,we are building a new advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn't verified.We are designing this flow specifically to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren't tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer. It will also include clear warnings to ensure users fully understand the risks involved, but ultimately, it puts the choice in their hands. We are gathering early feedback on the design of this feature now and will share more details in the coming months. Matthew Forsythe Director at the Android Developers Blog While this is great news, I'm still concerned this is only temporary. Companies like Google have a tendency to announce some draconian measure to test the waters, walk it back in response to backlash, only to then reintroduce it through some sneaky backdoor a year later when nobody's looking. Installing whatever we want on the devices we own should be a protected right, not something graciously afforded to us by our corporate overlords. If you think this is the end of this story, you're a fool.

Ever ran into issues using sysupgrade on OpenBSD because /usr ran out of space? OpenBSD developers are trying to address this issue. Firstly, Stuart Henderson (sthen@)modifiedthe installer to increase free space prior to installing. Theo de Raadt (deraadt@)modifiedsysupgrade(8) so that, if space is too tight, it will fail gracefully rather than risk leaving the administrator with a broken system. OpenBSD Journal These are very welcome additions.

Valve announced a few new devices yesterday. There's a new Steam console, which is essentially just a tiny PC with SteamOS installed - think of it as a Steam Deck without a display. Second, Valve finally released a new Steam Controller to go with the Steam console, which has taken them long enough. Lastly, there's a brand new Steam VR headset, the Steam Frame. Other websites with actual access to these new devices will do a better job of covering them than I ever could, but I do want to highlight something crucially important about the Steam Frame: it contains a Snapdragon ARM processor, but can still run Steam and all of its games. How does this work? Well, after developing Proton to allow Windows games to run on Linux, Valve introduced" FEX, which will allow you to run x86 Windows games on ARM Linux. I put the quotation marks there because FEX was an existing project Valve invested heavily into in recent times, and it's now at the point where Valve seems confident enough it will be capable of running enough x86 games on ARM Linux. As such, the Steam Frame runs full SteamOS with KDE Plasma, you can run x86 Steam games, and as an additional bonus, you can install Android APKs as well. I've yet to even try VR, because I'm not particularly interested in buying into any locked-down platform. The Steam Frame may be the first VR device I'll buy - depending on price, of course - and the Steam console definitely looks like a great addition to the living room, too. My wife and I have little to no interesting in buying an Xbox or PS5, but having easy, no-hassle access to our massive Steam libraries on our TV will be awesome.

VMS/XDE is an OpenVMS x86 development environment for Linux and WIndows (via WSL). It provides a familiar user experience for OpenVMS developers working in Linux and Windows yet offers 100% binary and file system compatilibilty with OpenVMS. VMS/XDE includes OpenVMS V9.2-3 user, supervisor and executive mode operating system environments and a set of x86 native compilers and layered products geared towards OpenVMS software development and testing. VMS/XDE website VMS/XDE is a beta version, and comes with the usual annoying OpenVMS x86 time bombs, this time exploding on 3 January 2026. If you intend to use the finalised commercial version after the beta period ends, you'll have to employ the same licenses as regular OpenVMS. It's a bit of a mess, but that's the OpenVMS way, sadly - and I don't blame them, either, as I'm sure they're hamstrung by a ton of agreements and restrictions imposed upon them by HP. Regardless, VMS/XDE brings a zero setup OpenVMS environment to the operating system you're already using, making it easier to develop and cross-compile for the platform. I still have absolutely no clue just how many people OpenVMS is still relevant for, but I absolutely adore the fact VMS Software Inc. is working on this. In a world where so many of its former competitors are being held hostage by corporate indifference, it's refreshing to see VMS still moving forward.

As part of the KDE Plasma 6.5 release, we also got a new release of Plasma Mobile. As there's a lot of changes, improvements, and new features in Plasma Mobile 6.5, the Plasma Mobile Team published a blog post to highlight them all. The biggest improvement is probably the further integration of Waydroid, a necessary evil to run Android applications until the Plasma Mobile ecosystem manages to become a bit more well-rounded. Waydroid can now be managed straight from the settings application and the quick settings dropdown. Furthermore, the lockscreen has been improved considerably, there's been a ton of polish for the home screen and the user interface in general, the quick settings panel can now be customised to make it fit better on different form factors, the first early test version of the new Plasma mobile keyboard is included, and so much more. This is definitely a release I would want to try out, but since I don't have any of the supported devices, I'm a bit stuck. This is, of course, one of the two major problems facing proper mobile Linux: the lack of device support. It's improving due to the tireless work of countless volunteers, but they're always going to be swimming upstream. The other major problem is, of course, application availability, but at least Waydroid can bridge the gap for the adventurous among us.

Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, has released a new version. Milestone 38 isn't the most consequential release of all time, but it does bring a few small changes accompanied by the usual long list of updated open source packages. The zap install command now installs dependencies by default, while zap create-user will now restrict new home directories to mode 0700 by default. Meanwhile, int16h at Cryogenix published an article about using a Bhyve VM running FreeBSD to act as a Wi-Fi bridge for laptops with 802.11xx chips that Tribblix doesn't support. This is a great, albeit somewhat convoluted option if your hardware uses any Wi-Fi chips Tribblix doesn't support. There's honestly a solution for everything, isn't there?

Jonathan Pallant got lucky and managed to score a massive haul of '90s UNIX workstations, one of which was an HP 9000 Model 340, a HP-UX workstation built around a Motorola 68030 processor at 16.7 MHz. It doesn't come with a hard drive or even a floppy controller, though, so he decided to borrow a PA-RISC-based HP 9000 Model 705 to set up an HP-UX 9 cluster. But wait, how does that work, when we're dealing with two entirely different architectures? What's more fun though, is putting it into a cluster with the Model 705 and network booting it. Yes, that a 68030 machine network booting from a PA-RISC machine ... andsharing the same root filesystem. But aren't PA-RISC binaries and 68K binaries quite different? Oh yes, they really are. So, how does that work? Jonathan Pallant HP-UX is far more interesting and fascinating than a lot of people give it credit for, and while my interest lies with HP-UX 11i, I find what Pallant is doing here with HP-UX 9 just as fascinating. You first need to install HP-UX 9 for PA-RISC on the 700 series machine, convert it to a cluster server, and then install HP-UX 9 for 68k on top of that PA-RISC installation. After this is done, you effectively end up with a single root file system that contains both PA-RISC and 68k binaries, and you can network boot the 68k-based Model 340 right from it - using the same root filesystem on both machines. Absolutely wild. No, these are not universal binaries or some other trick you might know of from more modern system. In fact, installing the 68k version of HP-UX 9 into" the PA-RISC HP-UX 9 cluster server, you end up with something called a Context Dependent Filesystem. To get a better idea of what this means and how this works, you should really head on over to Pallant's excellent article for all the details.