OSnews

Microsoft has posted a blog post about detailing its latest round of additions to Windows 11, and as will surely not surprise you, it's AI", all the time, whether you like it or not. I'm not even going to detail most of these features", as I'm sure most of them will just become yet another series of checkboxes on whatever debloating tool you prefer. Still, there's one recurring theme running throughout Microsoft's recent AI" marketing that really stands out, and this blog post is no different: Until now, the power of AI has often been gated behind your skill at prompting. The more context you provide and detail you share, the richer response you receive in return. But typing it out can be tedious and time consuming, especially if it takes multiple tries to get it right. With 68% of consumers reporting using AI to support their decision making, voice is making this easier. Yusuf Mehdi at the Windows Blogs You're holding it wrong" has become a recurring meme whenever someone places the blame for a shit product on its users, but we're really starting to see this line of thinking explode with AI" tools now. If you're getting bad, wrong, or downright made up results out of your text generator - which happens all the time - the problem isn't that the text generator is shit; no, the problem is that the user is shit at manipulating and coercing it into generating the right string of words. This is a major problem for AI" companies, as the obtuseness of input and the inevitable shoddiness of results is most likely putting users off using them, and if there's one thing these companies needs, it's users. All of them are hemorrhaging money without any realistic paths towards profitability, so there's a mad scramble to convince and trick people into using AI" tools, and every single recent effort by Microsoft regarding Windows and Office is 100% geared towards this goal. That's why nothing is sacred, and everything from Notepad to Paint, from the the Windows Start menu to context menus, from the Explorer file manager to your Windows command line is getting Copilot buttons and sparkly icons: Microsoft has to be able to brag about AI" user numbers to keep the scam going. As the bubble gets bigger and bigger, and as we come closer and closer to that satisfying pop, you can expect ever more places in Windows to get AI" features. I can't wait for the sparkle icon to show up when formatting a disk, installing a driver through Device Manager, or during a kernel panic. I can't wait for the blue screen of death to open a Copilot chat that advises you to do something utterly unrelated. You can do it, Microsoft.

This beautiful purple slab is the Silicon Graphics Indigo^2 (though, unlike its earlier namesake, not actually indigocoloured) with the upper-tier MIPS R10000 CPU and IMPACT graphics. My recollection was that it worked at the time, but I couldn't remember if it booted, and of course that was no guarantee that it could still power on. If this machine is to stay working and in the collection, we're gonna need a Refurb Weekend. Cameron Kaiser at Old Vintage Computing Research Out of all the retro UNIX workstations of old, the machines from SGI are both the most popular, the most well-known, and thus, also some of the most expensive. Yet, at the same time, everything up until the very last generation or two of MIPS IRIX workstations, generally do not seem to be particularly rare either. The community around SGI's machines and IRIX is also quite thriving still, much more so than the communities of the other commercial UNIX variants. Still, the odds of me completing my collection of final-generation commercial UNIX workstations are low, exactly because of just how rare and stupidly expensive the SGI Tezro is. As always, Cameron Kaiser goes into a level of detail few other people in the world do when it comes to rare or special computers, and this article about the Silicon Graphics Indigo^2 is no exception. Detailed photographs, an in-depth history of the machine, detailed descriptions of the hardware, the various fixes that needed to be performed, getting it back up and running, and everything else. There's really nobody else writing these kinds of articles. The weekend's here, so sit back, relax, and have fun.

The NLnet foundation has sponsored a project to add WPA3 support to OpenBSD, support which in turn can be used by other operating systems. This project delivers the second open-source implementation of WPA3, the current industry standard for Wi-Fi encryption, specifically for the OpenBSD operating system. Its code can also be integrated by other operating systems to enable modern Wi-Fi encryption, thereby enhancing the diversity and resilience of the global IT ecosystem. NLnet foundation announcement WPA3 support in Linux seems to be the only other open source implementation of WPA3, so this is great news not only for OpenBSD, but also for other operating systems who rely on BSD network drivers through compatibility layers, like Haiku. FreeBSD, meanwhile, is planning to build its own WPA3 implementation, so they, too, might benefit form the work that's going to be done through OpenBSD. October is listed as the start of this project, so work is probably already underway.

One of the problems the ReactOS project continually has to deal with is that Windows is, of course, an evolving, moving target. Trying to be a Windows-compatible operating system means you're going to have to tie that moving target down, and for ReactOS, the current focus is on being compatible with Windows Server 2003 or later". This or later" part is getting a major boost in a very crucial area. The history of ReactOS spans a wider range than the lives of many of the people who work on it today. Incredible individuals have come and gone from the project with vastly different goals for what they want to see developed. In recent years, better hardware support has emerged as one of those goals. As ReactOS gazes towards the world of Vista and beyond, a few questions about how hardware works emerge. Vista introduced massive overhauls to how hardware drivers are written and maintained. Gradually we're trying to handle many of these overhauls with great success. Today we talk about WDDM, or the Windows Display Driver Model. An initial investigation into WDDM on ReactOS There's a ton of technical details in the blog post, but the end result is that ReactOS can now tentatively load some WDDM drivers. For instance, ReactOS can run NVIDIA's Windows 7 driver now, and the example used an NVIDIA GTX 1070. Of course, we're looking at basic 2D display output only and no 3D acceleration, so don't expect to be running any 3D games on ReactOS any time soon. Still, this is a pretty massive step forward for ReactOS, but of course, a ton more work remains to be done, as is always the case for ReactOS. I do have to say - the fact that WDDM support is now on the table and progress is being made here is great news. ReactOS is not even remotely close to being an alternative to Windows, but even if it never gets there, it's a great showcase for what talented, determined developers can do, and they deserve recognition for that.

Apple's new Liquid Glass interface design brings transparency and blur effects to all Apple operating systems, but many users find it distracting or difficult to read. Here's how to control its effects and make your interface more usable. Although the relevant Accessibility settings are quite similar across macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, I separate them because they offer different levels of utility in each. I have no experience with (or interest in) a Vision Pro, so I can't comment on Liquid Glass in visionOS. Adam Engst at TidBITS An incredibly detailed article showing exactly how to change the relevant settings, and exactly what they do, for each of Apple's relevant platforms. I have a feeling quite a few of you will want to bookmark this one.

As someone who cut their teeth on Maemo (the N800/N900 still live in my basement) and carried the first Jolla dev device, I like to pull out my SailfishOS phones every few months to see how things are progressing. Here's where I'm at in September 2025. Nick Schmidt I was one of the very first people to review the original Jolla Phone way back in 2014, and I also happen to own the quite rare Jolla Tablet, so I was definitely a serious backer and believer in the platform back when it first entered the market. Sadly, the pace of improvements was slow, and failed adventures and mismanagement eventually led to the platform almost dying out. It's only in recent years that they've been back on track and Sailfish OS is a more serious option again, but reading through Nick Schmidt's findings, it seems the same problems still haunt the platform. And we all know what the main problem will be: application availability. In your day-to-day use, you're going to be spending a lot of time using the Android compatibility layer, because native Sailfish applications simply don't pull their weight. This leads to the age-old problem of any operating system that loses focus on native applications and opts to go all-in on compatibility layers or ports instead, and int he case of Sailfish that means: why run Sailfish to run Android applications poorly, when you can also just run Android? And why develop native applications, when your Android build can run using the compatibility layer? OS/2 (with Windows applications) and Haiku (with Qt/GTK applications) suffer from the same problem. Apparently, the Jolla C2 phone is not exactly great either, and doesn't showcase Sailfish properly, and Sailfish's keyboard is still unpleasant to use, a problem I also had in my original review so many years ago. There are some bright spots, too; the swipe-based navigation is still great, and apparently Wi-Fi connectivity is much more stable now. Still, it seems like Sailfish is suffering from more or less exactly the kind of problems you'd expect a small platform to suffer from, and whether or not you can deal with those problems is a more a question of dedication than just altering some use patterns. Android and iOS, though illegal practices, have sucked all the air out of the room, and I doubt we're ever going to get any of it back.

Open AI has recently announced deals worth $600 Billion with Nvidia, AMD, and Oracle. OpenAI is able to spend hundreds of billions of dollars they do not have because those companies are paying that same money back to OpenAI via investment. The infinite money glitch means that stocks keep going higher as more circular revenue cycles between the same players. Sasha Yanshin The scam is so brazen, so public, so obvious. The foxes aren't just in the hen house - they bought the whole goddamn hen house.

Another month, another activity report from the Haiku project. This past month, a lot of work went into the FreeBSD/OpenBSD network driver compatibility layer, opening the door to drivers using interfaces other than PCI or USB. Support for NFS4 took a bit of a hit with last month's changes to VFS, and these have been addressed, and other aspects of NFS4 have been improved as well. On top of these two bigger items, there's a list of smaller changes and fixes as well, but it's been a calm month for Haiku so there's less activity than normal. I'm not sure what to add in a second paragraph here. I'm nearing act 3 in Silksong? Is that relevant here? I doubt it, but I still wanted to mention it. Only a few loose ends in act 2 and on Hornet goes!

Text ads on the search results page will now be grouped with a single Sponsored results" label. This new, larger label stays visible as people scroll, making it clear which results are sponsored - upholding our industry-leading standards for ad label prominence. We're also adding a new Hide sponsored results" control that allows you to collapse text ads with a single click if you want to focus only on organic results. In our testing, we found that the new design helps people navigate the top of the page more easily. The new design keeps the size of ads the same and you'll still never see more than four text ads in a grouping. Omkar Muralidharan on Google's Ads and Commerce Blog I guess this is an improvement, but I doubt this will convince anyone to turn off their ad blocker or switch back to Google from another search engine. The option to collapse sponsored results is especially welcome, but I wish they'd gone a step further and added an option in settings to permanently collapse them - which, of course, is never going to happen. Removing any and all AI" summaries would be nice, too, but with the entire technology industry pushing stringent AI" KPIs on employees, that's not going to happen, either. Regardless, it's still an improvement to Google's results page, and while we may not realise it in our little bubble here, the number of people whose search experience this will improve is absolutely massive. It's been a while since I've seen Google make a change to their search results page that doesn't make it substantially worse, so I'll take what I can get.

Are you still using your Amiga with the 1.3 version of Kickstart, but would you prefer an updated version of Workbench with a long list of additional features, improvements, and other niceties? Old Blue Workbench is a Workbench replacement for Amigas running Kickstart 1.3 written byMats Eirik Hansen. It adds a ton of features and improvements, such as enhanced menus in the Workbench 2.0 style, improved windows with things like lasso select, icon sorting, and more, and browser windows for navigating the filesystem. You can also add a dock with drag and drop support, launch applications at startup, define your own menus, and a whole lot more. It's free, and if I had an old Amiga I would love to try this out.

The world's best operating system, 9front, has released a new release called Release. 9front is a maintained fork of Plan 9. The new release Release brings atomic(2) functions for arm, arm64, mips, 386 and amd64, improved stability when the kernel runs out of memory, memdraw and devdraw now support affine warp primitive, and more. You can download Release from the usual mirrors.

The LineageOS project has released version 23 of their AOSP-based Android variant. LineageOS 23 is based on the initial release of Android 16 - so not the QPR1 release that came later - because Google has not made the source code for that release available yet. Like other, similar projects, LineageOS also suffers from Google's recent further lockdown of Android; not only do they not have access to Android 16 QPR1's source code, they also can't follow along with the latest security patches for Android due to changes Google made to the patch release process, and without the device trees for Pixel devices, Pixels are now no longer supported any better than other Android devices. LineageOS 23 brings many of the same features Android 16 brought, and comes with updated versions of LineageOS' own camera application and music player, as well as a new TV launcher. They've also worked hard to make it much easier to run LineageOS in QEMU, they've improved support for running mainline kernels, they've made it easier to merge security fixes and updates for various kernel versions, and much more. Update instructions can be found on the devices page, and specifically note that if you're using an unofficial LineageOS build, you'll need to perform the original installation again. With LineageOS being the Debian of the Android world, you can expect a ton of these unofficial versions to pop up over the coming months for devices LineageOS does not officially support.

With iOS 26, Apple seems to be leaning harder into visual design and decorative UI effects - but at what cost to usability? At first glance, the system looks fluid and modern. But try to use it, and soon those shimmering surfaces and animated controls start to get in the way. Let's strip back the frost and look at how these changes affect real use. Raluca Budiu I have not yet used Apple's new Liquid Glass" graphical user interface design, so here's the usual disclaimer that my opinions are, then, effectively meaningless. That being said, the amount of detailed articles about the problems with Liquid Glass - from bugs to structural design problems - are legion, and this article by Raluca Budiu is an excellent example. There are so many readability problems, spacing issues, odd animations that don't actually convey anything meaningful, performance issues, and tons of bugs. It feels like it was made not by user interface specialists, but by marketeers, who were given too little time to boot. It feels incoherent and messy, and it's going to take Apple a long, long time to mold and shape it into something remotely workable.

Framework, the maker of repairable laptops, is embroiled in a controversy, as the company and its CEO are openly supporting people with, well, questionable views. If you know a little bit about PR in social media space, you might note that, right out of the gate, a project by a vocal white nationalist known for splitting communities by their mere presence, is not a great highlight choice for an overtly non-left-right-political company like Framework. Does it get worse from here? Sadly, it does. Arya Bread Crumbs The questionable views we're talking about here are... Let's just say we're not talking about milquetoast stuff like we should be a bit stricter with immigration" or lower taxes on the rich", but views that are far, far outside of the mainstream in most places in the world. Framework has stated in no uncertain terms that it is supporting and embracing people like this. That's a choice they are entirely free to make, but I, and many with me, then, are entirely free to choose not to buy and/or promote products by Framework. I still sincerely hope that all of this is just a massive breakdown of PR and common sense at Framework and its CEO, but since they've already doubled-down, I'm not holding my breath. This whole thing is going to haunt them, especially since I'm fairly sure a huge chunk of their community and users - who are buying into hardware that is, in truth, overpriced - are not even remotely aligned with such extremist views. I care deeply about Framework's mission, but I don't give a single rat's ass about Framework itself. There are countless alternatives to Framework, some of which I've even reviewed here (like the MNT Reform or the NovaCustom V54), and if you, too, feel a deep sense of the ick when it comes to supporting extremist views like the above, I urge you to take them into consideration.

What if you are forced to use Windows, but want to use a real operating system instead? You could use WSL2 to use Linux inside Windows, but what if FreeBSD is more your thing? It turns out someone is working on making FreeBSD usable using WSL2. This repository hosts work-in-progress efforts to runFreeBSDinsideWindows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2)with minimal to no changes to the FreeBSD base system. The project builds on the open-source components of WSL2 to enable FreeBSD to boot and run seamlessly in a Windows environment. WSL for FReeBSD GitHub page The project is experimental, and definitely not ready for production use. It's also important to note that this project is not part of Microsoft or FreeBSD. At this point in time, FreeBSD boots using WSL2 with basic functionality, and work is currently focused on networking, I/O, and process management.

A lot of open source projects are struggling what to do with the AI" bubble, and Fedora is no different. This whole past year, the project's been struggling to formulate any official policies on the use of AI", and LWN.net's Joe Brockmeier has just done an amazing job summarising the various positions, opinions, and people influencing this process. His conclusion: There appears to be a growing tension between what Red Hat and IBM would like to see from Fedora versus what its users and community contributors want from the project. Red Hat and IBM have already come down in favor of AI as part of their product strategies, the only real questions are what to develop and offer to the customers or partners. The Fedora community, on the other hand, has quite a few people who feel strongly against AI technologies for various ethical, practical, and social reasons. The results, so far, of turning people loose with generative AI tools on unsuspecting open-source projects has not been universally positive. People join communities to collaborate with other people, not to sift through the output of large language models. It is possible that Red Hat will persuade Fedora to formally endorse a policy of accepting AI-assisted content, but it may be at the expense of users and contributors. Joe Brockmeier at LWN.net Reading through Brockmeier's excellent article, the various forces pulling and pushing on Fedora become quite clear, and the fact we've got IBM/Red Hat in favour of AI", and Fedora's community of developers and users against it, shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Wherever AI" makes an appearance, it's almost exclusively a top-down process with corporate interests pushing AI" hard on a largely indifferent userbase. It seems Fedora is no different. The massive rift between IBM/Red Hat on one side, and the Fedora community on the other is probably best illustrated by a remark from Graham White, technical lead for theGraniteAI agents at IBM. One of the earlier policy proposals referenced AI" slop, and White was offended by this, stating: I've been working in the industry and building AI models for a shade over 20 years and never come across AI slop". This seems derogatory to me and an unnecessary addition to the policy. Graham White, as quoted by Joe Brockmeier at LWN.net Us regular users are bombarded with AI" slop every day, and I just can't understand how disconnected from reality you must be to not only deny it's a problem, but to deny its existence entirely, when virtually every single Google query will drop you in AI" muck. If such denial is commonplace within IBM/Red Hat, it's really no wonder there's such a big rift between them and Fedora. It is wholly unsurprising, then, that Fedora is having such a hard time formulating an AI" policy. The current version of the proposed policy seems to view AI" and its use in or by Fedora mildly positively, which certainly has me, as a Fedora/KDE user, on edge. I don't want AI" anywhere near my operating system for a whole variety of reasons, and if the upcoming vote on the new policy ends up in favour of it, I might have to consider moving away from Fedora.

It seems like Microsoft is continuing its quest to force Windows users to use Microsoft accounts instead of local accounts, despite the fact Microsoft accounts on Windows are half-baked and potentially incredibly dangerous. In the most recent Windows 11 Insider Preview Build (26220.6772), the company has closed a few more loopholes people were using to trick the Windows installer into allowing local user accounts. We are removing known mechanisms for creating a local account in the Windows Setup experience (OOBE). While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use. Users will need to complete OOBE with internet and a Microsoft account, to ensure device is setup correctly. Amanda Langowski at the Windows Blogs It seems that the specific workaround removed with this change is executing the command start ms-cxh:localonly" in the command prompt during the installation process (you can access cmd.exe by pressing shift+F10 during installation). Several other workarounds have also been removed in recent years, making it ever harder for people forced to use Windows 11 to use a local account, like the gods intended. The only reason Microsoft is pushing online accounts this hard is that it makes it much, much easier for them to collect your data and wrestle control over your installation away from you. A regular, proper local account with additional online accounts for various services would work just as well for users, allowing them to mix and match exactly what kind of cloud services they want integrated into their operating system. However, leaving this choice to the user invariably means people aren't going to be using whatever trash services Microsoft offers. And so, Microsoft will make that choice for you, whether you like it or not. There are a million reasons to stay away from the Windows version that must be making Dave Cutler cry, and the insistence on online accounts is but one of them. It's a perfect example of how Microsoft developers Windows not to make it better for its users, but to make it better for its bottom line. I wonder how much more Microsoft can squeeze its users before we see some sort of actual revolt. Windows used to just lack taste. These days, it's also actively hostile.

Servo, the Rust-based browsing engine spun off from Mozilla, keeps making progress every month, and this made Ignacio Casal Quinteiro wonder: what if we make a GTK widget so we can test Servo and compare it to WebKitGTK? As part of my job at Amazon I started working in a GTK widget which will allow embedding a Servo Webview inside a GTK application. This was mostly a research project just to understand the current state of Servo and whether it was at a good enough state to migrate from WebkitGTK to it. I have to admit that it is always a pleasure to work with Rust and the great gtk-rs bindings. Instead, Servo while it is not yet ready for production, or at least not for what we need in our product, it was simple to embed and to get something running in just a few days. The community is also amazing, I had some problems along the way and they were providing good suggestions to get me unblocked in no time. Ignacio Casal Quinteiro The code is now out there, and while not yet ready for widespread use, this will make it easier for GTK developer to periodically assess the state of Servo, hopefully some day concluding it can serve as a replacement for WebKitGTK.

Earlier this year, popular NAS vendor Synology announced it would start requiring some of its more expensive models to only use Synology-branded drives. It seems the uproar this announcement caused has had some real chilling effect on sales, and the company just cancelled its plans. Synology has backtracked on one of its most unpopular decisions in years. After seeing NAS sales plummet in 2025, the company has decided to lift restrictions that forced users to buy its own Synology hard drives. The policy, introduced earlier this year, made third-party HDDs from brands like Seagate and WD practically unusable in newer models such as the DS925+, DS1825+, and DS425+. That change didn't go over well. Users immediately criticised Synology for trying to lock them into buying its much more expensive drives. Many simply refused to upgrade, and reviewers called out the move as greedy and shortsighted. According to some reports, sales of Synology's 2025 NAS models dropped sharply in the months after the restriction was introduced. Hilbert Hagedoorn at Guru3D.com If you want to screw over your users to make a few more euros, it's generally a good idea to first assess just how locked-in your users really are. Synology is but one of many companies making and selling NAS devices, and even building one yourself is stupidly easy these days. There's an entire cottage industry of motherboards and enclosures specifically designed for this purpose, and there are countless easy-to-use software options out there, too. In other words, nobody is really locked into Synology, so any unpopular move by the company was bound to make people look elsewhere, only to discover there are tons of competing options to choose from. The market seems to have spoken, and Synology can only respond by reversing its decision. Honestly, I had almost forgotten what a healthy tech market with tons of competing options looks like.

MicroPythonOS is a lightweight, fast, and versatile operating system designed to run on microcontrollers like the ESP32 and desktop systems. With a modern Android-like touch screen UI, App Store, and Over-The-Air updates, it's the perfect OS for innovators and developers. MicroPytonOS' website It's quite neat to see this running in such a constrained environment, especially considering it comes with a graphical user interface, some basic applications, and niceties like OTA updates and an application repository. As the name implies, MicroPythonOS uses native MicroPython for application and driver development, making cross-platform portability from microcontrollers to regular PCs a possibility. It's built on the MicroPython runtime, with LVGL for graphics, packaged by the lvgl_micropython project. It's still relatively early in development, but it's completely open source so anyone can help out and improve the project. I'm personally not too well-versed in the world of microcontrollers like the popular ESP32, so I'm not entirely sure just how capable other operating systems and platforms built on top if it are. This particular operating system seems to make it rather easy and straightforward for anyone to build and distribute an application for such microcontrollers, to a point where even an idiot like myself could relatively easily buy, say, an ESP32 kit with a display and assemble my own collection of small applications. To repeat myself, it simply looks neat.

It was good while it lasted, I guess. Arduino will retain its independent brand, tools, and mission, while continuing to support a wide range of microcontrollers and microprocessors from multiple semiconductor providers as it enters this next chapter within the Qualcomm family. Following this acquisition, the 33M+ active users in the Arduino community will gain access to Qualcomm Technologies' powerful technology stack and global reach. Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech professionals, students, educators, and hobbyists will be empowered to rapidly prototype and test new solutions, with a clear path to commercialization supported by Qualcomm Technologies' advanced technologies and extensive partner ecosystem. Qualcomm's press release Qualcomm's track record when it comes to community engagement, open source, and long-term support are absolutely atrocious, and there's no way Arduino will be able to withstand the pressures from management. We've seen this exact story play out a million times, and it always begins with lofty promises, and always ends with all of them being broken. I have absolutely zero faith Arduino will be able to continue to do its thing like it has. Arduino devices are incredibly popular, and it makes sense for Qualcomm to acquire them. If I were using Arduino's for my open source projects, I'd be a bit on edge right now.

Bradford Morgan White has published an excellent retrospective of QNX, the realtime microkernel operating system focused on embedded use cases. The final paragraph made me sad, though. QNX is a fascinating operating system. It was extremely well designed from the start, and while it has been rewritten, the core ideas that allowed it survive for 45 years persist to this day. While I am sad that Photon was deprecated, the reasoning is sound. Most vendors using QNX either do not require a GUI, or they implement their own. For example, while Boston Dynamics uses QNX in their robots, they don't really need Photon, and neither do SpaceX's Falcon rockets. While cars certainly have displays, most vehicle makers desire their screen interfaces to have a unique look and feel. Of course, just stating these use cases of robots, rockets, and cars speaks to the incredible reliability and versatility of QNX. Better operating systems are possible, and QNX proves it. Bradford Morgan White at Abort Retry Fail Way back in 2004, before I even joined OSNews properly, I wrote about QNX as a desktop operating system, because back then I went through a short stint where I used QNX and its amazing Photon MicroGUI as my primary desktop. Back then, there was a short-lived but very enthusiastic community using QNX on desktops, sharing tips and findings, supported by one or two QNX employees who tried their best to support this fledgling community in the face of corporate indifference. Eventually, these QNX employees left the company, and QNX started making it clearer than ever that they were not, in any way, interested in people using QNX on desktops, and in all honesty, they were most likely correct. However, I still think we had something special there, and had QNX' management decided to help us out, it could've grown into something more sustainable. An open source QNX and Photon could've had an impact. Using QNX on the desktop back then was much easier than you might imagine, with graphical package managers, capable browsers and email clients, a massive pile of open source packages, pretty great performance, and little to no need to ever leave the GUI and use a CLI. If your hardware was properly supported, you could have a great experience. One of the very small what-ifs" form the early 2000s.

Can these months please stop passing us by this quickly? It seems we're getting a monthly Redox update every other week now, and that's not right. Anyway, what have the people behind this Rust-based operating system been up to this past month? One of the biggest changes this month is that Redox is now multithreaded by default, at least on x86 machines. Unsurprisingly, this can enable some serious performance gains. Also contributing to performance improvements this month is inode data inliningfor small files, and the installation is now a lot faster too. LZ4 compression has been added to Redox, saving storage space and improving performance. As far as ports go, there's a ton of new and improved ports, like OpenSSH, Nginx, PHP, Neovim, OpenSSL 3.x, and more. On top of that, there's a long list of low-level kernel improvements, driver changes, and relibc improvements, changes to the main website, and so on.

Every single vibe coding is the future," the power of AI," and AI job loss" story written perpetuates a myth that will only lead to more regular people getting hurt when the bubble bursts. Every article written about OpenAI or NVIDIA or Oracle that doesn't explicitly state that the money doesn't exist, that the revenues are impossible, that one of the companies involvedburns billions of dollars and has no path to profitability,is an act of irresponsible make believe and mythos. Edward Zitron The numbers are clear. People aren't paying for AI", and those that do, are using up way more resources than they're actually paying for. The profits required to make all of this work just aren't realistic in any way, shape, or form. The money being pumped around doesn't even exist. It's a scam of such utterly massive proportions, it's easier for many of us to just assume it can't possibly be one. Too big to fail? Too many promises to be a scam. It's going to be a bloodbath, but as usual when the finance and tech bros scam entire sectors, it's us normal folk who will be left to foot the bill. Let's blame immigrants some more while we implement harsh austerity measures to bail out the billionaire class. Again.

Your lovely host, late last night: Google claims they won't be sharing developer information with governments, but we all knowthat's a load of bullshit, made all the more relevant afterwhatever the fuck this was. If you want to oppose thegenocidein Gaza or warn people of ICE raids, and want to create an Android application to coordinate such efforts, you probably should not, and stick to more anonymous organising tools. Thom Holwerda Let's check in with how that other walled garden Google is trying to emulate is doing. Apple hasremoved ICEBlock, an app that allowed users to monitor and report the location of immigration enforcement officers, from the App Store. We created theApp Storeto be a safe and trusted place to discover apps," Apple said in a statement to Business Insider. Based on information we've received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store." Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert, Peter Kafka, and Kwan Wei Kevin Tan for Business Insider Oh. Apple and Google are but mere extensions of the state apparatus. Think twice about what device you bring with you the next time you wish to protest your government's actions.

Google has been on a bit of a marketing blitz to try and counteract some of the negative feedback following its new developer verification requirement for Android applications, and while they're using a lot of words, none of them seem to address the core concerns. It basically comes down to that they just don't care about the consequences this new requirement has for projects like F-Droid, nor are they really bothered by any of the legitimate privacy concerns this whole thing raises. If this new requirement is implemented in its current form, F-Droid will simply not be able to continue to exist in its current form. F-Droid builds the applications in its repository themselves and signs them, and developer verification does not fit into that picture at all. F-Droid works this way to ensure its applications are built from the publicly available sources, so developers can't sneak anything nefarious into any binaries they would otherwise be submitting themselves. The privacy angle doesn't seem to bother Google much, either, which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. With this new requirement, Android application developers can simply no longer be anonymous, which has a variety of side-effects, not least of which is that anyone developing applications for, say, dissidents, can now no longer be anonymous. Google claims they won't be sharing developer information with governments, but we all know that's a load of bullshit, made all the more relevant after whatever the fuck this was. If you want to oppose the genocide in Gaza or warn people of ICE raids, and want to create an Android application to coordinate such efforts, you probably should not, and stick to more anonymous organising tools. Students and hobbyists are getting the short end of the stick, too, as Google's promised program specifically for these two groups is incredibly limited. Yes, it waves the $25 fee, but that's about the only positive here: Developers who register with Google as a student or hobbyist will face severe app distribution restrictions, namely a limit on the number of devices that can install their apps. To enforce this, any user wanting to install software from these developers must first retrieve a unique identifier from their device. The developer then has to input this identifier into the Android Developer Console to authorize that specific device for installation. Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority Google does waive the requirement for developer certification for one particular type of user, and in doing so, highlights the only group of users Google truly cares about: enterprise users. Any application installed by an enterprise on managed devices will not need to have its developer certified. Google states that in this particular use case, the enterprise's IT department is responsible for any security issues that may arise. Isn't it funny how the only group of users who won't have to deal with this nonsense are companies who pay Google tons of money for their enterprise tools? The only way we're going to get out of this is if any governments step up and put a stop to this. We can safely assume the United States' government won't be on our side - they're too busy with their recurring idiotic song-and-dance anyway - so our only hope is the European Commission stepping in, but I'm not holding my breath. After all, Apple's rules and regulations regarding installing applications outside of the App Store in the EU are not that different from what Google is going to do. While the EU is not happy with the details of Apple's rules, their general gist seems to be okay with them. I'm afraid governments won't be stepping in to stop this one.

And here we have yet another case of the EU's consumer protection legislation working in our favour. Dutch privacy and consumer rights organisation Bits of Freedom sued Facebook over the company's little trick of disregarding a user's settings under a variety of circumstances, such as when a user opts for a chronological, non-profiled timeline, only to have Facebook reset itself to the profiled timeline upon a restart. The judge states that Meta is indeed acting in violation of the law. He says that a nonpersistent choice option for a recommendation system runs counter to the purpose of the DSA, which is to give users genuine autonomy, freedom of choice, and control over how information is presented to them." The judge also concludes that the way Meta has designed its platforms constitutes a significant disruption of the autonomy of Facebook and Instagram users." The judge orders Meta to adjust its apps so that the user's choice is preserved, even when the user navigates to another section or restarts the app. Bits of Freedom press release This is good news, of course, but I really wish we would take this a step further: a complete ban on targeted advertising and timeline manipulation based on harvested user data. I just don't believe these business models and ragebait machines offer anything of value to society, and in fact, do far more harm than good. I am convinced that our world would be a better place without these business models. We restrict of outright ban dangerous substances or activities all the time. This should be among them.

With Google closing up Android at a rapid pace, there's some renewed interest in mobile platforms that aren't either iOS or Android, and one of those is Ubuntu Touch. It's been steadily improving over the years under the stewardship of the UBports Foundation, and today they released Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.0. Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.0 is the first release of Ubuntu Touch which is based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, a major upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04. This might not be as big compared to our last upgrade from Ubuntu 16.04 to 20.04, but this still brings newer software stack to Ubuntu Touch (such as Qt 5.15). Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.0 release announcement In this release, aside from the upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, there's now also a light mode for the shell, including experimental support for switching themes on the fly. Applications already supported a light theme since the previous releases, so adding support for it in the main shell is a welcome improvement. We've also got experimental support for encrypting personal data, which needs to be enabled per device, which I think indicates not all devices support it. On top of that, there's some changes to the phone application, and a slew of smaller fixes and improvements as well. The list of supported devices has grown as well, with the Fairphone 5 as the newcomer this release. The list is still relatively small, but to be fair to the project, it includes a number of popular devices, as well as a few that are still readily available. If you want to opt for running Ubuntu Touch as your smartphone platform, there's definitely plenty of devices to choose from.

Microsoft is reorganising the Windows teams. Again. For those unaware, the Windows organization has essentially been split in two since 2018. Teams that work on the core of Windows were moved under Azure, and the rest of the Windows team (those that focused on top level features and user experiences) remained under the Windows org. That is finally changing, with Davuluri saying that the Windows client and server teams are now going to operate under the same roof once again.This change unifies Windows engineering work under a single organization ... Moving the teams working on Windows client and server together into one organization brings focus to delivering against our priorities." Zac Bowden at Windows Central I mean, it's obviously far too simplistic to attribute Windows' many user-facing problems and failures on something as simple as this particular organisational split, but it sure does feel like it could be a contributing factor. It seems like the core of Windows is mostly fine and working pretty well, while the user experience is the ares that has suffered greatly in recent years, pressured as the Windows team seems to have been to add advertising, monetisation, tons of sometimes dangerous dark patterns, and more. I hope that bringing these two teams back together will eventually lead to an overall improvement of the Windows user experience, and not a deterioration of the core of the platform. In other words, that the core team lifts up the user experience team, instead of the user experience team dragging the core team down. A Windows that takes its users seriously and respects them could be a fine operating system to use, but it reorganisations like this take a long time to have any measurable effect. Of course, it could also just have no effect at all, or perhaps the rot has simply spread too far and wide. In a few years, depressing as it may seem, Windows 11 might be regarded as a highlight.

This article is intended to be acomprehensiveguide to writing your first GNOME app in Lua using LuaGObject. The article assumes that you already understand Lua and want to get started with building beautiful native applications for GNOME. I also assume you know how to use a command line to install and compile software. Having some knowledge of the C programming language, as well as the Make, Gettext, and Flatpak software will be helpful, but shouldn't be required to understand this guide. Victoria Lacroix Exactly what is says on the tin.

Have you ever heard of the Encore 91 computer system, developed and built by Encore Computer Corporation? I stumbled upon the name of this system on the website for the Macintosh like virtual window manager (MLVWM), an old X11 window manager designed to copy some of the look and feel of the classic Mac OS, and wanted to know more about it. An old website from what appears to be a reseller of the Encore 91 has a detailed description and sales pitch of the machine still online, and it's a great read. The hardware architecture of the Encore 91 series is based onthe Motorola high-performance 88100 25MHz RISC processor.A basic system is a highly integrated fully symmetrical singleboard multiprocessor. The single board includes two or four88100 processors with supporting cache memory, 16 megabytes of shared main memory, two synchronous SCSI ports,an Ethernet port, 4 asynchronous ports, real-time clocks,timers, interrupts and a VME-64 bus interface. The VME-64 bus provides full compatibility with VME plus enhancements for greater throughput. Shared main memory may be expanded to 272 megabytes (mb) by adding up to four expansion cards. The expansion memory boards have the same high-speed access characteristics as local memory. Encore computing 91 system The Encore 91 ran a combination of AT&T's system V.3.2 UNIX and Encore's POSIX-compliant MicroMPX real-time kernel, and would be followed by machines with more powerful processors in the 88xxx series, as well as machines based on the Alpha architecture. The company also created and sold its own modified RISC architecture, RSX, for which there are still some details available online. Bits and bobs of the company were spun off and sold off, and I don't think much of the original company is still around today. Regardless, it's an interesting system with an interesting history, but we'll most likely never get to see oe in action - unless it turns up in some weird corner of the United States where the rare working examples of hardware like this invariably tends to end up.

The consequences of Google requiring developer certification to install Android applications, even outside of Google's own Play Store, are starting to reverberate. F-Droid, probably the single most popular non-Google application repository for Android, has made it very clear that Google's upcoming requirement is most likely going to mean the end of F-Droid. If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all. F-Droid's myriad users will be left adrift, with no means to install - or even update their existing installed - applications. F-Droid's blog post A potential loss of F-Droid would be a huge blow to anyone trying to run Android without Google's applications and frameworks installed on their device. It's pretty clear that Google is doing whatever it can to utterly destroy the Android Open Source Project, something I've been arguing is what the rumours about Google killing AOSP really mean. Why kill AOSP, when you can just make it utterly unusable and completely barren? Sadly, there isn't much F-Droid can do. They're proposing regulators the world over look at Google's plans, and hopefully come to the conclusion that they're anti-competitive. Specifically the European Union and the tools provided by the Digital Markets Act could prove useful here, but in the end, only if the will exists to use them can these tools be used in the first place. It's dark times for the smartphone world right now, especially if you care about consumer rights and open source. iOS has always been deeply anti-consumer, and while the European Union has managed to soften some of the rough edges, nothing much has changed there. Android, on the other hand, had a thriving open source, Google-free community, but decision by decision, Google is beating it into submission and killing it off. The Android of yesteryear doesn't exist anymore, and it's making people who used to work on Android back during the good old times extremely sad. Jean-Baptiste Queru, husband of OSNews' amazing and legendary previous managing editor Eugenia Loli-Queru, worded it like this a few days ago: All the tidbits of news about Android make me sad. I used to be part of the Android team. When I worked there, making the application ecosystem as open as the web was a goal. Releasing the Android source code as soon as something hit end-user devices was a goal. Being able to run your own build on actual consumer hardware was a goal. For a while after I left, there continued to be some momentum behind what I had pushed for. But, now, 12 years later, this seems to have all died. I am sad... Jean-Baptiste Queru And so am I. Like any operating system, Android is far from perfect, but it was remarkable just how open it used to be. I guess good things just don't survive once unbridled capitalism hits.

Unite is an operating system in whicheverythingis a process, including the things that you normally would expect to be part of the kernel. The hard disk driver is a user process, so is the file system running on top of it. The namespace manager is a user process. The whole thing (in theory, see below) supports network transparency from the ground up, you can use resources of other nodes in the network just as easily as you can use local resources, just prefix them with the node ID. In the late 80's, early 90's I had a lot of time on my hands. While living in the Netherlands I'd run into the QNX operating system that was sold locally through a distributor. The distributors brother had need of a 386 version of that OS but Quantum Software, the producers of QNX didn't want to release a 386 version. So I decided to write my own. Jacques Mattheij What a great story. Mattheij hasn't done anthing or even looked at the code for this operating system he created in decades, but recently got the urge to fix it up and publish it online for all of us to see. Of course, resurrecting something this old and long untouched required some magic, and there's still a few things which he simply just can't get to work properly. I like how the included copy of vi is broken and adds random bits of garbage to files, and things like the mouse driver don't work because it requires a COM port and the COM ports don't seem to work in an emulated environment. Unite is modeled after QNX, so it uses a microkernel. It uses a stripped-down variant of the MINIX file system, only has one user but that user can run multiple sessions, and there's a basic graphics mode with some goodies. Sadly, the graphics mode is problematic an requires some work to get going, and because you'll need the COM ports to work to use it properly it's a bit useless anyway at the moment. Regardless, it's cool to see people going back to their old work and fixing it up to publish the code online.

Some time ago, I described Windows 3.0's WinHelp as a program for browsing online help files." But Windows 3.0 predated the Internet, and these help files were available even if the computer was not connected to any other network. How can it be online"? Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing I doubt this will be a conceptual problem for many people reading OSNews, but I can definitely understand especially younger people finding this a curious way of looking at the word online". You'll see the concept of online help" in quite a few systems from the '90s (and possibly earlier), so if you're into retrocomputing you might've run into it as well.

What if you have a PC-98 machine, and you want to run Linux on it, as you do? I mean, CP/M, OS/2, or Windows (2000 and older) might not cut it for you, after all. Well, it turns out that yes, you can run Linux on PC-98 hardware, and thanks to a bunch of work by Nina Kalinina - yes, the same person from a few days ago - there's now more information gathered in a single place to get you started. Plamo Linux is one of the few Linux distributions to support PC-98 series. Plamo 3.x is the latest distribution that can be installed on PC-9801 and PC-9821 directly. Unfortunately, it is quite old, and is missing lots of useful stuff. This repo is to share a-ha moments and binaries for Plamo on PC-98. Plamo98 goodies The repository details upgrading" - it's a bit more involved than plain upgrading, but it's not hard - Plamo Linux from 3.x to 4, which gives you access to a bunch of things you might want, like GCC 3.3 over 2.95, KDE 3.x, Python 2.3, and more. There's also custom BusyBox config files, a newer version of make, and a few other goodies and tools you might want to have. Once it's all set and done, you can Linux like it's 2003 on your PC-98. The number of people to whom this is relevant must be extraorinarily small, but at some point, someone is going to want to do this, only to find this repository of existing work. We've all been there.

I've been working on developing an operating system for the TI-99 for the last 18 months or so. I didn't intend this-my original plan was to develop enough of the standard C libraries to help with writing cartridge-based and EA5 programs. But that trek led me quickly towards developing an OS. As Unix is by far my preferred OS, this OS is an approximation. Developing an OS within the resources available, particularly the RAM, has been challenging, but also surprisingly doable. UNIX99 forum announcement post We're looking at a quite capable UNIX for the TI-99, with support for itssound, speech, sprites, and legacy 9918A display modes, GPU-accelerated scrolling, stdio (for text and binary files) and stdin/out/err support, a shell (of course), multiple user support, cooperative tasks support, and a ton more. And remember - all of this is running on a machine with a 16-bit processor running at 16MHz and a mere 16KB of RAM. Absolutely wild.

A few months ago, Microsoft finally blinked and provided a way for Windows 10 users to gain free" access to the Windows 10 Extended Security Update program. For regular users to gain access to this program, their options are to either pay around $30, pay 1000 Microsoft points, or to sign up for the Windows Backup application to synchronise their settings to Microsoft's computers (the cloud"). In other words, in order to get free" access to extended security updates for Windows 10 after the 25 October end-of-support deadline, you have to start using OneDrive, and will have to start paying for additional storage since the base 5GB of OneDrive storage won't be enough for backups. And we all know OneDrive is hell. Thanks to the European Union's Digital Markets Act, though, Microsoft has dropped the OneDrive requirement for users within the European Economic Area (the EU plus Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein). Citing the DMA, consumer rights organisations in the EU complained that Microsoft's OneDrive requirement was in breach of EU law, and Microsoft has now given in. Of course, dropping the OneDrive requirement only applies to consumers in the EU/EEA; users in places with much weaker consumer protection legislation, like the United States, will not benefit from this move. Consumer rights organisations are lauding Microsoft's move, but they're not entirely satisfied just yet. The main point of contention is that the access to the Extended Security Update program is only valid for one year, which they consider too short. In a letter, Euroconsumers, one of the consumer rights organisations, details this issue. At the same time, several points from our original letter remain relevant. The ESU program is limited to one year, leaving devices that remain fully functional exposed to risk after October 13, 2026. Such a short-term measure falls short of what consumers can reasonably expect for a product that remains widely used and does not align with the spirit of the Digital Content Directive (DCD), nor the EU's broader sustainable goals. Unlike previous operating system upgrades, which did not typically require new hardware, the move to Windows 11 does. This creates a huge additional burden for consumers, with some estimates suggesting that over 850 million active devices still rely on million Windows 10 and cannot be upgraded due to hardware requirements. By contrast, upgrades from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10 did not carry such limitations. Eurconsumer's letter According to the group, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that Microsoft is much more aggressive in phasing out support for Windows 10 than for previous versions of Windows. Windows 10 is being taken behind the shed four years after the launch of Windows 11, while Windows XP and Windows 7 enjoyed 7-8 years. With how many people are still using Windows 10, often with no way to upgrade but buying new hardware, it's odd that Microsoft is trying to kill it so quickly. In any event, we can chalk this up as another win for consumers in the European Union, with the Digital Markets Act once again creating better outcomes than in other regions of the world.

The contributions of Sun Microsystems to the world of computing are legion - definitely more than its ignominious absorption into Oracle implies - and one of those is NFS, the Network File system. This month, NFS more or less turned 40 years old, and in honour of this milestone, Russel Berg, Russ Cox, Steve Kleiman, Bob Lyon, Tom Lyon, Joseph Moran, Brian Pawlowski, David Rosenthal, Kate Stout, and Geoff Arnold created a website to honour NFS. This website gathers material related to the Sun Microsystems Network File System, a project that began in 1983 and remains a fundamental technology for today's distributed computer systems. The core of the collection is design documents, white papers, engineering specifications, conference and journal papers, and standards material. However it also covers marketing materials, trade press, advertising, books, swag", and personal ephemera. We're always looking for new contributions. NFS at 40 There's so many amazing documents here, such as the collection of predecessors of NFS that served as inspiration for NFS, like the Cambridge File Server or the Xerox Alto's Interim File System, but also tons of fun marketing material for things like NFS server accelerators and nerdy NFS buttons. Even if you're not specifically interested in the history of NFS, there's great joy in browsing these old documents and photos.

If you download YouTube videos, there's a real chance you're using yt-dlp, the long-running and widely-used command-line program for downloading YouTube videos. Even if you're not using it directly, many other tools for downloading YouTube videos are built on top of yt-dlp, and even some media players which offer YouTube playback use it in the background. Now, yt-dlp has always had a built-in basic JavaScript interpreter", but due to changes at YouTube, yt-dlp will soon require a proper JavaScript runtime in order to function. Up until now, yt-dlp has been able to use itsbuilt-in JavaScript interpreter"to solve the JavaScript challenges that are required for YouTube downloads. But due torecent changes on YouTube's end, the built-in JS interpreter will soon be insufficient for this purpose. The changes are so drastic thatyt-dlp will need to leverage a proper JavaScript runtime in order to solve the JS challenges. Yt-dlp's announcement on GitHub The yt-dlp team suggests using Deno, but compatibility with some alternatives has been added as well. The issue is that the interpreter" yt-dlp already includes consists of a massive set of very complex regex patterns to solve JS challenges, and those are difficult to maintain and no longer sufficient, so a real runtime is necessary for YouTube downloads. Deno is advised because it's entirely self-contained and sandboxed, and has no network or filesystem access of any kind. Deno also happens to be a single, portable executable. As time progresses, it seems yt-dlp is slowly growing into a web browser just to be able to download YouTube videos. I wonder what kind of barriers YouTube will throw up next, and what possible solutions from yt-dlp might look like.

If you're still running old versions of Windows from Windows 2000 and up, either for restrocomputing purposes or because you need to keep an old piece of software running, you've most likely heard of Legacy Update. This tool allows you to keep Windows Update running on Windows versions no longer supported by the service, and has basically become a must-have for anyone still playing around with older Windows versions. The project released a fairly major update today. Legacy Update 1.12 features a significant rewrite of our ActiveX control, and a handful of other bug fixes. The rewrite allows us to more easily work on the project, and ensures we can continue providing stable releases for the foreseeable future, despite Microsoft recently breaking the Windows XP-compatible compiler included with Visual Studio 2022. Legacy Update 1.12 release notes The project switched sway from compiling with Visual C++ 2008 (and 2010, and 2017, and 2022...), which Microsoft recently broke, and now uses an open-source MinGW/GCC toolchain. This has cut the size of the binary in half, which is impressive considering it was already smaller than 1MB. This new version also adds a three-minute timer before performing any required restarts, and speeds up the installation of the slowest type of updates (.NET Frameworks) considerably.

It's no secret that Google wants to bring Android to laptops and desktops, and is even sacrificing Chrome OS to get there. It seems this effort is gaining some serious traction lately, as evidenced by a conversation between Rick Osterloh, Google's SVP of platforms and devices, and Qualcomm's CEO, Christiano Amon, during Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit. Google may have just dropped its clearest hint yet that Android will soon power more thanphonesand tablets. At today's Snapdragon Summit kickoff, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon and Google's SVP of Devices and Services Rick Osterloh discussed a new joint project that will directly impact personal computing. In the past, we've always had very different systems between what we are building on PCs and what we are building on smartphones," Osterlohsaid on stage. We've embarked on a project to combine that. We are building together a common technical foundation for our products on PCs and desktop computing systems." Adamya Sharma at Android Authority Amon eventually exclaimed that's he's seen the prototype devices, and that it is incredible". He added that it delivers on the vision of convergence of mobile and PC. I cannot wait to have one." Now, marketing nonsense aside, this further confirms that soon, you'll be able to buy laptops running Android, and possibly even desktop systems running Android. The real question, though, is - would you want to? What's the gain of buying an Android laptop over a traditional Windows or macOS laptop? Then there's Google's infamous fickle nature, launching and killing products seemingly randomly, without any clear long-term plans and commitments. Would you buy an expensive laptop running Android, knowing full well Google might discontinue or lose interest in its attempt to bring Android to laptops, leaving you with an unsupported device? I'm sire schools that bought into Chromebooks will gradually move over to the new Android laptops as Chrome OS features are merged into Android, but what about everyone else? I always welcome more players in the desktop space, and anything that can challenge Microsoft and Apple is welcome, but I'm just not sure if I have faith in Google sticking with it in the long run.

Apple's first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable under the hood, the outer shell - the visual user interface - was jarringly bad. Without much experience in desktop UX, Apple's first OS looked like a Fisher-Price toy: heavily rounded corners, mismatched colors, inconsistent details and very low information density. Obviously, the tool was designed mostly for kids or perhaps light users or elderly people. Credit where credit is due: Apple had listened to their users and the next version - macOS Sequoia - shipped with lots of fixes. Border radius was heavily reduced, transparent glass-like panels replaced by less transparent ones, buttons made more serious and less toyish. Most system icons made more serious, too, with focus on more detail. Overall, it seemed like the 2nd version was a giant leap from infancy to teenage years. Rakhim Davletkali A top quality operating systems shitpost.

GrapheneOS is a security and privacy-focused mobile operating system based on a modified version of Android (AOSP). To enhance its protection, it integrates advanced security features, including its own memory allocator for libc:hardened malloc. Designed to be as robust as the operating system itself, this allocator specifically seeks to protect against memory corruption. This technical article details the internal workings of hardened malloc and the protection mechanisms it implementsto prevent common memory corruption vulnerabilities. It is intended for a technical audience, particularly security researchers or exploit developers, who wish to gain an in-depth understanding of thisallocator's internals. Nicolas Stefanskiat Synacktiv GrapheneOS is quite possibly the best way to keep your smartphone secure, and even law enforcement is not particularly amused that people are using it. If the choice is between security and convenience, GrapheneOS chooses security every time, and that's the reason it's favoured by many people who deeply care about (smartphone) security. The project's social media accounts can be a bit... Much at times, but their dedication to security is without question, and if you want a secure smartphone, there's really nowhere else to turn - unless you opt to trust the black box security approach from Apple. Sadly, GrapheneOS is effectively under attack not from criminals, but from Google itself. As Google tightens its grip on Android more and more, as we've been reporting on for years now, it will become ever harder for GrapheneOS to deliver the kind of security and fast update they've been able to deliver. I don't know just how consequential Google's increasing pressure is for GrapheneOS, but I doubt it's making the lives of its developers any easier. It's self-defeating, too; GrapheneOS has a long history of basically serving as a test best for highly advanced security features Google later implements for Android in general. A great example is the Memory Tagging Extension, a feature implemented by ARM in hardware, which GrapheneOS implements much more widely and extensively than Google does. This way, GrapheneOS users have basically been serving as testers to see if applications and other components experience any issues when using the feature, paving the way for Google to eventually, hopefully, follow in GrapheneOS' footsteps. Google benefits from GrapheneOS, and trying to restrict its ability to properly support devices and its access to updates is shortsighted.

Why does Space Station 14 crash with ANGLE on ARM64? 6 hours later... So. I've been continuing work on getting ARM64 builds out for Space Station 14. The thing I was working on yesterday were launcher builds, specifically asingledownload that supports both ARM64 and x64. I'd already gotten the game client itself running natively on ARM64, and it worked perfectly fine in my dev environment. I wrote all the new launcher code, am pretty sure I got it right. Zip it up, test it on ARM64, aaand... The game client crashes on Windows ARM64. Both in my VM and on Julian's real Snapdragon X laptop. PJB at A stream of consciousness Debugging stories can be great fun to read, and this one is a prime example. Trust me, you'll have no idea what the hell is going on here until you reach the very end, and it's absolutely wild. Very few people are ever going to run into this exact same set of highly unlikely circumstances, but of course, with a platform as popular as Windows, someone was eventually bound to. Sidenote: the game in question looks quite interesting.

I had the pleasure of going to RustConf 2025 in Seattle this year. During the conference, I met lots of new people, but in particular, I had the pleasure of spending a large portion of the conference hanging out with Jeremy Soller of Redox and System76. Eventually, we got chatting about EFI and bootloaders, and my contributions toPostmarketOS, and my experience booting EFI-based operating systems (Linux) on smartphones usingU-Boot.Redox OSis also booted via EFI, and so the nerdsnipe began. Could I run Redox OS on my smartphone the same way I could run PostmarketOS Linux? Spoilers, yes. Paul Sajna The hoops required to get this to work are, unsurprisingly, quite daunting, but it turns out it's entirely possible to run the ARM build of Redox on a Qualcomm-based smartphone. The big caveat here is that there's not much you can actually do with it, because among the various missing drivers is the one for touch input, so once you arrive at Redox' login screen, you can't go any further. Still, it's quite impressive, and highlights both the amazing work done on the PostmarketOS/Linux side, as well as the Redox side.

After researching the first commercial transistor computer, the British Metrovick 950, Nina Kalinina wrote an emulator, simple assembler, and some additional toys" (her word) so we can enjoy this machine today. First, what, exactly, is the Metrovick 950? Metrovick 950, the first commercial transistor computer, is an early British computer, released in 1956. It is a direct descendant of the Manchester Baby (1948), the first electronic stored-program computer ever. Nina Kalinina The Baby, formally known as Small-Scale Experimental Machine, was a foundation for the Manchester Mark I (1949). Mark I found commercial success as the Ferranti Mark I. A few years later, Manchester University built a variant of Mark I that used magnetic drum memory instead of Williams tubes and transistors instead of valves. This computer was called the Manchester Transistor Computer (1955). Engineers from Metropolitan-Vickers released a streamlined, somewhat simplified version of the Transistor Computer as Metrovick 950. The emulator she developed is only" compatible on a source code level, and emulates the CPU, a teleprinter with a paper tape punch/reader, a magnetic tape storage device, and a plotter", at 200-300 operations per second. It's complete enough you can play Lunar Lander on it, because is a computer you can't play games on really a computer? Nina didn't just create this emulator and its related components, but also wrote a ton of documentation to help you understand the machine and to get started. There's an introduction to programming and using the Metrovick 950 emulator, additional notes on programming the emulator, and much more. She also posted a long thread on Fedi with a ton more details and background information, which is a great read, as well. This is amazing work, and interesting not just to programmers interested in ancient computers, but also to historians and people who really put the retro in retrocomputing.

A very exciting set of kernel patches have just been proposed for the Linux kernel, adding multikernel support to Linux. This patch series introduces multikernel architecture support, enabling multiple independent kernel instances to coexist and communicate on a single physical machine. Each kernel instance can run on dedicated CPU cores while sharing the underlying hardware resources. Cong Wang on the LKML The idea is that you can run multiple instances of the Linux kernel on different CPU cores using kexec, with a dedicated IPI framework taking care of communication between these kernels. The benefits for fault isolation and security is obvious, and it supposedly uses less resources than running virtual machines through kvm and similar technologies. The main feature I'm interested in is that this would potentially allow for kernel handover", in which the system goes from using one kernel to the other. I wonder if this would make it possible to implement a system similar to what Android currently uses for updates, where new versions are installed alongside the one you're running right now, with the system switching over to the new version upon reboot. If you could do something similar with this technology without even having to reboot, that would be quite amazing and a massive improvement to the update experience. It's obviously just a proposal for now, and there will be much, much discussion to follow I'm sure, but the possibilities are definitely exciting.

The 1980s saw a flurry of graphical user interfaces pop up, almost all of them in some way made by people who got to see the work done by Xerox. Today's topic is no exception - GEM was developed by Lee Jay Lorenzen, who worked at Xerox and wished to create a cheaper, less resource-intensive alternative to the Xerox Star, which he got to do at DRI after leaving Xerox. His work was then shown off to Atari, who were interested in using it. The entire situation was pretty hectic for a while: DRI's graphics group worked on the PC version of GEM on MS-DOS; Atari developers were porting it to Apple Lisas running CP/M-68K; and Loveman was building GEMDOS. Against all odds, they succeeded. The operating system for Atari ST consisting of GEM running on top of GEMDOS was named TOS which simply meant the operating system", although many believed T" actually stood for Tramiel". Atari 520 ST, soon nicknamed Jackintosh",was introduced at the 1985 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegasand became an immediate hit. GEM ran smoothly on the powerful ST's hardware, and there were no clones to worry about. Atari developed its branch of GEM independently of Digital Research until 1993, when the Atari ST line of computers was discontinued. Nemanja Trifunovic at Programming at the right level Other than through articles like these and the occasional virtual machine, I have no experience with the various failed graphical user interfaces of the 1980s, since I was too young at the time. Even from the current day, though, it's easy to see how all of them can be traced back directly to the work done at Xerox, and just how much we owe to the people working there at the time. Now that the technology industry is as massive as it is, with the stakes being so high, it's unlikely we'll ever see a place like Xerox PARC ever again. Everything is secretive now, and if a line of research doesn't obviously lead to massive short-term gains, it's canned before it even starts. The golden age of wild, random computer research without a profit motive is clearly behind us, and that's sad.

Last night, my wife looks up from her computer, troubled. She tells me she can't log into her computer running Windows 11, as every time she enters the PIN code to her account, the login screen throws up a cryptic error: Your credentials could not be verified". She's using the correct PIN code, so that surely isn't it. We opt for the gold standard in troubleshooting and perform a quick reboot, but that doesn't fix it. My initial instinct is that since she's using an online account instead of a local one, perhaps Microsoft is having some server issues? A quick check online indicates that no, Microsoft's servers seem to be running fine, and to be honest, I don't even know if that would have an effect on logging into Windows in the first place. The Windows 11 login screen does give us a link to click in case you forget your PIN code. Despite the fact the PIN code she's entering is correct, we try to go through this process to see if it goes anywhere. This is where things really start to get weird. A few dialogs flash in and out of existence, until it's showing us a dialog telling us to insert a security USB key of some sort, which we don't have. Dismissing it gives us an option to try other login methods, including a basic password login. This, too, doesn't work; just like with the PIN code, Windows 11 claims the accurate, correct password my wife is entering is invalid (just to be safe, we tested it by logging into her Microsoft account on her phone, which works just fine). In the account selection menu in the bottom-left, an ominous new account mysteriously appears: WsiAccount. The next option we try is to actually change the PIN code. This doesn't work either. Windows wants us to use a second factor using my wife's phone number, but this throws up another weird error, this time claiming the SMS service to send the code isn't working. A quick check online once again confirms the service seems to be working just fine for everybody else. I'm starting to get really stumped and frustrated. Of course, during all of this, we're both searching the web to find anything that might help us figure out what's going on. None of our searches bring up anything useful, and none of our findings seem to be related to or match up with the issue we're having. While she's looking at her phone and I'm browsing on my Fedora/KDE PC next to hers, she quickly mentions she's getting a notification that OneDrive is full, which is odd, since she doesn't use OneDrive for anything. We take this up as a quick sidequest, and we check up on her OneDrive account on her phone. As OneDrive loads, our jaws drop in amazement: a big banner warning is telling her she's using over 5500% of her 5GB free account. We look at each other and burst out laughing. We exchange some confused words, and then we realise what is going on: my wife just got a brand new Samsung Galaxy S25, and Samsung has some sort of deal with Microsoft to integrate its services into Samsung's variant of Android. Perhaps during the process of transferring data and applications from her old to her new phone, OneDrive syncing got turned on? A quick trip to the Samsung Gallery application confirms our suspicions: the phone is synchronising over 280GB of photos and videos to OneDrive. My wife was never asked for consent to turn this feature on, so it must've been turned on by default. We quickly turn it off, delete the 280GB of photos and videos from OneDrive, and move on to the real issue at hand. Since nothing seems to work, and none of what we find online brings us any closer to what's going on with her Windows 11 installation, we figured it's time to bring out the big guns. For the sake of brevity, let's run through the things we tried. Booting into safe mode doesn't work; we get the same login problems. Trying to uninstall the latest updates, an option in WinRE, doesn't work, and throws up an unspecified error. We try to use a restore point, but despite knowing for 100% certain the feature to periodically create restore points is enabled, the only available restore point is from 2022, and is located on a drive other than her root drive (or C:\" in Windows parlance). Using the reset option in WinRE doesn't work either, as it also throws up an error, this time about not having enough free space. I also walk through a few more complex suggestions, like a few manual registry hacks related to the original error using cmd.exe in WinRE. None of it yields any results. It's now approaching midnight, and we need to get up early to drop the kids off at preschool, so I tell my wife I'll reinstall her copy of Windows 11 tomorrow. We're out of ideas. The next day, I decide to give it one last go before opting for the trouble of going through a reinstallation. The one idea I still have left is to enable the hidden administrator account in Windows 11, which gives you password-free access to what is basically Windows' root account. It involves booting into WinRE, loading up cmd.exe, and replacing utilman.exe in system32 with cmd.exe: If you then proceed to boot into Windows 11 and click on the Accessibility icon in the bottom-right, it will open utilman.exe", but since that's just cmd.exe with the utilman.exe name, you get a command prompt to work with, right on the login screen. From here, you can launch regedit, find the correct key, change a REG_BINARY, save, and reboot. At the login screen, you'll see a new adminstrator" account with full access to your computer. During the various reboots, I do some more web searching, and I stumble upon a post on

Intel is in very dire straits, and as such, the company needs investments and partnerships more than anything. Today, NVIDIA and Intel announced just such a partnership, in which NVIDIA will invest $5 billion into the troubled chip giant, while the two companies will develop products that combine Intel's x86 processors with NVIDIA's GPUs. For data centers, Intel will build NVIDIA-custom x86 CPUs that NVIDIA will integrate into its AI infrastructure platforms and offer to the market. For personal computing, Intel will build and offer to the market x86 system-on-chips (SOCs) that integrate NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets. These new x86 RTX SOCs will power a wide range of PCs that demand integration of world-class CPUs and GPUs. NVIDIA press release My immediate reaction to this news was to worry about the future of Intel's ARC graphics efforts. Just as the latest crop of their ARC GPUs have received a ton of good press and positive feedback, with some of their cards becoming the go-to suggestion for a budget-friendly but almost on-par alternative to offerings from NVIDIA and AMD, it would be a huge blow to user choice and competition if Intel were to abandon the effort. I think this news pretty much spells the end for the ARC graphics effort. Making dedicated GPUs able to compete with AMD and NVIDIA must come at a pretty big financial cost for Intel, and I wouldn't be surprised if they've been itching to find an excuse to can the whole project. With NVIDIA GPUs fulfilling the role of more powerful integrated GPUs, all Intel really needs is a skeleton crew developing the basic integrated GPUs for cheaper and non-gaming oriented devices, which would be a lot cheaper to maintain. For just $5 billion dollars, NVIDIA most likely just eliminated a budding competitor in the GPU space. That's cheap.