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The regular, consumer version of Windows 10 isn't the only Windows release reaching or having reached end-of-life, now middling on under the Extended Security Updates program for the many people sticking with the venerable release. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 (October 13, 2026), Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB (October 13, 2026), and Windows Server 2016 (January 12, 2027) are all reaching end-of-life soon, too. On the listed dates, these versions of Windows will receive their final monthly security updates. As with Windows 10 for consumers, however, there's a way out: the Extended Security Updates program will also kick in for these versions, offering critical and important security updates, and support relating to just those. The program will be offered for up to three years after official support ends, and won't be free. For Server 2016 and and Enterprise LTSB 2016, pricing will be $61 per year, but it would double for every year after the first. Pricing for IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB is available upon request. Of course, Microsoft urges you to upgrade to newer versions - Windows Server 2025, Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 2024, and Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 - but if you're happy with your current version, you can at least get a three-year reprieve, for a price.

Despite continuous rumors to the contrary, Oracle is still actively developing Solaris, and it's been more active than ever lately. Yesterday, the company pushed out another release for customers with the proper support contracts: Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU90. Aside from the various package updates to bring them up to speed with the latest releases, this new Solaris version also comes with a slew of improvements for ZFS. ZFS changes in Oracle Solaris 11.4.90 include more flexibility in setting retention properties when receiving a new file system, and adding the ability for zfs scrub and resilver to run before all the blocks have been freed from previous zfs destroy operations. (This requires upgrading pools to the new zpool version 54.) Alan Coopersmith You can now also set boot environments to never be destroyed by either manual or automatic means, and more work has been done to prevent a specific type of bug that would accidentally kill all running processes on the system. It seems some programs mistakenly use -1 as a pid value in kill() calls. Now in 11.4.90, the kill system call was modified to not allow processes to use a pid of -1 unless they'd specifically set a process flag that they intend to kill all processes first, to help with programs that didn't check for errors when finding the process id for the singular process they wanted to kill. Alan Coopersmith There's many more changes and improvements, of course, and hopefully, we'll get to see these in the next CBE release as well, so us mere mortals without expensive support contracts can benefit from them too.

I was trading New Year's resolutions with a circle of friends a few weeks ago, and someone mentioned a big one: sleeping better. I'm a visual neuroscientist by training, so whenever the topic pops up it inevitably leads to talking about the dreaded blue light from monitors, blue light filters, and whether they do anything. My short answer is no, blue light filters don't work, but there are many more useful things that someone can do to control their light intake to improve their sleep-and minimize jet lag when they're traveling. My longer answer is usually a half-hour rant about why they don't work, covering everything from a tiny nucleus of cells above the optic chiasm, to people living in caves without direct access to sunlight, to neuropeptides, the different cones, how monitors work, gamma curves, what I learned running ismy.blue, corn bulbs, melatonin, finally sharing my Apple Watch & WHOOP stats. What follows is slightly more than you needed to know about blue light filters and more effective ways to control your circadian rhythm. Spoiler: the real lever is total luminance, not color. Patrick Mineault And yet, despite a complete and utter lack of evidence blue-light filters do anything at all, even the largest technology companies in the world peddle them without so much as blinking an eye. It's pure quackery, and as always, we let them get away with it.

As if keeping track of whatever counts as a release schedule for Windows wasn't complicated enough - don't lie, you don't know when that feature they announced is actually being released either - Microsoft is making everything even more complicated. Soon, Microsoft will be releasing Windows 11 26H1, but you most likely won't be getting it because it's strictly limited to devices with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X2 Series processors. The only way to get this version of Windows is to go out and buy a device with a Snapdragon X2 Series processor. Windows 11 26H1 will not be made available to any other Windows 11 users, so nobody will be able to upgrade to it. Furthermore, users of Windows 11 26H1 will not be able to update to the feature update" for users of Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, the regular Windows versions, planned for late 2026. Instead, Microsoft promises there will be an upgrade path for 26H1 users in a future" release of Windows. Why? Devices running Windows 11, version 26H1 will not be able to update to the next annual feature update in the second half of 2026. This is because Windows 11, version 26H1 is based on a different Windows core than Windows 11, versions 24H2 and 25H2, and the upcoming feature update. These devices will have a path to update in a future Windows release. AriaUpdated at the Windows IT Pro Blog The same thing happened when Qualcomm releases its first round of Snapdragon processors for Windows, as Windows 24H2 was also tied to this specific platform. It seems Microsoft is forced to have entirely separate and partially incompatible codebases just to support Snapdragon processors, which must be a major pain in the ass to deal with. Considering Windows on ARM hasn't exactly been a smashing success, one may wonder how long Microsoft remains willing to make such exceptions for a singular chip.

So vi only has one level of undo, which is simply no longer fit for the times we live in now, and also wholly unnecessary given even the least powerful devices that might need to run vi probably have more than enough resources to give at least a few more levels of undo. What I didn't know, however, is that vi's limited undo behaviour is actually part of POSIX, and for full compliance, you're going to need it. As Chris Siebenmann notes, vim and its derivatives ignore this POSIX requirement and implement multiple levels of undo in the obviously correct way. What about nvi, the default on the BSD variants? I didn't know this, but it has a convoluted workaround to both maintain POSIX compatibility and offer multiple levels of undo, and it's definitely something. Nvi has opted to remain POSIX compliant and operate in the traditional vi way, while still supporting multi-level undo. To get multi-level undo in nvi, you extend the first u' with .' commands, so u..' undoes the most recent three changes. The u' command can be extended with .' in either of its modes (undo'ing or redo'ing), so u..u..' is a no-op. The .' operation doesn't appear to take a count in nvi, so there is no way to do multiple undos (or redos) in one action; you have to step through them by hand. I'm not sure how nvi reacts if you want do things like move your cursor position during an undo or redo sequence (my limited testing suggests that it can perturb the sequence, so that .' now doesn't continue undoing or redoing the way vim will continue if you use u' or Ctrl-r again). Chris Siebenmann Siebenmann lists a few other implementations and how they work with undo, and it's interesting to see how all of them try to solve the problem in slightly different ways.

F9 is an L4-inspired microkernel designed for ARM Cortex-M, targeting real-time embedded systems with hard determinism requirements. It implements the fundamental microkernel principles-address spaces, threads, and IPC, while adding advanced features from industrial RTOSes. F9 kernel GitHub page For once, not written in Rust, and comes with both an L4-style native API and a userspace POSIX API, and there's a ton of documentation to get you started.

It's been well over a year since Microsoft unveiled it was working on bringing MIDI 2.0 to Windows, and now it's actually here available for everyone. We've been working on MIDI over the past several years, completely rewriting decades of MIDI 1.0 code on Windows to both support MIDI 2.0 and make MIDI 1.0 amazing. This new combined stack is called Windows MIDI Services." The Windows MIDI Services core components are built into Windows 11, rolling out through a phased enablement process now to in-support retail releases of Windows 11. This includes all the infrastructure needed to bring more features to existing MIDI 1.0 apps, and also support apps using MIDI 2.0 through our new Windows MIDI Services App SDK. Pete Brown and Gary Daniels at the Windows Blogs This is the kind of work users of an operating system want to see. Improvements and new features like these actually have a meaningful, positive impact for people using MIDI, and will genuinely give them them benefits they otherwise wouldn't get. I won't pretend to know much about the detailed features and improvements listed in Microsoft's blog post, but I'm sure the musicians in the audience will be quite pleased. Whomever at Microsoft was responsible for pushing this through, managing this team, and of course the team members themselves should probably be overseeing more than just this. Less AI" bullshit, more of this.

KDE Plasma 6.6 has been released, and brings with a whole slew of new features. You can save any combination of themes as a global theme, and there's a new feature allowing you to increase or decrease the contrast of frames and outlines. If your device has a camera, you can now scan Wi-F settings from QR codes, which is quite nice if you spend a lot of time on the road. There's a new colour filter for people who are colour blind, allowing you to set the entire UI to grayscale, as well as a brand new virtual keyboard. Other new accessibility features include tracking the mouse cursor when using the zoom feature, a reduced motion setting, and more. Spectacle gets a text extraction feature and a feature to exclude windows from screen recordings. There's also a new optional login manager, optimised for Wayland, a new first-run setup wizard, and much more. As always, KDE 6.6 will find its way to your distribution's repositories soon enough.

SvarDOS is an open-source project that is meant to integrate the best out of the currently available DOS tools, drivers and games. DOS development has been abandoned by commercial players a long time ago, mostly during early nineties. Nowadays it survives solely through the efforts of hobbyists and retro-enthusiasts, but this is a highly sparse and unorganized ecosystem. SvarDOS aims to collect available DOS software and make it easy to find and install applications using a network-enabled package manager (like apt-get, but for DOS and able to run on a 8086 PC). SvarDOS website SvarDOS is built around a fork of the Enhanced DR-DOS kernel, which is available in a dedicated GitHub repository. The project's base installation is extremely minimal, containing only the kernel, a command interpreter, and some basic system administration tools, and this basic installation is compatible down to the 8086. You are then free to add whatever packages you want, either from local storage or from the online repository using the included package manager. SvarDOS is a rolling release, and you can use the package manager to keep it updated. Aside from a set of regular installation images for a variety of floppy sizes, there's also a dedicated talking" build that uses the PROVOX screen reader and Braille n Speak synthesizer at the COM1 port. It's rare for a smaller project like this to have the resources to dedicate to accessibility, so this is a rather pleasant surprise.

It's been a while since we've talked about AsteroidOS, the Linux distribution designed specifically to run on smartwatches, providing a smartwatch interface and applications built with Qt and QML. The project has just released version 2.0, and it comes with a ton of improvements. AsteroidOS 2.0 has arrived, bringing major features and improvements gathered during its journey through community space. Always-on-Display, expanded support for more watches, new launcher styles, customizable quick settings, significant performance increases in parts of the User Interface, and enhancements to our synchronization clients are just some highlights of what to expect. AsteroidOS 2.0 release announcement I'm pleasantly surprised by how many watches are actually fully supported by AsteroidOS 2.0; especially watches from Fossil and Ticwatch are a safe buy if you want to run proper Linux on your wrist. There are also synchronisation applications for Android, desktop Limux, Sailfish OS, and UBports Ubuntu Touch. iOS is obviously missing from this list, but considering Apple's stranglehold on iOS, that's not unexpected. Then again, if you bought into the Apple ecosystem, you knew what you were getting into. As for the future of the project, they hope to add a web-based flashing tool and an application store, among other things. I'm definitely intrigued, and am now contemplating if I should get my hands on a (used) supported watch to try this out. Anything I can move to Linux is a win.

Every modern iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS application uses Asset Catalogs to manage images, colors, icons, and other resources. When you build an app with Xcode, your .xcassets folders are compiled into binary .car files that ship with your application. Despite being a fundamental part of every Apple app, there is little to none official documentation about this file format. In this post, I'll walk through the process of reverse engineering the .car file format, explain its internal structures, and show how to parse these files programmatically. This knowledge could be useful for security research and building developer tools that does not rely on Xcode or Apple's proprietary tools. ordinal0 at dbg.re Not only did ordinal0 reverse-engineer the file format, they also developed their own unique custom parser and compiler for .car files that don't require any of Apple's tools.

Within the major operating system of its day, on popular hardware of its day, ran the utterly dominant relational database software of its day. PC Magazine, February 1984, said, Independent industry watchers estimate that dBASE II enjoys 70 percent of the market for microcomputer database managers." Similar to past subjects HyperCard and Scala Multimedia, Wayne Ratcliff's dBASE II was an industry unto itself, not just for data-management, but for programmability, a legacy which lives on today as xBase. Written in assembly, dBASE II squeezed maximum performance out of minimal hardware specs. This is my first time using both CP/M and dBASE. Let's see what made this such a power couple. Christopher Drum If you've ever wanted to run a company using CP/M - and who doesn't - this article is as good a starting point as any.

In my fundraiser pitch published last Monday, one of the things I highlighted as a reason to contribute to OSNews and ensure its continued operation stated that we do not use any AI'; not during research, not during writing, not for images, nothing." In the comments to that article, someone asked: Why do I care if you use AI? A comment posted on OSNews A few days ago, Scott Shambaugh rejected a code change request submitted to popular Python library matplotlib because it was obviously written by an AI", and such contributions are not allowed for the issue in question. That's when something absolutely wild happened: the AI" replied that it had written and published a hit piece targeting Shambaugh publicly for gatekeeping", trying to blackmail Shambaugh into accepting the request anyway. This bizarre turn of events obviously didn't change Shambaugh's mind. The AI" then published another article, this time a lament about how humans are discriminating against AI", how it's the victim of what effectively amounts to racism and prejudice, and how its feelings were hurt. The article is a cheap simulacra of something a member of an oppressed minority group might write in their struggle for recognition, but obviously void of any real impact because it's just fancy autocomplete playing a game of pachinko. Imagine putting down a hammer because you're dealing with screws, and the hammer starts crying in the toolbox. What are we even doing here? RAM prices went up for this. This isn't where the story ends, though. Ars Technica authors Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland published an article describing this saga, much like I did above. The article's second half is where things get weird: it contained several direct quotes attributed to Shambaugh, claimed to be sourced from Shambaugh's blog. The kicker? These quotes were entirely made up, were never said or written by Shambaugh, and are nowhere to be found on his blog or anywhere else on the internet - they're only found inside this very Ars Technica article. In a comment under the Ars article, Shambaugh himself pointed out the quotes were fake and made-up, and not long after, Ars deleted the article from its website. By then, everybody had already figured out what had happened: the Ars authors had used AI" during their writing process, and this AI" had made up the quotes in question. Why, you ask, did the AI" do this? Shambaugh: This blog you're on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn't figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn't access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed. Scott Shambaugh A few days later, Ars Technica's editor-in-chief Ken Fisher published a short statement on the events. On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. That is a serious failure of our standards. Direct quotations must always reflect what a source actually said. Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here. Ken Fisher at Ars Technica In other words, Ars Technica does not allow AI"-generated material to be published, but has nothing to say about the use of AI" to perform research for an article, to summarise source material, and to perform similar aspects of the writing process. This leaves the door wide open for things like this to happen, since doing research is possibly the most important part of writing. Introduce a confabulator in the research process, and you risk tainting the entire output of your writing. That is why you should care that at OSNews, we do not use any AI'; not during research, not during writing, not for images, nothing". If there's a factual error on OSNews, I want that factual error to be mine, and mine alone. If you see bloggers, podcasters, journalists, and authors state they use AI" all the time, you might want to be on your toes.

Have you ever wanted to read the original design documents underlying the Windows NT operating system? This binder contains the original design specifications for NT OS/2," an operating system designed by Microsoft that developed into Windows NT. In the late 1980s, Microsoft's 16-bit operating system, Windows, gained popularity, prompting IBM and Microsoft to end their OS/2 development partnership. Although Windows 3.0 proved to be successful, Microsoft wished to continue developing a 32-bit operating system completely unrelated to IBM's OS/2 architecture. To head the redesign project, Microsoft hired David Cutler and others away from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Unlike Windows 3.x and its successor, Windows 95, NT's technology provided better network support, making it the preferred Windows environment for businesses. These two product lines continued development as separate entities until they were merged with the release of Windows XP in 2001. Object listing at the Smithsonian The actual binder is housed in the Smithsonian, although it's not currently on display. Luckily for us, a collection of Word and PDF files encompassing the entire book is available online for your perusal. Reading these documents will allow you to peel back over three decades of Microsoft's terrible stewardship of Windows NT layer by layer, eventually ending up at the original design and intent as laid out by Dave Cutler, Helen Custer, Daryl E. Havens, Jim Kelly, Edwin Hoogerbeets, Gary D. Kimura, Chuck Lenzmeier, Mark Lucovsky, Tom Miller, Michael J. O'Leary, Lou Perazzoli, Steven D. Rowe, David Treadwell, Steven R. Wood, and more. A fantastic time capsule we should be thrilled to still have access to.

There's the two behemoth architectures, x86 and ARM, and we probably all own one or more devices using each. Then there's the eternally up-and-coming RISC-V, which, so far, seems to be having a lot of trouble outgrowing its experimental, developmental stage. There's a fourth, though, which is but a footnote in the west, but might be more popular in its country of origin, China: LoongArch (I'm ignoring IBM's POWER, since there hasn't been any new consumer hardware in that space for a long, long time). Wesley Moore got his hands on a mini PC built around the Loongson 3A6000 processor, and investigated what it's like to run Linux on it. He opted for Chimera Linux, which supports LoongArch, and the installation process feels more like Linux on x86 than Linux on ARM, which often requires dedicated builds and isn't standardised. Sadly, Wayland had issues on the machine, but X.org worked just fine, and it seems virtually all Chimera Linux packages are supported for a pretty standard desktop Linux experience. Performance of this chip is rather mid, at best. The Loongson-3A6000 is not particularly fast or efficient. At idle it consumes about 27W and under load it goes up to 65W. So, overall it's not a particularly efficient machine, and while the performance is nothing special it does seem readily usable. Browsing JS heavy web applications like Mattermost and Mastodon runs fine. Subjectively it feels faster than all the Raspberry Pi systems I've used (up to a Pi 400). Wesley Moore I've been fascinated by LoongArch for years, and am waiting to pounce on the right offer for LoongArch's fastest processor, the 3C6000, which comes in dual-socket configurations for a maximum total of 128 cores and 256 threads. The 3C6000 should be considerably faster than the low-end 3A6000 in the mini PC covered by this article. I'm a sucker for weird architectures, and it doesn't get much weirder than LoongArch.

If you look at the table of contents for my book, Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, you'll see that entries on networks before/outside the internet are arranged first by underlying infrastructure and then chronologically. You'll also notice that within the section on wired networks, there are two sub-sections: one for electrical wire and another for barbed wire. Even though the barbed wire section is quite short, it was one of the most fascinating to research and write about - mostly because the history of using barbed wire to communicate is surprisingly long and almost entirely undocumented, even though barbed wire fence phones in particular were an essential part of early- to mid-twentieth century rural life in many parts of the U.S. and Canada! Lori Emerson I had no idea this used to be a thing, but it obviously makes a ton of sense. If you can have a conversation by stringing a few tin cans together, you can obviously do something similar across metal barbed wire. There's something poetic about using one of mankind's most dividing inventions to communicate, and thus bring people closer together.

January was a busy month for Haiku, with their monthly report listing a metric ton of smaller fixes, changes, and improvements. Perusing the list, a few things stand out to me, most notably continued work on improving Haiku's touchpad support. The remainder of samuelrp84's patchset implementing new touchpad functionality was merged, including two-finger scrolling, edge motion, software button areas, and click finger support; and on the hardware side, driver support for Elantech version 4" touchpads, with experimental code for versions 1, 2, and 3. (Version 2, at least, seems to be incomplete and had to be disabled for the time being.) Haiku's January 2026 activity report On a related note, the still-disabled I2C-HID saw a number of fixes in January, and the rtl8125 driver has been synced up with OpenBSD. I also like the changes to kernel_version, which now no longer returns some internal number like BeOS used to do, instead returning B_HAIKU_VERSION; the uname command was changed accordingly to use this new information. There's some small POSIX compliance fixes, a bunch of work was done on unit tests, and a ton more.

We often lament Microsoft's terrible stewardship of its Windows operating system, but that doesn't mean that they never do anything right. In a blog post detailing changes and improvements coming to the Microsoft Store, the company announced something Windows users might actually like? A new command-line interface for the Microsoft Store brings app discovery, installation and update management directly to your terminal. This enables developers and users with a new way to discover and install Store apps, without needing the GUI. The Store CLI is available only on devices where Microsoft Store is enabled. Giorgio Sardo at the Windows Blogs Of course, this new command-line frontend to the Microsoft Store comes with commands to install, update, and search for applications in the store, but sadly, it doesn't seem to come with an actual TUI for browsing and discovery, which is a shame. I sometimes find it difficult to use dnf to find applications, as it's not always obvious which search terms to use, which exact spelling packagers are using, which words they use in the description, and so on. In other words, it may not always be clear if the search terms you're using are the correct ones to find the application you need. If package managers had a TUI to enable browsing for applications instead of merely searching for them, the process of using the command line to find and install applications would be much nicer. Arch has this third-party TUI called pacseek for its package manager, and it looks absolutely amazing. I've run into a rudimentary dnf TUI called dnfseek, but it's definitely not as well-rounded as pacseek, and it also hasn't seen any development since its initial release. I couldn't find anything for apt, but there's always aptitude, which uses ncurses and thus fulfills a similar role. To really differentiate this new Microsoft Store command-line tool from winget, the company could've built a proper TUI, but instead it seems to just be winget with nicer formatted output that is limited to just the Microsoft Store. Nice, I guess.

The team behind Tyr started 2025 with little to show in our quest to produce a Rust GPU driver for Arm Mali hardware, and by the end of the year, we were able to play SuperTuxKart (a 3D open-source racing game) at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC). Our prototype was a joint effort between Arm, Collabora, and Google; it ran well for the duration of the event, and the performance was more than adequate for players. Thankfully, we picked up steam at precisely the right moment: Dave Airlie just announced in the Maintainers Summit that the DRM subsystem is only about a year away" from disallowing new drivers written in C and requiring the use of Rust. Now it is time to lay out a possible roadmap for 2026 in order to upstream all of this work. Daniel Almeida at LWN.net A very detailed look at what the team behind Tyr is trying to achieve with their Rust GPU driver for Arm Mali chips.

With the original release of Windows 8, Microsoft also enforced Secure Boot. It's been 15 years since that release, and that means the original 2011 Secure Boot certificates are about to expire. If these certificates are not replaced with new ones, Secure Boot will cease to function - your machine will still boot and operate, but the benefits of Secure Boot are mostly gone, and as newer vulnerabilities are discovered, systems without updated Secure Boot certificates will be increasingly exposed. Microsoft has already been rolling out new certificates through Windows updates, but only for users of supported versions of Windows, which means Windows 11. If you're using Windows 10, without the Extended Security Updates, you won't be getting the new certificates through Windows Update. Even if you use Windows 11, you may need a UEFI update from your laptop or motherboard OEM, assuming they still support your device. For Linux users using Secure Boot, you're probably covered by fwupd, which will update the certificates as part of your system's update program, like KDE's Discover. Of course, you can also use fwupd manually in the terminal, if you'd like. For everyone else not using Secure Boot, none of this will matter and you're going to be just fine. I honestly doubt there will be much fallout from this updating process, but there's always bound to be a few people who fall between the cracks. All we can do is hope whomever is responsible for Secure Boot at Microsoft hasn't started slopcoding yet.

What happens when you slopcode a bunch of bloat to your basic text editor? Well, you add a remote code execution vulnerability to notepad.exe. Improper neutralization of special elements used in a command (command injection') in Windows Notepad App allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network. An attacker could trick a user into clicking a malicious link inside a Markdown file opened in Notepad, causing the application to launch unverified protocols that load and execute remote files. CVE-2026-20841 I don't know how many more obvious examples one needs to understand that Microsoft simply does not care, in any way, shape, or form, about Windows. A lot of people seem very hesitant to accept that with even LinkedIn generating more revenue for Microsoft than Windows, the writing is on the wall. Anyway, the fix has been released through the Microsoft Store.

If you're a developer and use KDE, you're going to be interested in a new feature KDE is working on for KDE Linux. In my last post, I laid out the vision for Kapsule-a container-based extensibility layer for KDE Linux built on top of Incus. The pitch was simple: give users real, persistent development environments without compromising the immutable base system. At the time, it was a functional proof of concept living in my personal namespace. Well, things have moved fast. Herp De Derp Not only is Kapsule now available in KDE Linux, it's also properly integrated with Konsole now. This means you can launch Kapsule containers right from the new tab menu in Konsole for even easier access. They're also working on allowing users to easily launch graphical applications from the containers and have them appear in the host desktop environment, and they intend to make the level of integration with the host more configurable so developers can better tailor their containers to their needs.

Another month, another Redox progress report. January turned out to be a big month for the Rust-based general purpose operating system, as they've cargo and rustc working on Redox. Cargo and rustc are now working on Redox! Thanks to Anhad Singh and his southern-hemisphere Redox Summer of Code project, we are now able to compile your favorite Rust CLI and TUI programs on Redox. Compilers are often one of the most challenging things for a new operating system to support, because of the intensive and somewhat scattershot use of resources. Ribbon and Ron Williams That's not all for January, though. An initial capability-based security infrastructure has been implemented for granular permissions, SSH support has been improved and now works properly for remoting into Redox sessions, and USB input latency has been massively reduced. You can now also add, remove, and change boot parameters in a new text editing environment in the bootloader, and the login manager now has power and keyboard layout menus. January also saw the first commit made entirely from within Redox, which is pretty neat. Of course, there's much more, as well as the usual slew of kernel, relibc, and application bugfixes and small changes.

I'm currently building an 80386-compatible core in SystemVerilog, driven by the original Intel microcode extracted from real 386 silicon. Real mode is now operational in simulation, with more than 10,000 single-instruction test cases passing successfully, and work on protected-mode features is in progress. In the course of this work, corners of the 386 microcode and silicon have been examined in detail; this series documents the resulting findings. In the previous post, we looked at multiplication and division - iterative algorithms that process one bit per cycle. Shifts and rotates are a different story: the 386 has a dedicated barrel shifter that completes an arbitrary multi-bit shift in a single cycle. What's interesting is how the microcode makes one piece of hardware serve all shift and rotate variants - and how the complex rotate-through-carry instructions are handled. nand2mario I understood some of this.

For me, vim is a combination of genuine improvements in vi's core editing behavior (cf), frustrating (to me) bits of trying too hard to be smart (which I mostly disable when I run across them), and an extension mechanism I ignore but people use to make vim into a superintelligent editor with things like LSP integrations. Some of the improvements and additions to vi's core editing may be things that Bill Joy either didn't think of or didn't think were important enough. However, I feel strongly that some or even many of omitted features and differences are a product of the limited environments vi had to operate in. The poster child for this is vi's support of only a single level of undo, which drastically constrains the potential memory requirements (and implementation complexity) of undo, especially since a single editing operation in vi can make sweeping changes across a large file (consider a whole-file :...s/../../' substitution, for example). Chris Siebenmann I have only very limited needs when it comes to command-line text editors, and as such, I absolutely swear by the simplicity of nano. In other words, I'm probably not the right person to dive into the editor debate that's been raging for decades, but reading Siebenmann's points I can't help but agree. In this day and age, defaulting an editor that has only one level of undo is insanity, and I can't imagine doing the kind of complex work people who use command-line editors do while being limited to just one window. As for the debate about operating systems that symlink the vi command to vim or a similar improved variant of vi, I feel like that's the wrong thing to do. Much like how I absolutely despise how macOS hides its UNIX-y file system structure from the GUI, leading to bizarre ls results in the terminal, I don't think you should be tricking users. If a user enters vi, it should launch vi, and not something that kind of looks like vi but isn't. Computers shouldn't be lying to users. If they don't want their users to be using vi, they shouldn't be installing vi in the first place.

Update: we've already hit the 5000 goal, in a little over 24 hours. Considering I thought this would take weeks - assuming we'd hit the goal at all - I'm a bit overwhelmed with all the love and support. Thank you so, so much. Since people are still donating, I upped the goal to 7500 to give people something to donate to. You people are wild. Amazing. It's time for an OSNews fundrasier! This time, it's unplanned due to a financial emergency after our car unexpectedly had to be scrapped (you can find more details below). If you want to support one of the few independent technology news websites left, this is your chance. OSNews is entirely supported by you, our readers, so go to our Ko-Fi and donate to our emergency fundraiser today! Why support OSNews? In short, we are truly independent. After turning off our ads, our Patreons and donors are our sole source of income, and since I know many of you prefer the occasional individual donation over recurring Patreon ones, I run a fundraiser a few times a year to rally the troops, so to speak. This particular fundraiser wasn't planned, however, given the circumstances described below, several readers have urged me to run a fundraiser now. We're incredibly grateful for even having the opportunity to do something like this, and as always, I'd like to stress that OSNews will never be paywalled, and that access to our website will never be predicated on your financial support. You can ignore all of this and continue on reading the site as usual. What's going on? Sadly, and unexpectedly, we've had to scrap our car. Our 2007 Hyundai Santa Fe did not survive this Arctic Winter, as the two decades in the biting cold has taken a toll on a long list of components and parts - it would no longer start. After consulting an expert, we determined that repairs would've been too expensive to make financial sense for such an old vehicle. Sometimes, you have to take the loss lest you throw money down a pit. An unreliable car in an Arctic climate is a really bad idea, since getting stranded on a back road somewhere when it's -30C (or colder) with two toddlers is not going to be a fun time. On top of that, my wife uses our car to commute to work, and while using the bus is going to be fine for a little while, her job in home care for the very elderly and recovering alcoholics is incredibly stressful and intensive. Dealing with bus schedules and wait times at such low temperatures is not exactly compatible with her job. Since she's just recovering from a doctor-mandated rest period - very common in her line of work - her income has taken a hit. Taking professional care of people with severe dementia or other old-age related conditions is a thankless and underpaid job, and it's no surprise those working in this profession often require mandated rest (and thus a temporary pay cut). And so, urged on by readers on Mastodon, I'm doing an OSNews fundraiser to help us pay for the new" car. Of course, we're looking for a used car, not a new one, and based on our needs we've set a budget of around 10,000. This should allow us to buy something like a used Mazda 6 or Volvo V60 from around 2014-2015, or something similar in size and age, with a reasonable petrol engine (an EV is well out of our price range). We consider this the sweet spot for safety features, size, age, longevity, and reliability. We've got some savings, but most of the purchase price will have to come in the form of a car loan. We've already made some changes to our monthly expenses to cover for part of the monthly repayments, including a lucky break where our daycare expenses will be going down considerably next month. Based on this, I've set the fundraising goal at 5000. If we manage to hit that - and the last few times we hit our goals quite fast - it won't cover the entire purchase price, but it will cut down on the amount we need to loan considerably. I'm feeling a little apprehensive about all of this, since this isn't really an OSNews-related expense I can easily get some content out of. However, I'm entirely open to suggestions about how I could get some OSNews content out of this - perhaps buying and installing one of those Android headunits with a large display? They make them tailored for almost every vehicle at low prices on AliExpress, and the installation process and user experience might be something interesting to write about, as it's potentially a great way to add some modern features to an older car. Feel free to make any suggestions. I'm also open to other crazy ideas. If you happen to work at an automaker, and need some testing done in an Arctic environment - including ice roads - I'm open to ideas. A few random notes Since about half of our audience hails from the United States, I figured I'd make a few notes about car pricing in Europe, and in Arctic Sweden in particular. Cars are definitely more expensive here in Europe, doubly so in the sparsely populated area where we live (low supply leads to higher prices). Buying a brand new car is entirely out of the question due to pricing, and leasing is also far too expensive (well over 500/month for even a basic, small car). Used electric cars are still well out of our budget as well, and since we don't have our own driveway, we wouldn't be able to charge at home anyway. Opting to forego a car entirely is sadly not an option either. With two small children, the Arctic climate, the remoteness, my wife's stressful job and commute, and long distances to basic amenities, we can't go Dutch" and live

About a year ago I mentioned that I had rediscovered the Dillo Web Browser. Unlike some of my other hobbies, endeavours, and interests, my appreciation for Dillo has not wavered. I only have a moment to gush today, so I'll cut right to it. Dillo has been plugging along nicely (see the Git forge.) and adding little features. Features that even I, a guy with a blog, can put to use. Here are a few of my favourites. Bobby Hiltz If you're looking for a more minimalist, less distracting browser experience that gives you a ton of interesting UNIXy control, you should really consider giving Dillo a try.

KDE's Nate Graham has published a status update about KDE Linux, the KDE project's new immutable Linux distribution, intended to be the KDE OS" showcasing the best of the KDE community. While the project is approaching the beta stage, it's currently still in alpha, but from what I gather from friends who are using it, the alpha label might actually be like how Haiku is supposedly still alpha: intended more to scare people away for now than ana ctual descriptor of the state of the software. Recently, KDE Linux enabled delta updates, possibly dramatically reducing the size of updates. Before delta updates were enabled, a system update would come in at 7GB, while with delta updates enabled, it's gone down to 1-2GB. In addition, plasma-setup and plasma-login-manager have been added to KDE Linux, which are, respectively, a first-run setup assistant and KDE's new login manager. This new login manager was forked from SDDM, and specifically targets Wayland, and comes with much deeper Plasma integration than SDDM. Note that SDDM will remain available for platforms that don't use Wayland. KDE Linux has also massively improved its hardware support, and the list is long; from scanners to fancy multi-button mice, from Android devices to professional audio devices, and much more. Performance has been improved as well, the boot manager menu will no longer be shown at every boot but only when needed, the wireless regulatory domain is now properly set and managed, and much, much more. I'm keeping an eye on KDE Linux as a possible replacement for my Fedora KDE installations if Fedora ever loses the plot, even if it's an immutable distribution relying on Flatpak. I'm a KDE user, and I want the latest and greatest the KDE community has to offer without going through an distributor.

Cameron Kaiser comes in with another amazing article, this time diving into a unique video titler from Canada, released in 1985. The Super Micro Script was one of several such machines this company made over its lifetime, a stylish self-contained box capable of emitting a 32*16 small or 10*4 large character layer with 64*32 block graphics in eight colours. It could even directly overlay its output over a composite video signal using a built-in genlock, one of the earliest such consumer units to do so. Crack this unit open, however, and you'll find the show controlled by an off-the-shelf Motorola 6800-family microcontroller and a Motorola 6847 VDG video chip, making it a relative of contemporary 1980s home computers that sometimes used nearly exactly the same architecture. More important than that, though, it has socketed EPROMs we can theoretically pull and substitute with our own - though we'll have to figure out why the ROMs look like nonsense, and there's also the small matter of this unit failing to generate a picture. Nevertheless, when we're done, another homegrown Canadian computer will rise and shine. We'll even add a bitbanged serial port and write a MAME emulation driver for it so we can develop software quickly ... after we fix it first. Cameron Kaiser I know I keep repeating myself, but Kaiser's work on so many of these rare and unique systems is not only worthwhile and amazing to read, they're also incredibly valuable from a historical and preservation perspective. This article in hand, anyone who stumbles upon one of these machines can get the most out of it, possibly fix one, and use it for fun projects. I'm incredibly grateful for this sort of work. Video titles are such an interesting relic of the past. These days, adding titles to a video is child's play, but back when computing power came at a massive premium and digital video was but a distant dream, using analog video to overlay text onto was the best way to go about it. Video titler makers did try to move the technology from professional settings to home settings, but from what I can gather, this move never really paid off. Still, I'd love to buy one of these at some point and mess around with it. There's some real cool retro effects you can create with these.

If you use an Apple silicon Mac I'm sure you have been impressed by its performance. Whether you're working with images, audio, video or building software, we've enjoyed a new turn of speed since the M1 on day 1. While most attribute this to their Performance cores, as it goes with the name, much is in truth the result of the unsung Efficiency cores, and how they keep background tasks where they should be. Howard Oakley While both Intel and AMD are making gains on Apple, there's simply no denying the reality that Apple's M series of chips are leading the pack in mobile computing (the picture is different in desktops). There are probably hundreds of reasons why Apple has had this lead for so many years now, but the way macOS distributes background and foreground tasks across the two types of cores in M series chips is an important one. Still, I wonder how the various other processors that use power and efficiency cores fare in this regard. You'd think they would provide a similar level of benefit, but I wouldn't be surprised if the way Windows or Linux handles such cores and the distribution of tasks is simply not as optimised or strict as it is in macOS. Apple often vastly overstates the benefits of its vertical integration", but I think the tight coupling between macOS and Apple's own processors is definitely a case where they're being entirely truthful.

We talked about Nemin's first impressions of the Guix System as someone coming from a Nix environment, but today they've got a follow-up article diving into the experience of creating new packages for Guix. I spent about a week packaging WezTerm and learning the ropes of being a Guix contributor along the way. During the packaging process I stumble many times, only to stand back up and figure out a solution. I also explain some of my complaints about the peculiarities of the process, but also provide plenty of praise about of how much the system tries to enable you to do your job. Finally, I also touch on how positive the experience of the code review was. Nemin's blog These are the kinds of content a rather niche system like Guix needs. Guix isn't exactly one of the popular picks out there, so having level-headed, honest, but well-written introductions to its core concepts and user experience, written by a third party is going to do wonders for people interested in trying it out.

It was only a matter of time before the illegal, erratic, inhumane, and cruel behaviours and policies of the second Trump regime were going to affect the open source world in a possibly very visible way. Christian Hergert, longtime GNOME and Linux contributor, employed by Red Hat, wanted to leave the US with his family and move to Europe, but requests to remain employed by Red Hat were denied. As such, he decided to end his employment at Red Hat and push on with the move. However, without employment, his work on open source software is going to suffer. While at their in-person visa appointment in Seattle, US border patrol goons shot two people in their hometown of Portland, underlining the urgency with which people might want to consider getting out of the US, even if it means losing employment. Regardless, the end result is that quite a bit of user-facing software that millions of people use every day is going to be affected. This move also means a professional shift. For many years, I've dedicated a substantial portion of my time to maintaining and developing key components across the GNOME platform and its surrounding ecosystem. These projects are widely used, including in major Linux distributions and enterprise environments, and they depend on steady, ongoing care. For many years, I've been putting in more than forty hours each week maintaining and advancing this stack. That level of unpaid or ad-hoc effort isn't something I can sustain, and my direct involvement going forward will be very limited. Given how widely this software is used in commercial and enterprise environments, long-term stewardship really needs to be backed by funded, dedicated work rather than spare-time contributions. Christian Hergert The list of projects for which Hergert is effectively the sole maintainer is long, and if you're a Linux user, odds are you're using at least some of them: GNOME's text editor, GNOME's terminal, GNOME's flagship IDE Builder, and tons of lower-level widely-used frameworks and libraries like GtkSourceView, libspelling, libpeas, and countless others. While new maintainers will definitely be found for at least some of these, the disruption will be real and will be felt beyond these projects alone. There's also the possibility that Hergert won't be the only prolific open source contributor seeking to leave the US and thus reducing their contributions, especially if a company like Red Hat makes it a policy not to help its employees trying to flee whatever mess the US is in. Stories like these illustrate so well why the no politics!" crowd is so utterly misguided. Politics governs every aspect of our lives, especially so if you're part of a minority group currently being targeted by the largest and most powerful state apparatus in the world, and pretending to be all three wise monkeys at once is not going to make any of that go away. Even if you're not directly targeted because you're not transgender, you're not brown, you're not an immigrant, or not whatever else they fancy targeting today, the growing tendrils of even an incompetent totalitarian regime will eventually find you and harm you. More so than any other type of software, open source software is made by real humans, and as these totalitarian tendrils keep growing, more and more of these real humans will be affected, no matter how incompetent these tendrils might be. You can't run away and hide from that reality, even if it makes you uncomfortable.

As part of our efforts to use more sovereign digital solutions, the European Commission is preparing an internal communication solution based on the Matrix protocol," the spokesperson told Euractiv. Matrix is an open source, community-developed messaging protocol shepherded by a non-profit that's headquartered in London. It's already widely used for public messengers across Europe, with the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces all using tools built on the protocol. Maximilian Henning at Euractiv Right now, most government agencies and institutions in Europe are effectively entirely reliant on Microsoft for their digital infrastructure, and that's not a tenable situation going forward with the Americans being openly hostile towards Europe, up to and including threatening to invade European countries. Europe needs its own digital infrastructure, and opting to build those around open source tools is the obvious way to go. Of course, this isn't an easy process, but two platitudes apply here: Rome wasn't built in a day, and every journey begins with a first step. By opting to use existing open source tools, though, these efforts will have a massive head start, and will hopefully lead to a flurry of increased activity for the open source projects in question. In this particular case it's Matrix, which can surely need some additional work and eyeballs, if my use of the protocol is any indication.

What does it look like when a hardware and software company descends into an obsession with recurring services revenue to please its shareholders? Look no further than Apple, who has turned its Apple News service into a vehicle for scam ads. These fake going out of business ads" have been around for a few years, and even the US Better Business Bureau warns about them, as they take peoples' money then shut down. Does Apple care? Does Taboola care? Does Apple care that Taboola serves ads like this? My guess: no, no, and no. Kirk McElhearn While serving obvious scams to users is already bad enough, the real kicker is that even if you are a paying user of Apple News, you still get served ads, including the scams. Of course, massive corporations like Apple are free too just scam you, since they're effectively immune from any legal consequences, so it's unlikely the scamming will stop as long as it makes line go up. On an entirely unrelated note, OSNews is entirely free of ads, so there's no scams here. OSNews is fully funded by our readers through single donations on Ko-Fi or by becoming a Patreon.

I nominate this for the Most Expected News Of The Decade" award. Today, The Tech Oversight Project published a new report spotlighting newly unsealed documents in the 2026 social media addiction trials. The documents provide smoking-gun evidence that Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok all purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing, and how that mass youth addiction was core to the companies' business models. The documents contain internal discussions among company employees, presentations from internal meetings, expert testimony, and evidence of Big Tech coordination with tech-funded groups, including the National Parent Teachers Association (PTA) and Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), in attempts to control the narrative in response to concerned parents. The Tech Oversight Project Modern social media companies are not entirely different from tobacco companies. They and everyone else know full well just how dangerous social media is, and how being addicted to it has disastrous consequences for the people involved. Tobacco companies, too, knew how dangerous smoking was decades before the general population was aware, and yet they kept pushing cigarettes, even to kids, deaths be damned. In fact, they're still doing the same thing today with vapes", and we're kind of letting it happen all over again. Social media is directly responsible for genocides, extreme polarisation, the spread of endless amounts of lies causing parents to harm their children, mass generation of child pornography, and much, much more. All of this is not a coincidence, mere side-effects, unintended consequences - social media are designed and optimised specifically to achieve these goals, like cigarettes and now vapes" are designed specifically to be as addictive as possible. The people responsible - social media companies, their executives, their employees - need to face justice, answer for what they've done, and face the legal consequences. Of course, that's not going to happen. Billionaires and their megacorporations are untouchable, too big to fail, too closely tied to especially the current regime in the US. I don't think social media bans for people under 16 are the answer, since they tend to come with onerous and invasive online identity checks and because they cut vulnerable people off from their support networks, but it's clear we need to do something.

Gadgets, desk accessories, widgets - whatever you they were called, they were a must-have feature for various operating systems for a while. Windows in particular has tried making them happen six times, and every time, they failed to really catch on and ended up being killed, only for the company to try again a few years later. Microsoft has been trying to solve the same UX problem since 1997: how to surface live information without making you launch an app. They've shipped six different implementations across nearly 30 years. Each one died from a different fundamental flaw - performance, security, screen space, privacy, engagement. And each death triggered the same reflex: containment. Pavel Osadchuk There's quite a few memories in this article. I never actually used Active Desktop back when it came out, because I seem to remember the channels feature was either not available in The Netherlands or the available channels were American stuff we didn't care about. The sidebar in Vista had a lot of potential, and I did like the feature, but there weren't a lot of great widgets and we hadn't entered the era of omnipresent notifications begging for out attention just yet, so use cases remained elusive. Now Metro, that's where things came together, at least for me. I was en enthusiastic Windows Phone user - I imported two Windows Phone devices from the US to be an early adopter - and I still consider its live tiles with notifications and other useful information to be the most pleasant user interface for a mobile device, bar none. It may have taken Microsoft six tries, but they nailed it with that one, and I'm still sad the Windows Phone user interface lost out to whatever iOS and Android offered. On desktops and laptops, though, it's a different story, and I don't think the Metro tiles concept ever made any sense there. Widgets as they exist in Windows now mostly seem like an annoying distraction, and I've never seen anyone actually use them. Does anyone even keep them enabled at all?

Microsoft Research, in collaboration with various others, has just released LiteBox, a library operating system. LiteBox is a sandboxing library OS that drastically cuts down the interface to the host, thereby reducing attack surface. It focuses on easy interop of various North" shims and South" platforms. LiteBox is designed for usage in both kernel and non-kernel scenarios. LiteBox exposes a Rust-y nix/rustix-inspired North" interface when it is provided a Platform interface at its South". These interfaces allow for a wide variety of use-cases, easily allowing for connection between any of the North-South pairs. LiteBox GitHub Page Suggested use-cases are running unmodified Linux applications on Windows, sandboxing Linux applications on Linux, running OP-TEE applications on Linux, and more. It's written in Rust, and the code is available on GitHub under an MIT license.

Over the past month or so, several enterprising contributors have taken an interest in the zig libc subproject. The idea here is to incrementally delete redundant code, by providing libc functions as Zig standard library wrappers rather than as vendored C source files. In many cases, these functions are one-to-one mappings, such as memcpy or atan2, or trivially wrap a generic function, like strnlen. So far, roughly 250 C source files have been deleted from the Zig repository, with 2032 remaining. With each function that makes the transition, Zig gains independence from third party projects and from the C programming language, compilation speed improves, Zig's installation size is simplified and reduced, and user applications which statically link libc enjoy reduced binary size. Andrew Kelley on the Zig Devlog The goal is to replace all of the musl, wasi-libc, and MinGW-w64 C code bundled in Zig with new Zig code.

Rust is everywhere, and it's no surprise it's also made its way into the lowest levels of certain operating systems and kernels, so it shouldn't be surprising that various operating system developers have to field questions and inquiries about Rust. NetBSD developer Benny Siegert wrote a blog post about this very subject, and in it, details why it's unlikely Rust will find its way into the NetBSD base system and/or the kernel First, NetBSD is famed for its wide architecture and platform support, and Rust would make that a lot more troublesome due to Rust simply not being available on many platforms NetBSD supports. Rust release cycles also aren't compatible with NetBSD, it would draw a lot of dependency code into the base system, and keeping Rust and its compiler toolchain working is a lot of work that falls on the shoulders of a relatively small group of NetBSD developers. Note that while NetBSD does tend to take a more cautious approach to these matters than, say, Linux or FreeBSD, the operating system isn't averse to change on principle. For instance, not only is Lua part of the base system, it's even used in the NetBSD kernel due to its ability to rapidly develop and prototype kernel drivers. In short, while it doesn't seem likely Rust will make it into the NetBSD base system, it's not an impossibility either.

We recently talked about Apple's pre-Mac OS X dabblings in UNIX, but Apple wasn't the only computer and operating system company exploring UNIX alternatives. Microsoft had the rather successful Xenix, Atari had ASV, Sony had NEWS, to name just a very small few. The Amiga, too, wanted in on the UNIX action, and as such, released Amiga UNIX, based on AT&T System V Release 4. The Amiga UNIX website is dedicated to everything you would ever want to know about this operating system. This site is dedicated on preserving Amix's history and sharing information and instructions on what Amix is, how to install it (either on real hardware or in emulation) and what can you do with it. Mainly, it tries to cater to people who wish to run AMIX for whatever reason on their hardware. By documenting experiences with it, it is hoped that subsequent SVR4 junkies will find the way more smooth than it might have been without any guidance at all. For even a relatively experienced modern Unix or GNU/Linux administrator, System V UNIX is sufficiently different to present difficulty in installation and administration. Not so much in moving around between directories, and using common utilities that persist to this day - although many of those are hoary and somewhat forgetful in their retirement - but of doing more in depth tasks and understanding the differences. The Amiga Unix Wiki If you wish to run Amiga UNIX yourself, you'll either have to have one of the original two models sold with it - the 2500UX and 3000UX - or one of the Amigas that meets the minimum requirements. Another option is, of course, emulation, and WinUAE has support for running Amiga UNIX.

After a seemingly endless stream of tone deaf news from Mozilla, we've finally got some good news for Firefox users. As the company's been hinting at for a while on social media now, they've added an AI" kill switch to the latest Firefox nightly release, as well as a set of toggles to disable specific AI" features. You can choose to use some of these and not others. If you don't want to use AI features from Firefox at all, you can turn on the Block AI enhancements toggle. When it's toggled on, you won't see pop-ups or reminders to use existing or upcoming AI features. Once you set your AI preferences in Firefox, they stay in place across updates. You can also change them whenever you want. Ajit Varma at the Mozilla blog I'm particularly enamoured with the specific mention that the setting will remain unaffected by updates. It's incredibly sad that Mozilla even has to mention this, but they have nobody to blame but themselves for that one. None of this is enough to draw me away from Librewolf and back to Firefox, but at least it gives those of us who prefer to keep using Firefox the option to disable all of this AI" nonsense. Also, there's no Librewolf for POWER9, so I have to use Firefox somewhere. It's unlikely Chrome or Safari will get such clear AI" kill switches, so it might become a reason for some to switch to Firefox from Chrome or Safari.

In the late 1980s, with the expansion of the Internet (even though it was not open to commercial activities yet) and the slowly increasing capabilities of workstations, some people started to imagine the unthinkable: that, some day, you may use your computer to record voice messages, send them over the Internet, and the recipient could listen to these messages on his own computer. That was definitely science fiction... until workstation manufacturers started to add audio capabilities to their hardware. Miod Vallat A great story detailing how the audio hardware in the HP 9000/425e was made to work on OpenBSD and NetBSD.

I previously covered x64 OpenVMS release on VMware. This was insanely cool achievement for the operating system. While it had no practical ramification there was one small annoyance. The OS console was on a serial port. In VMware it meant another VM connected via named pipe. Now OpenVMS x64 supports (limited?) local console on OPA0. Virtually Fun I think this has been available for a while now - since 2024 - but we hadn't covered it yet. That same 2024 post also indicates CDE and DECWindows work now, a side effect of a C/C++ compiler bugfix. Sadly, VSI has made it clear that desktop support is not at all on their list of things to spend time on, so don't expect graphics support to improve meaningfully other than by accident like in this case.

But NixOS isn't the only declarative distro out there. In fact GNU forked Nix fairly early and made their own spin called Guix, whose big innovation is that, instead of using the unwieldy Nix-language, it uses Scheme. Specifically Guile Scheme, GNU's sanctioned configuration language. I've been following Guix for a bit, but it never felt quite ready to me with stuff like KDE being only barely supported and a lot of hardware not working out of the box. However, now that (after three years) Guix announced its 1.5.0 release with a lot of stuff stabilized and KDE finally a first-party citizen, I figured now is the best time to give it a fresh shot. This post captures my experiences from installation to the first 3-4 days. Nemin's blog If you're interested in Guix, but aren't quite sure if you want to take the plunge, this article does a great job of showing you the ropes, listing what issues you might run into, some pitfalls to avoid, and so on.

It's no secret that Windows 11 isn't exactly well-liked by even most of its users, and I'm fairly sure that perception has permeated into the general public as well. It seems Microsoft is finally getting the message, and they're clearly spooked: the company has told The Verge that they have heard the complaints, and intend to start fixing many of the issues people are having. The feedback we're receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people. This year, you will see us focus on addressing pain points we hear consistently from customers: improving system performance, reliability, and the overall experience of Windows. Pavan Davuluri, head of Windows, to The Verge This entire statement is utterly meaningless. I have zero faith in words; only actions will do. Microsoft has made many promises over the years, and they have a history of simply not following through on them. Up until this year is over and there have been material improvements in Windows 11 that we can measure, see, and point to, nothing has changed between the day before the statement and the day after. Anyone taking this at face value and reporting it as such is an idiot. This means that at the end of this year, Windows 11 should be faster, more stable, experience far fewer breaking updates, have fewer - nay - zero ads, a far more consistent user interface, proper local account support, and more. If these things haven't become reality once the countdown runs out and on 31 December, Microsoft lied to our faces once more. Until then, don't use Windows.

Operating systems written in Rust - especially for embedded use - are quite common these days, and today's example fits right into that trend. Ariel OS is an operating system for secure, memory-safe, low-power Internet of Things (IoT). It is based on Rust from the ground up and supports hardware based on 32-bit microcontroller architectures (Cortex-M, RISC-V, and Xtensa). For a quick overview of our motivations and what we plan next, check our roadmap. Ariel OS builds on top of existing projects from the Embedded Rust ecosystem, including Embassy, esp-hal, defmt, probe-rs, sequential-storage, and embedded-test. While those provide high-quality building blocks for a wide range of embedded applications, such projects do not provide the high level of integration that developers know from contemporary C-based operating systems for microcontrollers, such as RIOT or Zephyr for instance. Ariel OS GitHub page There's bound to be a microcontroller you can get your hands on that Ariel OS supports, and since it's licensed under either a MIT or Apache 2.0 license, you can get going right away.

As most of you will know, Mac OS X (or Rhapsody if you count the developer releases) wasn't Apple's first foray into the world of UNIX. The company sold its own UNIX variant, A/UX, from 1988 to 1995, which combined a System V-based UNIX with a System 7.0.1 desktop environment and application compatibility, before it acquired NeXT and started working on Rhapsody/Mac OS X. As a sidenote, I don't know if the application compatibility layer was related to the Macintosh Application Environment for UNIX, which I have running on my HP-UX machines. That's not the only time Apple dabbled with UNIX, though - Apple's unique Apple Network Server product from 1996 also came with UNIX, but time it wasn't one from Apple itself, but rather from its enemy-turned-friend IBM: AIX. The Network Server shipped with a slightly customised version of IBM's AIX operating system; regular AIX straight from IBM wouldn't work. The more things change, the more they stay the same I guess. Since the Apple Network Server was built around a modified Power Macintosh 9500 - there's much more to the hardware, but that's the short of it - so you would expect the Network Server to also be able to run regular Mac OS for PowerPC, right? Apple even sold server products running plain Mac OS at the time, so it'd make sense, but nothing about Apple in the '90s made any sense whatsoever, so no, use of plain Mac OS was locked out through the ROM. And let's not even get started about other PowerPC operating systems of the time, like, of all things, Windows NT - something Apple supposedly demonstrated at some point. But was that always the case? Well, we've got new ROMs straight from a former Apple employee, and after flashing them to a supported ROM chip, the Apple Network Sever can now run classic Mac OS. On top of that, and even more miraculous, the Windows NT-capable ROMs have also been discovered. I'll give you a spoiler now: it turns out the NT ROM isn't enough to install Windows NT by itself, even though it has some interesting attributes. Sadly this was not unexpected. But the pre-production ROM does work to boot Mac OS, albeit with apparent bugs and an injection of extra hardware. Let's get the 700 running again (call it a Refurb Weekend) and show the process. Cameron Kaiser While it's great news to see that Mac OS can now be run on the Network Server, I'm personally much more interested in the story behind the Windows NT ROMs. The idea that Apple would sell a computer running Windows NT out of the box is wild to think about now, but considering the desperate state the company was in at the time, all options must've been on the table. Sadly, as Kaiser discovered, the Windows NT ROMs in and of themselves are not enough to run Windows NT. However, they appear to be much farther along in the development process than even the Mac OS-capable ROMs, which is fascinating. When Jobs talked Gil Amelio into canning the ANS as well, the ROM initiative naturally went out the window with it. However, while the existing 2.0 Mac OS ROMs are only known on an unmarked development flash stick similar to mine, these final 2.26NT ROMs appear almost production-ready with fully printed labels, suggesting they had reached a very late stage of development. Cameron Kaiser Despite not being able to boot Windows NT for PowerPC as-is, most likely because there's no compatible ARC or HAL, Kaiser did discover a ton of interesting details, like how this ROM configures the Network Server to run in little endian mode, which is all Windows NT for PowerPC ever supported, making this the very first time a PowerPC machine did so. I'm hoping Kaiser manages to track down the necessary components to make Windows NT bootable on the ANS, as one of the most unique curiosities in Apple history. There's a ton more details in the article, as per usual Kaiser standards, and it's an absolute joy to read.

While the two major open source desktop environments get most of the airtime - and for good reason, since they're both exceptionally good - there's a long tail of other desktop environments out there catering to all kinds of special workflows and weird niches. I think we can all agree that Xfce leads this long tail of more niche desktop environments, without really being niche itself. Xfce may not be as popular as KDE or GNOME, but it's an amazing full-featured desktop environment that offers a slightly more traditional, less fast-paced desktop for those that desire so. Xfce, too, is moving to Wayland, which can mean significant efforts in certain places, not the least of which is the window manager. Xfce originally planned to adapt its venerable xfwm4 to support both X11 and Wayland at the same time, but this turned out to be too complex for a variety of reasons, all more or less caused by differences between X11 and Wayland. On top of that, this approach would risk introducing new bugs to the X11 side of things, and the Xfce project does not want to subject its X11 users to that. As such, they've decided to develop a Wayland compositor from scratch: xfwl4. The goal is, that xfwl4 will offer the same functionality and behavior as xfwm4 does, or as much as possible considering the differences between X11 and Wayland. Using xfwl4 should feel just like using xfwm4 on X11. We even plan to reuse the existing xfwm4 configuration dialogs and xfconf settings to ensure a seamless transition. Xfwl4 will not be based on the existing xfwm4 code. Instead, it will be written from scratch in rust, using smithay building blocks. The Xfce development team This project also includes related tasks like rearchitecting session-startup to support Wayland, implementing support for the xdg-session-management protocol, and adding support for XWayland. This is obviously anything but a small effort, but it seems like a practical solution. Xfce users generally seem to choose Xfce exactly because it's a stable environment that does not move fast(er) and break (some) things. As such, keeping the X11 window manager separate and stable, without Wayland work possibly breaking it, seems like the kind of thing the average Xfce user can get behind. Personally, I can't wait for Xfce to become a full Wayland desktop, as dealing with X11's nonsense feels decidedly retro to me now, and I don't see Xfce as a retro environment at all. It's going to take some time, of course, but thanks to countless generous donations to Xfce, longtime Xfce core developer Brian Tarricone will be paid to work on this project. Excellent news for everyone involved.

Since I have no qualms about kicking a proprietary software product while it's down, let's now switch to NTDEVs thoughts on the state of Windows 11. Unfortunately, the issue that plagued Windows since the dawn of time has only aggravated recently. Windows 11 is a mixture of old and new technologies that are glued together, with decades of legacy code that simply refuses to die (because if it did a lot of corporate costumers would complain, and whether we like it or not they are paying big cash for support to Microsoft). Also, it tries to have a modern" UI that unfortunately not only is inconsistent, but also it's too heavy for its own good, being just a lipstick on a bloated old pig. Last, but certainly not least, it is full of AI features that most people didn't ask for, some are even actively feared (see Recall) and are also quite lacking in polish and usefulness. Until Microsoft stops treating Windows as an AI innovation platform" of sorts and starts treating it as the stable, reliable tool it was always meant to be, the user experience will continue to feel like a battle between the person sitting at the desk and the company that built the desk. NETDEV When even some of the most knowledgeable and respected Windows/Windows NT developers and experts are this down on the current state of Windows, you know things are way worse than we even know from just following the news and our own experiences. Back in 2024, I stated that I firmly believe we will see Windows - or at least, huge, crucial chunks of it - shift to an open source development model, as it's the only way for Windows to move forward without crumbling into itself. It would also be a massive cost-cutting and personnel-culling step for Microsoft, something that seems to become ever more relevant now that the company bet massively on AI", without any of it paying off. They're going to need to do some serious cost-cutting once the AI" bubble bursts, and Windows will definitely be the first on the chopping block. As a side note, the step to release Windows as open source won't be nearly as difficult or problematic as people think. In fact, Microsoft has provided access to the source code behind Windows and various other products for decades, and countless governments and organisations have access to said source code. On top of that, the source code to Windows XP and Server 2003 is out there, hosted on GitHub, and various other leaks have occurred as well over the years. While I'm sure a large clean-up effort would still be required, and while it surely will be a big engineering effort, if there were any truly shocking things in the code Microsoft wouldn't want the world to see we'd already know by now. I'm getting the strong feeling Microsoft is trying to squeeze every last drop of revenue out of Windows before it ends up on the chopping block. Windows will definitely not be axed, but cost-cutting is inevitable.

I've been terribly sick for a few days so we've got some catching up to. Let's first take a look at how Windows is doing. People often say Linux is too much work." And I agree. They're completely justified to complain. There's the documentation page diving, the forums, the reddit threads. And, most importantly, you have to basically rewire your brain and stop expecting it to behave like Windows used to. But I looked at the list above and realized: Windows is now also too much work. And the difference with Windows is that you're going to do all that work while actively fighting your computer only for it to be undone when the next surprise update comes and ruins everything. You might be thinking just disable updates, man" or just install LTSC", or just run some random debloat script off of GitHub". Why? Why would I jump through all these hoops? I'd rather put in the effort for an OS that knows what consent is and respects me as a user. Bogdan-Mihai Mosteanu You know how in most theme parks they have various different rides for all kinds of people? There's the wild and crazy over-the-top deathcoasters for the ultimate thrill seekers, the more gentle wooden coasters for those who like a thrill, but not over-the-top. There's the swinging ship-type things for thrill-seeking accountants who seek their thrills predictably. There's a game of Russian roulette played in the backlot. For the kids, there's the classic spinning tea cups. And then there's the public transport service dressed up as an old-timey steam train that just brings you to your destination without any issue, silently doing its thing, the unsung backbone of park logistics. Commercial operating systems like Windows and macOS are the games of Russian roulette, predictably unexpectedly shooting you in the face every sixth time you pull the trigger. That's not my vibe. I want my operating system to be that steam train, and desktop Linux is the only thing that fits that bill - and it's very clear more and more people are discovering that too.