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And when a Redox monthly progress report is here, Haiku's monthly report is never far behind (or vice versa, depending on the month). Haiku's February was definitely a busy month, but there's no major tentpole changes or new features, highlighting just how close Haiku is to a new regular beta release. The OpenBSD drivers have been synchronised wit upstream to draw in some bugfixes, there's a ton of smaller fixes to various applications like StyledEdit, Mail, and many more, as well a surprisingly long list of various file system fixes, improving the drivers for file systems like NTFS, Btrfs, XFS, and others. There's more, of course, so just like with Redox, head on over to pore over the list of smaller changes, fixes, and improvements. Just like last month, I'd like to mention once again that you really don't need to wait for the beta release to try out Haiku. The operating system has been in a fairly stable and solid condition for a long time now, and whatever's the latest nightly will generally work just fine, and can be updated without reinstallation.

February has been a busy month for Redox, the general purpose operating system written in Rust. For instance, the COSMIC compositor can now run on Redox as a winit window, the first step towards fully porting the compositor from COSMIC to Redox. Similarly, COSMIC Settings now also runs on Redox, albeit with only a very small number of available settings as Redox-specific settings panels haven't been made yet. It's clear the effort to get the new COSMIC desktop environment from System76 running on Redox is in full swing. Furthermore, Vulkan software can now run on Redox, thanks to enabling Lavapipe in Mesa3D. There's also a ton of fixes related to the boot process, the reliability of multithreading has been improved, and there's the usual long list of kernel, driver, and Relibc improvements as well. A major port comes in the form of NodeJS, which now runs on Redox, and helped in uncovering a number of bugs that needed to be fixed. Of course, there's way more in this month's progress report, so be sure to head on over and read the whole thing.

One day, I suddenly wondered how to detect when a USB device is plugged or unplugged from a computer running Linux. For most users, this would be solved by relying on libusb. However, the use case I was investigating might not actually want to do so, and so this led me down a poorly-documented rabbit hole. ArcaneNibble (or R) And ArcaneNibble (or R) is taking you down with them.

Oracle's Solaris 11 basically comes in two different flavours: the SRU (Support Repository Update) releases for commercial Oracle customers, and the CBE (Common Build Environment) releases, available to everyone. We've covered the last few SRU releases, and now it's time for a new CBE release. We first introduced the Oracle Solaris CBE in March 2022 and we released an updated version in May 2025. Now, as Oracle Solaris keeps on evolving, we've released the latest version of our CBE. With the previous release Alan and Jan had compiled a list to cover all the changes in the three years since the first CBE release. This time, because it's relatively soon after the last release we are opting to just point you to the what's new blogs on the feature release SRUs Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 84, Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 87, and Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 90. And of course you can always go to the blogs by Joerg Moellenkamp and Marcel Hofstetter who have excellent series of articles that show how you can use the Oracle Solaris features. Joost Pronk van Hoogeveen at the Oracle Solaris Blog You can update your existing installation with a pkg update, or do a fresh insrtall with the new CBE images.

In the world of open source, relicensing is notoriously difficult. It usually requires the unanimous consent of every person who has ever contributed a line of code, a feat nearly impossible for legacy projects. chardet, a Python character encoding detector used by requests and many others, has sat in that tension for years: as a port of Mozilla's C++ code it was bound to the LGPL, making it a gray area for corporate users and a headache for its most famous consumer. Recently the maintainers used Claude Code to rewrite the whole codebase and release v7.0.0, relicensing from LGPL to MIT in the process. The original author, a2mark, saw this as a potential GPL violation. Tuan-Anh Tran Everything about this feels like a license violation, and in general a really shit thing to do. At the same time, though, the actual legal situation, what lawyers and judges care about, is entirely unsettled and incredibly unclear. I've been reading a ton of takes on what happened here, and it seems nobody has any conclusive answers, with seemingly valid arguments on both sides. Intuitively, this feels deeply and wholly wrong. This is the license-washing AI" seems to be designed for, so that proprietary vendors can take code under copyleft licenses, feed it into their AI" model, and tell it to regurgitate something that looks just different enough so a new, different license can be applied. Tim takes Jim's homework. How many individual words does Tim need to change - without adding anything to Jim's work - before it's no longer plagiarism? I would argue that no matter how many synonyms and slight sentence structure changes Tim employs, it's still a plagiarised work. However, what it feels like to me is entirely irrelevant when laws are involved, and even those laws are effectively irrelevant when so much money is riding on the answers to questions like these. The companies who desperately want this to be possible and legal are so wealthy, so powerful, and sucked up to the US government so hard, that whatever they say might very well just become law. AI" is the single-greatest coordinated attack on open source in history, and the open source world would do well to realise that.

The memory management in DOS is simple, but that simplicity may be deceptive. There are several rather interesting pitfalls that programming documentation often does not mention. Michal Necasek at the OS/2 Museum A must-read for people writing software for earlier DOS versions.

What's the scroll lock key actually for? Scroll Lock was reportedly specifically added for spreadsheets, and it solved a very specific problem: before mice and trackpads, and before fast graphic cards, moving through a spreadsheet was a nightmare. Just like Caps Lock flipped the meaning of letter keys, and Num Lock that of the numeric keypad keys, Scroll Lock attempted to fix scrolling by changing the nature of the arrow keys. Marcin Wichary I never really put much thought into the scroll lock key, and I always just assumed that it would, you know, lock scrolling. I figured that in the DOS era, wherein the key originated, it stopped DOS from scrolling, keeping the current output of your DOS commands on the screen until you unlocked scrolling again. In graphical operating systems, I assumed it would stop any window with scrollable content from scrolling, or something - I just never thought about it, and never bothered to try. Well, its original function was a bit different: with scroll lock disabled, hitting the arrow keys would move the selection cursor. With scroll lock enabled, hitting the arrow keys would move the content instead. After reading this, it makes perfect sense, and my original assumption seems rather silly. It also seems some modern programs, like Excel, Calc, some text editors, and others, still exhibit this same behaviour when the scroll lock key is used today. The more you know.

Apple today announced the MacBook Neo," an all-new kind of low-cost Mac featuring the A18 Pro chip for $599. The MacBook Neo is the first Mac to be powered by an iPhone chip; the A18 Pro debuted in 2024's iPhone 16 Pro models. Apple says it is up to 50% faster for everyday tasks than the bestselling PC with the latest shipping Intel Core Ultra 5, up to 3x faster for on-device AI workloads, and up to 2x faster for tasks like photo editing. The MacBook Neo features a 13-inch Liquid Retina display with a 2408-by-1506 resolution, 500 nits of brightness, and an anti-reflective coating. The display does not have a notch, instead featuring uniform, iPad-style bezels. Hartley Charlton at MacRumors There's no denying this is a great offering from Apple, and it's going to sell really well, especially in the US. I can't think of any other laptop on the market that offers this kind of complete package at such an attractive price point - on the Windows side, you're going to get plastic laptops with worse displays, worse battery life, and, well, Windows. For education buyers, the price drops from $599 to $499, making it a no-brainer choice for families sending their kids off to high school or university. In the US, at least. Here in Europe, or at least in Sweden where I checked the price of the base model, it's going for almost 800 ($930), at which point the cost-cutting measures Apple has taken are a bit harder to swallow. At that kind of price point, I'm not going to accept a mere 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a paltry 60Hz display. When I saw the announcement of this new MacBook earlier today, I wondered if this could be my way of finally getting a macOS review on OSNews after well over a decade, but at 800 for something I won't be using after I'm done with the review? I can't justify that. Regardless, you're going to see tons of these in schools and in wrapping paper for the holiday season and birthdays, and at least at American pricing, it's definitely a great deal.

Chips and Cheese has an excellent deep dive into Arm's latest core design, and I have thoughts. Arm now has a core with enough performance to take on not only laptop, but also desktop use cases. They've also shown it's possible to deliver that performance at a modest 4 GHz clock speed. Arm achieved that by executing well on the fundamentals throughout the core pipeline. X925's branch predictor is fast and state-of-the-art. Its out-of-order execution engine is truly gargantuan. Penalties are few, and tradeoffs appear well considered. There aren't a lot of companies out there capable of building a core with this level of performance, so Arm has plenty to be proud of. That said, getting a high performance core is only one piece of the puzzle. Gaming workloads are very important in the consumer space, and benefit more from a strong memory subsystem than high core throughput. A DSU variant with L3 capacity options greater than 32 MB could help in that area. X86-64's strong software ecosystem is another challenge to tackle. And finally, Arm still relies on its partners to carry out its vision. I look forward to seeing Arm take on all of these challenges, while also iterating on their core line to keep pace as AMD and Intel improve their cores. Hopefully, extra competition will make better, more affordable CPUs for all of us. Chester Lam at Chips and Cheese The problem with Arm processors in the desktop (and laptop) space certainly isn't one of performance - as this latest design by Arm once again shows. No, the real problem is a complete and utter lack of standardisation, with every chip and every device in the Arm space needing dedicated, specific operating system images people need to create, maintain, and update. This isn't just a Linux or BSD problem, as even Microsoft has had numerous problems with this, despite Windows on Arm only supporting a very small number of Qualcomm processors. A law or rule that has held fast since the original 8086: never bet against x86. The number of competing architectures that were all surely going to kill x86 is staggeringly big - PowerPC, Alpha, PA-RISC, Sparc, Itanium, and many more - and even when those chips were either cheaper, faster, or both, they just couldn't compete with x86's unique strength: its ecosystem. When I buy an x86 computer, either in parts or from an OEM, either Intel or AMD, I don't have to worry for one second if Windows, Linux, one of the BSDs, or goddamn FreeDOS, and all of their applications, are going to run on it. They just will. Everything is standardised, for better or worse, from peripheral interconnects to the extremely crucial boot process. On the Arm side, though? It's a crapshoot. That's why whenever anyone recommends a certain cool Arm motherboard or mini PC, the first thing you have to figure out is what its software support situation is like. Does the OEM provide blessed Linux images? If so, do they offer more than an outdated Ubuntu build? Have they made any update promises? Will Windows boot on this thing? Does it work with any GPUs I might already own? There's so many unknowns and uncertainties you just don't have to deal with when opting for x86. For its big splashy foray into general purpose laptops with its Snapdragon Elite chips, Qualcomm promised Linux support on par with Windows from day one. We're several years down the line, and it's still a complete mess. And that's just one chip line, of one generation! As long as every individual Arm SoC and Arm board are little isolated islands with unknown software and hardware support status, x86 will continue to survive, even if x86 laptops use more power, even if x86 chips end up being slower. Without the incredible ecosystem x86 has, Arm will never achieve its full potential, and eventually, as has happened to every single other x86 competitor, x86 will eventually catch up to and surpass Arm's strong points, at lower prices. Never bet against x86.

Fifteen months have passed since our last Guix/Hurd on a Thinkpad X60 post and a lot has happened with respect to the Hurd. And most of you will have guessed, unless you skipped the title of this post, the rumored x86_64 support has landed in Guix! Janneke Nieuwenhuizen and Yelninei at the Guix blog A huge amount of work has gone into this effort over the past 18 months, but you can now download Guix and alongside the Linux kernel, you can now opt for the Hurd as well, in eother 32bit or 64 bit flavour. Do note that while Debian GNU/Hurd offers about 75% of Debian packages, Guix/Hurd only offers about 1.7% (32-bit) and 0.9% (64-bit) of packages for now. These percentages are always growing, of course, and now that Guix/Hurd can be installed in virtual machines and even on bare metal relatively easily like this, things might speed up a bit.

Have you bought and set up a new phone for someone else lately, especially someone less technologically savvy? It's a bit of a nightmare, with an endless list of confusing steps and dark patterns trying to trick you into signing up for all kinds of services. Joel Chrono (he took his username from the best game ever made) just went through this experience, with new Samsung phones for his parents, and it wasn't great. Without me, my parents would have ended up creating at least one extra Samsung account. Cloud services like OneDrive or Google Photos would be sucking up files and copying them to their servers, getting filled up with the data and then asking them to subscribe to unlock more storage a couple of months down the line. Left on their own, my parents may be seeing ads popping up constantly in OneUI, as well as browsing the web without an adblocker, they would be using default applications that don't work as reliably, that track whatever they do to a certain degree. And of course, all of those AI assistants would be listening in in the background. It really is a nightmare out there, and it's not only affecting my parents, it affects all of those unaware of the dangers that these practices bring. It's a mess all around. Joel Chrono In this particular case it involves Samsung phones, but the same applies to phones from other brands and even with other operating systems. Do you want to login with these accounts? Please add your credit card and all your personal information! Set up tap-to-pay so we can see where you buy what! Do you want to subscribe to our music service? Do you want access to our streaming service? What about the premium versions? Need more online storage? You're only getting 5GB for free, so if you don't want to lose those priceless pictures of your grand kids you should really upgrade to 1TB! Have you checked out our application store yet? And don't worry, if you say no to any of these questions we'll keep pestering you about them with notifications, fullscreen interstitials and banners in the settings application until your brain dissolves to mush! I have a collection of about a million PDAs, from the early days up until the very fanciest models from right around when the iPhone and Android started taking off. Of course, they're in storage so virtually always out of battery, but when I do turn any of them on, their onboarding process couldn't be simpler. Tap a few locations on the screen to calibrate the touch layer, set the date and time, and that's it - you're at the home screen ready to go. I wish modern smartphones were similar. I wish the greedy bean counters were told to pound sand and the user interface specialists took over again. My wife and I have two young boys, 3 and almost 5. One day, I'll be the out-of-touch dad or grandpa and I'll need their help to set up my brain implant chip or whatever. I hope it won't involve upsells for streaming services.

Microsoft is pushing AI" hard in Windows, Office, and in their other products, and it's earned them a cute new nickname: Microslop. It turns out the company really doesn't like it when you use this nickname, however, and its official Copilot Discord server - yes, there is an official one - has gone into a complete meltdown over people using the nickname. First the company started banning the word Microslop" in its Discord server, but after people started circumventing the ban with alternative spellings. That's when all hell broke loose. What started as a simple keyword filter quickly snowballed into users deliberately testing the restriction and posting variations of the blocked term. Accounts that included Microslop" in their messages first got banned from messaging again. Not long after, access to parts of the server was restricted, with message history hidden and posting permissions disabled for many users. Abhijith M B at Windows Latest People don't like AI". They don't like being forced to use it at work, they don't like it shoved in their face in their operating systems, they don't like every new product being plastered with nonsensical AI" marketing. It's absolutely no surprise that one of the companies pushing AI" in the most visible way, a company few people like anyway, gets a nice new nickname. I love that this happened. I hope their brand suffers as much as possible.

If you're following KDE Plasma development, you've most likely run into something called Union, a project KDE is working on to unify their various ways of theming their applications. The problem KDE is facing right now is that after so many decades of development and changes in how people want to develop applications, they ended up with various different ways of writing applications, each with their own theming method. The end result has been that for a while now, theming on KDE is kind of broken. Broken in what way? Most long-time KDE users will be aware that ever since KDE 4, the KDE shell (Plasma using SVG for theming) and KDE applications (QtWidgets using QStyle for theming) use separate theme engines. While this has always been annoying, it's at least manageable in that most theme designers tended to create both a Plasma SVG theme and a QStyle theme that matched. However, things got more complicated when KDE introduced QtQuick, its modern way of creating applications with QML. QtQuick has its own theme, qqc2-desktop-style, to make QtQuick applications look and feel like Breeze, KDE's current theme. Not only do all of these have to be kept in sync manually, QtQuick applications also do not properly inherit all the elements of the QStyle theme you set, leading to many modern KDE applications looking broken when using a non-default theme (and the same applies when using Kvantum; it also cannot properly theme QtQuick applications). In other words, there is currently no way to theme the entire KDE desktop for a consistent look, and if you try, many applications will simply look broken. Union is KDE's answer to this set of problems. Union is a new style engine that takes CSS and processes it into consistent themes for both QtWidget and QtQuick applications. It's quite flexible, and can potentially even be extended to generate GTK themes from that same CSS. Sadly, since the KDE Pasma shell SVG stuff is entirely different, it won't be styled by Union, but KDE might simply retire the SVG stuff entirely and move the Plasma shell to QtQuick's qqc2-desktop-style to address that issue. Union has been in development for a long time, as it's a difficult effort, but progress is definitely being made. KDE is currently already at the stage where they're adapting the current Breeze QStyle to better match the Union Breeze's style, to make the future transition from the separate QStyle/qqc2-desktop-style to the unified, single Union Breeze as seamless as possible. These changes are currently available for testing in the master branch, and will be part of Plasma 6.7 or 6.8. As a KDE user who likes to have a more classic, late '90s theme, but who also values consistency above all else, Union is something I'm very much looking forward to. While it certainly won't fix every single issue right away, it will definitely address the biggest issues with theming on KDE. I'm incredibly happy that KDE's developers still consider theming and user choice and agency over what pixels appear on their screen important enough to undertake an effort like Union.

I had no idea, but apparently, you can just use newline characters and tabs in URLs without any issues. Notice how it reports an error if there is a tab or newline character, but continues anyway? The specification says that A validation error does not mean that the parser terminates and it encourages systems to report errors somewhere. Effectively, the error is ignored although it might be logged. Thus our HTML is fine in practice. Daniel Lemire This reminds me of the Email is easy" quiz.

Are you not at all interested in upgrading to macOS Tahoe, and getting annoyed at the relentless notification spam from Apple trying to trick you into upgrading? The secret? Using device management profiles, which let you enforce policies on Macs in your organization, even if that organization" is one Mac on your desk. One of the available policies is the ability to block activities related to major macOS updates for up to 90 days at a time (the max the policy allows), which seems like exactly what I needed. Not being anywhere near an expert on device profiles, I went looking to see what I could find, and stumbled on the Stop Tahoe Update project. The eventual goals of this project are quite impressive, but what they've done so far is exactly what I needed: A configuration profile that blocks Tahoe update activities for 90 days. Rob Griffiths All you need to do is clone a random GitHub repository, set all its scripts to executable, generate two random UUIDs, insert those UUIDs into one of the scripts in the GitHub project folder you just cloned, run said script, open System Settings and go to Privacy & Security > Profiles, install the profile the script created, click install in two different dialogs, and now you have blocked Apple's update notification spam! Well, for 90 days that is. I honestly don't understand how normal people are supposed to use macOS. The amount of weird terminal commands you need just to change basic settings is bewildering. macOS definitely isn't ready for the desktop if they expect users to use the terminal for so many basic tasks. I'm glad I'm using Linux, where I don't have to deal with the terminal at all.

If this isn't catnip to the average OSNews reader, I don't know what is. Windows 95 is a comprehensive upgrade to the Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 products. Many changes have been made in almost every area of Windows, with the user interface being no exception. This paper discusses the design team, its goals and process then explains how usability engineering principles such as iterative design and problem tracking were applied to the project, using specific design problems and their solutions as examples. Kent Sullivan This case study was written in 1996 by Kent Sullivan, who joined the Windows 95 user interface team in 1992. I consider the second half of the '90s as the heyday of user interface design, with Windows 9x, Apple's Platinum in Mac OS 8 and 9, and BeOS' Tracker/Deskbar as the absolute pinnacles of user interface design. Coincidentally, this also seems to mark the end of a more scientific, study-based approach to designing graphical user interfaces. Reading through this particular case study for Windows 95 feels almost quaint. Where are the dozens of managers pushing for notification spam, upsells, and dark patterns to enable expensive data-hoarding services? Why are none of the people mentioned in the study talking about sneaky ways to secretly and silently convert your local account to an online account? Where are all the AI" buttons? Why is there n chapter on how to trick people into enabling telemetry data? The user interfaces of the late '90s were the last ones designed by people who actually cared, by people who approached the whole process with the end user in mind, rooted in scientific data collected by simply looking at people use their ideas. They were optimised for the user as best they could, instead of being optimised for the company's bottom line. It's been downhill ever since.

Bootc and OSTree represent a new way of thinking about Linux system deployment and management. Building on container and versioning concepts, they offer robust and modern solutions to meet the current needs of administrators and developers. Quentin Joly Slowly, very slowly, I've been starting to warm up to the relatively new crop of immutable Linux distributions. As a heavy Fedora user, opting for Fedora's atomic distributions, which use bootc and OSTree, seems like the logical path to go down if I ever made the switch, and this article provides some approachable insights and examples into how, exactly, it all works, and what benefits it might give you. It definitely goes beyond what I as a mere desktop user might encounter, but if you're managing a bunch of servers or VMs in a more professional setting, you might be interested, too. I'm still not convinced I need to switch to an immutable distribution, but I'd be lying if I said some of the benefits didn't appeal to me.

The file system of the Windows operating system is NTFS, whether you're running it on a desktop/laptop or server. It's the only file system Windows can run on and boot from, at least officially, so you're not even given a choice of file systems for the boot volume like you are on, say, desktop Linux. That's about to change, though: Microsoft has finally announced that Windows Server will be able to boot from ReFS. We're excited to announce that Resilient File System (ReFS) boot support is now available for Windows Server Insiders in Insider Preview builds. For the first time, you can install and boot Windows Server on an ReFS-formatted boot volume directly through the setup UI. With ReFS boot, you can finally bring modern resilience, scalability, and performance to your server's most critical volume - the OS boot volume. chcurlet-msft at Microsoft's Tech Community Without diving too much into the weeds, ReFS can roughly be seen as Microsoft's answer to modern file systems like ZFS and Btrfs, with comparable design goals and feature sets. It's been around since 2012, but only for Windows Server, and with every Windows Server release since, the company has improved performance, added new features, and fixed bugs. Now, in 2026, it seems Microsoft thinks ReFS is ready to be used as a bootable file system for Windows Server. If you want to try this for yourself, you need to be a Windows Insider and make sure you have Windows Server build 29531.1000.260206-1841 or newer. During installation, the Windows installer will ask you to choose between NTFS and ReFS; the rest of the installation process will be pretty much the same as before. Now all we need is to wait for ReFS to become an option on client versions of Windows too, which would mark - arguably - only the second time in history Windows transitioned from one default filesystem to the another.

Encryption backdoors, social media bans for children, creepy age verification for applications - what will they think of next? The latest brilliant idea by US lawmakers sure is a hell of a doozy: legally mandated age verification in every single operating system. Colorado's SB26-051, introduced last month, would require operating systems to register the owner's age, which third-party apps can then leverage to determine if the user is an adult.The bill calls for the device owner to register their birthdate or age, but for the purposes of creating an age bracket," which can then be shared to an app developer through an API to learn their age range, according to BiometricUpdate.com. Ball also said the legislation was based on California's bill AB 1043, which was passed last year. It too requires OS makers to create a way for the device owner to register their age bracket, which can then be shared to app developers over an API. The California law starts to take effect January 1, 2027. Michael Kan at PCMag Age verification to protect children sounds innocent enough, but if you have more than two brain cells to rub together it's crystal clear that what we're really looking at is the true end of privacy and online anonymity. If age verification is only used by certain applications, it's easy enough to avoid them, but if it becomes part of Windows, desktop Linux, Android, it's truly game over. Nobody will be anonymous online ever again, and nobody will have any sense of privacy left when opening up their computer. Worse yet, if you do end up using an operating system that doesn't adhere to this law, or you hack out or circumvent the age verification nonsense, you'll automatically become an easy target for law enforcement. Clearly, if you circumvent age verification, you must be up to no good, right? Of course, as we've seen in countries with heavily deteriorating democracies and freedoms, like the US or Hungary, even merely opposing the government will be classified as up to no good", and let's not even get started about the various minorities these countries are actively trying to eradicate. If something like this is enshrined in law in your country, you're fucked.

FreeBSD has its jails technology, and it seems NetBSD might be getting something similar soon. Jails for NetBSD aims to bring lightweight, kernel-enforced isolation to NetBSD. The system is intended to remain fully NetBSD-native. Isolation and policy enforcement are integrated into the kernel's security framework rather than implemented in a separate runtime layer. It does not aim to become a container platform. It does not aim to provide virtualization. Matthias Petermann It has all the usual features you have come to expect from jails, like resource quota, security profiles, logging, and so on. Processes inside jails have no clue they're in a jail, and using supervisor mode, jails are descendent from a single process and remain visible in the host process table. Of course, there's many more features listed in the linked article. It's in development and not a default part of NetBSD at this time. The project, led by Matthias Petermann, is developed out of tree, with an unofficial NetBSD 10.1 ISO with the jails feature included available as well.

The Genode OS Framework 26.02 has been released, and its tentpole improvement is the completion of moving configuration from XML to the new human-inclined data syntax, as we talked about a few months ago. The project has been working on this for years, and now that the tooling, documentation, and so on have been added this release cycle, they're ready to make the switch. On top of that, they also made the move from GitHub to Codeberg, but that's certainly not all. The technical topics of the release revolve around the progressive update of our Linux device-driver environment (DDE-Linux) to kernel version 6.18, usability improvements of the Goa SDK, input-event processing, and code rigidity. Feature-wise, version 26.02 further cultivates the genode-world repository as designated place for ported 3rd-party software, adding the port of Git as stepping stone on our way towards self-hosted development on Sculpt OS. Genode OS Framework 26.02 release notes Be sure to read the entire release notes for much more detailed information, as well as a ton of things not mentioned yet.

You may not be aware that FreeBSD has a pretty robust set of tools to run Linux binaries, unmodified. The result? A fast, smooth, fully-featured remote development experience on FreeBSD running Linux binaries transparently via the Linuxulator. It genuinely feels like magic. More importantly, it's a testament to how stable the Linux ABI itself is and how well FreeBSD's Linuxulator implements it. This setup completely changed how I work with FreeBSD, and it finally removed one of the biggest friction points in my workflow. Hayzam Sherif FreeBSD's Linux compatibility does kind of feel like magic. There's people running Steam and Steam games on FreeBSD using these very same technologies, and while it's far from perfect, it works for quite a few games without any issues. It'd be great is Steam ever made it to FreeBSD natively, but sine that's probably not going to happen any time soon, it's great to see that those of us using FreeBSD can still play at least some Steam games just fine.

It seems the widespread efforts in Europe to drastically reduce its dependency on US technology companies is starting to worry some people. President Donald Trump's administration has ordered U.S. diplomats to lobby against attempts to regulate U.S. tech companies' handling of foreigners' data, saying in an internal diplomatic cable seen by Reuters that such efforts could interfere with artificial intelligence-related services. Experts say the move signals the Trump administration is reverting to a more confrontational approach as some foreign countries seek limits around how Silicon Valley firms process and store their citizens' personal information - initiatives often described as data sovereignty" or data localization." Raphael Satter and Alexandra Alper at Reuters It's going to take time, but untangling the EU from the US - especially technologically and militarily - is worth the effort. I'll gladly pay more taxes to make this happen.

I've been a .com purist for over two decades of building. Once, I broke that rule and bought a .online TLD for a small project. This is the story of how it went up in flames. Tony S. An absolute horror story about Google's dominance over the web, in places nobody really talks about. Scary.

Only a few days ago we talked about the concept of client-side decorations, and how more and more desktop environments and operating systems - specifically GNOME and macOS - are putting more and more buttons, menus, and other widgets inside title bars. How about we take this concept a step further? This hides the AppMenu icon button and draws the menu in the title bar. It also includes a search button to find actions. It works on both X11 and Wayland. On Wayland, GTK apps don't export the menu in a KDE-friendly way. You need to start them with GDK_BACKEND=x11 environment variable or you can try the experimental appmenu-gtk-module-wayland (GTK3 only). material-decoration's GitHub page So this little tool allows you to add an application's menu bar (file, edit, view, etc.) to the titlebar of a KDE application. The way it works is that it adds an optional widget to KDE's System Settings > Colors & Themes > Window Decorations > Configure Titlebar Buttons..., alongside regular staples like close, minimise, maximise, etc. You can then freely add said menu bar" to the title bar of your applications. There's some configuration options, too. For instance, you can disable the search button, or turn the entire menu bar into a hamburger menu instead. It looks weird, and I'm definitely not the target audience for this, but I do find it intriguing. I've never seen anything like this before, and I doubt many people will like it since it takes up so much space if you don't opt to use the hamburger menu option. That being said, I'm fairly sure KDE and Kwin allow you to edit the titlebars of specific applications and specific windows, which does open some interesting possibilities for, say, applications or windows which you always have maximised or whatever. There's an AUR package for Arch users, but everyone else will have to build it themselves.

Microsoft released an optional cumulative update for Windows 11, and for once, it actually includes something many of you might actually like: it adds Sysmon from Sysinternals to Windows natively, so you no longer have to install it manually. Here's a refresher on what, exactly, Sysmon does. System Monitor (Sysmon) is a Windows system service and device driver that, once installed on a system, remains resident across system reboots to monitor and log system activity to the Windows event log. It provides detailed information about process creations, network connections, and changes to file creation time. By collecting the events it generates using Windows Event Collection or SIEM agents and subsequently analyzing them, you can identify malicious or anomalous activity and understand how intruders and malware operate on your network. The service runs as a protected process, thus disallowing a wide range of user mode interactions. Mark Russinovich and Thomas Garnier After installing the optional cumulative update in question, KB5077241, you can install Sysmon as an optional Windows component. Of course, this is Microsoft we're talking about, so it's not quite as straightforward as you'd think. In Windows 11, there's two places to add optional Windows features, and in the case of Sysmon, you have to go to the old Windows features dialog instead of the new View or edit optional features one. And also, don't forget to first remove the old Sysmon from Sysinternals in case you have it installed. After installation, run sysmon -i as an administrator to enable the feature.

This must be a universal experience at this point for people who aren't swayed by the latest and greatest marketing hype around new phone models: there's just nothing out there that fits one's needs. When I walked into a phone shop, I expected to witness with amazement how much technology has advanced in the present day compared to my eight-year-old model, and for the power of marketing to mind control me into buying a new phone that would bring all sorts of benefits to my life. But instead, I felt disappointed that I'd be forced to choose between two suboptimal devices, either of which would be a compromise compared to what I already have. I felt frustrated that my OnePlus 5T, which still meets my needs and is working wonderfully (apart from the volume buttons), is being taken from me by the 3G shutdown. Cadence It's remarkable how a market that was once rife with competition and choice, has now been reduced to well I guess I'll settle for this one then in such a short time frame. There's barely any competition, the number of device makers in (western or western-adjacent) countries has dropped to two, maybe three, and all of them are making what is essentially the exact same device with only the smallest of differences between them. For most average, normal people, it's some model by either Samsung or Apple. There's definitely more choice once you're willing to leave local stores (and thus, easy and quick repairs) behind, but most normal people who just want a phone aren't going to do that. You can also spend like twice or thrice the amount of money to get some foldable thing, but again, if you're just looking for a bog-standard normal-person phone, that's not a realistic option either. Smaller devices, headphone jacks, SD card slots - so many things have just disappeared from the face of the earth for most people, something that will definitely come as a huge, unpleasant surprise if you've been happy with an older phone that just had those things. It's like driving the same car for a decade and needing a new one, but you can only choose between a Toyota and a Volkswagen that look and feel entirely the same. And also the seats are now candles, door handles are gone, and there's no trunk.

Social media is going the way of alcohol, gambling, and other social sins: Societies are deciding it's no longer kid stuff. Lawmakers point to compulsive use, exposure to harmful content, and mounting concerns about adolescent mental health. So, many propose to set a minimum age, usually 13 or 16. In cases when regulators demand real enforcement rather than symbolic rules, platforms run into a basic technical problem. The only way to prove that someone is old enough to use a site is to collect personal data about who they are. And the only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely. Age-restriction laws push platforms toward intrusive verification systems that often directly conflict with modern data-privacy law. This is the age-verification trap. Strong enforcement of age rules undermines data privacy. Waydell D. Carvalho The answer to the dangers of social media is not to ban social media use among minors, for a whole variety of reasons. There's data privacy, as the linked article goes into, but there's also the fact that for a lot of people, including minors, who live in regressive, backwards environments and/or are victims of abuse, social media is their only support network. Cut them off from social media, and you cut them off from the very people who can save them from further abuse. The problem isn't social media in and of itself - it's profit-seeking social media. Companies like Facebook and TikTok spend billions to hyper-optimise and hyper-target vulnerable people, much like how tobacco companies and drug dealers do, to feed and worsen their addiction because keeping people addicted is how they maximise profits. The solution to the dangers of corporate social media is to strictly regulate their behaviour, something we already do with countless dangerous products and services. I'm obviously not qualified to come up with specific measures that would need to be taken, but I think we can all agree that whatever corporate social media have been and are doing is dangerous, unethical, should be stopped.

While Libadwaita applications running in a GNOME desktop environment look great and nicely consistent, they look utterly out of place and jarring when run in Xfce, Pantheon, KDE, and others. The biggest reason for this is GNOME's insistence on using client-side decorations, which feel at home inside a GNOME environment, but out of place in environments that otherwise do not use them. On top of that, Libadwaita's/GNOME's CSDs can interfere with non-GNOME window managers and their functionality, causing a whole host of problems. But what if you could turn CSDs off? GTK-NoCSD is an LD_PRELOAD library to disable CSD in GTK3/4, LibHandy, and LibAdwaita apps. CSD is client side decoration, there is also server side decoration, SSD, both serving as the titlebar of windows. GTK3 adopted CSD, where this thick headerbar is used with application controls embedded.This continued into the platform library, LibHandy, then into GTK4 and the platform library of that, LibAdwaita. This looks good on Gnome and makes these applications alike, but looks off everywhere else and can potentially break window managers and remove window manager provided functionality. This library restores the server side decoration, getting back the window manager titlebar, and moves the controls from the CSD to under it, into the window content. GTK-NoCSD's Codeberg page This isn't the first attempt at such a solution, and certainly won't be the last, and I'm glad they exist. Do note that if you decide to use this library, any problems or bugs you run into in an application modified' by it should never be reported to the application's developer, but to the developer of this library. If you encounter a bug in an application modified by this library, test the application in its unmodified state to ensure it's actually a bug in the application before reporting it to the application's developer. Developers who choose to use client-side decorations are not responsible for bugs and issues arising from you removing the CSD. Keep that in mind. That being said, whatever pixels appear on your screen is entirely up to you as a user, and you have the right to theme, alter, butcher, or mangle whatever application is running on your computer. If you dislike the way CSDs look and feel on your computer, you can opt to resort to a solution like this one, and that's entirely fair game. There's packages for Arch, Fedora, and Gentoo, and of course, you can build it yourself. As for my personal opinion - well, let's just say I prefer KDE for many, many reasons, and my disdain for CSDs is certainly one of them. Call me old-fashioned and out-of-touch, but I like the classic distinction between titlebar, menubar, and toolbar.

Every OpenBSD admin has booted bsd.rd at least once - to install, upgrade, or rescue a broken system. But few people stop to look at what's actually inside that file. It turns out bsd.rd is a set of nested layers, and you can take it apart on a running system without rebooting anything. That's what we'll do here. We'll go from the raw gzip file all the way down to the miniroot filesystem, exploring each layer with standard tools. Everything is documented in the man pages - we're just following the trail. Wesley Mouedine Assaby What am I supposed to add here?

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.