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A unique and very important find at the University of Utah: while cleaning out some storage rooms, the staff at the university discovered a tape containing a copy of UNIX v4 from Bell Labs. At this time, no complete copies are known to exist, and as such, this could be a crucial find for the archaeology of early UNIX. The tape in question will be sent to the Computer History Museum for further handling, where bitsavers.org will conduct the recovery process. I have the equipment. It is a 3M tape so it will probably be fine. It will be digitized on my analog recovery set up and I'll use Len Shustek's readtape program to recover the data. The only issue right now is my workflow isn't a while you wait" thing, so I need to pull all the pieces into one physical location and test everything before I tell Penny it's OK to come out. bitsavers.org It's amazing how we still manage to find such treasures in nooks and crannies all over the world, and with everything looking good so far, it seems we'll soon be able to fill in more of UNIX' early history.

Wait, what? The term3.5 inch floppy discis in fact a misnomer. Whilst the specification for 5.25 inch floppy discs employs Imperial units, the later specification for the smaller floppy discs employs metric units. The standards for these discs are all of which specify the measurements in metric, and only metric. These standards explicitly give the dimensions as 90.0mm by 94.0mm. It's in clause 6 of all three. Jonathan de Boyne Pollard Even the applicable standard in the US, ANSI X3.171-1989, specifies the size in metric. We could've been referring to these things using proper measurements instead of archaic ones based on the size of a monk's left testicle at dawn at room temperature in 1375 or whatever nonsense imperial or customary used to be based on. I feel dirty for thinking I had to use inches" for this. If we ever need to talk about these disks on OSNews from here on out, I'll be using proper units of measurement.

Redox keeps improving every month, and this past one is certainly a banger. The big news this past month is that Servo, the browser engine written in Rust, has been ported to Redox. It's extremely spartan at the moment, and crashes when a second website is loaded, but it's a promising start. It also just makes sense to have the premier Rust browser engine running on the premier Rust operating system. Htop and bottom have been ported to Redox for much improved system monitoring, and they're joined by a port of GoAccess. The version of Rust has been updated which fixed some issues, and keyboard layout configuration has been greatly improved. Instead of a few hardcoded layouts, they can now be configured dynamically for users of PS/2 keyboards, with USB keyboards receiving this functionality soon as well. There's more, of course, as well as the usual slew of low-level changes and improvements to drivers, the kernel relibc, and more.

On the newMacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple has mandated that all application icons fit into their prescribedsquircle. No longer can icons have distinct shapes, nor even any fun frame-breaking accessories. Should an icon be so foolish as to try to have a bit of personality, it will find itself stuffed into a dingy gray icon jail. Paul Kafasis The downgraded icons listed in this article are just... Sad. While there's no accounting for tastes, Apple's new glassy icons are just plain bad, void of any whimsy, and lacking in artistry. Considering where Apple came from back when it made beautifully crafted icons that set the bar for the entire industry. Almost seems like a metaphor for tech in general.

Some people not only have a very particular set of skills, but also a very particular set of interests that happen to align with those skills perfectly. When several unidentified and mysterious IBM PC ROM chips from the 1980s were discovered on eBay, two particular chips' dumped contents posed particularly troublesome to identify. In 1985, theFChmodel byte could only mean the 5170 (PC/AT),and the even/odd byte interleaving does point at a 16-bit bus. But there are three known versions of the PC/AT BIOS released during the 5170 family's lifetime, corresponding to the three AT motherboard types. This one here is clearly not one of them: its date stamps and part numbers don't match, and the actual contents are substantially different besides. My first thought was that this may have come from one of those more shadowy members of the 5170 family: perhaps the AT/370, the 3270 AT/G(X), or the rack-mounted 7532 Industrial AT. But known examples of those carry the same firmware sets as the plain old 5170, so their BIOS extensions (if any) came in the shape of extra adapter ROMs. Whateverthisthing was - some other 5170-type machine, a prototype, or even just a custom patch - it seemed I'd have to inquire within for any further clues. VileR at the int10h.org blog I'll be honest and state that most of the in-depth analysis of the code dumped from the ROM chips is far too complex for me to follow, but that doesn't make the story it tells any less interesting. There's no definitive, 100% conclusive answer at the end, but the available evidence collected by VileR does make a very strong case for a very specific, mysterious variant of the IBM PC being the likely source of the ROMs. If you're interested in some very deep IBM lore, here's your serving.

We talked about the Z80 SoftCard, Microsoft's first hardware product, back in 2023, but thanks to Raymond Chen and Nicole Branagan, we've got some more insights. TheMicrosoft Z-80 SoftCardwas a plug-in expansion card for the Apple II that added the ability to run CP/M software. According to Wikipedia, it was Microsoft's first hardware product and in 1980 was the single largest revenue source for the company. Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing And Chen links to an article by Branagan from 2020, which goes into even more detail. So there I was, very happy with myApple ][plus. But then I saw someone on the internet post, and it seems that my Apple is an overpriced box with a toy microcontroller for a CPU, whilerealcomputers use an Intel 8080, 8085 or Zilog Z80 to run something called CP/M"... but I've already spent so much money on the Apple, so can I turn it into a real computer? Nicole Branagan I have a soft spot for this particular subgenre of hardware - add-in cards that allow you to run an entirely different architecture inside your computer - and soon, I'll be diving into a particularly capable example here on OSNews.

There's something incredibly enticing and retrofuturistic about a well-designed TUI, or text-based user interface. There's an endless list number of these, but two crossed my path these past few days, and I found them particularly appealing. First, we've got bluetui, an application for managing Bluetooth connections on Linux systems with bluez installed. The second is resterm. Resterm is a terminal-first client for working withHTTP,GraphQL, andgRPCservices. No cloud sync, no signups, no heavy desktop app. Simple, yet feature rich, terminal client for .http/.rest files. It pairs a Vim-like-style editor with a workspace explorer, response diff, history, profiler and scripting so you can iterate on requests without leaving the keyboard. restterm GitHub page I don't use TUIs or the command line in general all that much, but these are two excellent examples of just how beautiful and user-friendly a good text-based user interface can really be. The command line is about a lot more than just archaic, cryptic incantations designed in the 1960s.

In the light of this year'sroadmapfocus on rigidity, clarity, performance", Sculpt OS 25.10 looks the same as the version 25.04 but might feel different as it includes countless under-the-hood improvements of the two preceding framework releases25.05and25.08. User interaction on performance-starved platforms like the PinePhone has become visibly smoother thanks our recent CPU schedulingadvances. The streamlinedblock-storage stackcombined with various refinements of the package-installation mechanism make the on-target installation of 3rd-party components a bliss. Regarding supported hardware, we steadily follow the tireless work of the Linux kernel community. All PC driver components using Linux kernel code are now consistently based on kernel version 6.12. Sculpt OS 25.10 release announcement There's also an optional brand new configuration format, which optionally replaces Scultp's use of XML for this purpose. Norman Feske, one of the co-founders of Genode Labs, published an article detailing how to test this new format, which also goes much deeper into how it works. For Sculpt OS' 25.10 release, Alexander Bottcher has also released an experimental image with five different kernel to choose from. The image is for PC, and works as a live system so there's no need to install it to explore Sculpt OS. Speaking of Alexander Bottcher, he also published an article about improvements and changes to Sculpt OS' lockscreen component. This component has existed for a very long time, and has been improved considerably over the years, and Bottcher's article details how to install it, configure it, and use it.

It seems like a number of Debian ports are going to face difficult times over the coming months. Debian developer Julian Andres Klode has sent a message to the Debian mailing lists that APT will very soon start requiring Rust. I plan to introduce hard Rust dependencies and Rust code into APT, no earlier than May 2026. This extends at first to the Rust compiler and standard library, and the Sequoia ecosystem. In particular, our code to parse .deb, .ar, .tar, and the HTTP signature verification code would strongly benefit from memory safe languages and a stronger approach to unit testing. Julian Andres Klode The problem for a lot of architectures that Debian supports, in one way or another, is that Rust and its toolchain simply aren't available for them. As such, Julian Andres Klode states, rather directly, that these architectures have about six months to get themselves a full Rust toolchain, or sunset their Debian ports. The Debian PA-RISC (hppa) and Alpha ports, for instance, do not have a Rust toolchain port, and most likely won't be getting one either, especially not within six months. The reasoning for moving towards a hard Rust dependency for APT is the same as it is in every other similar case: Debian's and APT's developers want to be able to make use of modern tools and technologies, even if that means dead architectures get left behind. As much as I am a massive fan of retro-architectures like PA-RISC, I really don't want otherwise modern Linux distributions to eschew modern tools and technologies just because they're not available for an architecture that died in 2005. I own and use the last and most powerful PA-RISC workstation running HP-UX as a retro platform, so I definitely care - but I really don't expect Debian or Fedora or whatever to waste any resources on supporting them if that means holding the distributions back for everyone else using it on actually modern platforms. If there's a large enough community of people around such architectures, they'll keep the Linux train running. If not, well, that's life.

Let's take a look at how things are going at Microsoft, whose CEO claimed a few months ago that 30% of their code was generated by AI". After installing Windows Updatesreleased on or after October 28, 2025 (KB5067036), you might encounter an issue where closing Task Manager using the Close (X)button does not fully terminate the process. When you reopen Task Manager, the previous instance continues running in the background even though no window is visible. This results in multiple lingering instances of taskmgr.exe, consuming system resources and potentially degrading device performance. Additional instances appear as Task Manager" in the Processes tab and as Taskmgr.exe" in the Details tab. Although the impact is less if Task Manager is opened and closed a few times, many instances accumulated over time can cause noticeable slowdowns in other applications. The Windows Health Dashboard Well okay then.

For those unfamiliar, cwm is the Calm Window Manager. It's part of the OpenBSD base distribution as one of the native window managers, along with an old version of fvwm and the venerable twm. It's pretty simple but surprisingly powerful, a floating window manager with some basic manual tiling. It's keyboard-centric, has an application launcher and highly configurable menus. It uses groups rather than workspaces which provides a lot of flexibility. My configuration isn't particularly groundbreaking, but it's comfy and suits me well. I can happily live in it indefinitely, though I do split my time between cwm and Xfce with occasional forays into other window managers or Wayland compositors. This has nothing to do with cwm limitations and everything to do with me being curious and craving novelty. It's cwm that I return to, because it's entirely unsurprising and very capable, and also because it's part of OpenBSD's base so I know I'm dealing with software that's been refined and audited and refined again. Antony Fox-Bramwell If you opt for a default installation of something like OpenBSD, without any additional desktop environments like Xfce, when you start X, you'll be served with the default OpenBSD window manager: cwm, or the calm window manager. At first glance, it looks incredibly basic and, to most people, archaic and unusable, but what it lacks in sparkles and boondoggles it more than makes up for in flexibility and configurability. The problem, however, is that it's not exactly intuitive to mold cwm into something that works for you. Articles like this one, by Antony Fox-Bramwell, function as great springboards into the world of configuring cwm. If you do an internet search for similar articles, you'll find tons of other examples that can help you become more capable at configuring cwm. Most of us are probably just fine accepting something like KDE or Xfce, but if those just don't scratch your itch, diving into cwm could be just what you're looking for.

This is a conversion of the original V7 pwd program for use on POSIX systems (tested primarily on Linux). This is mostly of historical interest - modern systems have a library routine or system call for getting the current directory, and don't need this. I've attempted to make the minimum set of logic/functionality changes needed to make the program work, preserving the core of the original logic. I've made slightly more aesthetic changes, to make reading easier for a post-standardization C speaker. Cliff L. Biffle Over on Fedi, Cliff L. Biffle provides more details as to why he undertook this project.

AMD is expanding its processor portfolio beyond the x86 architecture with its first ARM-based APU, internally known as Sound Wave." The chip's existence was uncovered through customs import records, confirming several details about its design and purpose. Built with a BGA-1074 package measuring 32 mm * 27 mm, the processor fits within standard mobile SoC dimensions, making it suitable for thin and light computing platforms. It employs a 0.8 mm pitch and FF5 interface, replacing the FF3 socket previously used in Valve's Steam handheld devices, further hinting at a new generation of compact AMD-powered hardware. Hilbert Hagedoorn at The Guru of 3D It only makes sense for AMD to enter the market for ARM SoCs, as it's a whole section of the processor market they're not tapping into. Even if they don't manage to compete with the best ARM processors out there, they can still serve the mid and lower end just fine.

Gaming isn't something we talk about very often here on OSNews, but I think this piece of news is actually a rare piece of good, welcome news from this industry. Mojang, the Microsoft-owned company behind Minecraft, has announced it's going to stop obfuscating the code behind the Java edition of Minecraft. A refresher: the Java edition of Minecraft is the original version of the game, which exists alongside the Bedrock Edition, which is written in C++. Both variants are kept more or less in sync with each other. The Java edition has historically been far more moddable, and comes with far fewer restrictions than the Bedrock Edition, which Microsoft maintains far tighter control over. Still, the modding scene around the Java Edition sprung up in spite of Mojang and Microsoft, not because of them, but over the years the modding scene has been embraced more and more by these two companies. The final step in this embrace comes today as Mojang will no longer obfuscate the code behind th Java Edition. Minecraft: Java Edition has been obfuscated since its release. This obfuscation meant that people couldn't see our source code. Instead, everything was scrambled -and those who wanted to mod Java Edition had to try and piece together what every class and function in the code did. But we encourage people to get creative both in Minecraft and with Minecraft - so in 2019 we tried to make this tedious process a little easier by releasing obfuscation mappings". These mappings were essentially a long list that allowed people to match the obfuscated terms to un-obfuscated terms. This alleviated the issue a little, as modders didn't need to puzzle out what everything did, or what it should be called anymore. But why stop there? Minecraft website This is excellent news for the game, the wider modding community, and players. Minecraft is still a massively popular game, and making modding easier is very welcome, as for a lot of people, mods are what make Minecraft actually interesting. It's also rare to see a massive force in gaming making a positive step like this, so they deserve the few kudos.

After the release of Windows 95, with its brand new and incredibly influential graphical user interface, it was only a matter of time before this new taskbar, Start menu, and everything else would make its way to Microsoft's other operating system line, Windows NT. The development of Windows 95 more or less lined up with that of Windows NT 3.5, but it wouldn't be until Windows NT 4.0, released a little less than a year after Windows 95, that NT, too, would have the brand new user interface. Raymond Chen has published a blog post detailing the cooperation and interplay between the Windows 95 and Windows NT teams, and, as always with Chen, it's a joy to read. Members of the Windows 95 user interface teammet regularly with members of the Windows NT user interface teamto keep them aware of what was going on and even get their input on some ideas that the Windows 95 team were considering. The Windows NT user interface team were focused on shipping Windows NT, but they appreciated being kept in the loop. During the late phases of the development of Windows 95, the Windows NT side of the house took a more active role in bringing the Windows 95 user interface to Windows NT. Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing Chen details there was a lot of code-sharing, to the point where the Windows 95 version of the GUI contained NT-specific code, and vice versa. This code-sharing was quite a lot less elegant than today with tools like git, since Microsoft's own internal source code system called SLM (pronounced slime') did not support branches, so they had to regularly perform three-way merges manually. It was a different time, for sure. Anyway, it's amazing how much of this ancient Microsoft lore could've been lost to time, or shrouded in mystery, if it wasn't for someone like Raymond Chen regularly sharing the stories from Microsoft's past.

OpenIndiana, the Illumos distribution for general use, has released its latest snapshot release, and there's some really interesting things in there. To refresh your memory: Illumos is a fork of the final OpenSolaris release, based on Solaris 11, before Oracle closed Solaris back up. It's been in development ever since that fateful day back in 2010, and several Illumos distributions with unique identities have sprung up around the project. OpenIndiana is one of them, and functions like a rolling release with a snapshot release every six months. OpenIndiana 2025.10 was released today, and this snapshot's changelog covers changes over the past six months. It comes with all the latest open source packages you would expect, like the latest or at least very recent versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, and much more, but the GNOME version (44.4 from 2023) is definitely a bit outdated. There's a ton new utilities written in Rust, and the usual bug and security fixes as well, like for crucial utilities such as OpenSSL and OpenSSH, and things like Python versions 3.14 3.13, 3.12, and 3.9. A particularly interesting bullet point is maintenance work and improvements for Sun Ray support, and the changelog notes that these little thin clients are still popular among their users. I'm very deep into the world of Sun Rays at the moment, so reading that you can still use them through OpenIndiana is amazingly cool. There's a Sun Ray metapackage that installs the necessary base components, allowing you to install Sun's/Oracle's original Sun Ray Server software on OpenIndiana. Even though MATE is the default desktop for OpenIndiana, the Sun Ray Server software does depend on a few GNOME components, so those will be pulled in. I've definitely put this on my list, once I'm done with my current Sun Ray deep dive on Solaris 10. If you're interested in SPARC support, there's quite a few machines that do work with the SPARC version of OpenIndiana, and recently, there's been a lot of progress on this front. Running the SPARC version on various servers can work, but desktop use, say, on a Sun Ultra 45, is a bit more problematic due to boot issues and a lack of graphics drivers. The work is ongoing, though, and there's been a ton of renewed interest.

Microsoft is introducing a new feature in Windows to better deal with blue screens of death. In the release notes for Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.6982 (Dev Channel), the company detailed that after a user experiences a blue screen, Windows will automatically perform a memory scan. We're introducing a new feature that helps improve system reliability. If your PC experiences a bugcheck (unexpected restart), you may see a notification when signing in suggesting a quick memory scan. If you choose to run it, the system will schedule a Windows Memory Diagnostic scan to run during your next reboot (taking 5 minutes or less on average) and then continue to Windows. If a memory issue is found and mitigated, you will see a notification post-reboot. Amanda Langowski at the Windows Blogs In its current iteration, this memory scan will trigger after every single error code to collect as much data as possible, but Microsoft states it will refine and narrow the number of error codes in the future. In addition, this feature will not be available on Arm64 and systems with Administrator Protection and/or BitLocker without Secure Boot. Let's hope this feature won't be a nuisance, but an actually useful feature that helps people uncover memory problems that otherwise remain undiagnosed.

Back in January 2025, the Python Software Foundation applied for a $1.5 million grant from the US government's National Science Foundation, under theSafety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program,to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI. After a lot of paperwork, their application was approved, but upon receiving the contractual agreement, the Python Software Foundation decided to back out. Why? We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws." This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant,but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole. Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to claw back" previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we'd already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk. In the end, however, the PSF simply can't agree to a statement that we won't operate any programs that advance or promote" diversity, equity, and inclusion, as it would be a betrayal of our mission and our community. Loren Crary at the PSF blog The fact that this is news at all is a deeply sad state of affairs, but it's great to see at least some organisations in tech still have a spine. In a world where tech giants and their sleazy CEOs are falling over each other to lather the US president in bribes and tasteless gifts, it's refreshing to see someone passing up on what would be an enormous amount of money for them. The PSF operates on a budget of $5 million a year, so $1.5 million would be a massive boon for the effort. The efforts of the PSF regarding outreach have been incredibly successful over the years. PyCon US had 1% female speakers in 2011, 7% in 2012, 15% in 2013, 33% in both 2014 and 2015, and 40% in 2016. DEI" efforts usually just mean the gruntwork of reaching out to members of underrepresented groups within your community, and ensuring they feel welcome, safe, and respected. Monocultures tend to be self-destructive, whether we're talking about operating systems or people. Having perspectives from people with different backgrounds, different life experiences, and different approaches is a massive net benefit to your organisation. Making efforts to foster such environments illegal is absolute batshit insanity, and I'm glad that unlike cowards like Tim Cook or Sundar Pichai, the Python Software Foundation has a spine and is standing up for what's right.

I love it when I discover - usually through people smarter than I - an operating system or graphical user interface I've never heard of. This time, we've got Bellcore MGR, as meticulously detailed by Nina Kalinina a few weeks ago. I love old computers, and I enjoy looking at old user interfaces immensely. I could spend a whole evening on installing an old version of MS Word and playing with it: Ah, look, how cute, they didn't invent scrollbars just yet". A special place in my heart is taken by user interfaces that were historically significant and yet fell into relative obscurity (like Windows 2 or BTRON). This is why I absolutely had to try Bellcore MGR. An early windowing system (1984), it was made by the Bell Communications Research, and it looked like Plan 9's older sister. The system was distributed over the Usenet, ported to every conceivable Unix-like system, including Minix, Linux and Coherent, and - eventually - mostly forgotten. The only two videos on YouTube that have something to do with MGR have a bit over 1000 views combined, and don't really show it in the best light possible. And I think it's a crying shame. Nina Kalinina The reference to Plan 9 is apt, as MGR definitely seems to function almost exactly like Plan 9's rio graphical user interface, including things like drawing a rectangle to open a new window. Rio is an acquired taste - to put it very mildly - and it seems MGR fits the same bill. There's also $home movie, an entire video editor for MGR, which is honestly mind-blowing considering it's running on a mere SPARCstation in the late '80s and early '90s. It has an incredibly unique UNIXy flavour: If you don't have 40 minutes to watch the tour, please do spend two minutes on this demo of the $HOME MOVIE" system. It is a suite of tools for the capture, editing and playback of window system sessions on a Sun Sparcstation" based on MGR. It is probably the most Unix way of making videos: the window manager dumps the rendering commands into a file, then the rendering commands can be altered with a set of small tools, some of which are in awk, and then these rendering commands can be packaged into a single demo. Nina Kalinina Kalinina had to more or less reverse-engineer its unique video format, too, but in doing so managed to upload the original demonstration of $movie home, narrated by its creator and created in $movie home itself, to YouTube. Kalinina also created and uploaded a ready-made hard disk image of Debian 0.93 with Bellcore MGR preinstalled for use in Qemu and 86Box.

You press the power button. A second later a wall of text scrolls by, or a logo fades in, and eventually Linux appears. What happens in between is not magic. It is a careful handshake between tiny programs and a very literal CPU. This part follows that handshake until the very first line of C code inside the Linux kernel runs. 0xkato's blog Exactly what it says on the tin.

I think most of us are aware that compositors use multiple planes to render our user interfaces, and in the case of KDE's Kwin specifically, they use two planes - one for the user interface, and one specifically for the mouse cursor. Kwin developer Xaver Hugl has been working on changing Kwin to use more than just two planes, and it turns out this delivers some considerable power use reductions and thus battery life improvements. So, when can you use these changes and test them? Due to various driver issues when trying to use overlays, like slow atomic tests on AMD as well as display freezes on some AMD and NVidia GPUs, this feature is still off by default. However, if you want to experiment anyways or attempt to fix the drivers, starting from Plasma 6.5, you can set theKWIN_USE_OVERLAYSenvironment variable to enable the feature anyways. If you test it, please report your findings! If there's problems in the drivers, we'd like to know and have bug reports for the GPU vendors of course, but also if things work well that would be nice to hear. Xaver Hugl Leave it to Linux graphics-related developers to uncover driver bugs in graphics drivers.

An extensive study by the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC highlights just how deeply inaccurate and untrustworthy AI" news results really are. AI" sucks even at its most basic function. It's incredible how much money is being pumped into this scam, and how many people are wholeheartedly defending these bullshit generators as if their lives depended on it. If these tools can't even summarise a text - something you learn in early primary school as a basic skill - how on earth are they supposed to perform more complex tasks like coding, making medical assessments, distinguish between a chips bag and a gun? Maybe we deserve it.

If you're eating a bag of chips in an area where AI" software is being used to monitor people's behaviour, you might want to reconsider. Some high school kid in the US was hanging out with his friends, when all of a sudden, he was being swarmed by police officers with with guns drawn. Held at gunpoint, he was told to lie down, after which he was detained. Obviously, this is a rather unpleasant experience, so say the least, especially considering the kid in question is a person of colour. In the US. Anyway, the AI" software used by the police department to monitor citizens' behaviour mistook an empty chips bag in his pocket for a gun. US police officers, who only receive a few weeks of training, didn't question what the computer told them and pointed guns at a teenager. In a statement, Omnilert expressed regret over the incident, acknowledging that the image closely resembled a gun being held." The company called it a false positive," but defended the system's response, stating it functioned as intended: to prioritize safety and awareness through rapid human verification." Alexa Dikos and Rebecca Pryor at FOX45 News I've been warning that the implementation of AI" was going to lead to people dying, and while this poor kid got lucky this time, you know it's only a matter of time before people start getting shot by US police because they're too stupid to question their computer overlords. Add in the fact that AI" is well-known to be deeply racist, and we have a very deadly cocktail of failures.

Like clockwork, every six months, we have a new OpenBSD release. OpenBSD 7.8 adds support for the Raspberry Pi 5, tons of improvements to sleep, wake, and hibernate, the TCP stack can now run in parallel on multiple processors, and so much more. DRM has been updated to match Linux 6.12.50, and drivers for the Qualcomm Snapdragon DRM subsystem and Qualcomm DisplayPort controller were added as well. The changelog is, as always, long and detailed, so head on over for the finer details. OpenBSD users will know how to upgrade, and new users can visit the download page.

Raymond Chen has another great post about some of the classic icons from Windows 95, this time focusing on pifmgr.dll. In this file, there are a variety of random-seeming icons, and it turns out they're random for a reason: they were just a bunch a fun, generic icons intended for people to use when creating PIF files. The icons inpifmgr.dll were created just for fun. They were not created with any particular programs in mind, with one obvious exception. They were just a fun mix of icons for people to use for their own homemade shortcut files. Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing For those of us who didn't grow up with Windows, or who, god forbid, are too young to know, PIF or personal information files are effectively shortcuts to DOS programs for use in a multitasking environment. A PIF file would not only point to the relevant DOS executable, but also contain information about the environment in which said executable was supposed to run. Their history goes back to IBM's TopView, and Microsoft later embraced and adapted them for use in Windows.

Microsoft has published a set of short questions and answers about driver updates through Windows Update, and there's one tidbit in there I found interesting. Driver datesmight look old, butthat isnottrue.The driver date is descriptive infoset by the driverproviderand can be any date they choose. Whendeterminingwhich driver to install, Windows Update uses targeting information set by theproviderinside thedriverfiles todeterminethe best driver. This lets the deviceproviderpromote the best driver, regardless of the chosen date. Microsoft knowledge base article Whenever I do have to fiddle with Windows machines, I always wondered about why some drivers in Windows Update would show some seriously old dates. It turns out the answer is as obvious as it always tends to be: OEMs.

KDE is on a roll lately, and keeps on rolling with today's release of KDE Plasma 6.5. As the project itself notes, this release focuses on relatively small improvements, refinements, and other niceties, without making any massive changes. With Linux desktops taking accessibility more seriously lately than ever before, I want to focus on the accessibility improvements first. The Orca screen reader now announces caps lock state changes, and screen readers will now describe the ShortcutsandAutostartpages more optimally. There's also a new grayscale colour filter for people sensitive to colours, developers have done Plasma-wide pass to eliminate bright flashes in the UI, and the desktop zoom feature will now follow the text insertion point as it moves around the UI. Keyboard navigation in various parts of Plasma have been improved, and a few other small changes have been to improve accessiblity. Other changes include rounded bottom window corners (which can be turned off), automatic and scheduled theme and wallpaper transitions (e.g. from light to dark), and a new and improved applications permissions settings panel. A small new feature that will be a massive time saver for me is the ability to favourite items in your clipboard history, so they remain available over time. I reuse certain copied bits of text all the time, and I can't wait to start using this little addition. Remote desktop has also received a ton of love in Plasma 6.5. You can now share your clipboard, and you no longer need to create dedicated RDP user accounts; you can just log in with your normal account credentials as you would expect you could. Plasma's Discover application, used for application and update management, has seen major work to improve its performance - very welcome, for sure. Of course, there's a ton of other changes, too. KDE Plasma 6.5 will find its way to your distribution soon enough.

Now that ARM's memory tagging, used extensively by Android ROMs such as GrapheneOS and now also by Apple, is becoming the new norm to aid in improving memory safety, the x86 world can't sit idly by. As such, Intel and AMD have announced a ChkTag, x86's version of memory tagging. ChkTag is a set of new and enhanced x86 instructions to detect memory safety violations, such as buffer overflows and misuses of freed memory (use-after-free). ChkTag is designed to be suitable for hardening applications, operating system kernels, hypervisors for virtualization, and UEFI firmware. ChkTag places control in the software developers' hands to balance their security needs with operational elements that often become prominent when deploying code. For example, ChkTag provides instruction-granular control over which memory accesses are checked. Compilers can offer optimizations and new language features or intrinsics. ChkTag prepares x86 for a future with increasing amounts of code written in memory-safe languages running alongside code in other languages. Furthermore, ChkTag loads tags from linear/virtual memory that can often be committed on demand. Intel and AMD's announcement It's important to note that ChkTag - why not just call it CheckTag - isn't ready yet, nor is there any indication when it will be included in any processors from Intel and AMD. The goal is to catch certain memory safety problems in hardware. According to Intel and AMD's shared announcement, developers will have fine-grained control over the feature, allowing them to tap into the functionality in whatever way they deem necessary or valuable for their software in specific circumstances. My fear is that Intel and AMD will use this feature as a product differentiator, restricting it to either more expensive processors or to Xeon/Threadripper processors, thereby fracturing the market. This would inevitably lead to spotty support for the feature across the x86 landscape, meaning most ordinary consumer won't benefit from it at all.

I can exclusively reveal today Anthropic's spending on Amazon Web Services for the entirety of 2024, and for every month in 2025 up until September, and that that Anthropic's spend on compute far exceeds that previously reported. Furthermore, I can confirm thatthrough September, Anthropic has spent more than 100% of its estimated revenue (based on reporting in the last year) on Amazon Web Services, spending $2.66 billion on compute on an estimated $2.55 billion in revenue. Ed Zitron These numbers do not even include what the company spends on Google's services. Going through all the numbers and reporting, Zitron explains that the more successful" Anthropic becomes, the bigger the gap between income from paying customers and its spending on Amazon and Google services becomes. It's simply unsustainable, and the longer we keep this scam going, the worse the consequences will be when the bubble pops. Sadly, nobody will go to jail once hell breaks loose.

This post is a combination of looks at several oddities among my pile of NES and Famicom cartridges. Why, for example, do I have a copy ofGyromitewhen I don't have a R.O.B.? Did I miss something interesting in myMMC blog post? And while it is the Japanese release ofKid Niki: Radical Ninja, is myKaiketsu Yanchamarubeing a littletooradical? Who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong? Some of these questions will be answered! Nicole Branagan at Nicole Express A well-written post with tons of weird NES nerdery. Branagan delivers, every time.

With official support for Windows 10 having officially ended a few days ago, let's take a look and see how its successor, Windows 11, is doing. Microsoft released thefirst Patch Tuesday update (KB5066835)for Windows 11 25H2 this past week and it is probably fair to say that it has been a rough start for the new feature update. Despite the announcement of a wide rollout wherein the new version isnow available for download for everyone, the company has already confirmed large-scale issues. First up, Microsoft was forced to issue an emergency workaround as the updatebroke localhost authand following that the company today has confirmed another problem where recovery can become impossible if you happen to use a USB keyboard or mouse. Sayan Sen at Neowin Yes. This is a real thing. This latest round of patches makes it entirely impossible to navigate the Windows Recovery Environment with USB keyboards and mice. Since it's 2025, USB is probably the protocol through which most people connect their keyboard and mice (although to be fair, some laptops probably still default to internal PS/2 for their touchpads). This means that if you run into a problem with Windows 11 that requires you to access the Windows Recovery Environment - perhaps OneDrive did too many lines of cocaine again - you can't actually do anything inside of it. There's no fix yet, so you either remove the offending patches, hope your PC still has a PS/2 port and you still have PS/2 peripherals, or hope Windows 11 won't fall over and die until Microsoft releases a fix for the issue. Of course, people still using Windows 10, people who aren't installing every single Windows 11 update as they become available, and people using real operating systems have nothing to worry about. You can't help but wonder, though - with Microsoft pushing AI" so hard, how many of these recent faceplants are the result of Microsoft engineers frantically trying to meet code quotas using Copilot?

Today, the Servo team has released new versions of theservoshellbinaries for all our supported platforms, taggedv0.0.1. These binaries are essentially the same nightly builds that were already available from thedownload pagewith additional manual testing, now tagging them explicitly as releases for future reference. Servo's official blog Servo is making steady progress, and that's awesome news. Every month a whole slew of new features and improvements make their way into this new browser engine, and I'm fairly confident Servo is our best shot at regaining some independence from Google and Apple in the web browser space. Other efforts are either too limited in scope, targeting only a specific niche, already being eaten alive by massive corporations, written in non-memory safe languages, run by people whose code I wouldn't even trust to flush my toilet, or any combination thereof. Servo is it, folks. Our best shot.

In older versions of Windows, if you had a video playing, took a screenshot, and pasted that screenshot into Paint, you could sometimes see the video continue to play inside Paint. What kind of sorcery enabled this to happen? A few of you will realise instantly why this used to happen: render surfaces. Back in at least the Windows 9x days, playing video involved drawing solid green where you wanted the video to go (the video player window), rendering the video pixels to a surface shared with the graphics card, and then have the graphics card replace said green pixels with the video pixels from the shared surface. This approach has a whole array of benefits, not least of which is that it allowed you to render the video on a thread separate from the main user interface, so that if the main interface was sluggish or locked up, the video would keep rendering properly. You could also create two shared surfaces to render multiple frames at once, thereby eliminating tearing. Knowing this, it should be obvious what's going on with the screenshot and Pain story. Now, when you load the image into Paint or any other image viewer, Windows sends those green pixels to the video card, but if the media player is still running, then its overlay is still active, and if you put Paint in the same place that the media player window is, then the green pixels in Paint get changed into the pixels of the active video. The video card doesn't know that the pixels came from Paint. Its job is to look for green pixels in a certain region of the screen and change them into the pixels from the shared surface. If you move the Paint window to another position where it doesn't overlap the media player, or if the media player isn't playing a video, you will see the bitmap's true nature: It's just a bunch of green pixels. Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing I've never had this particular oddity happen, but I do have vague memories of video player windows rendering tons of green artifacts whenever something went wrong with the video player, the file it was trying to play, or whatever else, and I guess the cause of those green artifacts is the same. In modern operating systems, graphics rendering of the UI is done entirely on the GPU, with only the final composition being sent to your display. As such, the green screen effect no longer occurs.

Chris Siebenmann with another interesting look at a tiny detail of UNIX history. A few years ago I wrote aboutthe divide in chown() about who got to give away files, where BSD and V7 were on one side, restricting it to root, while System III and System V were on the other, allowing the owner to give them away too. The answer is that the restriction was added in V6, wherethe V6 chown(2) manual pagehas the same wording as V7. In Research Unix V5 and earlier, people can chown(2) away their own files; this is documented inthe V4 chown(2) manual pageand is whatthe V5 kernel code for chown() does. This behavior runs all the way back tothe V1 chown() manual page, with an extra restriction that you can't chown() setuid files. Chris Siebenmann The deeper levels of this particular rabbit hole need more exploring, though, as eventually Siebenmann hits a roadblock when trying to figure out why, exactly, the restriction was added, and why certain versions chose to not adopt the new restriction. This may be part of the lore of UNIX we won't uncover, until one of the people involved speaks up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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