OSnews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We've talked about Ironclad a few times, but there's been two new releases since the 0.6.0 release we covered last, so let's see what the project's been up to. As a refresher, Ironclad is a formally verified, hard real-time capable kernel written inSPARKandAda. Versions 0.7.0 and 0.8.0 improved support for block device caching, added a basic NVMe driver, added support for x86's SMAP, switched from KVM to NVMM for Ironclad's virtualization interface, and much, much more. In the meantime, Ironclad also added support for RISC-V, making it usable on any 64 bit RISC-V target that supports aLimine-protocol compatible bootloader. The easiest way to try out Ironclad is to downloadGloire, a distribution that uses Ironclad and the GNU tools. It can be installed in both a virtual machine and on real hardware.

For those of us unaware - unlikely on OSNews, but still - for a hot minute in the second half of the '90s, Apple licensed its Mac OS to OEMs, resulting in officially sanctioned Mac clones from a variety of companies. While intended to grow the Mac's market share, what ended up happening instead is that the clone makers outcompeted Apple on performance, price, and features, with clones offering several features and capabilities before Apple did - for far lower prices. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he killed the clone program almost instantly. The rather abrupt end of the clone program means there's a number of variants of the Mac OS that never made their way into the market, most notable variants intended for the Common Reference Hardware Platform, or CHRP, a standard defined by IBM and Apple for PowerPC-based PCs. Thanks to the popular classic Mac YouTuber Mac84, we now have a few of these releases out in the wild. These CDs contain release candidates for Mac OS 7.6 and Mac OS 8 for CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) systems. They were created to support CHRP computers, but were never released, likely due to Steve Jobs returning to Apple in September 1997 and eliminating the Mac Clone program and any CHRP efforts. Mac OS 7.6/8 CHRP releases page Mac84 has an accompanying video diving into more detail about these individual releases by booting and running them in an emulator, so we can get a better idea of what they contain. While most clone makers only got access to Mac OS 7.x, some of them did, in fact, gain access to Mac OS 8, namely UMAX and Power Computing (the latter of which was acquired by Apple). It's not the clone nature of these releases that make them special, but the fact they're CHRP releases is. This reference platform was a failure in the market, and only a few of IBM's own machines and some of Motorola's PowerStack machines properly supported it. Apple, meanwhile, only aid minor lip service to CHRP in its New World Power Macintosch machines.

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has completed work to build FreeBSD without requiring root privilege. We have implemented support for all source release builds to use no-root infrastructure, eliminating the need for root privileges across the FreeBSD release pipeline. This work was completed as part of theprogram commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency. FreeBSD Foundation blog This is great news in and of itself, but there's more: FreeBSD has also improved build reproducability. This means that given the same source input, you should end up with the same binary output, which is an important part of building a verifiable chain of trust. These two improvements combined further add to making FreeBSD a trustworthy, secure option - something it already is anyway. In case you haven't noticed, the FreeBSD project and its countless contributors are making a ton of tangible progress lately on a wide variety of topics, from improving desktop use, to solidifying Wi-Fi support, to improving the chain of trust. I think the time is quite right for FreeBSD to make some inroads in the desktop UNIX-y space, especially for people to whom desktop Linux has strayed too far from the traditional UNIX philosphy (whatever that means).

LXQt, the other Qt desktop environment, released version 2.3.0. This new version comes roughly six months after 2.2.0, and continues the project's adoption of Wayland. The enhancement of Wayland support has been continued, especially in LXQt Panel, whose Desktop Switcher is now enabled for Labwc, Niri, .... It is also equipped with a backend specifically for Wayfire. In addition, the Custom Command plugin is made more flexible, regardless of Wayland and X11. LXQt 2.3.0 release announcement The screenshot utility has been improved as well, and lxqt-qdbushas been added tolxqt-wayland-session to make qdbus commands easier to use with all kinds of Wayland compositors.

FreeBSD offers a whole bunch of technologies and tools to make gaming on the platform a lot more capable than you'd think, and this article by Pertho dives into the details. Running all your games inside a FreeBSD Jail with Wine installed into it is pretty neat. Initially, I thought this was going to be a pretty difficult and require a lot of trial and error but I was surprised at how easy it was to get this all working. I was really happy to get some of my favorite games working in a FreeBSD Jail, and having ZFS snapshots around was a great way to test things in case I needed to backtrack. Pertho at their blog No, this isn't as easy as gaming on Linux has become, and it certainly requires a ton more work and knowledge than just installing a major Linux distribution and Steam, but for those of us who prefer a more traditional UNIX-like experience, this is a great option.

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.