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Since X11 has moved to legacy status, it's only a matter of time before the BSDs are going to have to make the move to being Wayland-first as well. This applies particularly to FreeBSD, which has been focusing on improving its suitability for desktop and laptops lately. The good news is that Wayland has been available on FreeBSD for a while now, and setting it up with a KDE desktop is a breeze. Dolce Far Niente has a quick and easy guide, updated today, that walks you through the steps of setting up KDE with Wayland on a fresh FreeBSD 15.x installation. I'm keeping this on my to-do list, but I'm not committing yet because we're getting quite close to the first incentive of the OSNews fundraiser, where I have to install, run, and use vanilla Windows 11 (including Office and Outlook) for a month. No point in setting up FreeBSD when we're about to hit that incentive. Regardless, this is going to be the future of FreeBSD for desktop and laptop use, so you if you're already a FreeBSD user, you might as well try and see if Wayland works for you today.

Two popular web browser are overhauling their user interface, and the first to actually ship its new version is Vivaldi. Version 8.0 of this Chromium-based browser completely overhauls its UI, but retains its extensive customisation options, including the option to go back to the old look and feel if the new one doesn't float your boat. I wonder if this update addresses some of my long-standing issues with Vivaldi where it just seemed impossible to integrate the browser properly with KDE or GNOME, since it opted for its own fonts and had a ton of very custom UI that made it stand out moreso than even other browser. Before publishing this post, I did a quick install and check, and no, it seems not much has changed in that department. Not everyone will care - in fact, I think most people don't - but I do, and I do whatever it takes to make my browser look properly native. Any Chromium-based browser is a hard sell in that area, and that applies doubly so for Vivaldi and its long list of custom UI elements. The other popular web browser overhauling its UI is Firefox, which is bringing its new UI to testing now, with an actual release later this year. You can clearly see that both Vivaldi and Firefox seem to be following a similar trend, even if I'm not entirely sure if it has a name yet. The new Firefox design also overhauls the settings page, integrates Mozilla services like its VPN, and brings back the compact mode (which has been hidden behind an about:config flag for years now). My biggest worry is how this will affect Librewolf and the KDE and GNOME themes I use, but it seems we're going to have more than enough time to figure that out.

I was a long-time Bitwarden user, until a year or so ago when I started migrating my passwords first to Firefox/LibreWolf, and recently from there to a KeePass database I can transfer and use with whatever password manager application is compatible with KeePass' file format. It seems I was accidentally on time, as it's come out over the last few days that Bitwarden is probably going down the drain soon. In February, the company got a new CEO, and in March, it doubled its Premium price, announcing the hike deep in a feature announcement. The new CEO seems to be a bellwether for what's to come for Bitwarden. He's a merger and acquisitions guy, with a history of gutting companies and selling them for parts, and changes to Bitwarden's website also indicate where it's headed. The phrase Always free" disappeared from thepersonal password manager pagein mid-April. It used to sit prominently under the plan selector. The free plan still exists - for now - but the commitment language is gone. And then there's the values rewrite. Bitwarden used to define its culture with the acronym GRIT: Gratitude, Responsibility,Inclusion, andTransparency. After May 4th, that changed. GRIT now stands for Gratitude, Responsibility,Innovation, andTrust. Inclusion and Transparency are out. Innovation and Trust are in. Patrick Boyd The Always free" motto quietly reappeared on the site after its removal was uncovered and went viral on Fedi. The change in CEO, the changes in values, and the removal (and reappearance) of Bitwarden's well-known and oft-repeated commitment to its free plan have all been quiet. No announcements, no blog posts, no posts on social media - but they did change a four-year old blog post by Bitwarden's former CEO to change that GRIT acronym. You don't need to be an honors student to figure out where this is going, and what the new CEO's plans are for Bitwarden. Do as I did, and get your passwords out of BitWarden. I strongly suggest using an open format that can be used by any compatible password manager, with KeePass' formats being the obvious choice. This way your passwords are truly yours, and not dependent on someone's continued commitment to free plans or proprietary services that can unexpectedly change hands. Bitwarden is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, but with all of the above, one has to wonder how long that's going to remain a thing.

Printing on Linux, macOS, and even on Windows seems to be pretty much a solved problem, but what about printing on OpenBSD? Anyway, to do so I would need to set up my HP OfficeJet printer, connected wirelessly to the network, on OpenBSD. I chose to do this using HPLIP and CUPS as they are both in ports, I am familiar with how they work, and my printer is old enough that its PPD (driver) file is included in the slightly older version of HPLIP that is ported to OpenBSD. However, after installing both packages, starting the relevant services via rcctl including Avahi, and launching CUPS and finding the printer, I could not get it to install properly. Either it would error out at the end saying the printer couldn't be added and advise me to check the CUPS error log, or it would seemingly successfully add the printer but I couldn't print anything and couldn't adjust the printer settings. Morgan at his blog Only very tangentially related, but my personal crowning achievement in computing is somehow making it possible for my PA-RISC c8000 workstation running HP-UX 11i v1 to print to my modern all-in-one HP printer thing, some random HP consumer junker we bought on a whim because it was a returned item and cheap. It took some messing around, but ever since I've been able to just print stuff right from any application on HP-UX over the network, wirelessly. Note that the c8000 and HP-UX 11i v1 are almost two decades out of date compared to the printer, but by trying out promising device files included in HP-UX I managed to get it all to work. I never need it, but I am fairly sure I'm one of the very few people in the world who can reliably print from an HP-UX 11i v1 workstation to a modern throwaway HP junker over Wi-Fi. Put that on my tombstone.

A little progress bar to keep track of our fundraiser! Donate through Ko-Fi Donate through SEPA transfer Why a fundraiser? Note that I have to update it manually, and that it includes both Ko-Fi donations, as well as direct bank transfers. Yes, if your country is part of SEPA (EU, more or less), you can now do a safe direct bank transfer using IBAN to a dedicated bank account. This avoids any third parties. Use your bank's application or website (Name: Thom Holwerda - IBAN: SE08 8000 0820 1684 4657 8414 - BIC: SWEDSESS).

This is a virtual museum of operating systems (and standalone applications) running under emulation, implemented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM. A custom emulator-independent launcher is provided, and all OSes and emulators are pre-installed and pre-configured. The launcher includes a snapshot feature to quickly revert broken installations back to a working state. Hypervisor installers and shortcuts to run the VM on Windows, macOS, and Linux are also included. Andrew Warkentin's Virtual OS Museum These types of preconfigured archives exist in the gaming world, but I've never seen something like this for operating systems. The amount of love, work, and care that have gone into this effort must've been immense, as it contains more than 1700 installs, more than 520 platforms, and more than 570 distinct operating systems, all wrapped into a single download, with a nice launcher on top to make using all of this as easy as possible. You can either download the full offline version at 121GB zipped, or a version that downloads each image as you fire them up for the first time at 14GB zipped. The contents span just about everything from early mainframes to desktop operating systems to all kinds of mobile platforms, from the late 1940s to today. I haven't yet found the time to download the whole thing, but I am absolutely going to, as there are so many names in here that I've been wanting to play around with for ages, but just never got the time to set up virtual machines or emulators for. This is going to be an amazing resource for the kinds of people who read OSNews.

We can inter Google Search to the Google Graveyard. At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined intelligent search box" - what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago. Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch information agents" to gather information on a user's behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs. Sarah Perez at TechCrunch The attack on online search has been ongoing for a long time, and it has already resulted in most people with a higher-than-average interest in technology to either no longer use Google, or just to not use online search at all. I used DuckDuckGo for a long time, until I switched to Startpage somewhere last year, and I have never looked back. Startpage (and many others like it) is a very simple, basic search engine: it just gives you a list of links. That's it. That's all I ever want from a search engine, as the task of then vetting each link for relevancy, accuracy, trustworthiness, and so on, is up to me, where it very well belongs. I do not want - and the world should not want - a massive technology corporation like Google, with a deeply vested, existential interest in guiding you towards websites from the companies that pay them for ads, to guide your online browsing experience. Google Search is already riddled with ads, but at least they're labeled and somewhat obvious. With these new AI" chatbot-style interfaces, not only are its sources nebulous and tucked away, if they even exist at all, but they also just make shit up, fail at the most basic of tasks, and generally just suck at what they're supposed to be doing. This will make online search with Google worse. Worse yet, this will make it even easier for the billionaire Epstein class to sow dissent among the population, creating rifts and hatred where none should exist, solely to keep the peasants occupied fighting each other so they don't turn their anger towards the real reason their lives suck. Panem et circenses has transformed into divide et impera, and these nebulous chatbots with complex, invisible levers and dials will only make the divide easier.

The following is a hands-on introduction to Futhark through a collection of commented programs, listed in roughly increasing order of complexity. You can load the programs into the interpreter to experiment with them. For a conventional introduction to the language, Parallel Programming in Futhark may be a better choice. For more examples, you can check our implemented benchmarks. We also maintain a list of projects using Futhark. Some of the example programs use directives for plotting or rendering graphics. Futhark homepage As a non-programmer, I just think the name is cool.

The world's best BSD (I'm kidding, I love them all equally) has released version 7.9, now available through your update tools and on mirrors the world over. OpenBSD 7.9 brings a ton of changes, fixes, and improvements, such as delayed hibernation support on amd64. This will allow OpenBSD laptops to briefly wake up from sleep, to then immediately drop into hibernation. A small but incredibly welcome change is that sysupgrade will now handle low space on /usr more gracefully, which will make quite a few people who once hit that limit very happy. OpenBSD 7.9 also brings VA-API and open Widevine support to its Chromium (and derivatives) port, and OpenBSD can now run as a guest under Apple's hypervisor for M-series Macs. There's initial low-level support for the FUSE API, the maximum support processor count on amd64 has been raised from 64 to 255, there's improved support for managing complex core configurations in the scheduler, and many more changes. There's also the usual new versions of LibreSSL and OpenSSH, of course, but that's a given.

To celebrate my 21 years and 20000 posts as OSNews' managing editor, it's time for a massive fundraiser: 1 for every story I've posted over the past 21 years, for a long-term total goal of 20000. Because OSNews is ad-free and independent, I rely entirely on your donations and support for my income and OSNews' continued survival. Your donations ensures OSNews remains free of ads, corporate influence, and other commercial interests that have ruined so many great websites. Why support OSNews? I want to make sure I can run OSNews for another two decades and another 20000 posts, and I need your help to do so. Since my wife, who has a tough, underpaid job in elderly care, is largely unable to work due to health reasons caused by that very same job, my income has become a lot more crucial for our kids, my wife, and myself. With OSNews readers being more skeptical of subscription-like things like our Patreon than most people, it's exactly these one-time donations that make up the bulk of your support. To sweeten the deal, I've come up with a bunch of silly incentives that will unlock at certain thresholds: I know many of you don't really care about incentives and silly things like these, but I think they're fun and add some interesting things to donate to. The donations already started coming in, so we've got a small head start. Also, if anyone has any idea on how to add a cool progress bar to OSNews to keep track of the donations and incentives, please let me know. I'm sure some of you can whip something up or point me to something. OSNews was founded in 1997, so we're almost 30 years old. Let's keep this wonderful little corner of the people-focused web alive for just a euro per post. Everyone here deserves it, because y'all are great.

Big news from the Haiku forums: the Haiku ARM port is running on M1 Macs now. This is bare metal, no VM. m1n1+u-boot deal with the Apple-specific parts of booting, so we can boot UEFI images from USB like any PC. smrobtzz on the Haiku forums USB is apparently broken, but all 8 cores are functional, and it boots to a desktop. It's still early days, for the ARM port in general and the M1 Mac port specifically, but it's a great start.

I've seen some wild projects in my day, but this one is definitely up there as one of the more ambitious. Stock Microsoft Windows CE 2.11 running on a real Nintendo 64. A custom HAL drops the unmodified nk.lib kernel onto VR4300, brings up the CE 2.11 GWES desktop and shell, mounts the EverDrive-64 X7's SD card under \SDCard, treats the N64 controller as a mouse, plays sound through the N64 AI hardware via the standard CE wave stack, and runs third-party CE 2.11 EXEs straight off the SD card. This is a hobby reverse-engineering project: there is no official CE 2.11 port to N64 from Microsoft. Everything below the unmodified nk.lib (HAL, OAL, display driver, FSD, kbd/mouse PDD, wave PDD, RDP-accelerated GDI fill, ed64-X7 driver) is part of this repo. ThroatyMumbo Getting a fully operational desktop on Windows CE 2.11 is a lot harder than it appears at first sight, because this earlier version of Windows CE didn't come with many of the reference implementations of components that later versions would add. OEMs were supposed to develop their own user interfaces for Windows CE 2.11, so the entire desktop you see here on this N64 port - window manager, taskbar, file manager, and so on - consists of custom code developed by ThroatyMumbo, using the standard Windows CE APIs. That's not all, though, as the same applies to the various drivers needed to make Windows CE 2.11 talk to the hardware in the Nintendo 64. Windows CE 2.11 contains the interfaces for drivers but OEMs were supposed to write their own device drivers. So ThroatyMumbo did: the display driver, input drivers, sound driver, cartridge driver, and so on, are all written from scratch. Absolutely incredible. Note: it seems AI" has been involved in this project, but it's unclear to what extent. I didn't see any telltale signs, but readers have reached out to me about this. The result of all this is that you can now run Windows CE 2.11, including a familiar shell, on your N64, and run any Windows CE applications as well. Absolutely wild.

There is one specific way in which the non-corporate open source projects typically document how their infrastructure work: not at all, and Flathub is no different. The full picture likely lives only in my brain, and while it could be sorted out by anyone (especially in this LLM age, yay or nay), why should it only be me thinking at night about all the single points of failure? Like any system that evolved naturally, it's all over the place. It's tempting to tell its history chronologically, but even then, it's difficult to find a good entry point. Instead, this post focuses on what happens when users call flatpak install; later entries will cover the website and, finally, the build infrastructure. Buckle up! Bart Piotrowski As time goes by and more and more issues with Flatpak are addressed, I feel my attitude towards the technology change somewhat. I'm still very much a traditional package manager type of person, and will opt for my distribution's repository if the versions they have are up-to-date, but I'm no longer audibly groaning if an application I want is only really available as a Flatpak. For the increasing number of normal, average users switching to Linux, Flatpak is probably the right way to go, especially since it can easily coexist with your traditional package manager. The only part of the linked article that made me raise my eyebrow was the reliance on Fastly, which seems to form an important linchpin of the whole Flathub stack. Fastly is an American company, and while they support Flathub entirely for free, the state of the world does have me wonder if this couldn't evolve into a problem in a myriad of ways, perhaps through questionable people acquiring Fastly or through pressures from the clown car US administration. I'm sure it's all fine, but it's hard not to think of these things in this day and age.

Microsoft is finally rolling out one of the most requested set of features to Windows 11: a movable and resizable taskbar. Windows 11 did away with the ability to move the taskbar to any side of the screen, as well as a various other taskbar customization options, that had been there since the very first iteration of the taskbar in Windows 95. Now they're finally bringing it back. Microsoft is finally rolling out two of the most requested features: the ability to move the taskbar and make it smaller, so you have more screen space. I tested Windows 11's new movable taskbar integration, and it's just as good as the original Windows 10 version, which let you move the taskbar to the top or sides. Mayank Parmar at Windows Latest It works exactly as you'd expect it to, with icons, text, menus, and other user interface elements adapting to their new location on the sides or top of the screen. I feel absolutely stupefied that I need to make a news item about this in this, the year of Our Lady 2026, but I know a lot of people stuck on Windows 11 were really missing these basic features. Rejoice.

Almost exactly 21 years ago, in June 2005, at a mere 20 years old, I took over the managing editor role at OSNews from Eugenia. I had already published a few articles in the years prior, and had given Eugenia enough confidence to suggest me as her replacement. It was, and is, a great honour. In those 21 years and more than 20000 posts, I've seen a lot of beautiful things. Linux grew from a curiosity among nerds into a popular desktop operating system, and often a better choice for gaming than Windows. The BSDs flourish steadily, growing into even stronger and capable alternatives to desktop Linux than they already were. On the commercial side of things, new offerings challenged the hegemony of Microsoft and Windows. While Android and Chrome OS are at best merely tolerated, the idea that a newcomer would produce not one, but two operating systems that would successfully take on Microsoft and Apple seemed unimaginable when I started in 2005. While many alternative operating systems of the early 2000s faded away, we've also seen success stories there. Haiku evolved from an unusable, unstable promise on the horizon into a stable, daily-drivable operating system. The unique Genode Framework and Sculpt OS keep exploring and redefining the boundaries of what a general purpose operating system should be. Redox has exploded onto the scene, and keeps making massive strides almost every month. OS/2 is still actively updated, maintained, and sold. The Amiga will outlast us all. Internet culture, too, is changing, and while things definitely look bleak right now, there are sparks of hope and joy. The general attitude towards the big technology companies among the general public has shifted from admiration to mistrust and dislike, corporate social media seems to be crumbling, and the youngest generations absolutely despise the latest hype, AI". All is certainly not lost, and sometimes I feel shimmers of hope that the pendulum may swing back to a more people-focused web, a web we've been part of since 1997. In those 21 years and more than 20000 posts, I've also seen a lot of hypes come and go, hypes that if I didn't embrace them, I'd surely be left behind. The pivot to video, the cryptocurrency mania, NFTs, virtual reality and the metaverse, AI" - all technologies and concepts I recognised for the hypes that they were, and consequently ridiculed and ignored, much to the dismay of many believers. I've got the angry emails and comments to prove it. This illustrates something about OSNews that I value and hold dear: OSNews doesn't jump on bandwagons, doesn't frantically try to follow the latest trends, doesn't cave under the pressure of big money interests. OSNews is constant, stable, deliberate, patient. Since 1997, we've covered the technology industry with interest, excitement, and wonder - tempered by a healthy dose of skepticism. When you follow this industry for almost three decades, you learn to spot the patterns and see the threads before anyone else does. That's not to say we haven't gone through changes. The most significant changes to OSNews happened in recent years, where instead of working on the site on a mostly voluntary basis with a pittance of ad revenue coming my way, I've turned my work for OSNews into my job. As part of this change, I removed all advertising from our website, morphing OSNews into a fully reader-funded endeavour. No ads, no corporate interests, no media network breathing down my neck. OSNews is a truly independent technology news website, a rarity these days. I don't have to keep corporate overlords or advertisers happy, and you'd be surprised to learn just how rare that is on the modern web. The OSNews website itself is fairly unchanging too, having gone through only a handful of redesigns since its founding in 1997. We've been using our current design, developed by Adam Scheinberg, for as long as I can remember (10-15 years?), and thanks to our independent, ad-free nature, any possible future redesign would only make the site simpler and even faster than it already is. There's no redesign in the cards at the moment, but rest assured, if it ever comes, we'll buck the trend of websites getting ever more complex and demanding and make OSNews lighter and even faster. And yes, despite commenters making up far less than one percent of our readership, I'll always opt to keep them. We might be a site of lurkers, but comments are a core part of OSNews. Even the annoying ones. Especially the annoying ones. That being said, there's going to be a small change to our design, rolling out today (it might take a few reloads for it to appear). To mark my 21 years and 20000 posts, OSNews is getting a new-ish logo, which combines the classic, intertwined beveled O-S" from the early 2000s with the modern logo we've been using over the past 15 years or so. The O and S are intertwined once again, highlighting the continuity and stability I want OSNews to bring in this chaotic industry (I can write corporatese if I want to). Fun fact: this new" logo was actually designed like 20 years ago, and we've had it in our back pocket ever since. Why create something new and of the times, when you've got something great sitting right there? Aside from the new logo, I'll be running a big fundraiser to mark this occasion early next week, with some silly incentives at various thresholds. If we reach the ultimate goal - a euro for every story I've posted - I'll overcome some very deep-rooted fears and anxieties, and tattoo the OSNews logo on my body, as my very first tattoo. OSNews has been part of my life for more than two decades, and I have every intention to add at least another two - having such a core part of my life immortalised on my body only makes sense. I've written about my anxiety disorder and how it affects me

Google recently launched something called Health Coach, an AI" thing that's part of the company's new Fitbit products. Let's check in with how that's going. Put simply, Google's paid replacement for Fitbit Premium immediately began hallucinating, even admitting to having made up the data before asking if, you know, maybe I'm the one who actually forgot to input a run. Remember, this is my very first report from this thing, making for an awful first impression. Even after this correction, the run data continues to exist within the AI-powered home screen layout, despite no record actually appearing within my account. It's not exactly a great advertisement for a platform that costs $10 per month or $100 annually. Will Sattelberg at 9To5Google The entire US' - and thus much of the world's - economic growth is built on this trash. What could possibly go wrong?

One of the top pieces of customer feedback in the graphics driver area is clear:Windows Update downgrades my drivers."Today, we are announcing a policy change to how display drivers are published through Windows Update - allowing2-Part HWID + Computer Hardware ID (CHID)targeting fornew devices. This change gives customers more control over their display driver of choice while preserving OEM control over the devices they ship. Garrettd at Microsoft's Hardware Dev Center Windows Update randomly downgrading your graphics drivers seems to be a common enough occurrence that its supposed fix deserves its own feature announcement and blog post. This is a real operating system that runs on most of the world's PCs.

The EU's Digital Markets Act has been in effect for a mere two years, but despite all the obstructionism, malicious compliance, and steady stream of lies from US tech companies and Apple in particular, it seems this rather basic consumer protection legislation is already bearing fruit. In a two-year review report on the DMA, the European Commission notes that alternative browser usage has soared, data portability solutions are spreading, alternative application stores are growing, and much more. On top of that, end users can now opt out of companies combining various data sources for profiling, and a significant share" of EU users have apparently done so. Furthermore, end users in the EU can now remove preinstalled applications (whereas American users cannot) and they can download their data from big technology companies and authorise other companies to use that data. Mozilla published a blog post detailing how it has profited from the Digital Markets Act, and it ain't no peanuts: every ten seconds, someone on iOS chooses Firefox on iOS' browser choice screen, which amounts to more than six million Firefox users on iOS. They also tend to stick with Firefox on iOS, as retention is five times higher when this browser is chosen through a browser choice screen. Academic analysis points the same way. Independent researchers compared Firefox daily active users in the EU with 43 non-EU countries. Comparing the 15 months before and after browser choice screens rolled out on iOS, they found that Firefox daily active users (DAU) were 113% higher in the EU than it would have been without the DMA. On Android, it was 12% higher. The smaller Android effect is due to the fact that Firefox usage there started from a much higher base, and the Android rollout has been more uneven than on iOS. The research also shows that the DMA's effect is growing over time. Gemma Petrie and Tasos Stampelos on the Mozilla blog Both the underlying data in the EC report and the data Mozilla provides indicates that the Digital Markets Act is having real and tangible effects, for end users, developers, and companies alike. The neverending barrage of anti-EU and anti-DMA propaganda from Apple, the US government, and their PR attack dogs seems to have been weirdly justified, from the American perspective: basic consumer protection legislation does, indeed, work to lessen the stranglehold major technology companies have on our lives. And considering just NVIDIA's market cap alone is now equal to more than 17% of the United States' GDP, it makes sense the Americans are unhappy with the DMA. That's going to make one hell of a sound when it pops.

Interest in classic user interface design is spiking, and today we've got another great example, highlighted yesterday by Micheal MJD. Classic 7 combined Windows 10 LTSC with a whole slew of themes and deep modifications to deliver Windows 10, but made to look, feel, and even act like Windows 7. Classic 7 is a Windows 10 (IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021) modification made to look 1:1 to Windows 7. It has all of the goodies that Windows 7 had along with some extras included! Classic 7 features a 1:1 OOBE recreation, meaning it'll feel just like your PC simplified once more. Classic 7 website As Micheal MJD's video shows, this is much more than a mere theme, and extends far deeper into the operating system than these kinds of projects generally do. I have no idea how stable this really is, or if it's even remotely legal to do something like this, but who the hell cares - this is incredibly fun, and seems quite well done.

The months, they don't stop coming, so here's another progress report for Haiku, our beloved successor to BeOS, the best operating system ever made. This past month the team's added basic support for SMP on ARM64 (enough to use it in QEMU), the MIME sniffer's internals have been overhauled for some serious performance gains, and a long list of smaller, but no less important or impactful, changes. Beta 6 still seems to be a ways off due to a number of unfixed bugs and an upcoming WebPositive release, but my usual spiel applies: you don't need to wait for a beta to test Haiku. It's stable enough as it is, and a nightly release will do you just fine, including updating to newer nightlies and application releases. This past month also saw which projects Haiku's GSoC people will be working on. Two projects will focus on improving Haiku's Bluetooth stack, including adding HFP profile support and support for HID devices, as well as general Bluetooth improvements across the board. The third and final project will focus on improving and expanding Haiku's Devices application to turn it into a real management utility along the lines of those available on many other modern operating systems.

The European Union is considering rules that would restrict its member governments' use of U.S. cloud providers to handle sensitive data, sources familiar with the talks told CNBC. Kai Nicol-Schwarz at CNBC The fact that this has only just become a possible reality now, and not decades ago, is beyond me, but better late than never, I suppose. The Americans voted en masse (not voting is a vote for the winner!) for Trump twice, and there's no indication they won't vote for such an anti-Europe basket case again. Their opinions and attitudes towards Europeans are clear: they dislike us deeply, and after the last few years, there's no going back. Violating trust is easy; restoring it takes decades. Relying on the Americans for our digital infrastructure is, therefore, a monumentally stupid and self-defeating idea. Of course, many members states are addicted to the cloud services from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, so there's going to be many individual member states who simply won't reduce their dependency on the Americans of their own volition. My own country of origin, The Netherlands, only recently signed off on the sale of its government ID services company and associated personal data to an American company, despite the vast majority of the Dutch House of Representatives telling them not to. As such, it makes sense for the EU to step in and simply making it illegal to hand over sensitive data to the Americans. Of course, we've got a long way to go, and I'm sure many of any possible proposed restrictions will be watered down considerably by pressure form major member states. Addiction is a harsh disease.

A few weeks ago, we talked about a project within KDE to revive two of their classic themes, Oxygen and Air, and polish them up to make them usable on the current versions of KDE. The developers and designers working on this project say they've been utterly surprised by just how popular this news has proven to be, and Filip Fila published a blog post with some thoughts on this unexpected popularity. Why are people yearning so strongly for user interfaces from the past? That's the real story underneath the retro-yearning. It isn't a simply story of people wanting their childhood from the 2000s back. It's that a lot of the new' we've been offering doesn't satisfy. It doesn't have personality. It doesn't feel warm. It doesn't feel like it was made with the idea of being anything more than a clean product that gets the job done. The escapism towards the past is a symptom. A symptom of unmet needs, not mere sentimentality. Filip Fila Fila uses modern architecture as an example, and I think it's an apt one. While monumental modern architecture can easily be beautiful and striking, it's the mundane buildings all around us that just don't seem to elicit any positive emotions, no sense of belonging or safety. As Fila also notes, the decades-long swing to minimalism in both architecture and UI design isn't merely because of a preference among designers, but also because minimalism is a hell of a lot cheaper to produce. A building with very little ornamentation and basic, straight lines is much easier, and thus cheaper, to design, construct, and maintain. The same applies to graphical user interface design. There are some signs that the pendulum is starting to swing back towards more instead of less, in all aspects of design. More and more people are loudly demanding buildings to adopt more classical elements, and as we can all attest to here on OSNews, the longing for aspects of UI design from the '90s and early 2000s to make a return is strong. And not just among us deep in the weeds, either; I've lost count of the number of times I've seen normal people utterly confounded by modern UI design. Anyway, bring back beveled edges.

The news that Google is working to move Chrome OS to the Android technology stack, and that it wants to start putting Android on laptops, is not exactly news, as the company has been talking about it for years. At an Android event today, the company finally unveiled the culmination of all this work: Googlebooks. We're bringing together the best of Android, which comes with powerful apps on Google Play and a modern OS that's designed for Intelligence, and ChromeOS, which comes with the world's most popular browser. The result is Googlebook: a new category of laptops built with Gemini's helpfulness at its core, designed to work seamlessly with the devices in your life and powered by premium hardware. We're sharing a sneak peek into the Googlebook experience today and will have a lot more to share later this year. Alex Kuscher at The Keyword, a Google blog apparently The approach here seems very similar to Chromebooks, with Googlebooks being designed and built by various OEMs, but instead of Chrome OS they run Android in desktop mode. Of course, AI" has been creamed all over these things, to the point where not even the venerable mouse cursor is safe: if you wiggle your cursor, it will turn into Magic Pointer", which will highlight various AI" actions as you hover over stuff on your screen. Google also showed off an AI"-based feature to create widgets, as well as the ability to access files on your phone right from a Googlebook. That's about all we know as far as functionality and features goes. They're supposed to go on sale later this year, with models coming from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo.

Every single software product is dealing with the question about what to do with AI"-generated code, but the question is particularly difficult to answer for open source operating systems like Linux distributions and the various BSDs, which often consist of a wide variety of software packages from hundreds to thousands of different developers. On top of that, they also have to ask the AI" question for every layer of their offering, from the base install, to the official repositories, to community-run ones. As users, we, too, are asking these same questions, wondering just how much AI" taint we're willing to spread across our computers. I understand the difficult position Linux distributions are in with regard to AI". I mean, when even the Linux kernel itself is tainted by AI", a no-AI" policy is basically an empty gesture for them at this point. Personally, I find a policy of we don't do AI' in our work, but we don't have control over the thousands of components we consist of" to be an entirely reasonable, if deeply unsatisfying, position to take. What else are they going to do? You can't really be a Linux distribution without, you know, the Linux kernel, which is, as I've already said, utterly tainted by AI" at this point. Still, in the back of my mind, I always had a trump card: if all else fails, we'll always have OpenBSD. Its project leader Theo de Raadt is deeply principled, every OpenBSD user and contributor I know hates AI" deeply, and the project routinely sticks to their principles even when it's difficult or inconvenient. Yes, this makes OpenBSD not the most ideal desktop operating system, but I'd rather use that than something that embraces the multitude of ethical, environmental, quality, and legal concerns regarding AI" code completely. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that OpenBSD already contains slopcode in its base installation, with the project's leaders and developers remaining oddly silent about it. My friend and OSNews regular Morgan posted this on Fedi a few days ago: Nearly six weeks later, and the question of whether AI" generated code in tmux - not tool-assisted bug finding, not refactoring, actual LLM-generated slop with questionable license(1) - that was consequently merged into OpenBSD base, is considered acceptable by the lead devs, remains unanswered. Despite Theo de Raadt's concrete stance against any code of questionable license origin polluting the project - and the tmux merge was indeed questionable - it seems this is being swept under the rug. This makes me extremely uncomfortable; it's like seeing a fox in the henhouse but the farmers are all looking the other way and no one can convince them to admit they can see it and root it out. I really don't know what to do being just a user; I feel like even if I tried to chime in on the mailing list I would just be ignored like the others trying to raise the alarm. I hope, as they do, that this is being discussed internally, away from the public list, and that a positive outcome is near. Maybe they are waiting for the 7.9 release before setting anything in stone. Or maybe the AI" disease has infected one of the last pure operating system projects we have left and there's no going back. Morgan on Fedi I obviously share Morgan's concerns, and like him, I'm also afraid that opening the door to a few drops of slop in base will quickly grow into a torrent of slop as time goes by. Yes, it's just a patch to tmux, but it's in base, and the base" of a BSD is almost a sacred concept, and entirely the last place where you want to see code that raises ethical, environmental, quality, and legal concerns. For all we know, this patch of slop or the next one contains a bunch of GPL code because it just so happens that's where the ball tumbling down the developer's pachinko machine ended up. GPL code that would then be in the base of a BSD. I echo the call for the OpenBSD project to address this problem, and to set clear boundaries and guidelines regarding AI" code, so users and developers alike know what level of quality and integrity we can expect from OpenBSD and its base installation going forward.

Microsoft is currently testing a brand new performance-enhancing feature in Windows 11. Microsoft, too, is introducing something to Windows 11 called low latency profile" and it this will work irrespective of the processor, be it AMD64 CPUs like Intel or AMD or ARM64 ones like from Qualcomm. Essentially what this new tech will do is apply a maximum available clock frequency boost for a very small span of time, like for one to three seconds, when a user launches any app. The idea is that the app launch time will reduce while the quick clock burst should not impact the overall efficiency of the system by much. Sayan Sen at Neowin Unsurprisingly, boosting the processor's clock speed to its maximum for a few seconds will make a menu or application open a little faster. I'm not entirely sure why anyone seems surprised by this, but here we are. Yes, the Start menu will load faster and applications will be ready quicker if you boost the processor to its full potential, but that does raise the question of why Windows 11 would need to do that just to open a menu or load an application in the first place. According to Microsoft's Scott Henselmann, who defended Microsoft's approach (weirdly enough he did so on a nazi platform called Twitter" that I'm obviously not linking to), every other modern operating system does the exact same thing, pointing specifically to macOS and GNOME and KDE on Linux. He also pointed out that the Start menu today does a lot more than the same Start menu back in Windows 95, including making network requests and rendering everything in HiDPI. I just want a cascading menu of stuff I can run and don't want my launcher to make network requests, but alas, I guess I'm old. Anyway, I don't know enough about the intricacies of how modern processors work to make any statements about how this affects battery life, but instinctively, you'd think this would not exactly be conducive to that. I also wonder if this will trigger a lot of laptops to spin up their fans whenever you open the Start menu, because the few seconds your processor goes full tilt raises its temperature just enough to make that happen. Once this new feature comes out of testing and is generally available, I'd be quite interested in seeing battery tests, as well comparisons to other operating systems to see how it fares.

Microsoft acquired GitHub and applied their unique brand of enshittification. Amongst their achievements was the spawning of the Copilot circle of hell. Now they're effectively DDoSing themselves with slop. I won't dwell on what else went wrong. I don't know and I don't care. GitHub is impressively bad now. It's embarrassing. Shameful. David Bushell Luckily, there's really very little in the form of lock-in with GitHub, unless you really value your stars or whatever. There are countless alternatives, and if you're a programmer, it's probably absolutely trivial for you to run your own instance of any of the various available forges. If you're still on GitHub, you should really be thinking about, and planning for, leaving, as it seems it's circling the drain.

Big news from the Debian release team: Debian is going for reproducible package builds. Aided by the efforts of the Reproducible Builds project, we've decided it's time to say that Debian must ship reproducible packages. Since yesterday, we have enabled our migration software to block migration of new packages that can't be reproduced or existing packages (in testing) that regress in reproducibility. Paul Gevers Reproducible means, in short, that you can verify that the source code used to build a package is indeed that source code. This provides a layer of defense against people tampering with code or otherwise trying to fiddle with the process between source code and final package on your system. This effort constitutes a tremendous amount of work, but it's massively important.

ymawky is a small, static http web server written entirely in aarch64 assembly for macos. it uses raw darwin syscalls with no libc wrappers, serves static files, supports GET, HEAD, PUT, OPTIONS, DELETE, byte ranges, directory listing, custom error pages, and tries to be as hardened as possible. why? why not? the dream of the 80s is alive in ymawky. everybody has nginx. having apache makes you a square. so why not strip every single convenience layer that computer science has given us since 1957? i wanted to understand how a web server actually works, something i know little about coming from a low-level/systems background. the risks that come up, the problems that need to be solved, the things you don't think about when you're writing python or c. this (probably) won't replace nginx, but it is doing something in the most difficult way possible. Tony imtomt" I love this.

Ada is incredibly well designed. One way this shows is that it takes the big, monolithic features of other languages and breaks them down into their constituent parts, so we can choose which portions of those features we want. The example I often reach for to explain this is object-oriented programming. Christoffer Stjernlof Exactly what it says on the tin.

Sculpt OS, the operating system based on the various components that make up Genode, has seen a new release, 26.04. A lot of the new features and changes to Genode that we've been talking about for a while now are part of this release, most notably the new human-inclined data syntax that replaces XML as the configuration language for Genode. That's not the only major improvement, though. Regarding technical advances of the new version and device support in particular, all Linux-based drivers have been updated to kernel version 6.18, making the system compatible with most modern Intel-PC hardware. Laptop users may appreciate the new USB networking option that is now offered by default. Software-wise, the new version comes with a longed-after update of Qt6 along with the Chromium-based Falkon browser, downloadable at the depot of cproc. In the same menu, one can find the experimental first version of the Goa SDK running natively on Sculpt OS without the need of a Linux VM. For the first time, Genode components can now be developed, compiled, and tested using Sculpt OS on its own. The amazement of walking without crutches. Sculpt OS 26.04 release notes This new release is available for common PC hardware, the PinePhone, and the MNT Reform.

Sprite scaling. It is the coolest effect of the 2D arcade era, a must-have for games from Space Harrier to Real Bout Fatal Fury Special. Home consoles pretty much lacked it- sorry, Nintendo, but Mode 7 only scales a background, not sprites. So therefore you might be surprised to hear that Sega's plucky underdog Master System could do it. Well, don't get your hopes up; this is far too limited- calling it scaling is overstating things. But let's dig in anyway! Nicole Branagan Nicole Branagan has the best articles on obscure console features, and this one is no exception.

The ways in which Google can lock you into their ecosystem are often obvious, but sometimes, they're incredibly sneaky and easily missed. CAPTCHA tests are annoying, but at the same time, they can help protect websites from bots. While these tests are already the bane of our internet existence, they are going to get worse for some Android users. A requirement for Google's next-generation reCAPTCHA system will make it a lot harder for de-Googled phones to browse the web. A Reddit user has highlighted a seemingly innocuous support page for Google's reCAPTCHA system. The page in question relates to troubleshooting reCAPTCHA verification on mobile. In the document, it says that you'll need to use a compatible mobile device to complete verification. If you have an Android phone, then that means you'll need to be running Google Play Services version 25.41.30 or higher. Ryan McNeal at Android Authority When was the last time you actively thought about reCAPTCHA being a Google property? Even then, when was the last time you imagined something as annoying but ultimately basic as a captcha prompt could be used to tie people to Google Play Services, and thus to blessed" Android? Every time we manage to work around one of these asinine ties to Google Play Services, another one pops up to ruin our day. We're so stupidly tied down to and entirely dependent on two very mid - at best - mobile operating systems, and it's such a stupid own goal for especially everyone outside of the US to just sit there and do nothing about it. Worse yet, it seems we're only tying ourselves down further, while paying for the privilege. At the very least we should be categorising certain services - government ID services, payment services, popular messaging platforms, and a few more - as vital infrastructure, and legally mandate these services have clearly defined and well-documented APIs so anyone is free to make alternative clients. The fact that many people are tied to either iOS or blessed" Android because of something as stupid as what bank they use or the level of incompetency of their government ID service should be a major crisis in any country that isn't the US. I don't want to use iOS or Android, but nobody is leaving me any choice. It's infuriating.

With that context, I always found it strange that the designers of ASCII included 6 characters after uppercase Z before starting the lowercase letters. Then it hit me: we have 26 letters in the English alphabet, plus 6 additional characters before lowercase starts: 26 + 6 = 32. If you know anything about computers, powers of 2 tend to stick out. Let's take a look at the binary representations of some characters compared to their lowercase counterparts. Tyler Hillery I only have a middling understanding of the rest of the article and thus the ultimate reason why ASCII includes those six characters between Z and a, but I think it comes down to making certain operations on uppercase and lowercase letters specifically more elegant. In some deep crevices of my brain all of this makes sense, but I find it very difficult to truly understand and explain as someone who knows little about programming.

Many Bourne shells go slightly beyond the POSIX sh specification to also support a -l' option that makes the shell act as a login shell'. POSIX's omission of -l isn't only because it doesn't really talk about login shells at all, it's also because Unix has a special way of marking login shells that goes back very far in its history. The -l option isn't necessarily what login and sshd and so on use, it's something that you can use if you specifically want to get a login shell in an unusual circumstance. Bourne shells also have a -c <command string>' option that causes the shell to execute the command string rather than be interactive (this is a long standing option that is in POSIX). It may surprise you to hear that most or all Bourne shells that support -l also allow you to use -l and -c together. Basically all Bourne shells interpret this as first executing your .profile and so on, then executing the command string instead of going interactive. One use for this is to non-interactively run a command line in the context of your fully set up shell, with $PATH and other environment variables ready for use. Chris Siebenmann Now, what if you want to detect the use of these two options combined, for instance to make it so certain parts of your .profile are ignored? It turns out very few Bourne shells actually support this, and that's what Siebenmann's latest post is about.

On the Fedora forums, there's a long-running thread about a proposal for Fedora to build a variant of the distribution aimed specifically at AI". The problem" identified in the proposal is that setting up the various parts that a developer in the AI" space needs is currently quite difficult on Fedora, and as such, a bunch of technical steps need to be taken to make this easier. Setting aside the AI" of the proposal and ensuing discussion, it's actually a very interesting read, going deep into the weeds about consequential questions like building an LTS kernel on Fedora, support for out-of-tree kernel mods, and a lot more. To spoil the ending: the proposal has already been approved unanimously by the Fedora Council, meaning the efforts laid out in the proposal will be undertaken. This means that, depending on progress, we'll see a Fedora AI" Desktop or whatever it's going to be called somewhere in the timeframe from Fedora 45 to Fedora 47. As a Fedora user on all my machines, I'm obviously not too happy about this, since I'd much rather the scarce resources of a project like Fedora goes towards things not as ethically bankrupt, environmentally destructive, and artistically deficient as AI", but in the end it's a project owned and controlled by IBM, so it's not exactly unexpected. What really surprised me in this entire discussion is a post by Fedora Project Leader Jef Spaleta, responding to worries people in the thread were having about such a big AI" undertaking under the Fedora branding causing serious reputational damage to Fedora as a whole. These concerns are clearly valid, as people really fucking hate AI", doubly so in the open source community whose work especially AI" coding tools are built on without any form of consent. As such, Fedora undertaking a big AI" desktop project is bound to have a negative impact on Fedora's image. Just look at what aggressively pushing Copilot has done to Windows 11's already shit reputation. Spaleta, however, just doesn't care. Literally. As the Fedora Project Leader, I am absolutely not concerned about the reputational damage to this project that comes with setting up an entirely new output attractive to developers who want to make use of Ai tools. Jef Spaleta I've been looking at this line on and off for a few days now, and I just can't wrap my head around how the leader of an open source project built on and relying on the free labour of thousands of contributors says he doesn't care about reputational damage to the project he's leading. Effective and capable open source contributors are not exactly a commodity, and a lot of the decisions they make about what projects to donate their time to are based on vibes and personal convictions - you can't really pay them to look the other way. Saying you don't care about reputational damage to your huge open source project seems rather shortsighted, but of course, I don't lead a huge open source project so what do I know? In the linked thread alone, one long-time Fedora contributor, Fernando Mancera, already decided to leave the project on the spot, and I have a sneaking suspicion he won't be the last. AI" is a deeply tainted hype on many levels, and the more you try to chase this dragon, the more capable people you'll end up chasing away.

Another month, another progress report, Redox, etc. etc., you know the drill by now. This past month Redox saw improved booting on real hardware by making sure the boot process continues even if certain drivers fail or become blocked. Thanks to some changes on the RISC-V side, running Redox on real RISC-V hardware has also improved. Furthermore, tmux has been ported to Redox, CPU time reporting has been improved, and Orbital, Redox' desktop environment, gianed support for partial window pixel updating, which should increase UI performance. On top of that, there's a brand new web user interface to browse Redox packages (x86-64, i586, ARM64 (aarch64), and RISC-V (riscv64gc)), as well as the usual list of improvements to the kernel, drivers, relibc, and many more areas of the operating system.

Time for another Sun Ray blog post! I've had a few people email me asking for help setting up a Sun Ray server over the last few months, and despite my attempts to help them get it going there's been mixed results with running SRSS on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10. my Sun Ray server is still on an earlier OI snapshot, so I figured it was about time to try to actually follow the new guides myself. The Iris System Ever since my spiraling down the Sun rabbit hole late last year, I've tried for a few times now to get the x86 version of OpenIndiana and Oracle Solaris working on any of my machines, exactly for the purposes of setting up a modern Sun Ray server. Sadly, none of my machines are compatible with any illumos distribution or Oracle Solaris, so I've been shit out of luck trying to get this side project off the ground. My Ultra 45 is sadly also not supported by any SPARC version of illumos or Oracle Solaris, so unless I buy even more hardware, my dream of a modern Sun Ray setup will have to wait. Of course, virtualisation is an option for many, and that's exactly what this particular guide is about: setting up OpenIndiana on a Proxmox virtual machine. I actually have a Proxmox machine up and running and could do this too, but I'm a sucker for running stuff like this on real hardware. Yes, that makes my life more complicated and difficult, and no, it's not more noble or real or hardcore - it's just a preference. Still, for normal people who pick up a Sun Ray or two on eBay for basically nothing, running OpenIndiana in a virtual machine is the smart, reasonable, and effective option.

If you're sick of Chrome OS on your Chromebook, or can find a Chromebook for cheap somewhere but don't actually want to use Chrome OS, have you considered postmarketOS? Since I was kind frustrated with ChromeOS, I decided to take a look at something that I knew supported my Lenovo Duet 3 for some time: postmarketOS. For those who don't know, postmarketOS is an Alpine Linux based-distro focused in replacing the original OS from old phones (generally running Android) with a true" Linux distro. They also seem to support some Chromebooks because of their unique architecture and, luckily, they support my device under the google-trogdor platform. kokada PostmarketOS is aimed at smartphones primarily, but supports other formfactors just fine as well. The Duet 3 is one of the tablet-like devices it supports, and it seems most things are working quite well. In fact, judging by the postmarketOS wiki, quite a few Chromebooks have good support, and with Chromebooks being cheap and dime-a-dozen on eBay and similar auction sites, it seems like a great way to get started with what is trying to become a true Linux for smartphones.

There is a persistent misconception among sighted developers: if an application runs in a terminal, it is inherently accessible. The logic assumes that because there are no graphics, no complex DOM, and no WebGL canvases, the content is just raw ASCII text that a screen reader can easily parse. The reality is different. Most modern Text User Interfaces (TUIs) are often more hostile to accessibility than poorly coded graphical interfaces. The very tools designed to improve the Developer Experience (DX) in the terminal-frameworks like Ink (JS/React), Bubble Tea (Go), or tcell-are actively destroying the experience for blind users. Casey Reeves The core reason should be obvious: the command-line interface, at its core, is just a stream of data with the newest data at the bottom, linearly going back in time as you go up. Any screen reader can deal with this fairly easily, and while I personally have no need for such a tool, I've heard from those that do that kernel-level screen readers are quite good at what they do. TUIs, or text-based user interfaces, made with modern frameworks are actually very different: they're 2D grid of pixels, where every character cell is a pixel. abandons the temporal flow for a spatial layout." It should become immediately obvious that screen readers won't really know what to do with this, and Reeves gives countless examples, but the short version is this: the cursor jumps all over the place with every screen update, which makes screen readers go nuts. Various older TUIs, made in a time well before these modern TUI frameworks came about, were designed in a much more terminal-friendly way, or give you options to hide the cursor to solve the problem that way. Irssi, for example, uses VT100 scrolling regions instead of redrawing the whole screen every time something changes. I had never really stopped to think about TUIs and screen readers, as is common among us sighted people. The problems Reeves describes seem to stem not so much from TUIs being inherently inaccessible, but from modern frameworks not actually making use of the terminal's core feature set. I really hope this Reeves' article shines a light on this problem, and that the people developing these modern TUIs start taking accessibility more seriously.

Backing up in modern times, we've had ZFS snapshots and replication to make this task extremely easy. However, you may not have access to another ZFS endpoint for replication, need to diversify risk by using a non-ZFS tool for backup, or are simply using UFS2, living the old skool life. For these situations, my first recommendation is to lean on Tarsnap for its ease of use and simplicity, making restoration just as easy as backing up. But some situations call for a different approach. Maybe you have a strict firewall at your company that doesn't allow Tarsnap data streams to egress from your corporate network, or you have internal/easy access to storage endpoints, such as S3-compatible object storage or a large-file storage location with SFTP access. When you are faced with the latter, the duplicity (sysutils/duplicity in ports) utility is available as an easily installable package onto your FreeBSD system. Jason Tubnor at the FreeBSD Foundation The rest of the article explains how to use duplicity on FreeBSD for the purpose described above.

Earlier this year, Mac OS and Windows NT-capable ROMs were discovered for Apple's unique AIX Network Server. Cameron Kaiser has since spent more time digging into just how capable these ROMs are, and has published another one of his detailed stories about his efforts. Well, thanks to Jeff Walther who generously built a few replica ROM SIMMs for me to test, we can now try the 2.0" MacOS ROMs on holmstock, our hard-working Apple Network Server 700 test rig (stockholm, my original ANS 500, is still officially a production unit). And there are some interesting things to report, especially when we pit the preproduction ROMs and this set head-to-head in MacBench, and even try booting Rhapsody on it. Cameron Kaiser A great read, as always.

With Windows being as old and long-running as it is, there's a ton of old and outdated bits and pieces lurking in every nook and cranny. I have always found these old relics fascinating, especially now that over the past few years, Microsoft has attempted to replace some of those bits and pieces with modern replacements (not always to great success, but that's another story). One of those parts of the UI that's been virtually unchanged since the release of Windows 95 is the Run dialog, but that's about to change: Microsoft has released a completely new Run dialog to early testers. Windows Run, also known as the Run dialog, is a surface that has been around for over 30 years. It has become a heavily relied upon tool for developers and advanced users alike. Users have decades of muscle memory where they hit Win+R, navigate through their Run history, and hit Enter to quickly access various paths and tools. We all have our favorite tool we launch there as well. For us, some of our favorites are wt (Windows Terminal), mstsc (Remote Desktop) and winword (Microsoft Word). But it's more than jUsT a TeXt BoX tHaT rUnS tHiNgS. The Run dialog can handle navigating both local and network file paths as well. And everything it does, it does fast. Win+R opens the run dialog seemingly instantly. If we wanted to modernize the Run Dialog to fit the modern Windows 11 design style, we had to make sure it did everything just as well as before. We needed to maintain the same performance while also keeping the user interface minimal, just as Windows 95 intended. Clint Rutkas at the Microsoft Dev Blogs The new Run dialog looks like it belongs in Windows 11, which is a nice improvement, but the most important part is that they actually seem to have made it a little faster. Sure, they may have only shaved off a few milliseconds from its opening time, but considering virtually everything else they've touched in Windows over the years got considerably slower, that's a good showing for Microsoft. The new feature they've added is that by typing ~\, you can open your home directory. The one casualty is the browse button, which according to Microsoft's data, literally nobody ever used. I know it's just a small thing and in the end not even a remotely consequential one, but with an operating system as old and storied as Windows, replacing these ancient parts that millions of people rely on every day absolutely fascinates me. There must be a considerable amount of pressure on the people developing something like this new Run dialog, especially with Windows' reputation being at one of its lowest points, so it's good to see them being able to deliver. The new Run dialog is available today for testers, and if you're on the Windows Insider Experimental Channel, you can enable it in Settings > System > Advanced. Coincidentally, on my Windows 11 machine that I use for just one stupid video game, this Advanced page displays a loading spinner for five minutes and then just dies. Also, Notepad won't start (one time it showed this dialog), and using the terminal to load it causes the old Win32 version of Notepad to open after 5 minutes of waiting, which then hangs and crashes. People pay money for this.

While I'm normally a KDE user, I do keep close tabs on various other desktop environments, and install and set them up every now and then to see how they're fairing, what improvements they've made, and ultimately, if my preference for KDE is still warranted. This usually means setting up a nice OpenBSD installation for Xfce, Fedora for GNOME, and less often others for some of the more niche desktop environments. Since GNOME 50 was just released, guess who's time in the round is up? Since everybody's already made up their mind about their preferred desktop eons ago, with upsides and downsides debated far past their expiration date, I'm not particularly interested in reviewing desktop environments or Linux distributions. However, after asking around on Fedi, it seemed there was quite a bit of interest in an article detailing how I set up GNOME, what changes I make to the defaults, which extensions I use, what tweaks I apply, and so on. Of course, everything described in this article is highly personal, and I'm not arguing that this is the optimal way to tweak GNOME, that the extensions I use are the best ones, or that any visual modifications I make are better than whatever defaults GNOME uses. No, my goal with this article is twofold: one, to highlight that GNOME is a lot more configurable, extensible, and malleable than common wisdom on the internet would have you believe. It's not KDE or one of those cobbled-together tiling Wayland desktops, but it's definitely not as rigid as you might think. And two, that GNOME is good, actually. Tools of the trade The first thing I do is install a few crucial tools that make it easier to modify and tweak GNOME. I really dislike lists in articles, but I will begrudgingly use one here: After installing all of these tools, the actual tweaking can commence. Visual tweaks I didn't use to like GNOME's Adwaita visual style, but over the years, it started growing on me to the point where I don't actively dislike it anymore. With the arrival of libadwaita, it has also become effectively impossible to theme modern GNOME applications, so even if you do change to something else, many of your applications won't follow along. If consistency is something you care about, you'll stick to Adwaita, but that leaves one problem unresolved: applications that still use GTK3. These applications will follow a much older version of Adwaita, making them stand out like eyesores among all the modern GTK4 stuff. Luckily, since GTK3 applications are still properly themable, this is easily fixed: just install the adw-gtk3 theme, either by hand, or through your distribution's repositories. To enable it, first install the user themes extension through Extension Manager, and then enable the theme in GNOME Tweaks for Legacy Applications". Any potential GTK3 applications you still use will now integrate nicely with modern libadwaita applications. The one part of GNOME I really do deeply dislike is its icon theme. I can't quite explain why I dislike this icon set so much, but it runs deep, so one of the very first things I do is replace the default GNOME icon set with my personal favourite, Qogir. This is a popular icon set, so it's usually available in your distribution's repositories, but I always install it from its GitHub page. Changing GNOME's icon set is as simple as selecting it in GNOME Tweaks. You can't get much more personal taste than an icon set, and there are dozens of amazing sets to choose from in the Linux world. Changing them out and trying out new ones is stupidly easy, and it's definitely worth looking at a few that might be more pleasing to you than GNOME's (or KDE's) default. Lastly, I open Add Water and enable the amazing GNOME theme for LibreWolf. Add Water basically makes this as easy as flipping a switch, so there's no need to copy any files into your LibreWolf profile or whatever. The application also provides a few more small tweaks to fiddle with, like enabling standard tab widths so tabs don't grow and shrink as you close and open tabs, moving the bookmarks bar below the tab bar, and many more. Extensions Since the release of GNOME 3 in 2011, extensions have been the most capable way to modify GNOME's look, behaviour, and feature set. As far as I can tell, while the extension framework is an official part of the GNOME Shell, the extensions themselves are all third-party and not part of a vanilla GNOME installation. By now, there are over 2800 listed extensions, but that number includes abandoned extensions so it's hard to determine the actual number of currently-maintained ones. Whatever the actual number is, there's bound to be things in there you're going to want to use. Here are the extensions I have installed. Let's just start at the top and work our way down. I guess I'm forced to do another list. There are countless more extensions to choose from, and you're definitely going to find things you never even thought could be useful. Miscellaneous tweaks There's a few other things I modify. In GNOME Tweaks, I make it so that double-clicking a window's titlebar minimises it while right-clicking it lowers it; two features I picked up during my years as a BeOS user that I absolutely refuse to give up. I configure the dock from Dash to Dock so that it always remains on top and never hides itself, no matter the circumstances. In Settings, I disable virtual desktops entirely (I don't like virtual desktops), and I make sure tap-to-click is disabled (if I'm on a laptop). GNOME is good, actually After making all of these changes, I feel quite comfortable using GNOME, at least on my laptop. It's a nice, coherent experience, and offers what is probably the most polished graphical user interface you can find on Linux, even if it isn't the most full-featured. The third-party application ecosystem, through modern

To assess how small a macOS VM could be, I ran the same VM of macOS 26.4.1 on progressively smaller CPU core and memory allocations, using my virtualiser Viable. The VM's display window was set to a standard 1600 x 1000, and I ran Safari through its paces and performed some lightweight everyday tasks, including Storage analysis in Settings. Starting with 4 virtual cores and 8 GB vRAM, where the VM ran perfectly briskly with around 5 GB of memory used, I stepped down to 3 cores and 6 GB, to discover that memory usage fell to 3.9 GB and everything worked well. With just 2 cores and 4 GB of memory only 3.1 GB of that was used, and the VM continued to handle those lightweight tasks normally. Howard Oakley This is good news for people interested in the MacBook Neo who may also want to run a macOS virtual machine on it.

Email is like those creaking old Terminators from the '70s which continue to function without complaining. Designed for a world that doesn't exist anymore, it has optional encryption, no built-in auth, three retrofitted security layers bolted on top, an unstandardized filtering layer and many more quirks. Yet billions of emails arrive correctly every single day. Email is not elegant but nonetheless it is Lindy. In the new age of agentic AI, we can only expect it to metamorphose into another dimension. Saurabh Sam" Khawase The fact that email is as complicated as it is bad enough, but having it be so dominantly controlled by only a few large gatekeepers like Google and Microsoft surely isn't helping either. I feel like email is no longer really a technology individuals can actively partake in at every level; it feels much more like WhatsApp or iMessage or whatever in that we just get to send messages, and that's it. Running your own mail sever isn't only a complex endeavour, it's also a continuous cat-and-mouse game with companies like Google and Microsoft to ensure you don't end up on some shitlist and your emails stop arriving. I settled on Fastmail as my email service, and it works quite well. Still, I would love to be able to just run my own email server, or have some of my far more capable friends run one for a small group of us, but it's such a daunting and unpleasant effort few people seem to have the stomach and perseverance for it.

What if you run a few online services for you and your friends, like a small git instance and a grocery list service, but you get absolutely hammered by AI" scrapers? I cannot impress upon you, reader, that this is not only an attack that is coordinated, it is an attack that is distributed. I run a small set of services, basically only for me and my friends. I am not a hyperscaler, I am not a tech company, I am not even a small platform. I have a git forge where I put the shit I make, and a couple other services where me and my friends backup our files or write our grocery lists. I am not fucking Meta and I cannot scale the fuck up just because OpenAI or Anthropic or Meta or whoever is training a model that weeks wants to suck all the content out of my VPS ONCE MORE until it's dry. lux at VulpineCitrus So how much traffic did the author of this piece, lux, get from AI" scraping bots? Within a time period of 24 hours, they were hammered by 2040670 unique IP addresses, 98% of which were IPv4 addresses, which means that 1 out of every 2000 publicly available IPv4 addresses were involved in the scraping. Together, they performed over 5 million requests. And just to reiterate: they were scraping a few very small, friends-only services run by some random person. This is absolutely insane. If, at this point in time, with everything that we know about just how deeply unethical every single aspect of AI" is, you're still using and promoting it, what is wrong with you? If you're so addicted to your AI" girlfriend's unending stream of useless, forgettable sycophantic slop, despite being aware of the damage you're doing to those around you, there's something seriously wrong with you, and you desperately need professional help. You don't need any of this. The world doesn't need any of this. Nobody likes the slop AI" regurgitates, and nobody likes you for enabling it. Get help.

Microsoft is continuing its efforts to release early versions of DOS as open source, and today we've got a special one. We're stoked today to showcase some newly available source code materials that provide an even earlier look into the development of PC-DOS 1.00, the first release of DOS for the IBM PC. A dedicated team of historians and preservationists led by Yufeng Gao and Rich Cini has worked to locate, scan, and transcribe the stack of DOS-era source listings from Tim Paterson, the author of DOS. The listings include sources to the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, several development snapshots of the PC-DOS 1.00 kernel, and some well-known utilities such as CHKDSK. Not only were these assembler listings, but there were also listings of the assembler itself! This work offers rare insight into how MS-DOS/PC-DOS came to be, and how operating system development was done at the time, not as it was later reconstructed. Stacey Haffner and Scott Hanselman It's wild that the source code had to be transcribed from paper, including notes and changes. You can find more information about the process on Gao's website and Cini's website.

When Apple unveiled the Vision Pro, almost three (!) years ago, I concluded: If there's one company that can convince people to spend $3500 to strap an isolating dystopian glowing robot mask onto their faces it's Apple, but I still have a hard time believing this is what people want. Thom Holwerda at OSNews (quoting myself is weird) MacRumors' Juli Clover, today: Apple has all but given up on the Vision Pro after the M5 model failed to revitalize interest in the device, MacRumors has learned. Apple updated the Vision Pro with a faster M5 chip and a more comfortable band in October 2025, but there were no other hardware changes, and consumers still weren't interested. Apple has apparently stopped work on the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro team has been redistributed to other teams within Apple. Some former Vision Pro team members are working on Siri, which is not a surprise as Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell has been leading the Siri team since March 2025. Juli Clover at MacRumors VR - what the Vision Pro is, whether Apple's marketing likes to say it or not - has proven to be good for exactly two things: games and porn. The Vision Pro has neither. It was destined to be a flop from the start, as nobody wants to strap an uncomfortable computer to their face that does less than all of the other computers they already have, and what it does do, it does worse. I do wonder if this makes the Vision Pro the most expensive flop in human history. Has any company ever spent more on a product that failed this spectacularly?

It seems like Apple is finally going to remove support for AFP from macOS, twelve years after first moving from AFP to SMB for its default network file-sharing technology. This change shouldn't impact most people, as it's highly unlikely you're using AFP for anything in 2026. Still, there is one small group of people to whom this change has an actual impact: owners of Apple's Time Capsule devices. Time Capsules only support AFP and SMB1, and with SMB1 being removed from macOS ages ago, and now AFP being on the chopping block as well, macOS 27 would render your Time Capsule more or less unusable. It's important to note that the last Time Capsule sold by Apple, the fifth generation, was released in 2013, and the product line as a whole was discontinued in 2018. If you bought a Time Capsule in the twilight years of the line's availability, I think you have a genuine reason to be perturbed by Apple cutting you off from your product if you upgrade to macOS 27, but at least you have the option of keeping an older version of macOS around so you can keep interacting with your time Capsule. It still feels like a bit of a shitty move though, as those fifth generation models came with up to 3TB of storage, which can still serve as a solid NAS solution. Thank your lucky stars, then, that open source can, as usual, come to the rescue when proprietary software vendors do what they always do and screw over their customers. Did you know every generation of Time Capsule actually runs NetBSD, and that it's trivially easy to add support for Samba 4 and SMB3 authentication to your Time Capsule, thereby extending its life expectancy considerably? TimeCapsuleSMB does exactly that. If the setup completes successfully, your Time Capsule will run its own Samba 4 server, advertise itself over Bonjour (show up automatically in the Network" folder on macOS), and accept authenticated SMB3 connections from macOS. You should then be able to open Finder, choose Connect to Server, and use a normal SMB URL instead of relying on Apple's legacy stack. You should also be able to use the disk for Time Machine backups. TimeCapsuleSMB It's compatible with both NetBSD 4 and NetBSD 6-based Time Capsules, although you'll need to run a single SMB activation command every time a NetBSD 4-based Time Capsule reboots. This will also disable any AFP and SMB1 support, but that is kind of moot since those are exactly the technologies that don't and won't work anymore once macOS 27 is released. The installation is also entirely reversible if, for whatever reason, you want to undo the addition of Samba 4. This whole saga is such an excellent example of why open source software protects users' rights, by design.

Dillo is an amazing web browser for those of us who want their web browsing experience to be calmer and less flashing. Dillo also happens to be a very UNIX-y browser, and their latest release, 3.3.0, underlines that. A new dilloc program is now available to control Dillo from the command line or from a script. It searches for Dillo by the PID in the DILLO_PID environment variable or for a unique Dillo process if not set. Dillo 3.3.0 release notes You can use this program to control your Dillo instance, with basic commands like reloading the current URL, opening a new URL, and so on, but also things like dumping the current page's contents. I have a feeling more commands and features will be added in future releases, but for now, even the current set of commands can be helpful for scripting purposes. I'm sure some of you who live and die in the terminal are already thinking of all the possibilities here. You can now also add page actions to the right-click context menu, so you can do things like reload a page with a Chrome curl impersonator to avoid certain JavaScript walls. This, too, is of course extensible. Dillo 3.3.0 also brings experimental support for building the browser with FLTK 1.4, and implemented a fix specifically to make OAuth work properly.