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The following chart shows how the Adobe Reader installer has grown in size over the years. When possible, 64-bit versions of installers were used. Alexander Gromnitsky Disk space is cheap, sure, but this is insanity.

I recently moved to an area with more internet provider options, all of which werenotsatellite-based. This change allowed me leave my current provider (Starlink) and also freed my network from being locked behind CGNAT. The jump from ~150Mbps to 1Gbps has been fantastic, but the real benefit in this switch has been the ability to overhaul my home network setup. Bradley Taunt OpenBSD is generally the way to go for custom router setups, it seems, and if it wasn't for my own full Ubiquiti setup, I'd definitely consider this too.

Google's grip on Android keeps tightening. In what will certainly be another step that we will look back upon as just another nail in the coffin, Google is going to require every Android developer to register with Google, even if they don't publish anything in the Play Store. In other words, even if you develop Android applications ad only make them available through F-Droid or GitHub, you'll still have to register with Google and hand over a bunch of personal information and a small fee of $25. Google is effectively recreating Apple's Gatekeeper for macOS, but on Android. It won't come as a surprise to you that Google is doing this in the name of security and protecting users. The company claims that its own analysis found over 50 times more malwarefrom internet-sideloaded sources than on apps available through Google Play", and the main reason is that malware developers can hide behind anonymity. As such, Google's solution is to simply deanonymise every single Android developer. Starting next year, Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed by users oncertified Android devices. This creates crucial accountability, making it much harder for malicious actors to quickly distribute another harmful app after we take the first one down. Think of it like an ID check at the airport, which confirms a traveler's identity but is separate from the security screening of their bags; we will be confirming who the developer is, not reviewing the content of their app or where it came from. This change will start in a few select countries specifically impacted by these forms of fraudulent app scams, often from repeat perpetrators. Suzanne Freyat the Android Developer Blog This new policy will only apply to certified Android devices", which means Android devices that ship with Google Play Services and all related Google stuff preinstalled. How this policy will affect devices running de-Googled Android ROMs like GrapheneOS where the user has opted to install the Play Store and Google Play Services is unclear. Google does claim the personal information you hand over as part of your registration will remain entirely private and not be shown to anyone, but that's not going to reassure anyone. To its small credit, Google intends to create an Android Developer Console explicitly for developers who only operate outside of the Play Store, and a special workflow for students and hobbyists that waives the $25 fee. First tests will start in October of this year, with an official rollout in a number of countries later in 2026, which will then expand to cover the whole world. The first countries seeing the official rollout will be countries hit especially hard by scams (according to Google's research, at least): Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. Google has been trying to claw back control over Android for years now, and it seems the pace is accelerating lately. None of these steps should surprise you, but they should highlight just how crucially important it is that we somehow managed to come to a viable third way, something not controlled by either Apple or Google.

Earlier this year, I was trying to get actual daily work done on HP-UX 11.11 (11i v1) running on HP's last and greatest PA-RISC workstation, the HP c8000. After weeks of frustration caused first by outdated software no longer working properly with the modern web, and then by modern software no longer compiling on HP-UX 11.11, I decided to play the ace up my sleeve: NetBSD's pkgsrc has support for HP-UX. Sadly, HP-UX is obviously not a main platform or even a point of interest for pkgsrc developers - as it should be, nobody uses this combination - so various incompatibilities and more modern requirements had snuck into pkgsrc, and I couldn't get it to bootstrap. I made some minor progress here and there with the help of people far smarter than I, but in the end I just lacked the skills to progress any further. This story will make it to OSNews in a more complete form, I promise. Anyway, in May of this year, it seems Brian Robert Callahan was working on a very similar problem: getting pkgsrc to work properly on IBM's AIX. The state of packages on AIX genuinely surprises me. IBM hosts arepositoryof open source software for AIX. But it seems pretty sparse compared to what youcouldget with pkgsrc. Anotherwebsiteoffering AIX packages seems quite old. I think pkgsrc would be a great way to bring modern packages to AIX. I am not the first to think this. There are AIX 7.2 pkgsrc packages available atthis repository, however all the packages are compiled as 32-bit RISC System/6000 objects. I would greatly prefer to have everything be 64-bit XCOFF objects, as we could do more with 64-bit programs. There also aren't too many packages in that repository, so I think starting fresh is in our best interest. As we shall see, this was not as straightforward as I would have hoped. Brian Robert Callahan Reading through his journey getting pkgsrc to work properly on AIX, I can't help but feel a bit better about myself not being to get it to work on HP-UX 11.11. Callahan was working with AIX 7.2 TL4, which was released in November 2019 and still actively supported by IBM on a maintained architecture, while I was working with HP-UX 11.11 (or 11i v1), which last got some updates in and around 2005, running on an architecture that's well dead and buried. Looking at what Callahan still had to figure out and do, it's not surprising someone with my lack of skill in this area couldn't get it working. I'm still hoping someone far smarter than I stumbles upon a HP c8000 and dives into getting pkgsrc to work on HP-UX, because I feel pkgsrc could turn an otherwise incredibly powerful HP c8000 from a strictly retro machine into something borderline usable in the modern world. HP-UX is much harder to virtualise - if it's even possible at all - so real hardware is probably going to be required. The NetBSD people on Mastodon suggested I could possibly give remote access to my machine so someone could dive into this, which is something I'll keep under consideration.

The history of Android applications on Windows is convoluted, with various failed and cancelled attempts by Microsoft to allow Windows users to run Android applications behind us. Now that these attempts are well dead and buried, Microsoft is going at it from a different perspective: what if you could continue where you left off on your Android phone, right on your Windows machine, but without having to run an Android applications on Windows? We are beginning to gradually roll out the ability to seamlessly resume using your favorite apps from your Android phone on your Windows 11 PC to Windows Insiders in the Dev and Beta Channels. To start with, you will be able to resume or continue listening to your favorite Spotify tracks and episodes right from where you left off on the Spotify app on your Android phone. First, start listening to one of your favorite songs or episodes in the Spotify app on your Android phone. On your PC (running the latest Insider Preview builds in the Dev or Beta Channels) a Resume alert'will appear onyour taskbar. When you click on that alert, Spotify's desktop app will open and the same track will now continue playing on your PC. Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc So basically, the Spotify application on Windows will know where you left off on the Spotify application on Android, and resume playback. This is table-stakes for most services, and it doesn't seem like it would warrant such a big announcement from Microsoft, and while I don't use Spotify, I assume it was already built into the service anyway. It seems all Microsoft is doing is providing a nice little notification to expose that functionality a little bit more clearly, but it also explains that you need to manually link your device and the Spotify Android application to the Windows PC and Spotify Windows application, which seems like a lot of manual steps. Does this mean every application developer needs to opt into this and add this feature, thereby making it dead on arrival? Well, yes, you'll need to add support on both sides of the equation, which I can guarantee you very few developers will do. Not only does this feature require you to already have a Windows version of your application - which, statistically, you don't - it also requires you to do the work yourself, and manually apply to Microsoft to even gain access to the required APIs and SDKs. The odds of this feature making it beyond a few very big names Microsoft can give money to is slim.

I have a slight problem wherein every time I start up a game of NetHack, I completely lose touch with my surroundings for hours on end. ThankfullyThe DevTeam Thinks Of Everythingand there's a solution that allows communication with the outside world without breaking immersion: the mail daemon! If compiled with-DMAILandOPTIONS=mailis set in your runtime configuration (the default on Linux), NetHack will periodically check a user specified mbox file (MAIL) for new mail, and upon receiving an email a mail daemon will spawn in and deliver a scroll of mail to the player. Upon reading this scroll a mail program (MAILREADER) will be executed, which hopefully allows you to read your mail. George Huebner I love everything about this.

The most unlikely subsystem of contention is definitely the init system used by Linux, with most popular distributions opting for systemd, while a vocal minority prefers to use something else. Neither of these two groups are wrong or right, as we live in a free world and different people have different needs and desires. Personally, I don't think there's a more utterly pointless and meaningless debate than this, and people who make the init system they use their entire personality more often than not come across as really, really sad. It's a tool; use the one you like and move on with life. A brand new init system was recently released by Leah Neukirchen, who among a ton of other things, contributes to Void Linux. It's called nitro, and it's a tiny process supervisor that also can be used as pid 1 on Linux", and it also can be used on FreeBSD supervised by FreeBSD's init. There's some overlap with runit here, so Neukirchen published a blog post detailing the differences between the two, which should help in getting a better understanding of what makes nitro stand apart. While both use a directory of services managed by small scripts, nitro seems to opt for a more contained, monolithic approach, as it keeps everything in a single process. On top of that, Nitro contains some new features runit doesn't have. The focus seems to be on integrating a few capabilities that on runit require hacks, but on nitro are just built-in, like support for one-shot services', i.e. running scripts on up/down without a process to supervise (e.g. persist audio volume, keep RNG state)", running service directories multiple times, and more. Nitro also maintains its runtime state in RAM and provides an IPC service to query it, meaning it can be run on read-only filesystems without special configuration. There's a lot more information in Neukirchen's blog post, including a look at some of the current limitations of Nitro. I highly suggest reading it, and perhaps we will see nitro as another valid alternative to the popular systemd.

It's not AI winter just yet, though there is a distinct chill in the air. Meta isshaking up and downsizingits artificial intelligence division. A new report out of MIT finds that95 percentof companies' generative AI programs have failed to earn any profit whatsoever.Tech stocks tanked Tuesday, regarding broader fears that this bubble may have swelled about as large as it can go. Surely, there will be no wider repercussions for normal people if and when Nvidia, currently propping up the market like a load-bearing matchstick, finally runs out of fake companies to sell chips to. But getting in under the wire, before we're all bartering gas in the desert and people who can read become the priestly caste, is Microsoft, with the single most Who asked for this?" application of AI I've seen yet: They're jamming it into Excel. Barry Petchesky at Defector I'm going to skip over the mounting and palpable uneasiness that the cracks in the AI" bubble are starting to form, and go right to that thing about Excel. Quite possible one of the most successful applications of all time, and the backbone of countless small, medium, and even large business, it started out as a Mac program to supplant Microsoft's MultiPlan, which was being clobbered in the market by Lotus 1-2-3. It wasn't until version 2.0 that it came to Intel, as an application that contained a Windows runtime. It was a port of Excel 2.0 for the Mac. Anyway, it took a few years, but Excel took over the market, and I don't think any other spreadsheet program has ever even remotely threatened its market dominance ever since. Well, not until Google Sheets arrived on the scene - it's hard to find any useful numbers, but it seems Google Sheets is insanely popular in all kinds of sectors, at least according to Statista. They claim Google's online office suite has a 49% market share, with Microsoft Office sitting at 29%. I have no idea how that translates into the usage shares of Google Sheets versus Microsoft Excel, but it's a sign of the times, regardless. One of the things you'd expect a spreadsheet to do is calculate numbers and tabulate data, and to do so accurately. The core competency of a computer is to compute, do stuff with numbers, and we'd flip out collective shit if our computers failed to do such basic arithmetic. So, what if I told you that Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to add AI" to Excel, and as such, has to add a disclaimer that this means Excel may not do basic arithmetic correctly? Look, we can all disagree on the use of AI", where it makes sense, where it doesn't, if it even does anything useful, and so on, but I would assume - for the world's sake - that we can at least agree that using AI" in an application used to do very important calculations for a lot of business is a really, really dumb idea? Is the person doing the bookkeeping in Excel at Windmill Restaurant, in Spearville, Kansas, properly aware of the limitations of AI", or are they not following technology that closely, and as such only hear the marketing and hype? A spreadsheet should give accurate outcomes based on the input given by humans. The moment you let a confabulator loose on your spreadsheet, it ceases being a tool that can be used for anything even remotely serious. The fact that Microsoft is adding this nonsense to Excel and letting it loose on the unsuspecting public at large is absolutely wild to me, and I can assure you it's going to have serious consequences for a lot of people. Microsoft, of course, will be able to point at the disclaimer buried in some random support document and absolve itself of any and all responsibility. I'd like to point out that Lotus 1-2-3 probably still runs on Windows 11, for no reason at all.

If you have spent any time around HID devices under Linux (for example if you are an avid mouse, touchpad or keyboard user) then you may have noticed that your single physical device actually shows up as multiple device nodes (for free! and nothing happens for free these days!). If you haven't noticed this, runlibinput recordand you may be part of the lucky roughly 50% who get free extra event nodes. Peter Hutterer I've honestly always wondered about this, since some of my laptops shows both a trackpad and a mouse configuration panel even when there's no mouse plugged in. Thanks to this article, I now know why this happens.

There's a ton of cloud operating systems" out there, which basically are really fancy websites that try to look and feel like an operating system. There's obviously a ton of skill and artistry involved in making these, but I always ignore them because they're not really operating systems. And let's be honest here - how many people are interested in booting their PC, loading their operating system, logging in, starting their browser, and logging into a website to see a JavaScript desktop that's slower and more cumbersome than what they are already using to power their browser anyway? Still, that doesn't mean they can't have any interesting ideas or other aspects worth talking about. Take OS Yamato for instance; yes, it's one of those cloud operating systems, this time aimed at your mobile device, but it has something interesting that stood out to me. The system is partly ephemeral, and objects that haven't been altered or opened in a year will simply be deleted from the system. Each data object (note, photo, contact...) includes a lastOpenedAt timestamp. After 330 days, it shows a icon - a sign of digital wilting. After 365 days, it's automatically deleted. OS Yamato GitHub page The project definitely sounds more like an art installation than something anybody is supposed to seriously use in their day-to-day lives, and seems to ask the question: just how important are all those digital scraps you collect over the years, really? If you haven't bothered to open something in a year, is it really worth saving? For instance, from the moment I started my translation career in 2011 up until I quit in 2024, I saved every single translation I ever made, neatly organized in folders, properly backed up to multiple locations. I still have this archive, still make sure it's safe, but I never actually use it for anything, never open a single one of the files, I honestly don't even really care that much about it. So why am I still wasting so much energy in keeping it around? That seems to be the question OS Yamato poses, and there's something to be said for being less anal about which digital scraps we keep around, and why. It hasn't convinced me - yet - to delete my translation archive or perform any other pruning, but it did plant a seed.

Markdown - or, more accurately, incompatible variants of Markdown - is everywhere, but that doesn't mean everybody likes it. It's the lowest common denominator of light markup languages, with a lot of well-documented issues, and Karl Voit decided to write a long and detailed article about the Markdown's shortcomings. Just to make sure we're on the same page here: I do not want to take away awesome workflows that are made possible by using an LML like Markdown. I just want to mention that the very same kind of workflows are possible by using a better designed LML. Unfortunately, some issues mentioned here do seem very subtle and minor. However, their consequences are not. With LMLs getting more and more popular and gaining wider use in tools, we really should make sure that our LML choice is a really good one. Personal feelings aside. Karl Voit Voit clearly has a preference for a specific alternative LML, but that doesn't mean the points they make in the article are any less valid. The world of Markdown is chaotic, with a seemingly endless number of varieties and dialects, perfectly illustrated by the Markdown Monster. To make matters worse, the Markdown syntax is quite ambiguous, further complicating how you're supposed to write it, and how tools are supposed to process it. The end result is that documents you write in Markdown today might be difficult to process decades from now, which isn't exactly conducive to its intended function. Voit mentions more issues, but this is the main gist. There's one major issue - at least for me - that Voit doesn't go into, and that's a problem I have with any of these simple markup languages I've tried: their syntaxes rely on some of the most annoying and cumbersome characters to type. There's a lot of weird keyboard clawing you need to do to enter the characters required by the syntax, and it just makes for an uncomfortable typing experience for me. I wish someone would design one of these syntaxes with typability in mind, making sure to only use characters that are easy to type. While this probably imposes some pretty hefty restrictions during the design of such a syntax, I think it can make for a much more elegant typing experience. As a result, I do not use Markdown or any of its alternatives.

It is no secret that Windows 11's dark mode is undercooked, to put it mildly. While modern parts of the operating system support dark mode and they look fantastic with it, plenty of commonly used UI surfaces and legacy parts are still stubbornly light. Those include common file action dialogs, such as copying/moving progress, deleting prompts, file properties dialog, and more. Nearly four years into Windows 11's lifecycle, Microsoft is finally fixing that. Taras Buria at Neowin Many things about Windows baffle me deeply, but the half-baked, broken dark" mode must be one of the biggest of them all. Here's one of the largest, wealthiest companies in the world, and while introduced in 2016, the dark mode in their flagship operating system product is still effectively broken. Nine years into its existence, Windows users finally will no longer be blinded whenever they start a file operation, which is nice, I guess, but I doubt this new push to fix dark mode in Windows will cover everything. Windows' dark mode joins the Settings application as one of those things that's just deeply half-assed in Windows. I find it incredibly hard to believe Microsoft couldn't have taken like five developers from their AI" team to comb through Windows years ago to address these issues, so my only conclusion is that they just don't care. Windows and its user experience just isn't a priority for the company, and this should really make Windows users reconsider their choice" of operating system.

Googleis managing to achieve whatMicrosoftcouldn't: killing the openweb. The efforts oftech giantsto gain control of and enclose the commons for extractive purposes have been clear to anyone who has been following the history of theInternetfor at least the last decade, and the adopted strategies are varied in technique as they are in success, fromEmbrace, Extend, Extinguish(EEE) to monopolization and lock-in. What I want to talk about in this article is the war Google has been waging onXMLfor over a decade, why it matters that they've finally encroached themselves enough to get what they want, and what we can do to fight this. Oblomov (I can't discern the author's preferred name) Google's quest to destroy the open web - or at the very least, aggressively contain it - is not new, and we're all aware of it. Since Google makes most of its money from online advertising, what the company really wants is a sanitised, corporate web that is deeply centralised around as few big players as possible. The smaller the number of players that have an actual influence on web, the better - it's much easier for Google to find common ground with other megacorps like Apple or Microsoft than with smaller players, open source projects, and individuals who actually care about the openness of the web. One of Google's primary points of attack is XML and everything related to it, like RSS, XMLT, and so on. If you use RSS, you're not loading web pages and thus not seeing Google's ads. If you use XSLT to transform an RSS feed into a browsable website, you're again not seeing any ads. Effectively, anything that we can use to avoid online advertising is a direct threat to Google's bottom line, and thus you can be certain Google will try to remove, break, or otherwise cripple it in some way. The most recent example is yet another attempt by Google to kill XSLT. XSLT, or Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations, is a language which allows you to transform any XML document - like an RSS feed - into other formats, like HTML, plaintext, and tons more. Google has been trying to kill XSLT for over a decade, but it's such an unpopular move that they had to back down the first time they proposed its removal. They're proposing it again, and the feedback has been just as negative. And we finally get to these days. Just asRSS feeds are making a comebackand users are starting to grow skeptic of the corporate silos, Googlemakes another run to kill XSLT, this time using the WHATWG as a sock puppet. Particularly of note,the corresponding Chromium issuewas createdbeforethe WHATWG Github issue. It is thus to no one's surprise that theoverwhelmingly negativereactions to the issue, the detailed explanations about whyXSLTis important, how instead of removing it browsers should move to more recent versions of the standard, and even the indications of existing better and more secure libraries to base such new implementations on,everycounterpoint to the removal have gonecompletelyignored. In the end, the WHATWG was forced to close down comments to the Github issue to stop the flood of negative feedback, so that the Googler could move on to the next step:commencing the process of formalizing the dismissal of XSLT. Oblomov (I can't discern the author's preferred name) At this point in time, there's really no more web standards as we idealise them in our head. It's effectively just Google, and perhaps Apple, deciding what is a web standard" and what isn't, their decisions guided not by what's best for a healthy and thriving open web, but by what's best for their respective bottom lines. The reason the web looks and feels like ass now is not because we wanted it to be so, but because Google and the other technology giants made it so. Everyone is just playing by their rules because otherwise, you won't show up in Google Search or your site won't work properly in mobile Safari. This very detailed article and the recent renewed interest in XSLT - thanks for letting everyone know, Google! - has me wondering if OSNews should use XSLT to create a pretty version of our RSS feed that will render nicely even in browsers without any RSS support. It doesn't seem too difficult, so I'll see if I can find someone to figure this out (I lack the skills, obviously). We've already removed our ads, and I think our RSS feed is full-article already anyway, so why not have a minimal version of OSNews you could browse to in your browser that's based on our RSS feed and XSLT?

If you're interested in developing for and programming on MS-DOS and other variants of the venerable operating system, SuperIlu has collected the various tools and applications they use and like for this very task. In case you're wondering who SuperIlu is - they are the developer of things like DOStodon, a Mastodon client for DOS, DOjS, and much more. This is my short list of interesting resources for MS-DOS development. This is neither meant to be unbiased nor exhaustive, it is just a list of software/tools I know and/or use. The focus is on free and open source software. SuperIlu at GitHub None of the items on the list are abandonware, so there's no risk of relying on things that are no longer being developed. With most of the items also being free and open source software, you can further be assured you're safe from the odd rugpull. If you're into DOS development, this is a treasure trove.

A week ago we talked about focus stealing prevention on KDE and Wayland, and this time we have a similar article, but detailing GNOME's approach instead. Many of the underlying mechanisms are the same, of course, but since GNOME uses a different window manager, the details are different. The problem GNOME faces is the same as KDE, though: application and toolkit developers need to adopt the XDG Activation protocol, but the question is how to get there. While some people have asked for focus stealing prevention to be disabled completely until it's implemented by most apps and toolkits, I'm not sure this is the best way forward. If we did that, nobody would notice which apps don't implement it, so there'd be no reason for toolkits to do so. On the other hand, there are some remaining issues around terminal applications and similar use cases that we don't have a plan for yet, so just switching tostrictto flush out app bugs isn't ideal either at the moment. Julian Sparber Basically, the GNOME team doesn't yet know how to move forward, and is collecting feedback and gathering information to see where to go from here. My suggestion would be to coordinate this effort with the KDE team, as the underlying systems and protocols are identical and the end goal is the same: get applications and toolkits to properly support XDG Activation. Many popular applications are shared between the two desktop environments anyway, so it makes sense to apply some mild pressure together, as one. Once support has permeated enough of the ecosystem to allow for focus stealing prevention to become stricter, GNOME and KDE would still be free to go off into their own directions. Weremoved adsfrom OSNews. Donate toour fundraiserto ensure our future!

Weremoved adsfrom OSNews. Donate toour fundraiserto ensure our future! One of the most hated features" of Windows is its update system - it's slow, error-prone, and most annoyingly of all, tends to interrupt users at the worst possible times. This last issue is apparently so common it's basically a recognisable meme, among both tech enthusiasts as well as regular users. The root cause of the problem is that because Microsoft wants to force users to install updates, you can only postpone them for a short while, after which Windows will install updates, even if you're about to start a presentation. Microsoft is now bringing this approach to the Microsoft Store. Up until now, the Microsoft Store allowed you to install updates whenever you pleased, but that's no longer the case. Just like Windows Update, you now only have the option to postpone application updates for a short while, after which they will be installed. There's no registry hack to turn this off or revert back to the old behaviour. Be advised in case you're using applications from the Microsoft Store for anything critical that starting soon, they will just update in the middle of whatever you're doing. Splendid.

Weremoved adsfrom OSNews. Donate toour fundraiserto ensure our future! We all know the earlier versions of Windows NT were available not only for x86, but also for MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC (and there were unreleased ports to SPARC and Clipper). While we have the operating systems archived and available, applications properly compiled for the non-x86 versions of Windows NT can be a bit harder to come by. For instance, while Microsoft Word for MIPS and Alpha have been available for a while, we apparently never had a copy of Microsoft Word for PowerPC archived. Until now. Antoni Sawicki was pointed to an eBay auction for a copy of Microsoft Office Standard 4.2, and the photographed box clearly said it contained version for x86, Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC. He decided to buy it, and it did, indeed, contain the PowerPC version of Microsoft Word. Of course, he made this version of Office available online for posterity. An excellent find, and good to see we have people willing to spend money just to ensure software isn't lost to time.

Weremoved adsfrom OSNews. Donate toour fundraiserto ensure our future! But what if your friends and relatives are more interested in FreeBSD than Linux? Well, here we have a detailed guide to setting up a FreeBSD desktop using KDE Plasma and Wayland. Yes, Wayland is available in the BSD world as well, and in a few years I wouldn't be surprised to see most FreeBSD desktop guides - including the documentation from FreeBSD itself - to primarily advise using Wayland over X11, as Wayland support in FreeBSD improve even further. I'm sure this will upset nobody.

Weremoved adsfrom OSNews. Donate toour fundraiserto ensure our future! It's weekend, you might be visiting friends or relatives, and perhaps some of them are curious about switching away from Windows or macOS to Linux. There's countless guides out there about this very topic, but to help you along a bit and cut through the avalanche of AI" and SEO slop, here's a true beginners' guide to desktop Linux written by KDE developer Akseli Lahtinen, second most famous developer out of Finland after Linus Torvalds. There has been quite a surge in interest towards desktop Linux lately. The userbase, atleast according tosome metrics, seems to be climbing. I realised today that it's been 4 years for me since I did the switch. I have gathered some know-how that maybe a complete newbie could find useful. I also try to untangle some jargon I've learned: It may not be exactly technically correct, but this is meant for a more regular user anyway. Akseli Lahtinen This won't be particularly interesting for most people who read a site like OSNews, but it's a great roundup for newcomers in your circle.

Weremoved adsfrom OSNews. Donate toour fundraiserto ensure our future! Ever wanted to know everything about a specific 8*19 font Intel used for the POST and BIOS screens on its motherboards? OS/2 Museum's Michal Necasek has you covered. The obvious remaining question is, who came up with 8*19 fonts for BIOS use? Was it really Intel? Or was it someone else? Note that the Intel boards were used bymanyOEMs (including but not limited to AST, Dell, Gateway, HP, Micron, Packard Bell) so just because an OEM system uses an 8*19 font doesn't mean there isn't Intel behind it. Michal Necasek Great weekend reading, as always, from Necasek.

Weremoved adsfrom OSNews. Donate toour fundraiserto ensure our future! What if you could run the full macOS on your iPhone or iPad? Quite a few people have made the case to run macOS especially on the latter, and it seems this isn't as much of an unobtainable pipe dream as you might think. Duy Tran has been working on getting macOS to run on jailbroken iPhones and iPads, and it seems he's making some headway. Eventually, I managed to boot somewhat macOS 13.4 natively on my iPhone XS Max on iOS 16.5; keyboard & mouse input is currently done via VNC. After some manual patching, many apps and daemons running (WindowServer, ControlCenter, Dock, and even Xcode 15b8). Duy Tran on Reddit It should go without saying this is incredibly limited so far, and there's immense amounts of work required to bring this to a point where anyone could use this in any serious manner. Still, it's very impressive so far, and it shows beyond the shadow of a doubt that macOS can, indeed, run on iPads if Apple wanted it to. This initial code is on GitHub, but it's definitely not for the faint of heart.

Weremoved adsfrom OSNews. Donate toour fundraiserto ensure our future! An internal Meta Platforms document detailing policies on chatbot behavior has permittedthe company's artificial intelligencecreations to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual," generate false medical information and help users argue that Black people are dumber than white people." These and other findings emerge from a Reuters review of the Meta document, which discusses the standards that guide its generative AI assistant,Meta AI, and chatbots available on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, the company's social-media platforms. Jeff Horwitz at Reuters The only way one can describe the examples of allowed behaviour towards minors is absolutely fucked up. If I'd find any person talking to my kids like Facebook and Zuckerberg apparently think it's okay to talk to children, I'd be calling the police to file a report. I know I shouldn't be surprised considering it's Facebook and Zuckerberg, a company with a history of knowingly inciting violence and genocide and a founder who created his website to creep on women, but the lows to which this company and its founder are willing to go are just so unimaginable to even people with just a modicum of morality, I just can't wrap my brain around it. The treatment of people of colour isn't any better. Facebook will happily argue for you that black people are dumber than white people without so much as batting an eye. Again, none of this should be surprising considering it's Facebook, but add to it the fact that AI" is the endgame for totalitarians, and it all makes even more sense. These tools are explicitly designed to generate totalitarian propaganda, because they're trained on totalitarian propaganda, i.e., most of the internet. The examples of AI" being fascist and racist are legion, and considering the people creating them - Zuckerberg, Altman, Musk, and so on - all have clear fascist and totalitarian tendencies or simply are overtly fascist, we, again, shouldn't be surprised. Totalitarians hate artists and intellectuals, because artists and intellectuals are the ones who tend to not fall for their bullshit. That's why one of the first steps taken by any totalitarian regime is curtailing the arts and sciences, from Pol Pot to Mao, from Trump to Orban. Promoting AI" as a replacement for exactly these groups in society - AI" generating art" to replace artists, AI" doing research" to replace actual scientists - fits within the totalitarian playbook like a perfectly fitted glove. When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. This apparently also applies to AI".

Weremoved adsfrom OSNews. Donate toour fundraiserto ensure our future! Hi, FAB 2025 is still happening in Prague and it has been a wonderful event. It's been great to meet so many people from our community at home, in Czechia! But during my chats with the attendee's, there was one topic which was emerging time and time again, and that is the state of open hardware. I cannot talk about all of the open hardware, but I can share experience from 3D printing. And it is not good! Open hardware in 3D printing is dead - you just don't know it yet. This is an opinion piece, imagine we are talking about this topic over a cold Pilsner... Josef Prusa What happens when the Chinese government lists 3D printing as an industry it wants to dominate? Well, an explosion in bogus patents and the death of tons of smaller, local brands, leaving only major players from China and perhaps one or two bigger non-Chinese brands. That's the conclusion by Josef Prusa, founder of Prusa Research, a major 3D printer maker from Prague, Czechia. Prusa's printers used to be entirely open source, but starting in 2023, this is no longer the case - ostensibly because being open source hardware meant that competitors were copying their work wholesale without contributing anything back, or worse, stealing their work entirely and keeping it all closed, despite the copyleft license in use. Looking at the numbers, it seems clear that smaller companies will not be able to deal with the onslaught of bogus patents, as fighting patent infringement claims in court and getting patents invalidated, even if prior art exists in abundance, is prohibitively expensive and incredibly time-consuming. It's a game of really expensive whack-a-mole against people with far deeper pockets than you. Still, this whole thing does taste a bit sour considering Prusa's abandonment of its open source roots and ideals. There's a business to be run here, I understand that, but principles do matter, and if not even a company priding itself on producing open source hardware stands by its ideals, why should anyone else?

We removed ads from OSNews. Donate to our fundraiser to ensure our future! We all managed to survive another month, so here we are, with another monthly update from Haiku, covering the month of July. It's been a rather short month, it being the middle of Summer and all, but there's still some significant stuff in here. For instance, a whole slew of fixes arrived for su and other multiuser commands, mostly for the benefit of SSH sessions. A central theme in July seems to have been filesystems, as FAT16 was added to the known filesystem types in the Storage Kit, quite a few fixes were implemented for NFSv4, and a number of filesystems saw bugfixes to fix issues in rsync, and much more. Another central theme is apparently a port of DOSEMU, for which a number of bugfixes, changes, and improvements were implemented that could, in turn, also benefit other possible ports. And of course, there's much, much more that happened, for which you'll have to dive into the full progress report.

We removed ads from OSNews. Donate to our fundraiser to ensure our future! We're not done with the AROS news quite yet, as Andrzej Subocz published another update with the latest news from the AROS community. Some of it we already covered, but a lot it we haven't. For instance, there's the initial version of a partitioning tool for AROS, called QuickPart. For now, it's in read-only mode, but once it's complete, it will allow users to do, well, partitioning. Work has also begun on porting SDL2 to AROS, replacing the aging SDL 1.2 version currently available. On top of all that, there's a lot of work on new and improved network drivers for the 64bit version, an extensive amount of changes and improvements to the build system, C library, datatypes, and much more. Subocz' full report has many more details, so head on over and read up.

We removed ads from OSNews. Donate to our fundraiser to ensure our future! Covering the Amiga world is always a bit of a crapshoot, since for what is surely an incredibly small segment of the computing world, it happens to be incredibly complex, with multiple competing Amiga-ish operating systems and hardware platforms, all worsened by many empty promises and bitter animosity flying every which way. This makes it hard for an outsider to get a firm grasp on what's going on, but as always, I'll try my best. The news here is that AmiKit has released a new browser for the classic 68k Amiga that can load modern websites. The browser is called AmiBrowser. AmiBrowser is an HTML 5 capable web browser built for 68K with Zune/MUI. Ituses ARM libraries to power the native rendering of the web pages. AmiKit press release AmiBrowser is exclusive to AmiKit's own Amiga-like hardware, the A600 GS and A1200 NG, both of which are replacement boards for the original Amiga 600 and 1200, respectively. How do these machines work? Well, they come in the shape of their original counterparts, but with far fewer chips, and one crucial addition: a little Orange Pi Zero 3 (in the case of the A1200 NG, at least) daughterboard that contains the actual ARM SoC that powers the machine. The way this setup works is that the Orange Pi Zero 3 boots into a minimal Linux environment with a launcher-like interface, which can in turn load up the Amiberry classic 68K Amiga emulator that can communicate with its ARM Linux host. It's inside this 68K emulator where the actual operating system runs. This Amiga-like operating system is called AmiBench, which is, very simply put, a modified variant of the 68K version of AROS, combined with libraries and components that can make use of the ARM processor. And so we finally arrive at this new browser. This new browser runs the Chromium Embedded Framework in the host Linux environment on the ARM processor, forwarding its rendering towards a native 68K Amiga/AROS application that's running inside the 68K emulator. In between the CEF running on the Linux host and the native Amiga 68K application running inside the emulator sits a glue layer that takes care of the communication between the two sides. It's an interesting approach to a very difficult problem: how do you run a modern browser on a hardware platform - 68K, in this case - that is horribly outdated and far too slow to deal with modern websites? It's an interesting approach, but it also feels a little bit like a house of cards. That being said, if the choice is between no access to the modern web and shaky access to the modern web, I'd still choose the latter.

We removed ads from OSNews. Donate to our fundraiser to ensure our future! The Hurd, the collection of services that run atop the GNU Mach microkernel, has been in development for a very, very long time. The Hurd is intended to serve as the kernel for the GNU Project, but with the advent of Linux and its rapid rise in popularity, it's the Linux kernel that became the defacto kernel for the GNU Project, a combination we're supposed to refer to as GNU/Linux. Unless you run Alpine, of course. Or you run any other modern Linux distribution, which probably contains more non-GNU code than it does GNU code, but I digress. The Hurd is still in development, however, and one of the more common ways to use The Hurd is by installing Debian GNU/Hurd, which combines the Debian package repositories with The Hurd. Debian GNU/Hurd 2025 was released yesterday, and brings quite a few large improvements and additions. This is a snapshot of Debian sid" at the time of the stable Debian Trixie" release (August 2025), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release. Samuel Thibault About 72% of the Debian archive is available for Debian GNU/Hurd, for both i386 and amd64. This indeed means 64bit support is now available, which makes use of the userland disk drivers from NetBSD. Support for USB disks and CD-ROM was added, and the console now uses xkb for keyboard layout support. Bigger-ticket items are working SMP support and a port of the Rust programming language. Of course, there's a ton more changes, fixes, improvements, and additions as well. You can either install Debian GNU/Hurd using the Debian installer, or download a pre-installed disk image for use with, say, qemu.

Earlier today, I made the decision to remove all advertising from OSNews. From here on out, you will no longer see any ads, cookie banners, and other ad-related privacy-invasive technologies on this website. While this means a hit to my income, making OSNews even more reliant on our Patreon supporters and Ko-Fi donors, it genuinely feels liberating. I should've made this decision years ago. Read on for how you can support us, and our big fundraiser. I have always been open and honest about my dislike for the modern online advertising industry. It's incredibly privacy-invasive, a massive security risk, generally lacking in taste, and genuinely intrusive. As such, despite running ads on OSNews, I have always advocated for the concept of your computer, your rules", meaning only you, the user, gets to decide what gets run on your computer and displayed on your screen. This includes the use of ad-blockers. I have a Pi-Hole, and you can pry it from my cold, dead hands. Because of this, maintaining ads on OSNews became untenable. Everything about the ads on our site, from the actual ads themselves to the annoying cookie banners talking about our 1500 partners", gave me the ick, as the young, hip people say, and I've been considering turning them off for a long time. Today, after yet another reader rightfully pointing out how absurd our cookie banner was, I finally made the call. One email to our owner, David Adams, later, and we're now entirely ad-free, for everyone. This is a hit to my income, and as such, I kindly ask anyone capable of doing so to support the continued existence of OSNews. How can you support OSNews? We've been online since 1997, meaning soon we'll be hitting our 30-year anniversary. Very few websites can boast about such a long, uninterrupted existence, and despite all the changes both the industry and the world at large have gone through, OSNews is still here, doing what it has always done. The removal of ads means we're even more dependent on you, dear readers, but I'm confident in saying that we'll make it another 30 years. Thank you for all your continued support over the decades, and let's keep going. Without icky ads.

Apple, back in June of this year: This is our broadest software design update ever. Meticulously crafted by rethinking the fundamental elements that make up our software, the new design features an entirely new material called Liquid Glass. It combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity only Apple can achieve, as it transforms depending on your content or context. Apple's WWDC press release Today, iGerman00, detailing their merge request for adding Liquid Glass effects to a KWin plugin: Added a Concave (lens) refraction mode for a more Liquid Glass" look, it's a lot closer than the current implementation. Also added a Refraction Corner Radius slider (0-200px, 30 steps) to shape the SDF independently of edge size. Because the concave implementation is a bit weaker", I've raised the maxima to 30 for the relevant sliders. Added some UI logic for irrelevant options between modes. iGerman00's merge request One of the world's wealthiest companies, outdone by a random amateur hobbyist developer. Not only does this merge request recreate Apple's Liquid Glass effects, it does so with a detailed settings panel to control every aspect of the effect, something Apple obviously won't allow you to do. Only Apple" my ass.

Almost three weeks ago, Mozilla released Firefox 141 that, among other features like memory optimizations for Linux and a built-in unit converter, brought controversial AI-enhanced tab groups. Powered by a local AI model, these groups identify related tabs and suggest names for them. There is even a Suggest more tabs for group" button that users can click to get recommendations. Now, several users have taken to the Firefox subreddit to complain about high CPU usage when using the feature, as well as express their disappointment in Mozilla for adding AI to the browser. David Uzondu at NeoWin Is anybody even asking for AI" features in Firefox? Of the six people still left using Firefox, does even one of them want a chatbot in Firefox? Is any Firefox user the type of user to use some nebulous AI" tool to organize their open tabs? Seeing these kinds of frivolities in Chrome or Edge or whatever makes sense, but in Firefox? At least they're easy to disable through about:config - just set both browser.ml.chat.enabled and browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled to false. I mean, I guess I can understand Mozilla trying to ride the hype bubble, but at least make this nonsense opt-in, instead of asking users to dig around in obtuse config flags.

You click a link in your chat app, your browser with a hundred tabs comes to the front and opens that page. How hard can it be? Well, you probably know by now that Wayland, unlike X, doesn't let one application force its idiot wishes on everyone else. In order for an application to bring its window to the front, it needs to make use of the XDG Activation protocol. In essence, an application cannot take focus, it can only receive focus. In the example above, your chat app would request an XDG Activation token from the compositor. It then asks the system to open the given URL (typically launching the web browser) and sends along the token. The browser can then use this token to activate its window. Kai Uwe After explaining exactly how this mechanism works, KDE developer Kai Uwe details the issue that not every application yet properly supports the XDG Activation protocol, and some that do have bugs that, say, might make an application discard its token too early. In other words, it's time to start testing. You'll need to use the latest git master brach of KWin, and enable set the Focus Stealing Prevention" option in Window Management to Extreme". When set to Extreme", KWin will exclusively activate windows that request activation with a valid token. They've already found and fixed a number of issues in KDE using this method, but more are bound to found, particularly in third-party applications. They're planning on turning on KWin's focus stealing prevention on Wayland with forgiving settings at first, but increase the strictness of the feature as time progresses and issues are fixed.

One of the things I'm working on at Red Hat is HDR support. HDR is inherently linked to luminance (brightness, but ignoring human perception) which makes it an important parameter for us that we would like to be in control of. Sebastian Wick A really interesting look at how GNOME is going to handle screen brightness.

It seems Microsoft is absorbing GitHub deeper into Microsoft. GitHub's CEO Thomas Dohmke is stepping down, and GitHub will be integrated into a new department within Microsoft. Which department will become the new stewards of GitHub, and the massive pile of open source code it's hosting? You already know. Still, after all this time, my startup roots have begun tugging on me and I've decided to leave GitHub to become a founder again. GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft's CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon. I'll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we've built as a remote-first organization spread around the world. Thomas Dohmke GitHub will become part of a new AI" engineering group inside Microsoft, led by a former Facebook executive, Jay Parikh. As The Verge notes, this new group includes platform and development tools and Dev Div teams, with a focus on building an AI platform and tools for both Microsoft and its customers". In other words, Microsoft is going to streamline taking your code and sucking it up into its AI" slop machines. If you're hosting code on GitHub, the best time to move it somewhere else was yesterday, but if you haven't yet, the second best time is today. Unless you want your code to be sucked up into Microsoft and regurgitated to sloppify Windows and Office, you should be moving your code to GitHub alternatives.

Over the years, we've seen a good number of interfaces used for computer monitors, TVs, LCD panels and other all-things-display purposes. We've lived through VGA and the large variety of analog interfaces that preceded it, then DVI, HDMI, and at some point, we've started getting devices with DisplayPort support. So you might think it's more of the same. However, I'd like to tell you that you probably should pay more attention to DisplayPort - it's an interface powerful in a way that we haven't seen before. Arya Voronova at HackADay DisplayPort is a better user experience in every way compared to HDMI. I am so, so sad that HDMI has won out in the consumer electronics space, with all of its countless anti-user features as detailed in the linked article. I refuse to use HDMI when DisplayPort is available, so all of my computers' displays are hooked up over DP. Whenever I did try to use HDMI, I always ran into issues with resolution, refresh rates, improper monitor detection, and go knows what else. Plug in a DP cable, and everything always just works. Sadly, in consumer electronics, DisplayPort isn't all that common. Game consoles, Hi-Fi audio, televisions, and so on, all push HDMI hard and often don't offer a DisplayPort option at all. It takes me back to the early-to-late 2000s, when my entire audio setup was hooked up using optical cables, simply because I was a MiniDisc user and had accepted the gospel of optical cables. Back then, too, I refused to buy or use anything that used unwieldy analog cables. Mind you, this had nothing to do with audio quality - it was a usability thing. If anyone is aware of home audio devices and televisions that do offer DisplayPort, feel free to jump into the comments.

It's a bit of a silly post, because syntax is the least interesting d detail about the language, but, still, I can't stop thinking how Zig gets this detail just right for the class of curly-braced languages, and, well, now you'll have to think about that too. On the first glance, Zig looks almost exactly like Rust, because Zig borrows from Rust liberally. And I think that Rust has great syntax, considering all the semantics it needs to express (see Rust's Ugly Syntax"). But Zig improves on that, mostly by leveraging simpler language semantics, but also through some purely syntactical tasteful decisions. Alex Kladov Y'all know full well I know very little about programming, so there's much interesting stuff I can add here. The only slightly related frame of reference I have is how some languages - as in, the ones we speak - have a pleasing grammar or spelling, and how even when you can't actually speak a language, some of them intrinsically look attractive and pleasing when you see them in written form. I mean, you can't look at Scottisch Gaelic and not notice it just looks pleasing: Dh' eirich mi moch air mhaduinn an-deS gun ghearr mi'n ear-thalmhainn do bhrigh mo sgeilAn duil gu m faicinn fhein run mo chleibhOch oin gu m faca s a cul rium fein. Mo Shuil Ad Dheidh by Donald MacNicol I have no idea if programmers can look at programming languages the same way, but I've often been told there's more overlap between programming languages and regular language than many people think. As such, it wouldn't surprise me if some programming languages look really pleasing to programmers, even if they can't use them because they haven't really learned them yet.

Debian has released its latest version, Debian 13 trixie". This release contains over 14,100 new packages for a total count of 69,830 packages, while over 8,840 packages have been removed as obsolete. 44,326 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for trixie is 403,854,660 kB (403 GB), and is made up of 1,463,291,186 lines of code. Debian 13 release announcement I'm never quite sure what to say about new Debian releases, as Debian isn't exactly the kind of distribution to make massive, sweeping changes or introduce brand new technologies before anyone else. That being said, Debian is a massively important cornerstone of the Linux world, forming the base for many of the most popular Linux distributions. At some point, you're going to deal with Debian 13.

AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans. As a result, on September 30, 2025 this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued. AOL support document I've seen a few publications writing derisively about this, surprised dial-up internet is still a thing, but I think that's misguided and definitely a bit elitist. In a country as large as the United States, there's bound to be quite a few very remote and isolated places where dial-up might be the best or even only option to get online. On top of that, I'm sure there are people out there who use the internet so sparingly that dial-up may suit their needs just fine. I genuinely hope this move by AOL doesn't cut a bunch of people off of the internet without any recourse, especially if it involves, say, isolated and lonely seniors to whom such changes may be too difficult to handle. Access to the internet is quite crucial in the modern world, and we shouldn't be ridiculing people just because they don't have access to super high-speed broadband.

Remember the old Windows Control Panel? It's still there, in your up-to-date Windows 11 installation, as a number of settings still cannot be changed in the new" Settings application. In the latest Insider Preview for Windows 11 in the Dev Channel, Microsoft moved another long list of settings from the Control Panel to Settings. The focus is very much on time and language this time around. A whole slew of more niche features related to the clock, such as adding additional clocks to the Notification Center or changing your time synchronisation server, can now be done in Settings. Format settings for time and date have also been moved into Settings, which is a welcome change for anyone dealing with mysterious cases where Windows somehow insists on using anything but the sane 24-hour clock. As for language settings, things like enabling Unicode UTF-8 support is now available in Settings as well, and you can now copy existing language and regions settings from one user to another, and to the welcome screen. Lastly, keyboard settings like the character repeat/delay rate and blink rates are now also in Settings. It's absolutely wild to me that Windows still has two separate places to change settings, and that countless settings dialogs still look like they came straight from Windows 95. It's a reply fractured user experience, and one that's been in place since the release of Settings in Windows 8, 13 years ago. The curve Windows is graded on compared to its competitors has basically become a circle. People write entire treatises about how Linux is not ready for the desktop because of some entirely arbitrary and nebulous reasons, while at the same time Windows users are served a hodgepodge of 30 years of random cruft without anyone even so much as raising an eyebrow. I've long argued that if you truly take a step back and look at the landscape of desktop operating systems today, and you were to apply the same standards to all of them, there's no chance in hell Windows can be considered ready for the desktop". The fact Windows has had two competing settings applications 13 years now with no end in sight is just one facet of that conclusion, but definitely an emblematic one.

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), which provides device makers and OEMs with the infrastructure to upload and distribute firmware files to Linux users, as well as support during this process, is taking bold steps to ensure large companies contribute to the project. LVFS is the infrastructure behind fwupd, the tool users actually use to download and install firmware updates. While Richard Hughes, the maintainer of LVFS, is employed by Red Hat to work on the project, and the Linux Foundation provides the hosting costs, there's just not enough people and resources dedicated to the project. They're going to take measures to address this. This year there will be a fair-use quota introduced, with different sponsorship levels having a different quota allowance. Nothing currently happens if the quota is exceeded, although there will be additional warnings asking the vendor to contribute. The associate" (free) quota is also generous, with 50,000 monthly downloads and 50 monthly uploads. This means that almost all the 140 vendors on the LVFS should expect no changes. Vendors providing millions of firmware files to end users (and deriving tremendous value from the LVFS...) should really either be providing a developer to help write shared code, design abstractions and review patches (like AMD does) or allocate some funding so that we can pay for resources to take action for them. So far no OEMs provide any financial help for the infrastructure itself, although two have recently offered - and we're now in a position to say yes" to the offers of help. Richard Hughes In other words, functionality is going to be reduced for vendors who make extensive use of LVFS, but who don't provide any financial or development support. I think this is an excellent incentive to get corporations who effectively freeload off a free infrastructure without providing anything in return to step up. It seems the measures are explicitly designed to target only the very few major users of LVFS, leaving the smaller companies unaffected. Funding in open source is a major issue, and as open source becomes ever more popular and used by more and more large companies with excessive amounts of revenue, the strain on maintainers and developers is going to keep increasing. I'm entirely on board with efforts to encourage funding and contributions, as long as they fall within the confines of the terms of the open source licenses in use.

Choosing human-readable file formats is an act of technological sovereignty. It's about maintaining control over your data, ensuring long-term accessibility, and building systems that remain comprehensible and maintainable over time. The slight overhead of human readability pays dividends in flexibility, durability, and peace of mind. These formats also represent a philosophy: that technology should serve human understanding rather than obscure it. In choosing transparency over convenience, we build more resilient, more maintainable, and ultimately more trustworthy systems. Adele It's hard not to agree with this sentiment. I definitely prefer being able to just open and read things like configuration files as if they're text files, for all the same reasons Adele lists in their article. It just makes managing your system a lot easier, since I means you won't have to rely on the applications the files belong to to make any changes. I think this also extends to other areas. When I'm dealing with photo or music library tools, I want them to use the file system and directories in a human-readable way. Having to load up an entire photo management application just to sort some photos seems backwards to me; why can't I use my much leaner file manager to do this instead? I also want emails to be stored as individual files in directories matching mailboxes inside my email client, just like BeOS used to do back in the day (note that this is far from exclusive to BeOS). If I load up my file manager, and create a new directory inside the root mail directory I designated and copy a few email files into it, my email client should reflect that. As operating systems get ever more locked down, we're losing the human-readability of our systems, and that's not a good development.

With Apple's desktop operating systems straying ever further from what some of us consider its heyday, it's no surprise people long for the days before Apple started relentlessly focusing on services revenue, bringing iOS paradigms to macOS, and dropping its Aqua design language for whatever they're doing now. Some people take this longing and channel it into something a bit more concrete, and an example of this is a website I stumbled upon on Fedi: Mavericks Forever. Mavericks Forever is a detailed guide to, as the name implies, keep using Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks. It covers everything from hardware options to security patches, browser choices, and so, so much more. It even goes as far as adding more recent emoji releases, custom security patches, and visual customisations. There's a ton to go over here, and of course, you don't have to implement every single suggestions. I ostensibly like pain, because I've had a soft spot for the trash can Mac Pro ever since they came out. Now that they are wholly and completely outdated by Apple standards, their prices are probably dropping rapidly, so I may have to grab one from eBay or whatever and follow this guide for a modern-ish Mavericks setup. I do actually like the Mac OS X of old quite a bit, I would love to have a usable version of it that I can use when I feel like it. If only to remember the good old days.

A simple instruction-stepped Z80 CPU emulator written in Go, inspired by the cycle-accurate emulation techniques described in floooh's blog posts. Zen80 GitHub page It has support for all documented Z80 instructions, supports most games and applications, and much more.

In 2022, Google launched a major push for gaming Chromebooks, including a version of Steam for ChromeOS. Steam for ChromeOS remained in Google's nebulous beta" state ever since, however, and today Google is doing a Google by killing Steam for ChromeOS altogether. Entering Steam" into the ChromeOS Launcher starts the install process like before, but there's now an intermediary message: The Steam for Chromebook Beta program will conclude on January 1st, 2026. After this date, games installed as part of the Beta will no longer be available to play on your device. We appreciate your participation in and contribution to learnings from the beta program, which will inform the future of Chromebook gaming." Abner Li at 9To5Google Chromebooks are cheap devices for students, and while there are expensive, powerful Chromebooks, I doubt they sell in any meaningful numbers to justify spending any time on maintaining Steam for ChromeOS. Of course, Steam for ChromeOS is just the Linux version of Steam, but Google did maintain a list of compatible" games, so the company was at least doing something. The list consists of 99 games, by the way. It's just another example of Google seemingly having no idea what it wants to do with its operating systems, made worse in this case because Google actually had OEMs make and sell Chromebooks with gaming features. Sure, Android games still exist and can be run on ChromeOS, but I doubt that's what the six people who bought a gaming Chromebook for actual gaming had in mind when they bought one.

Akseli Lahtinen, a KDE developer who works on various components of the KDE Plasma desktop environment, had never actually made his own KDE application from scratch - until now. He created a to-do application, called KomoDo (available on Flathub), that makes use of the todo.txt format, and penned a blog post detailing his experiences. Of course, as a KDE developer, he's got a head start and access to people who know their stuff, but that doesn't mean it was a walk in the park. If you're thinking of developing a KDE application, Lahtinen's blog post is a great place to start.

Welcome, friends, to my grubby little corner of the internet. A corner so strewn with obscenity that the UK government has decided you must prove you're a grown-up before you canaccess certain parts of it. The UK's new Online Safety Act has come into force, so UK people might have noticed a bunch of websites suddenly demanding you take a selfie, share your credit card details, or jump through another hoop to prove that you're over 18. Quite a few of my friends have been discussing this in the pub, because for understandable reasons people who aren't embedded in the world of online pornography or internet law are suddenly curious aboutwhythe internet is now so very broken. They're also often convinced that the government will change its mind and therefore no one really needs to worry. I've had this conversation so many times now that I reckon I've got the basis for a fairly solid layperson's guide to age verification: what it is, how it affects you, and why we absolutely, genuinelydoneed to worry. Girl on the Net Girl on the Net basically published the definitive guide on why age verification online, as currently implemented in the United Kingdom, and explored by the United States and the European Union, is such a terrible idea. It's a privacy disaster, a clear onramp for Christian extremists to go after LGBTQ+ content, it doesn't protect the children", it's easily circumvented, breaks accessibility, casts such a wide net that it even hits sites like Wikipedia, and so, so much more. Whenever anyone online tries to sell you on age verification as a means to think of the children", you can just point them to the linked article. If, after reading it, they still believe this is the way to protect children from seeing naked people (while leaving the door to the most brutal forms of violent content wide open, of course, as is tradition), they will have either ulterior motives, or are some form of extremist you can't argue with anyway. The demonization of sexual content and the sex workers that produce it as a means to introduce strict authoritarian control over the internet is something that will never go away. Think of the children" is an incredibly powerful rallying cry for authoritarians to scare sheltered boomers into accepting pretty much any draconian measure, regardless of efficacy, and I doubt we will ever definitely win this fight. But we won't have to sit down and accept it.

Whether you like Microsoft and its products or not, the one thing we can all agree on is that the company is absolutely terrible at naming things. Sometimes I feel like managers at Microsoft get their bonuses based on how many times they can rename products, because I find it hard to accept that they're really that inept at product naming in Redmond. I mean, just look at my recent article about the most Microsoft support document of all time. Bonkers. While the list of examples of confusing, weird, unclear, and strange Microsoft product names is long, let's go back to that weird moment in time where Windows updates were suddenly given names like the Fall Creators Update". As with every naming scheme Microsoft introduces, this one was short-lived, but for once, we have an explanation. Raymond Chen explains: It was during an all-hands meeting that a senior executive asked if the organization had any unconscious biases. One of my colleagues raised his hand. He grew up in the Southern Hemisphere, where the seasons are opposite from those in the Northern Hemisphere. He pointed out that naming the updates Spring and Fall shows a Northern Hemisphere bias and is not inclusive of our customers in the Southern Hemisphere. The names of the semiannual releases were changed the next day to be hemisphere-neutral. Raymond Chen If you live in the northern hemisphere - and you can't live much more north than I do - you don't often have to think about how the seasons in the southern hemisphere are reversed. We all know it - I assume, at least - but it's not something that we're confronted with very often, as our media, movies, books, and so on, all tend to be made in and for consumers in the northern hemisphere. I'm assuming that people in the southern hemisphere are much more acutely aware of this issue, because their media is probably dominated by stories set in the northern hemisphere, too. It's wild that Microsoft ever went with a seasonal naming scheme to begin with, and that it somehow slipped through the cracks for a while before anyone spoke up.

Main highlight of this update is a modernized core built upon Debian 13 Trixie", ensuring a robust foundation for the platform. Proxmox VE 9.0 further introduces significant advancements in both storage and networking capabilities, addressing critical enterprise demands. A highlight is the long-awaited support for snapshots on thick-provisioned LVM shared storage, improving storage management capabilities especially for enterprise users with Fibre Channel (FC) or iSCSI SAN environments. With newly added fabric" support for Software-Defined Networking (SDN), administrators can construct highly complex and scalable network architectures. Proxmox press release I've only very recently accepted the gospel of Proxmox, and I now have a little mini PC running Proxmox, hosting a Debian Pi-Hole container, a 9front virtual machine, and a Windows 7 retro virtual machine. I'm intending to use it as an easy shortcut for running retro stuff, as well as any fun tools I might run into that work best in a container. I haven't updated yet to this new release, but I'm interested to see how easy the upgrade process will be. Considering it's just Debian, it can't be too involved. I'm curious of anyone else here is using Proxmox or similar tools at home, or at work for more complex use cases.

As promised in the first iteration, we will now explore how GPU drivers work in more detail by exploring an application known asVkCube. As the program name implies, this application uses the Vulkan API to render a rotating cube on the screen. Its simplicity makes it a prime candidate to be used as a learning aid in our journey through GPU drivers. This article will first introduce the concept of User Mode Drivers (UMDs) and Kernel Mode Drivers (KMDs), breaking down the steps needed to actually describeVkCubes workload to the GPU. This will be done in a more compact way for brevity as it's a rather extensive topic that has been detailed in several books. We will wrap up with an overview of the actual API offered by Tyr. As previously stated, this is the same API offered by Panthor, which is the C driver for the same hardware. Daniel Almeida There isn't much to add here, except maybe this kitten.

The most popular desktop operating system today is still Windows, with its userbase roughly equally divided between Windows 10 and Windows 11. While we tend to focus on the marketing names used by Microsoft, like Windows XP, Windows 7, or Windows 11, their real name is still, to this day, Windows NT. Underneath all the marketing names, there's still the Windows NT version number corresponding to the marketing name; Windows XP was Windows NT 5.1 (or 5.2 for the 64bit version), Windows 7 was Windows NT 6.1, and the current latest version, Windows 11, is Windows NT 10.0, a version number that's been static since 2015. Of course, version numbers don't really mean anything, but it does highlight that yes, the Windows you're using is still Windows NT, and thus, the operating system you're using isn't a part of the Windows 3.x/9x line, but of the NT line. And probably the first version of Windows NT that set us on this path is Windows NT 4.0 - with Windows 2000 sealing the deal, and Windows XP delivering the obvious knock-out punch. Since Windows NT 4.0 turned 29 years old a few days ago, Dave Farquhar published a retrospective of this release, highlighting many important changes in Windows NT 4.0 that in my mind mark it as the true beginning of the shift from Windows 9x to Windows NT as Microsoft's consumer operating system. First, Windows NT 4.0 was the first version of Windows NT that shipped with the user interface from Windows 95. It brought over the Start menu, taskbar, and everything else introduced with Windows 95 to the Windows NT line, which up until that point had been using the same user interface as Windows 3.x. A default Windows NT 4.0 desktop basically looks indistinguishable from a Windows 95 desktop, and like the earlier versions of NT, it came in a workstation edition for desktop use. Second, another massive, at the time controversial, change came with the graphics subsystem, as Farquhar notes: And one change, easily forgotten today, regarded graphics drivers. Microsoft moved the video subsystem from user space, ring 3, to kernel space, ring 0. There was a lot of talk about Ring 0 versus ring 3 on July 19, 2024 thanks to the large computer outage on that day. In 1996, this move was controversial, for the same reasons. The fear was that a malfunction in the graphics driver would now be able to take down the entire system. But the trade-off was much improved performance. It meant Windows NT 4.0 could be used for serious graphics work. Dave Farquhar Windows NT 4.0 delivered more than what's highlighted by Farquhar, of course. A major new feature in Windows NT 4.0 was DirectX, as it was the first Windows version to come with it preinstalled. DirectX support remained limited in NT 4.0, though, so Windows 9x remained the better option for most people playing video games. Other new features were the System Policy Editor and system policies, Sysprep, and, of course, a whole slew of low-level improvements to both the operating system itself as well as its various server-oriented features. Windows NT 4.0 also happened to be the last version of Windows NT which supported the Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC architectures, although Windows 2000 retained support for Alpha in its alpha, beta, and release candidate versions. Of course, Windows would later expand its architecture support with first Itanium, and more recently, ARM. As someone who was selling and managing computer systems at the time, Farquhar has some great insights into why NT 4.0 was such a big deal, and why it seemed to fare better in the market than previous versions of Windows NT did. He also highlights on particular oddity from NT 4.0 that's still lurking around today, an oddity you really don't want to run into.

There's a lovely device called apistorm, an adapter board that glues a Raspberry Pi GPIO bus to a Motorola 68000 bus. The intended use case is that you plug it into a 68000 device and then run an emulator that reads instructions from hardware (ROM or RAM) and emulates them. You're still limited by the ~7MHz bus that the hardware is running at, but you can run the instructions as fast as you want. These days you're supposed to run a custom built OS on the Pi that just does 68000 emulation, but initially it ran Linux on the Pi and a userland 68000 emulator process. And, well, that got me thinking. The emulator takes 68000 instructions, emulates them, and then talks to the hardware to implement the effects of those instructions. What if we, well, just don't? What if we just run all of our code in Linux on an ARM core and then talk to the Amiga hardware? Matthew Garrett This is so cursed. I love it.