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The solution the Flatpak team is looking into is to use virtualisation for the graphics driver, as the absolute last-resort option to keep things working when nothing else will. It's a complex and interesting solution to a complex and interesting problem.

Four years ago, I reviewed a truly fully open source desktop computer, from operating system down to firmware: the Raptor Blackbird, built entirely around IBM's POWER9 processor. The overall conclusion was that using was mostly an entirely boring experience, which was a very good thing - usually ideologically-fueled computers come with a ton of downsides and limitations for average users, but Raptor's POWER9 machines bucked this trend by presenting a bog-standard, run-of-the-mill desktop Linux experience, almost indistinguishable from using an x86 machine. Almost indistinguishable. The one thing that was missing from using desktop Linux on POWER9 was Firefox' JIT, which meant that many websites, especially more complex ones, would bring the browsing experience down to a crawl. One area where this affected me quite a bit was our own WordPress backend, which is effectively unusable on Firefox without its JIT. The only other option was to use Chromium, which was fully ported to POWER9 - but I don't like Chromium, and want to use Firefox to be able to share tabs, history, passwords, and so on. Since then, back in 2021, things have improved. The ongoing effort to port Firefox' JIT to POWER9, led by Cameron Kaiser, made a ton of progress, to the point where community Firefox builds with Kaiser's JIT integrated became available through a dedicated Fedora copr. Sadly, the last build is from four months ago, and covers Firefox 128.14.0-1, an old ESR release. Since I recently set up the other machine Raptor sent to me - a Talos II workstation with two POWER9 processors - I was curious what the state of the POWER9 JIT effort was, so I inquired on the related bug report for Firefox. Kaiser replied, and explained that due to a critical error with wasm against later versions of the JIT, as well as a change in his personal circumstances forcing him to work on this effort remotely - obviously not great for a client application like Firefox - there simply hasn't been much progress, until last week (what a coincidence!). Last week I took some time off work and dragged the JIT up to the current ESR. This compiles and links. However, although it passes the majority of the test suite, there are still too many serious failures to make it useable. I'm continuing work on this in whatever free time I actually have on my workstation. If I can restore test compliance in Baseline mode, this would suffice for a community third-party build like what Dan Horak generates now, since that is what is in 128. To get it in tree, however, I would also need to solve that critical wasm fault which manifested in the interim and fix the remaining gaps in the CodeGenerator to get it to a point of sufficient quality. Cameron Kaiser There are two main problems at the moment that make it harder than it needs to be to work on this effort. First, the state of debugging tools on ppc64le - to which POWER9 belongs - is apparently not great, requiring Kaiser to step through thousands of instructions manually using gdb just to fix the last bug he discovered. That's clearly deeply suboptimal, not fun, and not something somebody should spend their precious free time on. At this point in the discussion, Raptor's Timothy Pearson jumped in and noted that getting rr-debugger to work on POWER9 is something Raptor would be interested in, but it wouldn't be cheap: On the topic of the debugger (rr-debugger), while this isn't on our internal roadmap at the moment it is something that Raptor could do under a development contract. The main question is whether there is enough interest to make that viable; the work is significant so the cost would probably be in the mid to upper 5 figures range (USD), assuming no major roadblocks are discovered. When I was looking into it before I was fairly certain the PMU on POWER9 supports the overall structure of rr-debugger's methods, and that our load-store idioms are generally compatible. The former is what stops it working on most arm64 devices IIRC, and the latter is relevant mainly to non-POWER RISC architectures. Timothy Pearson Kaiser noted that while having rr-debugger available wouldn't be a magic bullet, it would make the whole process a lot easier. The second major issue is, of course, the same one as it always is for such niche efforts: a lack of manpower. According to Kaiser, there's enough interest and awareness in getting Firefox' JIT ported to POWER9, with the real problem being that there simply aren't a lot of people with enough knowledge of both Firefox' JIT and the modern ppc64le ISA. Understandably, Kaiser would like to avoid having to deal with people who are well-intentioned but don't fully grasp the complexity of the undertaking at hand. This is not exactly an easy effort, and it's honestly downright amazing how far along the project already is. Even if it's an older version, being able to run Firefox 128ESR on POWER9 with a working JIT makes such a huge difference to the overall desktop user experience, and I'm sure I speak for the entire POWER9 community when I say I'm incredibly grateful for it. Still, it would be amazing if we could find someone with just the right skillset to help Kaiser out, to be able to get the JIT stable enough again for community Firefox builds - and perhaps even look at what lies beyond: getting it upstreamed into Firefox as a whole. The odds of finding that person are slim - if you're into this sort of stuff, you're most likely already aware of the POWER9 JIT effort - but who knows, maybe shining some renewed light on this task will make a difference. If you happen to have the right skillset and appreciate the complexities involved in this effort, you might want to reach out.

About half a year ago, I wrote an article about persistent rumours I'd heard from Android ROM projects that Google was intending to discontinue the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). AOSP has been gutted by Google over the years, with the company moving more and more parts of the operating system into closed-source, non-AOSP components, like Google Play Services. While you can technically still run bare AOSP if you're really hardcore, it's simply unusable for 99% of smartphone users out there. Google quickly responded to these widespread rumours, stating that AOSP is not going away", and a lot of people, clearly having learned nothing from human history, took this at face value and believed Google word-for-word. Since corporations can't be trusted and lying is their favourite activity, I drew a different conclusion at the time: This seems like a solid denial from Google, but it leaves a lot of room for Google to make a wide variety of changes to Android's development and open source status without actually killing off AOSP entirely. Since Android is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, Google is free to make Pixel Android" - its own Android variant - closed source, leaving AOSP up until that point available under the Apache 2.0 license. This is reminiscent of what Oracle did with Solaris. Of course, any modifications to the Linux kernel upon which Android is built will remain open source, since the Linux kernel is licensed under the GPLv2. If Google were indeed intending to do this, what could happen is that Google takes Android closed source from here on out, spinning off whatever remains of AOSP up until that point into a separate company or project, as potentially ordered during the antitrust case against Google in the United States. This would leave Google free to continue developing its own Pixel Android" entirely as proprietary software - save for the Linux kernel - while leaving AOSP in the state it's in right now outside of Google. This technically means AOSP is not going away", as Chau claims. Thom Holwerda at OSNews Ever since the claim that AOSP is not going away", Google has taken numerous steps to further tighten the grip it has on Android, much to the detriment of both the Android Open Source Project and the various ROM makers that depend on it. Device-specific source code for Pixel devices is no longer being released, Google dabbled with developer certification even for developers outside of Google Play, and Google significantly scaled back the release of security patches to AOSP. And now it's early 2026, and Google is about to take the next step in the slow killing of the Android Open Source Project. On the main page of the Android Open Source Project, there's now a new message: Effective in 2026, to align with our trunk stable development model and ensure platform stability for the ecosystem, we will publish source code to AOSP in Q2 and Q4. For building and contributing to AOSP, we recommend utilizing android-latest-release instead of aosp-main. The android-latest-release manifest branch will always reference the most recent release pushed to AOSP. This means that instead of four AOSP code releases every year, Google is now scaling back to just two every year. The gutting and eventual killing of AOSP has now reached the point where the open source nature of AOSP is effectively meaningless, and we're yet a few more big steps closer to what I outlined above: eventually, Google will distance itself from AOSP entirely, focusing all of its efforts on Pixel Android alone - without any code contributions to AOSP at all. If you still think AOSP is not going away", you're delusional. OASP is already on life support, and with this latest move Google is firmly gripping the plug.

Since we moved to a new year, we also moved to a new month, and that means a new monthly report from Redox, the general purpose operating system written in Rust. The report obviously touches on the news we covered a few weeks ago that Redox now has the first tidbits of a modesetting driver for Intel hardware, but in addition to that, the project has also taken the first steps towards basic read-only APIs from Linux DRM, in order to use Linux graphics drivers. ARM64 now has dynamic linking support, POSIX compliance has been improved, and countless other improvements. Of course, there's also the usual massive list of bug fixes and minor changes to the kernel, relibc, drivers, and so on. I genuinely wish the Redox project another successful year. The team seems to have its head screwed on right, and is making considerable progress basically every month. I don't know what the end goal is, but the way things are looking right now, I wouldn't be surprised to see it come preinstalled on system76 laptops somewhere over the coming five years.

Happy New Year 2026! Once again, a lot has happened in Gentoo over the past months. New developers, more binary packages, GnuPG alternatives support, Gentoo for WSL, improved Rust bootstrap, better NGINX packaging, ... As always here we're going to revisit all the exciting news from our favourite Linux distribution. Gentoo's 2025 retrospective We don't talk about Gentoo very often, and I consider that a good thing. Gentoo is just Gentoo, doing its thing, seemingly unaffected by the shifting sands of any community or world events. Gentoo will always just be Gentoo, and we're all better for it. The past year brought a ton of improvements to both Gentoo as a distribution and as a wider project and community. Because of Github's insistence to shove AI" into everything, the project is currently moving to Codeberg instead, EAPI 9 has been approved and finalised, there are now weekly Gentoo images for WSL, the project welcomed several new developers, they've got a second build server, and so much more. Sadly, the project did have to drop the hppa and sparc architectures down a peg due to a lack of hardware, which hurts my soul a tiny bit but is entirely understandable, of course. Gentoo is doing great, and I doubt it'll ever not be doing great. Gentoo is just Gentoo.

The new version brings a ton of new enhancements and fixes to all 3 supported platforms, with Steam running not only on Arm64, but also on RiSC-V and on Loongarch! And this is the Linux version of Steam, not the Windows one (but the Windows one works too if you really prefer that one). While Box32 (used to run Steam) is still experimental and unstable, stability did improve. Still, expect some crashes when downloading things with steam. And it's not all, Battle.net is also getting stable, and some games are working too. Not all unfortunately, and your success might depend on your geographical region, as program versions might differ. At least, you can try it on ARM64 & Loongarch. It's still to be tested on RiSC-V. Box64 0.4.0 release announcement These are some major improvements to Box64, and impressive ones at that.

Ever noticed your computer acting sluggish or warning you about low storage? Temporary files could be the sneaky culprit. Windows creates these files while installing apps, loading web pages, or running updates. Left unchecked, they pile up and hog valuable space. Luckily, clearing them out is easier than cleaning your kitchen junk drawer. Let's explore Storage Sense, Disk Cleanup, manual deletion, and a few bonus performance tips to keep your PC running like new. Microsoft Windows Learning Center You may think this is one of those junk SEO articles generated by AI" to trap Google searches, but no, this is published by Microsoft on Microsoft's website. Instead of fixing the long-standing and well-known problems around Windows being absolutely terrible at keeping itself clean and functional over longer periods of time, the company figured it'd be a better idea to just keep shoving that responsibility unto users instead. None of the tools mentioned in this article should need to be run or set up by users manually. A computer is supposed to make life less tedious, not more so, and I already have enough cleaning up and laundry to do out here in the real world, and I don't want to be bothered with it on my computer. Why on earth am I supposed to manually remove unnecessary Windows Update files? Why did Adobe installers leave about 15GB of old installers in some directory inside C:/Windows on my wife's computer that I had to remove using a third party tool? In what universe is this okay? Sometimes I wonder how much of our collective time is wasted just by dealing with Windows on a day-to-day basis in our society. Imagine the time we could reclaim and spend on our loved ones, families, and hobbies instead, if only Windows was developed by people with even a modicum of competency.

The way the histories of CP/M, DOS, Microsoft, and the 8086 intertwine would be worthy of an amazing film if it wasn't for the fact it would be very hard to make it interesting screen material. Few OEMs were asking for an 8086 version of CP/M. One that did was SCP - the same company that helped Microsoft design SoftCard. They needed a disk operating system for their 8086 board released in November 1979. In April 1980, after CP/M-86 was still nowhere to be seen, they lost patience and asked their young engineer Tim Paterson to develop a quick and dirty" OS similar to CP/M that would hopefully boost the sales of their board. That little operating system, officially named 86-DOS, was eventually purchased by Microsoft and renamed MS-DOS. Paterson has stated on multiple occasions that he would never have begun developing it had CP/M86 been available on time. Nemanja Trifunovic There's a ton more in this article about CP/M-86 and its gestation period, but this tangled little knot of coincidences always entertains me. It really could've been CP/M, and it really could've not been Microsoft. This industry is filled to the brim with interesting what-if stories that we barely regard as a worthy footnote, but few are as fascinating as what the world would've looked like had CP/M won out over DOS. The entire world would've been drastically different, and while nobody can say with a straight face it would be a better world, we'd at least not have the spectres of MS-DOS haunting system administrators, developers, and users the world over. Of course, they'd be haunted by different spectres, but still.

We've talked about just how bad Apple's regular icons have become, but what about the various icons Apple now plasters all over its menus, buttons, and dialogs? They've gotten so, so much worse. In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that. But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn't mean users will find what they are looking for faster. And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that's not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves. Nikita Prokopov The number of detailed examples in this article are heartbreaking. I just don't understand how anyone can look at even three of these and not immediately ring the alarm bells, slam the emergency brake, rush to Tim Cook's office. It further illustrates that no, the problem at Apple is not just one man, whether he be Jonathan Ive or Alan Dye or the next unfortunate bloke on the chopping block, but the institution as a whole. I have a feeling the kind of people who care about proper UI design have all left Apple by now. The institutional knowledge is gone. And that kind of knowledge is extremely difficult to get back.

CheriBSD is a Capability Enabled, Unix-like Operating System that extends FreeBSD to take advantage of Capability Hardware on Arm's Morello and CHERI-RISC-V platforms. CheriBSD implements memory protection and software compartmentalization features, and is developed by SRI International and the University of Cambridge. CheriBSD website This obviously raises the question - what exactly is CHERI? The FreeBSD Foundation has an article about this from 2023 providing more details. CHERI extends existing architectures (Armv8-A, MIPS64 (retired), RISC-V, and x86_64 (in development)) with a new hardware type, the CHERI capability. In CHERI systems, all access to memory is via CHERI capabilities either explicitly via new instructions or implicitly via a Default Data Capability (DDC) and Program Counter Capability (PCC) used by instructions with integer arguments. Capabilities grant access to specific ranges of (virtual, or occasionally, physical) memory via a base and length, and can further restrict access with permissions, which are compressed into a 128-bit representation (64-bits for the address and 64-bits for the metadata). In memory and in registers, capabilities are protected by tags that are cleared when the capability data is modified by a non-capability instruction or if a capability instruction would increase the access the capability grants. Tags are stored separately from data and cannot be manipulated directly. Brooks Davis CheriBSD brings this capability to anyone with compatible hardware, providing access to about 10000 pre-built memory-safe packages alongside more than 260000 pre-built memory-unsafe packages, as well as fully memory-safe versions of the KDE desktop, bhyve, and a ton of others. You can use both types of packages alongside one another, there's a nice installer, and it basically seems like you're using regular FreeBSD, just with additional complications, the biggest of which is, of course, the limited hardware support. I have a feeling that if you're the kind of person to own CHERI-enabled hardware, you're most likely already aware of CheriBSD. Still, if this is something you're looking for, be aware that you're going ot need special hardware. It's also important to note that DTrace won't work on CheriBSD, and most optional modules, like firewall systems, don't work either.

Up until now, it's always remained possible to activate Windows offline, by calling a phone number, going through a lengthy phase of entering digits on your phone dialpad, and carefully listening to and entering a string of numbers on the device you're trying to activate. For a while, even, this was, as far as I can tell, one of the easiest ways to fix activation issues caused by replacing one component too many, causing Windows activation to think you had a new machine. Phone activation was always remarkably more lenient and forgiving than online activation. Well, as part of Microsoft's crusade to make Windows progressively more shit, it seems phone activation is going away. However, that seems to no longer work on Windows 11 or 10 or Windows 7 either, as another user Ben Kleinberg has documented on his YouTube channel. Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: Support for product activation has moved online. For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh" Sayan Sen at Neowin They're going after your local, non-online account, they're going after offline activation - what's next in line on the chopping block? Are they going to actively start blocking the various debloat tools that make Windows 11 at least slightly less of a block of concrete chained around your neck? Please switch to a real operating system.

Desktop Classic System is an operating system based on Debian and a customized version of the MATE Desktop Environment that hearkens back to, but is not a direct copy of, the classic Mac OS. DCS seeks to provide and sometimes even improve upon the conceptual simplicity offered by the old Macintosh. Desktop Classic System website I'm usually not particularly interested in reporting on random Linux distributions, but any one of them that defaults to a proper spatial file manager is one that I will highlight. I'm not entirely sure if this is just a supported feature of MATE's file manager, or something more custom - there are some patches to Caja here, as mentioned - but spatial file managers are a dying breed and that's a shame. They're hard to implement and even harder to get right, which is probably why few people take on the challenge. Other than that, DCS isn't particularly revolutionary or special, but I'd love for more Linux distributions to look back at what we've lost, and see if we can bring those things back.

KDE developer Herz published a detailed look at the immense amount of work they've done cleaning up the developer onboarding documentation for KDE. All that just to say that I'm finally content with the state of beginner onboarding docs in our KDE Developer Platform. That is to say, all the beginner docs fixes I wanted to add to Develop are either already there or have merge requests ready or almost ready. Herz at rabbitictranslator.com Judging by the article, KDE's developer documentation really were in need of major work, and it's great to see that thankless task being done. One of the areas where KDE lags behind GNOME is that the latter has a more vibrant application ecosystem, with tons of great GNOME applications under active development. Now, I'm not saying it's the state of KDE's documentation is the sole reason for this, but I'm sure it wasn't helping either. Improving documentation is not a particularly glamorous task, but it's vitally important nonetheless.

It shouldn't be surprising that the HP-UX FAQ eventually grew an entry for how can I make a 712 run headless". It was possible, and to do it you had to change the firmware console" path. The 712 firmware would not allow you to do this, to keep you locked to a keyboard and frame buffer console, but some of the HP-UX standalone tools could be used to change this without the firmware getting in the way, so the FAQ recipe was roughly abort the boot sequence, at the BOOT_ADMIN> prompt, do not start the HP-UX kernel but some diagnostic tool, and then at the tools prompt, type a magic sequence without any mistake or you'll be very, very, very sorry". There was no exaggeration in these words: the magic sequence is conspath 2/0/4.0x283, which is everything but intuitive and easy to remember. Miod Vallat What a great story.

IceWM, the venerable X11 window manager, has released a new version, bumping the version number to 4.0.0. This release brings a big update to the alt+tab feature. The Alt+Tab window switcher can now handle large numbers of application windows in both horizontal and in vertical mode. Type the first letter of an application class name in Alt+Tab, to select the next instance window of that application class. Select an application by pressing one of the number keys. Select an application by mouse in Alt+Tab in horizontal mode. Support navigating the quick switch with all navigation keys. Press the menu button on Alt+Tab to open the system menu. QuickSwitchPreview is a new mode to preview applications. These previews are updated while the quick switch is active. IceWM 4.0 release notes On top of this major set of improvements to alt+tab, there's the usual list of bug fixes and small changes, as well as a bunch if updated translations.

The new year isn't even a day old, and Haiku developer X512 dropped something major in Haiku users' laps: the first alpha version of an accelerated NVIDIA graphics drivers for Haiku. Supporting at least NVIDIA Turing and Ampere GPUs, it's very much in alpha state, but does allow for proper GPU acceleration, with the code surely making its way to Haiku builds in the near future. Don't expect a flawless experience - this is alpha software - but even then, this is a major milestone for Haiku.

It's 31 December 2025 today, the last day of the year, but it also happens to mark the end of support for the last and final version of one of my favourite operating systems: HP-UX. Today is the day HPE puts the final nail in the coffin of their long-running UNIX operating system, marking the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux. HP-UX' versioning is a bit of a convoluted mess for those not in the know, but the versions that matter are all part of the HP-UX 11i family. HP-UX 11i v1 and v2 (also known as 11.11 and 11.23, respectively) have been out of support for exactly a decade now, while HP-UX 11i v3 (also known as 11.31) is the version whose support ends today. To further complicate matters, like 11i v2, HP-UX 11i v3 supports two hardware platforms: HP 9000 (PA-RISC) and HP Integrity (Intel Itanium). Support for the HP-UX 11i v3 variant for HP 9000 ended exactly four years ago, and today marks the end of support for HP-UX 11i v3 for HP Integrity. And that's all she wrote. I have two HP-UX 11i v1 PA-RISC workstations, one of them being my pride and joy: an HP c8000, the last and fastest PA-RISC workstation HP ever made, back in 2005. It's a behemoth of a machine with two dual-core PA-8900 processors running at 1Ghz, 8 GB of RAM, a FireGL X3 graphics card, and a few other fun upgrades like an internal LTO3 tape drive that I use for keeping a bootable recovery backup of the entire system. It runs HP-UX 11i v1, fully updated and patched as best one can do considering how many patches have either vanished from the web or have never leaked" from HPE (most patches from 2009 onwards are not available anywhere without an expensive enterprise support contract). The various versions of HP-UX 11i come with a variety operating environments" you can choose from, depending on the role your installation is supposed to fulfill. In the case of my c8000, it's running the Technical Computing Operating Environment, which is the OE intended for workstations. HP-UX 11i v1 was the last PA-RISC version of the operating system to officially support workstations, with 11i v2 only supporting Itanium workstations. There are some rumblings online that 11i v2 will still work just fine on PA-RISC workstations, but I have not yet tried this out. My c8000 also has a ton of other random software on it, of course, and only yesterday I discovered that the most recent release of sudo configures, compiles, and installs from source just fine on it. Sadly, a ton of other modern open source code does not run on it, considering the slightly outdated toolchain on HP-UX and few people willing and/or able to add special workarounds for such an obscure platform. Over the past few years, I've been trying to get into contact with HPE about the state of HP-UX' patches, software, and drivers, which are slowly but surely disappearing from the web. A decent chunk is archived on various websites, but a lot of it isn't, which is a real shame. Most patches from 2009 onwards are unavailable, various software packages and programs for HP-UX are lost to time, HP-UX installation discs and ISOs later than 2006-2009 are not available anywhere, and everything that is available is only available via non-sanctioned means, if you know what I mean. Sadly, I never managed to get into contact with anyone at HPE, and my concerns about HP-UX preservation seem to have fallen on deaf ears. With the end-of-life date now here, I'm deeply concerned even more will go missing, and the odds of making the already missing stuff available are only decreasing. I've come to accept that very few people seem to hold any love for or special attachment to HP-UX, and that very few people care as much about its preservation as I do. HP-UX doesn't carry the movie star status of IRIX, nor the benefits of being available as both open source and on commodity hardware as Solaris, so far fewer people have any experience with it or have developed a fondness for it. HP-UX didn't star in a Steven Spielberg blockbuster, it didn't leave behind influential technologies like ZFS. Despite being supported up until today, it's mostly forgotten - and not even HPE itself seems to care. And that makes me sad. When you raise your glasses tonight to mark the end of 2025 and welcome the new year, spare a thought for the UNIX everyone forgot still exists. I know I will.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, Win32/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, loss32 Win32 plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning system made useful by WINE, the ReactOS userland, and other vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by Microsoft. The loss32 homepage Joking introduction aside, this is exactly what you think it is: a Linux kernel with the Windows user interface running on top through Wine. I'm sure quite a few of use mused about this very concept at some point in time, but hikari_no_yume went a step further and created this working concept. It's rough around the edges and needs a ton of work, but I do think the idea is sound and could offer real benefits for certain types of users. It's definitely a more realistic idea than ReactOS, a project that's perpetually chasing the dragon but never coming even close to catching it. Not having to recreate the entire Windows NT kernel, drivers, and subsystems, and using Linux instead, is simply a more realistic approach that could bring results within our lifetimes. The added benefit here is that this could still run Linux applications, too, of course. hikari_no_yume is looking for help with the project, and I hope they find it. This is a great idea, with an absolutely amazing name, too.

Nina Kalinina has been on an absolute roll lately, diving deep into VisiOn, uncovering Bellcore MGR, installing Linux on a PC-98 machine, and much more. This time, she's ported Windows 2 to run on a machine it was never supposed to run on. I bought my first Apricot PC about three years ago, when I realised I wanted an 8086-based computer. At the time, I knew nothing about it and simply bought it because it looked rad and the price was low. I had no idea that it was not IBM PC-compatible, and that there were very few programs available for it. I have been on a quest to get a modern-ish word processor and spreadsheet program for it ever since. Which eventually made me port" Windows 2 on it. In this post, I will tell you the story of this port. Nina Kalinina To get Windows 2 working on the Apricot, Kalinina had to create basic video, keyboard, and mouse drivers, allowing Windows 2 to boot into text mode. I wasn't aware of this, but Windows 2 in text mode is funky: it's rendering all the text you would see in a full Windows 2 user interface, just without any of the user interface elements. Further developing the video driver from scratch turned out to be too big of an undertaking for now, so she opted to extract the video driver from Windows 1 instead - which required a whole other unique approach. The keyboard and mouse drivers were extracted from Windows 1 in the same way. The end result is a fully working copy of Windows 2, including things like Word and Excel, which was the original goal in the first place. There aren't many people around doing stuff like this, and it's great to see such very peculiar, unique itches being scratched. Even if this is only relevant for exactly one person, it's still been worth it.

I knew digital cameras and phones had to do a lot of processing and other types of magic to output anything human eyes can work with, but I had no idea just how much. This is wild.

There's been endless talk online about just how bad Apple's graphical user interface design has become over the years, culminating in the introduction of Liquid Glass across all of the company's operating systems this year. Despite all the gnawing of teeth and scathing think pieces before the final rollout, it seems the average Apple user simply doesn't care as much about GUI design as Apple bloggers thought they did, as there hasn't been any uproar or stories in local media about how you should hold off on updating your iPhone. The examples of just how bad Apple's GUI design has become keep on coming, though. This time it's Howard Oakley showing once again how baffling the macOS UI is these days. If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn't have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to the interface changes brought in macOS Tahoe with Liquid Glass. After three months of strong feedback during beta-testing, I was disappointed when Tahoe was released on 15 September to see how little had been addressed. When 26.1 followed on 3 November it had only regressed, and 26.2 has done nothing. Here I summarise my opinions on where Tahoe's overhaul has gone wrong. Howard Oakley at The Eclectic Light Company Apple bloggers and podcasters are hell-bent on blaming Apple's terrible GUI design over the past 10 years on one man. Their first target was Jony Ive, who was handed control over not just hardware design, but also software design in 2012. When he left Apple, GUI design at Apple would finally surely improve again, and the Apple bloggers and podcasters let out a sigh of relief. History would turn out different, though - under Ive's successor, Alan Dye, Apple's downward trajectory in this area would continue unabated, culminating in the Liquid Glass abomination. Now that Alan Dye has left Apple, history is repeating itself: the very same Apple bloggers and podcasters are repeating themselves - surely now that Alan Dye is gone, GUI design at Apple will finally surely improve again. The possibility that GUI design at Apple does not hinge on the whims of just one person, but that instead the entire company has lost all sense of taste and craftmanship in this area does not cross their minds. Everyone around Jony Ive and Alan Dye, both below, alongside, and above them, had to sign off on Apple's recent direction in GUI design, and the idea that the entire company would blindly follow whatever one person says, quality be damned, would have me far more worried as an Apple fan. At this point, it's clear that Apple's inability to design and build quality user interfaces is not the fault of just one fall guy, but an institutional problem. Anyone expecting a turnaround just because Ive Dye is gone isn't seeing the burning forest through the trees.

We're all familiar with things like marquee and blink, relics of HTML of the past, but there are far more weird and obscure HTML tags you may not be aware of. Luckily, Declan Chidlow at HTMLHell details a few of them so we can all scratch shake our heads in disbelief. But there are far more obscure tags which are perhaps less visually dazzling but equally or even more interesting. If you're younger, this might very well be your introduction to them. If you're older, this still might be an introduction, but also possibly a trip down memory lane or a flashback to the horrors of the first browser war. It depends. Declan Chidlow at HTMLHell I think my favourite is the dir tag, intended to be used to display lists of files and directories. We're supposed to use list tags now to achieve the same result, but I do kind of like the idea of having a dedicated tag to indicate files, and perhaps have browsers render these lists in the same way the file manager of the platform it's running on does. I don't know if that was possible, but it seems like the logical continuation of a hypothetical dir tag. Anyway, should we implement bgsound on OSNews?

If you're building a package manager and git-as-index seems appealing, look at Cargo, Homebrew, CocoaPods, vcpkg, Go. They all had to build workarounds as they grew, causing pain for users and maintainers. The pull request workflow is nice. The version history is nice. You will hit the same walls they did. Andrew Nesbitt It's wild to read some of these stories. I can't believe CocoaPods had 16000 directories contained in a single directory, which is absolutely bananas when you know how git actually works. Then there's the issue that git is case-sensitive, as any proper file system should be, which causes major headaches on Windows and macOS, which are dumb and are case-insensitive. Even Windows' path length limits, inherited from DOS, cause problems with git. There just so many problems with using git for a package managers' database. The basic gist is that git is not a database, and shouldn't be used as such. It's incredulous to me that seasoned developers would opt for solutions" like this.

Christmas is already behind us, but since this is an announcement from 11 December - that I missed - I'm calling this a very interesting and surprising Christmas present. The team and I are beyond excited to share what we've been cooking up over the last little while: a full desktop environment running on QNX 8.0, with support for self-hosted compilation! This environment both makes it easier for newly-minted QNX developers to get started with building for QNX, but it also vastly simplifies the process of porting Linux applications and libraries to QNX 8.0. John Hanam at the QNX Developer Blog What we have here is QNX 8.0 running the Xfce desktop environment on Wayland, a whole slew of build and development tools like clang, gcc, git, etc.), a ton of popular code editors and IDEs, a web browser (looks like GNOME Web?), access to all the ports on the QNX Open-Source Dashboard, and more. For now, it's only available as a Qemu image to run on top of Ubuntu, but the plan is to also release an x86 image in the coming months so you can run this directly on real hardware. This isn't quite the same as the QNX of old with its unique Photon microGUI, but it's been known for a while now that Photon hasn't been actively developed in a long time and is basically abandoned. Running Xfce on Wayland is obviously a much more sensible solution, and one that's quite future-proof, too. As a certified QNX desktop enthusiast of yore, I can't wait for the x86 image to arrive so I can try this out properly. There are downsides. This image, too, is encumbered by annoying non-commercial license requirements and sign-ups, and this also wouldn't be the first time QNX starts an enthusiast effort, only to abandon it shortly after. Buyer beware, then, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

We've got more X11-related news this day, the day of Xmas. Phoenix is a new X server, written from scratch in Zig (not a fork of Xorg server). This X server is designed to be a modern alternative to the Xorg server. Phoenix' readme page Phoenix will only support a modern subset of the X11 protocol, focusing on making sure modern applications from roughly the last 20 years or so work. It also takes quite a few pages out of the Wayland playbook by not having a server driver interface and by having a compositor included. On top of that, it will isolate applications from each other, and won't have a single framebuffer for all displays, instead allowing different refresh rates for individual displays. The project also intends to develop new standards to support things like per-monitor DPI, among many other features. That's a lot of features and capabilities to promise for an X server, and much like Wayland, the way they aim to get there is by effectively gutting traditional X and leaving a ton of cruft behind. The use of Zig is also interesting, as it can catch some issues before they affect any users thanks to Zig's runtime safety option. At least it's not yet another thing written in Rust like every other project competing with an established project. I think this look like an incredibly interesting project to keep an eye on, and I hope more people join the effort. Competition and fresh, new ideas are good, especially now that everything is gravitating towards Wayland - we need alternatives to promote the sharing of ideas.

Wayback, the tool that will allow you to run a legacy X11 desktop environment on top of Wayland, released a new version just before the Christmas. Wayback 0.3 overhauls its custom command line option parser to allow for more X.org options to be supported, and its manual pages have been cleaned up. Other fixes merely include fixing some small typos and similar small changes. Wayback is now also part of Alpine Linux' stable releases, and has been made available in Fedora 42 and 43. Wayback remains alpha software and is still under major development - it's not yet ready for primetime.

Can you use a cheap FPGA board as a base for a new computer inspired by the original IBM PC? Well, yes, of course, so that's what Yuri Zaporozhets has set out to do just that. Based on the GateMateA1-EVB, the project's got some of the basics worked out already - video output, keyboard support, etc. - and work is underway on a DOS-like operating system. A ton of work is still ahead, of course, but it's definitely an interesting project.

Elementary OS, the user-friendly Linux distribution with its own unique desktop environment and applications, just released elementary OS 8.1. Its minor version number belies just how big of a punch this update packs, so don't be fooled here. We released elementary OS 8 last November with a new Secure Session-powered by Wayland-that ensures applications respect your privacy and consent, a brand new Dock with productive multitasking and window management features, expanded access to cross-platform apps, a revamped updates experience, and new features and settings that empower our diverse community through Inclusive Design. Over the last year we've continued to build upon that work to deliver new features and fix issues based on your feedback, plus we've improved support for a range of devices including HiDPI and Multi-touch devices. Danielle Fore at the elementary OS blog The biggest change from a lower-level perspective is that elementary OS 8.1 changes the default session to Wayland, leaving the X11 session as a fallback in case of issues. Since the release of elementary OS 8, a ton of progress has been made in improving the Wayland session, fixing remaining issues, and so on, and the team now feels it's ready to serve as the default session. Related to this is a new security feature in the Wayland session where the rest of the screen gets dimmed when a password dialog pops up, and other windows can't steal focus. The switch to Wayland also allowed the team to bring fractional scaling to elementary OS with 8.1. Elementary OS is based on Ubuntu, and this new release brings an updated Hardware Enablement stack, which brings things like Linux 6.14 and Mesa 25. This is also the first release with support for ARM64 devices that can use UEFI, which includes quite a few popular ARM devices. Of course, the ARM64 version comes as a separate ISO. Furthermore, there's a ton of improvements to the dock - which was released with 8 as a brand-new replacement for the venerable Plank - including bringing back some features that were lost in the transition from Plank to the new dock. Animations are smoother, elementary OS' application store has seen a slew of improvements from clearer licensing information, to a controller icon for games that support them, to a label identifying applications that offer in-app purchases, and more. There's a lot more here, like the accessibility improvements we talked about a few months ago, and tons more.

Mount Amiga filesystem images on macOS/Linux using native AmigaOS filesystem handlers via FUSE. amifuse runs actual Amiga filesystem drivers (like PFS3) through m68k CPU emulation, allowing you to read Amiga hard disk images without relying on reverse-engineered implementations. Amifuse GitHub page Absolutely wild.

Almost two months ago, a tape containing UNIX v4 was found. It was sent off to the Computer History Museum where bitsavers.org would handle the further handling of the tape, and this process has now completed. You can download the contents of the tape from Archive.org - which is sadly down at the moment - while squoze.net has a readme with instructions on how to actually run the copy of UNIX v4 recovered from the tape.

If you've been waiting for the right moment to try FreeBSD on a laptop, take note - 2025 has brought transformative changes. The Foundation's ambitious Laptop Support & Usability Project is systematically addressing the gaps that have held FreeBSD back on modern laptop hardware. The project started in 2024 Q4 and covers areas including Wi-Fi, graphics, audio, installer, and sleep states. 2025 has been its first full year, and with a financial commitment of over $750k to date there has been substantial progress. Alice Sowerby for the FreeBSD Foundation I think that's an understatement. As part of this effort, FreeBSD introduced support for Wi-Fi 4 and 5 in 2025, with 6 being worked on, and sound support has been greatly improved as well, with new tools and better support for automatic sound redirection for HDA cards. Another major area of improvement is support for various forms of sleep and wake, with modern standby coming in FreeBSD 15.1, and possibly hibernate in 15.2. On top of all this, there's the usual graphics drivers updates, as well as changes to the installer to make it a bit more friendly to desktop use cases. The FreeBSD project is clearly taking desktop and especially laptop seriously lately, and they're putting their money and developers where their mouth is. Add in the fact that FreeBSD already has pretty decent Wayland support, and it the platform will be able to continue to offer the latest KDE releases (and GNOME, if they figure out replacements for its systemd dependencies). With progress like this, we're definitely going to see more and more people making the move to FreeBSD for desktop and laptop use over the coming years.

If Excel rules the world, Word rules the legal profession. Jordan Bryan published a great article explaining why this is the case, and why this is unlikely to change any time soon, no matter how many people from the technology world think they can change this reality. Microsoft Word can never be replaced. OpenAI could build superintelligence surpassing human cognition in every conceivable dimension, rendering all human labor obsolete, and Microsoft Word will survive. Future contracts defining the land rights to distant galaxies will undoubtedly be drafted in Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word is immortal. Jordan Bryan at The Redline by Version Story Bryan cites two main reasons underpinning Microsoft Word's immortality in the legal profession. First, lawyers need the various formatting options Word provides, and alternatives often suggested by outsiders, like Markdown, don't come close to offering even 5% of the various formatting features lawyers and other writers of legal documents require. By the time you add all those features back to Markdown, you've recreated Word, but infinitely worse and more obtuse. Also, and this is entirely my personal opinion, Markdown sucks. Second, and this one you've surely heard before: Word's .docx format is effectively a network protocol. Everyone in the legal profession uses it, can read it, work with it, mark it up, apply corrections, and so on - from judges to lawyers to clients. If you try to work with, say, Google Docs, instead, you create a ton of friction in every interaction you have with other people in the legal profession. I vividly remember this from my 15 years as a translator - every single document you ever worked with was a Microsoft Office document. Sure, the translation agency standing between the end client and the translator might have abstracted the document into a computer-aided translation tool like Trados, but you're still working with .docx, and the translated document sent to the client is still .docx, and needs to look identical to the source, just in a different language. In the technology world, there's a lot of people who come barging into some other profession or field, claiming to know everything, and suggest to just do x", without any deference to how said profession or field actually operates. Just use Markdown and git" even if the people involved have no clue what a markup language even is let alone what git is; just use LibreOffice" even if the people involved will skewer you for altering the formatting of a document even ever so slightly; we all know examples of this. An industry tends to work a certain way not because they're stupid or haven't seen the light - it tends to work that way because there's a thousand little reasons you're not aware of that make that way the best way.

In 1979, VisiCalc was released for the Apple II, and to this day, many consider it the very first spreadsheet program. Considering just how important spreadsheets have become since then - Excel rules the world - the first spreadsheet program is definitely an interesting topic to dive into. It turns out that while VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program for home computers, it's not actually the first spreadsheet program, period. That honour goes to LANPAR, created ten years before VisiCalc. Ten years before VisiCalc, two engineers at Bell Canada came up with a pretty neat idea. At the time, organizational budgets were created using a program that ran on a mainframe system. If a manager wanted to make a change to the budget model, that might take programmers months to create an updated version. Rene Pardo and Remy Landau discussed the problem and asked what if the managers could make their own budget forms as they would normally write them?" And with that, a new idea was created: the spreadsheet program. The new spreadsheet was called LANPAR, for LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random" (but really it was a mash-up of their last names: LANdau and PARdo). Jim Hall at Technically We Write While there wasn't a graphical user interface on the screen with a grid and icons and everything else we associate with a spreadsheet today, it was still very much a spreadsheet. Individual cells were delinianated with semicolons, you could write down formulas to manipulate these cells, and the program could do forward referencing. The idea was to make it so easy to use, managers at Dell Canada could make budgeting changes overnight, instead of having programmers take weeks or months to do so. I'm not particularly well-versed in Excel and spreadsheets in general, but I can definitely imagine advanced users no longer really seeing the grids and numbers as individual entities, instead visualising everything much more closely to what LANPAR did. Like Neo when he finally peers through the Matrix.

Jamie Zawinski, one of the founders of Netscape and later Mozilla, has dug up the original versions of the iconic Mozilla dinosaur logos, and posted them online in all their glory. While he strongly believes Mozilla owned these logos outright, and that they were released as open source in 1998 or 1999, he can't technically prove that. It has come to my attention that the artwork for the original mozilla.org dinosaur" logo is not widely available online. So, here it is. As I explained in some detail in my 2016 article They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo", I commissioned this artwork from Shepard Fairey to use as the branding of the newly-founded mozilla.org and our open source release of the Netscape source code, which eventually became Firefox. This happened in March 1998. Jamie Zawinski The original Mozilla dinosaur logos are works of pure art. They sure don't make logos like this anymore.

Mark Weiser has written a really interesting article about just how desirable new computing environments, like VR, AI" agents, and so on, really are. On the topic of AI" agents, he writes: Take intelligent agents. The idea, as near as I can tell, is that the ideal computer should be like a human being, only more obedient. Anything so insidiously appealing should immediately give pause. Why should a computer be anything like a human being? Are airplanes like birds, typewriters like pens, alphabets like mouths, cars like horses? Are human interactions so free of trouble, misunderstandings, and ambiguity that they represent a desirable computer interface goal? Further, it takes a lot of time and attention to build and maintain a smoothly running team of people, even a pair of people. A computer that I must talk to, give commands to, or have a relationship with (much less be intimate with), is a computer that is too much the center of attention. Mark Weiser That's one hell of a laser-focused takedown of AI" tools in modern computing. When it comes to voice input, he argues that it's too intrusive, too attention-grabbing, and a good tool is supposed to be the exact opposite of that. Voice input, especially when there's other people around, puts the interface at the center of everyones attention, and that's not what you should want. With regards to virtual reality, he notes that it replaces your entire perception with nothing but interface, all around you, making it as much the center of attention as it could be. What's most fascinating about this article and its focus on AI" agents, virtual reality, and more, is that it was published in January 1994. All the same questions, worries, and problems in computing we deal with today, were just as much topics of debate over thirty years ago. It's remarkable how you could copy and paste many of the paragraphs written by Weiser in 1994 into the modern day, and they'd be just applicable now as they were then. I bet many of you had no idea the quoted paragraph was over thirty years old. Mark Weiser was a visionary computer scientist, and had a long career at Xerox PARC, eventually landing him the role of Chief Technology Officer at PARC in 1996. He coined the term ubiquitous computing" in 1988, the idea that computers are everywhere, in the form of wearables, handhelds, and larger displays - very prescient for 1988. He argued that computers should be unobtrusive, get out of your way, help you get things done that aren't managing and shepherding the computer itself, and most of all, that computers should make users feel calm. Sadly, he passed away in 1999, at the age of 46, clearly way too early for someone with such astonishing forward-looking insight into computing. Looking at what computers have become today, and what kinds of interfaces the major technology companies are trying to shove down our throats, we clearly strayed far from Weiser's vision. Modern computers and interfaces are the exact opposite of unobtrusive and calming, and often hinder the things you're trying to get done more than they should. I wonder what Weiser would think about computing in 2025.

In recent years, things have not been going well for Mozilla. Firefox's market share is a rounding error, and financially, the company is effectively entirely dependent on free money from Google for making it the default search engine in Firefox. Mozilla's tried to stem the bleeding with deeply unpopular efforts like focusing on online advertising and cramming more and more AI" into Firefox, but so far, nothing has worked, and more and more of the remaining small group of Firefox users are moving to modded versions of Firefox without the AI" nonsense and other anti-features. The task of turning the tide is now up to Mozilla's new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, who took up the role starting today. In his first message to the public in his new role as CEO of Mozilla, he lays out his vision for the future of the company. What are his plans for Mozilla's most important product, the Firefox web browser? Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions. Anthony Enzor-DeMeo So far, the AI" additions to Firefox have not exactly been met with thunderous applause - to put it mildly - and I don't see how increasing these efforts is going to magically turn that sentiment around. I'd hazard a guess that Firefox users, in particular, are probably quite averse to AI" and what it stands for, further strengthening the feeling that the people leading Mozilla seem a little bit out of touch with their own users. Add to this the obvious fact that AI" is a bubble waiting to pop, and I'm left wondering how investing in AI" now is going to do anything but make Mozilla waste even more money. I don't want Firefox to fail, as it is currently the only browser that isn't Chrome, Chrome in a trench coat, or Safari, but it seems Mozilla is trying to do everything to chase away what few users Firefox had left. In the short term, we can at least use modified versions of Firefox that have the AI" nonsense and other anti-features removed, but for the long term, we're going to need something else if Mozilla keeps going down the same path it's been going in recent years. The only viable long-term alternative is Servo, but that's still a long way off from being a usable day-to-day browser. The browser landscape ain't looking so hot, and this new Mozilla CEO is not making me feel any better.

Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It's neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don't think about it often. I applied it to qsort, which sadly accepts no context pointer. More practical would be working around insufficient custom allocator interfaces, to create allocation functions at run-time bound to a particular allocation region. I've learned a lot since I last wrote about this subject, and a recent article had me thinking about it again, and how I could do better than before. In this article I will enhance Win32 window procedure callbacks with a fifth argument, allowing us to more directly pass extra context. I'm using w64devkit on x64, but the everything here should work out-of-the-box with any x64 toolchain that speaks GNU assembly. Chris Wellons Sometimes, people get upset when I mention something is out of my wheelhouse, so just for those people, here's an article well outside of my wheelhouse. I choose honesty over faking confidence.

Any computing device will inevitably get a custom operating system - whether based on an existing operating system or something entirely custom - and of course, Kobo e-readers are no exception. QuillOS is an Alpine Linux-based distribution specifically developed for the unique challenges of e-readers, and comes with a custom Qt-based user interface, support for a whole slew of e-book formats, NetSurf as a web browser, encrypted storage, a VNC viewer, and a ton more. Basic hardware capabilities like Wi-Fi and power management are also supported, and it has online update support, too. The current release is already two years old, sadly, so I'm not sure how active the project is at this point. I wanted to highlight it here since something like this is a great way to liberate your Kobo device if, for some reason, Kobo ever started making their devices worse through updates, or the company shutters its services. You know, something that seems rather relevant today. Sadly, my own Kobo does not seem to be supported.

There's a new Haiku monthly activity report, and this one's a true doozy. Let's start with the biggest news. The most notable development in November was the introduction of a port of the Go programming language, version 1.18. This is still a few years old (from 2022; the current is Go 1.25), but it's far newer than the previous Go port to Haiku (1.4 from 2014); and unlike the previous port which was never in the package repositories, this one is now already available there (for x86_64 at least) and can be installed via pkgman. Haiku activity report As the project notes, they're still a few versions behind, but at least it's a lot more modern of an implementation than they had before. Now that it's in the repositories for Haiku, it might also attract more people to work on the port, potentially bringing even newer versions to the BeOS-inspired operating system. Welcome as it may be, this new Go port isn't the only big ticket item this month. Haiku can now gracefully recover from an app_server crash, something it used to be able to do a long time ago, but which was broken for a long time. The app_server is Haiku's display server and window manager, so the ability to restart it at runtime after a crash, and have it reconnect with still-running applications, is incredibly welcome. As far as I can tell, all modern operating systems can do this by now, so it's great to have this functionality restored in Haiku. Of course, aside from these two big improvements, there's the usual load of fixes and changes in applications, drivers, and other components of the operating system.

Alpine Linux maintainer Ariadne Conill has published a very interesting blog post about the shortcomings of both sudo and doas, and offers a potential different way of achieving the same goals as those tools. Systems built around identity-based access control tend to rely on ambient authority: policy is centralized and errors in the policy configuration or bugs in the policy engine can allow attackers to make full use of that ambient authority. In the case of a SUID binary like doas or sudo, that means an attacker can obtain root access in the event of a bug or misconfiguration. What if there was a better way? Instead of thinking about privilege escalation as becoming root for a moment, what if it meant being handed a narrowly scoped capability, one with just enough authority to perform a specific action and nothing more? Enter the object-capability model. Ariadne Conill To bring this approach to life, they created a tool called capsudo. Instead of temporarily changing your identity, capsudo can grant far more fine-grained capabilities that match the exact task you're trying to accomplish. As an example, Conill details mounting and unmounting - with capsudo, you can not only grant the ability for a user to mount and unmount whatever device, but also allow the user to only mount or unmount just one specific device. Another example given is how capsudo can be used to give a service account user to only those resources the account needs to perform its tasks. Of course, Conill explains all of this way better than I ever could, with actual example commands and more details. Conill happens to be the same person who created Wayback, illustrating that they have a tendency to look at problems in a unique and interesting way. I'm not smart enough to determine if this approach makes sense compared to sudo or doas, but the way it's described it does feel like a superior, more secure solution.

Unix has been enormously successful over the past 55 years. It started out as a small experiment to develop a time-sharing system (i.e., a multi-user operating system) at AT&T Bell Labs. The goal was to take a few core principles to their logical conclusion. The OS bundled many small tools that were easy to combine, as it was illustrated by a famous exchange between Donald Knuth and Douglas McIlroy in 1986. Today, Unix lives on mostly as a spiritual predecessor to Linux, Net/Free/OpenBSD, macOS, and arguably, ChromeOS and Android. Usenet tells us about the height of its early popularity. Gabor Nyeki There are so many amazing stories in this article, I honestly have no idea what to highlight. So first and foremost, I want you to read the whole thing yourself, as everyone's bound to have their own personal favourite section that resonates the most. My personal favourite story from the article - which is just an aside, to illustrate that even the asides are great - is that when Australia joined Usenet in 1983, new posts to Usenet were delivered to the country by airmail. On magnetic tape. Once per week. The overarching theme here is that the early days of UNIX, as documented on Usenet, were a fascinating wild west of implementations, hacks, and personalities, which, yes, clashed with each other, but also spread untold amounts of information, knowledge, and experience to every corner of the world. I hope Nyeki will write more of these articles.

System76, creator of Pop!_OS and prominent Linux OEM, has just announced the release of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS - normally not something I particularly care about, but in this case, it comes with the first stable release of COSMIC Desktop. COSMIC is a brand new desktop environment by System76, written in Rust, and after quite some time in development, it's now out in the wild as a stable release. Today is special not only in that it's the culmination of over three years of work, but even more so in that System76 has built a complete desktop environment for the open source community. We're proud of this contribution to the open source ecosystem. COSMIC is built on the ethos that the best open source projects enable people to not only use them, but to build with them. COSMIC is modular and composable. It's the flagship experience for Pop!_OS in its own way, and can be adapted by anyone that wants to build their own unique user experience for Linux. Carl Richell You don't need to run Pop!_OS to try out COSMIC, as it's already available on a variety of other distributions (although it may take a bit for this stable version to land in the respective repositories).

I'm sure most of us here are aware of the bright red-and-yellow colour scheme called Hot Dog Stand", included in Windows 3.1. While it's not the only truly garish colour scheme included in Windows 3.1, its name probably did a lot to make it stand out from the others. There's been a ton of speculation about the origins of the colour scheme, and why it was included in Windows 3.1, but it seems nobody ever bothered to look for someone who actually worked on the Windows 3.1 user interface - until now. PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon contacted Virginia Howlett, Microsoft's first user interface designer who joined the company in 1985, and asked her about the infamous colour scheme. It turns out that the origin story for the infamous colour scheme is rather mundane. In Howlett's own words: I do remember some discussion about whether we should include it, and some snarky laughter. But it was not intended as a joke. It was not inspired by any hot dog stands, and it was not included as an example of a bad interface-although it was one. It was just a garish choice, in case somebody out there liked ugly bright red and yellow. Virginia Howlett, quoted by Wes Fenlon in PC Gamer Howlett then lists a few other included colour schemes that were just as garish, or even more so, as examples to underline her point. Personally, I'm a huge proponent of allowing users to make their interfaces as ugly and garish as they want, as the only arbiter on what's on your screen is you, and nobody else. Hot Dog Stand and similar garish themes need to make a comeback, because there's bound to be some people out there whose vibes align with it.

IBM owns Red Hat which in turn runs Fedora, the popular desktop Linux distribution. Sadly, shit rolls downhill, so we're starting to see some worrying signs that Fedora is going to be used a means to push AI". Case in point, this article in the Fedora Magazine: Generative AI systems are changing the way people interact with computers. MCP (model context protocol) is a way that enables generate AI systems to run commands and use tools to enable live, conversational interaction with systems. Using the new linux-mcp-server, let's walk through how you can talk with your Fedora system for understanding your system and getting help troubleshooting it! Mairin Duffy and Brian Smith at Fedora Magazine This linux-mcp-server" tool is developed by IBM's Red Hat, and of course, IBM has a vested interest in further increasing the size of the AI" bubble. As such, it makes sense from their perspective to start pushing AI" services and tools all the way down to the Fedora community, ending up with articles like this one. What's sad is that even in this article, which surely uses the best possible examples, it's hard to see how any of it could possibly be any faster than doing the example tasks without the help" of an AI". In the first example, the AI" is supposed to figure out why the computer is having Wi-Fi connection issues, and while it does figure that out, the solutions it presents are really dumb and utterly wrong. Most notably, even though this is an article about running these tools on a Fedora system, written for Fedora Magazine, the AI" stubbornly insists on using apt for every solution, which is a basic, stupid mistake that doesn't exactly instill confidence in any of its other findings being accurate. The second example involves asking the AI" to explain how much disk space the system is using, and why. The prompt" (the human-created question" the AI" is supposed to answer") is bonkers long - it's a 117 words long monstrosity, formatted into several individual questions - and the output is so verbose and it takes such a scattershot approach that following-up on everything is going to take a huge amount of time. Within that same time frame, it would've been not only much faster, but also much more user-friendly to just open Filelight (installed by default as part of KDE), which creates a nice diagram which instantly shows you what is taking up space, and why. The third example is about creating an update readiness report for upgrading from Fedora 42 to Fedora 43, and its prompt" is even longer at 190 words, and writing that up with all those individual questions must've taken more time than to just... Do a simple dry-run of a dnf system upgrade which gets you like 90% of the way there. Here, too, the AI" blurts out so much information, much of which entirely useless, that going through it all takes more time than just manually checking up on a dnf dry run and peaking at your disk space usage. All this effort to set all of this up, and so much effort to carefully craft complex prompts", only to end up with clearly wrong information, and way too much superfluous information that just ends up distracting you from the task you set out to accmplish. Is this really the kind of future of computing we're supposed to be rooting for? Is this the kind of stuff Fedora's new AI" policy is supposed to enable? If so, I'm afraid the disconnect between Fedora's leadership and whatever its users actually use Fedora for is far, far wider than I imagined.

I have some potentially devastating news for POWER users interested in using FreeBSD, uncovered late last month by none other than Cameron Kaiser. FreeBSD is considering retiring powerpc64 prior to branching 16, which would make FreeBSD 15 the last stable version to support the architecture. (32-bit PowerPC is already dropped as of FreeBSD 14, though both OpenBSD and NetBSD generally serve this use case, and myself I have a Mac mini G4 running a custom NetBSD kernel with code from FreeBSD for automatic restart.) Although the message says powerpc64 and powerpc64le" it later on only makes specific reference to the big-endian port, whereas both endiannesses appear on the FreeBSD platform page and on the download server. Cameron Kaiser There's two POWER9 systems in my office, so this obviously makes me quite sad. At the same time, though, it's hard not to understand any possible decision to drop powerpc64/powerpc64le at this point in time. Raptor's excellent POWER9 systems - the Blackbird, which I reviewed a few years ago, and the Talos II, which I also have - are very long in the tooth at this point and still quite expensive, and thanks to IBM royally screwing up POWER10, we never got any timely successors. There were rumblings about a possible POWER11-based successor from Raptor back in July 2025, but it's been quiet on that front since. In other words, there are no modern powerpc64 and powerpc64le systems available. POWER10 and brand new POWER11 hardware are strictly IBM and incredibly expensive, so unless IBM makes some sort of generous donation to the FreeBSD Foundation, I honestly don't know how FreeBSD is supposed to keep their powerpc64 and powerpc64le ports up-to-date with the latest generation of POWER hardware in the first place. It's important to note that no final decision has been made yet, and since that initial report by Kaiser, several people have chimed in to argue the case that at least powerpc64le (the little endian variant) should remain properly supported. In fact, Timothy Pearson from Raptor Engineering stepped up the place, and stated he's willing to take over maintainership of the port, as Raptor has been contributing to it for years anyway. Raptor remains committed to the architecture as a whole, and we have resources to assist with development. In fact, we sponsor several FreeBSD build machines already in our cloud environment, and have kernel developers working on expanding and maintaining the FreeBSD codebase. If there is any concern regarding hardware availability or developer resources, Raptor is willing and able to assist. Timothy Pearson Whatever decision the FreeBSD project makes, the Linux world will be fine for a while yet as IBM contributes to its development, and popular distributions still consider POWER a primary target. However, unless either IBM moves POWER hardware downmarket (extremely unlikely) or the rumours around Raptor have merit, I think at least the FreeBSD powerpc64 (big endian) port is done for, with the powerpc64le port hopefully being saved by people hearing these alarm bells.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio waded into the surprisingly fraught politics of typefaces on Tuesday with an order halting the State Department's official use of Calibri, reversing a 2023 Biden-era directive that Mr. Rubio called a wasteful" sop to diversity. While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio's directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed radical" diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork. Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz at The New York Times

If you're old enough, you no doubt remember that up until the 2.6.0 release of the Linux kernel, an odd number after the first version number indicated a pre-release, development version of the kernel. Even though this scheme was abandoned with the 2.6.0 release in 2003 and since then every single release has been a stable release, it seems the ghosts of this old versioning scheme still roam the halls, because prominent Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman just published an explainer about Linux kernel versions. Despite having a stable release model and cadence since December 2003, Linux kernel version numbers seem to baffle and confuse those that run across them, causing numerous groups to mistakenly make versioning statements that are flat out false. So let's go into how this all works in detail. Greg Kroah-Hartman I genuinely find it difficult to imagine what could possibly be unclear about Linux kernel version numbers. The Linux kernel uses a very generic major.minor scheme, but that's not where the problems lie - it's the actual development process of each of these numbered release that's a bit more complex. This is where we have to talk about things like the roughly 10-week release cycle, containing a 2-week merge window, as well as Torvalds handing off the stable branch to the stable kernel maintainers. The other oddity is when the major version number gets incremented - the first number in the version number. There's no real method to this, as Kroah-Hartman admits Torvalds increments this number whenever the remaining numbers get too high and unwieldy to deal with. Very practical, but it does mean that going from, say, 5.x to 6.x doesn't really imply there's any changes in there that are any bigger or more disruptive than when going from 6.8.x to 6.9.x or whatever. There's a few more important details in here, of course, like where LTS releases come from, but that's really it - nothing particularly groundbreaking or confusing.

With the current, rapidly deteriorating state of the Windows operating system, you have to take the small wins you can get: Microsoft is now offering the option of removing AI" actions from Windows 11's context menus. buried deep in the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7344 release notes, there's this nugget: If there are no available or enabled AI Actions, this section will no longer show in the context menu. Windows Insider Preview release notes If you then go to Settings > Apps > Actions and uncheck all the AI" actions, the entire submenu in Windows 11's context menus will vanish. While this is great news for those Windows users who don't want to be bothered by all the AI" nonsense, I wish Microsoft would just give users a proper way to edit the context menu that doesn't involve third party hackery. KDE's Dolphin file manager gives me full control over what does and does not appear in its context menu, and I can't imagine living without this functionality - there's so many file-related operations I never use, and having them clutter up the context menu is annoying and just slows me down. There's more substantial and important changes in this Insider Preview Build too, most notably the rollout of the Update Orchestration Platform, which should make downloading and installing application updates less cumbersome, but since it's a new feature, application won't support it right away. This release also brings the new Windows MIDI Services, and Microsoft hopes this will improve the experience for musicians using MIDI 1.0 or MIDI 2.0 on Windows. There's a slew of smaller changes, too, of course. I'm not exactly sure when these new features will make their way to production installations - who does, honestly, with Microsoft's convoluted release processes - but I hope it's sooner rather than later.

When Mac OS X was designed, it switched to the bundle structure inherited from NeXTSTEP. Instead of this multitude of resources, apps consisted of a hierarchy of directories containing files of executable code, and those with what had in Mac OS been supporting resources. Those app bundles came to adopt a standard form, shown below. Howard Oakley A short, but nonetheless informative overview of the structure of a macOS application. I'm sure most people on OSNews are aware that a macOS application is a bundle, which is effectively a glorified directory containing a variety of files and subdirectories that together make up the application. I haven't used macOS in a while, but I think you can right-click on an application and open it as a folder to dig around inside of it. I'm trying to remember from my days as a Mac OS X user - 15-20 years ago - if there was ever a real need to do so, but I'm sure there were a few hacks you could do by messing around with the files inside of application bundles. These days, perhaps with all the code-signing, phoning-home to Apple, and other security trickery going on, such acts are quite frowned upon. Does making any otherwise harmless changes inside an application bundle set off a ton of alarm bells in macOs these days?

The end of an era, perhaps. Applets are officially, completely removed from Java 26, coming in March of 2026. This brings to an official end the era of applets, which began in 1996. However, for years it has been possible to build modern, interactive web pages in Java without needing applets or plugins. TeaVM provides fast, performant, and lightweight tooling to transpile Java to run natively in the browser. And for a full front-end toolkit with templates, routing, components, and more, Flavour lets you build your modern single-page app using 100% Java. Andrew Oliver As consumers, we don't really encounter Java that much anymore unless we play Minecraft, but that doesn't mean Java no longer has a place in this world. In fact, it still consistently ranks in the top three of most popular programming languages, so any tools to make using Java easier, both for programmers and users, are welcome.