OSnews

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.

We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine. Although Perplexity initially crawls from their declared user agent, when they are presented with a network block, they appear to obscure their crawling identity in an attempt to circumvent the website's preferences. We see continued evidence that Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing their sourceASNsto hide their crawling activity, as well as ignoring - or sometimes failing to even fetch -robots.txtfiles. The Internet as we have known it for the past three decades israpidly changing, but one thing remains constant: it is built on trust. There are clear preferences that crawlers should be transparent, serve a clear purpose, perform a specific activity, and, most importantly, follow website directives and preferences. Based on Perplexity's observed behavior, which is incompatible with those preferences, we have de-listed them as a verified bot and added heuristics to our managed rules that block this stealth crawling. The CloudFlare Blog Never forget they destroyed Aaron Swartz's life - literally - for downloading a few JSTOR articles.

It's not every day you stumble upon an X11 desktop environment you've never hard of, but today's one of those days. The Orbitiny Desktop Environment is a one-person project, consisting of an entirely custom desktop environment written in Qt. Version 1.0 Pilot 4 was just released. Built from the ground up usingQtand coded in C++,Orbitiny Desktopis a new, 100% portable, innovative and traditional but modern looking desktop environment for Linux.Innovativebecause it has featuresnot seen in any other desktop environment beforewhilekeeping traditional aspects of computing alive(desktop icons, menus etc). Portable because you can run it on any distro and on any live CD and that's because everything gets saved inside the directory that gets created when the archive is extracted (this can be changed so that the settings go to $HOME/.config/orbitiny). Orbitiny Desktop Environment Gitea page It's got all the usual amenities like a desktop, panels, and so on, and a custom file manager. It's also replete with a ton of small features that you don't see very often, like full mouse gesture support on the desktop and a device managerthat can enable/disable devices without blacklisting kernel modules. When you cut or copy a file, its icon will get a little emblem to indicate it's on the clipboard, you can append and prepend files using simple drag-and-drop operations, you can set individual desktop directories for each virtual desktop, and much more. Now, it's technically not a full desktop environment, because it doesn't have things like a session manager, power manager, various hardware configuration panels, and so on, but it can be run on top of existing desktop environments. While it has basic Wayland support, not all components work there, so X11 is the main focus for now. Considering it's a one-person project, you can't expect a bug or issue-free experience, but that doesn't mean it's any less damn impressive. I honestly feel like there's something valuable and interesting here, and I'd love for more people to get involved to see where this can go. There's clearly a ton of love and dedication here, and the various unique features clearly set it apart from everything else. If you have the skills, consider helping out.

Solene Rapenne, who writes a lot about and contributes to operating systems like OpenBSD and Qubes OS, has published a primer about what, exactly, Qubes OS is. I like to call Qubes OS a meta operating system, because it is not a Linux / BSD / Windows based OS: its core is Xen (some kind of virtualization enabled kernel). Not only it's Xen based, but by design it is meant to run virtual machines, hence the name meta operating system" which is an OS meant to run many OSes make sense to me. Solene Rapenne Rapenne explains the various ways in which isolated virtual machines are used in Qubes OS, and it's easy to see just how secure Qubes OS' way of doing things is. At the same time, it seems quite cumbersome to me as a regular user, and I don't think I'm up for dealing with all of that. If you do security research, handle private or classified data, are a whistleblower or an investigative journalist, thoug, Qubes seems like a natural choice. Interesting to note is that Rapenne used to use OpenBSD for her security work, but moved to Qubes OS because its virtual machine infrastructure is far more robust, and hardware support is better, as well.

In October 1997 you could have bought a PowerBook 3400c running up to a 240MHz PowerPC 603e for $6500 , which was briefly billed as the world's fastest laptop, or you could have bought this monster new to the market, the RDI PrecisionBook running up to a 160MHz (later 180MHz) PA-7300LC starting at $12,000 . Both provided onboard Ethernet, SCSI and CardBus PCMCIA slots. On the other hand, while the 3400c had an internal media bay for either a floppy or CD-ROM, both external options on the PrecisionBook, the PrecisionBook gave you a 1024*768 LCD (versus 800*600 on the 3400c), a bigger keyboard, at least two 2.5'' hard disk bays and up to 512MB of RAM (versus 144MB) - and HP-UX. And, through the magic of Apple's official Macintosh Application Environment, you could do anything on it an HP PA-RISC workstation could do and run 68K Mac software on it at the same time. Look at the photograph and see: on our 160MHz unit we've got HP-UX 11.00 CDE running simultaneously with a full Macintosh System 7.5.3 desktop. Yes, only a real Power Mac could run PowerPC software back then, but 68K software was still plentiful and functional. Might this have been a viable option to have your expensive cake and eat it too? We'll find out and run some real apps on it (includingthatgame we must all try running), analyze its performance and technical underpinnings, and uncover an unusual artifact of its history hidden in the executable. Cameron Kaiser at Old Vintage Computing Research I actually have Apple's Macintosh Application Environment installed and running on my PA-RISC machines, and it's incredible just how well-made and complete it really is. You get a full Mac desktop and its applications, excellent integration with the host, file sharing between host and client, and so much more. Running it on newer versions of HP-UX than it was originally intended for does lead to the odd issue here and there, but due to HP-UX' excellent backwards compatibility, it all just works. It has created this odd situation that my 2004 HP c8000 machine, with two of the fastest dual-core PA-RISC processors ever made, will most likely be the fastest machine I'll ever officially run classic Mac OS on. Sure, you can use other emulators not created and blessed by Apple and run classic Mac OS on much faster hardware, but if you want to stick to official, supported methods of running the classic Mac OS, it doesn't get much faster than this.

AWS: Not even once. This prominent Ruby developer lost his entire test environment - which, ironically, was pivotal to AWS' own infrastructure - because of a rogue team within AWS itself that apparently answers to no one and worked hard to cover up a dumb mistake. On July 23, 2025, AWS deleted my 10-year-old account and every byte of data I had stored with them. No warning. No grace period. No recovery options. Just complete digital annihilation. This is the story of a catastrophic internal mistake at AWS MENA, a 20-day support nightmare where I couldn't get a straight answer to Does my data still exist?", and what it reveals about trusting cloud providers with your data. Abdelkader Boudih Nightmare scenario doesn't even begin to describe what happened here.

Security isn't exactly a strong point of X11, and improving it is one of the main reasons why Wayland is such a vast improvement over X11. Just one of the many examples of X11 being inherently insecure is that keyloggers are entirely trivial on X11, because keylogger functionality is effectively built into it. Of course, this isn't exactly news, and as Peter Hofmann details, there is an old X11 extension that adds somewhat rudimentary security to X11: theX11 SECURITY extension. This extension is part of every X.org installation, but it hasn't seen any meaningful work in a long, long time. What it does is allow you to do is set X11 clients as trusted" and untrusted", where untrusted clients cannot interact with tusted ones. This provides some basic security - it actually prevents keylogging! - but only very basic, as Hoffman notes: The thing is that it's immediately clear that this extension -in its current state- is not the answer to X11 is insecure": You only have two classes, trusted and untrusted. That's not enough. For example: When you run your browser as untrusted, you can't simultaneously run some sandboxed program (Snap, Flatpak, ...)in a meaningful way, because those two clients can spy on each other again. You want a proper per-client isolation instead. Sandboxing plays an important role here. If you run programs the traditional way" (i.e., full access to the filesystem and network), then an attacker can do all kinds of things and X11 keylogging is just one of a million concerns. Peter Hofmann but it also happens to break a lot of things, and many applications simply don't work with it at all. Oddly enough, Firefox has no issues with it, and will happily run in untrusted mode. The biggest problem, however, is that untrusted clients only have access to exactly two other X11 extensions, which leads to a whole host of problems, like no scaling, broken keyboard layouts, no 3D acceleration, and so on. On top of all of that, it breaks clipboard functionality, as anything copied in an untrusted client cannot be pasted anywhere else. As such, Hoffman concludes: In its current state, I'd say the SECURITY extension is somewhat useful", but more work would have to be done. Both in X.Org and in the clients. You would have to come up with a new clipboard protocol, for example. And the list goes on. (See where I'm going with this?) It's not that simple. Peter Hofmann Since pretty much nobody adopted it when this extension came out in the '90s, and it hasn't seen much work since, the amount of work that would be required to bring it up to modern standards would be astronomical, and trying to get clients to adopt it would probably prove fruitless considering Wayland already exists, and offers all of the potential security benefits and then some. People often claim it would be easy" to modernise X11, but just this one particular issue - security, kind of important - shows just how quickly the X11 house of cards comes crashing down if you try to do anything to drag it out of its '80s and '90s mindset.

Patchworkis a 64-bit monolithic NON-POSIX operating system for the x86_64 architecture that rigorously follows a everything is a file" philosophy. Built from scratch in C it takes many ideas from Unix, Plan9, DOS and others while simplifying them and sprinkling in some new ideas of its own. PatchworkOS GitHub page Patchwork is a surprisingly advanced operating system considering it's a hobby project. It has multithreading with aconstant-time scheduler, fully preemptive mutitasking, SMP, file-based IPC (includingpipes,shared memory,socketsand Plan9 inspired signals" callednotes), and much more. It also uses a Linux-style VFS and has a custom C standard library. On top of that, there's a modular window manager that supports themes, in which everything is a window, and so much more. It supports x86_64, but only supports running in RAM. It's licensed under the MIT license.

Claude Code has considerably changed my relationship to writing and maintaining code at scale. I still write code at the same level of quality, but I feel like I have a new freedom of expression which is hard to fully articulate. Claude Code has decoupled myself from writing every line of code, I still consider myself fully responsible for everything I ship to Puzzmo, but the ability to instantly create a whole scene instead of going line by line, word by word is incredibly powerful. Orta Therox Oh sweet Summer child. As a former translator, I can tell you that's how it starts. As time goes on, your clients or your manager will demand more and more code from you. You will stop checking every line to meet the deadlines. Maybe you just stop checking the boilerplate at first, but it won't stay that way. As pressure to be more productive" mounts, you'll start checking fewer and fewer lines. Before you know it, your client or manager will just give you entire autogenerated swaths of code, and your job will be to just go over it, making sure it kind of works. Before long, you realise there are fewer and fewer of you. Younger and less-skilled developers" can quickly go over autogenerated code just as well as you do - but they're way cheaper. You see the quality of the code you sign off on deteriorate rapidly, but you have no time, and not enough pay, to rewrite the autogenerated code. It works, kind of, and that will have to be enough. The autogenerated codebases you're supposed to be checking and fixing are so large now, you're no longer even really checking anything anymore. Quick, cursory glances, that's all you have time for and can afford. Documentation and commenting code went out the window a long time ago, and every line of code scrolling across your screen is more tech debt you don't care about, because it's not your code anyway. And then it hits you. There's no skill here. There's no art here. You're no longer a programmer. There's no career prospects. Scrolling past shitty autogenerated code day in, day out, without the time or pay to wrangle it into something to be proud of, is the end of the line for you. Speak up about it, and you'll be replaced by someone cheaper. The first time I was given a massive pile of autotranslated text to revise, without enough time and pay to ensure I was delivering a quality product, I quit and left the translation industry instantly. Like programming, translating is part skill, part art, and I didn't get two university degrees in language and translation just to deliver barely passable trash. I took pride in my work, and I wasn't going to let anyone put my name under a garbage product. Programmers, you're next. Will you have the stones to stand by your art?

Wayback has been barely announced, and the first version 0.1 has barely left git, but it's already time for version 0.2. It won't surprise you to find out this isn't some massive release, and you'd be right. It really only addresses a few very small bugs, while the developers also take the opportunity to highlight Wayback is now available on Gentoo GURUand Nixpkgs.

If there's one thing Microsoft is good at, it's creating weird variants of Windows with odd names that tech media talk about for like a day, after which everyone, especially Microsoft, forgets they even exist. Usually, these weird Windows variants are the result of either legal requirements, or, more commonly, of perceived threats to Windows' dominance on the desktop. An example of the former are the various N" editions of Windows, while an example of the latter is the one we're talking about today: Windows 11 SE. I honestly had completely forgotten Windows 11 SE existed, and most likely you did, too. Windows 11 SE was (one of) Microsoft's response(s) to the growing popularity of Chromebooks in schools, and as such, this Windows variant omitted a bunch of features for performance and distraction reasons, stored files in OneDrive instead of locally, was locked down so only administrators could control which applications could be used, and so on. In fact, unless specifically whitelisted, Windows 11 SE would not run any Win32 or UWP applications - everything had to be either a PWA or a website. Notably, it was only available in combination with a few specific devices. The past tense in the preceding paragraph should be a dead giveaway of what's happening. Yes, Microsoft just cancelled the whole thing, after being on the market for only a few years. Microsoft will not release a feature update after Windows 11 SE, version 24H2. Support for Windows 11 SE-including software updates, technical assistance, and security fixes-will end in October 2026. While your device will continue to work, we recommend transitioning to a device that supports another edition of Windows 11 to ensure continued support and security. Windows 11 SE support document In other words, if your school fell for Microsoft's sales pitch for Windows 11 SE, you're kind of screwed after October 2026, because Windows 11 SE only shipped on specific, low-cost, low-powered devices. You'd think other variants of Windows 11 will more or less run on those, too, but if not - or far too slowly - your school is now sitting on a pile of e-waste. Anybody want to run a betting pool for the Windows variant Microsoft will cancel next?

Late last year, we talked about Bismuth, a virtual machine being developed by Eniko Fox, one of the developers of the awesome game Kitsune Tails. Part of a operating systems development side project, Bismuth is a VM (think Java Virtual Machine, not VMware) on top of Fox' custom kernel, designed specifically to run programs in a sandbox. The first article detailed the origins of Bismuth, and the second article delved into memory safety, sandboxing, and more. We're a few months down the line now, and Fox recently published another article in the series, this time explaining how a hello world-program works in Bismuth. This is the third in aseries of postsabout a virtual machine I'm developing as a hobby project called Bismuth. I've talked a lot about Bismuth, mostly on social media, but I don't think I've done a good job at communicating how you go from some code to a program in this VM. In this post I aim to rectify that by walking you through the entire life cycle of a hello world Bismuth program, from the highest level to the lowest. Eniko Fox There's a ton of detail here, and at the end you'll have a pretty solid grip on how Bismuth works.

Servo is unique for a few other reasons, too. It's managed by theLinux Foundation Europewith decisions made by a technical steering committee, not a big tech company. One of the main goals is to be an embeddable web rendering engine," meaning it's not just for browsers-it could be a replacement forElectronor theAndroid WebView. Servo is also the first completely new browser engine in decades, so it's taking lessons learned from mainstream browsers while building a new foundation. Corbin Davenport At the moment, as Davenport notes, Servo is far from ready to be a daily driver browser engine. Tons of websites' rendering is broken and some crash the browser altogether, and performance is nowhere near that of the other browser engines. This makes perfect sense, as Servo is still in heavy development, and there's no massive corporation with endless money (and ulterior motives) backing it. Still, out of all the various attempts at wrestling control away from Blink and WebKit, I feel like Servo's the one with the most promise in the long term.

Getting hardware to run AmigaOS 4.1 or MorphOS on isn't always easy, cheap, or even possible in the first place. Luckily, there's now an incredibly easy and straightforward way to emulate these two operating systems: Kyvos, developed by George Sokianos. Kyvos is a user-friendly frontend for Qemu, designed to streamline the creation of AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS emulated environments on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Pronounced kee-vos," this name is inspired by the Greek word ," meaning cube, symbolizing these virtual systems running within the host OS. Setting up an AmigaOS 4 or MorphOS system is effortless with Kyvos-just a few clicks, and you're ready to go. A helpful wizard guides users in locating or downloading necessary dependencies, including Qemu and 7zip binaries. George Sokianos Of course, nothing is stopping you from following guides online to build your own Qemu virtual machine and associated complex command to start it, but Kyvos takes all that work out of your hands and makes it incredibly easy, all wrapped in a nice graphical user interface. It's available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. All you need is Kyvos - which is free, but Ko-Fi donations are appreciated - and a copy of either AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition or MorphOS. Based on a toot by Hyperion, the developers of AmigaOS 4.1, you need the version for the AmigaOne board specifically, which will set you back about 30 for a boxed copy (I've asked if there are any download versions for sale as well). A copy of MorphOS costs about 79, and can be bought from inside MorphOS after installation. Note that you can also use MorphOS without a license, but it will slow down its performance after about 30 minutes until you reboot. I'm stoked to try this out, as I've been wanting to review both of these operating systems again, since my previous reviews of Amiga OS 4 (from 2009) and MorphOS (also from 2009) are horribly outdated at this point. MorphOS on old Apple PowerPC hardware just doesn't cut it - believe me, I've tried - and AmigaOS 4 hardware is quite expensive and outdated at this point. Until - and let's face it, if - the Mirari comes out, easy emulation through Qemu might be an option.

Stuck at the bottom of NVIDIA's announcement of its latest graphics driver update is a section about the company's plan for Windows 10 support. As we all know, Windows 10 will become end-of-life in October of this year, and like so many others, NVIDIA needs to deal with this. Before we get to Windows 10, though, NVIDIA also reminds users that a few very popular GPU generations will no longer receive driver updates after October of this year. The company notes that GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures will Game Ready Driver in October 2025, after which they'll only get quarterly security updates for another three years. These three architectures roughly correspond to the GeForce GTX 7xx, 9xx, and 10xx series and their mobile counterparts, as well as a few other higher-end cards from the same generations. The full list is available to see if your GPU will receive its last driver update in a few months. As for Windows 10 support, the company notes: Also, we're extending Windows 10 Game Ready Driver support for all GeForce RTX GPUs to October 2026, a year beyond the operating system's end-of-life, to ensure users continue to receive the latest day-0 optimizations for new games and apps. Andrew Burnes at nvidia.com Considering half of Windows users are still using Windows 10, this is probably the correct policy by NVIDIA. Ideally this support would last even longer than just that one year, but with a company like NVIDIA you kind of have to take what you can get, because generous they are not.

BlueOS kernel is written in Rust, featuring security, lightweight, and generality. It is compatible with POSIX interfaces and supports Rust's standard library. BlueOS kernel GitHub page This is the kernel for the BlueOS operating system, developed by Vivo, a Chinese consumer electronics company. Sadly, all of the websites and documentation for BlueOS are written in Mandarin, making it virtually impossible to really get a grip on what they're developing, and I certainly don't trust Google Translate or whatever enough to give me a proper, trustworthy, and accurate translation. I hope the company either hires some translators, or perhaps enthusiasts with the right skillset can provide some more insight over the coming years. It seems similar to Huawei's HarmonyOS Next, and it's apparently shipping on one of Vivo's smartwatches.

Last week-end, I was invited to theUNIX Social CampinDijon, Franceto talk about the reasons I still use OpenBSD these days and why should others do so; or at least, have a look atOpenBSD. Joel Carnat Here's my short pitch as to why you should use OpenBSD: it's the closest you'll get to a traditional, classic UNIX, while still using a modern and maintained operating system. OpenBSD just makes sense, and every time I run into some issue or I want to know how something in OpenBSD works, the answers always make me go well that makes sense". That's rare in modern computing, and we need to cherish it.

Are you still using LinkedIn, the website where failed tech startup entrepreneurs go to die and AI" influencers try to sell you on the latest version of the chatbot Florpium like a Utah mom trying to sell leggings that are totally not an MLM? If you are, and the other ten thousand reasons not to use the website incarnation of an ad for a personal injury lawyer along I-11 in Henderson, Nevada, weren't enough, Microsoft just handed you another one. LinkedInremovedtransgender-related protections from its policy on hateful and derogatory content. The platformno longer lists misgenderingor deadnamingof transgender individuals" as examples of prohibited conduct. While content that attacks, denigrates, intimidates, dehumanizes, incites or threatens hatred, violence, prejudicial or discriminatory action" is still considered hateful, addressing a person by a gender and name they ask not be designated by is not anymore. Similarly, the platform removed race or gender identity" from its examples of inherent traits for which negative comments are considered harassment. That qualification of harassment is now kept only for behaviour that is actively disparaging another member's perceived gender", not mentioning race or gender identity anymore. Matti Schneider at the Open Terms Archive Microsoft joined the chorus of pathetic, spineless US tech companies bowing to far-right extremism long ago, and this is just another sign that Microsoft, like so many other US tech companies, is pulling an IBM. They did learn from the best, after all, and it doesn't surprise me one bit that all of these CEOs click their heels like the good little brownshirts that they are. Anyway, LinkedIn has no value to anyone with even a gram of self-respect, and Microsoft's other products are such utter trash they basically have to make you upgrade at the barrel of a gun. For those using their products - do you hate yourself that much? You deserve so much more.

Adjusted for the inevitable progress of time, the Common Desktop Environment or CDE is the best desktop environment of all time, and no, I will not be taking question at this time. OpenBSD wasn't yet graced by CDE's presence, but this is currently changing as the first commit for porting CDE to OpenBSD has appeared. It's still rough around the edges and very slightly tested. I wouldn't use is as a daily driver, it's old unsecure code but it's fun if you want to bring back memories. Antoine at the openbsd-ports mailing list On top of that, this being the initial commit also means there's probably bugs and other issues lurking in the code, so caution is definitely advised.

Microsoft is finally changing the way Task Manager reports CPU utilisation to make it consistent across the different tabs. So apparently this has been gradually rolling out to the 34 different Windows 11 beta dev preview testing alpha release candidate service pack 4 channels since early this year, but then stopped the roll-out to fix some issues. These issues seem fixed now, as the roll-out restarted this week. It"s an important change that I think y'all will care about. From the original announcement of the change back in February: We are beginning to roll out a change to the way Task Manager calculates CPU utilization for the Processes, Performance, and Users pages. Task Manager will now use the standard metrics to display CPU workload consistently across all pages and aligning with industry standards and third-party tools. For backward compatibility, a new optional column called CPU Utility is available (hidden by default) on the Details tab showing the previous CPU value used on the Processes page. Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc at the Windows Blogs Before this change, Task Manager's Processes tab didn't take the number of processor cores into account when calculating PCU usage, so you could see a process at 100% CPU usage even if it was only using one core. These new changes standardise CPU usage reporting across all tabs, taking the number of CPU cores into account properly. Rejoice.

RISC-V has been supported in the upstream Linux kernel since 2017. But without a common hardware baseline, ensuring compatibility across builds and distros hasn't been easy. The ecosystem was in need of a compelling, clearly defined hardware target - something both software and hardware teams could rally around to produce silicon capable of running stable, enterprise-grade software. This target arrived in October 2024 with the ratification of the application-class RVA23 Profile - RISC-V-speak for a baseline configuration, similar to microarchitecture feature levels in x86. The culmination of years of progress, RVA23 brings together the work done to shape the ISA and standardize key extensions such as vector, bit manipulation and hypervisor. James De Vile at RISC-V International's blog Such a standard, stable baseline is incredibly welcome, and RISC-V working to have everything part of the upstream Linux kernel is crucial. Having to deal with out-of-tree patches and drivers and specific builds for specific boards is a nightmare - look at Linux on ARM - and hinders adoption of RISC-V.

This release includes some Ext4 performance improvements; XFS support for large atomic writes; support for USB audio offload; support for zero-copy send TCP payloads from DMABUF memory; various futex improvements; initial support for Intel Trusted Domain Extensions; automatic weighted interleaved memory allocation policy; support for sending coredumps over an AF_UNIX socket, and make easier to build your kernel optimized for your local CPU. As always, there are many other features, new drivers, improvements and fixes. KernelNewbies: Linux 6.16 You'll get it eventually, usually when the first few point releases iron out any troubling issues.

The European Union is in the process of testing an age-verification application, which people can use to verify their age in a privacy-preserving manner (in theory, of course). There's countless important discussions to be had about whether or not age verification, privacy-preserving or not, is even something we should want, but that's a topic for another time and for people smarter than I. For now, several member states are currently testing the application on a voluntary basis, and the application itself is open source, with the code hosted on GitHub. Aside from the obvious concerns about just how private such an application can even be, and concerns about whether or not we should even want something like this, there's another major problem: the application intends to make use of and require application and device verification by using the proprietary tools for such functionality from Google and Apple, built into Android and iOS, respectively. Listed as future features": App and device verification based on Google Play Integrity API and Apple App Attestation The application's GitHub page This is a massive problem. For reasons that should be obvious to anyone with at least six functioning neurons, the European Union, as well as countless other countries, are trying to reduce their dependency on US technology companies. As such, it's indefensible to then require anyone who needs to use age verification in the European Union to use an application that will only work on Google-approved Android devices and even then, only when installed from the Google Play Store, with the only alternative being, of all things, Apple's iOS. This means that the EU will require anyone who needs age verification to have either a Google or an Apple account, and can only use Google-approved Android or iOS. This application would not work on, say, GrapheneOS or any other non-Google-approved Android ROM - in fact, even if you were to compile the application yourself, you wouldn't be able to actually use it because it wouldn't be installed from the Google Play Store. Of course, any mobile operating other than Android or iOS need not apply either. The danger of tying age verification to Google and Apple did not go by unnoticed, and a GitHub issue raised the issue a few weeks ago. I would like to strongly urge to abandon this plan. Requiring a dependency on American tech giants for age verification further deepens the EU's dependency on America and the USA's control over the internet. Especially in the current political climate I hope I do not have to explain how undesirable and dangerous that is. TheLastProject in the GitHub issue The comment thread attached to the issue is long, but during the two weeks since the issue was raised, nobody from the application's team has answered or even acknowledged people's concerns, which doesn't exactly inspire confidence in this being taken seriously. I just hope that with this entire project being in the early testing phases, at least someone manages to realise tying this to Google and Apple is one of the dumbest ideas in a long, long time.