OSnews

Like clockwork, every six months, we have a new OpenBSD release. OpenBSD 7.8 adds support for the Raspberry Pi 5, tons of improvements to sleep, wake, and hibernate, the TCP stack can now run in parallel on multiple processors, and so much more. DRM has been updated to match Linux 6.12.50, and drivers for the Qualcomm Snapdragon DRM subsystem and Qualcomm DisplayPort controller were added as well. The changelog is, as always, long and detailed, so head on over for the finer details. OpenBSD users will know how to upgrade, and new users can visit the download page.

Raymond Chen has another great post about some of the classic icons from Windows 95, this time focusing on pifmgr.dll. In this file, there are a variety of random-seeming icons, and it turns out they're random for a reason: they were just a bunch a fun, generic icons intended for people to use when creating PIF files. The icons inpifmgr.dll were created just for fun. They were not created with any particular programs in mind, with one obvious exception. They were just a fun mix of icons for people to use for their own homemade shortcut files. Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing For those of us who didn't grow up with Windows, or who, god forbid, are too young to know, PIF or personal information files are effectively shortcuts to DOS programs for use in a multitasking environment. A PIF file would not only point to the relevant DOS executable, but also contain information about the environment in which said executable was supposed to run. Their history goes back to IBM's TopView, and Microsoft later embraced and adapted them for use in Windows.

Microsoft has published a set of short questions and answers about driver updates through Windows Update, and there's one tidbit in there I found interesting. Driver datesmight look old, butthat isnottrue.The driver date is descriptive infoset by the driverproviderand can be any date they choose. Whendeterminingwhich driver to install, Windows Update uses targeting information set by theproviderinside thedriverfiles todeterminethe best driver. This lets the deviceproviderpromote the best driver, regardless of the chosen date. Microsoft knowledge base article Whenever I do have to fiddle with Windows machines, I always wondered about why some drivers in Windows Update would show some seriously old dates. It turns out the answer is as obvious as it always tends to be: OEMs.

KDE is on a roll lately, and keeps on rolling with today's release of KDE Plasma 6.5. As the project itself notes, this release focuses on relatively small improvements, refinements, and other niceties, without making any massive changes. With Linux desktops taking accessibility more seriously lately than ever before, I want to focus on the accessibility improvements first. The Orca screen reader now announces caps lock state changes, and screen readers will now describe the ShortcutsandAutostartpages more optimally. There's also a new grayscale colour filter for people sensitive to colours, developers have done Plasma-wide pass to eliminate bright flashes in the UI, and the desktop zoom feature will now follow the text insertion point as it moves around the UI. Keyboard navigation in various parts of Plasma have been improved, and a few other small changes have been to improve accessiblity. Other changes include rounded bottom window corners (which can be turned off), automatic and scheduled theme and wallpaper transitions (e.g. from light to dark), and a new and improved applications permissions settings panel. A small new feature that will be a massive time saver for me is the ability to favourite items in your clipboard history, so they remain available over time. I reuse certain copied bits of text all the time, and I can't wait to start using this little addition. Remote desktop has also received a ton of love in Plasma 6.5. You can now share your clipboard, and you no longer need to create dedicated RDP user accounts; you can just log in with your normal account credentials as you would expect you could. Plasma's Discover application, used for application and update management, has seen major work to improve its performance - very welcome, for sure. Of course, there's a ton of other changes, too. KDE Plasma 6.5 will find its way to your distribution soon enough.

Now that ARM's memory tagging, used extensively by Android ROMs such as GrapheneOS and now also by Apple, is becoming the new norm to aid in improving memory safety, the x86 world can't sit idly by. As such, Intel and AMD have announced a ChkTag, x86's version of memory tagging. ChkTag is a set of new and enhanced x86 instructions to detect memory safety violations, such as buffer overflows and misuses of freed memory (use-after-free). ChkTag is designed to be suitable for hardening applications, operating system kernels, hypervisors for virtualization, and UEFI firmware. ChkTag places control in the software developers' hands to balance their security needs with operational elements that often become prominent when deploying code. For example, ChkTag provides instruction-granular control over which memory accesses are checked. Compilers can offer optimizations and new language features or intrinsics. ChkTag prepares x86 for a future with increasing amounts of code written in memory-safe languages running alongside code in other languages. Furthermore, ChkTag loads tags from linear/virtual memory that can often be committed on demand. Intel and AMD's announcement It's important to note that ChkTag - why not just call it CheckTag - isn't ready yet, nor is there any indication when it will be included in any processors from Intel and AMD. The goal is to catch certain memory safety problems in hardware. According to Intel and AMD's shared announcement, developers will have fine-grained control over the feature, allowing them to tap into the functionality in whatever way they deem necessary or valuable for their software in specific circumstances. My fear is that Intel and AMD will use this feature as a product differentiator, restricting it to either more expensive processors or to Xeon/Threadripper processors, thereby fracturing the market. This would inevitably lead to spotty support for the feature across the x86 landscape, meaning most ordinary consumer won't benefit from it at all.

I can exclusively reveal today Anthropic's spending on Amazon Web Services for the entirety of 2024, and for every month in 2025 up until September, and that that Anthropic's spend on compute far exceeds that previously reported. Furthermore, I can confirm thatthrough September, Anthropic has spent more than 100% of its estimated revenue (based on reporting in the last year) on Amazon Web Services, spending $2.66 billion on compute on an estimated $2.55 billion in revenue. Ed Zitron These numbers do not even include what the company spends on Google's services. Going through all the numbers and reporting, Zitron explains that the more successful" Anthropic becomes, the bigger the gap between income from paying customers and its spending on Amazon and Google services becomes. It's simply unsustainable, and the longer we keep this scam going, the worse the consequences will be when the bubble pops. Sadly, nobody will go to jail once hell breaks loose.

This post is a combination of looks at several oddities among my pile of NES and Famicom cartridges. Why, for example, do I have a copy ofGyromitewhen I don't have a R.O.B.? Did I miss something interesting in myMMC blog post? And while it is the Japanese release ofKid Niki: Radical Ninja, is myKaiketsu Yanchamarubeing a littletooradical? Who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong? Some of these questions will be answered! Nicole Branagan at Nicole Express A well-written post with tons of weird NES nerdery. Branagan delivers, every time.

With official support for Windows 10 having officially ended a few days ago, let's take a look and see how its successor, Windows 11, is doing. Microsoft released thefirst Patch Tuesday update (KB5066835)for Windows 11 25H2 this past week and it is probably fair to say that it has been a rough start for the new feature update. Despite the announcement of a wide rollout wherein the new version isnow available for download for everyone, the company has already confirmed large-scale issues. First up, Microsoft was forced to issue an emergency workaround as the updatebroke localhost authand following that the company today has confirmed another problem where recovery can become impossible if you happen to use a USB keyboard or mouse. Sayan Sen at Neowin Yes. This is a real thing. This latest round of patches makes it entirely impossible to navigate the Windows Recovery Environment with USB keyboards and mice. Since it's 2025, USB is probably the protocol through which most people connect their keyboard and mice (although to be fair, some laptops probably still default to internal PS/2 for their touchpads). This means that if you run into a problem with Windows 11 that requires you to access the Windows Recovery Environment - perhaps OneDrive did too many lines of cocaine again - you can't actually do anything inside of it. There's no fix yet, so you either remove the offending patches, hope your PC still has a PS/2 port and you still have PS/2 peripherals, or hope Windows 11 won't fall over and die until Microsoft releases a fix for the issue. Of course, people still using Windows 10, people who aren't installing every single Windows 11 update as they become available, and people using real operating systems have nothing to worry about. You can't help but wonder, though - with Microsoft pushing AI" so hard, how many of these recent faceplants are the result of Microsoft engineers frantically trying to meet code quotas using Copilot?

Today, the Servo team has released new versions of theservoshellbinaries for all our supported platforms, taggedv0.0.1. These binaries are essentially the same nightly builds that were already available from thedownload pagewith additional manual testing, now tagging them explicitly as releases for future reference. Servo's official blog Servo is making steady progress, and that's awesome news. Every month a whole slew of new features and improvements make their way into this new browser engine, and I'm fairly confident Servo is our best shot at regaining some independence from Google and Apple in the web browser space. Other efforts are either too limited in scope, targeting only a specific niche, already being eaten alive by massive corporations, written in non-memory safe languages, run by people whose code I wouldn't even trust to flush my toilet, or any combination thereof. Servo is it, folks. Our best shot.

In older versions of Windows, if you had a video playing, took a screenshot, and pasted that screenshot into Paint, you could sometimes see the video continue to play inside Paint. What kind of sorcery enabled this to happen? A few of you will realise instantly why this used to happen: render surfaces. Back in at least the Windows 9x days, playing video involved drawing solid green where you wanted the video to go (the video player window), rendering the video pixels to a surface shared with the graphics card, and then have the graphics card replace said green pixels with the video pixels from the shared surface. This approach has a whole array of benefits, not least of which is that it allowed you to render the video on a thread separate from the main user interface, so that if the main interface was sluggish or locked up, the video would keep rendering properly. You could also create two shared surfaces to render multiple frames at once, thereby eliminating tearing. Knowing this, it should be obvious what's going on with the screenshot and Pain story. Now, when you load the image into Paint or any other image viewer, Windows sends those green pixels to the video card, but if the media player is still running, then its overlay is still active, and if you put Paint in the same place that the media player window is, then the green pixels in Paint get changed into the pixels of the active video. The video card doesn't know that the pixels came from Paint. Its job is to look for green pixels in a certain region of the screen and change them into the pixels from the shared surface. If you move the Paint window to another position where it doesn't overlap the media player, or if the media player isn't playing a video, you will see the bitmap's true nature: It's just a bunch of green pixels. Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing I've never had this particular oddity happen, but I do have vague memories of video player windows rendering tons of green artifacts whenever something went wrong with the video player, the file it was trying to play, or whatever else, and I guess the cause of those green artifacts is the same. In modern operating systems, graphics rendering of the UI is done entirely on the GPU, with only the final composition being sent to your display. As such, the green screen effect no longer occurs.

Chris Siebenmann with another interesting look at a tiny detail of UNIX history. A few years ago I wrote aboutthe divide in chown() about who got to give away files, where BSD and V7 were on one side, restricting it to root, while System III and System V were on the other, allowing the owner to give them away too. The answer is that the restriction was added in V6, wherethe V6 chown(2) manual pagehas the same wording as V7. In Research Unix V5 and earlier, people can chown(2) away their own files; this is documented inthe V4 chown(2) manual pageand is whatthe V5 kernel code for chown() does. This behavior runs all the way back tothe V1 chown() manual page, with an extra restriction that you can't chown() setuid files. Chris Siebenmann The deeper levels of this particular rabbit hole need more exploring, though, as eventually Siebenmann hits a roadblock when trying to figure out why, exactly, the restriction was added, and why certain versions chose to not adopt the new restriction. This may be part of the lore of UNIX we won't uncover, until one of the people involved speaks up.

Microsoft has posted a blog post about detailing its latest round of additions to Windows 11, and as will surely not surprise you, it's AI", all the time, whether you like it or not. I'm not even going to detail most of these features", as I'm sure most of them will just become yet another series of checkboxes on whatever debloating tool you prefer. Still, there's one recurring theme running throughout Microsoft's recent AI" marketing that really stands out, and this blog post is no different: Until now, the power of AI has often been gated behind your skill at prompting. The more context you provide and detail you share, the richer response you receive in return. But typing it out can be tedious and time consuming, especially if it takes multiple tries to get it right. With 68% of consumers reporting using AI to support their decision making, voice is making this easier. Yusuf Mehdi at the Windows Blogs You're holding it wrong" has become a recurring meme whenever someone places the blame for a shit product on its users, but we're really starting to see this line of thinking explode with AI" tools now. If you're getting bad, wrong, or downright made up results out of your text generator - which happens all the time - the problem isn't that the text generator is shit; no, the problem is that the user is shit at manipulating and coercing it into generating the right string of words. This is a major problem for AI" companies, as the obtuseness of input and the inevitable shoddiness of results is most likely putting users off using them, and if there's one thing these companies needs, it's users. All of them are hemorrhaging money without any realistic paths towards profitability, so there's a mad scramble to convince and trick people into using AI" tools, and every single recent effort by Microsoft regarding Windows and Office is 100% geared towards this goal. That's why nothing is sacred, and everything from Notepad to Paint, from the the Windows Start menu to context menus, from the Explorer file manager to your Windows command line is getting Copilot buttons and sparkly icons: Microsoft has to be able to brag about AI" user numbers to keep the scam going. As the bubble gets bigger and bigger, and as we come closer and closer to that satisfying pop, you can expect ever more places in Windows to get AI" features. I can't wait for the sparkle icon to show up when formatting a disk, installing a driver through Device Manager, or during a kernel panic. I can't wait for the blue screen of death to open a Copilot chat that advises you to do something utterly unrelated. You can do it, Microsoft.

This beautiful purple slab is the Silicon Graphics Indigo^2 (though, unlike its earlier namesake, not actually indigocoloured) with the upper-tier MIPS R10000 CPU and IMPACT graphics. My recollection was that it worked at the time, but I couldn't remember if it booted, and of course that was no guarantee that it could still power on. If this machine is to stay working and in the collection, we're gonna need a Refurb Weekend. Cameron Kaiser at Old Vintage Computing Research Out of all the retro UNIX workstations of old, the machines from SGI are both the most popular, the most well-known, and thus, also some of the most expensive. Yet, at the same time, everything up until the very last generation or two of MIPS IRIX workstations, generally do not seem to be particularly rare either. The community around SGI's machines and IRIX is also quite thriving still, much more so than the communities of the other commercial UNIX variants. Still, the odds of me completing my collection of final-generation commercial UNIX workstations are low, exactly because of just how rare and stupidly expensive the SGI Tezro is. As always, Cameron Kaiser goes into a level of detail few other people in the world do when it comes to rare or special computers, and this article about the Silicon Graphics Indigo^2 is no exception. Detailed photographs, an in-depth history of the machine, detailed descriptions of the hardware, the various fixes that needed to be performed, getting it back up and running, and everything else. There's really nobody else writing these kinds of articles. The weekend's here, so sit back, relax, and have fun.

The NLnet foundation has sponsored a project to add WPA3 support to OpenBSD, support which in turn can be used by other operating systems. This project delivers the second open-source implementation of WPA3, the current industry standard for Wi-Fi encryption, specifically for the OpenBSD operating system. Its code can also be integrated by other operating systems to enable modern Wi-Fi encryption, thereby enhancing the diversity and resilience of the global IT ecosystem. NLnet foundation announcement WPA3 support in Linux seems to be the only other open source implementation of WPA3, so this is great news not only for OpenBSD, but also for other operating systems who rely on BSD network drivers through compatibility layers, like Haiku. FreeBSD, meanwhile, is planning to build its own WPA3 implementation, so they, too, might benefit form the work that's going to be done through OpenBSD. October is listed as the start of this project, so work is probably already underway.

One of the problems the ReactOS project continually has to deal with is that Windows is, of course, an evolving, moving target. Trying to be a Windows-compatible operating system means you're going to have to tie that moving target down, and for ReactOS, the current focus is on being compatible with Windows Server 2003 or later". This or later" part is getting a major boost in a very crucial area. The history of ReactOS spans a wider range than the lives of many of the people who work on it today. Incredible individuals have come and gone from the project with vastly different goals for what they want to see developed. In recent years, better hardware support has emerged as one of those goals. As ReactOS gazes towards the world of Vista and beyond, a few questions about how hardware works emerge. Vista introduced massive overhauls to how hardware drivers are written and maintained. Gradually we're trying to handle many of these overhauls with great success. Today we talk about WDDM, or the Windows Display Driver Model. An initial investigation into WDDM on ReactOS There's a ton of technical details in the blog post, but the end result is that ReactOS can now tentatively load some WDDM drivers. For instance, ReactOS can run NVIDIA's Windows 7 driver now, and the example used an NVIDIA GTX 1070. Of course, we're looking at basic 2D display output only and no 3D acceleration, so don't expect to be running any 3D games on ReactOS any time soon. Still, this is a pretty massive step forward for ReactOS, but of course, a ton more work remains to be done, as is always the case for ReactOS. I do have to say - the fact that WDDM support is now on the table and progress is being made here is great news. ReactOS is not even remotely close to being an alternative to Windows, but even if it never gets there, it's a great showcase for what talented, determined developers can do, and they deserve recognition for that.

Apple's new Liquid Glass interface design brings transparency and blur effects to all Apple operating systems, but many users find it distracting or difficult to read. Here's how to control its effects and make your interface more usable. Although the relevant Accessibility settings are quite similar across macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, I separate them because they offer different levels of utility in each. I have no experience with (or interest in) a Vision Pro, so I can't comment on Liquid Glass in visionOS. Adam Engst at TidBITS An incredibly detailed article showing exactly how to change the relevant settings, and exactly what they do, for each of Apple's relevant platforms. I have a feeling quite a few of you will want to bookmark this one.

As someone who cut their teeth on Maemo (the N800/N900 still live in my basement) and carried the first Jolla dev device, I like to pull out my SailfishOS phones every few months to see how things are progressing. Here's where I'm at in September 2025. Nick Schmidt I was one of the very first people to review the original Jolla Phone way back in 2014, and I also happen to own the quite rare Jolla Tablet, so I was definitely a serious backer and believer in the platform back when it first entered the market. Sadly, the pace of improvements was slow, and failed adventures and mismanagement eventually led to the platform almost dying out. It's only in recent years that they've been back on track and Sailfish OS is a more serious option again, but reading through Nick Schmidt's findings, it seems the same problems still haunt the platform. And we all know what the main problem will be: application availability. In your day-to-day use, you're going to be spending a lot of time using the Android compatibility layer, because native Sailfish applications simply don't pull their weight. This leads to the age-old problem of any operating system that loses focus on native applications and opts to go all-in on compatibility layers or ports instead, and int he case of Sailfish that means: why run Sailfish to run Android applications poorly, when you can also just run Android? And why develop native applications, when your Android build can run using the compatibility layer? OS/2 (with Windows applications) and Haiku (with Qt/GTK applications) suffer from the same problem. Apparently, the Jolla C2 phone is not exactly great either, and doesn't showcase Sailfish properly, and Sailfish's keyboard is still unpleasant to use, a problem I also had in my original review so many years ago. There are some bright spots, too; the swipe-based navigation is still great, and apparently Wi-Fi connectivity is much more stable now. Still, it seems like Sailfish is suffering from more or less exactly the kind of problems you'd expect a small platform to suffer from, and whether or not you can deal with those problems is a more a question of dedication than just altering some use patterns. Android and iOS, though illegal practices, have sucked all the air out of the room, and I doubt we're ever going to get any of it back.

Open AI has recently announced deals worth $600 Billion with Nvidia, AMD, and Oracle. OpenAI is able to spend hundreds of billions of dollars they do not have because those companies are paying that same money back to OpenAI via investment. The infinite money glitch means that stocks keep going higher as more circular revenue cycles between the same players. Sasha Yanshin The scam is so brazen, so public, so obvious. The foxes aren't just in the hen house - they bought the whole goddamn hen house.

Another month, another activity report from the Haiku project. This past month, a lot of work went into the FreeBSD/OpenBSD network driver compatibility layer, opening the door to drivers using interfaces other than PCI or USB. Support for NFS4 took a bit of a hit with last month's changes to VFS, and these have been addressed, and other aspects of NFS4 have been improved as well. On top of these two bigger items, there's a list of smaller changes and fixes as well, but it's been a calm month for Haiku so there's less activity than normal. I'm not sure what to add in a second paragraph here. I'm nearing act 3 in Silksong? Is that relevant here? I doubt it, but I still wanted to mention it. Only a few loose ends in act 2 and on Hornet goes!

Text ads on the search results page will now be grouped with a single Sponsored results" label. This new, larger label stays visible as people scroll, making it clear which results are sponsored - upholding our industry-leading standards for ad label prominence. We're also adding a new Hide sponsored results" control that allows you to collapse text ads with a single click if you want to focus only on organic results. In our testing, we found that the new design helps people navigate the top of the page more easily. The new design keeps the size of ads the same and you'll still never see more than four text ads in a grouping. Omkar Muralidharan on Google's Ads and Commerce Blog I guess this is an improvement, but I doubt this will convince anyone to turn off their ad blocker or switch back to Google from another search engine. The option to collapse sponsored results is especially welcome, but I wish they'd gone a step further and added an option in settings to permanently collapse them - which, of course, is never going to happen. Removing any and all AI" summaries would be nice, too, but with the entire technology industry pushing stringent AI" KPIs on employees, that's not going to happen, either. Regardless, it's still an improvement to Google's results page, and while we may not realise it in our little bubble here, the number of people whose search experience this will improve is absolutely massive. It's been a while since I've seen Google make a change to their search results page that doesn't make it substantially worse, so I'll take what I can get.

Are you still using your Amiga with the 1.3 version of Kickstart, but would you prefer an updated version of Workbench with a long list of additional features, improvements, and other niceties? Old Blue Workbench is a Workbench replacement for Amigas running Kickstart 1.3 written byMats Eirik Hansen. It adds a ton of features and improvements, such as enhanced menus in the Workbench 2.0 style, improved windows with things like lasso select, icon sorting, and more, and browser windows for navigating the filesystem. You can also add a dock with drag and drop support, launch applications at startup, define your own menus, and a whole lot more. It's free, and if I had an old Amiga I would love to try this out.

The world's best operating system, 9front, has released a new release called Release. 9front is a maintained fork of Plan 9. The new release Release brings atomic(2) functions for arm, arm64, mips, 386 and amd64, improved stability when the kernel runs out of memory, memdraw and devdraw now support affine warp primitive, and more. You can download Release from the usual mirrors.

The LineageOS project has released version 23 of their AOSP-based Android variant. LineageOS 23 is based on the initial release of Android 16 - so not the QPR1 release that came later - because Google has not made the source code for that release available yet. Like other, similar projects, LineageOS also suffers from Google's recent further lockdown of Android; not only do they not have access to Android 16 QPR1's source code, they also can't follow along with the latest security patches for Android due to changes Google made to the patch release process, and without the device trees for Pixel devices, Pixels are now no longer supported any better than other Android devices. LineageOS 23 brings many of the same features Android 16 brought, and comes with updated versions of LineageOS' own camera application and music player, as well as a new TV launcher. They've also worked hard to make it much easier to run LineageOS in QEMU, they've improved support for running mainline kernels, they've made it easier to merge security fixes and updates for various kernel versions, and much more. Update instructions can be found on the devices page, and specifically note that if you're using an unofficial LineageOS build, you'll need to perform the original installation again. With LineageOS being the Debian of the Android world, you can expect a ton of these unofficial versions to pop up over the coming months for devices LineageOS does not officially support.

With iOS 26, Apple seems to be leaning harder into visual design and decorative UI effects - but at what cost to usability? At first glance, the system looks fluid and modern. But try to use it, and soon those shimmering surfaces and animated controls start to get in the way. Let's strip back the frost and look at how these changes affect real use. Raluca Budiu I have not yet used Apple's new Liquid Glass" graphical user interface design, so here's the usual disclaimer that my opinions are, then, effectively meaningless. That being said, the amount of detailed articles about the problems with Liquid Glass - from bugs to structural design problems - are legion, and this article by Raluca Budiu is an excellent example. There are so many readability problems, spacing issues, odd animations that don't actually convey anything meaningful, performance issues, and tons of bugs. It feels like it was made not by user interface specialists, but by marketeers, who were given too little time to boot. It feels incoherent and messy, and it's going to take Apple a long, long time to mold and shape it into something remotely workable.

Framework, the maker of repairable laptops, is embroiled in a controversy, as the company and its CEO are openly supporting people with, well, questionable views. If you know a little bit about PR in social media space, you might note that, right out of the gate, a project by a vocal white nationalist known for splitting communities by their mere presence, is not a great highlight choice for an overtly non-left-right-political company like Framework. Does it get worse from here? Sadly, it does. Arya Bread Crumbs The questionable views we're talking about here are... Let's just say we're not talking about milquetoast stuff like we should be a bit stricter with immigration" or lower taxes on the rich", but views that are far, far outside of the mainstream in most places in the world. Framework has stated in no uncertain terms that it is supporting and embracing people like this. That's a choice they are entirely free to make, but I, and many with me, then, are entirely free to choose not to buy and/or promote products by Framework. I still sincerely hope that all of this is just a massive breakdown of PR and common sense at Framework and its CEO, but since they've already doubled-down, I'm not holding my breath. This whole thing is going to haunt them, especially since I'm fairly sure a huge chunk of their community and users - who are buying into hardware that is, in truth, overpriced - are not even remotely aligned with such extremist views. I care deeply about Framework's mission, but I don't give a single rat's ass about Framework itself. There are countless alternatives to Framework, some of which I've even reviewed here (like the MNT Reform or the NovaCustom V54), and if you, too, feel a deep sense of the ick when it comes to supporting extremist views like the above, I urge you to take them into consideration.

What if you are forced to use Windows, but want to use a real operating system instead? You could use WSL2 to use Linux inside Windows, but what if FreeBSD is more your thing? It turns out someone is working on making FreeBSD usable using WSL2. This repository hosts work-in-progress efforts to runFreeBSDinsideWindows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2)with minimal to no changes to the FreeBSD base system. The project builds on the open-source components of WSL2 to enable FreeBSD to boot and run seamlessly in a Windows environment. WSL for FReeBSD GitHub page The project is experimental, and definitely not ready for production use. It's also important to note that this project is not part of Microsoft or FreeBSD. At this point in time, FreeBSD boots using WSL2 with basic functionality, and work is currently focused on networking, I/O, and process management.

A lot of open source projects are struggling what to do with the AI" bubble, and Fedora is no different. This whole past year, the project's been struggling to formulate any official policies on the use of AI", and LWN.net's Joe Brockmeier has just done an amazing job summarising the various positions, opinions, and people influencing this process. His conclusion: There appears to be a growing tension between what Red Hat and IBM would like to see from Fedora versus what its users and community contributors want from the project. Red Hat and IBM have already come down in favor of AI as part of their product strategies, the only real questions are what to develop and offer to the customers or partners. The Fedora community, on the other hand, has quite a few people who feel strongly against AI technologies for various ethical, practical, and social reasons. The results, so far, of turning people loose with generative AI tools on unsuspecting open-source projects has not been universally positive. People join communities to collaborate with other people, not to sift through the output of large language models. It is possible that Red Hat will persuade Fedora to formally endorse a policy of accepting AI-assisted content, but it may be at the expense of users and contributors. Joe Brockmeier at LWN.net Reading through Brockmeier's excellent article, the various forces pulling and pushing on Fedora become quite clear, and the fact we've got IBM/Red Hat in favour of AI", and Fedora's community of developers and users against it, shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Wherever AI" makes an appearance, it's almost exclusively a top-down process with corporate interests pushing AI" hard on a largely indifferent userbase. It seems Fedora is no different. The massive rift between IBM/Red Hat on one side, and the Fedora community on the other is probably best illustrated by a remark from Graham White, technical lead for theGraniteAI agents at IBM. One of the earlier policy proposals referenced AI" slop, and White was offended by this, stating: I've been working in the industry and building AI models for a shade over 20 years and never come across AI slop". This seems derogatory to me and an unnecessary addition to the policy. Graham White, as quoted by Joe Brockmeier at LWN.net Us regular users are bombarded with AI" slop every day, and I just can't understand how disconnected from reality you must be to not only deny it's a problem, but to deny its existence entirely, when virtually every single Google query will drop you in AI" muck. If such denial is commonplace within IBM/Red Hat, it's really no wonder there's such a big rift between them and Fedora. It is wholly unsurprising, then, that Fedora is having such a hard time formulating an AI" policy. The current version of the proposed policy seems to view AI" and its use in or by Fedora mildly positively, which certainly has me, as a Fedora/KDE user, on edge. I don't want AI" anywhere near my operating system for a whole variety of reasons, and if the upcoming vote on the new policy ends up in favour of it, I might have to consider moving away from Fedora.

It seems like Microsoft is continuing its quest to force Windows users to use Microsoft accounts instead of local accounts, despite the fact Microsoft accounts on Windows are half-baked and potentially incredibly dangerous. In the most recent Windows 11 Insider Preview Build (26220.6772), the company has closed a few more loopholes people were using to trick the Windows installer into allowing local user accounts. We are removing known mechanisms for creating a local account in the Windows Setup experience (OOBE). While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use. Users will need to complete OOBE with internet and a Microsoft account, to ensure device is setup correctly. Amanda Langowski at the Windows Blogs It seems that the specific workaround removed with this change is executing the command start ms-cxh:localonly" in the command prompt during the installation process (you can access cmd.exe by pressing shift+F10 during installation). Several other workarounds have also been removed in recent years, making it ever harder for people forced to use Windows 11 to use a local account, like the gods intended. The only reason Microsoft is pushing online accounts this hard is that it makes it much, much easier for them to collect your data and wrestle control over your installation away from you. A regular, proper local account with additional online accounts for various services would work just as well for users, allowing them to mix and match exactly what kind of cloud services they want integrated into their operating system. However, leaving this choice to the user invariably means people aren't going to be using whatever trash services Microsoft offers. And so, Microsoft will make that choice for you, whether you like it or not. There are a million reasons to stay away from the Windows version that must be making Dave Cutler cry, and the insistence on online accounts is but one of them. It's a perfect example of how Microsoft developers Windows not to make it better for its users, but to make it better for its bottom line. I wonder how much more Microsoft can squeeze its users before we see some sort of actual revolt. Windows used to just lack taste. These days, it's also actively hostile.

Servo, the Rust-based browsing engine spun off from Mozilla, keeps making progress every month, and this made Ignacio Casal Quinteiro wonder: what if we make a GTK widget so we can test Servo and compare it to WebKitGTK? As part of my job at Amazon I started working in a GTK widget which will allow embedding a Servo Webview inside a GTK application. This was mostly a research project just to understand the current state of Servo and whether it was at a good enough state to migrate from WebkitGTK to it. I have to admit that it is always a pleasure to work with Rust and the great gtk-rs bindings. Instead, Servo while it is not yet ready for production, or at least not for what we need in our product, it was simple to embed and to get something running in just a few days. The community is also amazing, I had some problems along the way and they were providing good suggestions to get me unblocked in no time. Ignacio Casal Quinteiro The code is now out there, and while not yet ready for widespread use, this will make it easier for GTK developer to periodically assess the state of Servo, hopefully some day concluding it can serve as a replacement for WebKitGTK.

Earlier this year, popular NAS vendor Synology announced it would start requiring some of its more expensive models to only use Synology-branded drives. It seems the uproar this announcement caused has had some real chilling effect on sales, and the company just cancelled its plans. Synology has backtracked on one of its most unpopular decisions in years. After seeing NAS sales plummet in 2025, the company has decided to lift restrictions that forced users to buy its own Synology hard drives. The policy, introduced earlier this year, made third-party HDDs from brands like Seagate and WD practically unusable in newer models such as the DS925+, DS1825+, and DS425+. That change didn't go over well. Users immediately criticised Synology for trying to lock them into buying its much more expensive drives. Many simply refused to upgrade, and reviewers called out the move as greedy and shortsighted. According to some reports, sales of Synology's 2025 NAS models dropped sharply in the months after the restriction was introduced. Hilbert Hagedoorn at Guru3D.com If you want to screw over your users to make a few more euros, it's generally a good idea to first assess just how locked-in your users really are. Synology is but one of many companies making and selling NAS devices, and even building one yourself is stupidly easy these days. There's an entire cottage industry of motherboards and enclosures specifically designed for this purpose, and there are countless easy-to-use software options out there, too. In other words, nobody is really locked into Synology, so any unpopular move by the company was bound to make people look elsewhere, only to discover there are tons of competing options to choose from. The market seems to have spoken, and Synology can only respond by reversing its decision. Honestly, I had almost forgotten what a healthy tech market with tons of competing options looks like.

MicroPythonOS is a lightweight, fast, and versatile operating system designed to run on microcontrollers like the ESP32 and desktop systems. With a modern Android-like touch screen UI, App Store, and Over-The-Air updates, it's the perfect OS for innovators and developers. MicroPytonOS' website It's quite neat to see this running in such a constrained environment, especially considering it comes with a graphical user interface, some basic applications, and niceties like OTA updates and an application repository. As the name implies, MicroPythonOS uses native MicroPython for application and driver development, making cross-platform portability from microcontrollers to regular PCs a possibility. It's built on the MicroPython runtime, with LVGL for graphics, packaged by the lvgl_micropython project. It's still relatively early in development, but it's completely open source so anyone can help out and improve the project. I'm personally not too well-versed in the world of microcontrollers like the popular ESP32, so I'm not entirely sure just how capable other operating systems and platforms built on top if it are. This particular operating system seems to make it rather easy and straightforward for anyone to build and distribute an application for such microcontrollers, to a point where even an idiot like myself could relatively easily buy, say, an ESP32 kit with a display and assemble my own collection of small applications. To repeat myself, it simply looks neat.

It was good while it lasted, I guess. Arduino will retain its independent brand, tools, and mission, while continuing to support a wide range of microcontrollers and microprocessors from multiple semiconductor providers as it enters this next chapter within the Qualcomm family. Following this acquisition, the 33M+ active users in the Arduino community will gain access to Qualcomm Technologies' powerful technology stack and global reach. Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech professionals, students, educators, and hobbyists will be empowered to rapidly prototype and test new solutions, with a clear path to commercialization supported by Qualcomm Technologies' advanced technologies and extensive partner ecosystem. Qualcomm's press release Qualcomm's track record when it comes to community engagement, open source, and long-term support are absolutely atrocious, and there's no way Arduino will be able to withstand the pressures from management. We've seen this exact story play out a million times, and it always begins with lofty promises, and always ends with all of them being broken. I have absolutely zero faith Arduino will be able to continue to do its thing like it has. Arduino devices are incredibly popular, and it makes sense for Qualcomm to acquire them. If I were using Arduino's for my open source projects, I'd be a bit on edge right now.

Bradford Morgan White has published an excellent retrospective of QNX, the realtime microkernel operating system focused on embedded use cases. The final paragraph made me sad, though. QNX is a fascinating operating system. It was extremely well designed from the start, and while it has been rewritten, the core ideas that allowed it survive for 45 years persist to this day. While I am sad that Photon was deprecated, the reasoning is sound. Most vendors using QNX either do not require a GUI, or they implement their own. For example, while Boston Dynamics uses QNX in their robots, they don't really need Photon, and neither do SpaceX's Falcon rockets. While cars certainly have displays, most vehicle makers desire their screen interfaces to have a unique look and feel. Of course, just stating these use cases of robots, rockets, and cars speaks to the incredible reliability and versatility of QNX. Better operating systems are possible, and QNX proves it. Bradford Morgan White at Abort Retry Fail Way back in 2004, before I even joined OSNews properly, I wrote about QNX as a desktop operating system, because back then I went through a short stint where I used QNX and its amazing Photon MicroGUI as my primary desktop. Back then, there was a short-lived but very enthusiastic community using QNX on desktops, sharing tips and findings, supported by one or two QNX employees who tried their best to support this fledgling community in the face of corporate indifference. Eventually, these QNX employees left the company, and QNX started making it clearer than ever that they were not, in any way, interested in people using QNX on desktops, and in all honesty, they were most likely correct. However, I still think we had something special there, and had QNX' management decided to help us out, it could've grown into something more sustainable. An open source QNX and Photon could've had an impact. Using QNX on the desktop back then was much easier than you might imagine, with graphical package managers, capable browsers and email clients, a massive pile of open source packages, pretty great performance, and little to no need to ever leave the GUI and use a CLI. If your hardware was properly supported, you could have a great experience. One of the very small what-ifs" form the early 2000s.

Can these months please stop passing us by this quickly? It seems we're getting a monthly Redox update every other week now, and that's not right. Anyway, what have the people behind this Rust-based operating system been up to this past month? One of the biggest changes this month is that Redox is now multithreaded by default, at least on x86 machines. Unsurprisingly, this can enable some serious performance gains. Also contributing to performance improvements this month is inode data inliningfor small files, and the installation is now a lot faster too. LZ4 compression has been added to Redox, saving storage space and improving performance. As far as ports go, there's a ton of new and improved ports, like OpenSSH, Nginx, PHP, Neovim, OpenSSL 3.x, and more. On top of that, there's a long list of low-level kernel improvements, driver changes, and relibc improvements, changes to the main website, and so on.

Every single vibe coding is the future," the power of AI," and AI job loss" story written perpetuates a myth that will only lead to more regular people getting hurt when the bubble bursts. Every article written about OpenAI or NVIDIA or Oracle that doesn't explicitly state that the money doesn't exist, that the revenues are impossible, that one of the companies involvedburns billions of dollars and has no path to profitability,is an act of irresponsible make believe and mythos. Edward Zitron The numbers are clear. People aren't paying for AI", and those that do, are using up way more resources than they're actually paying for. The profits required to make all of this work just aren't realistic in any way, shape, or form. The money being pumped around doesn't even exist. It's a scam of such utterly massive proportions, it's easier for many of us to just assume it can't possibly be one. Too big to fail? Too many promises to be a scam. It's going to be a bloodbath, but as usual when the finance and tech bros scam entire sectors, it's us normal folk who will be left to foot the bill. Let's blame immigrants some more while we implement harsh austerity measures to bail out the billionaire class. Again.

Your lovely host, late last night: Google claims they won't be sharing developer information with governments, but we all knowthat's a load of bullshit, made all the more relevant afterwhatever the fuck this was. If you want to oppose thegenocidein Gaza or warn people of ICE raids, and want to create an Android application to coordinate such efforts, you probably should not, and stick to more anonymous organising tools. Thom Holwerda Let's check in with how that other walled garden Google is trying to emulate is doing. Apple hasremoved ICEBlock, an app that allowed users to monitor and report the location of immigration enforcement officers, from the App Store. We created theApp Storeto be a safe and trusted place to discover apps," Apple said in a statement to Business Insider. Based on information we've received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store." Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert, Peter Kafka, and Kwan Wei Kevin Tan for Business Insider Oh. Apple and Google are but mere extensions of the state apparatus. Think twice about what device you bring with you the next time you wish to protest your government's actions.

Google has been on a bit of a marketing blitz to try and counteract some of the negative feedback following its new developer verification requirement for Android applications, and while they're using a lot of words, none of them seem to address the core concerns. It basically comes down to that they just don't care about the consequences this new requirement has for projects like F-Droid, nor are they really bothered by any of the legitimate privacy concerns this whole thing raises. If this new requirement is implemented in its current form, F-Droid will simply not be able to continue to exist in its current form. F-Droid builds the applications in its repository themselves and signs them, and developer verification does not fit into that picture at all. F-Droid works this way to ensure its applications are built from the publicly available sources, so developers can't sneak anything nefarious into any binaries they would otherwise be submitting themselves. The privacy angle doesn't seem to bother Google much, either, which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. With this new requirement, Android application developers can simply no longer be anonymous, which has a variety of side-effects, not least of which is that anyone developing applications for, say, dissidents, can now no longer be anonymous. Google claims they won't be sharing developer information with governments, but we all know that's a load of bullshit, made all the more relevant after whatever the fuck this was. If you want to oppose the genocide in Gaza or warn people of ICE raids, and want to create an Android application to coordinate such efforts, you probably should not, and stick to more anonymous organising tools. Students and hobbyists are getting the short end of the stick, too, as Google's promised program specifically for these two groups is incredibly limited. Yes, it waves the $25 fee, but that's about the only positive here: Developers who register with Google as a student or hobbyist will face severe app distribution restrictions, namely a limit on the number of devices that can install their apps. To enforce this, any user wanting to install software from these developers must first retrieve a unique identifier from their device. The developer then has to input this identifier into the Android Developer Console to authorize that specific device for installation. Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority Google does waive the requirement for developer certification for one particular type of user, and in doing so, highlights the only group of users Google truly cares about: enterprise users. Any application installed by an enterprise on managed devices will not need to have its developer certified. Google states that in this particular use case, the enterprise's IT department is responsible for any security issues that may arise. Isn't it funny how the only group of users who won't have to deal with this nonsense are companies who pay Google tons of money for their enterprise tools? The only way we're going to get out of this is if any governments step up and put a stop to this. We can safely assume the United States' government won't be on our side - they're too busy with their recurring idiotic song-and-dance anyway - so our only hope is the European Commission stepping in, but I'm not holding my breath. After all, Apple's rules and regulations regarding installing applications outside of the App Store in the EU are not that different from what Google is going to do. While the EU is not happy with the details of Apple's rules, their general gist seems to be okay with them. I'm afraid governments won't be stepping in to stop this one.

And here we have yet another case of the EU's consumer protection legislation working in our favour. Dutch privacy and consumer rights organisation Bits of Freedom sued Facebook over the company's little trick of disregarding a user's settings under a variety of circumstances, such as when a user opts for a chronological, non-profiled timeline, only to have Facebook reset itself to the profiled timeline upon a restart. The judge states that Meta is indeed acting in violation of the law. He says that a nonpersistent choice option for a recommendation system runs counter to the purpose of the DSA, which is to give users genuine autonomy, freedom of choice, and control over how information is presented to them." The judge also concludes that the way Meta has designed its platforms constitutes a significant disruption of the autonomy of Facebook and Instagram users." The judge orders Meta to adjust its apps so that the user's choice is preserved, even when the user navigates to another section or restarts the app. Bits of Freedom press release This is good news, of course, but I really wish we would take this a step further: a complete ban on targeted advertising and timeline manipulation based on harvested user data. I just don't believe these business models and ragebait machines offer anything of value to society, and in fact, do far more harm than good. I am convinced that our world would be a better place without these business models. We restrict of outright ban dangerous substances or activities all the time. This should be among them.

With Google closing up Android at a rapid pace, there's some renewed interest in mobile platforms that aren't either iOS or Android, and one of those is Ubuntu Touch. It's been steadily improving over the years under the stewardship of the UBports Foundation, and today they released Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.0. Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.0 is the first release of Ubuntu Touch which is based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, a major upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04. This might not be as big compared to our last upgrade from Ubuntu 16.04 to 20.04, but this still brings newer software stack to Ubuntu Touch (such as Qt 5.15). Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.0 release announcement In this release, aside from the upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, there's now also a light mode for the shell, including experimental support for switching themes on the fly. Applications already supported a light theme since the previous releases, so adding support for it in the main shell is a welcome improvement. We've also got experimental support for encrypting personal data, which needs to be enabled per device, which I think indicates not all devices support it. On top of that, there's some changes to the phone application, and a slew of smaller fixes and improvements as well. The list of supported devices has grown as well, with the Fairphone 5 as the newcomer this release. The list is still relatively small, but to be fair to the project, it includes a number of popular devices, as well as a few that are still readily available. If you want to opt for running Ubuntu Touch as your smartphone platform, there's definitely plenty of devices to choose from.

Microsoft is reorganising the Windows teams. Again. For those unaware, the Windows organization has essentially been split in two since 2018. Teams that work on the core of Windows were moved under Azure, and the rest of the Windows team (those that focused on top level features and user experiences) remained under the Windows org. That is finally changing, with Davuluri saying that the Windows client and server teams are now going to operate under the same roof once again.This change unifies Windows engineering work under a single organization ... Moving the teams working on Windows client and server together into one organization brings focus to delivering against our priorities." Zac Bowden at Windows Central I mean, it's obviously far too simplistic to attribute Windows' many user-facing problems and failures on something as simple as this particular organisational split, but it sure does feel like it could be a contributing factor. It seems like the core of Windows is mostly fine and working pretty well, while the user experience is the ares that has suffered greatly in recent years, pressured as the Windows team seems to have been to add advertising, monetisation, tons of sometimes dangerous dark patterns, and more. I hope that bringing these two teams back together will eventually lead to an overall improvement of the Windows user experience, and not a deterioration of the core of the platform. In other words, that the core team lifts up the user experience team, instead of the user experience team dragging the core team down. A Windows that takes its users seriously and respects them could be a fine operating system to use, but it reorganisations like this take a long time to have any measurable effect. Of course, it could also just have no effect at all, or perhaps the rot has simply spread too far and wide. In a few years, depressing as it may seem, Windows 11 might be regarded as a highlight.

This article is intended to be acomprehensiveguide to writing your first GNOME app in Lua using LuaGObject. The article assumes that you already understand Lua and want to get started with building beautiful native applications for GNOME. I also assume you know how to use a command line to install and compile software. Having some knowledge of the C programming language, as well as the Make, Gettext, and Flatpak software will be helpful, but shouldn't be required to understand this guide. Victoria Lacroix Exactly what is says on the tin.

Have you ever heard of the Encore 91 computer system, developed and built by Encore Computer Corporation? I stumbled upon the name of this system on the website for the Macintosh like virtual window manager (MLVWM), an old X11 window manager designed to copy some of the look and feel of the classic Mac OS, and wanted to know more about it. An old website from what appears to be a reseller of the Encore 91 has a detailed description and sales pitch of the machine still online, and it's a great read. The hardware architecture of the Encore 91 series is based onthe Motorola high-performance 88100 25MHz RISC processor.A basic system is a highly integrated fully symmetrical singleboard multiprocessor. The single board includes two or four88100 processors with supporting cache memory, 16 megabytes of shared main memory, two synchronous SCSI ports,an Ethernet port, 4 asynchronous ports, real-time clocks,timers, interrupts and a VME-64 bus interface. The VME-64 bus provides full compatibility with VME plus enhancements for greater throughput. Shared main memory may be expanded to 272 megabytes (mb) by adding up to four expansion cards. The expansion memory boards have the same high-speed access characteristics as local memory. Encore computing 91 system The Encore 91 ran a combination of AT&T's system V.3.2 UNIX and Encore's POSIX-compliant MicroMPX real-time kernel, and would be followed by machines with more powerful processors in the 88xxx series, as well as machines based on the Alpha architecture. The company also created and sold its own modified RISC architecture, RSX, for which there are still some details available online. Bits and bobs of the company were spun off and sold off, and I don't think much of the original company is still around today. Regardless, it's an interesting system with an interesting history, but we'll most likely never get to see oe in action - unless it turns up in some weird corner of the United States where the rare working examples of hardware like this invariably tends to end up.

The consequences of Google requiring developer certification to install Android applications, even outside of Google's own Play Store, are starting to reverberate. F-Droid, probably the single most popular non-Google application repository for Android, has made it very clear that Google's upcoming requirement is most likely going to mean the end of F-Droid. If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all. F-Droid's myriad users will be left adrift, with no means to install - or even update their existing installed - applications. F-Droid's blog post A potential loss of F-Droid would be a huge blow to anyone trying to run Android without Google's applications and frameworks installed on their device. It's pretty clear that Google is doing whatever it can to utterly destroy the Android Open Source Project, something I've been arguing is what the rumours about Google killing AOSP really mean. Why kill AOSP, when you can just make it utterly unusable and completely barren? Sadly, there isn't much F-Droid can do. They're proposing regulators the world over look at Google's plans, and hopefully come to the conclusion that they're anti-competitive. Specifically the European Union and the tools provided by the Digital Markets Act could prove useful here, but in the end, only if the will exists to use them can these tools be used in the first place. It's dark times for the smartphone world right now, especially if you care about consumer rights and open source. iOS has always been deeply anti-consumer, and while the European Union has managed to soften some of the rough edges, nothing much has changed there. Android, on the other hand, had a thriving open source, Google-free community, but decision by decision, Google is beating it into submission and killing it off. The Android of yesteryear doesn't exist anymore, and it's making people who used to work on Android back during the good old times extremely sad. Jean-Baptiste Queru, husband of OSNews' amazing and legendary previous managing editor Eugenia Loli-Queru, worded it like this a few days ago: All the tidbits of news about Android make me sad. I used to be part of the Android team. When I worked there, making the application ecosystem as open as the web was a goal. Releasing the Android source code as soon as something hit end-user devices was a goal. Being able to run your own build on actual consumer hardware was a goal. For a while after I left, there continued to be some momentum behind what I had pushed for. But, now, 12 years later, this seems to have all died. I am sad... Jean-Baptiste Queru And so am I. Like any operating system, Android is far from perfect, but it was remarkable just how open it used to be. I guess good things just don't survive once unbridled capitalism hits.

Unite is an operating system in whicheverythingis a process, including the things that you normally would expect to be part of the kernel. The hard disk driver is a user process, so is the file system running on top of it. The namespace manager is a user process. The whole thing (in theory, see below) supports network transparency from the ground up, you can use resources of other nodes in the network just as easily as you can use local resources, just prefix them with the node ID. In the late 80's, early 90's I had a lot of time on my hands. While living in the Netherlands I'd run into the QNX operating system that was sold locally through a distributor. The distributors brother had need of a 386 version of that OS but Quantum Software, the producers of QNX didn't want to release a 386 version. So I decided to write my own. Jacques Mattheij What a great story. Mattheij hasn't done anthing or even looked at the code for this operating system he created in decades, but recently got the urge to fix it up and publish it online for all of us to see. Of course, resurrecting something this old and long untouched required some magic, and there's still a few things which he simply just can't get to work properly. I like how the included copy of vi is broken and adds random bits of garbage to files, and things like the mouse driver don't work because it requires a COM port and the COM ports don't seem to work in an emulated environment. Unite is modeled after QNX, so it uses a microkernel. It uses a stripped-down variant of the MINIX file system, only has one user but that user can run multiple sessions, and there's a basic graphics mode with some goodies. Sadly, the graphics mode is problematic an requires some work to get going, and because you'll need the COM ports to work to use it properly it's a bit useless anyway at the moment. Regardless, it's cool to see people going back to their old work and fixing it up to publish the code online.

Some time ago, I described Windows 3.0's WinHelp as a program for browsing online help files." But Windows 3.0 predated the Internet, and these help files were available even if the computer was not connected to any other network. How can it be online"? Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing I doubt this will be a conceptual problem for many people reading OSNews, but I can definitely understand especially younger people finding this a curious way of looking at the word online". You'll see the concept of online help" in quite a few systems from the '90s (and possibly earlier), so if you're into retrocomputing you might've run into it as well.

What if you have a PC-98 machine, and you want to run Linux on it, as you do? I mean, CP/M, OS/2, or Windows (2000 and older) might not cut it for you, after all. Well, it turns out that yes, you can run Linux on PC-98 hardware, and thanks to a bunch of work by Nina Kalinina - yes, the same person from a few days ago - there's now more information gathered in a single place to get you started. Plamo Linux is one of the few Linux distributions to support PC-98 series. Plamo 3.x is the latest distribution that can be installed on PC-9801 and PC-9821 directly. Unfortunately, it is quite old, and is missing lots of useful stuff. This repo is to share a-ha moments and binaries for Plamo on PC-98. Plamo98 goodies The repository details upgrading" - it's a bit more involved than plain upgrading, but it's not hard - Plamo Linux from 3.x to 4, which gives you access to a bunch of things you might want, like GCC 3.3 over 2.95, KDE 3.x, Python 2.3, and more. There's also custom BusyBox config files, a newer version of make, and a few other goodies and tools you might want to have. Once it's all set and done, you can Linux like it's 2003 on your PC-98. The number of people to whom this is relevant must be extraorinarily small, but at some point, someone is going to want to do this, only to find this repository of existing work. We've all been there.

I've been working on developing an operating system for the TI-99 for the last 18 months or so. I didn't intend this-my original plan was to develop enough of the standard C libraries to help with writing cartridge-based and EA5 programs. But that trek led me quickly towards developing an OS. As Unix is by far my preferred OS, this OS is an approximation. Developing an OS within the resources available, particularly the RAM, has been challenging, but also surprisingly doable. UNIX99 forum announcement post We're looking at a quite capable UNIX for the TI-99, with support for itssound, speech, sprites, and legacy 9918A display modes, GPU-accelerated scrolling, stdio (for text and binary files) and stdin/out/err support, a shell (of course), multiple user support, cooperative tasks support, and a ton more. And remember - all of this is running on a machine with a 16-bit processor running at 16MHz and a mere 16KB of RAM. Absolutely wild.

A few months ago, Microsoft finally blinked and provided a way for Windows 10 users to gain free" access to the Windows 10 Extended Security Update program. For regular users to gain access to this program, their options are to either pay around $30, pay 1000 Microsoft points, or to sign up for the Windows Backup application to synchronise their settings to Microsoft's computers (the cloud"). In other words, in order to get free" access to extended security updates for Windows 10 after the 25 October end-of-support deadline, you have to start using OneDrive, and will have to start paying for additional storage since the base 5GB of OneDrive storage won't be enough for backups. And we all know OneDrive is hell. Thanks to the European Union's Digital Markets Act, though, Microsoft has dropped the OneDrive requirement for users within the European Economic Area (the EU plus Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein). Citing the DMA, consumer rights organisations in the EU complained that Microsoft's OneDrive requirement was in breach of EU law, and Microsoft has now given in. Of course, dropping the OneDrive requirement only applies to consumers in the EU/EEA; users in places with much weaker consumer protection legislation, like the United States, will not benefit from this move. Consumer rights organisations are lauding Microsoft's move, but they're not entirely satisfied just yet. The main point of contention is that the access to the Extended Security Update program is only valid for one year, which they consider too short. In a letter, Euroconsumers, one of the consumer rights organisations, details this issue. At the same time, several points from our original letter remain relevant. The ESU program is limited to one year, leaving devices that remain fully functional exposed to risk after October 13, 2026. Such a short-term measure falls short of what consumers can reasonably expect for a product that remains widely used and does not align with the spirit of the Digital Content Directive (DCD), nor the EU's broader sustainable goals. Unlike previous operating system upgrades, which did not typically require new hardware, the move to Windows 11 does. This creates a huge additional burden for consumers, with some estimates suggesting that over 850 million active devices still rely on million Windows 10 and cannot be upgraded due to hardware requirements. By contrast, upgrades from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10 did not carry such limitations. Eurconsumer's letter According to the group, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that Microsoft is much more aggressive in phasing out support for Windows 10 than for previous versions of Windows. Windows 10 is being taken behind the shed four years after the launch of Windows 11, while Windows XP and Windows 7 enjoyed 7-8 years. With how many people are still using Windows 10, often with no way to upgrade but buying new hardware, it's odd that Microsoft is trying to kill it so quickly. In any event, we can chalk this up as another win for consumers in the European Union, with the Digital Markets Act once again creating better outcomes than in other regions of the world.

The contributions of Sun Microsystems to the world of computing are legion - definitely more than its ignominious absorption into Oracle implies - and one of those is NFS, the Network File system. This month, NFS more or less turned 40 years old, and in honour of this milestone, Russel Berg, Russ Cox, Steve Kleiman, Bob Lyon, Tom Lyon, Joseph Moran, Brian Pawlowski, David Rosenthal, Kate Stout, and Geoff Arnold created a website to honour NFS. This website gathers material related to the Sun Microsystems Network File System, a project that began in 1983 and remains a fundamental technology for today's distributed computer systems. The core of the collection is design documents, white papers, engineering specifications, conference and journal papers, and standards material. However it also covers marketing materials, trade press, advertising, books, swag", and personal ephemera. We're always looking for new contributions. NFS at 40 There's so many amazing documents here, such as the collection of predecessors of NFS that served as inspiration for NFS, like the Cambridge File Server or the Xerox Alto's Interim File System, but also tons of fun marketing material for things like NFS server accelerators and nerdy NFS buttons. Even if you're not specifically interested in the history of NFS, there's great joy in browsing these old documents and photos.

If you download YouTube videos, there's a real chance you're using yt-dlp, the long-running and widely-used command-line program for downloading YouTube videos. Even if you're not using it directly, many other tools for downloading YouTube videos are built on top of yt-dlp, and even some media players which offer YouTube playback use it in the background. Now, yt-dlp has always had a built-in basic JavaScript interpreter", but due to changes at YouTube, yt-dlp will soon require a proper JavaScript runtime in order to function. Up until now, yt-dlp has been able to use itsbuilt-in JavaScript interpreter"to solve the JavaScript challenges that are required for YouTube downloads. But due torecent changes on YouTube's end, the built-in JS interpreter will soon be insufficient for this purpose. The changes are so drastic thatyt-dlp will need to leverage a proper JavaScript runtime in order to solve the JS challenges. Yt-dlp's announcement on GitHub The yt-dlp team suggests using Deno, but compatibility with some alternatives has been added as well. The issue is that the interpreter" yt-dlp already includes consists of a massive set of very complex regex patterns to solve JS challenges, and those are difficult to maintain and no longer sufficient, so a real runtime is necessary for YouTube downloads. Deno is advised because it's entirely self-contained and sandboxed, and has no network or filesystem access of any kind. Deno also happens to be a single, portable executable. As time progresses, it seems yt-dlp is slowly growing into a web browser just to be able to download YouTube videos. I wonder what kind of barriers YouTube will throw up next, and what possible solutions from yt-dlp might look like.