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With the United States having started an incredibly dumb and destructive trade war with Canada, Mexico, and most likely soon the European Union, there's quite a few people who want to avoid American products. With how interconnected the global production chain and corporate ownership structures are, it's often difficult to determine where products actually come from. Luckily, technology can help. There's online directories like Buy European Made, which lists European companies in all kinds of markets, or European Alternatives, which focuses on listing European alternatives to online services. As nice as these are, they are quite manual, and require people to actively search around, which is kind of a hassle when you're making a quick grocery store run. What if we could use image recognition to just take a photo of a product's box, and have our phone tell us where a product's made? That's exactly what Made O'Meter does: take a photo of a product, wait for a few seconds, and it'll tell you exactly where it's made. It's made in Denmark, with the goal to support Europe, Canada & friends". I've been trying it out on various products around the house, from groceries like cereals and cookies, to tech products and clothing we just bought that still had the tags on them. Every result turned out to be 100% accurate, and it takes only a few seconds to analyse each photo. It also doesn't seem to be too fussy with the quality of the photos themselves - it doesn't care about hands and fingers in the frame, or weirdly-shaped boxes that don't fit nicely in a view finder. It's a website, not an app - very platform-agnostic, which is great - and I was using it in Firefox for Android without issue. If you want to avoid American products, Made O'Meter is a great tool to have with you the next time you order something or run to the store.

Fuchsia is a new (non-Linux) operating system from Google, and one of the key pieces of Fuchsia's design is the component framework. Components on Fuchsia have many similarities with some of the container solutions on Linux (such as Docker): they both fetch content addressed blobs from the network, assemble those blobs into an isolated filesystem structure that holds all the dependencies necessary to run some piece of software, and launch namespaced processes with that created directory as its root. The most interesting details are where these two projects diverge. Both have different use cases and requirements, which leads to different strengths between the systems. This talk will largely be focusing on where and why these two similar technologies diverge. Claire Gonyeo A very interesting talk by Claire Gonyeo, a software engineer at Google working on Fuchsia.

Clearly, online search isn't bad enough yet, so Google is intensifying its efforts to continue speedrunning the downfall of Google Search. They've announced they're going to show even more AI"-generated answers in Search results, to more people. Today, we're sharing that we've launched Gemini 2.0 for AI Overviews in the U.S. to help with harder questions, starting with coding, advanced math and multimodal queries, with more on the way. With Gemini 2.0's advanced capabilities, we provide faster and higher quality responses and show AI Overviews more often for these types of queries. Plus, we're rolling out to more people: teens can now use AI Overviews, and you'll no longer need to sign in to get access. Robby Stein On top of this, Google is also testing a new search mode where AI" takes over the entire search experience. Instead of seeing the usual list of links, the entire page of results" will be generated by AI". This feature, called AI Mode" is opt-in for now. You can opt-in in Labs, but you do need to be a paying Google One AI Premium subscriber. I guess it's only a matter of time before this AI Mode" will be the default on Google Search, because it allows Google to keep its users on Google.com, and this makes it easier to show them ads and block out competitors. We all know where this is going. But, I hear you say, I use DuckDuckGo! I don't have to deal with any of this! Well, I've got some bad news for you, because DuckDuckGo, too, is greatly expanding its use of AI" in search. DDG will provide free, anonymous access to various AI" chatbots, deliver more AI"-generated search results based on more sources (but still English-only), and more - all without needing to have an account. A few of these features were already available in beta, and are now becoming generally available. Props to DuckDuckGo for providing a ton of options to turn all of this stuff off, though. They give users quite a bit of control over how often these AI"-generated search results appear, and you can even turn them off completely. All the AI" chatbot stuff is delegated to a separate website, and any link to it from the normal search results can be disabled, too. It's entirely possible to have DuckDuckGo just show a list of regular search results, exactly as it should be. Let's hope DDG can keep these values going, because if they, too, start pushing this AI" nonsense without options to turn it off, I honestly have no idea where else to go.

Back when Java was still a new programming language, Sun had the idea of building a computer specifically designed for Java, unique processor running byte-code as its native machine code and all. This whole endeavour proved to be more complicated than Sun had hoped, and as such, they eventually abandoned the idea of a Java processor in favour of plain SPARC. When the JavaStation shipped, it was a regular SPARC workstation without a hard drive, running something called JavaOS from flash memory. Since JavaOS is, of course, long gone, what can you do with JavaStation today? Well, you apparently can run NetBSD on it, but it's quite an ordeal. The JavaStation needs to boot from the network using a combination of RARP, NFS, and more, and surprisingly, this entire setup, including the computer acting as the server' for the JavaStation, is well-documented and supported by NetBSD. Once you've gone through all the steps, you'll end up with a JavaStation running the latest release of NetBSD, which is pretty cool. Obviously there is still a lot to do; as you can see postfix isn't happy, and the swapfile security needs tightening up for a start. But we do now have a functional NetBSD system running on a vintage network computer! Old Fart's Almanac NetBSD's continued support for the most arcane of hardware will never cease to amaze me.

Now that we have examined the vulnerability that enables arbitrary microcode patches to be installed on all (un-patched) Zen 1 through Zen 4 CPUs, let's discuss how you can use and expand our tools to author your own patches. We have been working on developing a collection of tools combined into a single project we're calling zentool. The long-term goal is to provide a suite of capabilities similar to binutils, but targeting AMD microcode instead of CPU machine code. You can find the project source code here along with documentation on how to use the tools. Google's Bug Hunters website I just read a whole bunch of words, but I barely understand what's going on. The general, very simplified gist is that the researchers discovered a way for an attacker with local administrator privileges to load arbitrary microcode onto AMD Zen 1-4 processors.

In October 2026, Microsoft Publisher will reach its end of life. After that time, it will no longer be included in Microsoft 365 and existing on-premises suites will no longer be supported. Microsoft 365 subscribers will no longer be able to open or edit Publisher files in Publisher. Until then, support for Publisher will continue and users can expect the same experience as today. Microsoft's Support website Microsoft Publisher is an application with a long history, and it's been part of Microsoft Office for almost 35 years. The initial 1.0 version was released all the way back in 1991, and it's tried to compete with tools like InDesign and QuarkXPress in the desktop publishing market, but it never gained much of a share. Microsoft advises users of Publisher to use a combination of Word, PowerPoint, or Designer instead, which, of course, are all Microsoft products too. Due to Microsoft's stupidly complex naming schemes and branding changes over the years, you might assume that the quoted paragraph means Publisher will just stop working for everyone, but that's not the case. People who have the regular, non-subscription version of Publisher, probably as part of Microsoft Office, will of course be able to keep using it perpetually, just without support. If you use Office through Microsoft 365, however, the application will just... Stop working. Welcome to the future, I guess. I'm curious, though - do any of you use Microsoft Publisher, at home or at your work? I assumed the entire desktop publishing market was locked up by things like InDesign and QuarkXPress, and I had almost forgotten Publisher was still a thing in the first place.

How much faster is fastDOOM than regular Doom on a decked-out 486 from 1993? 30% faster without cutting any features! On a demanding map like doom2's demo1, the gain is even higher, from 16.8 fps to 24.9fps. That is 48% faster! I did not suspect that DOOM had left that much on the table. Obviously shipping within one year left little time to optimize. I had to understand how this magic trick happened. Fabien Sanglard What follows is an incredibly detailed exploration of why, exactly, fastDOOM is so much faster, by building and benchmarking every version, and even going git commit by git commit to really understand how fastDOOM's developer, Victor Viti95" Nieto, achieved these impressive results.

These months are coming and going way too fast, for a whole variety of reasons, so we've got another month of improvements for Redox, the operating system written in Rust. I February, January's work on dynamic linking continued, adding support for it to the recipes for Cargo, LLVM, Rust, libssh2, OpenSSL, zlib, COSMIC Terminal, NetSurf, libpng, bzip2, DevilutionX, and LuaJIT, as well as to the project's Rust and OpenSSL forks. Relibc also saw its usual slew of improvements, as did the build system and documentation. The Intel HD Audio driver initialization has been fixed, and PS/2 touchpad support has been fixed as well - you'd be surprised to find out how many laptops use PS/2 internally, so this is an important function to maintain. And as always, there's a whole slew of smaller changes and fixes, too.

Over the past few years, the tech industry has gone from cushy landing pad for STEM grads to a cesspit of corporate greed, where grueling hours are commonplace, and layoffs could strike at any moment. Unfortunately for employees of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, the squeeze is just getting started. Joe Wilkins at Futurism Sergey Brin, one of the original co-founders of Google who seems to spend most of his time not working at Google, has sent out a company-wide memo demanding everyone working at Google puts in at least 60 hours a week, in the office, to work on AI" that will eventually replace the very employees he's demanding work 60 hours a week in the office. Mind you, this is the same Google that has just gone through several rounds of layoffs and made $26.3 billion in profit in a single quarter. The goal, according to Brin, is for Google to be the first to create an artificial general intelligence", you know, that thing we used to call just AI" until the Silicon Valley scammers got a hold of the term. There's no indication anyone is even remotely close to anything even remotely related to AGI", and it's highly unlikely the glorified autocomplete they are peddling today are anything more than a very expensive dead end to nowhere, but that's not stopping him from working his employees to the bone. At this point in time I feel like the big tech companies are racing towards a cliff, blinded by huge piles of investment money, deafened by each other's hyperbolic claims and promises, while clueless politicians cheer them on. All of this is going to come crashing down in a spectacular fashion, and of course, the billionaires at the top won't be the one suffering the consequences. As is tradition.

Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++, has issued a call for the C++ community to defend the programming language, which has been shunned by cybersecurity agencies and technical experts in recent years for its memory safety shortcomings. C and C++ are built around manual memory management, which can result in memory safety errors, such as out of bounds reads and writes, though both languages can be written and combined with tools and libraries to help minimize that risk. These sorts of bugs, when they do crop up, represent the majority of vulnerabilities in large codebases. Thomas Claburn at The Register I mean, it makes sense to me that those responsible for new code to use programming languages that more or less remove the most common class of vulnerabilities. With memory-safe languages like Rust having been around for quite a while now, it's almost wilful negligence to write new code where security is a priority in anything but such memory-safe languages. Of course, this doesn't mean you delete any and all existing code - it just means you really need to start writing any new code in safer languages. After all, research shows that even when you only write new code in memory-safe languages, the reduction in vulnerabilities is massive. This reminds me a lot of those old videos of people responding to then-new laws mandating the use of seat belts in cars. A lot of people didn't want to put them on, saying things to the tune of I don't need one because I'm a good driver". Even if you are a good driver - which statistically you aren't - everyone else on the road isn't. When we see those old videos now, they feel quaint, archaic, and dumb - of course you wear a seat belt, you'd be an irresponsible idiot not to! - but only a few decades ago, those arguments made perfect sense to people. It won't be long before the same will apply to people doggedly refusing to use memory-safe languages or libraries/extensions that introduce such safety to existing languages, and Bjarne Stroustrup seems to understand that. Are you really smarter than Bjarne Stroustrup?

About two weeks ago, there was a bit of confusion about the system requirements for Windows 11 24H2, because Intel's 8th Gen, 9th Gen, and 10th Gen processors had disappeared from the list of supported hardware. This seemed rather drastic, even by Windows 11 standards. I skipped posting about it on OSNews because I kind of assumed it must've been an error instead of actual policy, and it turns out that's indeed the case. A page update made on February 13, 2025 did not reflect accurate offerings. It has since been updated, including the addition of Intel processor models 8th, 9th, and 10th generation Intel CPUs, and the reclassification for select Intel processor models to support Windows 11. Windows 11 version 24H2 supported Intel processors Good news for people still stuck on the Windows 11 train.

The prime feature is the continuation of the multi-monitor topic of the previous release, covering multi-monitor window management and going as far as seamlessly integrating multi-monitor virtual machines (Section Multi-monitor window management and virtual machines). The second and long anticipated feature is the Chromium engine version 112 in combination with Qt 6.6.2, which brings our port of the Falkon web browser on par with the modern web (Section Qt, WebEngine, and Falkon browser). On the account of exploratory activities, we are happy to report that Qemu can now be used directly on Genode (Section Qemu on Genode). Genode release notes Another incredibly impressive set of improvements to Genode, which will benefit Sculpt OS, too of course. Aside from the improvements mentioned above, there's also new support for Intel's Meteor Lake and embedded F&S MX8MP armStone boards, improvements to USB and audio, and much more.

For the past several years my desktop has also had a disk dedicated to maintaining a Windows install. I'd prefer to use the space in my PC case for disks for Linux. Since I already run a home NAS, and my Windows usage is infrequent, I wondered if I could offload the Windows install to my NAS instead. This lead me down the course of netbooting Windows 11 and writing up these notes on how to do a simplified modern" version. Terin Stock The setup Terin Stock ended up with is rather ingenious, to be honest. They had to create not just an environment in which netbooting through iXPE using iSCSI, but also a customised Windows PE ISO that included the necessary drivers to make installing Windows onto a iSCSI-connected remote drive possible in the first place, because they're not included in the Windows installation ISO. This isn't exactly a standard setup, of course, so there were a few roadblocks to clear before getting there. They now have Windows 11 booting from a drive in their NAS, and it seems it doesn't affect gaming - the reason why they did this in the first place is an online game that hard-requires Windows - at all. Installing the game through Steam took a bit longer, sure, but regular gameplay seems unaffected, and there's no saturation on the network or disk. You'd think this would be wholly too slow to be suitable for gaming, but I guess at least some games handle this just fine. My uneducated guess is that more demanding games that rely on a ton of disk activity to load textures and so on will have a much more difficult time running. In any event, this intrigues me, and I'm kind of curious to try and set this up myself, if only for the memes. It looks like fun.

The hits just keep on coming. Mozilla not only changed its Privacy Notice and introduced a Terms of Use for Firefox for the first time with some pretty onerous terms, they also removed a rather specific question and answer pair from their page with frequently asked questions about Firefox, as discovered by David Gerard. The following question and answer were removed: Does Firefox sell your personal data? Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That's a promise. David Gerard detailing what has been removed This promise is now gone from the website, a removal which tells you all you need to know about what Mozilla has in mind. Combine it with the much broadened data collection and buying and claiming to be an online advertising company, and what I have been predicting and warning everyone about has come to pass: Firefox has become a mere tool to collect user data, user data to be sold by Mozilla for the purposes of advertising. For years I've been warning about this inevitable outcome, and for just as many years people told me I was overreacting, that it wouldn't happen, that I was crazy. The problem is especially dire for the desktop Linux world, who soon might not have a browser they can safely include in their ISOs and base installations. A desktop Linux installation with Chromium where you have to manually drag and drop extensions to install them, and set up a Google API key just to get browser sync, isn't exactly a great experience. At this point I have no idea where to go. Chrome and its various skins are a no-go, obviously, and relatively soft forks like LibreWolf are still dependent on Firefox and Mozilla. Alternatives like Falkon also use the Chromium engine deep down, and have their own set of issues and lack of manpower to deal with. Apple users are somewhat lucky to have the WebKit-based Safari to work with, but I'd rather publish my personal data in The New York Times than trust Apple and Tim Cook. We're right back where we started. Lovely.

At some point, I wondered-what if I sent a packet using a transport protocol that didn't exist? Not TCP, not UDP, not even ICMP-something completely made up. Would the OS let it through? Would it get stopped before it even left my machine? Would routers ignore it, or would some middlebox kill it on sight? Could it actually move faster by slipping past common firewall rules? No idea. So I had to try. Hawzen Okay so the end result is that it's technically possible to send a packet across the internet that isn't TCP/UDP/ICMP, but you have to take that literally: one packet.

I installed Void on my current laptop on the 10th of December 2021, and there has never been any reinstall. The distro is absurdly stable. It's a rolling release, and yet, the worst update I had in those years was one time, GTK 4 apps took a little longer to open on GNOME. Which was reverted after a few hours. Not only that, I sometimes spent months without any update, and yet, whenever I did update, absolutely nothing went wrong. Granted, I pretty much only did full upgrades, and never partial upgrades, which generally help a lot. Still. Sarah Mathey Void is love, Void is life. It's such an absurdly good distribution, and if it wasn't for the fact that I prefer Fedora KDE by a hair, I'd be using Void on all of my machines. The only reason I'm not is that I would set up Void very close to what I get from Fedora KDE out of the box anyway, so my laziness gets the better of me there. I used to run Void on my POWER9 hardware, but that architecture is no longer supported by Void. If you're looking for a Linux distribution free of systemd, there's little out there that can equal or top Void, and even if you don't care much about init systems, Void still has a lot to offer. The documentation is decent, its package manager is a joy to use, the repositories are loaded and up-to-date, and it strikes a great balance between building an entire Linux system from scratch on the one hand, and complete desktop distributions like Fedora on the other. The best way I can describe it is that Void feels like the most BSD-y of Linux distributions. Void is my fallback, in case Fedora for whatever reason slips up and dies. IBM, Red Hat, AI" - there's a lot of pits Fedora can fall into, after all.

Windows was an early adopter of Unicode, and its file APIs use UTF16 internally since Windows 2000-used to be UCS-2 in Windows 95 era, when Unicode standard was only a draft on paper, but that's another topic. Using UTF-16 means that filenames, text strings, and other data are stored as sequences of 16bit units. For Windows, a properly formed surrogate pair is perfectly acceptable. However, issues arise when string manipulation produces isolated or malformed surrogates. Such errors can lead to unreadable filenames and display glitches-even though the operating system itself can execute files correctly. But we can create them deliberately as well, which we can see below. Zafer Balkan What a wild ride and an odd corner case. I wonder what kind of odd and fun shenanigans this could be used for.

I guess my praise for Mozilla's and Firefox' continued support for Manifest v2 had to be balanced out by Mozilla doing something stupid. Mozilla just published Terms of Use for Firefox for the first time, as well as an updated Privacy Notice, that come into effect immediately and include some questionable terms. The Terms of Use state: When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox. Firefox' new Terms of Use That's incredibly broad, and it could easily be argued that this gives Mozilla the right to use whatever you post or upload online through Firefox, which is clearly insane. However, it might also just be standard, regular, wholly unenforceable legalese, but the fact it's in the Firefox Terms of Use now that you have to accept is disconcerting. Does this mean that if an artist uses Firefox to upload a new song they made, Mozilla now has a license to use that song in whatever way they deem fit? You'd hope not, but that does seem what the terms are stating here. Moving on to the new Privacy Notice, and it seems Mozilla intends to collect more data in more situations. For instance, Mozilla is going to collect things such as Unique identifiers" and Browsing data" to Market services", consent for which Mozilla will only ask for in jurisdictions where such consent is required, and it's opt-out, not opt-in. I would hazard a guess that even in places where strict privacy regulations are in place, the wording of such consent will probably be obtuse, and the opt-out checkbox hidden somewhere deep in settings. Mozilla also intends to collect all data types" to comply with applicable laws, and identify and prevent harmful, unauthorized or illegal activity". Considering how fast, I don't know, being trans or women's health care is criminalised in the US, illegal activity" can cover a lot of damn things once you have totalitarians like Musk and Trump in power. An organisation like Mozilla shouldn't be collecting any data types, let alone all of them, and especially not in places where such data types can lead to real harm to innocent people. The backlash to the new Terms of Use and updated Privacy Notice is already growing, and it further cements my worries that Mozilla is intending to invest more and more into becoming an advertising company first, browser maker second. The kinds of data they're going to collect now from Firefox users are exactly the kinds of data that are incredibly useful to advertisers, and it doesn't take a genius to see where this is going.

Remember about half a year ago, when the PowerPC versions of Windows NT were made to run on certain models of PowerPC Macs? The same developer responsible for that work, Rairii, took all of this to the next level, and it's now possible to run the PowerPC version of Windows NT on the GameCube, Wii, Wii U, and a few related development boards. NT 3.51 RTM and higher. NT 3.51 betas (build 944 and below) will need kernel patches to run due to processor detection bugs. NT 3.5 will never be compatible, as it only supports PowerPC 601. (The additional suspend/hibernation features in NT 3.51 PMZ could be made compatible in theory but in practise would require all of the additional drivers for that to be reimplemented.) Windows NT for GameCube/Wii GitHub page As you may have expected, there are some issues, such as instability and random reboots, USB hotplugging doesn't work, and some other, smaller issues, but none of that takes away from just how awesome and impressive this really is. There's framebuffer support for the Flipper GPU, full support for the controllers ports and a ton of compatible controllers and related input devices, including support for the N64 mouse and keyboard, although said support is untested. The GameCube and Wii (U) are PowerPC computers, after all, running IBM processors, so it shouldn't be surprising that running Windows NT on them is possible. Still, it's an impressive feat of engineering to get this to work at all, let alone in as complete a state as it appears to be.

I'm sure we can all have a calm, rational discussion about this, so here it goes: zlib-rs, the Rust re-implementation of the zlib library, is now faster than its C counterparts in both decompression and compression. We've released version 0.4.2 of zlib-rs, featuring a number of substantial performance improvements. We are now (to our knowledge) the fastest api-compatible zlib implementation for decompression, and beat the competition in the most important compression cases too. Folkert de Vries As someone who isn't a programmer, looking at all the controversies and fallout around anything related to Rust is both fascinating and worrying. Fascinating because Rust clearly brings a whole slew of improvements over established and older languages, and worrying because the backlash from the establishment has been wildly irrational and bordering on the childish, complete with tamper tantrums and the taking of balls and going home. It shouldn't surprise me that people get attached to programming languages the same way people get attached to operating systems, but surprisingly, it still does. If Rust not only provides certain valuable benefits like memory safety, but can also be used to create implementations that are faster than those created in, say, C, it's really only going to be a matter of time before it simply becomes an untenable position to block Rust from, say, the Linux kernel. Progress has a tendency to find a way, especially the more substantial the benefits get, and as studies show, even only writing new code in memory-safe languages provides substantial benefits. In other words, more and more projects will simply switch over to Rust for new code where it makes sense, whether Rust haters want it or not. There will be enough non-Rust code to write and maintain, though, so I don't think people will be out of a job any time soon because they refuse to learn Rust, but to me as an outsider, the Rust hate seems to grow more and more irrational by the day.

Mozilla has officially reiterated that it's going to keep offering support for both Manifest v2 and Manifest v3 extensions in Firefox. Google is removing support for Manifest v2 from Chrome, and with it a feature called blockingWebRequest that is used by ad blockers like uBlock Origin. Google's replacement for that feature is more restrictive and less capable, and as such, uBlock Origin no longer works on Chrome. Firefox, however, will continue supporting both blockingWebRequest and declarativeNetRequest - giving developers more flexibility and keeping powerful privacy tools available to users. Scott DeVaney and Ed Sullivan There's a lot to be worried about when it comes to Mozilla's future, but on this matter, at least, they're taking the correct stance that genuinely puts users first. It's no surprise Google is using Manifest v3 as an excuse to nerf adblocking in Chrome, since adblocking cuts into Google's most important source of revenue. If you're still using Chrome, this alone should be more than enough reason to switch to Firefox, so you can retain the most optimal form of adblocking. The various Chromium skins will most likely all lose support for Manifest v2 as well once the code is actually removed from Chromium in June 2025. Vivaldi announced as such, and unless any of the other Chromium skins out there decide to fork Chromium and maintain their own version, you can expect all of them to lose support for Manifest v2 around the same date. Safari is harder to pin down, since Apple doesn't make any statements about future product. For now, it supports both Manifest v2 and v3, and I don't really see a reason why Apple would remove v2 support.

The Wayland color-management protocol extension has landed on Feb 13th, 2025, in upstream wayland-protocols repository in the staging directory. It was released with wayland-protocols 1.41. The extension enables proper interactions between traditional (sRGB), Wide Color Gamut (WCG), and High Dynamic Range (HDR) image sources and displays once implemented in Wayland compositors and used in applications. Of course, a protocol is just a language. Two participants need to speak the same language for the language to be of any use: Wayland compositors and a component on the application side (e.g., a toolkit library). Major efforts have been going on in various projects to prove and take advantage of the protocol, including KWin, Mutter, Weston, wlroots, GStreamer, GTK, Qt, SDL, Mesa, and mpv. Support in Mesa means that applications will be able to render and display in HDR by using the relevant EGL and Vulkan features. Pekka Paalanen Colour management has been an important missing piece of the Wayland puzzle, so it's good to see this finally released and added to Wayland as a new protocol after so many years of work. It's important to note that the work done so far focuses almost entirely on the entertainment side of things, like watching video or playing games. The other important side, professional colour management for things like photo editing or desktop publishing, is still missing, with the major holdup being measuring physical monitor response (measuring a reference image displayed on a monitor with a hardware device).

I've saved the worst for last. For some reason, Xcode phones home to appstoreconnect.apple.com every time I open an Xcode project. This also appears to be unnecessary, and I experience no problems after denying the connections in Little Snitch, so I do! I assume that the connections send identifying information about the Xcode project to Apple, otherwise why even make the connections when opening a project? And all of these connections from Xcode, to every domain, require login to your Apple Developer account, so Apple is definitely receiving identifying information about you in any case. In effect, Xcode is a developer analytics collection mechanism, whether you like it or not, which I don't. Jeff Johnson If, at this point in time, you're still surprised Apple doesn't practice what it preaches, the fault lies pretty much entirely with you. Anyway, it seems Xcode phones home to Apple quite a bit, which I doubt is all that unique in the world of commercial development environments. I honestly don't think Apple itself doing anything particularly nefarious with this data, but the fact it's collecting it in the first place should still make you think twice about using Xcode, especially if you're developing anything even remotely sensitive. What should really worry you is the fact Tim Cook and Apple are close allies of Trump and his regime. Xcode is required for iOS/iPadOS/etc. development, because the App Store requires applications be built and submitted with it. As such, every iOS developer is sending substantial amounts of data to Apple during development, which should be especially concerning for people outside of the US and people who aren't straight white males; using Xcode requires an Apple Account, so Apple knows quite a bit about who is using it. With the breakdown of the rule of law in the US, all of this data is basically freely accessible to US authorities, and we've seen by now that people like self-styled genius Elon Musk don't worry too much about pesky things like the rule of law. If Musk wants this data, Apple will hand it over. If you're an Apple developer, you should stop and think every time you open Xcode. You're sending your data straight to a hostile entity. If you're claiming to use Apple products because of Apple's privacy promises", Xcode's data collection should be a huge worry for you.

Starting with Android smartphones running on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform, Qualcomm Technologies now offers device manufacturers the ability to provide support for up to eight consecutive years of Android software and security updates. Smartphones launching on new Snapdragon 8 and 7-series mobile platforms will also be eligible to receive this extended support. Mike Genewich I mean, good news of course, but Qualcomm has a history of making empty promises, so I'll see it when I believe it. Also note that this news doesn't mean every Snapdragon 8 Elite Android device will get eight years of updates - it just means OEMs are able to offer such support now, not that they'll actually do it. Considering it's usually the OEMs refusing to offer updates, I wonder just how big the actual impact of this news will be. In any event, this includes both regular Android updates as well as two Android Common Kernel upgrades, which are required to meet this eight year window. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty about Android and the Android Common Kernels, the official Android documentation has more details.

We now have the bizarre situation that anyone with any sense can see that America is no longer a reliable partner, and that the entire US business world bows to Trump's dictatorial will, but we STILL are doing everything we can to transfer entire governments and most of our own businesses to their clouds. Not only is it scary to have all your data available to US spying, it is also a huge risk for your business/government continuity. From now on, all our business processes can be brought to a halt with the push of a button in the US. And not only will everything then stop, will we ever get our data back? Or are we being held hostage? This is not a theoretical scenario, something like this has already happened. Bert Hubert The cold and harsh reality is that the alliance between the United States and Europe, the single-most powerful alliance in human history, is over. Voters in the United States prefer their country ally itself with the brutal and genocidal dictator of Russia, instead of being allied with the democratic and free nations of Europe. That's their choice to make, their consequences to face, and inevitably, their cross to bear. Governments in Europe have not yet fully accepted that they can no longer rely on the United States for, well, anything. Whether it be existential, like needing to shore up defense spending and possibly unifying European militaries, or something more mundane, like which computer systems European governments use, the United States should be treated in much the same way as Russia or China. Europe has to fend for itself, spend on itself, and build for itself, instead of assuming that the Americans will come through on any promise" they make. An unreliable partner like the US is a massive liability. Bert Hubert is exactly right. European data needs to be stored within European borders. Just as we wouldn't store our data on servers owned or controlled by the Chinese government, we shouldn't be storing our data on servers owned or controlled by the US government. The general European public is already changing its buying habits - it's time our governments do so too.

Sailfish OS 5.0, originally released late last year as part of the new Jolla C2 Community Phone, will now be pushed to all Sailfish OS devices. There have been several other minor releases since the original release, so if you're running Sailfish OS on something other than the C2, you're getting a release with some more bugfixes and improvements. The main improvement is an upgrade to Gecko ESR91, with work underway to move to ESR102 - this is far from the latest release, but sticking to ESR releases seems like a wise idea for a smaller team. This release also upgrades the Android application support to Android 13 (API level 33), and adds the microG 0.3.6 enablers. There's Wireguard support now, call blocking, and new landscape view for a variety of applications. Incidentally, I was one of the first people to publish a review of the original Jolla Phone, exactly 11 years ago in 2014. Since I was such an early adopter, I have the The First One version, and it just so happens I'm also one of the very few people who actually received the Jolla Tablet, after being an extremely early backer of that device, too. I still have both of them, and especially the Jolla Phone I used as my main device for quite a while - half a year to a year, or so - before going back to Android. I'm glad Sailfish OS is still going, and I'm definitely interested in giving this new release a go. I would need to buy the Jolla C2 Community Phone, and if finances allow, I may actually do so. In case you want to help, feel free to become an OSNews Patreon or make a one-time donation through Ko-Fi.

Microsoft seems to be addressing some of the oddities with the Windows 11 Start menu, finally adding basic views that should've been in Windows 11 since the very start. We're introducing two new views to the All" page in the Start menu: grid and category view. Grid and list view shows your apps in alphabetical order and category view groups all your apps into categories, ordered by usage. This change is gradually rolling out so you may not see it right away. We plan to begin rolling this out to Windows Insiders who are receiving updates based on Windows 11, version 24H2 in the Dev and Beta Channels soon. Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc These new views are very welcome, but sadly, you still can't set them as the default view in the Start menu. You're still forced to use whatever that default view is, and click on All" to get to these new views, instead of being available right as you open the Start menu. I messed around with Windows 11 on my XPS 13 9370 for a few weeks as I waited for a review laptop to arrive, and I couldn't last for a few hours without buying a replacement for the Start menu that allowed me to have a working, non-terrible menu that I could configure to my own needs. It's wild to me that such an iconic element of the Windows user interface is in such a dire, unliked state. We all know Windows seems to be a in a bit of a rut, with Microsoft investing more in nonsense like AI" and ads in the operating system than in actually listening to users and improving their experience. It's been roughly thirty years since the introduction of the Start menu, and the original one from Windows 95 is still superior to whatever's in Windows now. Wild.

Last year somebody reported a problem with the DOS 3.3 SYS.COM command when used with NetDrive. They started with a valid FAT12 image, ran SYS.COM to make it bootable, and then they were not able to mount the image using NetDrive again. Running SYS.COM against the image had broken something. Besides copying the operating system's hidden files to the target drive letter, SYS.COM also copies some boot code into the first sector of the disk. In general it does not make sense to run it against a NetDrive image because you already had to boot DOS to mount the image, but it should not hurt anything. So I decided to have a look at what was going on. Michael Brutman A good old classic bug hunt in some retro DOS code from roughly 1987. This one's a bit more technical and in-depth than these things usually are, and quite a bit of it goes over my head, but I'm sure since most of you are much smarter than I am, you'll do a better job understanding what's going on.

While SPARC may no longer be supported by the main Illumos project, it still works and is still viable. This page brings together a variety of information regarding Illumos on SPARC, not necessarily limited to Tribblix. Tribblix website It seems running Tribblix - and other Illumos-based distributions - on SPARC is still possible, but there are some serious limitations anyone who has tried to use even slightly older operating systems will be fairly familiar with. For instance, since there's no Rust for Illumos on SPARC, Firefox and other applications that use it are not available, and Tribblix in particular no longer builds Pale Moon (or LibreOffice). Rust is available on Solaris 11, though, so it may be possible to bring it to Illumos. In a similar vein, Go also isn't available for SPARC either. As far as hardware support goes, it's a bit of a mixed bag, as systems that should work do, in fact, not, and even systems that do work run into a very familiar problem: graphics card support is a big issue. This is a problem plaguing X.org on any outdated or sidelined architecture, and it seems Illumos is also affected. Obviously, this greatly reduces the usefulness of Illumos on workstations, but is less of an issue on servers. You'll run into the same problem when trying to run NetBSD, OpenBSD, or Linux in, say, PA-RISC hardware. Of course, the problem is both a lack of people interested in and capable of contributing to keeping stuff running on older architectures, further spurred on by a dwindling supply of hardware available at reasonable prices. Sad, but there isn't much that can be done about it.

About two weeks ago we talked about why Fedora manages its own Flatpak repository, and why that sometimes leads to problems with upstream projects. Most recently, Fedora's own OBS Flatpak was broken, leading to legal threats from the OBS project, demanding Fedora remove any and all branding from its OBS Flatpak. In response, Fedora's outgoing project leader Matthew Miller gave an interview on YouTube to Brodie Robertson, in which Miller made some contentious claims about a supposed lack of quality control, security, and safety checks in Flathub. These claims led to a storm of criticism directed at Miller, and since I follow quite a few people actively involved in the Flatpak and Flathub projects - despite my personal preference for traditional Linux packaging - I knew the criticism was warranted. As a more official response, Cassidy James Blaede penned an overview of all the steps Flathub takes and the processes it has in place to ensure the quality, security, and safety of Flathub and its packages. With thousands of apps and billions of downloads, Flathub has a responsibility to help ensure the safety of our millions of active users. We take this responsibility very seriously with a layered, in-depth approach including sandboxing, permissions, transparency, policy, human review, automation, reproducibility, auditability, verification, and user interface. Apps and updates can be fairly quickly published to Flathub, but behind the scenes each one takes a long journey full of safety nets to get from a developer's source code to being used on someone's device. While information about this process is available between various documentation pages and the Flathub source code, I thought it could be helpful to share a comprehensive look at that journey all in one place. Cassidy James Blaede Flathub implements a fairly rigorous set of tests, both manual and automated, on every submission. There's too many to mention, but reading through the article, I'm sure most of you will be surprised by just how solid and encompassing the processes are. There are a few applications from major, trusted sources - think applications from someone like Mozilla - who have their own comprehensive infrastructure and testing routines, but other than those few, Flathub performs extensive testing on all submissions. I'm not a particular fan of Flatpak for a variety of reasons, but I prefer to stick to facts and issues I verifiably experience when dealing with Flatpaks. I was definitely a bit taken aback by the callousness with which such a long-time, successful Fedora project leader like Miller threw Flathub under the bus, but at least one of the outcomes of all this is greater awareness of the steps Flathub takes to ensure the quality, security, and safety of the packages it hosts. Nothing is and will be perfect, and I'm sure issues will occasionally arise, but it definitely seems like Flathub has its ducks in a row.

There's some bad news for Windows users who want to use all of the built-in features of the operating system and its integrated apps. Going forward, Microsoft is restricting features in two iconic apps, which you'll need to unlock with a paid subscription. The two apps in question? Notepad and Paint. Windows Insiders were previously able to use these app features free of charge. However, Microsoft is now making it necessary to have a Microsoft 365 subscription for full use of these apps. You'll see a new overlay that informs you of this before use. In our case, however, the respective features were simply grayed out. Laura Pippig at PCWorld It's only the AI" features that are being paywalled here, so I doubt many people will care. What does feel unpleasent, though, is that the features are visible but greyed out, instead of being absent entirely until you log into Windows with an account that has a Microsogt 365 subscription with the AI" stuff enabled. Now it just feels like the operating system you paid good money for - and yes, you do actually pay for Windows - is incomplete and badgering you for in-app purchases. The gameification of Windows continues. There's also a y in the day, so we have another Ars Technica article detailing the long list of steps you need to take to make Windows suck just a little less. The article is long, and seems to grow longer every time Ars, or any other site for that matter, posts an updated version. I installed Windows 11 on my XPS 13 9370 a few weeks ago to see just how bad things had gotten, and the amount of work I had to do to make Windows 11 even remotely usable was insane. Even the installation alone - including all the updates - took several hours, compared to a full installation of, say, Fedora KDE, which, including updated, takes like 10 minutes to install on the same machine. I personally used WinScript to make the process of unfucking Windows 11 less cumbersome, and I can heartedly recommend it to anyone else forced to use Windows 11. Luckily for me, a brand new laptop is being delivered today, without an operating system preinstalled. Can't wait to install Fedora KDE and be good to go in like 20 minutes after unboxing the thing.

Lets start with some context, the project consists of implementing, shipping and maintaining native Wayland support in the Chromium project. Our team at Igalia has been leading the effort since it was first merged upstream back in 2016. For more historical context, there are a few blog posts and this amazing talk, by my colleagues Antonio Gomes and Max Ihlenfeldt, presented at last year's Web Engines Hackfest. Especially due to the Lacros project, progresses on Linux Desktop has been slower over the last few years. Fortunately, the scenario changed since last year, when a new sponsor came up and made it possible to address most of the outstanding missing features and issues required to move Ozone Wayland to the finish line. Nick Yamane There still quite a bit of work left to do, but a lot of progress has been made. As usual, Nvidia setups are problematic, which is a recurring theme for pretty much anything Wayland-related. Aside from the usual Nvidia problems, a lot of work has been done on improving and fixing fractional scaling, adding support for the text-input-v3 protocol, reimplementing tab dragging using the proper Wayland protocol, and a lot more. They're also working on session management, which is very welcome for Chrome/Chromium users as it will allow the browser to remember window positions properly between restarts. Work is also being done to get Chromium's interactive UI tests infrastructure and code working with Wayland compositors, with a focus on GNOME/Mutter - no word on KDE's Kwin, though. I hope they get the last wrinkles worked out quick. The most popular browser needs to support Wayland out of the box.

There's a number of backups of old DECtapes from Dennis Ritchie, which he gave to Warren Toomey in 1997. The tapes were eventually uploaded, and through analysis performed by Yufeng Gao, a lot of additional details, code, and software were recovered from them. A few days ago, Gao came back with the results from their analys of two more tapes, and on it, they found something quite special. Getting this recovered version to run was a bit of a challenge, and only aap's PDP-11 emulator is capable of running it. To even get it to run in the first place, Gao had perform quite some intricate steps, but eventually he managed to build an image that can be downloaded and booted on aap's PDP-11 emulator. The image in question, as well as some more details, can be found on the GitHub page.

We've recognized that Mozilla faces major headwinds in terms of both financial growth and mission impact. While Firefox remains the core of what we do, we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term; and creating online fundraising campaigns that will draw a bigger circle of supporters over the long run. Mozilla's impact and survival depend on us simultaneously strengthening Firefox AND finding new sources of revenue AND manifesting our mission in fresh ways. That is why we're working hard on all of these fronts. Mark Surman on the Mozilla blog None of this is new to anyone reading OSNews. I've been quite vocal about Mozilla's troubles and how it intends to address those troubles, and I'm incredibly worried and concerned about the increasing efforts by Mozilla to push advertising and AI" to somehow find more revenue streams. I think this is the wrong direction to take, and will not make up for the seemingly inevitable loss of the Google search deal - and my biggest fear is that Firefox will get a lot worse before Mozilla realises advertising and AI" just aren't compatible with their mission and the morals and values of the last few remaining Firefox users. I don't have any answers either, of course. Making a competitive browser is hard, and clearly requires a lot of people and a lot of time. Donations are fickle, nobody will pay for a browser, and relying on corporate sponsoring in other forms than the Google search deal will just mean Firefox will become like Chrome even faster, with more and more exceptions for allowed" ads and additional roadblocks for adblockers to try and work around. In essence, I strongly believe that it is impossible to both earn money from online ads and make a good browser. It's one or the other - not both. There's basically no competition in the browser space, and if we lose Firefox, the only other option is Chrome and its various skins. Not a future I'm looking forward to.

The goal of this project is to emulate an Intel 8086 processor and supporting PC hardware well enough to run the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset (ELKS), including a shell and utilities. It should be possible to run other x86 software as long as it doesn't require more than a simple serial terminal. NES86 GitHub page Is this useful in any meaningful sense? No. Will this change the word? No. Does it have any other purpose than just being fun and cool? Nope. None of that matters.

Everywhere you look, the media is telling you that OpenAI and their ilk are the future, that they're building advanced artificial intelligence" that can take human-like actions," but when you look at any of this shit for more than two seconds it's abundantly clear that it absolutely isn't and absolutely can't. Despite the hype, the marketing, the tens of thousands of media articles, the trillions of dollars in market capitalization, none of this feels real, or at least real enough to sustain this miserable, specious bubble. People like Marc Benioff claiming that today's CEOs are the last to manage all-human workforces" are doing so to pump up their stocks rather than build anything approaching a real product. These men are constantly lying as a means of sustaining hype, never actually discussing the products they sell in the year 2025, because then they'd have to say what if a chatbot, a thing you already have, was more expensive?" Edward Zitron Looking at the data and numbers, as Zitron did for this article, the conclusions are sobering and harsh for anyone still pushing the AI" bubble. Products aren't really getting any better, they're not making any money because very few people are paying for them, conversion rates are abysmal, the reported user numbers don't add up, the projections from AI" companies are batshit insane, new products they're releasing are shit, and the media are eating it up because they stand to benefit from the empty promises. Generative AI is a financial, ecological and social time bomb, and I believe that it's fundamentally damaging the relationship between the tech industry and society, while also shining a glaring, blinding light on the disconnection between the powerful and regular people. The fact that Sam Altman can ship such mediocre software and get more coverage and attention than every meaningful scientific breakthrough of the last five years combined is a sign that our society is sick, our media is broken, and that the tech industry thinks we're all fucking morons. This entire bubble has been inflated by hype, and by outright lies by people like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, their lies perpetuated by a tech media that's incapable of writing down what's happening in front of their faces. Altman and Amodei are raising billions and burning our planet based on the idea that their mediocre cloud software products will somehow wake up and automate our entire lives. Edward Zitron In a just world, these 21st century snake oil salesmen would be in prison.

Broadcom has been closely examining Intel's chip-design and marketing business, according to people familiar with the matter. It has informally discussed with its advisers making a bid but would likely only do so if it finds a partner for Intel's manufacturing business, the people said. Nothing has been submitted to Intel, the people cautioned, and Broadcom could decide not to seek a deal. Separately, TSMC has studied controlling some or all of Intel's chip plants, potentially as part of an investor consortium or other structure, according to people familiar with the discussions. Asa Fitch, Lauren Thomas, and Yang Jie at The WSJ The vultures continue to circle, but considering Intel isn't actually dead yet, it does all feel a little bit premature. The company needs time to right the ship, but with its current non-technical, finance-oriented leadership it might already be too late for such time to be given to the company. For all we know, they're already working on a big payday through divestment or wholesale selling of the company, and they're just waiting on the right offer. I don't think it's a good idea to let Intel be stripped for parts and looted by the ultra-wealthy, but with the United States hurdling towards a massive constitutional crisis and experiencing utter destruction of government institutions, I don't think anyone's left to stop it or think things through properly.

Humane is selling most of its company to HP for $116 million and will stop selling AI Pin, the company announced today. AI Pins that have already been purchased will continue to function normally until 3PM ET on February 28th, Humane says in a support document. After that date, Pins will no longer connect to Humane's servers." As a result, AI Pin features will no longer include calling, messaging, AI queries / responses, or cloud access." Humane is also encouraging users to download any pictures, videos, and notes stored on their Pins before they are permanently deleted at that shutdown time. Jay Peters at The Verge I can't think of a better example of AI" being a planet-cooking hype bubble than the Humane failure everybody saw coming from a mile away. HP can add this useless acquisition next to the Palm one.

AIDA64, the popular benchmarking tool for Windows, released a new version today. I don't particularly care about benchmarking - even less so benchmarking on Windows - but this new release comes with an interesting line in the release notes. Discontinued support for Windows 95, 98, Me AIDA64 v7.60 release notes Seeing a widely-used, popular piece of software drop support for Windows 95, 98, and ME only in this, the year of our lord, 2025, is kind of amazing.

It's been two years since the release of ArcaOS 5.1, which was a hugely important release because it brought UEFI support to this continuation of IBM's OS/2, ensuring longevity for the project for years to come. Since I don't think much is known about what, exactly, Arca Noae, and eComStation before it, has access to within the licensing agreement with IBM, it's difficult to ascertain just how much room they actually have to make changes to the code at the core of the old OS/2. Regardless, I tested ArcaOS 5.1 before and during its release, and the support for UEFI and GPT partition layouts was excellent on my machines. Almost 18 months later comes the next release in the 5.1 branch, ArcaOS 5.1.1, and as the version number implies, this isn't another major release on the scale of 5.1. Looking at the list of changes, it mostly contains a ton of upgraded versions of various programs and tools included in ArcaOS. After some digging into some of those upgraded versions, I think I can safely say we're looking at a ton of small bugfixes, but there are also a few other things that stand out to me as welcome changes. For instance, the changelog mentions various improvements to the installer and related tools, such as an improved method of determining the right screen resolution and font scaling during the installation. Considering I had to deal with some issues there - I think the installer UI elements were grossly oversized - this is a welcome fix. There are also refreshed" Firefox and Thunderbird builds, although I don't know if that means an update to the latest ESR releases, or just a rebuild of what was already shipping with ArcaOS 5.1. I never found the time around the 5.1 release to do a proper review - I was knee-deep in baby and toddler care overload at the time - but if Arca Noae is willing to provide me with a 5.1.1 copy, I should be able to actually review it now that I'm only ankle-deep in baby and toddler care overload.

What might be somewhat more surprising though considering its research origins is that Unix almost since the very beginning had a comprehensive set of online reference documentation for all its commands, system calls, file formats, etc. These are the the manual- or man-pages. On Unix systems used interactively, the man-pages have historically always been installed, space permitting. The way the manual pages have evolved and how they are used has changed over the decades. This set of posts is intended to give people unfamiliar with them an overview, as well as offer a review to seasoned users. Alex Bochannek Right in this first article in the series there's an interesting observation I never stopped and thought about: because the original creators of UNIX were writing the content of man pages with the very tools they were creating for UNIX, it led to a virtuous cycle. Unix tools were used to document Unix, improving the documentation tools themselves as well." I tend to use the internet now to learn how specific tools and commands work, but having such detailed man pages built right into the operating system was a huge deal pre-internet.

One of the reactions to my discussion of why Windows 95 setup used three operating systems (and oh there were many) was my explanation that an MS-DOS based setup program would be text-mode. But c'mon, MS-DOS could do graphics! Are you just a bunch of morons? Yes, MS-DOS could do graphics, in the sense that it didn't actively prevent you from doing graphics. You were still responsible for everything yourself, though. There were no graphics primitives aside from a BIOS call to plot a single pixel. Everything else was on you, and you didn't want to use the BIOS call to plot pixels anyway because it was slow. If you wanted any modicum of performance, you had to access the frame buffer directly. Raymond Chen And with everything the Windows 95 setup program needs that you'd have to create, you'd end up just... Developing a custom operating system in the first place. Since Microsoft already had Windows 3.x lying around, why not reuse parts of that to aid in the Windows 95 installation process? Honestly, all of it makes perfect sense, and I really don't understand why anyone would seriously advocate for building a separate, entirely custom operating system just to install Windows 95 when Windows 3.x was right there. Of course, these days things are a little different, but Windows still loads a different operating system during its installation. It's called the Windows Preinstallation Environment, but it's no longer based on Windows 3.x, obviously, and instead is a cut-down version of the Windows version you're actually installing. The latest version of Windows PE is 10.0.26100.1, and it's built from Windows 11 24H2. Windows PE also powers the Windows Recovery Environment, the menu you can boot into to perform various analyses, maintenance, and repair of your Windows installation. Since Microsoft does not want Windows PE to be used a general purpose operating system, it comes with a few interesting limitations you can't really circumvent. It has a non-configurable 72-hour time bomb, after which if will just shut off, and since PE runs entirely in memory, no changes are saved - unless you make any changes during the creation of the PE image. It also makes use of FAT32, so there's a whole host of limitations there, and there's a few other things Microsoft disabled. Since you an add drivers to a PE image, though, I wonder if you could sneak in a file system driver and circumvent FAT32's limitations that way?

JotaleaOS is an open source, minimalistic, experimental operating system made by Jotalea, designed for extreme low-resource environments. It does not support external programs or games, as it lacks a standard application execution environment. The system is entirely self-contained, running only its built-in commands. JotaleaOS website Exactly what is says on the tin: a tiny operating system created entirely as a learning experience. That's it.

Unlike most (all?) other distributions with built-in Flatpak support, Fedora maintains its own repository of Flatpak applications. Everyone else defaults to using Flathub, where developers of applications themselves tend to publish their Flatpaks. Fedora's shadow Flathub' sometimes leads to problems, with Fedora-made Flatpaks containing bugs and brokenness, while presenting themselves as official, developer-made Flatpaks. In turn, users complain to the developers, while the issues they experience are actually caused by Fedora making its own Flatpaks. One of the applications this happened to is OBS, and over three weeks ago the OBS project requested that either the broken, unofficial Fedora Flatpak be removed, or that it be made clear that the Flatpak was third-party. This request seems entirely reasonable to me, and it would be fairly trivial for Fedora to do this. In fact, I think respecting this request is merely common decency. Sadly, the Fedora project thought differently, and just... Ignored the request. And so the OBS project escalated the issue. This is a formal request to remove all of our branding, including but not limited to, our name, our logo, any additional IP belonging to the OBS Project, from your distribution. Failure to comply may result in further legal action taken. We expect a response within the next 7 business days (By Friday, February 21st, 2025). Joel Bethke It seems this caught the attention of the Fedora project, as within less than 24 hours, a formal request was made by the maintainer of Fedora's OBS RPM package to have the broken OBS Flatpak removed. It seems there's no official process to follow for making such a request, but I hope it gets through and honoured, if only because, like I said above, it would be common decency to do so. I do wish to go back to the original OBS complaint, though, as it poses the question most of you are asking yourselves at this point. I would also like some sort of explanation on why someone thought it was a good idea to take a Flatpak that was working perfectly fine, break it, and publish it at a higher priority to our official builds. We spend an enormous amount of effort on our official Flatpak published to Flathub to ensure everything is working as well as it can be. Joel Bethke Why does Fedora maintain its own shadow-Flathub, set at a higher priority than the real Flathub? There's a few reasons, as detailed in this Fedora Magazine article from 2022. There's the obvious stuff like Fedora only allowing free and open source software, whereas Flathub also allows proprietary software, meaning that if Fedora ships with the Flathub repository enabled and prioritised, it would violate Fedora's policies. You can argue back and forth about this, but Fedora's policy being what it is, I can see where they're coming from. The article mentions Flathub will split proprietary applications from free and open source ones, but I can't find any word on if this has happened already. A second big difference are the sources where the Flatpaks are drawn from. While Flathub allows and all sources, with their packages reusing Debian packages, Ubuntu Snaps, tarballs, AppImages, and more, Fedora exclusively reuses its own RPM packages when creating its Flatpak packages. Furthermore, Fedora Flatpaks use the Docker-like OCI format to publish applications (which ties into the Fedora Registry), while Flathub uses OSTree. Lastly, Fedora Flatpaks use one, single, big underlying runtime, while Flathub has a number of different, smaller runtimes. The issue here seems to be that the motivations for maintaining a Flatpak repository differ greatly between Flathub and Fedora, but one has to wonder how much of that actually matters to users. Maintaining your own, separate Flatpak repository that effectively duplicates the work developers do when publishing to Flathub is not only wasteful, but also prone to cause bugs, issues, and outdated Flatpaks - which in turn causes strife with the original developers of the applications who have to deal with problems causes not by their own work, but by Fedora - problems that they can't even fix. I don't think this situation makes any sense to perpetuate, and it's high time Fedora defaults to Flathub for Flatpak applications. It will reduce the workload on package maintainers, prevent needless packaging bugs, improve the experience for users, and make developers happier. It's a no-brainer at this point.

Speaking of KDE, Plasma 6.3 has been released. It brings with it a ton of improvements aimed at digital artists, such as much improved management and configuration of drawing tablets. You can now map an area of the tablet's surface to a part of the screen, change the functions of stylus buttons, customise the pressure curve and range of a stylus, and much more. The entire settings panel for drawing tablets has also been redesigned to make it easier to find what you're looking for. Plasma 6.3 also completely overhauls KWin's fraction scaling. Fractional scaling in KWin will not try to snap everything to your display's pixel grid, to reduce blurriness and make everything look sharper. KWin's zoom effect also makes use of these improvements, making for a pixel-perfect zoom feature with a pixel grid overlay, which is great for artists and designers. This will be a very welcome improvement for people using e.g. 125% or 150% scaling on their displays. Hardware monitoring is much improved too, with System Monitor showing more information while using fewer resources, and KDE users on FreeBSD can now see GPU statistics too. There's also a ton of small additions that are still quite welcome, like opening the menu editor instead of a properties dialog when clicking on Edit Application in a launcher menu's context menu, the ability to clone panels, an option to turn of symbolic icons in Kickoff, a Show Target" option in the context menu of symbolic links, and a lot more. KDE Plasma 6.3 will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.

One of the major issues with KDE's styling system is the fact that over the year, it has accumulated four ways of styling applications - which makes themeing and changing aspects of the default theme far more cumbersome than it should be. In fact, with the current version of KDE, it's effectively impossible to consistently theme the entire KDE desktop, as several parts of it, like Kirigami applications, only inherit parts of the theme you're applying. It's a bit of a mess, and KDE is well aware of this. This problem is not new; we already identified it several years ago. Unfortunately, it also is not easy to solve. Some of the reasons it got to this state are simply inertia. Some things like Plasma's SVG styling were developed as a way to improve styling in an era where a lot of the technologies we currently use did not exist yet. The solutions developed in those days have now existed for a pretty long time so we cannot suddenly drop them. Other reasons are more technical in nature, such as completely different rendering stacks. Arjen Hiemstra These different rendering stacks form the core of the problem, as they can't use the same rendering code for everything. Currently, KDE tries to address the problem through a compatibility layer to tie everything together, but it's not perfect, it has to be maintained, and it means they're not utilising their rendering stacks to their fullest potential. The solution KDE is working on is called Union. However, there is another option, which is to take a step back and realise that we actually may not even want to share the rendering code, given that they are quite different. Instead, we need a description of what the element should look like, and then we can have specific rendering code that implements how to render that in the best way for a certain technology stack. Arjen Hiemstra Basically, an input layer will interpret file formats with style descrpitions, while an intermediate layer consists of a library that converts that interpretation into a more abstract description of what needs to be rendered. The final output layer then uses the data from the intermediate layer to tell the rendering stacks what to do. By standardising on the input format, say CSS, it'll be much easier to impement themes or make changes. This effort is still far from done, but they're making good progress. It ties into the Plasma Next initiative, which is, as the name implies, an effort to make changes to Plasma's default look and feel.

You might think the world of Linux distributions is a rather boring, settled affair, but there's actually a ton of interesting experimentation going on in the Linux world. From things like NixOS with its unique packaging framework, to the various immutable distributions out there like the Fedora Atomic editions, there's enough uniqueness to go around to find a lid for every pot. Oasis Linux surely falls into this category. One of its main unique characteristics is that it's entirely statically linked. All software in the base system is linked statically, including the display server (velox) and web browser (netsurf). Compared to dynamic linking, this is a simpler mechanism which eliminates problems with upgrading libraries, and results in completely self-contained binaries that can easily be copied to other systems. Oasis GitHub page That's not all it has to offer, though. It also offers fast and 100% reproducible builds, it's mostly ISO C conformant, and it has minimal bootstrap dependencies - all you need is a POSIX system with git, lua, curl, a sha256 utility, standard compression utilities, and an x86_64-linux-musl cross compiler". The ISO C-comformance is a crucial part of one of Oasis' goals: to be buildable with cproc, a small, very strict C11 compiler. It has no package manager, but any software outside of Oasis itself can be installed and managed with pkgsrc or Nix. Another important goal of the project is to be extremely easy to understand, and its /etc directory is honestly a sight to behold, and as the project proudly claims, the most complex file in there is rc.init at a mere 16 lines. The configuration files are indeed incredibly easy to understand, which is a breath of fresh air compared to the archaic stuff in commercial UNIX or the complex stuff in modern Linux distributions that I normally deal with. I'm not sure is Oasis would make for a good, usable day-to-day operating system, but I definitely like what they're putting down.

The Redox project has posted its usual monthly update, and this time, we've got a major milestone creeping within reach. Thanks to Anhad Singh for his amazing work on Dynamic Linking! In this southern-hemisphere-Redox-Summer-of-Code project, Anhad has implemented dynamic linking as the default build method for many recipes, and all new porting can use dynamic linking with relatively little effort. This is a huge step forward for Redox, because relibc can now become a stable ABI. And having a stable ABI is one of the prerequisites for Redox to reach Release 1.0". Ribbon and Ron Williams A major step forward for Redox, and one of those things not everyone might think about when they consider the state of an operating system. This wasn't all of the news this month, though, as Redox also received a port of the LOVE game engine, which powers quite a few successful indie games, like the recent hit Balatro. Thanks to this port, you can now play Balatro on Redox, which is pretty cool - and highlights just how far Redox has already come. On top of these major two headlines, there's a ton of improvements all over the operating system, mostly at the lower levels.

During a weekend of tidying up - you know, the kind of chore where you're knee-deep in old boxes before you realize it. Digging through the dusty cables and old, outdated user manuals, I found something that I had long forgotten: an oldPlan 9distribution. Judging by the faded ink and slight warping of the disk sleeve, it had to be from around 1994 or 1995. I couldn't help but wonder: why had I kept this? Back then, I was curious about Plan 9. It was a forward-thinking OS that never quite reached full potential. Holding that disk, however, it felt more like a time capsule, a real reminder of computing's advancements and adventurous spirit in the 1990s. Bill Dyer at It's FOSS As the article notes, 9front is the way to go if you want to try Plan 9 today. Plan 9/9front appeals to a very specific type of person, but when you dive into the excellent - and incredibly entertaining - documentation, it really seems quite easy to grasp and get started with. There's definitely things you'll need to unlearn and some compromises you'll need to make, but I think you'll be able to get a lot more work done than you might think. Also, if you start adding software to 9front, you get to use the best GitHub alternative of all time: shithub. That alone makes it worth it to try 9front.

Acomplete guide toconfiguring FreeBSD asanaudiophile audio server: setting upsystem and audio subsystem parameters, real-time operation, bit-perfect signal processing, and the best methods for enabling and parameterising the system graphic equalizer (equalizer) and high-quality audio equalization with FFmpeg filters. Linux users will also find useful information, especially inthe context ofconfiguring and personalising the MPD player and filters. Marcin Szewczyk-Wilgan FreeBSD is a much more capable desktop and workstation operating system than it gets credit for, especially with the Linux world sucking all the air out of the room, but you do often need to do a little more and dive a little deeper into the operating system to get it to do what you want. In the case of audio, Szewczyk-Wilgan explains that he thinks it's even ahead of Linux, due to being able to precisely track the parameters of the audio device along with the system kernel parameters and modify them", as well as FreeBSD having better support for real-time operation. This guide is an incredibly detailed explanation of which options and configurations you should use in FreeBSD to turn it into an audio server. This clearly isn't for everyone, and I assume most audio experts won't be considering FreeBSD, but what this article demonstrates is that it's very, very much possible to do so.