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After two years of intense development, the third major Linux desktop environment has released a new version: Xfce 4.20 is here. The major focus of this release cycle was getting Xfce ready for Wayland, and they've achieved quite a bit of that goal, but support for it is still experimental. Thanks toBrianandGaelalmost all Xfce components are able to run on Wayland windowing, while still keeping support for X11 windowing. This major effort was achieved by abstracting away any X11/Wayland windowing specific calls and making use of Wayland/Wlroots protocols. A whole new Xfce library, libxfce4windowing" was introduced during that process. XWayland will not be required to run any of the ported Xfce components. Xfce development team A major gap in Xfce's Wayland support is the fact that Xfwm4 has not been ported to Wayland yet, so the team suggests using Labwc or Wayfire instead if you want to dive into using Xfce on Wayland. While there are plans to port Xfwm4 over to Wayland, this requires a major restructuring and they're not going to set any timelines or expectations for when this will be completed. Regardless, this is an excellent achievement and solid progress for Xfce on Wayland, which is pretty much a requirement for Xfce (and other desktop environments) te remain relevant going forward. Of course, while Wayland is a major focus this release, there's a lot more here, too - and that's not doing the Xfce developers justice. Xfce 4.20 comes packed with so many new features, enchancements, and bug fixes across the board that I have no idea where to start. I like the large number of changes to Thunar, like the ability to use symoblic icons in the sidebar, optimising it for small window sizes, automatically opening folders when dragging and dropping, and so much more. They've also done another pass to update any remaining icons not working well on HiDPI displays, removing any instances where you'd encounter fuzzy icons. I can't wait to give Xfce 4.20 a go once it lands in Fedora Xfce.

Haiku is already awash with browsers to choose from, with Falkon (yes, the same one) being the primary choice for most Haiku users, since it offers the best overall experience. We've got a new addition to the team, however, as Firefox - in the form of Iceweasel, because trademark stuff and so on - has been ported to Haiku. Jules Enriquez provides some more background in a post on Mastodon: An experimental port of Firefox Iceweasel is now available on HaikuDepot! So far, most sites are working fine. YouTube video playback is fine and Discord just works, however the web browser does occasionally take itself down. Still rather usable, though! If @ActionRetro thought that Haiku was ready for daily driving with Falkon (see first screenshot), then rebranded Firefox surely has to make it even more viable by those standards! It should be noted though that just like with Falkon, some crash dialogs can be ignored (drag them to another workspace) and the web browser can still be used. Jules Enriquez It's not actually called Firefox at the moment because of the various trademark restrictions Mozilla places on the Firefox branding, which I think is fair just to make sure not every half-assed barely-working port can slap the Firefox logo and name on itself and call it a day. As noted, this port is experimental and needs more work to bring it up to snuff and eligible for using the name Firefox, but this is still an awesome achievement and a great addition to the pool of applications that are already making Haiku quite daily-drivable for some people. Speaking of which, are there any people in our audience who use Haiku as their main operating system? There's a lot of chatter out there about just how realistic of an option this has become, but I'm curious if any of you have made the jump and are leading the way for the rest of us. Action Retros videos about Haiku have done a lot to spread the word, and I'm noticing more and more people from far outside the usual operating system circles talking about Haiku. Which is great, and hopefully leads to more people also picking up Haiku development, because I'm sure the team can always use fresh blood.

It was only a matter of time before Google would jump into the virtual/augmented reality fray once again with Android, after their several previous attempts failed to catch on. This time, it's called Android XR, and it's aimed at both the big clunky headsets like Apple's Vision Pro as well as basic glasses that overlay information onto the world. Google has been working on this with Samsung, apparently, and of course, this new Android variant is drenched in AI" slop. We're working to create a vibrant ecosystem of developers and device makers for Android XR, building on the foundation that brought Android to billions. Today's release is a preview for developers, and by supporting tools like ARCore, Android Studio, Jetpack Compose, Unity, and OpenXR from the beginning, developers can easily start building apps and games for upcoming Android XR devices. For Qualcomm partners like Lynx, Sony and XREAL, we are opening a path for the development of a wide array of Android XR devices to meet the diverse needs of people and businesses. And, we are continuing to collaborate with Magic Leap on XR technology and future products with AR and AI. Shahram Izadi at Google's blog What they've shown of Android XR so far looks a lot like the kind of things Facebook and Apple are doing with their headsets, as far as user interface and interactions go. As for the developer story, Google is making it possible for regular Android applications to run on XR headsets, and for proper XR applications you'll need to user Jetpack Compose and various new additions to it, and the 3D engine Google opted for is Unity, with whom they've been collaborating on this. For now, it's just an announcement of the new platform and the availability of the development tools, but for actual devices that ship with Android XR you'll have to wait until next year. Other than the potential for exercise, I'm personally not that interested in VR/AR, and I doubt Google's Android-based me-too will change much in that regard.

I've been dropping a lot of hints about my journey to rid myself of Google's Android on my Pixel 8 Pro lately, a quest which grew in scope until it covered everything from moving to GrapheneOS to dropping Gmail, from moving to open source stock" Android application replacements to reconsidering my use of Google Photos, from dropping my dependency on Google Keep to setting up Home Assistant, and much, much more. You get the idea: this has turned into a very complex process where I evaluated my every remaining use of big tech, replacing them with alternatives where possible, leaving only a few cases where I'm sticking with what I was using. And yes, this whole process will turn into an article detailing my quest, because I think recent events have made remocing big tech from your life a lot more important than it already was. Anyway, one of the few things I couldn't find an alternative for was Google Pay's tap-to-pay functionality in stores. I don't like using cash - I haven't held paper money in my hands in like 15 years - and I'd rather keep my bank cards, credit card, and other important documents at home instead of carrying them around and losing them (or worse). As such, I had completely embraced the tap-to-pay lifestyle, with my phone and my Pixel Watch II. Sadly, Google Pay tap-to-pay NFC payments are simply not possible on GrapheneOS (or other de-Googled ROMS, for that matter), because of Google's stringent certification requirements. Some banks do offer NFC payments through their own applications, but mine does not. I thought this is where the story ended, but as it turns out, there is actually a way to get tap-to-pay NFC payments in stores back: Garmin Pay. Garmin offers this functionality on a number of its watches, and it pretty much works wherever Google Pay or Apple Pay is accepted, too. And best of all: it works just fine on de-Googled Android ROMs. Peope have been asking me to check this out and make it part of my quest, and ever the people-pleaser, I would love to oblige. Sadly, it does require owning a supported Garmin watch, which I don't have. To guage interest in me testing this, I've set up a Ko-Fi goal of 400 you can contribute to. Obviously, this is by no means a must, but if you're interested in finding out if you can ditch big tech, but keep enjoying the convenience of tap-to-pay NFC payments - this is your chance.

With its latest reales qemu added the Venus patches so that virtio-gpu now support venus encapsulation for vulkan. This is one more piece to the puzzle towards full Vulkan support. An outdated blog post onclollaboradescribed in 2021 how to enable 3D acceleration of Vulkan applications in QEMU through the Venus experimental Vulkan driver for VirtIO-GPU with a local development environment. Following up on the outdated write up, this is how its done today. Pepper Gray A major milestone, and for the adventurous, you can get it working today. Give it a few more months, and many of the versions required will be part of your ditribution's package repositories, making the process a bit easier. On a related note, Linux kernel developers are considering removing 32-bit x86 KVM host support for all architectures that support it - PowerPC, MIPS, RISC-V, and x86-64 - because nobody is using this functionality. This support was dropped from 32bit ARM a few years ago, and the remaining architectures mentioned above have orders of magnitude fewer users still. If nobody is using this functionality, it really makes no sense to keep it around, and as such, the calls to remove it. In other words, if your custom workflow of opening your garage door through your fridge light's flicker frequency and the alignment of the planets and custom scripts on a Raspberry Pi 2 requires this support, let the kernel developers know, or forever hold your peace.

CPUs start executing instructions by fetching those instruction bytes from memory and decoding them into internal operations (micro-ops). Getting data from memory and operating on it consumes power and incurs latency. Micro-op caching is a popular technique to improve on both fronts, and involves caching micro-ops that correspond to frequently executed instructions. AMD's recent CPUs have particularly large micro-op caches, or op caches for short. Zen 4's op cache can hold 6.75K micro-ops, and has the highest capacity of any op cache across the past few generations of CPUs. This huge op cache enjoys high hitrates, and gives the feeling AMD is leaning harder on micro-op caching than Intel or Arm. That begs the question of how the core would handle if its big, beautiful op cache stepped out for lunch. Chester Lam at Chips and Cheese The results of turning off the op cache were far less dramatic than one would expect, and this mostly comes down to the processor having to wait on other bottlenecks anyway, like the memory, and a lot of tasks consisting of multiple types of operations which not all make use of op cache. While it definitely contributes to making Zen 4 cores faster overall, even without it, it's still an amazing core that outperforms its Intel competition. As a sidenote, this is such a fun and weird thing to do and benchmark. It doesn't serve much of a purpose, and the information gained isn't very practical, but turning off specific parts of a processor and observing the consequences does create some insight into exactly how a modern processor works. There are so many different elements that make up a modern processor now, and just gigahertz or even the number of cores barely tells even half the story. Anyway, we need more of these weird benchmarks.

When we announced the security flawCVE-2024-11053on December 11, 2024 together with the release ofcurl 8.11.1we fixed a security bug that was introduced in a curl release9039days ago. That is close to twenty-five years. The previous record holder wasCVE-2022-35252at 8729 days. Daniel Stenberg Ir's really quite fascinating to see details like this about such a widepsread and widely used tool like curl. The bug in question was a logic error, which made Stenberg detail how any modern language like Rust, instead of C, would not have prevented this issue. Still, about 40% of all security issues in curl stem from not using a memory-safe language, or about 50% of all high/critical severity ones. I understand that jumping on every bandwagon and rewriting everything in a memory-safe language is a lot harder than it sounds, but I also feel like it's getting harder and harder to keep justifying using old languages like C. I really don't know why people get so incredibly upset at the cold, hard data about this. Anyway, the issue that sparked this post is fixed in curl 8.11.1.

Every now and then I load OpenPA and browse around. Its creator and maintainer, Paul Weissmann, has been very active lately updating the site with new articles, even more information, and tons of other things, and it's usually a joy to stumble upon something I haven't read yet, or just didn't know anything about. This time it's something called HP-RT, a real-time operating system developed and sold by HP for a number of its PA-RISC workstations back in the '90s. HP-RT is derived from the real-time operating system LynxOS and was built as real-time operating system from scratch with native POSIX API and Unix features like protected address spaces, multiprocessing, and standard GUI. Real-time scheduling is part of the kernel with response times under 200 s, later improved to sub-100 s for uses such as hospital system tied to a heart monitor, or a missile tracking system. For programming, HP-RT supported dynamic shared libraries, ANSI C, Softbench (5.2), FORTRAN, ADA, C++ and PA-RISC assembly. From HP-RT 3.0, GUI-based debugging environment (DDErt) and Event Logging library (ELOG) were included. POSIX 1003.1, 1003.1b and POSIX 1003.4a draft 4 were supported. On the software side, HP-RT supported fast file system, X and Motif clients, X11 SERVERrt, STREAMSrt (SVR 3.2), NFS, and others. Paul Weissmann at OpenPA I had no idea HP-RT existed, and looking at the feature list, it seems like it was actually a pretty impressive operating system and wider ecosystem back in the '90s when it was current. HP released several versions of its real-time operating system, with 1997's 3.0 and 3.01 being the final version. Support for it ended in the early 2000s alongside the end of the line for PA-RISC. I'd absolutely love to try it out today, but sadly, my PA-RISC workstation - an HP Visualise c3750 - is way too new" to be supported by HP-RT, and in the wrong product category at that. HP-RT required both a regular HP 9000 700 HP-UX workstation, as well as one of HP's VME machines with a single-module module with the specific rt" affix in the model number. On top of that you obviously needed the actual HP-RT operating system, which was part of the HP-RT Development Environment. The process entails using the HP-UX machine to compile HP-RT, which was then downloaded to the VMe machine. The odds of not only finding all the right parts to complete the setup, but also to get it all working with what is undoubtedly going to be spotty documentation and next to nobody to talk to about how to do it, are very, very slim. I'm open to suggestions, of course, but considering the probable crazy rarity of the specific hardware, the price-gauging going on in the retrocomputing world, the difficulty of shipping to the Swedish Arctic, and the knwoledge required, I don't think I'll be the one to get this to work and show it off. But man do I want to.

Some news is both sad and dystopian at the same time, and this is one of those cases. Moxie, a start-up selling $800 emotional support robots intended to help children is shutting down operations since it can't find enough money, and since their robots require constant connectivity to servers to operate, all of the children's robots will cease functioning within days. They're not offering refunds, but they will send out a letter to help parents tell their children in an age-appropriate way" that their lovable robot is going to die. If you have kids yourself, you know how easily they can sometimes get attached to the weirdest things, from fluffy stuffed animals designed to be cute, to random inanimate objects us adults would never consider to be even remotely interesting. I can definitely see how my own kids would be devastated if one of their favourite emotional" toys were to suddenly stop working or disappear, and we don't even have anything that pretends to have a personality or that actively interacts with our kids like this robot thing does. We can talk about how it's insane that no refunds will be given, or how a company can just remotely kill a product like this without any repercussions, but most of all I'm just sad for the kids who use one and are truly attached to it, who now have to deal with their little friend going away. That's just heartbreaking, and surely a sign of things to come as more and more companies start stuffing AI" into their toys. The only thing I can say is that we as parents should think long and hard about what kind of toys we give our children, and that we should maybe try to avoid anything tied to a cloud service that can go away at any time.

Although there's little evidence of them today, Apple made a long succession of Mac servers and servers for Macs from 1988 to 2014, and only discontinued support for the last release of macOS Server in April 2022. Its first entry into the market was a special version of the Macintosh II running Apple's own port of Unix way back in 1988. Howard Oakley These days, you can nab Xserves for pretty cheap on eBay, but since Apple doesn't properly support them anymore, they're mostly a curiosity for people who are into retro homelab stuff and the odd Apple enthusiast who doesn't know what to do with it. It always felt like Apple's head was never really in the game when it came to its servers, despite the fact that both its hardware and software were quite interesting and user friendly compared to the competition. Regardless, if my wife and I ever manage to buy our own house, the basement's definitely getting a nice homelab rack with old - mostly non-x86 Sun and HP - servers, and I think an Xserve would be a fun addition, too. Living in the Arctic means any heat they generate is useful for like 9 or so months of the year to help warm the house, and since our electricity is generated from hydropower they wouldn't be generating a massive excess of pollution, either. I have to figure out what to do with the excess heat during the few months of the year where it's warm outside, though.

Today I'm delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements. The concensus seems to be that this is a major achievement and milestone in quantum computing, and that it's come faster than everyone expected. This topic is obviously far more complicated than most people can handle, so we have to rely on the verdicts and opinions from independent experts to gain some sense of just how significant an announcement this really is. The paper's published in Nature for those few of us possessing the right amount of skill and knowledge to disseminate this information.

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It's no secret that I am very worried about the future of Firefox, and the future of Firefox on Linux in particular. I'm not going to rehash these worries here, but suffice to say that with Mozilla increasingly focusing on advertising, Firefox' negligible market share, and the increasing likeliness that the Google Search deal, which accounts for 85% of Mozilla's revenue, will come to an end, I have little faith in Firefox for Linux remaining a priority for Mozilla. On top of that, as more and more advertising nonsense, in collaboration with Facebook, makes its way into Firefox, we may soon arrive at a point where Firefox can't be shipped by Linux distributions at all anymore, due to licensing and/or idealogical reasons. I've been warning the Linux community, and distributions in particular, for years now that they're going to need an alternative default browser once the inevitable day Firefox truly shits the bed is upon us. Since I'm in the middle of removing the last few remaining bits of big tech from my life, I figured I might as well put my money where my mouth is and go on a small side quest to change my browser, too. Since I use Fedora KDE on all my machines and prefer to have as many native applications as possible, I made the switch to KDE's own browser: Falkon. What is Falkon? Falkon started out as an independent project called QupZilla, but in 2017 it joined the KDE project and was renamed to Falkon. It uses QtWebEngine as its engine, which is Qt's version of the Chromium engine, but without all the services that talk to Google, which are stripped out. This effectively makes it similar to using de-Googled Chromium. The downside is that QtWebEngine does lag behind the current Chromium version; QtWebEngine 6.8.0, the current version, is Chromium 122, while Chromium 133 is current at the time of writing. The fact that Falkon uses a variant of the Chromium engine means websites just work, and there's really nothing to worry about when it comes to compatibility. Another advantage of using QtWebEngine is that the engine is updated independently from the browser, so even if it seems Falkon isn't getting much development, the engine it uses is updated regularly as part of your distribution's and KDE's Qt upgrades. The downside, of course, is that you're using a variant of Chromium, but at least it's de-Googled and entirely invisible to the user. It's definitely not great, and it contributes to the Chromium monoculture, but I can also understand that a project like Qt isn't going to develop its own browser engine, and in turn, it makes perfect sense for KDE, as a flagship Qt product, to use it as well. It's the practical choice, and I don't blame either of them for opting for what works, and what works now - the reality is that no matter what browser you're choose, you're either using a browser made by Google, or one kept afloat by Google. Pick your poison. It's not realistic for Qt or KDE to develop their own browser engine from scratch, so opting for the most popular and very well funded browser engine and strip out all of its nasty Google bits makes the most sense. Yes, we'd all like to have more capable browser engines and thus more competition, but we have to be realistic and understand that's not going to happen while developing a browser engine is as complex as developing an entire operating system. Falkon's issues and strengths While rendering websites, compatibility, and even performance is excellent - as a normal user I don't notice any difference between running Chrome, Firefox, or Falkon on my machines - the user interface and feature set is where Falkon stumbles a bit. There's a few things users have come to expect from their browser that Falkon simply doesn't offer yet, and those things needs to be addressed if the KDE project wants Falkon to be a viable alternative to Firefox and Chrome, instead of just a languishing side project nobody uses. The biggest thing you'll miss is without a doubt support for modern extensions. Falkon does have support for the deprecated PPAPI plugin interface and its own extensions system, but there's no support for the modern extensions API Firefox, Chrome, and other browsers use. What this means for you as a user is that there are effectively no extensions available for Falkon, and that's a huge thing to suddenly have to do without. Luckily, Falkon does have adblock built-in, including support for custom block lists, so the most important extension is there, but that's it. There's a very old bug report/feature request about adding support for Firefox/Chrome extensions, which in turn points to a similar feature request for QtWebEngine to adopt support for such extensions. The gist is that for Falkon to get support for modern Firefox and Chrome extensions, it will have to go through QtWebEngine and thus the Qt project. While I personally can just about get by with using the BitWarden application (instead of the extension) and the built-in adblock, I think this is an absolute most for most people to adopt Falkon in any serious numbers. Most people who would consider switching to a different browser than Chrome or Firefox are going to need extensions support. The second major thing you'll miss is any lack of synchronisation support. You won't be synchronising your bookmarks across different machines, let alone open tabs. Of course, this extends to mobile, where Falkon has no presence, so don't expect to send your open tabs from your phone to your desktop as you get home. While I don't think this is as big of an issue as the lack of modern extensions, it's something I use a lot when working on OSNews - I find stories to link to while browsing on my phone, and then open them on my desktop to post them through the tab sharing feature of Firefox, and

Back in December 2019, Microsoftfinally killed off Windows 10 Phoneas it announced the end of support. The company's grand plans with Lumia and Windows Phones sadly never became the success it needed to be in order to be able to compete with the likes of Android or iOS. Thus Windows 11 Phone never became a real official thingoutside of concepts. However, there is a free unofficial way that makes it possible, albeit the experience may not totally be free from flaws. Dubbed Project Renegade, the mod enables users to try Windows 11 on Qualcomm Snapdragon phones, among other devices. Sayan Sen at Neowin Windows Phone 7 and 8 were amazing, and probably my favourite mobile platform of all time. I'm still sad that the duopoly made it impssible even for Microsoft to gain a foothold, because their efforts definitely deserved it. They didn't just blindly copy Android or iOS, but came up with a truly original, unique, and in my view, superior mobile operating system, and in a fair market, they would've been rewarded for it, and Windows Phone would have a perhaps small, but profitable segment of the market. In the vein of Bernie can still win, I still have this faint belief that Microsoft hasn't completely given up on the smartphone market. Now that they're serious about Windows on ARM, they might use it as sneaky way to get application developers on board, so that their applications are ready for the big Surface Phone a few years from now, complete with Windows Phone-inspired features and UI. I know this won't happen, but let me enjoy my non-existent future, please. I don't want to rely on big tech anymore, but I might make an exception for an up-to-date Windows Phone. I'm only human.

EXiGY rolls up the all of the above experiences into a single package: make games the way they were made in the mid-90s, by dragging and dropping objects into a window, programming some behaviour into those objects, and clicking the Run button. It's like ZZT with tile graphics instead of ASCII. Want to send your little game to some friends? Click the Gift button to package all of the files up, and send your friend the .XGY file. EXiGY is about making it fun to create games again. Chris on the Exigy website I fell in love with this the second I saw it come by on Mastodon. Chris - I don't know the author's full name so I'll stick with Chris - has been working on this for the past year, and it's not out quite yet. Still, the feature list is packed, and on the linked website, they intend to post development updates so we can keep up with the goings-on. This seems like an incredibly cool project and I'd love to play around with it when Chris deems it ready for release.

Every time a new Redox monthly report comes out, I'm baffled by the fact we've apparently rounded another month. They just keep on coming and going, don't they? And I even turned 40 this 1 December, so it hits even harder this time. I'm now as old as I remember my parents were in some of my oldest memories, and now I've got two kids of my own. Wild. Time isn't supposed to move this fast, and I strongly advise the Redox team to stop this madness. Anyway, this month also saw the release of the 4th alpha of system76's new COSMIC Linux desktop environment, and the parts of COSMIC available on Redox were updated to reflect that. This past months also saw a major milestone: the RISC-V version of Redox running in an emulator on the x86-64 version of Redox. That's quite the feat, and highlights just how capable Redox has become in such a short time. There's also the usual list of kernel, driver, and relibc improvements, as well as additional Rust programs ported to Redox. Also highlighted in this report: a video detailing how to build Redox under Windows Subsystem for Linux. This could be a great avenue for operating system developers who use Windows to get their feet wet at building Redox on their own systems.

Today, we are announcing the availability ofVanir, a new open-source security patch validation tool. Introduced at Android Bootcamp in April, Vanir gives Android platform developers the power to quickly and efficiently scan their custom platform code for missing security patches and identify applicable available patches. Vanir significantly accelerates patch validation by automating this process, allowing OEMs to ensure devices are protected with critical security updates much faster than traditional methods. This strengthens the security of the Android ecosystem, helping to keep Android users around the world safe. Google Security Blog Google makes it clear this tool can easily be adapted for other avenues too - it's not locked into only working with Android and Java/C/C++. Since it's now open source, anyone can contribute to it and make it compatible - for lack of a better term - with other platforms and programming languages as well.

Mozilla isn't just another tech company - we're a global crew of activists, technologists and builders, all working to keep the internet free, open and accessible. For over 25 years, we've championed the idea that the web should be for everyone, no matter who you are or where you're from. Now, with a brand refresh, we're looking ahead to the next 25 years (and beyond), building on our work and developing new tools to give more people the control to shape their online experiences. Lindsey Lionheart O'Brien at the Mozilla blog I have no clue about marketing and branding and what investments in those things cost, but all I could think about while reading this massive pile of marketing wank is that the name Firefox" only occurs once. How many Firefox bugs could've been squashed with the money spent on this rebrand literally nobody is going to care about because nobody uses Firefox as it is? Is a new logo and accompanying verbal diarrea really what's going to turn this sinking ship around? I've already made my choice, and I've left Firefox behind on all my machines, opting for an entirely different browser instead. I'm writing about that experience as we speak, so you'll have to wait a bit longer to find out what choice I made, but rest assured I know I'm not the only one who is leaving Firefox behind after two decades of loyal service, and I doubt an expensive new logo is going to change anybody's mind.

This is my hobby operating system written in C++. Currently supports x86_64 and i686 architectures. Banan-OS git page A hobby operating system as a learning experience, but for once not written in Rust, which in and of itself makes it more unique than you'd think. Despite being mostly a one-person hobby project, it's ticked quite a few boxes already: SMP, network stack, copy-on-write memory, ELF loading, NVME and ATA support, PS/2 and USB peripheral support, a basic GUI, and a lot more. Contributions are welcomed, too.

VEKOS is an experimental operating system written in Rust that focuses on verification and security at its core. This is the first alpha release (v0.0.1) that demonstrates the basic architecture and key features of the system. VEKOS GitHub page Hobby and experimental operating systems written in Rust are not exactly a novel concept, but that doesn't mean each new one that comes up isn't cool. This one is still in its very early stages, but focuses on something quite interesting: every filesystem and memory operation is cryptographically verified using a proof system. It's already got basic file system operations, signal handling and a scheduler, a shell, and more. Contributions are welcomed.

HarmonyOS Next, the new version of Huawei's mobile operating system, runs on a brand new microkernel, uses a new, homegrown programming language, and most notably in this duopolistic world, does not run Android applications. This won't be much of an issue inside China, where Huawei can more easily make sure the most important Chinese applications are supported and ported over, but outside of China that might pose some problems, especially for Chinese tourists visiting other countries. It turns out there's a solution for this, called (as Android Authority notes, this seems to translate to something like Easy Abroad"), which is basically a containerised Android runtime using microG. It comes with its own built-in application store filled with a number of popular Android applications, and runs them on HarmonyOS Next. The tool is called , which roughly translates to Easy Abroad." It's apparently designed to aid Chinese tourists who travel abroad. The tool seems to create a container for Android apps to run in, which is not a new concept but is surprising to see pop up so quickly for the new operating system. When installed, the tool lets you install a number of Android apps from its self-contained app store, including Facebook, Instagram, Discord, Reddit, YouTube, Google Search, Google Maps, Uber, Chrome, Gmail, Spotify, Disney Plus, Netflix, Steam, and more. These Android apps show up in a folder in the home screen but they cannot be dragged out of the folder. An early hands-on of the tool from YouTuberLL Techviewshows that it works surprisingly well. Android apps launch quickly, run pretty smoothly, and even appear in the recents menu. It's even possible to sign into your Google Account to use apps like Google Search and Gmail. Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority There are limitations, of course, and they're roughly the same as the ones found on any device running microG instead of Google Play Services - something I just wrote about in my review of /e/OS on a FairPhone 5: certain banking applications won't work, anything that hooks too deeply into Play Services won't run, that sort of stuff. On top of that, this tool also brings in some limitations of its own, like only whitelisted application being supported, notifications not working properly, and a few other issues. This all feels very similar to what Jolla and Sailfish tried to do way back in 2014. Running Android applications as a side hustle was jank back then and I feel like it's probably going to be jank today. Even just running Play Services in a restrictive sandbox - like I do with GrapheneOS on my daily driver, a Pixel 8 Pro - presents some issues, and microG adds even more compatibility issues on top. Putting all of this in a container will surely add an additional layer of jank, like it did on Sailfish OS. Regardless, I'm 100% down with trying to get my hands on a HarmonyOS Next device if they ever become available in some form here in Sweden, as I feel like a review of what is the most serious attempt at breaking the Android-iOS duopoly in over a decade is something that belongs here on OSNews. If that time ever comes, I might set up another fundraiser to get it done.

14.2-RELEASEnow includes OCI-compatible images, and the Podman toolkit on FreeBSD is ready to use them, on both amd64 and arm64 systems. Dave Cottlehuber This article from Dave Cottlehuber goes into more detail about the OCI-compatible FreeBSD images and how to use them.

If you were secretly hoping Microsoft would lower the system requirements for Windows 11 so you could upgrade your or your family's Windows 10 machines to Windows 11, you're going to be in for some bad news. In a blog post, Microsoft detailed that its most stringent Windows 11 requirement - the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 - is here to stay and crucial to the future of Windows. By instituting TPM 2.0 as a non-negotiable standard for the future of Windows, we elevate the security benchmark. It allows you and us to better align with the growing need for formidable data protection in the modern digital sphere. In conclusion, TPM 2.0 is not just a recommendation-it's a necessity for maintaining a secure and future-proof IT environment with Windows 11. And it's an important part of the larger Zero Trust strategy, alongside Secure Boot, Credential Guard, and Windows Hello for Business. Steven Hosking at the Windows IT Pro Blog So no, if you had the hope Microsoft would lower Windows 11's system requirements in the face of the oncoming end of support deadline for the 60% of Windows users still using Windows 10, your hope has just been dashed. A more likely outcome here is that as the deadline grows closer, Microsoft will extend the deadline by another year, and if needed another, because leaving 60% of users without security updates and little to no path to upgrade is not going to be a good look for the marketing and legal departments. If you really do want to upgrade to Windows 11, there's a few options. There's the enterprise-focused Windows 11 LTSC 2024 release, which does not require a TPM 2.0, regarding it as an optional feature instead. On top of that, LTSC is much more bare-bones, shipping without much of the stuff many of us more nerdy users aren't interested in anyway. The big downside is that getting your hands on a legal copy of LTSC will be difficult, as it's only available to volume licensing customers, which you most likely are not. Of course, you shouldn't give a shit about Microsoft's rules, so you can always use unapproved methods of getting a license. Another option is the one I took for my parts-bin Windows 11 PC which I only use for League of Legends: I bought a cheap TPM 2.0 module from eBay, slotted it into my motherboard, and was on my merry way. Due to League of Legends' required rootkit, a TPM 2.0 module is needed, so a few euros and days waiting later, I was ready to go. Do make sure you get the right type of TPM 2.0 module for your motherboard, as they're not universally compatible. The final option is to use one of the few remaining ways to circumvent Windows 11's system requirements, which are sadly dwindling with every major update. Right now that means using a tool like Flyby11, which uses the Windows Server installer to bypass Windows 11's system requirements. We'll have to wait and see for how long that trick remains possible.

Ntfs2btrfs is a tool which does in-place conversion of Microsoft's NTFS filesystem to the open-source filesystem Btrfs, much asbtrfs-convertdoes for ext2. The original image is saved as a reflink copy atimage/ntfs.img, and if you want to keep the conversion you can delete this to free up space. Mark Harmstone An amazing piece of software that works on both Linux and Windows, and even, as described above, comes with the option of undoing the conversion if you so desire and haven't removed the original image yet. Its developer, Mark Harmstone, of course stresses that while he thinks the tool is quite stable, he obviously makes no guarantees or claims about its stability. In other words, please don't use this on sensitive data or in a production environment. What makes this tool even more amazing is that you can combine it with two of Harmstone's other tools to really pull some rabbits out of your hat. First, there's his Btrfs driver for Windows, which, as the name implies, allows Windows to work with Btrfs-formatted drives. Second, and here's where things get really spicy, there's Quibble, his custom bootloader consisting of open source reimplementations of Windows' own bootloader. Using these three tools together you can, if you're lucky, boot and run Windows off a Btrfs drive. That's quite cool, and while perhaps not particularly useful due to its experimental nature, it's still an awesome weekend project.

This is a bit of an odd few days for Intel. Mere days after the board ousted its CEO Pat Gelsinger, once heralded as the chip giant's messiah, they're today launching two brand new desktop graphics cards. They're aimed at the more budget-oriented consumer, and might very well be the last discrete graphics cards Intel makes, since this is one of the product lines on the chopping block. Intel's next - and possibly last - desktop graphics cards will begin arriving in just 10 days.Right on cue, the company has announced the budget $249 Arc B580 and $219 Arc B570, shipping December 13th and January 16th, respectively, as the best-in-class performance per dollar" options in the GPU market. They're based on the same Xe2 Battlemage" GPU architecture you'll find in Intel's Lunar Lake laptop chips but with more than double the graphics cores, up to 12GB of dedicated video memory, and up to 190W of power compared to their limited laptop forms - enough power to see the B580 slightly beat Nvidia's $299 RTX 4060 and AMD's $269 RX 7600, according to Intel's benchmarks, but sometimes still trading blows. Sean Hollister at The Verge As for Gelsinger's dismissal, it seems the board forced him out after being frustrated with the slow progress the company was making in its turnaround. The fact that a finance person and a marketing person will together be interim CEOs seems to indicate the board is more interested in quick profit than a long-term turnaround, and with companies like Qualcomm being interested in acquiring Intel, the board's short-term mentality might be winning out, and ousting Gelsinger is just paving the way for selling off parts of Intel until there's nothing left. Who knows, I might be reading way too much into all of this, but it feels like expecting an organisation as complex as a high-end processor makers to turn itself around in just a few years is incredibly shortsighted, and you'd think board members at Intel would understand that. If the goal is to maintain Intel as a separate, profitable entity making some of the world's fastest processors, you're going to need to give a CEO and leadership team more than just a few years to turn the ship around. Within a few years we'll know the board's true intentions, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Intel being sold for parts over the coming years.

FreeBSD 14.2 has been released, and as the version number suggests, this isn't a major release with huge changes. Still, it does bring support for downloading and installing necessary firmware packages after installation, the latest versions of OpenZFS and OpenSSL, and much more. FreeBSD 14.2 is available for the main architectures it supports - x86, PowerPC/POWER, ARM, and RISC-V, and can be downloaded from the usual location.

Rejecting an engrained practice of bullshitting does not come easily. Frameworkism preaches that the way to improve user experiences is to adopt more (or different) tooling from the framework's ecosystem. This provides adherents with something todothat looks plausibly like engineering, except it isn't. It can even become a totalising commitment; solutions to user problems outside the framework's expanded cinematic universe are unavailable to the frameworkist. Non-idiomatic patterns that unlock significant wins for users are bugs to be squashed. And without data or evidence to counterbalance bullshit artists's assertions, who's to say they're wrong? Orthodoxy unmoored from measurements of user outcomes predictably spins intoabstruse absurdities.Heresy, eventually, is perceived to carry heavy sanctions. It's all nonsense. Alex Russell I'm not a developer, but any application that uses frameworks like React that I've ever used tend to be absolute trainwrecks when it comes to performance, usability, consistency, and platform integration. When someone claims to have an application available for a platform I use, but it's using React or Electron or whatever, they're lying in my eyes - what they really have is a website running in a window frame, which may or may not even be a native window frame. Developing using these tools indicates to me a lack of care, a lack of respect for the users of your product. I am militantly native. I'd rather use a less functional application than a Chrome web application cosplaying as a real application, and I will most likely not even consider using your service if all you have is a website-in-a-box. If you don't respect me, I see no need to respect you. If you want an application on a specific platform, use that platform's native tools and APIs to build it. Anything else tells me all I need to know about how much you truly care about the product you're building.

This is the Hall Research Technologies SC-VGA-2, sold as a VGA/HDTV Video Processor." In addition to slicing, dicing and pureeing, apparently, it will take any of a bundle of input formats and both rescale and resample them on the fly into the VGA or HDTV signal you desire, including 60Hz rates. This came from a seller specializing in teleprompter equipment and Hall still sellsan HDMI versionwith additional resolutions ... for around US$500. However, this or the slightly newerSC-VGA-2AandSC-VGA-2Bare all relatively common devices and found substantially cheaper used. Let's try it out and show some sample output, including those delicious NeXTSTEP system messages and some ST grabs. Cameron Kaiser With the obscurity of some of the hardware Cameron Kaiser details on his website, I'm not surprised he has some seriously unique needs when it comes to taking screengrabs. He couldn't very well not take the device apart, and inside it appears to be a system with two small processors, at least one of which is an Intel 8051 8bit microcontroller. Kaiser goes into his usual great detail explaining and showing how the device works. If you've got unique screengrabbing needs, this might be of interest to you.

Within in the last release cycle we worked on adding and extending the support for the i.MX8MP SoC as also found in one of the SoM options for theMNT Pocket Reformand are happy to show-case a first preview version of Sculpt running on this handy computing device. Josef Sontgen If you have a Pocket Reform - I reviewed its bigger sibling earlier this year - you can now run Genode on it. Not everything is working flawlessly yet - most notably audio and NVMe need work - but networking is operational, so you can actually browse the web. I'm not sure how much overlap there is between Genode users and Pocket Reform owners, but at least both groups now know it's an option.

Today is Black Friday", which is the day where a lot of retailers, both online and offline, pretend to have massive discounts on things they either raised the prices for a few weeks ago, or for useless garbage they bought in bulk that'll end up in a landfill within a year. Technology media happily partakes in this event, going full-mask off posting an endless stream of stories" promoting these discounts. They're writing ads for fake discounts, often for products from the very companies they're supposed to report on, and dress them up as normal articles. It's sad and revealing, highlighting just how much of the technology media landscape is owned by giant media conglomerates. OSNews does not partake. We're independent, answer to nobody, and are mostly funded directly by you, our readers. If you want to keep it this way, and keep OSNews free from the tripe you see on every other technology site around this time, consider supporting us through Patreon, making a one-time donation through Ko-Fi, or buying some merch. That's it. That's our extra special discount bonanza extravaganza Black Friday super coverage.

The Cinnamon Desktop, the GTK desktop environment developed by the Linux Mint project, has just released version 6.4. The focus of this release is on nips and tucks in the default theme, dialogs, menus, and other user interface elements. They seem to have taken a few pages out of GNOME's book, especially when it comes to dialogs and the OSD, which honestly makes sense considering Cinnamon is also GTK and most Cinnamon users will be running a ton of GNOME/Libadwaita applications. There's also a new night light feature to reduce eyestrain, vastly improved options for power profiles and management, and more. Cinnamon 6.4 will be part of Linux Mint's next major release, coming in late December, but is most likely already making its way to various other distributions' repositories.

Recently, I've been moving away from macOS to Linux, and have settled on using KDE Plasma as my desktop environment. For the most part I've been comfortable with the change, but it's always the small things that get me. For example, the Mail app built into macOS provides an Unsubscribe" button for emails. Apparently this is also supported in some webmail clients, but I'm not interested in accessing my email that way.Unfortunately, I haven't found an X11 or Wayland email client that supports this sort of functionality, so I decided to implement it myself. And anyway, I'm trying out Kontact for my mail at the moment, which supports plugins. So why not use this as an opportunity to build one? datagirl.xyz Writing a Kmail plugin like this feels a bit like an arcane art, because the process is not documented as well as it could be, and I doubt that other than KDE developers themselves, very few people are interested in writing these kinds of plugins. In fact, I can't find a single one listed on the KDE Store, and searching around I can't find anything either, other than the ones that come with KDE. It seems like this particular plugin interface is designed more to make it easy for KDE developers to extend and alter Kmail than it is for third parties to do so - and that's fine. Still, this means that if some third party does want to write such a plugin, there's some sleuthing and hacking to be done, and that's exactly the process this article details. In the end, we end up with a working unsubscribe plugin, with the code on git so others can learn from it. While this may not interest a large number of people, it's vital to have information like this out on the web for those precious few to find - so excellent work.

A three-year fight to help support game preservation has come to a sad end today. The US copyright office has denied a request for a DMCA exemption that would allow libraries to remotely share digital access to preserved video games. Dustin Bailey at GamesRadar This was always going to end in favour of the massive gaming industry with effectively bottomless bank accounts and more lawyers than god. The gist is that Section 1201 of the DMCA prevents libraries from circumventing the copy protection to make games available remotely. Much like books, libraries loan out books not just for research purposes, but also for entertainment purposes, and that's where the issue lies, according to the Copyright Office, who wrote there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes". The games industry doesn't care about old titles nobody wants to buy anymore and no consumer is interested in. There's a long tail of games that have no monetary value whatsoever, and there's a relatively small number of very popular older games that the industry wants to keep repackaging and reselling forever - I mean, we can't have a new Nintendo console without the opportunity to buy Mario Bros. for the 67th time. That'd be ludicrous. In order to protect the continued free profits from those few popular retro titles, the endless list of other games only a few nerds are interested in are sacrificed.

There have beensome past rumblingson the internetabout a capacitor being installed backwardsin Apple'sMacintosh LC III. The LC III was a pizza box" Mac model produced from early 1993 to early 1994, mainly targeted at the education market. It also manifested as various consumer Performa models: the 450, 460, 466, and 467. Clearly, Apple never initiated a huge recall of the LC III, so I think there is some skepticism in the community about this whole issue. Let's look at the situation in more detail and understand the circuit. Did Apple actually make a mistake? Doug Brown Even I had heard of these claims, and I'm not particularly interested in Apple retrocomputing, other than whatever comes by on Adrian Black or whatever. As such, it surprises me that there hasn't been any definitive answer to this question - with the amount of interest in classic Macs you'd think this would simply be a settled issue and everyone would know about it. This vintage of Macs pretty much require recaps by now, so I assumed if Apple indeed soldered on a capacitor backwards, it'd just be something listed in the various recapping guides. It took some very minor digging with the multimeter, but yes, one of the capacitors on this family of boards is soldered on the wrong way, with the positive terminal where the negative terminal should be. It seems the error does not lie with whomever soldered the capacitors on the boards - or whomever set the machine that did so - because the silkscreen is labeled incorrectly, too. The reason it doesn't seem to be noticeable problem during the expected lifespan of the computer is because it was rated at 16V, but was only taking in -5V. So, if you plan on recapping one of these classic Macs - you might as well fix the error.

The moment a lot of us has been fearing may be soon upon us. Among the various remedies proposed by the United States Department of Justice to address Google's monopoly abuse, there's also banning Google from spending money to become the default search engine on other devices, platforms, or applications. We strongly urge the Court to consider remedies that improve search competition without harming independent browsers and browser engines," a Mozilla spokesperson tells PCMag. Mozilla points to a key but less eye-catching proposal from the DOJ to regulate Google's search business, which a judgeruledas a monopoly in August. In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering something of value" to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices. Michael Kan at PC Mag Obviously Mozilla is urging the courts to reconsider this remedy, because it would instantly cut more than 80% of Mozilla's revenue. As I've been saying for years now, the reason Firefox seems to be getting worse is because of Mozilla is desperately trying to find other sources of revenue, and they seem to think advertising is their best bet - even going so far as working together with Facebook. Imagine how much more invasive and user-hostile these attempts are going to get if Mozilla suddenly loses 80% of its revenue? For so, so many years now I've been warning everyone about just how fragile the future of Firefox was, and every one of my worries and predictions have become reality. If Mozilla now loses 80% of its funding, which platform Firefox officially supports do you think will feel the sting of inevitable budget cuts, scope reductions, and even more layoffs first? The future of especially Firefox on Linux is hanging by a thread, and with everyone lulled into a false sense of complacency by Chrome and its many shady skins, nobody in the Linux community seems to have done anything to prepare for this near inevitability. With no proper, fully-featured replacements in the works, Linux distributions, especially ones with strict open source requirements, will most likely be forced to ship with de-Googled Chromium variants by default once Firefox becomes incompatible with such requirements. And no matter how much you take Google out of Chromium, it's still effectively a Google product, leaving most Linux users entirely at the whim of big tech for the most important application they have. We're about to enter a very, very messy time for browsing on Linux.

There are so many ecological, environmental, and climate problems and disasters taking place all over the world that it's sometimes hard to see the burning forests through the charred tree stumps. As at best middle-income individuals living in this corporate line-must-go-up hellscape, there's only so much we can do turn the rising tides of fascism and leave at least a semblance of a livable world for our children and grandchildren. Of course, the most elementary thing we can do is not vote for science-denying death cults who believe everything is some non-existent entity's grand plan, but other than that, what's really our impact if we drive a little less or use paper straws, when some wealthy robber baron flying his private jet to Florida to kiss the gaudy gold ring to signal his obedience does more damage to our world in one flight than we do in a year of driving to our underpaid, expendable job? Income, financial, health, and other circumstances allowing, all we can do are the little things to make ourselves feel better, usually in areas in which we are knowledgeable. In technology, it might seem like there's not a whole lot we can do, but actually there's quite a few steps we can take. One of the biggest things you, as an individual knowledgeable about and interested in tech, can do to give the elite and ruling class the finger is to move away from big tech, their products, and their services - no more Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, or Amazon. This is often a long, tedious, and difficult process, as most of us will discover that we rely on a lot more big tech products than we initially thought. It's like an onion that looks shiny and tasty on the outside, but is rotting from the inside - the more layers you peel away, the dirtier and nastier it gets. Also you start crying. I've been in the process of eradicating as much of big tech out of my life for a long time now. Since four or five years ago, all my desktop and laptop PCs run Linux, from my dual-Xeon workstation to my high-end gaming PC (ignore that spare parts PC that runs Windows just for League of Legends. That stupid game is my guilty pleasure and I will not give it up), from my XPS 13 laptop to my little Home Assistant thin client. I've never ordered a single thing from Amazon and have no Prime subscription or whatever it is, so that one was a freebie. Apple I banished from my life long ago, so that's another freebie. Sadly, that other device most of us carry with us remained solidly in the big tech camp, as I've been using an Android phone for a long time, filled to the brim with Google products, applications, and services. There really isn't a viable alternative to the Android and iOS duopoly. Or is there? Well, in a roundabout way, there is an alternative to iOS and Google's Android. You can't do much to take the Apple out of an iPhone, but there's a lot you can do to take the Google out of an Android phone. Unless or until an independent third platform ever manages to take serious hold - godspeed, our saviour - de-Googled Android, as it's called, is your best bet at having a fully functional, modern smartphone that's as free from big tech as you want it to be, without leaving you with a barely usable, barebones experience. While you can install a de-Googled ROM yourself, as there's countless to choose from, this is not an option for everyone, since not everyone has the skills, time, and/or supported devices to do so. Murena, Fairphone, and sustainable mining This is where Murena comes in. Murena is a French company - founded by Gael Duval, of Mandrake Linux fame - that develops /e/OS, a de-Googled Android using microG (which Murena also supports financially), which it makes available for anyone to install on supported devices, while also selling various devices with /e/OS preinstalled. Murena goes one step further, however, by also offering something called Murena Workspace - a branded Nextcloud offering that works seamlessly with /e/OS. In other words, if you buy an /e/OS smartphone from Murena, you get the complete package of smartphone, mobile operating system, and cloud services that's very similar to buying a regular Android phone or an iPhone. To help me test this complete package of smartphone, de-Googled Android, and cloud services, Murena loaned me a Fairphone 5 with /e/OS preinstalled, and while this article mostly focuses on the /e/OS experience, we should first talk a little bit about the relationship between Murena and Fairphone. Murena and Fairphone are partners, and Murena has been selling /e/OS Fairphones for a while now. Most of us will be familiar with Fairphone - it's a Dutch company focused on designing and selling smartphones and related accessories that are are user-repairable and long-lasting, while also trying everything within their power to give full insight into their supply chain. This is important, because every smartphone contains quite a few materials that are unsustainably mined. Many mines are destructive to the environment, have horrible working conditions, or even sink as low as employing children. Even companies priding themselves on being environmentally responsible and sustainable, like Apple, are guilty of partaking in and propping up such mining endeavours. As consumers, there isn't much we can do - the network of supply chains involved in making a smartphone is incredibly complex and opaque, and there's basically nothing normal people can do to really fully know on whose underpaid or even underage shoulders their smartphone is built. This holiday season, Murena and Fairphone are collaborating on exactly this issue of the conditions in mines used to acquire the metals and minerals in our phones. Instead of offering big discounts (that barely eat into margins and often follow sharp price increases right before the holidays), Murena and Fairphone will donate

Every now and then, news from the club I'm too cool to join, the plan9/9front community, pierces the veil of coolness and enters our normal world. This time, someone accidentally made a package manager for 9front. I've been growing tired of manually handling random software, so I decided to find a simple way to automate the process and ended up making a sort of package manager" for 9front^1. It's really just a set of shell scripts that act as a frontend forgitand keep a simple database of package names and URLs. Running thepkginitscript will ask for a location to store the source files for installed packages (/sys/pkgby default) which will then be created if non-existent. And that's it! No, really. Now you can provide a URL for a git repository topkg/add. Kelly bubstance" Glenn As I somehow expected from 9front, it's quite a simple and elegant system. I'm not sure how well it would handle more complex package operations, but I doubt many 9front systems are complex to begin with, so this may just be enough to take some of the tedium out of managing software on 9front, as the author originally intended. One day I will be cool enough to use 9front. I just have to stay cool.

The author of this article, Dr. Casey Lawrence, mentions the opt-out checkbox is hard to find, and they aren't kidding. On Windows, here's the full snaking path you have to take through Word's settings to get to the checkbox: File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: Turn on optional connected experiences". That is absolutely bananas. No normal person is ever going to find this checkbox. Anyway, remember how the AI" believers kept saying hey, it's on the internet so scraping your stuff and violating your copyright is totally legal you guys!"? Well, what about when you're using Word, installed on your own PC, to write private documents, containing, say, sensitive health information? Or detailed plans about your company's competitor to Azure or Microsoft Office? Or correspondence with lawyers about an antirust lawsuit against Microsoft? Or a report on Microsoft's illegal activity you're trying to report as a whistleblower? Is that stuff fair game for the gobbledygook generators too? This AI" nonsense has to stop. How is any of this even remotely legal?

A month and a bit ago,I wondered if I could cope with a terminal-only computer. The only way to really find out was to give it a go. My goal was to see what it was like to use a terminal-only computer for mypersonalcomputing for two weeks, and more if I fancied it. Neil's blog I tried to do this too, once. Once. Doing everything from the terminal just isn't viable for me, mostly because I didn't grow up with it. Our family's first computer ran MS-DOS (with a Windows 3.1 installation we never used), and I'm pretty sure the experience of using MS-DOS as my first CLI ruined me for life. My mental model for computing didn't start forming properly until Windows 95 came out, and as such, computing is inherently graphical for me, and no matter how many amazing CLI and TUI applications are out there - and there are many, many amazing ones - my brain just isn't compatible with it. There are a few tasks I prefer doing with the command line, like updating my computers or editing system files using Nano, but for everything else I'm just faster and more comfortable with a graphical user interface. This comes down to not knowing most commands by heart, and often not even knowing the options and flags for the most basic of commands, meaning even very basic operations that people comfortable using the command line do without even thinking, take me ages. I'm glad any modern Linux distribution - I use Fedora KDE on all my computers - offers both paths for almost anything you could do on your computer, and unless I specifically opt to do so, I literally - literally literally - never have to touch the command line.

I had to dive into our archive all the way back to 2017 to find the last reference to the MaXX Interactive Desktop, and it seems this wasn't exactly my fault - the project has been on hiatus since 2020, and is only now coming back to life, as MaXXdesktop v2.2.0 (nickname Octane) Alpha-1 has been released, alongside a promising and ambitious roadmap for the future of the project. For the uninitiated - MaXX is a Linux reimplementation of the IRIX Interactive Desktop with some modernisations and other niceties to make it work properly on modern Linux (and FreeBSD) machines. MaXX has a unique history in that its creator and lead developer, Eric Masson, managed to secure a special license agreement with SGI way back in 2005, under which he was allowed to recreate, from scratch, the IRIX Interactive Desktop on Linux, including the use of SGI's trademarks and IRIX' unique look and feel. It's important to note that he did not get access to any code - he was only allowed to reverse-engineer and recreate it, and because some of the code falls under this license agreement and some doesn't, MaXX is not entirely open source; parts of it are, but not all of it. Any new code written that doesn't fall under the license agreement is released as open source though, and the goal is to, over time, make everything open source. And as you can tell from this v2.2.0 screenshot, MaXX looks stunning even at 4K. This new alpha version contains the first changes to adopt the freedesktop.org application specifications, a new Expose-like window overview, tweaks to the modernised version of the IRIX look and feel (the classic one is also included as an option), desktop notifications, performance improvements, various modernisations to the window manager, and so, so much more. For the final release of 2.2.0 and later releases, more changes are planned, like brand new configuration and system management panels, a quick search tool, a new file manager, and a ton more. MaXX runs on RHEL/Rocky and Ubuntu, and probably more Linux distributions, and FreeBSD, and is entirely free.

This is a Silicon Graphics workstation from 1995. Specifically, it is an Teal' Indigo 2 (as opposed to a Purple' Indigo 2, which came later). Ordinarily that's rare enough - these things were about 30,000 brand new. A close look at the case badge though, marks this out as a Teal' POWER Indigo 2 - where instead of the usual MIPS R4600 or R4400SC CPU modules, we have the rare, unusual, expensive and short-lived MIPS R8000 module. Jonathan Pallant It's rare these days to find an article about exotic hardware that has this many detailed photographs - most people just default to making videos now. Even if the actual contents of the article aren't interesting, this is some real good hardware pornography, and I salute the author for taking the time to both take and publish these photos in a traditional way. That being said, what makes this particular SGI Indigo 2 so special? The R8000 is not a CPU in the traditional sense. It is a processor, but that processor is comprised of many individual chips, some of which you can see and some of which are hidden under the heatsink. The MIPS R8000 was apparently an attempt to wrestle back the Floating-Point crown from rivals. Some accounts report that at 75 MHz, it has around ten times the double-precision floating point throughput of an equivalent Pentium. However, code had to be specially optimised to take best advantage of it and most code wasn't. It lasted on the market for around 18 months, before bring replaced by the MIPS R10K in the Purple' Indigo 2. Jonathan Pallant And here we see the first little bits of writing on the wall for the future of all the architectures trying to combat the rising tide of x86. SGI's MIPS, Sun's SPARC, HP's PA-RISC, and other processors would stumble along for a few more years after this R8000 module came on the market, but looking back, all of these companies knew which way the wind was blowing, and many of them would sign onto Intel's Itanium effort. Itanium would fail spectacularly, but the cat was out of the bag, and SGI, Sun, and HP would all be making standard Xeon and Opteron workstations within a a few years. Absolutely amazing to see this rare of a machine and module lovingly looked after.

This is the first post in what will hopefully become aseries of postsabout a virtual machine I'm developing as a hobby project called Bismuth. This post will touch on some of the design fundamentals and goals, with future posts going into more detail on each. But to explain how I got here I first have to tell you about Bismuth, the kernel. Eniko Fox It's not every day the a developer of an awesome video game details a project they're working on that also happens to be excellent material for OSNews. Eniko Fox, one of the developers of the recently released Kitsune Tails, has also been working on an operating system and virtual machine in her spare time, and has recently been detailing the experience in, well, more detail. This one here is the first article in the series, and a few days ago she published the second part about memory safety in the VM. The first article goes into the origins of the project, as well as the design goals for the virtual machine. It started out as an operating systems development side project, but once it was time to develop things like the MMU and virtual memory mapping, Fox started wondering if programs couldn't simply run inside a virtual machine atop the kernel instead. This is how the actual Bismuth virtual machine was conceived. Fox wants the virtual machine to care about memory safety, and that's what the second article goes into. Since the VM is written in C, which is anything but memory-safe, she's opting for implementing a form of sandboxing - which also happens to be the point in the development story where my limited knowledge starts to fail me and things get a little too complicated for me. I can't even internalise how links work in Markdown, after all (square or regular brackets first? Also Markdown sucks as a writing tool but that's a story for another time). For those of you more capable than me - so basically most of you - Fox' series is a great series to follow along as she further develops the Bismuth VM.

Valve, entirely going against the popular definition ofVendor, is still actively working on improving and maintaining the kernel for their Steam Deck hardware. Let's see what they're up to in this6.8cycle. Samuel Dionne-Riel Just a quick look at what, exactly, Valve does with the Steam Deck Linux kernel - nothing more, nothing less. It's nice to have simple, straightforward posts sometimes.

Ah, the Common Hardware Reference Platform, IBM's and Apple's ill-fated attempt at taking on the PC market with a reference PowerPC platform anybody could build and expand upon while remaining (mostly) compatible with one another. Sadly, like so many other things Apple was trying to do before Steve Jobs returned, it never took off, and even Apple itself never implemented CHRP in any meaningful way. Only a few random IBM and Motorola computers ever fully implemented it, and Apple didn't get any further than basic CHRP support in Mac OS 8, and some PowerPC Macs were based on CHRP, without actually being compatible with it. We're roughly three decades down the line now, and pretty much everyone except weird nerds like us have forgotten CHRP was ever even a thing, but Linux has continued to support CHRP all this time. This support, too, though, is coming to an end, as Michael Ellerman has informed the Linux kernel community that they're thinking of getting rid of it. Only a very small number of machines are supported by CHRP in Linux: the IBM B50, bplan/Genesi's Pegasos/Pegasos2 boards, the Total Impact briQ, and maybe some Motorola machines, and that's it. Ellerman notes that these machines seem to have zero active users, and anyone wanting to bring CHRP support back can always go back in the git history. CHRP is one of the many, many footnotes in computing history, and with so few machines out there that supported it, and so few machines Linux' CHRP support could even be used for, it makes perfect sense to remove this from the kernel, while obviously keeping it in git's history in case anyone wants to work with it on their hardware in the future. Still, it's always fun to see references to such old, obscure hardware and platforms in 2024, even if it's technically sad news.

Windows 10's free, guaranteed security updatesstop in October 2025, less than a year from now. Windows 10 users with supported PCs have been offered the Windows 11 upgrade plenty of times before. But now Microsoft is apparently making a fresh push to get users to upgrade, sending them full-screen reminders recommending they buy new computers. Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica That deadline sure feels like it's breathing down Microsoft's neck. Most Windows users are still using Windows 10, and all of those hundreds of millions (billions?) of computers will become unsupported less than a year from now, which is going to be a major headache for Microsoft once the unaddressed security issues start piling up. CrowdStrike is fresh in Microsoft's minds, and the company made a ton of promises about changing its security culture and implementing new features and best practices to stop it from ever happening again. That's going to be some very tough promises to keep when the majority of Windows users are no longer getting any support. The obvious solution here is to accept the fact that if people haven't upgraded to Windows 11 by now, they're not going to until forced to do so because their computer breaks or becomes too slow and Windows 11 comes preinstalled on their new computer. No amount of annoying fullscreen ads interrupting people's work or pleasure are going to get people to buy a new PC just for some halfbaked AI" nonsense or whatever - in fact, it might just put even more people off from upgrading in the first place. Microsoft needs to face the music and simply extend the end-of-support deadline for Windows 10. Not doing so is massively irresponsible to a level rarely seen from big tech, and if they refuse to do so I strongly believe authorities should get involved and force the company to extend the deadline. You simply cannot leave this many users with insecure, non-maintained operating systems that they rely on every day to get their work done.

VMS Software, the company migrating OpenVMS to x86 (well, virtualised x86, at least) has announced the release of OpenVMS 9.2-3, which brings with a number of new features and changes. It won't surprise you to hear that many of the changes are about virtualisation and enterprise networking stuff, like adding passthrough support for fibre channel when running OpenVMS in VMware, a new VGA/keyboard-based guest console, automatic configuration of TCP/IP and OpenSSH during installation, improved performance for virtualised network interfaces on VMware and KVM, and much more. Gaining access to OpenVMS requires requesting a community license, after which OpenVMs will be delivered in the form of a preinstalled virtual disk image, complete with a number of development tools.

I've linked to quite a few posts by OpenBSD developer Solene Rapenne on OSNews, mostly about her work for and knowledge of OpenBSD. However, she recently posted about her decision to leave the OpenBSD team, and it mostly comes down to the fact she hasn't been using OpenBSD for a while now due to a myriad of problems she's encountering. Posts like these are generally not that fun to link to, and I've been debating about this for a few days now, but I think highlighting such problems, especially when detailed by a now-former OpenBSD developer, is an important thing to do. Hardware compatibility is an issue because OpenBSD has no Bluetooth support, its gamepad support is fractured and limited, and most of all, battery life and heat are a major issue, as Solene notes that OpenBSD draws more power than alternatives, by a good margin". For her devops work, she also needs to run a lot of software in virtual machines, and this seems to be a big problem on OpenBSD, as performance in this area seems limited. Lastly, OpenBSD seems to be having stability issues and crashes a lot for her, and while this in an of itself is a big problem already, it's compounded by the fact that OpenBSD's file system is quite outdated, and most crashes will lead to corrupted or lost files, since the file system doesn't have any features to mitigate this. I went through a similar, but obviously much shorter and far less well-informed experience with OpenBSD myself. It's such a neat, understandable, and well-thought out operating system, but its limitations are obvious, and they will start to bother you sooner or later if you're trying to use it as a general purpose operating system. While it's entirely understandable because OpenBSD's main goal is not the desktop, it still sucks because everything else about the operating system is so damn nice and welcoming. Solene found her alternative in Linux and Qubes OS: I moved from OpenBSD to Qubes OS for almost everything (except playing video games) on which I run Fedora virtual machines (approximately 20 VM simultaneously in average). This provides me better security than OpenBSD could provide me as I am able to separate every context into different spaces, this is absolutely hardcore for most users, but I just can't go back to a traditional system after this. Solene Rapenne She lists quite a few Linux features she particularly likes and why, such as cgroups, systemd, modern file systems like Btrfs and ZFS, SELinux, and more. It's quite rare to see someone of her calibre so openly list the shortcomings of the system she clearly otherwise loves and put a lot of effort in, and move to what is generally looked at with some disdain within the community she came from. It also highlights that issues with running OpenBSD as a general purpose operating system are not confined to less experienced users such as myself, but extend towards extremely experienced and knowledgeable people like actual OpenBSD developers. I'm definitely not advocating for OpenBSD to change course or make a hard pivot to becoming a desktop operating system, but I do think that even within the confines of a server operating system there's room for at least things like a much improved and faster file system that provides the modern features server users expect, too.

One of my favourite devices that never took on in the home is the thin client. Whenever I look at a fully functional Sun Microsystems thin client setup, with Sun Rays, a Solaris server, and the smartcards instantly loading up your desktop the moment you slide it in the Ray's slot, my mind wonders about the future we could've had in our homes - a powerful, expandable, capable server in the basement, running every family member's software, and thin clients all throughout the house where family members can plug their smartcard into to load up their stuff. This is the future they took from us. Well, not entirely. They took this future, made it infinitely worse by replacing that big server in our basement with massive datacentres far away from us in the cloud", and threw it back in our faces as a shittier inevitability we all have to deal with. The fact this model relies on subscriptions is, of course, entirely coincidental and not all the main driving force behind taking our software away from us and hiding it stronghold datacentres. So anyway Microsoft is launching a thin client that connects to a Windows VM running in the cloud. They took the perfection Sun gave us, shoved it down their throats, regurgitated it like a cow, and are now presenting it to us as the new shiny. It's called the Windows 365 Link, and it connects to, as the name implies, Windows 365. Here's part of the enterprise marketing speak: Today, as users take advantage of virtualization offerings delivered on an array of devices, they can face complex sign-in processes, peripheral incompatibility, and latency issues. Windows 365 Link helps address these issues, particularly in shared workspace scenarios. It's compact, lightweight, and designed to maximize productivity with its highly responsive performance. It takes seconds to boot and instantly wakes from sleep, allowing users to quickly get started or pick up where they left off on their Cloud PC. With dual 4K monitor support, four USB ports, an Ethernet port, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3, Windows 365 Link offers seamless connectivity with both wired and wireless peripherals. Anthony Smith at the Windows IT Pro Blog This is just a thin client, but worse, since it seemingly can only connect to Microsoft's cloud", without the ability to connect to a server on-premises, which is a very common use case. In fact, you can't even use another vendor's tooling, so if you want to switch from Windows 365 to some other provider later down the line, you seemingly can't - unless there's some BIOS switches or whatever you can flip. At the very least, Microsoft intends for other vendors to also make Link devices, so perhaps competition will bring the price down to a more manageble level than $349. Unless an enterprise environment is already so deep into the Microsoft ecosystem that they don't even rely on things like Citrix or any of the other countless providers of similar services, why would you buy thousands of these for your employees, only to lock your entire company into Windows 365? I'm no IT manager, obviously, so perhaps I'm way off base here, but this thing seems like a hard sell when there are so, so many alternative services, and so many thin client devices to choose from that can use any of those services.

FLTK 1.4.0 has been released. This new version of the Fast Light Toolkit contains some major improvements, such as Wayland support on both Linux and FreeBSD. X11 and Wayland are both supported by default, and applications using FLTK will launch using Wayland if available, and otherwise fall back to starting with X11. This new release also brings HiDPI support on Linux and Windows, and improves said support on macOS. Those are the headline features, but there's more changes here, of course, as well as the usual round of bugfixes. Right after the release of 1.4.0, a quick bugfix release, version 1.4.0-1, was released to address an issue in 1.4.0 - a build error on a single test program on Windows, when using Visual Studio. Not exactly a major bug, but great to see the team fix it so rapidly.

Way back in April of this year, I linked to a question and answer about why some parts of the Windows 98 installer looked older than the other parts. It turns out that in between the MS-DOS (the blue part) and Windows 98 parts of the installation process, the installer boots into a small version of Windows 3.1. Raymond Chen posted an article detailing this process for Windows 95, and why, exactly, Microsoft had to resort to splitting the installer between MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95. The answer is, as always, backwards compatibility. Since Windows 95 could be installed from MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95 (to fix an existing installation), the installer needed to be able to work on all three. The easiest solution would be to write the installer as an MS-DOS program, since that works on all three of these starting points, but that would mean an ugly installer, even though Windows 95 was supposed to be most people's first experience with a graphical user interface. This is why Microsoft ended up with the tiered installation process - to support all possible starting points in the most graphical way possible. Chen also mentions another fun fact that is somewhat related to this: the first version of Excel for Windows was shipped with a version of the Windows 2.1 runtime, so that even people without Windows could still run Excel. Even back then, Microsoft took backwards compatibility seriously, and made sure people who hadn't upgraded from MS-DOS to Windows 2.x yet - meaning, everyone - could still enjoy the spreadsheet lifestyle. I say we pass some EU law forcing Microsoft to bring this back. The next version of Excel should contain whatever is needed to run it on MS-DOS. Make it happen, Brussels.