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Is KDE too much for you? GNOME tries to do too much? Xfce still a bit too fancy? Do you need something smaller? Even more minimalist? What about a mere 20 lines of code which provide the absolute barest possible minimum of window management functionality? You need mwm. This is the smallest, actually usable window manager I know about. Even TinyWM is twice as large. However, it doesn't let you launch programs, or assign key bindings.mwmdoes. Mwm's GitHub page It will open a window, and let you switch between windows, that are always fullscreen. No titlebars, no virtual desktops, no menus, no nothing. This is the true minimalist's experience.

The Document Foundation, which developers LibreOffice, is mad at Microsoft for the levels of complexity in the Microsoft 365 document format. They claim Microsoft intentionally makes this format's XML schema as complex and obtuse as possible to lock users into the Microsoft Office ecosystem. This artificial complexity is characterised by a deeply nested tag structure with excessive abstraction, dozens or even hundreds of optional or overloaded elements, non-intuitive naming conventions, the widespread use of extension points and wildcards, the multiple import of namespaces and type hierarchies, and sparse or cryptic documentation. In the case of the Microsoft 365 document format, the only characteristic not present is sparse or cryptic documentation, given that we are talking about a set of documents totalling over 8,000 pages. All the other characteristics are present to a greater or lesser extent, making life almost impossible for a developer trying to implement the schema. Italo Vignoli I feel like this was widely known already, since I distinctly remember the discussions around the standardisation process for the Office Open XML file formats. Then, too, it was claimed that Microsoft's then-new XML file formats were far more complex and obtuse than the existing, already standardised OpenDocument file formats, and that there was no need to push Microsoft's new file formats through the process. These days, you might wonder how relevant all of this still is, but considering vast swaths of the private, corporate, government, and academic world still run on Microsoft Office and its default file formats, it's definitely still a hugely relevant matter. As an office suite, you are basically required to support Office Open XML, and if Microsoft is making that more complex and obtuse on purpose, that's a form of monopoly abuse that should be addressed.

The year before his death in 1994,Gary Kildall-inventorof the early microcomputer operating system CP/M-wrote a draft of a memoir, Computer Connections: People, Places, and Events in the Evolution of the Personal Computer Industry." He distributed copies to family and friends, but died before realizing his plans to release it as a book. This week, theComputer HistoryMuseum in Mountain View, with the permission of Kildall's children, released thefirst portion of that memoir. You can download ithere. Tekla S. Perry at IEEE Spectrum Invaluable writing, and I'm so glad it's getting published.

Why is my burgerblue?" I asked, innocently. Oh! We're making all of our foodblue, all the best restaurants are doing it now." the waiter explained. But I didn't want my burger to beblue. Luna Winters Blue" food isn't food.

In this blog post, I have described how I have been using Linux on my Amiga 4000. I hope this information can be of use to anyone who is planning to run Linux on their Amigas. Furthermore, I hope that the existing documentation on the Linux/m68k homepage gets updated at some point. May be the information in this blog post can help with that. Debian 3.1 works decently for me, but everything is much slower compared to a PC. This is not really surprising if you run an operating system (last updated in 2008) on a CPU from the early 90s that still runs at a 25 MHz clock speed :). Sander van der Burg The blog post in question is from January of this year, but as soon as I saw it I knew I had to post it here. It's an incredibly intricate and detailed guide to running Linux on a 25Mhz Amiga 4000, including X11, networking, internet access, file sharing, and so, so much more - up to running Linux for Amiga inside FS-UAE. There's so much love and dedication in this detailed guide, and I love it. In fact, Van den Burg has a similar article about running NetBSD on the Amiga 4000, with the same level of detail, dedication, and information density. A fun note is that while X11 for Linux on the Amiga can't seem to make use of the Amiga chipset, the X Window System on NetBSD does make us of it. I'm not surprised. Articles like these are useful only for a very small number of people, but having this amount of knowledge concentrated like this will prove invaluable like five years from now when someone else finds an Amiga 4000 in their attic or at a yard sale, and choose to go down this same path. We need more of these kinds of write-ups.

ISO 27001 is like that careful lawyer who never says exactly what they mean - it tells you what needs to be achieved, not how to do it. When it comes to logging, this is particularly telling: Control A.12.4.2 simply states that logging information and logging facilities shall be protected against tampering and unauthorized access." Period. How? That's your problem to solve. Rafael Sadowski It turns out OpenBSD has a few relatively simple tools to make logs immutable, in a way that not even root can delete or modify them, or change any of the logging schedules. Reading through the blog post, you don't even need a ton of intricate knowledge to set this up, thanks mostly to just how much innate sense OpenBSD tends to make, and how excellent the documentation is. I have no need for this level of security, but if you do, you can set this up in a few minutes.

With both Exchange 2016 and 2019going out of support in October 2025, we have heard from some of our customers that they have started their migrations to Exchange Subscription Edition (SE) but might need a few extra months of Security Updates (SU) for their Exchange 2016 / 2019 servers while they are finalizing their migrations. We are announcing that we now have a solution for such customers.Starting onAugust 1st, 2025, customers can contact their Microsoft account team to get information about and purchase an additional 6-month Extended Security Update (ESU) for their Exchange 2016 / 2019 servers.Your account teams will have information related to per server cost and additional details on how to purchase and receive ESUs, starting August 1st, 2025. The Exchange Team blog Microsoft is clearly in a place where a lot of their software released over the past ten years or so just kind of works, and people just don't feel as strong of a need to upgrade to newer versions, especially not if those newer versions come with complex subscriptions. It must be a strange position to be in for Microsoft.

Tilckis an educationalmonolithickernel designed to be Linux-compatible at binary level. It runs on i686 and RISCV64 at the moment. Project's small-scale and simple design makes it theperfect playgroundfor playing in kernel mode while retaining the ability to compare how thevery sameusermode bitsrun on the Linux kernel as well. That's arare featurein the realm of educational kernels. Because of that, building a program for Tilck requires just agcc-musltoolchain frombootlin.com. Tilck hasno needto have its own set of custom written applications, like most educational kernels do. It just runs mainstream Linux programs like theBusyBoxsuite. While the Linux-compatibility and the monolithic design might seem a limitation from the OS research point of view, on the other side, such design bring the whole project much closer toreal-worldapplications in the future, compared to the case where some serious (or huge) effort is required to port pre-existing software on it. Also, nothing stops Tilck from implementing custom non-Linux syscalls that aware apps might take advantage of. Tilck GitHub page Tilck implements about 100 Linux syscalls, and is not focused on replacing the Linux kernel or even becoming a generic desktop or server operating system. It supports both i686 and RISC-V, has support for FAT, and a whole slew of other features. It can run a number of console and even a few framebuffer applications, but don't expect things like X11 to work, or to ever work.

Do you have a Windows XP retro virtual machine or, god forbid, run Windows XP on your primary machine? You're going to need a sort-of up-to-date browser, and it turns out Mypal68 offers just that. Terrible name aside, it's Firefox 68 ported to and maintained to run on Windows XP SP3; SP2 and lower are not supported, but some people do seem to have some success getting it to run on those. There are issues, of course: there's a 1.5GB memory limit, and the browser will crash when it reaches that limit, and 64bit builds simpy don't work at all, so there's only a 32bit build. Version 74.1.0 was released a few days ago, but that version number doesn't actually mean the browser is now based on Firefox 74; they had to change the reported version number for extension compatibility. I'm currently setting up a dedicated Proxmox PC for retro virtual machines, and Windows XP will obviously be one of them. I'm definitely going to try this out.

When it comes to open hardware, choices are not exactly abundant. Truly open source hardware - open down to the firmware level of individual components - that also has acceptable performance is rare, with one of the few options being the Talos II and Blackbird POWER9 workstations from Raptor Computing Systems (which I reviewed). Another option that can be fully open source with the right configuration are the laptops made by MNT, which use the ARM architecture (which I also reviewed). Both of these are excellent options, but they do come with downsides; the Talos II/Blackbird are expensive and getting a bit long in the tooth (and a possible replacement is at least a year away), and the MNT Reform and Pocket Reform simply aren't for everyone due to their unique and opinionated design. Using an architecture other than x86 also simply isn't an option for a lot of people, ruling out POWER9 and ARM hardware entirely. In the x86 world, it's effectively impossible to avoid proprietary firmware blobs, but there are companies out there trying to build x86 laptops that try to at least minimise the reliance on such unwelcome blobs. One of these companies is NovaCustom, a Dutch laptop (and now desktop!) OEM that sells x86 computers that come with Dasharo open firmware (based on coreboot) and a strong focus on privacy, open source, customisability, and repairability. NovaCustom sent over a fully configured NovaCustom V54 laptop, so let's dive into what it's like to configure and use an x86 laptop with Dasharo open firmware and a ton of unique customisation options. Hardware configuration I opted for the 14'' laptop model, the V54, since the 16'' V65 is just too large for my taste. NovaCustom offers a choice between a 1920*1200 60Hz and a 2880*1800 120Hz panel, and I unsurprisingly chose the latter. This higher-DPI panel strikes a perfect balance between having a 4K panel, which takes a lot more processing power to drive, and a basic 1080p panel, which I find unacceptable on anything larger than 9'' or so. The refresh rate of 120Hz is also a must on any modern display, as anything lower looks choppy to my eyes (I'm used to 1440p/280Hz on my gaming PC, and 4K/160Hz on my workstation - I'm spoiled). The display also gets plenty bright, but disappointingly, the V54 does not offer a touch option. I don't miss it, but I know it's a popular feature, so be advised. While the V54 can be equipped with a dedicated mobile RTX 4060 or 4070 GPU, I have no need for such graphical power in a laptop, so I stuck with the integrated Intel Arc GPU. Note that if you do go for the dedicated GPU, you'll lose the second M.2 slot, and the laptop will gain some weight and thickness. I did opt for the more powerful CPU option with the Intel Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, which packs 6 performance cores (with hyperthreading), 8 efficiency cores, and 2 low-power cores, for a total of 16 cores and 22 threads maxing out at 4.8Ghz. Unless you intend to do GPU-intensive work, this combination is stupid fast and ridiculously powerful. Throw in the 32GB of DDR5 5600MHz RAM in a dual-channel configuration (2*16, replaceable) and a speedy 7.400 MB/s (read)/6.500 MB/s (write) 1TB SSD, and I sometimes feel like this is the sort of opulence Marie Antoinette would indulge herself in if she were alive today. It won't surprise you to learn that with this configuration, you won't be experiencing any slowdowns, stuttering, or other performance issues. Ports-wise, the V54 has a USB-C port (3.2 Gen 2), a Thunderbolt 4 port (with Display Alt Mode supportingDP 2.1), a USB-A port (3.2 Gen 2) and a barrel power jack on the right side, a combo audio jack, USB-A port (3.2 Gen 1), microSD card slot, and a Kensington lock on the left, and an Ethernet and HDMI port on the back. Especially the Ethernet port is such a welcome affordance in this day and age, and we'll get back to it since we need it for Dasharo. The trackpad is large, smooth, and pleasant to use - for a diving board type trackpad, that is. More and more manufacturers are adopting the Apple-style haptic trackpads, which I greatly prefer, but I suspect there might be some patent and IP shenanigans going on that explain why uptake of those in the PC space hasn't exactly been universal. If you're coming from a diving board trackpad, you'll love this one. If you're coming from a haptic trackpad, it's a bit of a step down. A standout on the V54 is the keyboard. The keys are perfectly spaced, have excellent travel, a satisfying, silent click, and they are very stable. It's an absolute joy to type on, and about as good as a laptop keyboard can be. On top of that, at least when you opt for the US-international keyboard layout like I do, you get a keyboard that actually properly lists the variety of special characters on its keys. This may look chaotic and messy to people who don't need to use those special characters, but as someone who does, this is such a breath of fresh air compared to all those modern, minimalist keyboards where you end up randomly mashing key combinations to find that one special character you need. Considering my native Dutch uses diacritics, and my wife's native Swedish uses the extra letters a, a, and o (they're letters!), this is such a great touch. The keyboard also has an additional layer for a numeric pad, as well as the usual set of function keys you need on a modern laptop, including a key that will max out the fan speed in case you need it (the little fan glyph on my keyboard seems double-printed, though, which is a small demerit). I especially like the angry moon glyph on the sleep key. He's my grumpy friend and I love him. Of course, the

Did you know KDE has a television-focused user interface? It's been languishing for a while now, but a recent week-long effort by KDE developer Devin has brought a lot of new life into the project. I have been a long timePlasma Mobilecontributor, but I have always had a keen interest in having Linux on my TV! I have noticed that in the past few months, thePlasma Bigscreenproject has had some interest from people wanting to contribute, but there have not been any active KDE developers working on the project. Since I have some time off school (having just graduated university), I decided to take a swing at improving the project for a week. Devin, KDE developer It turned out to be one hell of a productive week, because the list of improvements achieved in that one week is kind of amazing. Lots of overhauls of the visual design, a new search view, complete redesign of the settings panels, and a lot more. The idea of running a KDE Plasma-based interface on my TVs sounds incredibly appealing, and I hope the project can make even more progress.

Haiku also survived another month of development, so it's time for another roundup of what they've been doing. Considering it's the height of Summer, it's no surprise the list of changes is a bit shorter, consisting mostly of smaller bugfixes and minor improvements. A few standout changes are that cursors can now be properly scaled in HiDPI, the iprowifi3945 driver from FreeBSD has been replaced by the OpenBSD one because it performs better, and several improvements to how colour schemes work. waddlesplash refactored how control edge (borders, etc.) colors are computed inside HaikuControlLook (the class that renders UI controls under the default appearance), cleaning up a lot of convoluted computations. He also fixed some color handling in the progress bar control, and then along with nephele, refactored how control colors are used and computed across the system. The Control background" color in Appearance preferences now has a new default and is much more properly used across the Interface Kit; under the default colors, renderings should be basically the same as before, but for users on dark mode" or other custom color schemes, it will now be much easier to pick control colors. waddlesplash on the Haiku website There's more, of course, so be sure to read the whole thing.

Late last year, Mishaal Rahman reported that Google was going to merge ChromeOS and Android, and it seems Google itself has now confirmed that's exactly what's happening. I asked because we're going to be combining ChromeOS and Android into a single platform, and I am very interested in how people are using their laptops these days and what they're getting done," Samat explained. Lance Ulanoff at TechRadar I'm definitely interested to see what using Android across desktops, laptops, tablets, martphones, and smartwatches is going to be like. The same applications on all those form factors? So many have tried, and as many have failed. I just don't think Google has what it takes.

The latest alpha of the upcoming Blender 5.0 release comes withHigh Dynamic Range (HDR) support for Linux on Waylandwhich will, if everything works out, make it into the final Blender 5.0 release on October 1, 2025. The post on the developer forum comes with instructions on how to enable the experimental support and how to test it. If you are using Fedora Workstation 42, which ships GNOME version 48, everything is already included to run Blender with HDR. All that is required is an HDR compatible display and graphics driver, and turning on HDR in the Display Settings. Sebastian Wick It's interesting to note that Blender on Windows won't be getting HDR support, and that's because Windows' HDR support is subpar compared to Wayland on Linux, and requires a ton more work which the Blender team isn't going to do. It seems the Wayland developers made all the right choices when it comes to HDR support. Needless to say, X11 doesn't have HDR support. The design of the Wayland color-management protocol, and the resulting active color-management paradigm of Wayland compositors was a good choice, making it easy for developers to do the right thing, while also giving them more control if they so chose. Sebastian Wick Weird. I was told Wayland was an unusable mess.

Tribblix, the illumos distribution that aims to provide a retro feel with modern components, has just released a new update, Milestone 37. At the system level, the max PID is now 99999, so you may see larger PIDs. Usernames exceeding 8 characters are now accepted without warnings. Files with dates after the Y2038 transition are now permitted on ZFS. Notable default version updates: the default Java is now JDK21, postgres is now v17, go is now v1.24, and ruby is v3.4. Tribblix Milestone 37 release notes See the full list of changes for all the various updated components.

On Windows, there's an option to show the seconds on the taskbar clock, but it comes with a warning that it might reduce battery life if you switch it on. LTT Labs decided to look into this to see just how much of a thing this really is, and they concluded that yes, it does actually affect battery life. They saw a drop of about 5%-15%, depending on configuration. In percentage terms, the drops weren't massive. For most people, it probably won't make or break your day. But if you're on a long flight, running low on battery, or trying to squeeze out every last bit of endurance, it's not entirely nothing either. Woolly Door at LTT Labs I mean, having the second tick away on the click would drive me up the wall when I'm trying to use my computer, but I'm sure quite a few among you do enable the seconds display on your own setups (Windows or otherwise). I'm curious to see if the same battery life reduction is measurable on KDE, GNOME, or macOS.

What if you want to use Wayland, but prefer Window Maker, which is restricted to legacy X11? Enter wlmaker, or Wayland Maker, a Wayland compositor that reproduces the look and feel of Window Maker. It's lightweight, very configurable through human-readable configuration files, supports dockable applications, and more. It's actually packaged in FreeBSD and a number of Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Debian (Fedora's package is outdated), but of course, you can compile it yourself, too.

In recent weeks and months, you may have noticed that when accessing some websites, you see a little progress bar and a character, performing some sort of check. You've most likely encountered Anubis, a tool to distinguish real human browser users from AI" content crawlers that are causing real damage and harm. It turns out Anubis is quite effective at what it does, but it did come with a limitation: it required JavaScript to be enabled. Well, no more. One of the first issues in Anubis before it was moved to theTecharoHQ orgwas a requestto support challenging browsers without using JavaScript. This is a pretty challenging thing to do without rethinking how Anubis works from a fundamentally low level, and with v1.20.0,Anubis finally has support for running without client-side JavaScriptthanks to theMeta Refreshchallenge. Xe Iaso Before this new non-JS challenge, users who disabled client-side JavaScript or browsers which don't support JavaScript were straight-up blocked from passing Anubis' test, meaning they couldn't access the website Anubis was protecting from AI" scraper abuse. This is now no longer the case.

I'm hardly a networking" or system admin expert. Even still, I've always been interested in the concept of building out my own home router with OpenBSD. It seemed so hacky" and cool! The problem is that most of the tutorials I stumble across on the internet seem sodaunting. I normally read through the guides (maybe even poke around the coremandocs for a bit as well) but always end up returning to my default ISP setup. But that all changes today! Best of all, you can come along for the ride! Bradley Taunt Exactly what it says on the tin.

It's become almost impossible to avoid the AI" evangelists spreading the gospel of how AI" tools are helping them work faster and get more stuff done in less time, but do any of those claims have any basis in reality? Should we really be firing countless people and replace them with AI" tools? Should we spend god knows how much money on AI" tools and force employees to use them? Well... When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues-a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%. Joel Becker, Nate Rush, Beth Barnes, and David Rein We're very much in the early days of proper research into the actual effectiveness and real-world benefits of AI" tools for all kinds of professions, so a study like this definitely isn't a smoking gun, but it does fly in the face of the tech companies and their evangelists shoving AI" down our collective throat. With how much these tools get even the most basic stuff wrong, with how often they lie and make stuff up, I just can't imagine them speeding up as many tasks as people claim they do. At the same time, AI" tools do definitely have a place for very specific tasks, and I think that studies like these will look different for every single profession and even every single task within a profession. It's going to be incredibly hard or even impossible to come to a theory of everything" on the effectiveness and usefulness of AI" tools. It won't be until this idiotic hype dies down before we can have a grounded, honest, fact-based discussion about which AI" tools make sense where.

James Heppell, representing Open Web Advocacy, published an article detailing his experience attending DMA compliance workshop in Brussels, in which members of the public can ask questions of companies who have products designated as gatekeepers under the DMA. After attending the Apple one, he concludes: As a final thought, I called this article Apple Vs The Law" primarily in reference to the rule of law, about how it should be applied equally and fairly against all, no matter the size and influence of your company. I think some of these gatekeepers - above all Apple, do a lot to undermine this process, in some places genuinely damaging trust in democracy. Going out of their way to paint the DMA law and the EU as overstepping and extreme hurts its reputation, as does the invented rhetoric about it being the great risk to privacy ever imposed to government" (China?), or that they're acting without experts in the field". Similarly for the number of covertly funded and supported lobbying groups that they bring to regulators all around the world. And the constant pressure from the US administration to not enforce the DMA - helped in no small part by these gatekeepers. These money-driven practices - which in many ways mirror the propaganda typically produced by authoritarian regimes like Russia, seriously hurt all democracies that they come in to touch with, and is a kind of behaviour that should make Apple, and any other group involved, ashamed of themselves. James Heppell Sometimes I wonder if us Europeans wouldn't simply be better off without these lying, scheming, law-breaking American technology companies. Yes, there's be a bit of a shock and a chaotic scrambling as newcomers fill the void, but I think I'd prefer that over the illegal behaviours that are clearly endemic in US technology companies. As a EU citizen, I'm not even afforded 0.01% of the kind of silk glove, patient, and cooing treatment these corporations get when they break the law, and it highlights once more just how tiered justice really is. I think the EU would, in the long term, be better off without the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook routinely and repeatedly breaking our laws. Rip that festering, rotting band-aid off and endure the chaos for a few years while European newcomers fill the void in a beautiful explosion of competition and innovation. Do we really want to be tied to these corporations that clearly despise us?

There's quite a few ways to mess around with home automation, with the most popular communication methods being things like ZigBee, plain Wi-Fi, and so on. One of the more promising new technologies is Thread, and Dennis Schubert decided to try and use it for a new homebrew project he was working on. After diving into the legalese of the matter, though, he discovered that Thread is a complete non-starter due to excessive mandatory membership fees without any exceptions for non-commercial use. To summarize: if you're a hobbyist without access to some serious throwaway money to join the Thread Group, there is no way to use Thread legally - the license does not include an exception for non-commercial uses. If you're like me and want to write a series of blog posts about how Thread works, there's also no legal way. A commercial membership program for technology stacks like Thread isn't new; it's somewhat common in that space. Same with requiring certifications for your commercial products if you want to use a logo like the Works with Thread" banner. And that's fine with me. If you're selling a commercial electronics product, you have to go through many certification processes anyway, so that seems fair. But having a blanket ban on implementations, even for non-commercial projects, is absolutely bonkers. This means that no hobbyist should ever get close to it, and that means that the next generation of electrical engineers and decision-makers don't get to play around with the tech before they enter the industry. But of course, that doesn't really matter to the Thread Group:their members listincludes companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Nordic, NXP, and Qualcomm - they can justforceThread into being successful by making sure it's shipped in the most popular home hubs". So it's just us that get screwed over. Anyway, if you planned to look at Thread... well, don't. You're not allowed to use it. Dennis Schubert So you can buy Thread dev kits to create your own devices at home, but even such non-commercial use is not allowed. The situation would be even more complex for anyone trying to sell a small batch of fun devices using Thread, because they'd first have to fork over the exorbitant yearly membership fee. What this means is that Thread is a complete non-starter for anyone but an established name, which is probably exactly why the big names are pushing it so hard. They want to control our home automation just as much as everything else, and it seems like Thread is their foot in the door. Be advised.

To better support you and provide earlier, more consistent access to in-development features, we are announcing a significant evolution in our pre-release program. Moving forward, the Android platform will have aCanary release channel, which will replace the previous developer preview program. This Canary release channel will function alongside the existing beta program. This change is designed to provide a more streamlined and continuous opportunity for you to try out new platform capabilities and provide feedback throughout the entire year, not just in the early months of a new release cycle. Dan Galpin on the Android Developers Blog This new Canary channel is intended for developers, and you can expect a ton of bugs and breaking changes. Updates are basically streamed continuously over the air, but not all changes will make it to a final release of Android (as in, they can be pulled definitively). You can join the new channel with any supported Pixel device, but going back to a beta or final release will require a full wipe.

The year is 2013 and I amhopping mad. systemdis replacing my plaintext logs with a binary format and pumping steroids intoinitand it islaughingat me. The unix philosophy cries out: is this the end of Linux (or, as many are calling it, GNU plus Linux)? The year is 2025 and I'm here to repent. Not only issystemda worthy successor to traditionalinit, but I think that it deserves a defense for what it's done for the landscape - especially given the hostile reception it initially received (and somehow continues to receive? for some reason?). No software is perfect - except forTempleOS- but I think that systemd has largely been a success story and proven many dire forecasts wrong (including my own). I was wrong! Tyler Langlois The article goes into detail on a number of awesome features, niceties, and clever things systemd has, and they're legion. Even as a mere user, I like systemd, as every time I have had to or wanted to interact with it, it's been a joy to use, with excellent documentation making it remarkably easy even for someone like me to get into it without doing any damage or breaking anything. Every time I read up on system'd more advanced features, I'm surprised by how well thought out and implemented it all seems to be. I've experienced several major leaps forward in the Linux world that made using Linux on my computers easier and more reliable, and the adoption of systemd stands among them as one of the biggest leaps forward desktop Linux has ever made. The idea of going back to a random piles of non-standardized init scripts with nebulous dependencies from varying sources and wildly different levels of quality seems like a complete nightmare to me. There's a lot of charm in doing things the old way', and I'm not saying you're wrong for wanting an init system that tries to do less, or that's easier to read and parse for you, or whatever, but that doesn't mean systemd is bad, evil, or part of a Red Hat conspiracy to kill Linux.

In Chrome, Skia is used to render paint commands from Blink and the browser UI into pixels on your screen, a process called rasterization. Skia has powered Chrome Graphicssince the very beginning. Skia eventually ran into performance issues as the web evolved and became more complex, which led Chrome and Skia to invest in a GPU accelerated rasterization backend called Ganesh. Over the years, Ganesh matured into a solid highly performant rasterization backend and GPU rasterization launched on all platforms in Chrome on top of GL (via ANGLE on Windows D3D9/11). However, Ganesh always had a GL-centric design with too many specialized code paths and the team was hitting a wall when trying to implement optimizations that took advantage of modern graphics APIs in a principled manner. This set the stage for the team to rethink GPU rasterization from the ground up in the form of a new rasterization backend, Graphite. Graphite was developed from the start to be principled by having fewer and more comprehensible code paths. This forward looking design helps take advantage of modern graphics APIs like Metal, Vulkan and D3D12 and paradigms like compute based path rasterization, and is multithreaded by default. Michael Ludwig and Sunny Sachanandani at the Chromium Blog The level of complexity in browsers and their rendering engines blows my mind every time I read about it. When I first got access to the internet, it consisted of static pages with text and still images, but now browser engines are almost as complex as entire operating systems. Not all of that progress has been good - boy has a lot of it not been good - but we're stuck with it now, and thus people making browsers have to deal with stuff like this. If you ever wonder why there really only are two browser engines in the world - Google's Blink and Apple's WebKit - this is your answer. Who in their right mind wants to develop something like this from scratch and compete with Google and Apple?

GlobalFoundries today announced a definitive agreement to acquire MIPS, a leading supplier of AI and processor IP. This strategic acquisition will expand GF's portfolio of customizable IP offerings, allowing it to further differentiate its process technologies with IP and software capabilities. Press release about the acquisition MIPS has a long and storied history, most recently as it abandoned its namesake instruction set architecture in favour of RISC-V. MIPS processors are still found in a ton of devices though, but usually not in high-profile devices like smartphones or whatever. Their new RISC-V cores haven't yet seen a lot of uptake, but that's a problem all across the RISC-V ecosystem.

Ah, Power. The architecture that has so much going for it, but despite concerted efforts from very dedicated people, IBM seems to be hellbent on preventing anyone from expanding Power beyond expensive enterprise servers. We had Raptor Computing Systems achieving some niche success with their POWER9 workstations - I have two, and reviewed one of them - but that's about it. When IBM moved to Power10, the new processors required closed-source, proprietary firmware in a few areas of the design, which made them unsuitable for Raptor to develop a successor to the Talos II and Blackbird POWER9 workstations. I admire Raptor for sticking firmly to their convictions of only producing fully open source hardware, down to the firmware level. The requirement for proprietary firmware was never addressed by IBM during the Power10 lifecycle, so Raptor obviously never jumped aboard the IBM Power10 train, and as far as I can tell, neither did anyone else. As such, the only Power10 hardware we have comes from IBM, and the offering consist entirely of enterprise servers, which are unsuitable and unaffordable for home use, whether as server or workstation. Raptor did make a joint announcement with Solid Silicon, with rumours suggesting Solid Silicon was working on a Power10-based chip that didn't require any proprietary firmware, but that was late 2023, and it's been silence ever since. But Power10 is old news now, since IBM just officially launched Power11. IBM made the date official: Power11 launchesJuly 25, with the 32 AI-coreSpyre Acceleratorexpected to follow in the fourth quarter. IBM's launch products will be the full-rack Power E1180 with up to up to 256 SMT-8 Power11 cores with 2MB L2 each and up to 128GB of shared L3 (8GB per core) with 64TB of DDR5 memory, the midrange 4U Power E1150 with up to 120 Power11 cores and 16TB of DDR5, the junior 4U Power S1124 with up to 60 Power11 cores and 8TB of DDR5, and the low-end" 2U Power S1122 with up to 60 Power11 cores and 4TB of DDR5. The processors come in 16, 24 or 30-core versions; the E systems have four sockets (with up to four nodes in the E1180) and the S systems have two. All four systems can run AIX and Linux, and all systems except for the E1150 can run IBM i. As is usual for IBM's initial offerings, internally they look like straight-up implementations of the Blueridge reference platform and should be expected to scale accordingly. And if you have to ask how much they are, well... Cameron Kaiser Sadly, there's no word on whether or not IBM's Power11 processors still require proprietary firmware, so it's impossible to tell if they will show up in any possible Raptor workstations. There's also zero indication of anyone else joining the fray, and IBM itself obviously isn't going to focus on end-user workstations because the world is bleak and joyless. That being said, we've got some solid rumours from Cameron Kaiser, who is generally well-informed on these topics. I have been advised by an anonymous individual with knowledge of the situation that a new Raptor announcement on products under development is scheduled for Q1 2026 ... which would be six to twelve months after" as predicted. Open firmware" is specifically mentioned and absolutely planned. It's worth pointing out thatbothRaptor and SolidSilicon are now listed as top-tierPlatinum members for OpenPOWERparallel with IBM itself. That implies SolidSilicon is still in the mix and IBM is still backing OpenPOWER. They stressed this is not an official announcement, so you take it for what it's worth. Cameron Kaiser It's something, but not much. I would love to be able to upgrade the POWER9 machines in my office to something newer, even if they perform quite well to this day. I simply have a soft spot for Power, and I want the ISA to succeed beyond enterprise servers. The architecture has what it takes to do so, but IBM seems to have zero interest in making it happen, making life quite hard for anyone else in the ecosystem trying their hardest. All we're asking for is a single or dual socket Power11 workstation in a nice case, IBM. Just flip one of those servers 90, disable the enterprise stuff, and optionally ship it with AIX. It won't bite. I promise.

Alpine Linux maintainer Ariadne Conill only started working on Wayback a few weeks ago, but in a blog post today they dive into a few more details about how much progress has already been achieved. To refresh your memory, Wayback allows you to run a legacy X11-based desktop environment on top of Wayland by running a stub Wayland compositor in front of Xwayland, capable of serving as a full X server. This way, the transition to Wayland and the removal of X.org from popular distributions won't mean you can't run X11-based desktop environments anymore. Within just a few weeks, the project has made serious progress. There's a lot still left to do before we can confidently say that Wayback is ready for distributions to switch to. This work is across the stack: Wayback still needs to expose surfaces that Xwayland can use, Xwayland needs to implement a few new features such as cursor warping and some X extensions inside Xwayland itself need to be properly plumbed (such as Xinerama being able to make use of the Wayland output layout data). Longer term goals aside, we are at most a few weeks away from the first alpha-quality release of Wayback. The main focus of this release is to get to a point where enough is working that users with basic setups and requirements can be reasonably served by Wayback in place of the X.org server, to allow for further testing. It's already to a point where I am daily driving it. Ariadne Conill Of course, there's still tons of bugs to figure out and missing functionality to implement, but the fact that they're just weeks away from a first alpha release is honestly impressive. I really hope Wayback picks up even more and gets adopted by other distributions as well, since it's such an elegant and future-proof solution to a very real problem. It's important that desktop environments that will not or cannot transition to Wayland remain available to Linux users regardless of their choice of Wayland or X11. When facing the slow sunsetting of a windowing system, some people go off on deranged neofascist conspiracy rants against the woke illuminati, while others sit down and develop real forward-looking solutions. I'm glad virtually every Linux distribution that matters trusts the latter over the former.

As of today, Stat Counter reports that Windows 11 now has 50.88% of the Windows market, with Windows 10 dropping to 46.2%, giving it a comfortable lead over its predecessor. Windows 11 has been on the market since 2021 but had only amassed less than 10% of the market by 2022. It's been a slow but steady climb since then, growing from 18% to 28% in 2023, with similar growth to 36% in 2024. It's this year where Windows 11 really started taking off, likely aided by the fact that Microsoft is now pushingWindows 10's end of supporthard. Zac Bowden at Windows Central Up to 50% of all Windows users, mere months before Windows 10 is no longer supported, and it took them 4 years to get here. Windows users really don't like Windows 11, do they?

The developers of Legacy Update, the tool that allows users of older Windows versions to keep downloading updates from Microsoft, recently discovered that users of the tool on Windows 7 were having issues. After doing some debugging they figured out it was DNS it was an expired Microsoft certificate. This certificate was set to expire on 1 July 2025, and when it did, nobody at Microsoft bothered to correct it until a few days later. As you can see from<ExpiryDate>, it definitely stopped working because the expiry date lapsed. As seems to happen too often in our industry, apparently nobody set a reminder to make sure it would be updated in advance of the date. You might notice that it has an <IssuedDate> of 2017-12-01. That's fairly recent! After digging further, we learned thatthis already happened once!On the 4th of that month,Bleeping Computer coveredan error Windows 7 users were receiving when checking for updates. That error is80248015- pretty familiar, right? Microsoft allowed this file to expire, not on the 1st but rather on the 4th (more specifically, 35 seconds before midnight in US Pacific time, or 8:00 PM UTC), and did not manage to upload a new file until the 6th at 10:02 AM Pacific (6:02 PM UTC). This left Microsoft Update broken for 3 days. Adam Demasi Microsoft moved the expiry date up to 2033, thereby fixing the problem. Legacy Update's developer Adam Demasi expected that once 2033 comes around, Legacy Update will probably have to add Widnows 7 to its proxy server that it's already using for older versions, as improvements in TLS and ciphers will probably lock Windows 7 out of Windows Update definitively. But hey, 2033 is decades away. Right?

WinUAE has released version 6.0.0 of the Windows version of the UAE Amiga emulator, packing a truly terrifying number of changes, improvements, and fixes. Major update to custom chipset emulation. Internally almost everything in main chipset emulation has been rewritten. Fastest possible/JIT mode chipset timing/sync had major changes which can cause side-effects. Bugs are very possible, especially in very rarely used features. WinUAE website Going through the changelog is dizzying, ranging from an almost complete rewrite of the main chipset emulation for internal cycle accuracy, to running the emulation of the Denise/Lisa chips in a separate thread for better performance, to a ton of fixes and smaller updates.

With macOS 26, Apple has announced a dramatically new look to their UI: Liquid Glass. Solid material icon elements give way to softer, shinier, glassier icons. The rounded rectangle became slightly more rounded, and Apple eliminated the ability for icon elements to extend beyond the icon rectangle (as seen in the current icons for GarageBand, Photo Booth, Dictionary, etc.). With this release being one of the most dramatic visual overhauls of macOS's design, I wanted to begin a collection chronicling the evolution of the system icons over the years. I've been rolling these out on social media over the past week and will continue to add to and update this collection slowly over the summer. Enjoy! BasicAppleGuy Every single one of these icons is getting progressively worse with almost every design change. They go from beautifully crafted, easily readable and supremely distinguishable icons to generic, repetitive blobs of colour, void of any personality, artistry, or usability considerations. Also, Apple's new icon design language makes the icons look fuzzy, like they're not being rendered properly. It's very unnerving. The one exception is probably the generic folder icon, which looks fine in all of its incarnations. Then there's the classic Platinum, pixelated version from Mac OS 9 and earlier, which, together with icons from Windows and BeOS from the same time period, are a whole different style that I don't think most people would accept anymore these days, but that I absolutely adore. Mostly I'm just sad that the craft of making exquisite icons for operating systems is dying, replaced by what almost look like AI" generated blobs of indeterminate meaning, that rely more on preexisting knowledge of the operating system and its applications in question than on being recognisable and decipherable by anyone. I truly hope Windows and the various open source desktops don't follow in Apple's footsteps here.

A couple of days ago, Microsoft announced9,000 layoffs across its global workforce, impacting its engineering, Xbox, sales, and management teams. This move also affected various initiatives, resulting in thecancellation of at least three Xbox games, job cuts across various studios, and even the shuttering of one game studio, The Initiative. In the wake of this dark day in the the tech industry, a tone-deaf Microsoft executive urged laid off workers to turn to AI tools for emotional support. Usama Jawad at Neowin These corporations are raking in massive amounts of profit, they're doing better than ever, the cup of money runneth over, and yet, they keep laying off thousands and thousands of people almost every few months. The incentives in modern-day capitalism clearly aren't working out for the vast majority of people, and then to give that final kick when you're already down, some asshat manager tells you to talk to" sparkly autocomplete for emotional support. Fuck this guy.

Since the disastrous launch of the RTX 50 series, NVIDIA has been unable to escape negative headlines: scalper bots are snatching GPUs away from consumers before official sales even begin, power connectors continue to melt, with no fix in sight, marketing is becoming increasingly deceptive, GPUs are missing processing units when they leave the factory, and the drivers, for which NVIDIA has always been praised, are currently falling apart. And to top it all off, NVIDIA is becoming increasingly insistent that media push a certain narrative when reporting on their hardware. Sebin Nyshkim Out of all the issues listed here - and there are many, and each is bad enough on their own - it's the frame generation and related pressure campaigns on reviewers that really get on my nerves the most. Technologies like DLSS (rendering at a lower internal resolution scaling that up) and frame generation (injecting fake AI" frames to jack up the frame rate) can be fine technologies when used at the consumer's discretion to find a balance between improved perceived performance in exchange for blurry image quality and artefacting, but we've now reached a point where NVIDIA will only boast about performance figures with these technologies enabled, downsides be damned. If that wasn't misleading enough, the company is also pressuring reviewers who don't enable these technologies, and focus on real frames, real resolutions, and this, real performance. If you don't comply, you're not getting the next crop of GPUs in early access. It's the kind of shit Apple pulls all the time, and we need less of it, not more. Just don't buy NVIDIA. They're already a terrible choice if you're running anything other than Windows, but the company's recent behaviour and serious missteps have made the choice for AMD or Intel only more obvious.

Redox continues to make progress, and as another month has passed us by, it's time for another monthly update. This past month, the focus has been on UNIX domain sockets, which are needed for Redox' goal of running Wayland. As we continue to move forward with our plans for Wayland, a key technology for Wayland support is the ability to send file descriptors over Unix Domain Sockets. File descriptor sending is also an important part of many other OS features, including Capability-based Security. Our Redox Summer of Code project to implement that ability has been progressing very well. Ibuki, a new member of the Redox team, has jumped right into the deep end, and implemented thesendmgandrecvmsgfunctionality, and continues to move forward with work on UDS. Ribbon and Ron Williams You can read more about the UNIX domain sockets progress in a detailed post on the Redox website. Redox now also supports network booting through PXE, but for now, only UEFI is supported. Of course, all of this work is topped off with the usual slew of fixes in relibc, RedoxFS, various drivers, and more, as well updated ports across the board.

All of this to say: value is complicated. The Pi 5 ismuchmore compact and slightly more power efficient (especially at idle) compared to the cheapest N1XX Intel systems. The Intel systems are better suited for a desktop use case. The Pi 5 can be run off PoE power, for easier one-cable networking + power. The Intel systems are more compatible with a wider range of software (not the least of which isanything requiring Windows). Jeff Geerling Intel's N100 and N150 are vastly underappreciated. The mini laptop I reviewed over a year ago is built around the N100, and I still use it every day for watching YouTube, writing OSNews posts, and so on. I never run into performance issues, battery life is excellent, and I don't have to deal with the annoyances of using ARM. The catch is that you're going to want to use Linux - I use Fedora KDE - because Windows' performance on the N100 is dreadful. I don't think the jump from the N100 to the N150 is worthwhile enough to buy the new version of my mini laptop, so I'll stick with what I have. I do hope Intel continues the Nxxx line or processors, because it offers something no other x86 chip offers: more than reasonable performance at low power usage for an incredibly low price.

A recent bug report filed against Ubuntu's upgrading tool confirmed a major change with regards to the RISC-V requirements for the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 release - most existing RISC-V devices willnotbe able to run Ubuntu 25.10. How come? Joey Sneddon at omgubuntu.co.uk RISC-V just isn't delivering. That's the cold and harsh truth more and more people are having to deal with, such as Chimera Linux dropping RISC-V support because the ecosystem is simply lacking the kind of powerful and available hardware to sustain itself (Chimera got lucky, though, and gained access to a Milk-V Pioneer through Adelie Linux). The number of systems and boards that are both powerful and available is close enough to zero that it might as well be zero, and if neither users nor developers can buy RISC-V hardware, what's the point in supporting it? The issue for Ubuntu specifically is that version 25.10 of the distribution intends to target only the RVA23 baseline RISC-V profile, while currently Ubuntu supports RVA20 as the baseline. This higher baseline profile requires a number of extensions to the instruction set that no existing hardware yet supports, making 25.10 effectively a clean break for all existing RISC-V hardware. In other words, if you're running Ubuntu on RISC-V hardware today, you won't be able to upgrade to 25.10 or higher. RISC-V really needs vastly improved hardware availability, because right now it's just not delivering on the years of promises.

Amiga lore is full of exciting tales. Many of them are retold to demonstrate how the incompetence of Commodore's management destroyed a platform that, by rights, was destined for success.Coulda, shoulda,and the Amigawouldarisen as rightful ruler of all other computer platforms, forever and ever. Amen. One of those stories is about how Sun Microsystems allegedly showed interest in the Amiga 3000 during the early 1990s. It's a classic Amiga anecdote, usually recounted without much reflection, and oneI've certainly helped perpetuate. Alas, the more I think about it, the less it adds up. Fact or factoid? Let's speculate! Carl Svensson Great speculation with some solid reasoning and sourcing. Considering that had been some minor joint marketing between Sun and Commodore, my money is on the talks around that deal birthing rumours about more extensive Sun involvement in the Amiga 3000. At this point in time, however, decades after the fact and with several conflicting account, it's unlikely we'll ever get a solid answer.

Clifton Sellers attended a Zoom meeting last month where robots outnumbered humans. He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The 10 others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting. Lisa Bonos and Danielle Abril at The Bezos Post Management strongly encourages - mandates - that everyone use AI" to improve productivity, but then gets all uppity when people actually do. Welcome to finding out".

With recent efforts to improve accessibility in GNOME and KDE, as well as a renewed focus on highlighting the many issues that still need fixing, the Linux desktop is making meaningful strides in becoming more accessible to those among us with disabilities. Obviously, the Linux desktop is bigger than just GNOME and KDE, so today we have elementary OS improving its accessibility features in a variety of ways. July is Disability Pride Month, an opportunity for us to consider how we're serving our disabled community and work on breaking down barriers to access. Last year we had the pleasure of being introduced toFlorian-a fully blind cybersecurity enthusiast-and thanks to his feedback we completely rewrote navigation in Onboarding to be more keyboard and screen reader friendly, as well as took another look at Installation and Initial Setup to vastly improve our entire first run experience for blind folks. Plus, we implemented the screen reader interface in the+window switcher. Thanks to this feedback, elementary OS 8 can be installed and set up completely blind, an important win for maintaining your independence as a person with vision disabilities. Since the release of OS 8 we've been working on things like improving contrast, support for Dark Mode screenshots and brand colors in AppCenter, turning on or snoozing Dark Mode without canceling your schedule, expanding the scope of the Reduce Motion" setting, and adding more options to reduce distracting notification bubbles. Plus, thanks to feedback fromAaronwho you may know fromhis blog series on Linux accessibility, Notifications and the Shortcut Overlay both got releases that add screen reader support. Danielle Fore at elementary's blog I'm glad we're finally putting to rest this idea that accessibility features should be afterthoughts, relevant to only a minute percentage of people. Not only is the disabled community way bigger than we might think, many of the features they require are simply also extremely nice and beneficial to users who might not actually require them. I know tons of people who, for instance, love reduce motion features simply because it makes their operating system feel faster, or people who just don't want to be bothered with notifications the instant they arrive. Accessibility goes far beyond what we traditionally think of as accessibility features, like screen readers or high contrast modes. Making software more accessible for those that require it, also makes software more accessible for those that merely desire it. Even though elementary OS probably isn't the type of distribution that appeals to the average OSNews reader, I'm incredibly happy they're taking accessibility seriously, and I intend to continue to highlight such improvements.

I've used thin clients at home for quite a while - both for theirintendeduse (remotely accessing a desktop of another system); and in the sense of modern thin clients are x86 boxes that are wildly overpowered for what they run, so they make good mini servers." Recently, I saw a bulk lot of Sun Ray thin clients pop up on Trade Me (NZ's eBay-like auction site) - and with very little idea of how many clients were actually included in this lot, I jumped on it. After a 9 hour round-trip drive (on some of the worst roads I've seen!), I returned home with the back of my car completely packed with Sun Rays. Time for some interesting shenanigans! catstret.ch I was unaware you could still set up a Sun Ray environment with latest versions of OpenIndiana, and that has me quite interested in buying a few Sun Rays off eBay and follow in the author's footsteps. It seems like it's not too difficult, and while there's some manual nonsense you have to do to get everything to install correctly, it's nothing crazy. To this day, I firmly believe that the concept of dumb thin clients connected to powerful servers is an alluring and interesting way of computing. I'm not talking about connecting up to servers owned by massive technology corporations - I'm talking about a few powerful servers down in your own basement or attic or whatever, serving applications and desktops straight to basic thin clients all around your house. These thin clients can take the shape of anything, from something like a desktop setup in your office, down to a basic display in your kitchen for showing recipes, setting timers, and other basic stuff - and everything in between. Sun Rays could hot desk' using personal smart cards, but of course, in this day and age you'd have your smartphone. The thin clients around your house would know it was you through your smartphone, and serve up the applications, desktop, tools, and so on that you use, but everything would be running on the servers in your house. Of course, my wife would have her own account on the server, as would our children, when they are old enough. None of this is impossible with today's tools and computing power, but it wouldn't be easy to set up. There are no integrated solutions out there to make this happen; you'd have to scrap it together from disparate parts and tools, and I doubt such a house of cards would end up being reliable enough not to quickly become a massive annoyance and time sink. On top of that, we live in a rental apartment, so we don't even have a basement or attic to store loud servers in, nor are we allowed to drill holes and route Ethernet cabling for optimal performance. Anyway, there's no chance in hell any of the major technology companies would build such a complex ecosystem in a world where it's much easier and more profitable to force people to subscribe to shitty services. In my ideal computing world, though - a server in every home, with cheap thin clients in every room.

We need a new framework for how to defend against trolls". The feeding metaphor ran its course many years ago. It is done and will not be coming back. New online risks demand that we adapt and become proactive in protecting our spaces. We have to loudly and proudly set the terms of what is permissible. Those holding social or institutional power in communities should be willing to drop a few loudfuck offsto anyone trying to work their way in by weaponizing optics, concern trolling, or the well knowntolerance paradox". Conceding through silence, or self-censorship, only emboldens those who benefit from attacking a community. diegoebe Een volk dat voor tirannen zwicht, zal meer dan lijf en goed verliezen, dan dooft het licht.

Apparently, Donkey Kong Country 2 has runs into a bug in the old SNES emulator ZSNES, where one of the barrels that you're supposed to be able to precisely control the spinning direction of ends up spinning forever. This bug is caused by ZSNES not emulating open bus behavior. I believe this was originally discovered by Anomie roughly two decades ago, who subsequently fixed the same bug in Snes9x. This original fix hardcoded the specific addresses to return the values that the game depends on rather than properly emulating open bus, but it fixed DKC2 and probably didn't break anything else. The bug was never fixed in ZSNES, which is now a long abandoned project (last release in 2007). Purely out of curiosity, I wanted to dig into this a little more to figure out what exactly in the game code causes these barrels to spin forever in an emulator that doesn't emulate open bus behavior. jsgroth Just in case you've always wanted to know.

With X.org being in maintenance mode, with the process of replacing it with Wayland accelerating pretty quickly now, a lot of projects using X.org are looking for ways to prepare for the future. Alpine Linux, a distribution focused on musl, BusyBox, and OpenRC, also wants to reduce its maintenance burden for X11 applications, and so Alpine Linux maintainer Ariadne Conill has come up with something interesting. Wayback is an experimental X compatibility layer which allows for running full X desktop environments using Wayland components. It is essentially a stub compositor which provides just enough Wayland capabilities to host a rootful Xwayland server. It is intended to eventually replace the classic X.org server in Alpine, thus reducing maintenance burden of X applications in Alpine, but a lot of work needs to be done first. Wayback GitHub page It's nowhere near done and most likely contains massive amounts of bugs and issues, but the seed has been planted. Wayback will make it possible to keep running X11-based desktop environments even in a full-Wayland environment. This may be necessary in case you need a specific feature not yet available in the Wayland version of your desktop environment, or if your desktop environment of choice simply isn't going to move to Wayland at all (due to lack of maintainers or whatever). It'll also be a boon for retrocomputing, especially as over the coming years and decades unmaintained X11 desktop environments become become ever harder to keep running on modern Linux distributions. While X.org as it exists today certainly isn't going anywhere any time soon, it will, eventually, stop working properly on Linux distributions who don't ship it by default anymore, and it's awesome to already have the beginnings of a project to address this problem.

This blog post is intended to notify all Windows Hardware program partners that Microsoft has taken a strategic initiative to clean up legacy drivers published on Windows Update to reduce security and compatibility risks. The rationale behind this initiative is to ensure that we have the optimal set of drivers on Windows Update that cater to a variety of hardware devices across the windows ecosystem, while making sure that Microsoft Windows security posture is not compromised. This initiative involves periodic cleanup of drivers from Windows Update, thereby resulting in some drivers not being offered to any systems in the ecosystem. Microsoft's Hardware Dev Center The general gist is that Microsoft is going to remove all drivers from Windows Update for which newer versions exist - or, to put it in a different way, only the latest versions of a driver are going to remain available on Windows Update. It's effectively a clean-up of Windows Update, and the only way older versions of drivers will remain available on Windows Update is if the manufacturer in question can make a business justification" to keep them around. Some of this may sound surprising, since many people assume Windows Update only offers the latest versions of drivers - annoyingly so, sometimes - but this isn't the case. Corporations with fleets of devices can actually determine exactly which drivers get sent to their devices, including opting for older versions in case newer versions have regressions or otherwise cause issues. Sometimes you just don't have a choice. According to Adam Demasi, the creator and maintainer of the amazing Legacy Update service, Microsoft hasn't deleted a single driver or update from Windows Update since 2001 (save for problematic updates). This results in a truly massive collection of updates and drivers, and that's causing real problems for Microsoft. Windows Update has a pretty cool system of describing whether an update is necessary to be installed on the current system, or if it is already installed. It also builds a relationship graph between updates, to indicate when they have been replaced by a newer update that includes all changes from the previous update. That system is also its downfall, causing the Windows Update service to beincredibly slowin checking for updates, possibly never completing the check at all. This issue also applies to WSUS, which despite being based on the very robustSQL Server, struggles with the number of drivers Microsoft hosts on Windows Update.As of April, we know that Windows Update hosts 1,799,339 drivers, and this creates a 138 GB database that requires almost 16 days to synchronise down from the main servers. The WSUS server is brought to its knees, with frequent timeouts while it furiously tries to complete database queries. (The PC used is a Ryzen 5700G with 32 GB of 3600 MHz RAM and 500 GB of NVMe, running Windows Server 2025 and SQL Server 2022.) Adam Demasi From this, it's easy to understand why Microsoft would want to perform some housekeeping, followed by a new set of rules around only keeping the latest versions of drivers around in Windows Update. Demasi also notes that these plans by Microsoft won't affect drivers for old devices, since they will still be served their newest" driver version, and it won't affect Legacy Update either.

The GPU in your computer is about 10 to 100 times more powerful than the CPU, depending on workload. For real-time graphics rendering and machine learning, you are enjoying that power, and doing those workloads on a CPU is not viable. Why aren't we exploiting that power for other workloads? What prevents a GPU from being a more general purpose computer? Raph Levien Fascinating thoughts on parallel computation, including some mentions of earlier projects like Intel's Larabee or the Connection Machine with 64k processors the '80s, as well as a defense of the PlayStation 3's Cell architecture.

The blue screen of death has been such a core part of Windows that's it's become part of humanity's collective consciousness. They're not nearly as common anymore as they used to be back in the Windows 9x and early Windows XP days, but they do still occasionally when dealing with broken hardware, shoddy drivers, or other such faults. Well, the blue screen of death is losing its eponymous blue colour, and will now clearly mention the stop code and where - in which driver - the kernel panic occurred. The Windows 11 24H2 release included improvements to crash dump collection which reduced downtime during an unexpected restart to about two seconds for most users. We're introducing a simplified user interface (UI) that pairs with the shortened experience. The updated UI improves readability and aligns better with Windows 11 design principles, while preserving the technical information on the screen for when it is needed. David Weston at the Windows Blogs This is part of a new feature in Windows 11 called quick machine recovery, or QMR. If a Windows PC gets stuck in a boot loop, ending up in the Windows Recovery Environment, Microsoft can now deploy fixes and remediations through WinRE. This feature will become available later this year by default on Windows 11 Home, while on Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise, administrators can control how this feature works. So far, it seems QMR is only intended to be used for widespread outages, but I wonder if it would be possible to eventually use QMR locally. It would be pretty neat if Microsoft released the server-side component of QMR so individuals can run and (ab)use it locally for their own machines.

The world isn't short of classic Macintosh emulators, but one more certainly cannot hurt. Snow emulates classic (Motorola 680*0-based) Macintosh computers. It features a graphical user interface to operate the emulated machine and provides extensive debugging capabilities. The aim of this project is to emulate the Macintosh on a hardware-level as much as possible, as opposed to emulators that patch the ROM or intercept system calls. It currently emulates the Macintosh 128K, Macintosh 512K, Macintosh Plus, Macintosh SE, Macintosh Classic and Macintosh II. Snow's homepage Snow is written in Rust and open source under the MIT license.

It's been nearly a year since a faulty CrowdStrike update took down 8.5 million Windows-based machines around the world, and Microsoft wants to ensure such a problem never happens again. After holding a summit with security vendors last year, Microsoft is poised to release a private preview of Windows changes that will move antivirus (AV) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) apps out of the Windows kernel. Tom Warren at The Verge After the CrowdStrike incident, one of the first things Microsoft hinted as was moving antivirus and EDR applications out of the kernel, building an entirely new framework for these applications instead. The company has been working together with several large security vendors on these new frameworks and APIs, and it's now finally ready to show off this new work to the outside world. Instead of designing the new frameworks and APIs in-house and just dumping them on the security vendors, Microsoft requested the security vendors send them detailed documentation on how they want the new frameworks and APIs to work. This first preview of the new implementation will be private, and will allow security vendors to request changes and additional features. Microsoft states it will take a few iterations before it's ready for general availability, and on top of that, security software is only the first focus of this new effort. It turns out Microsoft wants to move more stuff out of the kernel, with anti-cheat software - more accurately described as rootkits, like Riot's Vanguard - being an obvious next target. Perhaps this effort could have some beneficial side effects for gaming on Linux, which you should be doing anyway if you want better performance, because Windows games seem to perform better on Linux than they do on Windows.

Jokes aside, this is exciting news. PNG is back to its former glory after its progress stalled for over two decades. Did you know the U.S. Library of Congress, Library and Archives Canada, and the National Archives of Australia recommend PNG? It is important that we keep PNG current and competitive. After 20 years of stagnation, PNG is back with renewed vigor! With these titans behind it, the image format is back with full momentum. Work has already begun on the nexttwo PNG spec updates. Chris Blume The new PNG specification update adds proper HDR support, which is probably its most important new features. Chris Lilly, one of the original creators of PNG and actively involved in these new updates as well, has a detailed blog post diving into how HDR in PNG works. Other changes include officially adding Mozilla's animated PNG implementation to PNG, support for EXIF data, and a ton of smaller changes and cleanups.