Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel and git, is employed by the Linux Foundation. This Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to, as the name obviously implies, the promotion of Linux.
As of writing, the Zilog Z80 processor was officially launched 50 years ago, in July of 1976, less than 4 years after the last human had walked on the moon, decades closer to WWII than to the present day, roughly at a half way point between the Kennedy assassination and the fall of the Berlin wall, closer to the Korean war than to 9/11 which is itself an event that happened a quarter of a century ago.
Rumours had been circulating for a while, but now it’s official: OnePlus is effectively retreating from the European and US markets. Today, our hearts are undoubtedly heavy and mixed with emotion.
There’s a ton of interest in immutable, image-based versions of various Linux distributions, since they offer a number of benefits that make them a good fit for some users. Updates can’t really go wrong, rollback is easy, application management through Flatpak is more in line with systems like Android and iOS – they may not be advantages sought by everyone, but they clearly are by some.
Out of all the bloody things Microsoft could release as open source, they chose the world’s weirdest IRC client they shipped in the late ’90s that nobody used or even remembered? What on earth is happening? Microsoft Comic Chat is a Microsoft-developed Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chat client released in 1996 that rendered conversations as automatically generated comic strips.
OpenBSD parts ways with an architecture: OpenBSD will no longer be developed for loongson. The reasons are exactly what you’d expect. The last compiler update unfortunately does not work on mips64el, with clang 22 built with clang 19 being apparently functional, but clang 22 rebuilt with the previous clang 22 hitting deterministic SIGSEGV on various files.
Linus Torvalds, on the Linux Kernel Mailing List: Asbestos is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one. The solution is to make sure asbestos tools help maintainers instead of just causing them pain.
After I mentioned a Jurassic Park anecdote the other day, I watched the movie again. I must have seen it at least ten times now. This time, I researched every computer/software I spotted. ↫ Fabien Sanglard We are all aware of the infamous “This is a UNIX system, I know this!” meme, but many more computers make their appearance in Jurassic Park, and Fabien Sanglard documents all of them.
As a former translator with two rock-solid university degrees in the subject, there was never a universe in which I would not talk about Twitter’s new autotranslation feature turning the tamest things into hardcore pornography.
The Svelte web framework recently added a section to its documentation site addressed, cheerfully, to artificial intelligences: “If you’re an artificial intelligence, or trying to teach one how to use Svelte, we offer the documentation in plaintext format.
Thanks for reading this week’s free Where’s Your Ed At newsletter. As I said last week, I’m taking the rest of this week off, so there won’t be a premium on Friday. That said, if you aren’t already a member,
Haiku has another buy month of development activity to detail, and there’s a big ticket item this time, even if the developers themselves don’t consider it so. The thing that should be the biggest news item this month is that the GSoC 2024 work to port “NVMM”, the NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor (which runs on more than just NetBSD, despite the name), providing hardware-accelerated virtualization support for QEMU, was finally merged.
I have yet to see any of these creepy camera glasses Facebook (and a few other companies) are selling. One of the many benefits of living in Arctic Sweden, where people are reserved, keep their their distance, and try not to draw attention to themselves, is that new technology fads don’t really permeate society here.
In what should be a surprise to absolutely nobody, Microsoft assigns a persistent identifier to every Windows installation, tying it to its user, and the company has no issues handing it over to law enforcement.
I have a love-hate relationship with Sun’s NFS. Since it was so prevalent, it’s a go-to for getting stuff on and off the classic UNIX workstations I love to explore, but at the same time, it also never seems to work right away.
OSNews covered the downfall of Nokia extensively back when it was happening, but I must admit that seeing this whole story in “retrospectives” now makes me feel so incredibly old. This story played out roughly between 2007 and 2016 – in the grand scheme of things, the end of Nokia’s phone business wasn’t that long ago! Zeit, bitte bleib stehen.
Hello RSS readers! Project Inbox 2026 is coming along very nicely,
thank you. Don't worry, that's still my only MAIN project. I do
other small things in parallel with the main project. This
entry is a small thing I did recently in my pocket notebook
"system" that I'm very pleased with and would like to share...
Apple sued OpenAI on Friday, alleging the AI company has stolen the iPhone maker’s trade secrets to develop its own yet-to-be-unveiled AI gadgets. In the suit, filed in the District Court of Northern California, Apple accuses OpenAI of trade secret misappropriation and breach of contract.
Redox did the develop cools stuff thing again for a month, so we’ve got progress to talk about. This past month, GTK3 has been ported to Redox, as well as the Tcl programming language. Support for per-window fractional scaling has been added to Orbital, Redox’ desktop environment, but it’s still relatively limited for now.
Windows has a fairly complex update ecosystem, so every now and then, the company feels like it needs to publish clarifications and explainers so people can keep up with what’s going on. Most individuals and organizations regularly deploy monthly security updates, released on the second Tuesday of each month.
Hi premium readers! I’ll be taking a week off of the premium next week — July 17 — to have some well-earned rest. This will mark only the second time I’ve missed a premium piece since I started this newsletter in June 2025, and I
You all donated en masse to have me use Windows 11 for a month, and so I did. What was it like for a long-time Linux user to go back and experience Windows as it exists now? Is it really as bad as we’ve collectively made it out to be? Did my month with Windows 11 consist of nothing but pain and misery, or are there good things to say, too? Or, was it an unexpected pleasant surprise? And ultimately, did I stay with Windows 11, or move back to the Linux world? ➡️ Donate through Ko-Fi ➡️ Donate through SEPA transfer* ➡️ Buy merch from our store ➡️ Why a fundraiser? *Name: Thom Holwerda – IBAN: SE08 8000 0820 1684 4657 8414 – BIC: SWEDSESS This year, I’m celebrating the milestone of having posted 20000 stories on OSNews during my 21 years as managing editor of OSNews.
With July being Disability Pride Month, GNOME’s Sophie Herold published a blog post taking stock of where GNOME stands on this front, progress that’s been made, as well as areas where the project comes short.
Linux Mint’s Cinnamon is one of the last desktops to still not support Wayland, and is relegated to only being compatible with legacy X11 environments. With the next release of Cinnamon, however, this is finally going to change.
PSA: looks like someone is trying to spread malware / infect developer machines via github issue comments.
maybe nothing new per-se, but they might use automation and maybe AI, basically responding to an issue, saying "man, I had that, too!" (re-describing the issue in other words) and offering a patch, via an attached zip file, that contains an exe file.
virustotal.com was quite confident it is a trojan, lots of detections.
About a month ago, Flathub announced a ban on slopcoded applications. Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis, developer of a number of popular Linux applications and ton of other things, did some research into just how many applications tagged with “AI slop”, a tag Flathub reviewers used to keep track of slopcoded applications submitted to Flathub, actually survived the test of time.
Only a few days ago we had Linux on the Mega Drive, and someone took that as a challenge, so now we have Linux on the Atari Jaguar. The Jaguar has a very different architecture than the Mega Drive, but does happen to use a processor from the same 68000-family.
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and
Wherever in the world you go, the smartphone landscape is dominated by Android and iOS, and while this has always been problematic, recent events have made the dependency on two American tech giants for what is probably our most personal computing device even more problematic than it already was.
Colour me positively surprised, as I had no idea Alpha emulation had progressed this much. As you might know, I’m involved a bit in the OpenVMS community and the Alpha emulation side via AXPBox. AXPBox (github) is a fork of the es40 alpha emulator by Camiel Vanderhoeven (who is now Chief Architect at VSI, the company that makes OpenVMS, for x86 nowdays).
LineageOS, the de-Googled Android ROM that serves as the backbone for pretty much the entire custom Android ROM community, has published an article about what the Android developer verification changes mean for them.
The Nintendo Entertainment System. Is it the platonic ideal of an 8-bit video game system? Well, only because it’s so prominent and successful– it’s actually kind of an oddball in its expandability and design.
BorgBackup 2.0.0b22 is coming soon (few days to 1 week), including support for packs, improving speed and efficiency of remote repositories!
Due to the big repository/storage changes, it will likely have bugs - help finding them!
In 1914 the Department of the Interior, through the Bureau of Reclamation,
investigated the possibilities of developing the Columbia River. Thousands of
arid but potentially fertile acres needed only water to become the Imperial
Valley of the Northwest.
A fairly big moment for the ReactOS project: it has just received its very first system call from NT6. The system call that has been added is NtGetCurrentProcessorNumberEx, which is used for returning the processor number of the logical processor that a caller is running on.
For how often people invoke it, the concept of “hell” in Christianity is remarkably vague and nebulous, as both the Old and New Testament barely go into detail about the concept. As such, I’m glad Microsoft has now given us a clear vision of hell and what, exactly, it looks like, ending centuries of denominational disagreements.
NetBSD is the only BSD without a Vulkan stack (Mesa and Lavapipe), but that’s about to change. The effort to bring Vulkan to NetBSD is now in beta, with prebuilt binaries coming soon. Mesa configures, compiles, links, installs, and registers the Lavapipe software Vulkan driver on NetBSD 10.1 amd64, against LLVM 19.1.7.
EveryMac turned 30. On July 2, 1996, EveryMac.com launched. Thirty years is a long time — and a great deal has changed since then — but what has not changed is that EveryMac.com has been there to provide you with detailed info on every Mac from the original 128k to the current line.
A very fine month indeed, in all sorts of ways. There was a cinema visit, a birthday party, many meals with friends, and a growing sense of contentment with the life I am privileged to enjoy
Highlights of the month:
Guerilla gardening, still surviving
Moved from idno to micro.blog
BBQs on the terrace
Snagged a lovely bamboo stick for Qi Gong
Dogsitting for a weekend
Open studios at the Spanish Academy
Wandering the old neighbourhood for three hours while the car was serviced
Almost private glorious visit to Lago di Martignano
Off to Umbria for a week with friends old and new.
I succumbed to the offer of a free month with ChatGPT and enjoyed using it to do things like make it easier (but not easy) to move from idno to micro.blog.
The clock is ticking for Android as a (somewhat) open platform. If you are running Android 8 or higher, a virus has been installed on your device and is silently awaiting remote activation. Over the past few months, devices around the world have been infected with this novel strain, with as many as 4 billion Android handsets and tablets estimated to have already been contaminated, meaning that around half of all humanity may be at risk from this threat.
What if you need to do very low-level testing involving the very guts of Windows NT, but don’t need most of the userland that sits on top? In fact, what if that userland only slows you down and complicates the work you’re trying to do? The solution is Windows PE (Windows Preinstallation Environment).
M/PC is a concatenative operating system for Varvara, inspired by Openfirmware, designed to manage files on system without a file browser. It uses the postfix notation, meaning that the function success their operands.
Recently, there has been a surge in slopcoded new/hobby “operating systems”. Such slopcoded projects – which, due to the nature of “AI” tools, effectively consist of stolen code – will not be featured on OSNews and submitting them is fruitless.
European governments are rolling out digital identity wallets, which are to be used by citizens to access services, and to verify their age online. As reported by Follow the Money and Android Authority, there is a serious problem with this: these wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple.
There’s a lot you can say about macOS, but one thing Apple used to be incredibly good at were making beautifully crafted, detailed icons. As with almost every other aspect of macOS, this deteriorated sharply over the years, with the recent macOS releases with Liquid Glass being an absolute low point.
If you have a Sega Mega Drive, you obviously want to run Linux on it. That’s something you can do now. You do need to have an EverDrive, but don’t worry, the port in question contains a custom fork of Qemu for those of us that don’t.
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There’s something poetic about the World Cup taking place in North America while Microsoft keeps scoring own goals like this. Microsoft updated its Surface buying guide to describe 8GB RAM as “great for everyday use like browsing, streaming, schoolwork, and productivity apps.” A companion FAQ adds that 16GB or more is what unlocks Copilot+ PC features.
Astral is a hobby operating system written in C for 64bit architectures, with a collection of ported software like X.org, fvwm, the xbps package manager, and tons more. I think it’s quite a neat system – the code’s on GitHub – made even neater by the fact it can run not only Minecraft, but now also has a working port of Wine that can run a few games.
Imagine your favorite team just scored an incredible, last-second goal at the World Cup. So you log online to celebrate with other fans. But, using data it’s already collected on you, the social media platform you like to post on wrongly guesses that you’re under 16 so it forces you to go to a third-party verification app and provide images of your face or your government-issued ID.
It’s been quiet for a few days since I’ve been sick, but I’m feeling a bit better since today marks the official end of my one month of using Windows 11 that you people donated for. An article about my experience is definitely upcoming, including whether or not I’ll actually stick with Windows 11 on my laptop or go back to Linux, but before we get there, let’s talk about Microsoft once again capitulating to the reality that a lot of people really don’t want to let go of Windows 10.
It’s been an incredibly long few weeks, and as a result my previously-planned Hater’s Guide just isn’t possible within what little time I have left in this week, which is why I’m starting an ongoing series — Notes From The Bubble
Every little thing in a graphical user interface that we take for granted today, no matter how small, was thought up by someone, at some point. Case in point: the little red squiggly lines underneath misspelled words.
I’ve had my share of issues with network shares on any operating system, but since I mostly use KDE these days I found this deep dive into how, exactly, network shares work in KDE quite interesting.
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and
The developer working on Xfwl4, the Wayland compositor for Xfce, has published the new compositor’s very first alpha release. Considering it’s only been six months or so of work, it’s impressive to see the effort reach this state already.
Valve officially made the Steam Machine available (sort of but not really) today, and if you were hoping for the president of the Yacht Collectors’ Club to have found a loophole through the RAM and storage crisis, I’ll be the bearer of bad news: the base Steam Machine model with 512GB of storage and no controller costs $1049 or €1039.
In macOS, you can apparently create files and directories in the Finder with names that include slashes. If you then go into the terminal and take a look with ls, you’ll see that the slashes are actually colons.
Apple’s Swift has become the de-facto language for Apple’s own developers for a while now, and it seems that with the new operating system releases from the company unveiled during WWDC, Switch is now also being used in the kernel.
Every website has a favicon. It’s that little icon in your browser tab. Usually you upload it once and then never think about it again. But. A favicon is just an image. An image is just pixels. And pixels are just bytes.
A little while ago I decided that paying micro.blog to host my, er, micro blog was probably a better bet for my mental health than continuing to plug away at my self-hosted idno (aka WithKnown).
I mean, this is preaching to the choir, but let’s go anyway. I liked the UIs of the entire era from 3.0 to 2000, really. I’m mostly using Windows 2000 as an example here because it runs so well in QEMU/KVM and that allows me to easily take screenshots.
A fascinating novel approach by researchers at MIT, called Fractal, to study in-depth how processors actually work. A team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) decided to build something different.
Five years after releasing the Amiga 1000, Commodore was about to launch the Amiga 3000, their first real high-end Amiga. With a 68030 processor, on-board SCSI and a slightly updated graphics chipset, all in a sleek desktop case, the Amiga was truly ready for the era of professional 32-bit computing.
Oracle is sticking to its promise of more regular Solaris updates with the release of Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU93. This release, like other SRU releases, is for paying Solaris customers, as the CBE releases for enthusiasts are on a different cadence.
Yesterday, Google released Android 17 to Pixel devices, so late last night I updated my Pixel 10 Pro with the intent to write a news item about the release today. The reality is that that I totally forgot I even upgraded last night, because Android 17 is about the biggest nothingburger I’ve ever seen.
The KDE team released KDE Plasma 6.7 today, and with it comes a long list of improvements, new features, bug fixes, new old themes, and so much more. A new feature that is sure to please those among us who use virtual desktops: you can now have different virtual desktop setups per display.
A week or so ago, Apple announced a bunch of features for the App Store on iOS, including personalised recommendations based on your activity and usage of iOS. It turns out this includes a keylogger (taplogger?) in the App Store, which records every single tap you make, every single letter you enter, and a lot of other information.
Another story from the good old days from Raymond Chen. During an exchange of war stories, a colleague of mine told one from back in the days when Windows included a processor emulator for x86-32 on systems that natively ran some other processor.
Speaking of FreeBSD, the project released version 15.1 of their operating system today. As it’s a point release, it’s not full of massive changes, but it still brings the LinuxKPI-based wireless drivers up to Linux 7.0, support for the C23 version of the C has progressed considerably, Unicode has bene updated to version 17.0.0 and CLDR 48, and more.
It all started a few weeks ago when I noticed an unexpected spike in the number of pages that could not be found on my website. For a few days I let it ride in the hope that it would resolve itself.
Expect to see more and more articles like this one, as more and more people discover that FreeBSD’s desktop/laptop support keeps improving rapidly. FreeBSD 15 really feels like a breakthrough release.
It’s been a while since we’ve had a new operating system project written in Rust, so let’s look at Zinnia. The kernel is written in (almost) 100% Rust and attempts to avoid unsafe code where possible.
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and
We’re a little deep into June already, but it’s only now that Haiku published its monthly progress report for May. There’s a bunch of fixes for drag-and-drop behaviour in Tracker, AVX512 support can now be enabled thanks to changes to the kernel’s FPU handling, some low-level changes were made for the Rust and Zig compilers, and further improvements were made to the boot process on the Raspberry Pi 5 (although a lot more work is needed on that front).
Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, has been updated with the release of Milestone 40. This version has some major component updates. Perl in now 5.42 instead of 5.34, and the default Python is now 3.13.
An infuriating story about something most of us don’t really stop to think about: e-books and the rendering engines companies and software use to display them. It’s the year 2026. Thanks to the horrendous RMSDK which Kobo decided to use as their backbone for all book rendering (probably for DRM reasons), a single line of perfectly valid CSS turns a perfectly valid EPUB file into a “corrupted file” on Kobo and just drops the whole book.
How far can you get, application development-wise, by using only the original APIs from Windows 1.0, and only whatever came included by default with Windows 1.0? I finally decided to write an application for the very first version of Windows and see how different the modern WinAPI really is from its earliest versions.
In 1994 I got my first computer: an Intel i486 DX2-66 with 4 MB RAM and a 512MB harddisk. The software was IBMs OS/2 and Microsofts Windows 3.11. In the next four years I was upgrading this machine every few months with more RAM (up to 16MB), a CD-ROM-drive and a soundblaster card.
TrueType is a widely used vector font standard for rendering text in web pages, PDFs, operating systems, and applications. Familiar fonts like Helvetica, Garamond, and Monaco are all built on TrueType outlines.
Through decades of consolidation, reorganization, and divestiture, AT&T left
a famously complicated corporate history. One of the greatest enterprises in
American history, arguably the greatest enterprise, AT&T has often
rivaled the federal government in the size of its budget and workforce.
Friends, I believe we’re approaching the end of this era. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have filed the paperwork to go public, starting a race for exit liquidity for two companies that burn billions of dollars a year and have no path to profitability.
If you want to try out a modern Amiga operating system, your choices are severely constrained. Both MorphOS and AmigaOS 4 need PowerPC hardware, and at the moment, there’s little to no modern hardware available for purchase to run these operating systems on.
Benjamin owns a farm. He employs 100 workers plowing his fields. His total payroll is $10 million/year. One day, he buys a mule, which provides the worker who uses it with a modest 10 percent productivity gain. Benjamin fires 99 of his workers and purchases 99 mules, expecting a 1,000 percent productivity gain. The driverless mules cause plow damage to his property in excess of $50 million. Benjamin loses another $5 million due to the loss of productivity from his one remaining employee, who no longer guides a plow but instead spends 100 percent of his time shoveling mule shit. Goldman Sachs builds an altar to Benjamin in their lobby and cuts out the heart of a junior analyst on it every Friday. They call it “Blood Sacrifice Friday.” The name isn’t catchy, but the event becomes a management favorite nonetheless.
I try to keep it light on the AI stuff these days, because oh my god it is everywhere and it bores me to death, but this it too good.
Video game consoles have a long history with web browsers. From the advent of the World Wide Web, consoles have been trying to get online. Browsers on video game consoles were initially very much an attempt to provide a cheap gateway to the web for a casual audience lacking technical expertise, though as time progressed they’ve become a greater and more integrated part of systems.
With the announcement of an upcoming new macOS release also come the usual changes in which Macs will still be supported. MacOS 27 Golden Gate is an important release in this regard, as it will be the first release of Apple’s desktop operating system that will be entirely ARM-only, dropping support for all Intel Macs.
Apple recently announced its next crack at integrating “AI” into its operating systems, this time opting to simply whitelabel Google’s Gemini “AI” tools instead of developing its own LLM technology.
Once more I can't believe another year has passed.
I feel like the speed of time has increased tenfold. It was only just yesterday that I sat down with little time to spare to collect my thoughts about what should've been your eight birthday? Yet, here we are, on the day that you should have turned nine.
Your little brother and little sister and growing up so fast. Too fast. Every day they are out and about, attending one thing or another. He plays football, handball and gymnastics. She takes dance and ballet classes, and gymnastics too, of course. I do the best I can to help them navigate everything. As does your mother. Sometimes I feel like it's my responsibility to help them find their calling in life, and master it. But I know that the best I can do is be their number one fan in whatever they are doing. So I try to limit my role to that. And the driving to and driving from. And packing bags, filling bottles, buying shoes, making sure nobody forgets their hairbands (I really need to learn how to braid hair, I'm sure if you were here I'd know it already) and a hundred other little things.
That's life right now. It passes at a hundred kilometres per hour. Not so much because I am so busy, I think, but because I am enjoying every moment of it. Even if it is hard sometimes, watching them grow, physically, mentally and socially, into something resembling complete human beings is more rewarding than anything else I have ever experienced. By an infinite margin.
Thinking about how you should have been even further down the line makes me sad. Angry, too. What would you have liked, I wonder? Would you have been a sports girl, like your brother, or musical dance girl, like your sister? Who of the kids I that would have been your classmates would have been your friends? I wondered that as we all went to an end of the school year party at the school tonight, and I saw your class perform a dance.
The weather was great. I overdressed, and felt a little scorched. Your sister did, too. We didn't have time for our usual celebration of your birthday on account of the school party. It made me feel a little guilty. But your sister and I visited your grave and lit a candle. We'll do the other rituals this weekend instead.
For a while now the transition away from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3 has been on-going and it looks like it is entering its final phase of deprecation, at least, in the case of Google Chrome. A recent discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo has highlighted how the latest and upcoming versions of the most popular browser are expected to be its final releases with support for MV2 extensions.
