On a related note, what about a raycasting first-person shooter written in… COBOL? Can you think of a better programming language than COBOL to implement an FPS from scratch? I know I can’t, so buckle up and enjoy what can only be described as an out-of-body experience for COBOL enthusiasts as I set out to make a Wolfenstein3D-like raycasting based FPS game (and potentially go a bit further than that, hopefully it’s not a DOOMed attempt).
My goal was to build a complete, shippable first-person shooter using techniques that were common in the early 90s, while allowing myself the luxury of using a modern compiler and a platform abstraction layer.
Microsoft has detailed that Windows 11 is going to switch away from dedicated printer drivers to its Windows Ready Print system. This should make it a lot easier and less cumbersome to get printers running on Windows 11.
It’s just a ruling from a lower court, but it sets the stage for how European courts are going to deal with the question of who is liable for whatever slop “AI” generates. The Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI-generated search overviews (case no.
When it comes to 80s computer brands, few flew as high as Eagle Computer flew in 1983. The aptly named company was selling 12,000 computers a month and had been doubling sales every quarter under the leadership of a talented CEO.
⏱️ 04:06 total (1:45 actual) ⇄28.5km ⌀16.1km/h ↗89m ↘?m
Good ride yesterday, to deliver some seedlings I have been growing to a friend who lives under the Fiumicino take-off flight path, just across from the excellent cycle path.
A new logo means new merch! I’m launching brand new merch today, all featuring the brand new OSNews logo. We’ve got the classic T-shirt with the new OSNews logo, in sandy white and terrain grey.
In today’s climate, I needed this: GentleOS, an operating system targeting both 386 (GentleOS/32) and even processors as old as the 80186 (GentleOS/16), with a lovely retro graphical user interface, usable on bare metal, and, of course, open source.
Apple’s developer conference started today, and as is tradition, this means it also announced coming updates to its operating systems lineup. macOS is probably one of the two major ones OSNews readers are interested in, so let’s start there: Much like Mac OS X Snow Leopard in 2009, Apple said it focused on improving macOS’s performance and dozens of underlying technologies this year.
Redox progressed another month, and that means a ton of improvements and new features to talk about. The biggest news this past month is that Xfce has been ported to Redox, which offers a better X11 experience than MATE currently does.
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Norman Feske, one of the main developers behind Genode and Sculpt OS, has published a blog post detailing how he developed a two-factor authentication application for Sculpt OS. With this little tool, which I have turned into an deploy option on Sculpt OS to swiftly bring it up whenever I need it, TOTP-based two-factor authentication has become part of my daily routine.
I’ve been using Fedora Silverblue on my desktop and laptop for the past, what, five years? Silverblue is Fedora’s main atomic variant, a spiritual counterpart to Fedora Workstation. I also make niri, a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.
x86CSS is a working CSS-only x86 CPU/emulator/computer. Yes, the Cascading Style Sheets CSS. No JavaScript required. What you’re seeing above is a C program that was compiled using GCC into native 8086 machine code being executed fully within CSS.
I had a lot of trouble on my Mac with Time Machine telling me the disk was full and yet I could not find huge wins just by inspection and deleting things that looked too big.
RISC-V has been in the “promising” phase for a long time now, especially for general purpose computing, never really breaking through into the mainstream in any measurable way. While I think that breakthrough is still relatively far away, we now do have newer RISC-V SoCs on the market supporting the RVA23 baseline RISC-V profile.
I’ve mentioned it before, but Chris Siebenmann is basically the Raymond Chen of the UNIX world, and today he’s filling that role perfectly once again. I recently read Simon Tatham’s Nitpicking the shell history scene in Tron: Legacy, where one thing that surprised Tatham was the film using ‘login -n root‘ to become root instead of ‘su‘.
The masterwork of Terry A. Davis is his eclectic operating system, TempleOS, which he worked on until his tragic death in 2018. In terms of technical excellence, TempleOS rates well in some respects and poorly in others.
Roku, the company that makes TV boxes and sells ad space based on your usage patterns, has released its remote control operating system as open source – and by remote control I don’t mean robot stuff or whatever, but actual remote controls, the thing you use to control your TV or whatever from the couch.
Raymond Chen shares some history regarding Windows 8’s development: During the development of Windows 8, we needed a name for “that thing we’re creating.” Not being a particularly clever bunch when it comes to code names, we just called it “the modern experience,” to distinguish it from what we had in Windows 7, which was called “the classic experience.” And then, as Microspeak demands, we started abbreviating like mad.
For the past few years, Microsoft has been phasing out NTLM in Windows in favor of Kerberos-based alternatives. Starting with the next versions of client and server editions of Windows, Microsoft will also be disabling the legacy authentication protocol by default.
May was a big month! The highlight was a cycling trip around Lake Konstanz, passing through Konstanz, Bregenz Austria, Stein am Rhein in Switzerland, and Meersburg.
A farm in Bodenseeufer, Germany
We passed a lot of operating agriculture, growing apples, strawberries, and other fruits.
The route is very continuous, mostly flat, and popular with retirees.
At its Build conference, Microsoft announced coreutils for Windows. Coreutils for Windows is a Microsoft-maintained set of UNIX-style command-line utilities that run natively on Windows — the same commands and pipelines you use on Linux, macOS, and WSL.
On the Vogon forums, user MarkDastedt posted an interesting bit of source code he discovered on an old company DVD: a very basic, very rudimentary implementation of multicore support for DOS. Another user, dartfrog, took a closer look and had this to say: Interesting stuff nonetheless.
A hobby operating system, not written in Rust, not targeting Qemu, not targeting a Raspberry Pi. Yes, it still happens. Serena OS is what you get when modern operating system design and implementation meets vintage hardware like the Amiga computers.
Andrew Tridgell, developer of rsync, has published a blog post addressing the massive surge in “AI” code submissions and the string of regressions supposedly caused by them. He explains rsync was flooded with “AI”-generated security reports, and he couldn’t handle the volumes anymore.
WinUtils started in 1996-1997 as a way to build my programming chops. I was poking around the Windows 95 shell APIs, found the file operation functions, and thought it would be cool to have CLI tools that called them instead of doing raw file I/O.
Google is adding a switch to allow website owners to opt out of being featured in their “AI” overviews and related slopsearch results. With this new toggle in Search Console, website owners can decide if they want their site to appear in and help ground responses in our generative AI Search features (like AI Overviews, AI Mode or AI Overviews in Discover).
There’s this idea in IndieWeb circles of the admin tax. That’s the work you have to do in order to be somewhat independent of the big silo platforms, the price you pay instead of paying with your attention.
With KDE Plasma 6.7 almost ready for release, developers have moved on to working on 6.8, and with that release comes probably one of the biggest deprecations in KDE’s history: as of today, the X11 session is gone from KDE.
Yesterday, a slew of Instagram accounts, including some high profile ones like the Obama White House account, seemingly got hacked. Look, I’m no spring chicken. I’ve spent almost a decade and a half identifying vulnerabilities and exploits at unicorn scale, but this is hands down the most unserious, “almost too stupid to be true” of them all.
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You’re a smart cookie, so you opted to buy a copy of Microsoft Office for macOS back in 2019 or 2021, eschewing the Office 365 subscription, so you could keep on using Office 2019/2021 forever if you wanted to.
It was an open secret that NVIDIA was working on an ARM-based system-on-a-chip for laptops and desktops, and today at Computex 2026 the company unveiled what it’s been working on. It’s surely a beast, and unsurprisingly, it’s lathered in “AI” buzzwords.
My favorite metonymic technology term is “cron job”: even though cron may not literally be the daemon that executes actions on a schedule, we apply the term to anything that walks like a cron and quacks like a cron.
Almost exactly 18 months after 3.19, the MorphOS team has released MorphOS 3.20. This is a major release, as it adds support for the upcoming Mirari PowerPC motherboards, which we talked about when that project was first announced.
A sad, painful, and infuriating read for this calm Sunday. In recent years, a lot of attention has gone into improving the output side of the accessibility story on Wayland – screen readers and the like – but apparently, the input side has languished.
The Alliance for Open Media has published the first version of the AV2 specification. AV2 is the next-generation video coding specification from the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). Building on the foundation of AV1, AV2 is engineered to provide superior compression efficiency, enabling high-quality video delivery at significantly lower bitrates.
When Cameron Kaiser speaks, we listen. In 1982, as we mentioned at length with our history of the DEC Professional, Digital Equipment Corporation attempted to keep their PDP-11 minicomputer market-relevant by turning the venerable architecture into a largely incompatible desktop microcomputer.
It has been an unfortunate turn in the software industry, one of many as of
late, that gambling is once again one of its primary engines. With the rise of
almost nationwide online sports betting, not to mention prediction markets,
making odds on real-world events and extracting the money of suckers is no
longer limited to island nations.
A beautiful TUI might not be particularly accessible, and there’s effectively zero consistency between how different TUI applications look, feel, and behave, but damn if an amazing TUI isn’t a work of art.
A little while ago, I decided that I would really like a better webmentions experience on this site. I’m currently indebted to Pelle Wasserman’s app to collect them for me and deliver them here, which I appreciate very much, but my effort to understand how I might improve the presentation, for example by separating and grouping the various kinds of reaction, taught me only that I have far too much to learn about doing that in a browser.
Flathub, by the most popular (effectively only) repository for Flatpak applications, has changed its policies to include a strict ban on “AI” use for both application submissions as well as the application code itself.
Last week I ran the second part of my three-part “What If…We’re In An AI Bubble?” series where I have been covering the scenarios that I believe could lead to the bubble popping.
The work on the May release has been dominated by topics on account of the just published Sculpt OS version 26.04. Besides featuring profound driver improvements across Wifi, ACPI, I2C HID, SOF audio, and graphics, it turns the most innovative aspects of Sculpt OS into building blocks for the easy reuse in other incarnations of Genode-based systems.
In the release notes for the latest NVIDIA driver version for Windows, the “AI” company who happens to spare a few GPUs for regular users every now and then has announced that the curtain has fallen for the classic NVIDIA Control Panel.
When you think of Gentoo, you tend to think of it being a difficult distribution, where you compile everything yourself. There’s much more to Gentoo than that. Yes, some of it comes from building from source: the flexibility.
It’s no secret there’s a war going on inside the open source community, with people adopting “AI” on one side, and those that want nothing to do with it on the other. While the former are, by nature, using destructive tactics like mass website scraping, license washing, taking people’s creative works without permission, taking all the RAM and GPUs, and oh, destroying the planet, the latter have mostly stuck to fairly benign things like policies banning “AI” use, “AI” bot blockers, and the occasional honey pot mazes to trap “AI” crawlers.
borgstore 0.5.0 was just released!
borgstore is a general purpose key/value store with some nice features, supporting misc. backends (local fs, sftp, REST https, s3, rclone).
it now supports optional caching (usually via an additional posixfs caching backend).
We’ve talked about the various age verification laws in the United States, and there’s been a development recently that a lot of people seem to think is a good thing: both the age verification laws in California and Colorado have received exemptions for open source operating systems.
But what I want to write about today are three protocols that have their own ecosystems, their own communities, and their own aesthetics. finger://, gopher://, and gemini://. Two predate the World Wide Web entirely, but one was created in 2019, the same year the first black hole photograph circled the planet.
Now that my one-month sentence of using Windows 11 has begun (you can follow along!), I’m also a bit more perceptive of news and developments regardingMicrosoft’s latest and greatest operating system version.
João Carrasqueira at XDA Developers has taken a look at the current state of Sailfish OS, and concludes: As an idea, I love Sailfish OS. Not only does it bring a wholly unique interface to mobile devices at a time when things seem more unified than ever, but it also has the potential to bring the full power of Linux to a smartphone you actually want to use.
borgstore will get caching. also, that might be used for full local mirroring of remote storage.
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I have a Nokia N8, and it’s one of my favourite retro (?) devices I own. It was one of Nokia’s last efforts to make Symbian happen in the post-iPhone era, and while the hardware was quite nice, Symbian just wasn’t made for multitouch devices.
Sometimes you come across a tune and you instantly know. It will be a combination of the melody, the instrumentation, the vocals and the lyrics. And everything else that makes music unique.
While listening I looked up their upcoming tour dates. Was mightily disappointed discovering that they're coming to Norway in the fall, but won't be playing in Oslo! Can we get someone on this asap?!
We’re a mere €124 away from the first incentive during our fundraiser: making me use stock Windows 11 for a month. Since the writing appears to be on the wall, and the donation pulling us across the line can come in any moment, I figured I’d better take a peek at how things stand with Windows.
Anyone who’s written C knows that full ISO C standard-adhering code is an impractical rarity. Most real world C code out there relies on non-standard behaviors and language extensions to varying extents, and a lot of this isn’t for extra features, but just to work around bugs and gaps in different compilers and libraries.
If you visit the Flatpak website today, it lists, as the very first advantage of the project: “Build for every distro: create one app and distribute it to the entire Linux desktop market.” If you then move on to the list of supported distributions, you’ll see the usual suspects, but also distributions like Void Linux, Guix, and Alpine.
You may think you know what “long-term support” means when picking a Linux distribution and version, but judging by the multitude of utterly wrong takes and deeply confused users I come across online, I’m starting to get the feeling that in fact, no, you don’t know what it means.
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Gnutella is a file sharing protocol that many have forgotten and it has the story of a decentralized technology adopted by millions of casual users who did not care to learn what a peer-to-peer system was.
Signed up for updates about Open Printer. Hopefully this project sees the light of day, and soon! Right ready for a printer in the house, and this looks perfect.
Bruno Croci’s blog had been running on Ubuntu 16.04 for a long time, well past the Linux distribution’s expiration date. As such, it was time to upgrade, but instead of opting for something standard like another Ubuntu release, he opted for FreeBSD instead.
We’ve already talked about the secure boot certificates from Microsoft that are about to become invalid, but Debian EFI team member and longtime Debian contributor Steve McIntyre published a blog post with more information for users and distribution developers alike.
Last week I ran the first part of my What If…We’re In An AI Bubble? Series, where I asked questions and posed scenarios as to the consequences of the many, many questions I’ve asked over the last few years.
The Information reports that OpenAI generated $5.7bn in revenue for the first quarter of 2026 based on discussions with sources familiar with its financials.
With adjusted negative margins of -122%, this means that for every dollar of revenue OpenAI made, it lost an additional $1.22, or
After Google killed its search engine a few days ago, one question remained: how exactly does advertising fit into all of this? Google is obviously not going to move to chatbot search without somehow adding ads to your conversation with the pachinko machine, so everybody was wondering how that was going to work, exactly.
Suppose your manager asks you next week to demonstrate that the AI coding tools your company signed up for are worth the subscription cost. Would you measure lines of code generated, or tickets closed? Or would you send out a survey asking whether developers feel more productive? Each of those approaches is flawed in a different way; the sections below explain why.
The stories of “AI” bots and crawlers absolutely ravaging websites and services keep on coming, and the amount of work people have to do just to survive these “AI” bot and crawler assaults is insane.
Since X11 has moved to legacy status, it’s only a matter of time before the BSDs are going to have to make the move to being Wayland-first as well. This applies particularly to FreeBSD, which has been focusing on improving its suitability for desktop and laptops lately.
Two popular web browser are overhauling their user interface, and the first to actually ship its new version is Vivaldi. Version 8.0 of this Chromium-based browser completely overhauls its UI, but retains its extensive customisation options, including the option to go back to the old look and feel if the new one doesn’t float your boat.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Anthropic is “about to have its first profitable quarter,” specifically an operating profit, or EBITDA profitability:
Anthropic’s revenue is set to more than double to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, an explosive rate of
I was a long-time Bitwarden user, until a year or so ago when I started migrating my passwords first to Firefox/LibreWolf, and recently from there to a KeePass database I can transfer and use with whatever password manager application is compatible with KeePass’ file format.
Printing on Linux, macOS, and even on Windows seems to be pretty much a solved problem, but what about printing on OpenBSD? Anyway, to do so I would need to set up my HP OfficeJet printer, connected wirelessly to the network, on OpenBSD.
⁂ A little progress bar to keep track of our fundraiser! ⁂ ➡️ Donate through Ko-Fi ➡️ Donate through SEPA transfer ➡️ Why a fundraiser? Note that I have to update it manually, and that it includes both Ko-Fi donations, as well as direct bank transfers.
I redesigned my blog! I decided to put some more personality into it this time, after over a decade of the minimalist style. This short post is just an excuse to show up in your feed reader so you can go look at it.
This is a virtual museum of operating systems (and standalone applications) running under emulation, implemented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM. A custom emulator-independent launcher is provided, and all OSes and emulators are pre-installed and pre-configured.
We can inter Google Search to the Google Graveyard. At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.
The following is a hands-on introduction to Futhark through a collection of commented programs, listed in roughly increasing order of complexity. You can load the programs into the interpreter to experiment with them.
The world’s best BSD (I’m kidding, I love them all equally) has released version 7.9, now available through your update tools and on mirrors the world over. OpenBSD 7.9 brings a ton of changes, fixes, and improvements, such as delayed hibernation support on amd64.
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