If you’re following KDE Plasma development, you’ve most likely run into something called Union, a project KDE is working on to unify their various ways of theming their applications. The problem KDE is facing right now is that after so many decades of development and changes in how people want to develop applications, they ended up with various different ways of writing applications, each with their own theming method.
I had no idea, but apparently, you can just use newline characters and tabs in URLs without any issues. Notice how it reports an error if there is a tab or newline character, but continues anyway? The specification says that A validation error does not mean that the parser terminates and it encourages systems to report errors somewhere.
Are you not at all interested in upgrading to macOS Tahoe, and getting annoyed at the relentless notification spam from Apple trying to trick you into upgrading? The secret? Using device management profiles, which let you enforce policies on Macs in your organization, even if that “organization” is one Mac on your desk.
If this isn’t catnip to the average OSNews reader, I don’t know what is. Windows 95 is a comprehensive upgrade to the Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 products. Many changes have been made in almost every area of Windows, with the user interface being no exception.
Bootc and OSTree represent a new way of thinking about Linux system deployment and management. Building on container and versioning concepts, they offer robust and modern solutions to meet the current needs of administrators and developers.
What I knew about Sinners before watching it:
Things in Sinners I didn't like:
What a movie. Score is absolutely spectacular.
It's not often I buy new stuff. Just compare my tech stack from December 2025 to what it looked like in December 2024.
Today, though, I made the leap and acquired a new piece of gear!
I bought the Airpods Pro shortly after they were released, in 2020. I've been rocking them since. They've been solid, and well worth the outlay. Except for the microphones, which have been useless for years. That means they're pretty useless in a office setting.
I do have an old pair of Bose QC25, but the cable went years ago and the cheap Bluetooth adapter I bought a few years ago doesn't have enough juice to last through a medium duration meeting. The end result is that I've been using no headphones at all for a few years. That's not really a big issue when I'm at the home office and there's nobody else in the house. When I'm in an open office landscape, though, it's impractical and impacts my ability to concentrate.
As a result, I've been thinking about acquiring a new pair of headphones for years. Throughout this period I've at various times thought about getting a new pair of Airpods Pro, a pair of regular Airpods, the Airpods Max, considered at least a couple of options from Bose, something from Jabra and, most recently, the Nothing Headphone (1).
When I finally decided to pull the trigger, I ended up with the Sony WH-1000XM5:
Being a previous generation product, the price was alright; well under half of what a pair of the MX6 would've cost me. Looking forward to giving these a proper spin the next few weeks, at home and in the office.
The file system of the Windows operating system is NTFS, whether you’re running it on a desktop/laptop or server. It’s the only file system Windows can run on and boot from, at least officially, so you’re not even given a choice of file systems for the boot volume like you are on, say, desktop Linux.
Encryption backdoors, social media bans for children, creepy age verification for applications – what will they think of next? The latest brilliant idea by US lawmakers sure is a hell of a doozy: legally mandated age verification in every single operating system.
FreeBSD has its jails technology, and it seems NetBSD might be getting something similar soon. Jails for NetBSD aims to bring lightweight, kernel-enforced isolation to NetBSD. The system is intended to remain fully NetBSD-native.
We have a global intelligence crisis, in that a lot of people are being really fucking stupid.
As I discussed in this week’s free piece, alleged financial analyst Citrini Research put out a truly awful screed called the “2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” — a slop-filled scare-fiction
The older I get, the more obvious the devastating effects of alcohol become. Even a fairly modest amount, two to four units, leaves me feeling pretty wrecked, pretty quickly. Not just the evening of and the day after. The mental side effects of feeling despondent and generally down linger for days.
I don't indulge too often, but even five to six times per year is starting to feel like too often. Might be time to ditch it altogether.
In the United States, we are losing our fondness for cash. As in many other
countries, cards and other types of electronic payments now dominate everyday
commerce. To some, this is a loss. Cash represented a certain freedom from
intermediation, a comforting simplicity, that you just don't get from Visa.
The Genode OS Framework 26.02 has been released, and its tentpole improvement is the completion of moving configuration from XML to the new human-inclined data syntax, as we talked about a few months ago.
You may not be aware that FreeBSD has a pretty robust set of tools to run Linux binaries, unmodified. The result? A fast, smooth, fully-featured remote development experience on FreeBSD running Linux binaries transparently via the Linuxulator.
It seems the widespread efforts in Europe to drastically reduce its dependency on US technology companies is starting to worry some people. President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered U.S.
Editor's note: a previous version of this newsletter went out with Matt Hughes' name on it, that's my editor who went over it for spelling errors and loaded it into the CMS.
I’ve been a .com purist for over two decades of building. Once, I broke that rule and bought a .online TLD for a small project. This is the story of how it went up in flames. ↫ Tony S. An absolute horror story about Google’s dominance over the web, in places nobody really talks about.
Only a few days ago we talked about the concept of client-side decorations, and how more and more desktop environments and operating systems – specifically GNOME and macOS – are putting more and more buttons, menus, and other widgets inside title bars.
Microsoft released an optional cumulative update for Windows 11, and for once, it actually includes something many of you might actually like: it adds Sysmon from Sysinternals to Windows natively, so you no longer have to install it manually.
This must be a universal experience at this point for people who aren’t swayed by the latest and greatest marketing hype around new phone models: there’s just nothing out there that fits one’s needs.
Social media is going the way of alcohol, gambling, and other social sins: Societies are deciding it’s no longer kid stuff. Lawmakers point to compulsive use, exposure to harmful content, and mounting concerns about adolescent mental health.
I just made up a Debian trixie setup that has no need for a GUI. In fact, I rarely use the text console either. However, because the machine is dual boot and also serves another purpose, it’s connected to my main monitor and KVM switch.
While Libadwaita applications running in a GNOME desktop environment look great and nicely consistent, they look utterly out of place and jarring when run in Xfce, Pantheon, KDE, and others. The biggest reason for this is GNOME’s insistence on using client-side decorations, which feel at home inside a GNOME environment, but out of place in environments that otherwise do not use them.
Every OpenBSD admin has booted bsd.rd at least once — to install, upgrade, or rescue a broken system. But few people stop to look at what’s actually inside that file. It turns out bsd.rd is a set of nested layers, and you can take it apart on a running system without rebooting anything.
H.W. Sanden in Anti-intellectual tech:
Don’t throw out books willingly, as we did with films, music, instruments, software and self-made websites. Be independent, self-contented, revolutionary, intellectual, brave, strong and scholarly. Normalise stating that you are proficient in several skills. And normalise not knowing, and doing something about it.
Don't stop with not throwing out books. Take back everything we gave away, while we still can. Show the children the future they can still have.
The regular, consumer version of Windows 10 isn’t the only Windows release reaching or having reached end-of-life, now middling on under the Extended Security Updates program for the many people sticking with the venerable release.
Despite continuous rumors to the contrary, Oracle is still actively developing Solaris, and it’s been more active than ever lately. Yesterday, the company pushed out another release for customers with the proper support contracts: Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU90.
I was trading New Year’s resolutions with a circle of friends a few weeks ago, and someone mentioned a big one: sleeping better. I’m a visual neuroscientist by training, so whenever the topic pops up it inevitably leads to talking about the dreaded blue light from monitors, blue light filters, and whether they do anything.
George R.R. Martin in The Mad King Is Coming:
You’ve been hearing about the great tourney at Harrenhal since A GAME OF THRONES came out in 1996. Now, at long last, we’re going to show it to you… live, on stage, at Stratford-upon-Avon, brought to you by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Never not surprised at the stuff George Martin will do to avoid doing the thing. As quality knows quality (or, so I've heard), procrastination knows procrastination, though, so I'm kinda not really surprised, actually. You know.
I've come to terms with the fact that A Song of Ice and Fire ended with the fifth novel, just as The Kingkiller Chronicle ended with the fifth and Gentlemen Bastard with the third. It's fine. We should just be happy that we got to read these stories at all!
And, in the case of Martin, I'm glad he continues pouring his energy into giving us more great stuff to enjoy. Been watching A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and I think it's absolutely brilliant.
Been keeping a list of albums I want to add to my music collection. Spent a small fortune (to me) today and splurged on all ten albums that were on the list! Downloading from Qobuz isn't the quickest, so I'm currently waiting for them all to finish downloading like it's 2002.
What a time to be alive!
Think I'll do a small note for each of these albums in the coming weeks. As good a thing to write about as anything else.
As if keeping track of whatever counts as a release schedule for Windows wasn’t complicated enough – don’t lie, you don’t know when that feature they announced is actually being released either – Microsoft is making everything even more complicated.
So vi only has one level of undo, which is simply no longer fit for the times we live in now, and also wholly unnecessary given even the least powerful devices that might need to run vi probably have more than enough resources to give at least a few more levels of undo.
F9 is an L4-inspired microkernel designed for ARM Cortex-M, targeting real-time embedded systems with hard determinism requirements. It implements the fundamental microkernel principles—address spaces, threads, and IPC, while adding advanced features from industrial RTOSes.
It’s been well over a year since Microsoft unveiled it was working on bringing MIDI 2.0 to Windows, and now it’s actually here available for everyone. We’ve been working on MIDI over the past several years, completely rewriting decades of MIDI 1.0 code on Windows to both support MIDI 2.0 and make MIDI 1.0 amazing.
KDE Plasma 6.6 has been released, and brings with a whole slew of new features. You can save any combination of themes as a global theme, and there’s a new feature allowing you to increase or decrease the contrast of frames and outlines.
SvarDOS is an open-source project that is meant to integrate the best out of the currently available DOS tools, drivers and games. DOS development has been abandoned by commercial players a long time ago, mostly during early nineties.
It’s been a while since we’ve talked about AsteroidOS, the Linux distribution designed specifically to run on smartwatches, providing a smartwatch interface and applications built with Qt and QML.
Every modern iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS application uses Asset Catalogs to manage images, colors, icons, and other resources. When you build an app with Xcode, your .xcassets folders are compiled into binary .car files that ship with your application.
Within the major operating system of its day, on popular hardware of its day, ran the utterly dominant relational database software of its day. PC Magazine, February 1984, said, “Independent industry watchers estimate that dBASE II enjoys 70 percent of the market for microcomputer database managers.” Similar to past subjects HyperCard and Scala Multimedia, Wayne Ratcliff’s dBASE II was an industry unto itself, not just for data-management, but for programmability, a legacy which lives on today as xBase.
Ploum in Do not apologize for replying late to my email:
As soon as my email was sent, I probably forgot about it. I may have thought a lot before writing it. I may have drafted it multiple times. Or not. But as soon as it was in my outbox, it was also out of my mind.
I am wholeheartedly behind Ploum on this. Never apologise for replying late to my email.
In my fundraiser pitch published last Monday, one of the things I highlighted as a reason to contribute to OSNews and ensure its continued operation stated that “we do not use any ‘AI’; not during research, not during writing, not for images, nothing.” In the comments to that article, someone asked: Why do I care if you use AI? ↫ A comment posted on OSNews A few days ago, Scott Shambaugh rejected a code change request submitted to popular Python library matplotlib because it was obviously written by an “AI”, and such contributions are not allowed for the issue in question.
Have you ever wanted to read the original design documents underlying the Windows NT operating system? This binder contains the original design specifications for “NT OS/2,” an operating system designed by Microsoft that developed into Windows NT.
There’s the two behemoth architectures, x86 and ARM, and we probably all own one or more devices using each. Then there’s the eternally up-and-coming RISC-V, which, so far, seems to be having a lot of trouble outgrowing its experimental, developmental stage.
If you look at the table of contents for my book, Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, you’ll see that entries on networks before/outside the internet are arranged first by underlying infrastructure and then chronologically.
As I came by Pete's pet peeve that media don't know how to use quotes, I realised that I also don't know.
The first pain point is that I simply don't know how to write the correct symbols on my keyboard. In search of a quick answer, I turned to our Large Language Model overlords. Unfortunately, both ChatGPT and Claude proved entirely unable to provide assistance. They were completely confident in their entirely wrong answers, however. I guess that's something.
For the two languages in which I write, Norwegian and English, there are six relevant symbols. I use a Macbook with a Norwegian bokmål (ISO 639-1 code nb) keyboard layout. The six symbols can be written as follows with this keyboard setup:
« = ⌥ (option) + shift + V
» = ⌥ (option) + shift + B
‘ = ⌥ (option) + n
’ = ⌥ (option) + m
“ = ⌥ (option) + shift + n
” = ⌥ (option) + shift + m
Not exactly easily accessible, hence my writing them down here for future reference. The intricate key combinations also explain why many simply default to the straight quotes ". On my keyboard, I write them by pressing shift + 2.
Next up is knowing when to use which symbols. That varies from language to language. And, as we'll see, from region to region within the same language.
In Norwegian, we use « and » for first level quotes, while second level quotes (a quote in a quote) is indicated by ‘ and ’.
In American English, they use “ and ” for first level quotes, and ‘ and ’ for second level quotes.
In British English, they use ‘ and ’ for first level quotes, while “ and ” denote a second level quote.
No wonder I'm confused and find myself turning to " and ' for simplicity. But, as Pete pointed out, that is just plain wrong. As I aim to be as correct as I can with details like these when writing, I need to get my act together.
These days, I don't publish much in the way of Norwegian text on this blog. Or elsewhere, for that matter. But if I do, I will make a point to use the correct symbols for quotes. I do more than a bit of writing in my day job, and — although some text editors will replace " with « and » when your language is set to Norwegian — knowing this will make me a better and more consistent writer at work. That's a good thing.
As far as this blog goes, I generally try to adhere to British English spelling and grammar. Which means I will aim to be consistent in using single quotes (‘ and ’) for first level quotes from here on and out. Send me an email and let me know when I inevitably mess that up.
January was a busy month for Haiku, with their monthly report listing a metric ton of smaller fixes, changes, and improvements. Perusing the list, a few things stand out to me, most notably continued work on improving Haiku’s touchpad support.
Scott Shambaugh in An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me:
Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.
It's not that it's surprising. Many people saw it coming from a mile away. I guess I just thought it would be less… trite.
If you get your kicks, any of your kicks, online, this is a watershed moment. We've ruined it. It was nice while it lasted, but the analogue world is once more where we belong. There's nothing left for us here, in the digital sphere.
Get outside. Feel the sun on your skin. Leave the phone at home. Joke around with a friend. Touch grass.
It's what we were meant to do.
We often lament Microsoft’s terrible stewardship of its Windows operating system, but that doesn’t mean that they never do anything right. In a blog post detailing changes and improvements coming to the Microsoft Store, the company announced something Windows users might actually like? A new command-line interface for the Microsoft Store brings app discovery, installation and update management directly to your terminal.
Since the beginning of 2023, big tech has spent over $814 billion in capital expenditures, with a large portion of that going towards meeting the demands of AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Big tech has spent big on GPUs, power infrastructure, and data center construction, using a
The team behind Tyr started 2025 with little to show in our quest to produce a Rust GPU driver for Arm Mali hardware, and by the end of the year, we were able to play SuperTuxKart (a 3D open-source racing game) at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC).
