V7 pwd, converted to modern POSIX systems This is a conversion of the original V7 pwd program for use on POSIX systems (tested primarily on Linux). This is mostly of historical interest — modern systems have a library routine or system call for getting the current directory, and don’t need this. I’ve attempted to make the minimum set of logic/functionality changes needed to make the program work, preserving the core of the original logic. I’ve made slightly more aesthetic changes, to make r ... ⌘ Read more

AMD to enter ARM market with new “Sound Wave” APU AMD is expanding its processor portfolio beyond the x86 architecture with its first ARM-based APU, internally known as “Sound Wave.” The chip’s existence was uncovered through customs import records, confirming several details about its design and purpose. Built with a BGA-1074 package measuring 32 mm × 27 mm, the processor fits within standard mobile SoC dimensions, making it suitable for thin and light computing platforms. It employ ... ⌘ Read more

Removing obfuscation in Minecraft: Java Edition Gaming isn’t something we talk about very often here on OSNews, but I think this piece of news is actually a rare piece of good, welcome news from this industry. Mojang, the Microsoft-owned company behind Minecraft, has announced it’s going to stop obfuscating the code behind the Java edition of Minecraft. A refresher: the Java edition of Minecraft is the original version of the game, which exists alongside the Bedrock Edition, which is ... ⌘ Read more

How did the Windows 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base? After the release of Windows 95, with its brand new and incredibly influential graphical user interface, it was only a matter of time before this new taskbar, Start menu, and everything else would make its way to Microsoft’s other operating system line, Windows NT. The development of Windows 95 more or less lined up with that of Windows NT 3.5, but it wouldn’t be unt ... ⌘ Read more

OpenIndiana 2025.10 released OpenIndiana, the Illumos distribution for general use, has released its latest snapshot release, and there’s some really interesting things in there. To refresh your memory: Illumos is a fork of the final OpenSolaris release, based on Solaris 11, before Oracle closed Solaris back up. It’s been in development ever since that fateful day back in 2010, and several Illumos distributions with unique identities have sprung up around the project. OpenIndiana is one of them, and fu ... ⌘ Read more

Windows to automatically suggest a memory scan after a blue screen Microsoft is introducing a new feature in Windows to better deal with blue screens of death. In the release notes for Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.6982 (Dev Channel), the company detailed that after a user experiences a blue screen, Windows will automatically perform a memory scan. We’re introducing a new feature that helps improve system reliability. If your PC experiences a bugcheck (une ... ⌘ Read more

Python Software Foundation has bigger spine than big tech Back in January 2025, the Python Software Foundation applied for a $1.5 million grant from the US government’s National Science Foundation, under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program, to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI. After a lot of paperwork, their application was approved, but upon receiving the contractual agreement, the Python Software Foundation decided to b ... ⌘ Read more

I’d like to speak to the Bellcore ManaGeR I love it when I discover – usually through people smarter than I – an operating system or graphical user interface I’ve never heard of. This time, we’ve got Bellcore MGR, as meticulously detailed by Nina Kalinina a few weeks ago. I love old computers, and I enjoy looking at old user interfaces immensely. I could spend a whole evening on installing an old version of MS Word and playing with it: “Ah, look, how cute, they didn’t invent scrollbars just ... ⌘ Read more

The Linux boot process: from power button to kernel You press the power button. A second later a wall of text scrolls by, or a logo fades in, and eventually Linux appears. What happens in between is not magic. It is a careful handshake between tiny programs and a very literal CPU. This part follows that handshake until the very first line of C code inside the Linux kernel runs. ↫ 0xkato’s blog Exactly what it says on the tin. ⌘ Read more

Upcoming Kwin changes extend battery life I think most of us are aware that compositors use multiple planes to render our user interfaces, and in the case of KDE’s Kwin specifically, they use two planes – one for the user interface, and one specifically for the mouse cursor. Kwin developer Xaver Hugl has been working on changing Kwin to use more than just two planes, and it turns out this delivers some considerable power use reductions and thus battery life improvements. So, when can you u ... ⌘ Read more

“AI” assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time An extensive study by the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC highlights just how deeply inaccurate and untrustworthy “AI” news results really are. “AI” sucks even at its most basic function. It’s incredible how much money is being pumped into this scam, and how many people are wholeheartedly defending these bullshit generators as if their lives depended on it. If these tools can’t even summarise a text – something ... ⌘ Read more

Teenager detained at gunpoint by US cops because “AI” mistook a chips bag for a gun If you’re eating a bag of chips in an area where “AI” software is being used to monitor people’s behaviour, you might want to reconsider. Some high school kid in the US was hanging out with his friends, when all of a sudden, he was being swarmed by police officers with with guns drawn. Held at gunpoint, he was told to lie down, after which he was detained. Obviously, ... ⌘ Read more

OpenBSD 7.8 released Like clockwork, every six months, we have a new OpenBSD release. OpenBSD 7.8 adds support for the Raspberry Pi 5, tons of improvements to sleep, wake, and hibernate, the TCP stack can now run in parallel on multiple processors, and so much more. DRM has been updated to match Linux 6.12.50, and drivers for the Qualcomm Snapdragon DRM subsystem and Qualcomm DisplayPort controller were added as well. The changelog is, as always, long and detailed, so head on over for the finer details. OpenBS ... ⌘ Read more

What about the icons in pifmgr.dll? Raymond Chen has another great post about some of the classic icons from Windows 95, this time focusing on pifmgr.dll. In this file, there are a variety of random-seeming icons, and it turns out they’re random for a reason: they were just a bunch a fun, generic icons intended for people to use when creating PIF files. The icons in pifmgr.dll were created just for fun. They were not created with any particular programs in mind, with one obvious exception. They w ... ⌘ Read more

Understanding driver updates through Windows Update Microsoft has published a set of short questions and answers about driver updates through Windows Update, and there’s one tidbit in there I found interesting. Driver dates might look old, but that is not true. The driver date is descriptive info set by the driver provider and can be any date they choose. When determining which driver to install, Windows Update uses targeting information set by the provider inside the driver file ... ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.5 released KDE is on a roll lately, and keeps on rolling with today’s release of KDE Plasma 6.5. As the project itself notes, this release focuses on relatively small improvements, refinements, and other niceties, without making any massive changes. With Linux desktops taking accessibility more seriously lately than ever before, I want to focus on the accessibility improvements first. The Orca screen reader now announces caps lock state changes, and screen readers will now describe the Shortcut ... ⌘ Read more

Intel, AMD to bring memory tagging to x86, at some point Now that ARM’s memory tagging, used extensively by Android ROMs such as GrapheneOS and now also by Apple, is becoming the new norm to aid in improving memory safety, the x86 world can’t sit idly by. As such, Intel and AMD have announced a ChkTag, x86’s version of memory tagging. ChkTag is a set of new and enhanced x86 instructions to detect memory safety violations, such as buffer overflows and misuses of freed memory (u ... ⌘ Read more

This is how much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services I can exclusively reveal today Anthropic’s spending on Amazon Web Services for the entirety of 2024, and for every month in 2025 up until September, and that that Anthropic’s spend on compute far exceeds that previously reported.  Furthermore, I can confirm that through September, Anthropic has spent more than 100% of its estimated revenue (based on reporting in the last year) on Amazon Web Services ... ⌘ Read more

Cartridge chaos: the official Nintendo region converter and more! This post is a combination of looks at several oddities among my pile of NES and Famicom cartridges. Why, for example, do I have a copy of Gyromite when I don’t have a R.O.B.? Did I miss something interesting in my MMC blog post? And while it is the Japanese release of Kid Niki: Radical Ninja, is my Kaiketsu Yanchamaru being a little too radical? Who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong? Some of these ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft breaks USB input in Windows Recovery Environment With official support for Windows 10 having officially ended a few days ago, let’s take a look and see how its successor, Windows 11, is doing. Microsoft released the first Patch Tuesday update (KB5066835) for Windows 11 25H2 this past week and it is probably fair to say that it has been a rough start for the new feature update. Despite the announcement of a wide rollout wherein the new version is now available for ... ⌘ Read more

Servo 0.0.1 released Today, the Servo team has released new versions of the servoshell binaries for all our supported platforms, tagged v0.0.1. These binaries are essentially the same nightly builds that were already available from the download page with additional manual testing, now tagging them explicitly as releases for future reference. ↫ Servo’s official blog Servo is making steady progress, and that’s awesome news. Every month a whole slew of new features and improvements make their way into this new br ... ⌘ Read more

“I remember taking a screen shot of a video, and when I opened it in Paint, the video was playing in it!” In older versions of Windows, if you had a video playing, took a screenshot, and pasted that screenshot into Paint, you could sometimes see the video continue to play inside Paint. What kind of sorcery enabled this to happen? A few of you will realise instantly why this used to happen: rener surfaces. Back in at least the Windo ... ⌘ Read more

The early Unix history of chown() being restricted to root Chris Siebenmann with another interesting look at a tiny detail of UNIX history. A few years ago I wrote about the divide in chown() about who got to give away files, where BSD and V7 were on one side, restricting it to root, while System III and System V were on the other, allowing the owner to give them away too. The answer is that the restriction was added in V6, where the V6 chown(2) manual page has the same word ... ⌘ Read more

Windows 11, now with even more “AI” where you don’t want it Microsoft has posted a blog post about detailing its latest round of additions to Windows 11, and as will surely not surprise you, it’s “AI”, all the time, whether you like it or not. I’m not even going to detail most of these “features”, as I’m sure most of them will just become yet another series of checkboxes on whatever debloating tool you prefer. Still, there’s one recurring theme running throughout Microsoft’s ... ⌘ Read more

A deep dive into the Silicon Graphics Indigo² IMPACT 10000 This beautiful purple slab is the Silicon Graphics Indigo² (though, unlike its earlier namesake, not actually indigo coloured) with the upper-tier MIPS R10000 CPU and IMPACT graphics. My recollection was that it worked at the time, but I couldn’t remember if it booted, and of course that was no guarantee that it could still power on. If this machine is to stay working and in the collection, we’re gonna need a ... ⌘ Read more

NLnet sponsors development of WPA3 support for OpenBSD The NLnet foundation has sponsored a project to add WPA3 support to OpenBSD, support which in turn can be used by other operating systems. This project delivers the second open-source implementation of WPA3, the current industry standard for Wi-Fi encryption, specifically for the OpenBSD operating system. Its code can also be integrated by other operating systems to enable modern Wi-Fi encryption, thereby enhancing the div ... ⌘ Read more

An initial investigation into WDDM on ReactOS One of the problems the ReactOS project continually has to deal with is that Windows is, of course, an evolving, moving target. Trying to be a Windows-compatible operating system means you’re going to have to tie that moving target down, and for ReactOS, the current focus is on being compatible with Windows Server 2003 “or later”. This “or later” part is getting a major boost in a very crucial area. The history of ReactOS spans a wider rang ... ⌘ Read more

How to turn Liquid Glass into a solid interface Apple’s new Liquid Glass interface design brings transparency and blur effects to all Apple operating systems, but many users find it distracting or difficult to read. Here’s how to control its effects and make your interface more usable. Although the relevant Accessibility settings are quite similar across macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, I separate them because they offer different levels of utility in each. I have no experience with (o ... ⌘ Read more

Revisiting Sailfish OS in 2025 As someone who cut their teeth on Maemo (the N800/N900 still live in my basement) and carried the first Jolla dev device, I like to pull out my SailfishOS phones every few months to see how things are progressing. Here’s where I’m at in September 2025. ↫ Nick Schmidt I was one of the very first people to review the original Jolla Phone way back in 2014, and I also happen to own the quite rare Jolla Tablet, so I was definitely a serious backer and believer in the platfor ... ⌘ Read more

Big tech is faking revenue Open AI has recently announced deals worth $600 Billion with Nvidia, AMD, and Oracle. OpenAI is able to spend hundreds of billions of dollars they do not have because those companies are paying that same money back to OpenAI via investment. The infinite money glitch means that stocks keep going higher as more circular revenue cycles between the same players. ↫ Sasha Yanshin The scam is so brazen, so public, so obvious. The foxes aren’t just in the hen house – they bought the wh ... ⌘ Read more

Haiku gets fixes for NFS4, improves its BSD driver compatibility layer Another month, another activity report from the Haiku project. This past month, a lot of work went into the FreeBSD/OpenBSD network driver compatibility layer, opening the door to drivers using interfaces other than PCI or USB. Support for NFS4 took a bit of a hit with last month’s changes to VFS, and these have been addressed, and other aspects of NFS4 have been improved as well. On top of t ... ⌘ Read more

Google changes how ads in Search are shown, and surprisingly it doesn’t make things worse Text ads on the search results page will now be grouped with a single “Sponsored results” label. This new, larger label stays visible as people scroll, making it clear which results are sponsored — upholding our industry-leading standards for ad label prominence. We’re also adding a new “Hide sponsored results” control that allows you to collapse text ads ... ⌘ Read more

Old Blue Workbench adds a ton of improvements to your old Amiga Are you still using your Amiga with the 1.3 version of Kickstart, but would you prefer an updated version of Workbench with a long list of additional features, improvements, and other niceties? Old Blue Workbench is a Workbench replacement for Amigas running Kickstart 1.3 written by Mats Eirik Hansen. It adds a ton of features and improvements, such as enhanced menus in the Workbench 2.0 style, improved w ... ⌘ Read more

9front Release released The world’s best operating system, 9front, has released a new release called Release. 9front is a maintained fork of Plan 9. The new release Release brings atomic(2) functions for arm, arm64, mips, 386 and amd64, improved stability when the kernel runs out of memory, memdraw and devdraw now support affine warp primitive, and more. You can download Release from the usual mirrors. ⌘ Read more

LineageOS 23 released The LineageOS project has released version 23 of their AOSP-based Android variant. LineageOS 23 is based on the initial release of Android 16 – so not the QPR1 release that came later – because Google has not made the source code for that release available yet. Like other, similar projects, LineageOS also suffers from Google’s recent further lockdown of Android; not only do they not have access to Android 16 QPR1’s source code, they also can’t follow along with the latest security patche ... ⌘ Read more

Liquid Glass is cracked, and usability suffers in iOS 26 With iOS 26, Apple seems to be leaning harder into visual design and decorative UI effects — but at what cost to usability? At first glance, the system looks fluid and modern. But try to use it, and soon those shimmering surfaces and animated controls start to get in the way. Let’s strip back the frost and look at how these changes affect real use. ↫ Raluca Budiu I have not yet used Apple’s new “Liquid Glass” graphical ... ⌘ Read more

In bizarre move, Framework embraces deeply extremist views Framework, the maker of repairable laptops, is embroiled in a controversy, as the company and its CEO are openly supporting people with, well, questionable views. If you know a little bit about PR in social media space, you might note that, right out of the gate, a project by a vocal white nationalist known for splitting communities by their mere presence, is not a great highlight choice for an overtly non-left-righ ... ⌘ Read more

Running FreeBSD using Windows Subsystem for Linux What if you are forced to use Windows, but want to use a real operating system instead? You could use WSL2 to use Linux inside Windows, but what if FreeBSD is more your thing? It turns out someone is working on making FreeBSD usable using WSL2. This repository hosts work-in-progress efforts to run FreeBSD inside Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) with minimal to no changes to the FreeBSD base system. The project builds on the open-s ... ⌘ Read more

Fedora’s “AI” policy process highlights rift between IBM/Red Hat and Fedora A lot of open source projects are struggling what to do with the “AI” bubble, and Fedora is no different. This whole past year, the project’s been struggling to formulate any official policies on the use of “AI”, and LWN.net’s Joe Brockmeier has just done an amazing job summarising the various positions, opinions, and people influencing this process. His conclusion: There appears to b ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft closes another loophole to enable local accounts in Windows 11 It seems like Microsoft is continuing its quest to force Windows users to use Microsoft accounts instead of local accounts, despite the fact Microsoft accounts on Windows are half-baked and potentially incredibly dangerous. In the most recent Windows 11 Insider Preview Build (26220.6772), the company has closed a few more loopholes people were using to trick the Windows installer into al ... ⌘ Read more

Servo GTK: a widget to embed Servo in GTK4 Servo, the Rust-based browsing engine spun off from Mozilla, keeps making progress every month, and this made Ignacio Casal Quinteiro wonder: what if we make a GTK widget so we can test Servo and compare it to WebKitGTK? As part of my job at Amazon I started working in a GTK widget which will allow embedding a Servo Webview inside a GTK application. This was mostly a research project just to understand the current state of Servo and whether it was ... ⌘ Read more

Synology reverses policy banning third-party HDDs after NAS sales plummet Earlier this year, popular NAS vendor Synology announced it would start requiring some of its more expensive models to only use Synology-branded drives. It seems the uproar this announcement caused has had some real chilling effect on sales, and the company just cancelled its plans. Synology has backtracked on one of its most unpopular decisions in years. After seeing NAS sales plummet ... ⌘ Read more

MicroPythonOS: an Android-like operating system for microcontrollers like the ESP32 MicroPythonOS is a lightweight, fast, and versatile operating system designed to run on microcontrollers like the ESP32 and desktop systems. With a modern Android-like touch screen UI, App Store, and Over-The-Air updates, it’s the perfect OS for innovators and developers. ↫ MicroPytonOS’ website It’s quite neat to see this running in such a constrained environment, e ... ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm gobbles up Arduino It was good while it lasted, I guess. Arduino will retain its independent brand, tools, and mission, while continuing to support a wide range of microcontrollers and microprocessors from multiple semiconductor providers as it enters this next chapter within the Qualcomm family. Following this acquisition, the 33M+ active users in the Arduino community will gain access to Qualcomm Technologies’ powerful technology stack and global reach. Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech profess ... ⌘ Read more

That small sliver of time where a QNX desktop was a real thing we did Bradford Morgan White has published an excellent retrospective of QNX, the realtime microkernel operating system focused on embedded use cases. The final paragraph made me sad, though. QNX is a fascinating operating system. It was extremely well designed from the start, and while it has been rewritten, the core ideas that allowed it survive for 45 years persist to this day. While I am sad that ... ⌘ Read more

Redox now multithreaded by default Can these months please stop passing us by this quickly? It seems we’re getting a monthly Redox update every other week now, and that’s not right. Anyway, what have the people behind this Rust-based operating system been up to this past month? One of the biggest changes this month is that Redox is now multithreaded by default, at least on x86 machines. Unsurprisingly, this can enable some serious performance gains. Also contributing to performance improvements t ... ⌘ Read more

The case against generative AI: the numbers just don’t add up (i.e., it’s a scam) Every single “vibe coding is the future,” “the power of AI,” and “AI job loss” story written perpetuates a myth that will only lead to more regular people getting hurt when the bubble bursts. Every article written about OpenAI or NVIDIA or Oracle that doesn’t explicitly state that the money doesn’t exist, that the revenues are impossible, that one of the companies involved bur ... ⌘ Read more

Under pressure from US government, Apple removes ICEBlock application from the App Store Your lovely host, late last night: Google claims they won’t be sharing developer information with governments, but we all know that’s a load of bullshit, made all the more relevant after whatever the fuck this was. If you want to oppose the genocide in Gaza or warn people of ICE raids, and want to create an Android application to coordinate such efforts, yo ... ⌘ Read more

Google details Android developer certification requirement, and it’s as bad as we feared Google has been on a bit of a marketing blitz to try and counteract some of the negative feedback following its new developer verification requirement for Android applications, and while they’re using a lot of words, none of them seem to address the core concerns. It basically comes down to that they just don’t care about the consequences this new requiremen ... ⌘ Read more

Dutch judge to Facebook: stop secretly disregarding your users’ settings And here we have yet another case of the EU’s consumer protection legislation working in our favour. Dutch privacy and consumer rights organisation Bits of Freedom sued Facebook over the company’s little trick of disregarding a user’s settings under a variety of circumstances, such as when a user opts for a chronological, non-profiled timeline, only to have Facebook reset itself to the pro ... ⌘ Read more