Windows drive letters are not limited to A-Z On its own, the title of this post is just a true piece of trivia, verifiable with the built-in subst tool (among other methods). Here’s an example creating the drive +:\ as an alias for a directory at C:\foo: The +:\ drive then works as normal (at least in cmd.exe, this will be discussed more later): However, understanding why it’s true elucidates a lot about how Windows works under the hood, and turns up a few curious behaviors. ↫ Ryan L ... ⌘ Read more

Migrating Dillo away from GitHub What do you do if you develop a lightweight browser that doesn’t support JavaScript, but you once chose GitHub as the home for your code? You’re now in the unenviable position that your own browser can no longer access your own online source repository because it requires JavaScript, which is both annoying and, well, a little awkward. The solution is, of course, obvious: you move somewhere else. That’s exactly what the Dillo browser did. They set up a small VPS, opt ... ⌘ Read more

Landlock-ing Linux Landlock is a Linux API that lets applications explicitly declare which resources they are allowed to access. Its philosophy is similar to OpenBSD’s unveil() and (less so) pledge(): programs can make a contract with the kernel stating, “I only need these files or resources — deny me everything else if I’m compromised.” It provides a simple, developer-friendly way to add defense-in-depth to applications. Compared to traditional Linux security mechanisms, Landlock is vastly easier to understand ... ⌘ Read more

System 7 natively boots on the Mac Mini G4 Only a few weeks ago, the CHRP variants of Mac OS 7.6 and 8 were discovered and uploaded to the internet for posterity, but we’re already seeing the positive results of this event unfold: Mac OS 7.x can now run on the Mac Mini G4 – natively. The very short of it is as follows. First, the CHRP release of Mac OS 8 contains a ROM file that allows Mac OS 8 to boot on the G4 Mac Mini. Second, the CHRP release of 7.6 contains a System Enabler that allo ... ⌘ Read more

Genode OS Framework 25.11 released The release 25.11 wraps up our year of “rigidity, clarity, performance” with a bouquet of vast under-the-hood improvements. Genode’s custom kernel received special tuning of its new CPU scheduler for Sculpt-OS workloads, and became much more scalable with respect to virtual-memory management. Combined, those efforts visibly boost the performance of Sculpt OS on performance-starved hardware like the PinePhone or the i.MX8-based MNT Reform laptop. On account of im ... ⌘ Read more

Dell: about 1 billion PCs will not or cannot be upgraded to Windows 11 During a Dell earnings call, the company mentioned some staggering numbers regarding the amount of PCs that will not or cannot be upgraded to Windows 11. “We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven’t been upgraded,” said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell’s slice of machines. “And w ... ⌘ Read more

CDE 2.5.3 released So my love for the Common Desktop Environment isn’t exactly a secret, so let’s talk about the project’s latest release, CDE 2.5.3, released a few days ago. As the version number suggests, this first new version in two years is a rather minor release, containing only a few bug fixes. For instance, CDE’s window manager dtwm picked up support for more mouse buttons, its file manager dtfile now uses sh to find files instead of ksh, and a few more of these rather minor, but welcome, changes and bug ... ⌘ Read more

Moss: a Linux-compatible kernel written in Rust Moss is a Unix-like, Linux-compatible kernel written in Rust and Aarch64 assembly. It features a modern, asynchronous core, a modular architecture abstraction layer, and binary compatibility with Linux userspace applications (currently capable of running most BusyBox commands). ↫ Moss’ GitHub page I mean, hobby operating systems and kernels written in Rust aren’t exactly the most unique right now, but that doesn’t make them any less inte ... ⌘ Read more

I work for an evil company, but outside work, I’m actually a really good person I love my job. I make a great salary, there’s a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five days a week, from morning to night, outside work, I’m actually a really good pe ... ⌘ Read more

KDE to drop X11 session in KDE Plasma 6.8 The KDE project has made the call. Well folks, it’s the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included. ↫ The Plasma Team They’re following in the footsteps of the GNOME project, who will also be leaving the legacy windowin ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft will start preloading Explorer because it’s so slow With all the problems Windows is facing, I think one area where Microsoft can make some easy, quick gains is by drastically improving Explorer, Windows’ file manager. It seems that in the latest developer releases, they’re doing just that. The most impactful change – possibly – is that Microsoft is going to preload Explorer. We’re exploring preloading File Explorer in the background to help improve File Explor ... ⌘ Read more

Google’s Android for desktops and laptops is called “Aluminium Google has made it very clear that it’s intending to bring Android to laptops and desktops, and replace Chrome OS with Android in the process. We now have a codename, and some more information about what this will look like in practice. Over the weekend, a tipster on Telegram named Frost Core shared a link to an intriguing Google job listing for a ‘Senior Product Manager, Android, Laptop and Tablets.’ While w ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft admits almost all major Windows 11 core features are broken You may have noticed a sharp increase in problems and issues in Windows recently – following the rise of the “AI” hype cycle, entirely coincidentally, I’m sure – and it seems Microsoft is finally starting to acknowledge just how bad Windows has become. On the positive side though, following all that backlash, Microsoft acknowledged Windows has issues, and as if on cue, the company in a new sup ... ⌘ Read more

The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting I suspect that many people who take an interest in Internet privacy don’t appreciate how hard it is to resist browser fingerprinting. Taking steps to reduce it leads to inconvenience and, with the present state of technology, even the most intrusive approaches are only partially effective. The data collected by fingerprinting is invisible to the user, and stored somewhere beyond the user’s reach. On the other hand, browser fingerprintin ... ⌘ Read more

“Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it’s costing the economy” We need to consume. The average American now holds onto their smartphone for 29 months, according to a recent survey by Reviews.org, and that cycle is getting longer. The average was around 22 months in 2016. While squeezing as much life out of your device as possible may save money in the short run, especially amid widespread fears about the strength of the consumer and ... ⌘ Read more

Tuxedo cancels Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop project For the past 18 months, the Linux OEM Tuxedo Computers has been working on bringing a Snapdragon X Elite ARM laptop to market, but now they cancelled the project due to complications. Development turned out to be challenging due to the different architecture, and in the end, the first-generation X1E proved to be less suitable for Linux than expected. In particular, the long battery runtimes—usually one of the strong argume ... ⌘ Read more

The Commodore CHESSmate The CHESSmate was demonstrated at the January 1978 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as a prototype in order to assess customer interest in the product. It was available for order at the June 1978 CES in Chicago and the first units, manufactured in Hong Kong, shipped later that year. It was a big seller in Germany from the beginning. ↫ Peter R. Jennings There’s no way I can summarise this story. ⌘ Read more

Microsoft removes WINS from future Windows Server releases Blasts from the pasts are often fun, and in the case of feature removals from Windows, it’s often accompanied by surprise that the feature in question still existed. Case in point: This article provides essential information about the deprecation and planned removal of Windows Internet Name Service (WINS) from future Windows Server releases. Microsoft has announced that WINS will be removed from all Windows Server ... ⌘ Read more

LionsOS: an adaptable OS based on the seL4 microkernel LionsOS is an operating system based on the seL4 microkernel with the goal of making the achievements of seL4 accessible. That is, to provide performance, security, and reliability. It is not a conventional operating system, but contains composable components for creating custom operating systems that are specific to a particular task. Components are joined together using the Microkit tool. ↫ LionsOS website The project is ... ⌘ Read more

HP, Dell quietly disable HEVC on certain laptops over minute license fee increase Inter-corporation bullshit screwing over consumers – a tale as old as time. Major laptop vendors have quietly removed hardware decode support for the H.265/HEVC codec in several business and entry-level models, a decision apparently driven by rising licensing fees. Users working with H.265 content may face reduced performance unless they verify codec support or rely on s ... ⌘ Read more

The why of LisaGUI LisaGUI is an amazing project that recreates the entire user interface of the Apple Lisa in the browser, using nothing but CSS, a bit of HTML, and SVG files, and it’s an absolute joy to use and experience. Its creator, Andrew Yaros, has published a blog post diving into the why and how of LisaGUI. I had been trying to think of a good project to add to my programming portfolio, which was lacking. Finding an idea I was willing and able to execute on proved harder than expected. Good ideas are bo ... ⌘ Read more

“Fixing” the broken Solaris Management Console Oracle won’t fix In my detailed article about the Sun Microsystems ecosystem of the late 2000s, I mentioned an issue I ran into with the latest (leaked) patchset for Solaris 10, the one from 2020, available on Archive.org. Sun does not make Solaris 10 patches and patchsets from 2014 and later freely available online, restricting them to big enterprise customers with expensive support contracts. The same restrictions apply to ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft warns its new “AI” agents in Windows can install malware Microsoft has just announced a whole slew of new “AI” features for Windows, and this time, they’ll be living in your taskbar. Microsoft is trying to transform Windows into a “canvas for AI,” with new AI agents integrated into the Windows 11 taskbar. These new taskbar capabilities are designed to make AI agents feel like an assistant in Windows that can go off and control your PC and do tasks for you a ... ⌘ Read more

Run old versions of UNIX for PDP-11 and x86 on modern hardware The contents of this repository allow older versions of UNIX (ancient UNIX) to run easily on modern Unix-like systems (Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, among others). ↫ Run ancient UNIX GitHub page With the guides in this repository, you can easily run Versions 1/5/7 UNIX and 2.11BSD UNIX for the PDP-11 and Version 7 UNIX for x86 (ported to x86 by Robert Nordier in 1999, with patches in 2006-2007). That’s it. ⌘ Read more

Living my best Sun Microsystems ecosystem life in 2025 In my lifetime, there’s been one ecosystem I deeply regret having missed out on: the Sun Microsystems ecosystem of the late 2000s. At that time, the company offered a variety of products that, when used together, formed a comprehensive ecosystem that was a fascinating, albeit expensive alternative to Microsoft and Apple. While not really intended for home use, I’ve always believed that Sun’s approach to computing would’ve ... ⌘ Read more

Using Rust in Android speeds up development considerably Google has been using Rust in Android more and more for its memory safety characteristics, and the results on that front were quite positive. It turns out, however, that not only does using Rust reduce the number memory safety issues, it’s also apparently a lot faster to code in Rust than C or C++. We adopted Rust for its security and are seeing a 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density compared to Andro ... ⌘ Read more

Haiku gets new guarded heap for the kernel Another month, another Haiku activity report, and this time we’ve got a major change under the hood: a brand new guarded heap. The old guarded heap was suboptimal and had started to lag behind, so the new one attempts to rectify some of these shortcomings. So, to rectify these limitations, I rewrote the kernel guarded heap more or less from scratch, taking the old code into account where it made sense but otherwise creating entirely new bookkeepi ... ⌘ Read more

Google cancels plans to require Android application certification outside of the Play Store Only a few months ago, Google announced it was going to require that all Android applications – even those installed outside of the Play Store – had to be verified. This led to a massive backlash, and it seems our protests and complaints have had effect: the company announced a change in plans today, and will, in fact, not require certification for i ... ⌘ Read more

Big news for small OpenBSD /usr partitions Ever ran into issues using sysupgrade on OpenBSD because /usr ran out of space? OpenBSD developers are trying to address this issue. Firstly, Stuart Henderson (sthen@) modified the installer to increase free space prior to installing. Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) modified sysupgrade(8) so that, if space is too tight, it will fail gracefully rather than risk leaving the administrator with a broken system. ↫ OpenBSD Journal These are very welcome additi ... ⌘ Read more

Valve brings x86 gaming to ARM Linux with FEX Valve announced a few new devices yesterday. There’s a new Steam console, which is essentially just a tiny PC with SteamOS installed – think of it as a Steam Deck without a display. Second, Valve finally released a new Steam Controller to go with the Steam console, which has taken them long enough. Lastly, there’s a brand new Steam VR headset, the Steam Frame. Other websites with actual access to these new devices will do a better job of co ... ⌘ Read more

VMS/XDE: an OpenVMS x86 development environment for Linux and Windows/WSL VMS/XDE is an OpenVMS x86 development environment for Linux and WIndows (via WSL). It provides a familiar user experience for OpenVMS developers working in Linux and Windows yet offers 100% binary and file system compatilibilty with OpenVMS. VMS/XDE includes OpenVMS V9.2-3 user, supervisor and executive mode operating system environments and a set of x86 native compilers and layered pro ... ⌘ Read more

Plasma Mobile 6.5 keeps improving As part of the KDE Plasma 6.5 release, we also got a new release of Plasma Mobile. As there’s a lot of changes, improvements, and new features in Plasma Mobile 6.5, the Plasma Mobile Team published a blog post to highlight them all. The biggest improvement is probably the further integration of Waydroid, a necessary evil to run Android applications until the Plasma Mobile ecosystem manages to become a bit more well-rounded. Waydroid can now be managed straight fro ... ⌘ Read more

Tribblix m38 released Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, has released a new version. Milestone 38 isn’t the most consequential release of all time, but it does bring a few small changes accompanied by the usual long list of updated open source packages. The zap install command now installs dependencies by default, while zap create-user will now restrict new home directories to mode 0700 by default. Meanwhile, int16h at Cryogenix published an article about ... ⌘ Read more

Setting up a combined 68k/PA-RISC HP-UX 9 cluster Jonathan Pallant got lucky and managed to score a massive haul of ’90s UNIX workstations, one of which was an HP 9000 Model 340, a HP-UX workstation built around a Motorola 68030 processor at 16.7 MHz. It doesn’t come with a hard drive or even a floppy controller, though, so he decided to borrow a PA-RISC-based HP 9000 Model 705 to set up an HP-UX 9 cluster. But wait, how does that work, when we’re dealing with two entirely differen ... ⌘ Read more

Ironclad 0.7.0 and 0.8.0 released, adds RISC-V support We’ve talked about Ironclad a few times, but there’s been two new releases since the 0.6.0 release we covered last, so let’s see what the project’s been up to. As a refresher, Ironclad is a formally verified, hard real-time capable kernel written in SPARK and Ada. Versions 0.7.0 and 0.8.0 improved support for block device caching, added a basic NVMe driver, added support for x86’s SMAP, switched from KVM to NVMM for Ironcla ... ⌘ Read more

Mac OS 7.6 and 8 for CHRP releases discovered For those of us unaware – unlikely on OSNews, but still – for a hot minute in the second half of the ’90s, Apple licensed its Mac OS to OEMs, resulting in officially sanctioned Mac clones from a variety of companies. While intended to grow the Mac’s market share, what ended up happening instead is that the clone makers outcompeted Apple on performance, price, and features, with clones offering several features and capabilities before Apple ... ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD now builds reproducibly and without root privilege The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has completed work to build FreeBSD without requiring root privilege. We have implemented support for all source release builds to use no-root infrastructure, eliminating the need for root privileges across the FreeBSD release pipeline. This work was completed as part of the program commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency. ↫ FreeBSD Foundation blog This is gre ... ⌘ Read more

LXQt 2.3.0 released LXQt, the other Qt desktop environment, released version 2.3.0. This new version comes roughly six months after 2.2.0, and continues the project’s adoption of Wayland. The enhancement of Wayland support has been continued, especially in LXQt Panel, whose Desktop Switcher is now enabled for Labwc, Niri, …. It is also equipped with a backend specifically for Wayfire. In addition, the Custom Command plugin is made more flexible, regardless of Wayland and X11. ↫ LXQt 2.3.0 release announcement T ... ⌘ Read more

WINE gaming in FreeBSD Jails with Bastille FreeBSD offers a whole bunch of technologies and tools to make gaming on the platform a lot more capable than you’d think, and this article by Pertho dives into the details. Running all your games inside a FreeBSD Jail with Wine installed into it is pretty neat. Initially, I thought this was going to be a pretty difficult and require a lot of trial and error but I was surprised at how easy it was to get this all working. I was really happy to get ... ⌘ Read more

Tape containing UNIX v4 found A unique and very important find at the University of Utah: while cleaning out some storage rooms, the staff at the university discovered a tape containing a copy of UNIX v4 from Bell Labs. At this time, no complete copies are known to exist, and as such, this could be a crucial find for the archaeology of early UNIX. The tape in question will be sent to the Computer History Museum for further handling, where bitsavers.org will conduct the recovery process. I have the equ ... ⌘ Read more

There is no such thing as a 3.5 inch floppy disc Wait, what? The term 3.5 inch floppy disc is in fact a misnomer. Whilst the specification for 5.25 inch floppy discs employs Imperial units, the later specification for the smaller floppy discs employs metric units. The standards for these discs are all of which specify the measurements in metric, and only metric. These standards explicitly give the dimensions as 90.0mm by 94.0mm. It’s in clause 6 of all three. ↫ Jonathan de Boyne Pol ... ⌘ Read more

Servo ported to Redox Redox keeps improving every month, and this past one is certainly a banger. The big news this past month is that Servo, the browser engine written in Rust, has been ported to Redox. It’s extremely spartan at the moment, and crashes when a second website is loaded, but it’s a promising start. It also just makes sense to have the premier Rust browser engine running on the premier Rust operating system. Htop and bottom have been ported to Redox for much improved system monitoring, and they’ ... ⌘ Read more

MacOS 26’s new icons are a step backwards On the new MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple has mandated that all application icons fit into their prescribed squircle. No longer can icons have distinct shapes, nor even any fun frame-breaking accessories. Should an icon be so foolish as to try to have a bit of personality, it will find itself stuffed into a dingy gray icon jail. ↫ Paul Kafasis The downgraded icons listed in this article are just… Sad. While there’s no accounting for tastes, Apple’s new gla ... ⌘ Read more

A lost IBM PC/AT model? Analyzing a newfound old BIOS Some people not only have a very particular set of skills, but also a very particular set of interests that happen to align with those skills perfectly. When several unidentified and mysterious IBM PC ROM chips from the 1980s were discovered on eBay, two particular chips’ dumped contents posed particularly troublesome to identify. In 1985, the FCh model byte could only mean the 5170 (PC/AT), and the even/odd byte interleaving ... ⌘ Read more

The Microsoft SoftCard for the Apple II: getting two processors to share the same memory We talked about the Z80 SoftCard, Microsoft’s first hardware product, back in 2023, but thanks to Raymond Chen and Nicole Branagan, we’ve got some more insights. The Microsoft Z-80 SoftCard was a plug-in expansion card for the Apple II that added the ability to run CP/M software. According to Wikipedia, it was Microsoft’s first hardware product and in 1980 ... ⌘ Read more

bluetui and restterm: two beautiful TUI applications There’s something incredibly enticing and retrofuturistic about a well-designed TUI, or text-based user interface. There’s an endless list number of these, but two crossed my path these past few days, and I found them particularly appealing. First, we’ve got bluetui, an application for managing Bluetooth connections on Linux systems with bluez installed. The second is resterm. Resterm is a terminal-first client for working with ... ⌘ Read more

Sculpt OS 25.10 released In the light of this year’s roadmap focus on “rigidity, clarity, performance”, Sculpt OS 25.10 looks the same as the version 25.04 but might feel different as it includes countless under-the-hood improvements of the two preceding framework releases 25.05 and 25.08. User interaction on performance-starved platforms like the PinePhone has become visibly smoother thanks our recent CPU scheduling advances. The streamlined block-storage stack combined with various refinements of the pac ... ⌘ Read more

Debian to add hard Rust dependency to APT It seems like a number of Debian ports are going to face difficult times over the coming months. Debian developer Julian Andres Klode has sent a message to the Debian mailing lists that APT will very soon start requiring Rust. I plan to introduce hard Rust dependencies and Rust code into APT, no earlier than May 2026. This extends at first to the Rust compiler and standard library, and the Sequoia ecosystem. In particular, our code to parse .deb, . ... ⌘ Read more

Microsoft breaks Task Manager in Windows 11, hard Let’s take a look at how things are going at Microsoft, whose CEO claimed a few months ago that 30% of their code was generated by “AI”. After installing Windows Updates released on or after October 28, 2025 (KB5067036), you might encounter an issue where closing Task Manager using the Close (X) button does not fully terminate the process. When you reopen Task Manager, the previous instance continues running in the background even th ... ⌘ Read more

Configuring cwm on OpenBSD For those unfamiliar, cwm is the Calm Window Manager. It’s part of the OpenBSD base distribution as one of the native window managers, along with an old version of fvwm and the venerable twm. It’s pretty simple but surprisingly powerful, a floating window manager with some basic manual tiling. It’s keyboard-centric, has an application launcher and highly configurable menus. It uses groups rather than workspaces which provides a lot of flexibility. My configuration isn’t particu ... ⌘ Read more