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. Unfortunately it still doesn’t fully work, so it’s still disabled by default: hence, it’s only a minor news item, unfortunately.
It may not work due to – so far – not well-understood problems causing any complex virtualised operating system to crash in a variety of ways, but since these problems seem related not to NVMM but Haiku itself, I still think this is a big piece of news. If the problems can be addressed, Haiku will have proper virtualisation, which is crazy to think about. There’s a forum thread in case you wish to help out with this effort.
Other than this major news, there’s the usual list of small fixes and changes, including preliminary work on USB Ethernet support, which, when working, could be very welcome news for people whose onboard Ethernet doesn’t work with Haiku. The team also believes a beta 6 might actually be released this August, but once again I’d like to underline that Haiku’s nightlies work just fine, and you really don’t need to wait for a beta.
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. The odds of me spotting one of these creepy predator glasses in my remote town are incredibly slim, and to me, that’s a feature, not a bug.
Meanwhile, in places where these creepy things can actually be found in the wild, a backlash is thankfully growing.
Will Kujawa, a freelance video producer, said that he has been thinking about buying a pair of Meta glasses with prescription lenses to film behind the scenes content during his shoots, but the online backlash has given him second thoughts. He says he was “blown away by how mean some of the people were” in response to his social media posts about considering buying a pair.
“I saw all these comments about if you wear those glasses you’re basically a predator or a creep, and I was like, ‘oh, maybe it’s not a good idea to have those,'” he told Engadget. But he says he understands why people have concerns. “I didn’t really think that through all the way … there are a lot of times where it’s not appropriate to wear cameras on your face. And even though I would have no intention of do[ing] anything creepy with them, it didn’t even occur to me [that] other people just assume that automatically.”
I can maybe see a use for these things in specific professional environments, but even then, obviously not ones made by Facebook, one of the, if not the creepiest companies in technology history. If I were to see anyone out here in the real world using one these things, I, too, would automatically assume that the guy (statistically speaking) wearing them is a creep. I can only imagine what the people most often targeted by creepy men would think encountering some rando wearing these.
Clearly, these things should be made illegal outside of specific professional environments where they could potentially be useful. While it’s impossible to stop tools like these from making their way into the hands of creeps, it at least provides the justice system with a clear method of nailing them to the wall. They didn’t get Al Capone for any of his violent crimes – they nailed him for tax evasion.
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. Abhijith M B at windows Latest dove into the details, and it’s just as bad as you would expect.
Am I glad Stokes got caught? Yes, without hesitation. Thirty-five pages of a teenager bragging about diamond chains spelling out “HACK THE PLANET” while extorting a jewelry store don’t leave much room for sympathy, whatever role Microsoft’s telemetry played in building the case.
But that doesn’t make the GDID okay. Every company selling you software has some version of this, and a persistent device identity is a reasonable thing to build into activation and fraud systems. What gets me is that most people had never come across the term GDID before a federal court filing such as this. Microsoft wrote one sentence about it in an Azure Monitor reference table meant for enterprise IT admins pulling update reports, not for the 1.6 billion or so regular people whose PCs are generating this data.
You might be tech savvy enough to turn off Activity History, pick a local account, and strip out every scrap of optional telemetry, but none of it changes the fact that the identifier exists, and that it answers to your Microsoft Account instead of you. Microsoft only told the public about it once a court forced the issue.
The thing is, even without this GDID, I can’t imagine Microsoft would have much trouble tying a Windows installation to a specific user. Consequently, I’m afraid the following is going to happen: this story gains even more traction, Microsoft removes the GDID, and everyone thinks the problem is resolved. Of course, in reality, any one of the hundreds of other metrics and data Microsoft collects can and will still be used in the exact same way as this GDID thing in this case.
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. However, the technology NFS was designed to replace was apparently quite a bit worse. Sun sold diskless workstations before NFS, which used something called nd (network disk). The problems with nd stem from a limitation of SunOS at the time. Since SunOS only provided support for a maximum of eight partitions per physical disk, nd offered the ability to create subpartitions, of which you had to manually create and remember the start and end sectors.
That’s a recipe for problems. But wait, there’s more!
For extra bonus problems, you might run out of available partitions to use on your server disk because you needed all of the available ones for regular filesystems and your swap area. If you were in this situation you could take the dangerous but necessary step of specifying your network disks using the special ‘c’ partition (cf dkinfo(8)), which was conventionally used to provide access to the entire disk. This was extra dangerous because you had to make sure that the nd disks you specified weren’t overlapping into any regular partitions that you were using, since as nd(8) says, nd itself did no sanity checking. If you said sectors X to Y were network disk X, that’s what they were, and goodness help you if some of them were also something else.
And this isn’t even everything. Every part of this sounds horrid, and I can totally understand seeing NFS as a godsend compared to nd. It’s depressing that we’re in 2026 now, and the basic task of sending a file from one computer to another over your own network often still a total clusterfuck.
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.
Anyway, here’s another retrospective, but this one I definitely like a bit more than the countless others we’ve seen, because it ends on the part of the story often left out: Nokia not only survived, it’s actually thriving.
The company itself ultimately survived, even if the transition wasn’t painless. Nokia’s revenues, which peaked in 2007, fell sharply through the mid-2010s before the company refocused on a decades-old business line—telecom infrastructure—that many had forgotten Nokia was even in. Nokia now ranks among the world’s top three suppliers of 5G network equipment, serving carriers across more than 125 countries, alongside Ericsson and Huawei. Although the company could never quite crack the smartphone, it now plays a key role in providing the network backbone those smartphones run on.
From a business perspective, I honestly doubt Nokia’s phone business could’ve survived to this day, even if they had responded to the arrival of the iPhone sooner, and even if they didn’t do the stupid thing of focusing on Windows Phone first and had just embraced Android right away. Obviously, a Nokia with its own touch-era smartphone operating system would never have survived – none of them did – and even if they went with Android from the onset, I think the eventual onslaught of Samsung, which has killed many a popular smartphone brand, would’ve trampled Nokia too.
In a better version of our world, Nokia would’ve survived with its own smartphone operating system, based on Symbian or not, and it would’ve been Europe’s strong, consistent answer to the Americans’ iOS and Android. While Nokia would’ve still been a business and would’ve undoubtedly tried the same anti-user shenanigans as Apple and Google, they’d at least be easier to reign in regulatory-wise. You’d hope.
The EU should’ve never allowed Nokia’s smartphone business to be sold to Microsoft.
I find this about as interesting and watching artificial grass grow, but with the common wisdom being that Apple is behind on “AI”, it was honestly only a matter of time before the lawsuits came. After all, that’s usually what companies who can’t win in the market do. At the very least this will give corporate tech news websites a whole slew of new material.
I just hope they both implode. We’d all be better off for it.
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. There’s also new USB gamepad support, which already works in quite a few emulators, as well as details about how Redox intends to improve its support for running in a virtual environment over the coming 12 months, an effort sponsored by NLnet.
Of course, there’s also the usual bugfixes and updates to various drivers, the kernel, Relibc, and more.
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. Windows also provides optional non-security preview updates, which give IT teams and early adopters an opportunity to validate upcoming fixes before they’re included in the next monthly security update.
This guide explains the purpose of each update type, when updates are released, and how they fit into the modern Windows servicing model.
It’s easy to make fun of Microsoft and Windows for just how complex and obtuse the update ecosystem really is, but in all honestly it’s kind of understandable. Windows is a sprawling platform used by so many different people, companies, and organisations, under so many different circumstances and in so many different environments, it makes sense that Microsoft wants to address the multitude of needs that arise from that complexity. And so we end up not only with a dizzying array of update types and a long corpus of mystic terminology, but also a long list of complex different management tools to deploy said updates.
And then there’s the various preview channels making everything even more complex.
I’m definitely not smart, qualified, or experienced enough to come up with a better solution, but I do think choosing better names for the various update types, and perhaps a centralised settings panel inside Windows that gave users a better idea of what each type of update actually does, would go a long way to improving clarity. During my month with Windows 11, I also found it deeply frustrating just how little information Microsoft provides about each of the updates Windows is installing. As a user, I was expected to copy/paste the KB number and then hope that would lead me to useful information, while it would be much more convenient if such information was available right then and there inside Windows Update.
If you can’t reduce complexity, you should try to improve transparency.
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?
This year, I’m celebrating the milestone of having posted 20000 stories on OSNews during my 21 years as managing editor of OSNews. This is my full-time job, and since nobody is going to give me any bonuses, stock options, or golden pens, we’re running a big fundraiser to keep OSNews going. To add some spice to the whole thing, I added some incentives, with the first being using Windows 11 for a month. We’re slowly but steadily approaching the next incentive, too, which is a proper video tour of my office, (unique) computers, and massive devices collection. There’s a similar incentive to this Windows 11 one, but for macOS. Yikes.
The rules for the Windows 11 incentive are simple: use stock Windows 11 for a month for my computing tasks (with the exception of gaming – converting my Linux gaming PC to Windows just to play the same games seemed silly). I wasn’t allowed to use any debloating tools, but as an EU citizen, I do have the ability to remove a ton of Windows stuff thanks to the success of the Digital Markets Act. I also tried to stick to Microsoft’s own applications as much as possible, for that true “ecosystem experience”, and wasn’t allowed to hack my way into a normal local user account. I was all-in.
So what was it like?
Setting it all up
The installation process posed a number of challenges and issues. First and foremost, the Windows 11 installation process is incredibly barebones, and basically assumes no other operating system exists in the world. It has no clue anything other than Windows’ filesystems exist, making it dangerously easy to accidentally damage or outright delete any other operating systems you might have installed. My laptop happens to have two M.2 SSDs in, so I could safely dedicate one of them to Windows 11 without interfering with the other SSD with Fedora installed on it, but if you’re experimenting with Windows 11 on your Linux machine with just one drive, you might want to reconsider.
I also had to perform the first portion of the installation process – the WinPE section – with just my keyboard, since apparently, my trackpad was not supported and did not work at all. Once the system went through its first of what would be many reboots to come and loaded into the phase of the installation where you’re actually already running Windows 11, my trackpad came to life, but without any gestures support – so no scrolling. Not a gamebreaker or anything, but definitely annoying.
A bigger issue was that the Wi-Fi 7 Intel BE200 chip in my laptop was not supported out of the box by Windows 11. This meant that I had to install these drivers during the installation process, which involves going to the Intel website and finding the correct drivers to use. To make this process more obtuse and less intuitive, you can’t use the normal driver installer; you have to specifically opt for the “Intel® PROSet/Wireless Software and Wi-Fi Drivers for IT Administrators“, download the ZIP, unpack it on a different computer, put the unpacked drivers on a USB stick, and point the Windows 11 installer to this USB stick.
Mind you, the BE200 chip was launched almost three years ago, and there’s no excuse for Windows 11 not supporting this chip out of the box – like Linux does.
The remainder of the installation process involved dodging a lot of tracking and telemetry prompts, reboots, a lot of waiting, setting up the dreaded online account, waiting some more, and then finally ending up at the desktop. I then set out to enjoy my EU privileges by removing whatever applications I didn’t need and turning off features I didn’t want, as well as making sure all the drivers were up to date. This mostly involved installing the Intel Driver & Support Assistant and the Intel graphics drivers. Curiously, this is where I hit a returning issue: after installing the Intel GPU drivers for the first time, as well as after every subsequent update, the screen would go black and stay that way, forcing a reboot. Windows’ graphics stack is supposed to be able to gracefully handle driver updates, but clearly, some bug or problem was preventing the updated Intel driver from being reinitialised.
Once those initial setup tasks were behind me, I experienced two more problems. First, sleep/wake was entirely broken and simply did not work. It turns out Windows 11 really doesn’t like S3 sleep, and I had to specifically go into my laptop’s Dasharo Coreboot firmware to switch to S0ix get sleep/wake to work on Windows 11. Windows defaults to something it calls “Modern Standby”, which requires the S0ix state to be enabled. You can also disable Modern Standby which would presumably make sleep/wake work with S3 (?), but this is a whole ordeal and clearly not something Microsoft wants you to do.
Of course, the correct way of handling this would be for Windows 11 to adapt its sleep/wake settings to what the firmware reports, but alas.
Another problem were the laptop’s cooling fans seemingly leading lives of their own, spinning up loudly at entirely random times, irrespective of use. It was so bad and loud I assumed the laptop was damaged somehow, and nothing I tried alleviated the issue. However, a day after installation, a massive Windows update came in that somehow fixed the issue, taming the fans back to the normal levels that I had come to expect while running Linux.
Except for one curious problem that seems to tie the fan and sleep/wake problems together: roughly one out of three sleep cycles, Windows would spin up the fans to maximum blast, for long periods of time before actually going to sleep; on some occasions, sleep would never set in at all, forcing a reboot as the screen wouldn’t come back on either. This seems to be a widely reported problem on a whole slew of different hardware configurations, so I’m assuming Windows 11 is just trash at putting devices to sleep properly.
Note that this same laptop running Fedora Linux has none of these issues; sleep/wake works perfectly every time regardless of whether Coreboot is set to S3 or S0ix, and the fans behave exactly as you’d expect.
One thing I found almost too hard to believe was that Windows 11 apparently does not natively support the “US (int’l with AltGr dead keys)” keyboard layout. Instead, the only option it seems to have for the “US (int’l)” keyboard layout family is the one with regular dead keys, which I personally find unusable. For those that don’t know, dead keys are when you press e.g. ', but nothing happens until you press a letter which then gets the diacritic added to it: ' followed by e will turn into é.
You might spot the problem here: you often need to use characters like ' and " as actual characters, especially when you type a lot of English, but if they function as dead keys you have to hit them twice to use them as individual characters instead. This is incredibly annoying – way more than it seems on paper – so an alternative exists: “US (int’l with AltGr dead keys)”. On this keyboard layout, AltGr acts a modifier you need to press to turn certain keys into dead keys. To input é using this layout, you hit AltGr + ' followed by e.
This keyboard layout has been available as an option in every Linux installer and every desktop environment for as long as I can remember, so I never even considered it might not be available in Windows. Luckily, people have created third-party “US (int’l with AltGr dead keys)” layouts for Windows, so I ended up downloading this one, which works perfectly.
Input crisis averted.
I also ran into a few smaller issues. Windows’ window manager is incredibly limiting and dumb, and won’t even allow you to change things like titlebar actions. By default, double-clicking a titlebar will maximise a window, but I’m a BeOS user at heart and double-click titlebars to minimise windows (I never maximise a window). I kept accidentally maximising windows when I was trying to minimise them, which wasn’t pleasant. The fact that such basic settings virtually every operating system and desktop environment support are unavailable on Windows is indefensible.
Another pain point is Explorer, Windows’ file manager. It takes longer to load than a file manager should, and lacks basic features like dealing with compressed files – I don’t count a decades-old cumbersome wizard-style interface with countless steps to go through just to unpack a compressed file to be even remotely acceptable in 2026. Dolphin and Nautilus handle compressed files entirely transparently and much faster than Explorer does, and once you’re used to that, going back to ’90s style compressed file management almost feels insulting.
A quick non-exhaustive rundown of even more issues: Windows operating system updates are slow, cumbersome, and require way too many reboots. The Start menu desperately needs to be more customisable and adaptable to user needs. The widgets system in the taskbar is useless. The overview/Exposé feature drops frames all the time. I was never given an option to change my home folder’s name. There are way too many useless default folders in your home directory, and most of them you can’t delete (they keep automatically reappearing). Dark mode is still broken, with many dialogs and panels only available in light mode.
I also happened to run into a curious bug in Explorer where the icons in the Quick Access tab were fuzzy. No amount of troubleshooting could fix this. I admit this bothered me way more than it should.
Applications
As part of the incentive, I also wanted to experience proper Windows applications. First and foremost, this means using Microsoft Edge. Like many other browsers today – even Firefox – Edge spams you with useless “AI” nonsense you have to meticulously disable, but once you’ve done that song and dance, Edge is mostly just fine? I even felt like it did a better job of handing online video – less heat, less fan noise – than Firefox did, but I didn’t do any benchmarking or anything so I have no data to back it up.
The email situation on Windows is abysmal. You’re supposed to use the “new” Outlook, which is basically just a web application that also happens to send all your login credentials, emails, and personal information to Microsoft as a requirement before you can use it. While the irony of Gmail users complaining about this isn’t lost on me – email is not, never has been, and never will be a private medium – it’s still just unethical, unpleasant, and wholly unnecessary. To make matters worse, if you don’t have some sort of Office 365 subscription, Outlook even shows you ads. The new Outlook is just a long string of own goals before kickoff.
Nevertheless, I took my assignment seriously, and after choosing to ignore it’s just a website, after sending all my data to Microsoft, and after paying the cheapest possible Office 365 subscription offer I could find to get rid of the ads, I found that the new Outlook is, much like Edge, fine. While I’m sure it falls apart quickly for people with more advanced email needs, it handled my basic personal send-and-receive use case just fine.
If you disregard it’s a website that sends all your emails and personal information to Microsoft and that you have to pay for it even after paying for Windows itself, then yes, it is mostly fine. A ringing endorsement if there ever was one, isn’t it? This whole situation is criminal, and the clearest example of just how much Microsoft utterly despises Windows and its users. A desktop operating system needs to come with a solid, serviceable email client. I consider this non-optional.
Moving beyond Microsoft’s own applications, the application ecosystem on Windows is in a dire state. Anything developed over the last decade or so using the long list of modern frameworks and APIs Microsoft championed and subsequently abandoned is an exercise in frustration; most applications in this category are unfinished, buggy, slow and/or abandoned. Applications with more pedigree from the classic Win32 days feel outdated and out of place, but at least they tend to get the job done. The end result is an incredibly inconsistent, messy, and jarring user experience where every application clearly feels of its time, dependent on which set of frameworks and UI design philosophies Microsoft was pushing at that particular moment in time.
No two titlebars are of the same height. There are countless entirely different designs for titlebar buttons. The modern desktop context menu has its own classic Win32 context menu. Win32 applications look and behave differently than WinUI 3 applications which look and behave differently than Fluent applications which look and behave differently than Metro applications which look and behave differently than – and so on. No two applications have their important UI elements in the same place, and no two applications seem to be using the same design language. Hell, Win32 UIs use completely different-looking font rendering than “modern” UIs. The word “mess” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
As someone who is used to KDE and GNOME, whose developers still take consistency in both look and behaviour quite seriously, this is the single biggest reason why using Windows 11 was such a frustrating experience for me. It’s like reading a book where every few words, the language and script randomly change. I know UI consistency has been a dirty word ever since the web and then iOS rose to prominence – I lamented the death of consistency in UI design back 2012, which is fourteen years ago! – but the situation on Windows today is particularly dire.
Managing applications is also not as nice and effortless as it is on Linux. Most of the time, you have to manually browse around and download applications (and hope they’re not malware), which use one of an endless variety of different installation wizards, and then update these manually using countless different update services running in the background. There’s also a Windows Store, but its selection is limited. On top of all that, Windows also has its own very limited and basic package manager now, but it doesn’t come with an easy-to-use graphical user interface; you have to find and download one yourself, and it seems UniGetUI is one the more popular ones. It’s a mess of an application – with its own entirely unique titlebar and buttons, as is Windows tradition – but at least it works.
Keeping track of all the individual updaters, the Windows Store, WinGet, and so on is a massive chore, and a huge regression compared to what’s been the norm in the Linux world for a very long time. Desktop Linux solved keeping applications updated decades ago. Microsoft seems to be making it worse every time they add another different application delivery and management framework.
Windows applications are also absolutely obsessed with the system tray. It seems like every single thing you install wants to bury itself in the system tray, even when they’re not actually running. Before you know it, you’ll have a long string of random icons in there competing for your attention, and each seems to operate and behave a little differently than the other. Some open their main window when you click on them once, some when you click on them twice, some open a menu, some only respond by opening a menu when you left-click on them instead.
Of course, the menus that pop up all have different designs, as is tradition.
It’s not all bad, I guess?
There were positive aspects to Windows 11, too. It’s taken them a very long time, but with most of the various settings and configuration panels now moved from the old Control Panel to the Settings application, I think the latter has come into its own quite nicely. If you ignore the various ads for Microsoft’s services – a common tactic in commercial operating systems like macOS, Windows, and iOS these days – I find it quite easy to use. There’s always going to be some arbitrariness to the organisation and hierarchy of the various settings and panels, but overall, I found things relatively easy to find, and performance didn’t seem to be an issue.
Windows 11 also has a combined emoji/symbol picker now (Super + .), negating the need to dive into the Character Map, a horrid application which basically hasn’t been meaningfully updated since Windows 3.x. There’s an actual clipboard manager in Windows too now (Super + v), and it works great as well. These are two relatively recent additions that make some of the menial tasks related to text input quite a bit more pleasant.
I really don’t have much more to add to this measly “positive vibes only” section. Like Linux, Windows 11 found and set up our crappy HP Wi-Fi printer/scanner combo thing without any issues, I guess?
Did I stay with Windows 11?
No. Of course not.
I gave it an honest-to-god try. I put in the time, work, and even some money. I was strict, didn’t allow myself to do any non-gaming tasks on Linux, and truly used Windows 11 exclusively for a month. Whenever I experienced a short stretch of time where I felt “perhaps this isn’t so bad?”, one (or multiple) of the problems and issues described above would snap me out of it. For someone used to desktop Linux, where respect for the user, consistency, customisability, and performance are still held in high regard, Windows 11 feels like an endless string of punches in the face.
Whether I use a KDE or GNOME desktop, things look, feel, and behave consistently. There are no ads for services I don’t want, no online accounts forced down my throat, no dark patterns to trick me into subscriptions I don’t want. Managing and updating applications and the operating system are so effortless you barely even notice it’s happening, and whether I’m using an older machine or something brand new, performance is going to be good, and consistent. Desktop Linux is also going to respect my privacy, and I don’t have to worry about data harvesting.
Windows 11 just cannot compete with any of that, and my month with Windows 11 proved that to me beyond a shadow of a doubt.
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. One particular paragraph from her introduction really hits the nail on the head about accessibility discussions in tech circles:
The reality of tech communities is that they are often ableist and elitist. Probably more so than the average population. If a user or contributor struggles with a tool, blame is shifted to a “skill issue,” if an interface is simplified to make it accessible to more people, it’s “dumbed down”. Assistive technologies are often developed by abled people, without involving and paying disabled people. This also leads to an attitude where contributors expect gratefulness from disabled people for providing them with the most basic needs. All these issues are also not absent from the GNOME community.
Even as someone who isn’t disabled and doesn’t use any tools classically shelved under the “accessibility” moniker, I encounter the attitudes she mentions in the quoted paragraph basically every day. While we can have normal, productive discussions and differences of opinion about accessibility – for instance, I strongly believe robust theming support is absolutely crucial to accessibility, while the wider GNOME community does not – the dismissive attitudes towards people with accessibility needs in the software world is shameful.
Even if you don’t have accessibility needs today, you will definitely be needing them at some point in your life. If accessibility isn’t one of the first words you jot down on your mood board or whatever when you start a new software project, you’ve already done millions of people a massive disservice. Get educated, learn what you can about accessibility, listen to people with accessibility needs, and make your software better for everyone.
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.
We worked really hard on Wayland and we got to the point where it feels solid and the experience is almost on par with X11. Wayland support will no longer be considered “experimental”. In the next version of Cinnamon, both X11 and Wayland will be fully supported.
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. The results are exactly what you’d expect.
Of the 120 unique repos, 32 were maintained and 88 were abandoned. No seriously, a big portion of them was completely deleted, nowhere to be found, others stopped 6 months ago, right after submitting to Flathub.
That’s absolutely soul-crushing. Why should Flathub’s reviewers spend their precious, limited time talking to lazy slopcoders’ “AI” agents to get their slopcoded applications into Flathub, when 70% of these applications are abandoned or outright deleted from existence within mere months of being submitted? Minimal effort for the slopcoders, maximum effort for the reviewers. Just dump a bunch of shitty code over the fence, let a chatbot handle the interactions with the reviewers, and pretend you made a valuable contribution.
This is the contradiction slopcode enthusiasts really don’t want to talk about. If these “AI” tools are so great, where is all the amazing new software? Where’s the massive gains in software quality? Isn’t the story that “AI” tools do the menial work, giving programmers more time to focus on improving their software? Reality does not seem to match the story we’re being sold. Despite these slopcode tools being out and available for years now, there’s no influx of great applications and other software, there’s no rise in software quality, nothing.
What we mostly seem to be getting are slopcoded projects nobody, not even their “creators” care about, so they just get abandoned and deleted as quickly as they were dredged up from the bottom of the programming barrel. These aren’t applications created because someone wanted them to exist; these are applications created because some mid programmer got high on their “AI” supply and fancied themselves better at programming than they really are – only to realise once the comedown hits they’ve got crappy, barely working, entirely unmaintainable gibberish vaguely looking like code nobody can make head nor tails of.
And then they abandon the project, ready for the next high – leaving everyone else to clean up their mess.
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.
Interestingly enough, to this day, Linux has architecture code for the 68000-family of processors. 68040, 68030, 68010… and even the original base 68000 processor. All neatly structured under arch/m68k/.
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. We use our smartphones to keep our secrets, do our banking, interact with our governments, share our deepest thoughts with our friends and family, and a whole lot more. Having this invaluable tool the vast majority of us depend on tied entirely to Google and Apple is not just bad for the market, it’s also a downright threat to the national security of anyone not living in the US.
Here in Europe, there’s been an awakening lately, with governments, companies, and people alike finally realising that having our entire digital infrastructure controlled by foreign, adversarial interests is a terrible idea. Sadly, breaking free from our Android and iOS chains is not so easy. The most ideal solution would be a truly open source alternative smartphone operating system, but that’s a hard sell for 99.9% of smartphone users who need the applications required to do their finances, talk to their friends, or interact with their governments. The cold and harsh truth is that with very few exceptions, these applications simply do not (yet) exist for smartphone operating systems that aren’t Android or iOS.
The only viable alternative at this point in time is to take whatever’s left of the Android Open Source Project, remove anything that ties it to Google and its services, fill in the gaps with alternative services and applications, and sell it as a Google-free or de-Googled Android platform. There’s several projects in this space, and with Europe drunkenly stumbling out of the technological hole it dug itself into, it’s no surprise that two of the more popular alternatives to Apple or Google-controlled smartphones come from Europe (and from the same country, no less). Today, we’re taking a look at one of these: iodéOS.
Iodé is a company based in Toulouse, France, which focuses on offering a Google-free Android called iodéOS, either preinstalled on phones you can buy, or as a ROM you can install yourself on supported devices. As a company, iodé makes its money through selling devices with iodéOS preinstalled, through an optional premium subscription (that I didn’t take a look at), and through donations, and all of their code is published as open source on their Gitlab instance hosted in France.
Iodé loaned me a Fairphone 6 with iodéOS preinstalled, one of he many smartphones and tablets they sell through their online store for review. This isn’t going to be an Android review; you already know what Android is like, and there’s no need for me to rehash any of that. Instead, I want to focus on the things that make using de-Googled Android different from using Google Android.
Don’t be afraid of microG
There are various ways to go about making a de-Googled Android variant, and iodéOS chose the LineageOS route, with microG installed on top. For those unaware, microG is a project which aims to replace the various proprietary parts of Google Play Services, required by many Android applications, with open source reimplementations. While it doesn’t offer 100% compatibility, it works exceptionally well, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find applications just don’t work at all with microG. IodéOS updates its microG installation through a dedicated F-Droid repository that’s obviously enabled by default, so you don’t have to do anything yourself.
Using microG instead of Google Play Services doesn’t mean you have to rely solely on whatever’s available in F-Droid, since there are a variety of alternative Play Store frontends available. IodéOS ships with the Aurora Store, which is an open-source frontend to the Play Store that can be used with or without a Google account. If you use it with your Google account, you’ll gain access to whatever applications you already own, including paid ones, but you won’t be able to buy applications inside Aurora. You can, however, buy an application on the Play Store website, after which it will show up in Aurora as well, assuming you’re logged in with the same account.
Aurora also comes with something something called FakeStore, which is sadly an important part of the puzzle; it’s a stub application that has the same package name as the real Play Store. Some applications check whether the Play Store is available before working properly, so this is sadly needed to ensure maximum compatibility. The only issue I sometimes ran into with Aurora is that it would load up its listings, but then any application I tapped on said it was unavailable. When this happened, reloading the Aurora application always fixed the issue. Annoying, but not gamebreaking.
A few things did not work for me when using microG on iodéOS, and they’re exactly the things you’d expect not to work. If you have a WearOS device, you’re out of luck; WearOS devices simply do not work when using microG, but there is a bounty to add support for it. If you want to use a smartwatch with iodéOS, there are various options available, such as Garmin devices, which is what I used during my testing and it worked flawlessly.
Another feature from “regular” Android that simply won’t work is RCS. There’s only one RCS client available on Android, Google Messages, and as you can imagine, Google is in no rush to allow devices without Google Play Services to register for and use RCS messaging. Tying to register with Google Messages will fail, and there are no other RCS clients available (save for a few China and India-specific clients). There’s a microG bounty for this, too, but no luck so far. Of course, there are countless messaging platforms that work just fine on iodéOS – regular SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, and so on – and especially if you’re European, it’s unlikely RCS support matters to you at all.
I just don’t ever think or care about RCS.
The big question mark hanging over everyone’s head when they consider moving to a de-Googled Android ROM without Google Play Services is, of course, banking applications. Personally, I’m lucky in that my bank’s application works just fine without Google Play Services, and the same applies to the various related applications and services here in Sweden, such as the BankID verification application (used to verify your identity for banking, government logins, etc.) and Swish, a popular Swedish payment platform.
While I think the problem of broken banking applications is a little bit overblown, it’s still a real issue and you should do some research before making the jump. Even if your specific bank’s application is listed as broken, though, you can usually still access the same functionality through your bank’s website, even if that’s probably a little less smooth and more cumbersome. Look, nobody said ditching Google wouldn’t come with difficulties and annoyances.
While my banking situation was fine on iodéOS, the same can’t be said for NFC payments. I use Google Wallet to pay with my phone and smartwatch at stores, and it won’t come as a surprise that Google doesn’t make its Wallet application work without its Play Services installed. If you’re in the same boat, you may be able to circumvent this problem through your bank’s application, as some banks offer NFC payment functionality of their own. If not, you’re out of luck – unless you happen to have a Garmin watch with Garmin Pay, which works without Play Services or even a smartphone at all, like I wrote about extensively a year ago.
The worry about losing access to banking applications and NFC payments is probably the biggest worry people have when considering switching to a de-Googled Android ROM like iodéOS, and while that worry is valid, I do think most people will be surprised by just how many banking applications work just fine even without Google Play Services. Before making the jump, some online searching will yield several maintained lists of working and broken applications so you know what you’re in for.
That being said, this is not an ideal situation, and one that most likely needs remedying in a regulatory manner. Access to basic and often mandatory services like banking, online government ID systems, messaging, and more should not be predicated on buying a locked-down, user-hostile American device.
Relying on the community
Usually, custom Android ROMs, de-Googled or not, ship with some Chromium browser by default, but iodéOS does things a bit differently by opting for a branded Firefox fork instead that has telemetry, trackers, and so on disabled. For its other Google application replacements, iodéOS relies on various proven open source applications, like CoMaps, Thunderbird, Fossify applications, and more. The end result is a complete offering where everything you’d find on a Google Android phone has been replaced by solid, capable, non-Google offerings from the open source community.
Of course, this is Android, so you can install whatever other maps, mail, or application you want if iodé’s choices aren’t to your liking.
An important feature of iodéOS is that it ships with an operating system-wide analysis tool that provides insight into with to what and whom, exactly, your phone and its applications are connecting. A system-wide adblocker is part of this, as well, with sensible defaults sourced from various open source blocklists. Of course, you have full control over what is and is not blocked, including the ability to block entire applications or websites if you so desire. While I personally didn’t try out their optional Premium subscription service, this service provides even more control, such as various parental control features.
IodéOS also has some nice, smaller touches that I really appreciated. During the first boot and initial setup, it showed a screen where you could select which default applications to remove, something I’ve never seen before. Sadly, many of the supposedly removable applications ended up only being “hidden”, which is Android speak for system applications that can’t be removed. I’m not sure what the exact reasoning is to make some applications system applications, but I would definitely prefer if all of the preinstalled applications, or at least most of them, were actually removable. This would seem to more closely align with iodéOS’ stated goals and values.
The default installation also comes with what is essentially a really barebones, basic changelog application. It shows nothing more than a list of recent updates with includes fixes changes, and additions, and it’s really nice to have this information easily accessible. I’m quite tired of the modern trend of empty or entirely missing changelogs, so it’s nice to see iodé putting this front and centre. The application itself could use some touching-up, but at the same time, I understand why this is probably not high on the list of priorities. It shows a changelog; it doesn’t need to win design awards.
Speaking of updates – during my use, iodéOS was never more than one month behind on Android’s security updates, which is not a bad showing compared to many much larger big-time Android OEMs. Still, I would prefer the monthly Android security updates to be available within the same month, so this is an area where iodéOS can improve and put themselves even farther ahead of most OEMs. People who are most likely to switch to a de-Googled Android are probably also going to be people who care about being up-to-date and as secure as possible.
Boring is good
Beyond the well-documented problems with WearOS, RCS, and some banking applications that are outside of iodé’s control, using iodéOS is simply boring and uneventful, and in this case, “boring” is exactly what they should be aiming for. For the vast majority of people, switching from Google Android to iodéOS will not be a particularly jarring experience, as all their favourite applications will still be available, running on the same underlying operating system they’re already used to. IodéOS does an excellent job of being inoffensive, unobtrusive, and frictionless – exactly what you want from something that aims to be a drop-in replacement for Google Android for as many people as possible.
IodéOS offers a solid Android experience to those who want to de-Google, and assuming you’re not deeply dependent on WearOS and/or RCS, it’s easy to recommend. It’s really “just Android”, and if you’re already used to Android – and statistically speaking, you are – buying a phone with iodéOS preinstalled is no different than buying any other Android device, just without all the Google baggage.
And as we realise a little bit more every day, that’s a massive value-add over Pixels and Samsung phones.
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). There have been many forks of es40 in the past and recently a new one has popped up with some great new features. Like speedups via a JIT compiler, S3 graphics port from MAME and ARC support, resulting in the ability to run Windows 2000 for the DEC Alpha.
Not only can you run the unreleased Alpha version of Windows 2000 on this forked emulator, it’s also capable of running OpenVMS and Tru64 UNIX. In fact, both OpenVMS and Tru64 can run their full X11 CDE desktops on the emulator as well, which is incredibly cool and a huge milestone. As the name of the original emulator implies, it’s emulating an AlphaServer Es40 from the turn of the century, which should be fast enough for enthusiast use.
The last AlphaStation ever made, the ES47, is still very high on my list of computers I desperately want but will never have – they are incredibly rare, and whenever they do come up for sale, incredibly expensive. If you have one, consider yourself lucky, and please, write about it! Tell the world!
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. I really like the factual tone of their article, especially this part:
Critics such as F-Droid, EFF, and “Keep Android Open” point out that this also happens to route every install path through Google-controlled infrastructure, hands Google a kill switch over any app or developer worldwide, and arrives shortly after Google’s antitrust lawsuits.
Both things can be true at once: real fraud is a problem and the restriction of developers is a convenient side effect of solving it this way – and we’re not in a position to pretend we know Google’s internal reasoning. We’re just telling you what they’ve said and what it changes; you can weigh the “why” yourself.
For LineageOS, these new verification measures don’t really mean much, as they don’t affect the project’s work or software. The developer verification infrastructure is a separate application that is part of Google Mobile Services, and LineageOS does not ship GMS nor does it ever intend to. As such, they don’t have to do anything, as this won’t be an issue unless LineageOS users choose to install a GApps package that happens to include the developer verification infrastructure.
If Google were to move the developer verification infrastructure into Play Services in the future, LineageOS makes it clear they’ll disable it globally, as they have done with a number of other “annoying Play Services-provided over-the-air update implementations“. There really isn’t much more they can do; the rest is up to users and projects that use LineageOS as their base.
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. But there’s something else about it. The picture is a bit… wobbly. Well, over composite video anyway. Let’s dig in and learn a little big more about the nitty-gritty of composite video.
As usual, the information density in this article by Branagan is kind of remarkable, especially when you consider it never overwhelms you. Such a great read.
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. It’s unclear how long it will take ReactOS to become compatible with Windows Vista software, but it took Microsoft around half a decade to develop Vista after the release of XP and marked a major upgrade, even if it didn’t land well with users at the time.
It’s a milestone for sure, but not one that’s going to make a huge difference for ReactOS at this moment in time. Still, it’s a sign of things to come, even if the very nature of the ReactOS project means that whatever things are coming tend to take a while to arrive.
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.
Microsoft is currently selling the idea of Windows and Copilot as two separate things: an OS and an assistant riding along on top of it. However, a leaked video shows Project Aion, an internal prototype where Copilot doesn’t just sit inside Windows, it becomes Windows, swallowing the Start menu, the taskbar, and three decades of desktop conventions in the process. The footage is reportedly two years old, so Aion is most likely dead by now. But it’s the clearest look yet at how far Microsoft was willing to take its agentic AI ambitions.
Everything about this is dreadful. Obviously replacing the entire shell with “AI” nonsense is the main crime against usability here, but on top of that, this new shell is all just websites, all the way down, so everything is slow and stuttery. Since this runs on something called “Win3”, which appears to be a very minimal, stripped-down version of Windows intended to only run the Edge browser engine, you can’t run Win32 applications. If you do try to run a Win32 application, it will load the application in a remote virtual machine running in the cloud, which I;m sure does wonder for performance, responsiveness, and latency.
We can all thank the lord this project is two years old and most likely cancelled by now, but we have no way of knowing if Microsoft is still intending for this to be the future direction of Windows. Since people don’t want to use “AI” of their own volition, it only makes sense in the technology industry’s sick, twisted mind to force people into using “AI” with efforts like this. Consent has never been Silicon Valley’s strength, after all.
At the time of writing, Microsoft is 225 billion dollars in the red on “AI”, so I wouldn’t be surprised if attempts to replace the regular Explorer shell with something “AI”-based is still very much on the table in Redmond.
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. The driver (libvulkan_lvp.so, ~17 MB) installs into /usr/pkg/lib, and its ICD manifest (advertising Vulkan API 1.4) installs into /usr/pkg/share/vulkan/icd.d/, so a Vulkan loader on the system can discover it. ldd resolves every dependency cleanly. The entire process — environment setup, dependency builds, the Mesa build, and installation — is automated end to end and reproducible on a fresh install.
It’s important to note that the next step in the process is to port the Vulkan loader, which is required to actually run Vulkan applications. This entire effort is still ongoing and seems to be handled mostly by Dean Howell alone, so expect breakage and incomplete documentation as development progresses. Still, this is a hugely important effort, and seeing it this far along is great news.
