GNOME has announced it’ll be increasing its dependency on systemd, the popular init system used by most (popular) Linux distributions. While GNOME already had a few relatively inconsequential dependencies on systemd, it was effectively not a huge problem to run GNOME on operating systems that don’t have systemd, which most notably includes the various flavours of BSD. That’s going to change.

There’s going to be two changes, one of which is relatively minor, and one of which will pose much bigger problems. The minor change involves GDM becoming dependent on systemd’s userdb infrastructure in order to clean up a lot of GDM’s code involved in multi-seat setups and remote login. Currently, this works through a series of hacks that the GDM developers are going to clean up, switching to using systemd-userdb to “dynamically allocate user accounts, and then runs each login screen as a unique user”.

To aid non-systemd environments during this transition, GDM will get a temporary alternate code path that enables you to run GDM without systemd-userdb. So if you compile GDM against elogind, GDM will use an alternative trick to enable multiple graphical sessions under the same user. This trick will remain in place at least until GNOME 50, but its future after that is uncertain.

The second change is much more involved.

Next, the bigger change. Since GNOME 3.34, gnome-session uses the systemd user instance to start and manage the various GNOME session services. When systemd is unavailable, gnome-session falls back to a builtin service manager. This builtin service manager uses .desktop files to start up the various GNOME session services, and then monitors them for failure. This code was initially implemented for GNOME 2.24, and is starting to show its age. It has received very minimal attention in the 17 years since it was first written. Really, there’s no reason to keep maintaining a bespoke and somewhat primitive service manager when we have systemd at our disposal. The only reason this code hasn’t completely bit rotted is the fact that GDM’s aforementioned hacks break systemd and so we rely on the builtin service manager to launch the login screen.

Well, that has now changed. The hacks in GDM are gone, and the login screen’s session is managed by systemd. This means that the builtin service manager will now be completely unused and untested. Moreover: we’d like to implement a session save/restore feature, but the builtin service manager interferes with that. For this reason, the code is being removed.

↫ Adrian Vovk

Mitigating this change will be a lot more involved for operating systems that don’t use systemd, and the blog post goes into detail into what, exactly, needs to be done in systemd-less environments. There’s quite a few systemd components and other little tidbits that you will need to find or create alternatives for, and considering you’ll need to have all of it in place roughly by GNOME 50, roughly a year from now, I can imagine this causing quite a few headaches for platforms like the BSDs and Linux distributions using init systems other than systemd.

With these changes, GNOME further solidifies itself as a Linux desktop only – and lest anyone forget, that’s entirely within their right to do. Systemd haters can jump up and down all they want, but in the end, they have no right to demand that GNOME developers spend precious time and resources testing GNOME on and developing it for platforms that they themselves do not use. They’re clearly targeting the trifecta of Linux, system, and Wayland, and that’s their choice to make, not anyone else’s.

Still, if operating systems like OpenBSD and FreeBSD, or Linux distributions without systemd intend to continue offering a fully functional GNOME desktop, they’re going to have some work to do.

And I’ve got another custom hobby operating system for you today: Munal OS.

An experimental operating system fully written in Rust, with a unikernel design, cooperative scheduling and a security model based on WASM sandboxing.

↫ Munal OS GitHub page

Munal OS has no bootloader, but is instead compiled into a single EFI binary that contains all it needs to function, including a few applications. Since Munal OS relies on a PCI driver that communicates with QEMU via the VirtIO 1.1 specification for things like input and graphics, it can’t yet run on real hardware. It has its own UI toolkit, and comes with applications like a basic web browser, a text editor, and a Python terminal.

Today, we’re bringing you Android 16, rolling out first to supported Pixel devices with more phone brands to come later this year. This is the earliest Android has launched a major release in the last few years, which ensures you get the latest updates as soon as possible on your devices.

Android 16 lays the foundation for our new Material 3 Expressive design, with features that make Android more accessible and easy to use.

↫ Seang Chau at the Google blog

Android 16 doesn’t seem like a very big release, and that’s because for most users, it really isn’t. There’s some neat features in here, like improved notification grouping, live notifications, a slew of protection features for people who run increased risk (think journalists or victims of abuse), and proper desktop-style windowing on tablets, which seems like the tentpole feature for now. The Material 3 Expressive design is not really here yet, though as that will come in subsequent Android 16 updates.

The release for devices coincides with the release of the source code, which is no longer released as part of the development process, but dumped across the fence at release time. This means that those of us using a de-Googled Android ROM – I use GrapheneOS – will have to wait a bit longer than we’re used to before getting the new version.

As part of its WWDC announcements, Apple has unveiled Containerization, which uses macOS’ virtualisation framework to run Linux containers on Apple Silicon Macs.

Containerization executes each Linux container inside of its own lightweight virtual machine. Clients can create dedicated IP addresses for every container to remove the need for individual port forwarding. Containers achieve sub-second start times using an optimized Linux kernel configuration and a minimal root filesystem with a lightweight init system.

vminitd is a small init system, which is a subproject within Containerization. vminitd is spawned as the initial process inside of the virtual machine and provides a GRPC API over vsock. The API allows the runtime environment to be configured and containerized processes to be launched. vminitd provides I/O, signals, and events to the calling process when a process is ran.

↫ Containerization GitHub page

Alongside this new tool, Apple also released container, which creates and runs OCI-compliant container images. Yes, both of these names are horribly generic and are definitely going to lead to confusion in online discussions and writing, but the tools themselves seem quite nice. People stuck on macOS who need to do Linux work can now easily get their work done on macOS – if you’re okay with using Electron for developers, of course, which is what containers really are.

Clearly, nobody can ignore Linux, not even Apple or Microsoft.

For years now – it feels more like decades, honestly – Apple has been trying a variety of approaches to make the iPad more friendly to power users, most notably by introducing, and subsequently abandoning, various multitasking models. After its most recent attempts – Stage Manager – fell on deaf ears, the company has thrown its hands up in the air and just implemented what we all wanted on the iPad anyway: a normal windowing environment.

Apple today revealed an overhaul of iPad multitasking, introducing a completely new windowing system, a macOS-style Menu Bar, a pointer, and more.

The centerpiece of the multitasking improvements is a new macOS-style windowing system. Apps still launch in full-screen by default, preserving the familiar ‌iPad‌ experience, but users can now resize apps into windows using a new grab handle. If an app was previously used in a windowed state, it will remember that layout and reopen the same way next time.

↫ Hartley Charlton at MacRumors

The new window manager includes tiling features, Exposé, support for multiple displays, and swiping twice on the home button will minimise all open windows. It’s literally the macOS way of managing windows transplanted onto the iPad, with some small affordances for touch input. This is excellent news, and should make the multitasking features of the iPad, which, at this point, is as powerful as a MacBook, much more accessible and effortless than all those hidden gesture-based features from before.

The amount of RAM in your iPad seems to determine how many active windows you can have open before the older ones get put to sleep, from four on the oldest iPad Pro models, to many more on the most recent models. Any windows above that limit will still be visible, but will just be a screenshot of their most recent state until you interact with them again. Any windows above a limit of twelve will be pushed to the recents screen instead.

In addition, and almost just as important, iPadOS 26 also introduces proper background processes, allowing applications to actually keep running in the background instead of being put to sleep. Anyone who has ever done any serious work on an iPad that involves long processes like exporting a video will consider this a godsend.

Now all we need is a proper terminal and Xcode and the iPad can be a real computer.

FreeBSD 14.3 has been released, an important point release for those of us using the FreeBSD 14.x branch. This release brings 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) support to many modern laptop wireless chips, OCI container images are now available in Docker and GitHub repositories, and a number of cornerstone packages have been updated to their latest versions.

Apple at WWDC announced iOS 26, introducing a comprehensive visual redesign built around its new “Liquid Glass” concept, alongside expanded Apple Intelligence capabilities, updates to core communication apps, and more.

Liquid Glass is a translucent material that reflects and refracts surroundings to create dynamic, responsive interface elements, according to Apple. The new design language transforms the Lock Screen, where the time fluidly adapts to available space in wallpapers, and spatial scenes add 3D effects when users move their iPhone. Meanwhile, app icons and widgets gain new customization options, including a striking clear appearance.

↫ Tim Hardwick at MacRumors

Apple also posted a video on YouTube where you can see the new design language in motion, which gives a bit of a better idea of what it’s actually like. Of course, before you believe anyone who’s writing about this new Liquid Glass design language, the only true way to form a coherent opinion of a user interface is through usage, so keep that in mind.

Looking at the video, the good part that immediately jumps out at me about this Liquid Glass stuff is the animations informing you where stuff is coming from and where it’s going. These are the sort of affordances I was writing about almost 20 years ago, when Compiz’ animations and effects made windows and virtual desktops feel like “real” objects that had a physical presence in a space. Apple’s Liquid Glass seems to have the same effect, and I’m here for it.

The transparency, though, I’m not a huge fan of. Depending on the content shown beneath the glass user interface elements, contrast can suffer, making things incredibly hard to read. While the glassy refraction effects looks neat, I would’ve much rather seen a focus on blurred glass, which makes a lack of contrast much less likely to occur. I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of screenshots, videos, and thinkpieces about how this much transparency is going to hurt readability.

I love it when an operating system gets a design language overhaul, and in this case, Apple is applying it across the board, to all of its operating systems. This may be the perfect moment for me to grit my teeth, hold my nose, and get my hands on a Mac just so I can write about Liquid Glass once it lands.

Quite often, I wonder how much nostalgia plays part in our perception of past events. Luckily, with software, you can go “back” and retest it, and so there’s no need for any illusions and misconceptions. To wit, I decided to reinstall and try Windows 7 again (as a virtual machine, but still), to see whether my impressions of the dross we call “modern” software today are justified.

↫ Igor Ljubuncic

The conclusion is that, yes, you can still get quite far today with Windows 7, and I honestly don’t fault anyone for longing for those days. Windows 7 sits dead smack in the middle between the dreadfulness of Windows XP and pre-patches Vista on one extreme, and the ad-infested, “AI”-slop that are Windows 10 and 11. Its Aero look also happens to be experiencing somewhat of a revival, with both Apple and Google borrowing heavily from it for their latest software releases. Transparent blurred glass is making a comeback, but I doubt the current crop of designers at Apple and Google will be able to top just how nice Aero Glass looked in Windows 7.

Still, I don’t think you should be using an out-of-support version of Windows for anything more than retrocomputing and as a curiosity, for obvious reasons we’re all aware of. With the end of support for Windows 10 – still used by two-thirds of Window users – approaching quickly, a lot of people are going to have to make the same choice that fans of Windows 7 made years ago: keep using what I like, risks and all, or move on to what I don’t like, but is at least maintained and supported? That is, assuming you can even make that choice in the first place, since in the current economic uncertainty, most definitely cannot.

Maybe the Windows world will dodge a bullet, and the circumstances force Microsoft to extend support for Windows 10, like they did with Office applications. Let’s see if they blink, again.

We’ve cleared another month by the skin of our teeth, so it’s time for another month of progress in Redox, the Rust-based operating system. They’ve got a big one for us this month, as Redox can now run X11 applications in its Orbital display server, working in much the same way as XWayland. This X11 support includes DRI, but it doesn’t yet fully support graphics acceleration. Related to the X11 effort is the brand new port of GTK3 and the arrival of Mesa3D EGL.

Moving on, there’s the usual massive list of bugfixes and low-level changes, such as the introduction of the /var directory and subdirectories for compliance with the FHS, a fix to make the live image work when there’s no other working storage driver, and a ton more. Of course, there’s the usual list of relibc fixes, as well as a ton of updated and improved ports.

Starting 20 June 2025, new rules and regulations in the European Union covering, among other thins, smartphones and tablets, will have some far-reaching consequences for device makers – consequences that, coincidentally, will work out pretty great for consumers within the European Union. The following “ecodesign requirements” will come into force on 20 June:

• resistance to accidental drops or scratches and protection from dust and water
• sufficiently durable batteries which can withstand at least 800 charge and discharge cycles while retaining at least 80% of their initial capacity
• rules on disassembly and repair, including obligations for producers to make critical spare parts available within 5-10 working days, and for 7 years after the end of sales of the product model on the EU market
• availability of operating system upgrades for longer periods (at least 5 years from the date of the end of placement on the market of the last unit of a product model)
• non-discriminatory access for professional repairers to any software or firmware needed for the replacement

↫ European Commission

Especially the requirements around repairability and the long-term availability of operating system updates will affect us consumers quite positively. While Android OEMs have improved their update policies somewhat, they’re still lagging behind Apple considerably, especially if you opt for lower-end devices or devices from smaller manufacturers. These new requirements will make getting Android updates a consumer right, not an optional service if the OEM happens to feel like it. Which they usually don’t.

I’m sure countless OEMs will try to weasel their way through supposed cracks and gaps in the exact wording of the rules, but the EU has shown not to take too kindly to corporations, big and small, trying to comply maliciously.

As part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to compliance with the Digital Markets Act, we are making the following changes to Windows 10, Windows 11, and Microsoft apps in the European Economic Area (EEA). We’ll update this post as these changes are shipped, first in Windows Insider builds and then in retail builds.

↫ Windows Insider Program Team

It’s time for more changes to make Windows suck just a little bit less, but only for those of us who live in the European Economic Area (the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway), courtesy of basic consumer protection laws like the Digital Markets Act. Windows users in other parts of the world will not get these changes, so if you don’t live in the EU/EEA, feel free to look away to remain blissfully ignorant.

In the EU/EEA, Edge will no longer bug you to be set as the default browser, unless you actually open Edge. In addition, other Microsoft applications won’t bug you to install Edge if you’ve removed it from your system. Setting a browser as default will now also register more filetypes. Whereas in other parts of the world setting, say, Firefox as your default browser in Windows will only register it as the default for http, https, .htm, and .html, it will register the following additional defaults: ftp, read, .mht, .mhtml, .shtml, .svg, .xht, .xhtml, and .xml.

Users in the EU/EEA can now also remove the Microsoft Store, without affecting updates or the ability for developers to the Microsoft Store Web Installer for their applications. You can now also have multiple online search providers in Windows Search, and countless Microsoft applications and Windows components will no longer default to opening Edge for web content, opting to use your default browser instead.

These are all very welcome improvements for European Windows users. It’s almost like consumer protection laws work.

Ice-T is a terminal emulator, allowing Atari computers with extended memory (128KB or more) to connect to remote dialup and Telnet hosts, such as Unix shells and BBSs. A limited version for machines without extended memory is also available.

↫ Ice-T 2.8.0 release announcement

Version 2.8.0 was released a few days ago, the first new release in almost twelve years. It comes with a ton of improvements, such as VT-102 support, limited ANSI coloured text support, macros, and a lot more.

The first prototype was ready in just six months. By October 1986, the project was announced, and in January 1987, the first NEWS workstation, the NWS 800 series, officially launched. It ran 4.2BSD UNIX and featured a Motorola 68020 CPU. Its performance rivaled that of traditional super minicomputers, but with a dramatically lower price point ranging from ¥950,000 to ¥2.75 million (approximately $6,555 to $18,975 USD in 1987). Competing UNIX workstations typically cost closer to ¥10 million (around $69,000 USD). NEWS caught on quickly in universities and R&D labs, where cost sensitive researchers needed real performance. The venture team had invested ¥400 million into development (about $2.76 million USD), and remarkably, they recouped those costs within just two months of launch.

That same year, Sony introduced a lower cost version called POP NEWS (PWS 1550). With a GUI shell named NEWS Desk, a document sharing format called CDFF (Common Document File Format), and a focus on Japanese language desktop publishing, PopNEWS aimed to make UNIX more accessible to general business users. Targeted at the Desktop Publishing market, it showed Sony’s desire to bridge consumer and professional segments in ways no other UNIX vendor was trying at the time.

↫ Obsolete Sony’s Newsletter

I’ve been fascinated by Sony’s NEWS workstations, and especially the NEWS-OS operating system, for a long time now. Real hardware is hard to find and prohibitively expensive, but some of these Sony NEWS workstations can be emulated through MAME. Sadly, as far as I can tell, you can only emulate NEWS-OS up to version 4.x, as I haven’t been able to find any information about emulating version 5.x and the final version, 6.x. If anyone knows anything about how to emulate these, if at all possible, please do share with the rest of us.

What’s interesting about Sony’s UNIX workstation efforts from the ’80s and ’90s is that they played an important role in the early development of the PlayStation. The early development kits for the PlayStation were modified NEWS workstations, with added PlayStation hardware. To further add to the importance of the NEWS line for gaming, Nintendo used them to develop several influential and popular first-party SNES titles, which isn’t surprising considering Nintendo and Sony originally worked together on bringing a CD-ROM drive to the SNES, which would later morph into the PlayStation as Nintendo cancelled the agreement at the last second.

What if you want to find out more about the PS/2 Model 280? You head out to Google, type it in as a query, and realise the little “AI” summary that’s above the fold is clearly wrong. Then you run the same query again, multiple times, and notice that each time, the “AI” overview gives a different wrong answer, with made-up details it’s pulling out of its metaphorical ass. Eventually, after endless tries, Google does stumble upon the right answer: there never was a PS/2 Model 280, and every time the “AI” pretended that there was, it made up the whole thing.

Google’s “AI” is making up a different type of computer out of thin air every time you ask it about the PS/2 Model 280, including entirely bonkers claims that it had a 286 with memory expandable up to 128MB of RAM (the 286 can’t have more than 16). Only about 1 in 10 times does the query yield the correct answer that there is no Model 280 at all.

An expert will immediately notice discrepancies in the hallucinated answers, and will follow for example the List of IBM PS/2 Models article on Wikipedia. Which will very quickly establish that there is no Model 280.

The (non-expert) users who would most benefit from an AI search summary will be the ones most likely misled by it.

How much would you value a research assistant who gives you a different answer every time you ask, and although sometimes the answer may be correct, the incorrect answers look, if anything, more “real” than the correct ones?

↫ Michal Necasek at the OS/2 Museum

This is only about a non-existent model of PS/2, which doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. However, what if someone is trying to find information about how to use a dangerous power tool? What if someone asks the Google “AI” about how to perform a certain home improvement procedure involving electricity? What if you try to repair your car following the instructions provided by “AI”? What if your mother follows the instructions listed in the leaflet that came with her new medication, which was “translated” using “AI”, and contains dangerous errors?

My father is currently undertaking a long diagnostic process to figure out what kind of age-related condition he has, which happens to involve a ton of tests and interviews by specialists. Since my parents are Dutch and moved to Sweden a few years ago, language is an issue, and as such, they rely on interpreters and my Swedish wife’s presence to overcome that barrier. A few months ago, though, they received the Swedish readout of an interview with a specialist, and pasted it into Google Translate to translate it to Dutch, since my wife and I were not available to translate it properly.

Reading through the translation, it all seemed perfectly fine; exactly the kind of fact-based, point-by-point readout doctors and medical specialists make to be shared with the patient, other involved specialists, and for future reference. However, somewhere halfway through, the translation suddenly said, completely out of nowhere: “The patient was combative and non-cooperative” (translated into English).

My parents, who can’t read Swedish and couldn’t double-check this, were obviously taken aback and very upset, since this weird interjection had absolutely no basis in reality. This readout covered a basic question-and-answer interview about symptoms, and at no point during the conversation with the friendly and kind doctor was there any strife or modicum of disagreement. Still, being into their ’70s and going through a complex and stressful diagnostic process in a foreign healthcare system, it’s not unsurprising my parents got upset.

When they shared this with the rest of our family, I immediately thought there must’ve been some sort of translation error introduced by Google Translate, because not only does the sentence in question not match my parents and the doctor in question at all, it would also be incredibly unprofessional. Even if the sentence were an accurate description of the patient-doctor interaction, it would never be shared with the patient in such a manner.

So, trying to calm everyone down by suggesting it was most likely a Google Translate error, I asked my parents to send me the source text so my wife and I could pour over it to discover where Google Translate went wrong, and if, perhaps, there was a spelling error in the source, or maybe some Swedish turn of phrase that could easily be misinterpreted even by a human translator. After pouring over the documents for a while, we came to a startling conclusion that was so, so much worse.

Google Translate made up the sentence out of thin air.

This wasn’t Google Translate taking a sentence and mangling it into something that didn’t make any sense. This wasn’t a spelling error that tripped up the numbskull “AI”. This wasn’t a case of a weird Swedish expression that requires a human translator to properly interpret and localise into Dutch. None of the usual Google Translate limitations were at play here. It just made up a very confrontational sentence out of thin air, and dumped it in between two other sentence that were properly present in the source text.

Now, I can only guess at what happened here, but my guess is that the preceding sentence in the source readout was very similar to a ton of other sentences in medical texts ingested by Google’s “AI”, and in some of the training material, that sentence was followed by some variation of “patient was combative and non-cooperative”. Since “AI” here is really just glorified autocomplete, it did exactly what autocomplete does: it made shit up that wasn’t there, thereby almost causing a major disagreement between a licensed medical professional and a patient.

Luckily for the medical professional and the patient in question, we caught it in time, and my family had a good laugh about it, but the next person this happens to might not be so lucky. Someone visiting a foreign country and getting medicine prescribed there after an incident might run instructions through Google Translate, only for Google to add a bunch of nonsense to the translation that causes the patient to misuse the medication – with potentially lethal consequences.

And you don’t even need to add “AI” translation into the mix, as the IBM PS/2 Model 280 queries show – Google’s “AI” is entirely capable of making shit up even without having to overcome a language barrier. People are going to trust what Google’s “AI” tells them above the fold, and it’s unquestionably going to lead to injury and most likely death.

And who will be held responsible?