For a while now I’ve been wondering if Microsoft would blink when it comes to Windows 10’s rapidly approaching end of support date. Only a few weeks ago, Microsoft at the very least twitched by extending support for Microsoft Office on Windows 10, which should’ve been an indication of what was to come. Today, Microsoft actually blinked: regular consumers wishing to keep using Windows 10 after support ends in October will now be able to sign up for an additional year of security updates.

Microsoft is making this possible by allowing Windows 10 users to sign up for the Windows 10 Extended Security Update program for one year of extended updates, for free. This program is normally only available to paying enterprise customers, and this marks the first time the company is letting regular consumers make use of it. The “for free” requires some serious caveats, though, as depending on how you look at it, it’s not free at all. You options are to either pay around $30, pay 1000 Microsoft points, or to sign up for the Windows Backup application to synchronise your settings to Microsoft’s computers (the “cloud”).

This last option is technically free, but not only does the free tier include just 5GB of online storage, it also makes use of OneDrive, so if you’re using OneDrive to store your documents and other files you may need to pay for additional storage. On top of that, anything that requires the use of OneDrive is simply not “free”, and only allows Microsoft to further get its claws in you. If Sartre was alive today, Huis clos would’ve declared “L’enfer, c’est OneDrive” instead.

Regardless, it’s the stay of execution many Windows 10 users have been waiting for, even if it isn’t entirely perfect. Sure, choosing between an unmaintained Windows 10, Windows 11, and using OneDrive is about as pleasant as shoving shards of glass underneath your fingernails, and I have a feeling quite a few people are about to find out.

IceWM, the venerable X11 window manager, has released version 3.8.0, with some small tweaks, bug fixes, and changes. The theme menu now loads faster, the processor and memory graphs use less processor cycles, among other small tidbits.

Asterinas is a new Linux-ABI-compatible kernel project written in Rust, based on what the authors call a “framekernel architecture”. The project overlaps somewhat with the goals of the Rust for Linux project, but approaches the problem space from a different direction by trying to get the best from both monolithic and microkernel designs.

↫ Ronja Koistinen at LWN.net

Ronja Koistinen has done an outstanding job diving into this new operating system kernel and approach to kernel architecture, including its intended focus and goals. Head on over to the source and read it over there.

For a while, X terminals were a reasonably popular way to give people comparatively inexpensive X desktops. These X terminals relied on X’s network transparency so that only the X server had to run on the X terminal itself, with all of your terminal windows and other programs running on a server somewhere and just displaying on the X terminal. For a long time, using a big server and a lab full of X terminals was significantly cheaper than setting up a lab full of actual workstations (until inexpensive and capable PCs showed up). Given that X started with network transparency and X terminals are so obvious, you might be surprised to find out that X didn’t start with them.

↫ Chris Siebenmann

I did indeed assume X terminals were part of the ecosystem from day one, but it makes sense that it took a while, and that they didn’t enter the scene until X had established itself as the standard windowing system in the UNIX world. I’ve been trying to get my hands on specifically the last HP X terminal, but they’re hard to find and often very expensive. I’d love to get a taste of a proper networked X environment on real UNIX, in the way people actually used to use it professionally.

As a sidenote, Siebenmann is doing such an excellent job with these stories about UNIX, X11, and related matters. He’s like the Raymond Chen of the UNIX world.

Over the past few months, YouTube has been trying another round of anti-adblock measures. Currently the anti-adblock stuff is being A/B tested, and one of my accounts is in the experimental group. I wrote a filter that partially avoids one of the anti-adblock measures, fake buffering, on uBlock Origin (and Brave browser, since it uses the same filter rules). (It’s already in the default filter lists, you don’t need to manually add the filter.)

One thing that people have ran into is “fake buffering”, where videos will take a while to load due to a lot of buffering, but only at the very start of the video (there’s no mid-video fake buffering). As I’ll explain, the fake buffering is 80% of the length of the ads you would’ve seen, so even with fake buffering you’re still saving time using an adblocker.

↫ iter.ca

The battle between YouTube on one side, and users wanting a non-shitty experience without paying for YouTube Premium on the other, is unlikely to end any time soon. Your computer, your rules, so I’m on the side of the people wanting to block ads on YouTube – the same applies to OSNews if you don’t want to pay for our ad-free version – but I’m still intrigued to find out just how far Google is willing to go.

I sometimes see YouTube with ads at other people’s homes. It’s a nightmare.

It’s 2025, and we’re going to talk about BeOS, AtheOS, Cosmoe, and OpenBeOS, all in one news item, right here, right now, on OSNews.

In the very early 2000s, Cosmoe was a unique project that started out as a merger of the AtheOS userland with the Linux kernel. AtheOS, in turn, was one of the quintessential hobby operating systems of the golden age of the advanced hobby operating systems, the early 2000s. AtheOS would eventually be abandoned in 2002, but would be forked into Syllable and continue development until it, too, was eventually abandoned in 2012.

Cosmoe was the brainchild of Bill Hayden, and originally consisted of the AtheOS userland running on top of the Linux kernel, in order to address the lack of supported hardware a custom operating system kernel inevitably has to deal with. Not long after the start of Cosmoe, AtheOS was abandoned, as mentioned above, but a new project had entered the scene: OpenBeOS, now known as Haiku. Hayden switched gears, and instead started porting the parts that made up OpenBeOS to run on the Linux kernel.

This project progressed nicely, but in 2007 Cosmoe came to a halt (ironically, our last item about Cosmoe is “Cosmoe is back“) as Hayden had no more free time left to work on it, being a father of five, and so he decided to put the project on hold indefinitely. That is, until last year, when everything changed.

In mid-2024, my 3rd son Joshua, not even born when I started this project but who is now in college studying to be a programmer himself, had some questions about operating systems. I decided to dust off Cosmoe and see if I could get it running again, to show him what I had worked on. At first it would only compile and run on extremely old 32-bit versions of Mandrake Linux from 2007. But I had caught the bug again. Not only had I forgotten how fun Cosmoe was to program, but the intervening 17 years of progress made by OpenBeOS (now Haiku) made the certain aspects of this revival come at lightning speed. Day by day, week by week, I got it running on newer versions of Linux, and re-synchronized it with ever-more-recent releases of Haiku. After about 2 months of late-night effort, I had a version of Cosmoe that was 64-bit compatible, ran on multiple modern Linux releases, and was almost completely up-to-date with the latest Haiku source changes.

↫ Cosmoe’s history page

We’re halfway through 2025 now, and Cosmoe now exists as two separate, but related projects. There’s Cosmoe Classic, which is the updated and modernised incarnation of Cosmoe’s original concept: Haiku’s userland running on top of the Linux kernel. In its current form, it runs inside an SDL window on your Linux desktop, as there’s no native video driver. Cosmoe Classic, however, is not what Hayden is focusing on.

Instead, Hayden is focusing on the new Cosmoe, which takes the same idea – the Haiku userland running on a Linux kernel – but implements it in a completely different way:

Cosmoe is a C++ class library that allows developers to build rich, native Linux apps with the easy-to-use BeOS API. This library is a light-weight, serverless version of Cosmoe Classic which targets the Wayland compositor on Linux.

↫ Cosmoe’s GitLab page

What Cosmoe on Wayland (to differentiate it from Cosmoe Classic) allows you to do is run BeOS/Haiku applications on Linux, provided you are running Wayland. The project is in an alpha state, but once compiled, it comes with a few BeOS/Haiku sample applications you can run right on your Wayland-based Linux desktop. Hayden states that about 95% of the BeOS API is implemented in Cosmoe, with the TODO file giving an idea of what tasks need to be done to improve compatibility and implement other improvements.

The return of Cosmoe is certainly not something I saw coming, but I’m incredibly excited. I’m not entirely sure about the usefulness of running Haiku applications on Wayland on Linux, but who the hell cares – this is an awesome project, with a ton of cherished history behind it that gives me butterflies in my stomach. It’s absolutely beautiful to see a project like this come back to life in 2025.

Cosmoe is back. Again.

rou2exOS is a 64-bit DOS-like operating system (OS). The system is mainly written in Rust, but some portion of x86 assembly is used as well (inline + freestanding code for the stage2 kernel loading).

↫ Blog post about rou2exOS at blog.vxn.dev

It can do basic VGA operations, comes with a very barebones networking stack, realtime clock support, a FAT12 driver, and a few more tidbits. It’s a rewrite of the previous iteration of the hobby operating system.

Welcome news coming out of Jolla, the company that develops Sailfish OS. Up until now, if you bought their Jolla C2 smartphone, you had to pay a yearly subscription fee in order to get updates (with the first year included in the purchase price). Today they’ve announced their dropping this construction, and they now guarantee five years of free updates.

We’re happy to announce that from now onwards long-term Sailfish OS updates are included free-of-charge to all Jolla C2 devices for a minimum of 5 years. This applies also to everybody who have already purchased the Jolla C2.

↫ Announcement at the Jolla forums

People don’t like subscriptions, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Jolla was simply running into a lot of resistance to this subscription model from potential customers. Nobody likes subscriptions, and I think that counts doubly so for the kinds of people interested in buying a phone like the C2 with Sailfish OS.

Kian Bradley was downloading something using BitTorrent, and noticed that quite a few trackers were dead.

Most of the trackers were totally dead. Either the hosts were down or the domains weren’t being used.

That got me thinking. What if I picked up one of these dead domains? How many clients would try to connect?

Kian Bradley

It turns out the answer is a lot.

Accessibility is something that doesn’t get nearly enough attention, especially considering because not only will we need accessibility features eventually as we grow older, but also because a lot of accessibility features are just helpful even if you don’t technically need them. Given these facts, it’s a shame that accessibility is usually an afterthought, doubly so on open source desktops, a problem we recently talked about.

But what if you don’t just need to use a few applications as, say, a blind person, but also actually program as a blind person? Acidic Light, accessibility engineer at KDE e.V., has published a blog post about how screen readers actually work, and what it’s like to program while blind, and the conclusions are not exactly great.

I truly feel that, based on my experience with KDE and my experience actually delving into the weeds with AccessKit in a custom UI system, that accessibility programming just isn’t accessible. Unless you happen to already understand the way each platform works, trying to find resources on how to actually let a screen reader know your UI exists is just painful. It’s going to involve reading code other people have already written. It’s going to involve hours, if not days, if not weeks of research and painful debugging. You likely won’t be able to ask many people for help, because they’ll know as much as you do.

↫ Acidic Light

If the people who know most what is needed to make a program accessible have so many problems actually making programs accessible, because the tooling, documentation, and institutional knowledge just isn’t there, what hope do other programmers have to make their code accessible? If a blind programmer can’t scratch their own itch, so to speak, we’re never going to reach a point where accessibility becomes a given.

I’m very happy awareness of accessibility is growing, but I feel like this isn’t the first time we’ve seen an increase in accessibility awareness only for it to eventually fizzle out without meaningful improvements for those that need it the most. I really hope it sticks this time.

I hate how these months keep going down like vodka-martinis on an Italian beach, but at least we get another progress report for Haiku every time. Aside from the usual small changes and bug fixes, the most important of which is probably allowing the EXT4 driver to read and write again, there’s this little paragraph at the end which definitely stands out.

This month was a bit lighter than usual, it seems most of the developers (myself included) were busy with other things… However, HaikuPorts remained quite active: most months, at this point, there are more commits to HaikuPorts than Haiku, and sometimes by a significant margin, too (for May, it was 52 in Haiku vs. 258 in HaikuPorts!). I think overall this is a sign of Haiku’s growing maturity: the system seems stable enough that the porters can do their work without uncovering too many bugs in Haiku that interrupt or halt their progress.

↫ Haiku activity report for May

I definitely hope that this positive read is correct, as it would be a shame for the project to run into declining activity and contributions just as it seems to be serving as a solid base for quite a wide variety of applications. I’ve definitely been seeing more and more people giving Haiku a try lately and coming away impressed, but of course, that’s just anecdotal and I have no idea if that means Haiku has reached a certain point of maturity.

One thing that definitely does indicate Haiku is a lot more stable and generally usable than most people think is the massive amount solid ports the platform can handle, from Firefox to LibreOffice, and everything in between. I think a lot of people would be surprised by just how far they can get with their day-to-day computing needs with Haiku, assuming their hardware can boot Haiku and is properly supported, of course.

My opinion on Haiku has not changed, but I’m a random idiot you shouldn’t be listening to. The cold and harsh truth is that old people like me who want their BeOS boomerware but in 2025, are a small minority who are impossible to please. The Haiku team’s focus on getting modern software ported to Haiku, instead or trying to convince people to code brand new native Haiku applications, is objectively the correct choice to ensure the viability of the platform going forward.

If Haiku wishes to fully outgrow its hobby status, looking towards the future is a far better approach than clinging to the past, and unsurprisingly, Haiku’s developers are more than smart enough to realise that.

Wayland this, Liquid Glass that – but what if you just want a nice, comforting text-based environment? Sure, you can just boot straight into a terminal, or perhaps get fancy about it with Screen or whatever, but what if you want a text-based environment, but don’t want to give up windows, menus, your mouse? How about a graphical user interface made up entirely of text?

Twin is text-based windowing environment with mouse support, window manager, terminal emulator, networked clients and the ability to attach/detach mode displays on-the-fly.

It supports a variety of displays:

• plain text terminals: Linux console, twin’s own terminal emulator, and any termcap/ncurses compatible terminal;
• X11, where it can be used as a multi-window xterm;
• itself (you can display a twin on another twin);
• twdisplay, a general network-transparent display client, used to attach/detach more displays on-the-fly.

↫ The Twin GitHub page

It looks exactly like what you’d think this would look like, and I find it absolutely fascinating. I’m not entirely sure how usable it is or who or what use case it’s optimised for, but I adore the dedication to the cause. It works on both Linux and FreeBSD, and most likely other systems as well.

Recently, a Reddit user discovered a rare RCA Spectra 70/35 computer control panel from 1966 in their family’s old collapsed garage, posting photos of the pre-moon landing mainframe component to the “retrobattlestations” subreddit that celebrates vintage computers. After cleaning the panel and fixing most keyswitches, the original poster noted that actually running it would require “1,500lbs of mainframe”—the rest of the computer system that’s missing.

↫ Benj Edwards at Ars Technica

Apparently, no photos of this panel existed online, and it may be one of the few – if only – ‘surviving’ example of such a panel. Of course, it’s effectively useless without all of the other chunks that make up the entire Spectra mainframe, but it’s still an interesting find. The person who found it intends to turn it into what is essentially a piece of home decor, but maybe we’ll get lucky and someone else out there who has been collecting parts and pieces to assemble a working RCA Spectra 70/35 can do something more productive with it.

Are you still using Windows 7, 8, 8.1, or a 32 bit version of Windows, relying on LibreOffice for your sexy office tasks of writing TPS reports and calculating and tabulating juicy, plump numbers? Bad news: the next version of LibreOffice will remove support for these platforms. Buried deep in the release notes of the second beta for LibreOffice 25.8, it reads:

Support for Windows 7 and 8/8.1 was removed.

Support for x86 (32-bit) Windows builds is deprecated.

↫ LibreOffice 25.8 beta 2 release notes

I honestly doubt many people actually still rely on LibreOffice on these platforms, and even if for some unfathomable reason you do, you are probably also okay with sticking with an older version of LibreOffice to keep your weird setup going a few years longer. You do you.