To celebrate my 21 years and 20000 posts as OSNews’ managing editor, it’s time for a massive fundraiser: €1 for every story I’ve posted over the past 21 years, for a long-term total goal of €20000. Because OSNews is ad-free and independent, I rely entirely on your donations and support for my income and OSNews’ continued survival. Your donations ensures OSNews remains free of ads, corporate influence, and other commercial interests that have ruined so many great websites.
Why support OSNews?
We do not run any ads, so we don’t have to be friendly to advertisers (i.e. the technology companies we’re supposed to report on).
We are not owned and controlled by a large media company dictating our tone and content. You’d be surprised how many other sites are.
We do not use any “AI”; not during research, not during writing, not for images, nothing.
We rely entirely on your support to keep going.
I want to make sure I can run OSNews for another two decades and another 20000 posts, and I need your help to do so. Since my wife, who has a tough, underpaid job in elderly care, is largely unable to work due to health reasons caused by that very same job, my income has become a lot more crucial for our kids, my wife, and myself. With OSNews readers being more skeptical of subscription-like things like our Patreon than most people, it’s exactly these one-time donations that make up the bulk of your support.
To sweeten the deal, I’ve come up with a bunch of silly incentives that will unlock at certain thresholds:
At €5000: I will use Windows 11 for a month for everything non-gaming. The real Windows 11, so not debloated, and with an online account, Office, Outlook for email, the whole deal. I dread this so much.
At €10000: I’ll make a proper photo and video tour of my office, my computers, and my vast collection of PDAs, edited and produced on Linux, of course. I know very little about videography, so I’ve got some learning to do.
At €15000: I will use some of the donated money to buy a Mac and use macOS for a month for everything non-gaming, and write a proper, fair review about it. I’ll live the Apple desktop life on a modern M series Mac, probably a MacBook Air or Neo, depending on deals I can find, most likely used/refurbished. I dread this even more than using Windows 11.
At €20000: as detailed in my 21 years and 20000 posts article, I will get the OSNews logo tattooed on my right shoulder (my first tattoo), in honour of the role OSNews plays in my life. Photo and video evidence of the result will be provided.
I know many of you don’t really care about incentives and silly things like these, but I think they’re fun and add some interesting things to donate to. The donations already started coming in, so we’ve got a small head start. Also, if anyone has any idea on how to add a cool progress bar to OSNews to keep track of the donations and incentives, please let me know. I’m sure some of you can whip something up or point me to something.
OSNews was founded in 1997, so we’re almost 30 years old. Let’s keep this wonderful little corner of the people-focused web alive for just a euro per post. Everyone here deserves it, because y’all are great. ♥️
USB is apparently broken, but all 8 cores are functional, and it boots to a desktop. It’s still early days, for the ARM port in general and the M1 Mac port specifically, but it’s a great start.
I’ve seen some wild projects in my day, but this one is definitely up there as one of the more ambitious.
Stock Microsoft Windows CE 2.11 running on a real Nintendo 64. A custom HAL drops the unmodified nk.lib kernel onto VR4300, brings up the CE 2.11 GWES desktop and shell, mounts the EverDrive-64 X7’s SD card under \SDCard, treats the N64 controller as a mouse, plays sound through the N64 AI hardware via the standard CE wave stack, and runs third-party CE 2.11 EXEs straight off the SD card.
This is a hobby reverse-engineering project: there is no official CE 2.11 port to N64 from Microsoft. Everything below the unmodified nk.lib (HAL, OAL, display driver, FSD, kbd/mouse PDD, wave PDD, RDP-accelerated GDI fill, ed64-X7 driver) is part of this repo.
Getting a fully operational desktop on Windows CE 2.11 is a lot harder than it appears at first sight, because this earlier version of Windows CE didn’t come with many of the reference implementations of components that later versions would add. OEMs were supposed to develop their own user interfaces for Windows CE 2.11, so the entire desktop you see here on this N64 port – window manager, taskbar, file manager, and so on – consists of custom code developed by ThroatyMumbo, using the standard Windows CE APIs.
That’s not all, though, as the same applies to the various drivers needed to make Windows CE 2.11 talk to the hardware in the Nintendo 64. Windows CE 2.11 contains the interfaces for drivers but OEMs were supposed to write their own device drivers. So ThroatyMumbo did: the display driver, input drivers, sound driver, cartridge driver, and so on, are all written from scratch. Absolutely incredible. Note: it seems “AI” has been involved in this project, but it’s unclear to what extent. I didn’t see any telltale signs, but readers have reached out to me about this.
The result of all this is that you can now run Windows CE 2.11, including a familiar shell, on your N64, and run any Windows CE applications as well. Absolutely wild.
There is one specific way in which the non-corporate open source projects typically document how their infrastructure work: not at all, and Flathub is no different. The full picture likely lives only in my brain, and while it could be sorted out by anyone (especially in this LLM age, yay or nay), why should it only be me thinking at night about all the single points of failure?
Like any system that evolved naturally, it’s all over the place. It’s tempting to tell its history chronologically, but even then, it’s difficult to find a good entry point. Instead, this post focuses on what happens when users call flatpak install; later entries will cover the website and, finally, the build infrastructure. Buckle up!
As time goes by and more and more issues with Flatpak are addressed, I feel my attitude towards the technology change somewhat. I’m still very much a traditional package manager type of person, and will opt for my distribution’s repository if the versions they have are up-to-date, but I’m no longer audibly groaning if an application I want is only really available as a Flatpak. For the increasing number of normal, average users switching to Linux, Flatpak is probably the right way to go, especially since it can easily coexist with your traditional package manager.
The only part of the linked article that made me raise my eyebrow was the reliance on Fastly, which seems to form an important linchpin of the whole Flathub stack. Fastly is an American company, and while they support Flathub entirely for free, the state of the world does have me wonder if this couldn’t evolve into a problem in a myriad of ways, perhaps through questionable people acquiring Fastly or through pressures from the clown car US administration.
I’m sure it’s all fine, but it’s hard not to think of these things in this day and age.
Microsoft is finally rolling out one of the most requested set of features to Windows 11: a movable and resizable taskbar. Windows 11 did away with the ability to move the taskbar to any side of the screen, as well as a various other taskbar customization options, that had been there since the very first iteration of the taskbar in Windows 95. Now they’re finally bringing it back.
Microsoft is finally rolling out two of the most requested features: the ability to move the taskbar and make it smaller, so you have more screen space. I tested Windows 11’s new movable taskbar integration, and it’s just as good as the original Windows 10 version, which let you move the taskbar to the top or sides.
It works exactly as you’d expect it to, with icons, text, menus, and other user interface elements adapting to their new location on the sides or top of the screen. I feel absolutely stupefied that I need to make a news item about this in this, the year of Our Lady 2026, but I know a lot of people stuck on Windows 11 were really missing these basic features.
Almost exactly 21 years ago, in June 2005, at a mere 20 years old, I took over the managing editor role at OSNews from Eugenia. I had already published a few articles in the years prior, and had given Eugenia enough confidence to suggest me as her replacement. It was, and is, a great honour.
In those 21 years and more than 20000 posts, I’ve seen a lot of beautiful things. Linux grew from a curiosity among nerds into a popular desktop operating system, and often a better choice for gaming than Windows. The BSDs flourish steadily, growing into even stronger and capable alternatives to desktop Linux than they already were. On the commercial side of things, new offerings challenged the hegemony of Microsoft and Windows. While Android and Chrome OS are at best merely tolerated, the idea that a newcomer would produce not one, but two operating systems that would successfully take on Microsoft and Apple seemed unimaginable when I started in 2005.
While many alternative operating systems of the early 2000s faded away, we’ve also seen success stories there. Haiku evolved from an unusable, unstable promise on the horizon into a stable, daily-drivable operating system. The unique Genode Framework and Sculpt OS keep exploring and redefining the boundaries of what a general purpose operating system should be. Redox has exploded onto the scene, and keeps making massive strides almost every month. OS/2 is still actively updated, maintained, and sold. The Amiga will outlast us all.
Internet culture, too, is changing, and while things definitely look bleak right now, there are sparks of hope and joy. The general attitude towards the big technology companies among the general public has shifted from admiration to mistrust and dislike, corporate social media seems to be crumbling, and the youngest generations absolutely despise the latest hype, “AI”. All is certainly not lost, and sometimes I feel shimmers of hope that the pendulum may swing back to a more people-focused web, a web we’ve been part of since 1997.
In those 21 years and more than 20000 posts, I’ve also seen a lot of hypes come and go, hypes that if I didn’t embrace them, I’d surely be left behind. The “pivot to video“, the cryptocurrency mania, NFTs, virtual reality and the metaverse, “AI” – all technologies and concepts I recognised for the hypes that they were, and consequently ridiculed and ignored, much to the dismay of many believers. I’ve got the angry emails and comments to prove it.
This illustrates something about OSNews that I value and hold dear: OSNews doesn’t jump on bandwagons, doesn’t frantically try to follow the latest trends, doesn’t cave under the pressure of big money interests. OSNews is constant, stable, deliberate, patient. Since 1997, we’ve covered the technology industry with interest, excitement, and wonder – tempered by a healthy dose of skepticism. When you follow this industry for almost three decades, you learn to spot the patterns and see the threads before anyone else does.
That’s not to say we haven’t gone through changes. The most significant changes to OSNews happened in recent years, where instead of working on the site on a mostly voluntary basis with a pittance of ad revenue coming my way, I’ve turned my work for OSNews into my job. As part of this change, I removed all advertising from our website, morphing OSNews into a fully reader-funded endeavour. No ads, no corporate interests, no media network breathing down my neck. OSNews is a truly independent technology news website, a rarity these days. I don’t have to keep corporate overlords or advertisers happy, and you’d be surprised to learn just how rare that is on the modern web.
The OSNews website itself is fairly unchanging too, having gone through only a handful of redesigns since its founding in 1997. We’ve been using our current design, developed by Adam Scheinberg, for as long as I can remember (10-15 years?), and thanks to our independent, ad-free nature, any possible future redesign would only make the site simpler and even faster than it already is. There’s no redesign in the cards at the moment, but rest assured, if it ever comes, we’ll buck the trend of websites getting ever more complex and demanding and make OSNews lighter and even faster.
And yes, despite commenters making up far less than one percent of our readership, I’ll always opt to keep them. We might be a site of lurkers, but comments are a core part of OSNews. Even the annoying ones. Especially the annoying ones.
That being said, there’s going to be a small change to our design, rolling out today (it might take a few reloads for it to appear). To mark my 21 years and 20000 posts, OSNews is getting a new-ish logo, which combines the classic, intertwined beveled “O-S” from the early 2000s with the modern logo we’ve been using over the past 15 years or so. The O and S are intertwined once again, highlighting the continuity and stability I want OSNews to bring in this chaotic industry (I can write corporatese if I want to). Fun fact: this “new” logo was actually designed like 20 years ago, and we’ve had it in our back pocket ever since. Why create something new and of the times, when you’ve got something great sitting right there?
Aside from the new logo, I’ll be running a big fundraiser to mark this occasion early next week, with some silly incentives at various thresholds. If we reach the ultimate goal – a euro for every story I’ve posted – I’ll overcome some very deep-rooted fears and anxieties, and tattoo the OSNews logo on my body, as my very first tattoo. OSNews has been part of my life for more than two decades, and I have every intention to add at least another two – having such a core part of my life immortalised on my body only makes sense.
I’ve written about my anxiety disorder and how it affects me here on OSNews, and it’s been preventing me from getting various tattoos I’ve been wanting for decades (and not for the reasons you may think – it’s not the pain or the needles). No better way to get fucking over it by making a public promise to tens of thousands of people. You can start donating today, but I’ll publish a proper post about it on Monday.
Of course, OSNews wouldn’t exist without all of you, our hundreds of thousands of readers. Whether you donate or not, whether you comment or not (you probably don’t!), each and every one of you contributes to making OSNews the steady success it’s been for almost 30 years. Few websites can boast such an uninterrupted lineage, and it’s thanks to all of you who keep coming back, every day.
Google recently launched something called Health Coach, an “AI” thing that’s part of the company’s new Fitbit products. Let’s check in with how that’s going.
Put simply, Google’s paid replacement for Fitbit Premium immediately began hallucinating, even admitting to having made up the data before asking if, you know, maybe I’m the one who actually forgot to input a run. Remember, this is my very first report from this thing, making for an awful first impression. Even after this correction, the run data continues to exist within the AI-powered home screen layout, despite no record actually appearing within my account. It’s not exactly a great advertisement for a platform that costs $10 per month or $100 annually.
One of the top pieces of customer feedback in the graphics driver area is clear: “Windows Update downgrades my drivers.” Today, we are announcing a policy change to how display drivers are published through Windows Update — allowing 2-Part HWID + Computer Hardware ID (CHID) targeting for new devices. This change gives customers more control over their display driver of choice while preserving OEM control over the devices they ship.
Windows Update randomly downgrading your graphics drivers seems to be a common enough occurrence that its supposed fix deserves its own feature announcement and blog post. This is a real operating system that runs on most of the world’s PCs.
The EU’s Digital Markets Act has been in effect for a mere two years, but despite all the obstructionism, malicious compliance, and steady stream of lies from US tech companies and Apple in particular, it seems this rather basic consumer protection legislation is already bearing fruit.
In a two-year review report on the DMA, the European Commission notes that alternative browser usage has soared, data portability solutions are spreading, alternative application stores are growing, and much more. On top of that, end users can now opt out of companies combining various data sources for profiling, and a “significant share” of EU users have apparently done so. Furthermore, end users in the EU can now remove preinstalled applications (whereas American users cannot) and they can download their data from big technology companies and authorise other companies to use that data.
Mozilla published a blog post detailing how it has profited from the Digital Markets Act, and it ain’t no peanuts: every ten seconds, someone on iOS chooses Firefox on iOS’ browser choice screen, which amounts to more than six million Firefox users on iOS. They also tend to stick with Firefox on iOS, as retention is five times higher when this browser is chosen through a browser choice screen.
Academic analysis points the same way. Independent researchers compared Firefox daily active users in the EU with 43 non-EU countries. Comparing the 15 months before and after browser choice screens rolled out on iOS, they found that Firefox daily active users (DAU) were 113% higher in the EU than it would have been without the DMA. On Android, it was 12% higher. The smaller Android effect is due to the fact that Firefox usage there started from a much higher base, and the Android rollout has been more uneven than on iOS. The research also shows that the DMA’s effect is growing over time.
Both the underlying data in the EC report and the data Mozilla provides indicates that the Digital Markets Act is having real and tangible effects, for end users, developers, and companies alike. The neverending barrage of anti-EU and anti-DMA propaganda from Apple, the US government, and their PR attack dogs seems to have been weirdly justified, from the American perspective: basic consumer protection legislation does, indeed, work to lessen the stranglehold major technology companies have on our lives.
And considering just NVIDIA’s market cap alone is now equal to more than 17% of the United States’ GDP, it makes sense the Americans are unhappy with the DMA. That’s going to make one hell of a sound when it pops.
Interest in classic user interface design is spiking, and today we’ve got another great example, highlighted yesterday by Micheal MJD. Classic 7 combined Windows 10 LTSC with a whole slew of themes and deep modifications to deliver Windows 10, but made to look, feel, and even act like Windows 7.
Classic 7 is a Windows 10 (IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021) modification made to look 1:1 to Windows 7. It has all of the goodies that Windows 7 had along with some extras included! Classic 7 features a 1:1 OOBE recreation, meaning it’ll feel just like your PC simplified once more.
As Micheal MJD’s video shows, this is much more than a mere theme, and extends far deeper into the operating system than these kinds of projects generally do. I have no idea how stable this really is, or if it’s even remotely legal to do something like this, but who the hell cares – this is incredibly fun, and seems quite well done.
The months, they don’t stop coming, so here’s another progress report for Haiku, our beloved successor to BeOS, the best operating system ever made. This past month the team’s added basic support for SMP on ARM64 (enough to use it in QEMU), the MIME sniffer’s internals have been overhauled for some serious performance gains, and a long list of smaller, but no less important or impactful, changes. Beta 6 still seems to be a ways off due to a number of unfixed bugs and an upcoming WebPositive release, but my usual spiel applies: you don’t need to wait for a beta to test Haiku. It’s stable enough as it is, and a nightly release will do you just fine, including updating to newer nightlies and application releases.
This past month also saw which projects Haiku’s GSoC people will be working on. Two projects will focus on improving Haiku’s Bluetooth stack, including adding HFP profile support and support for HID devices, as well as general Bluetooth improvements across the board. The third and final project will focus on improving and expanding Haiku’s Devices application to turn it into a real management utility along the lines of those available on many other modern operating systems.
The European Union is considering rules that would restrict its member governments’ use of U.S. cloud providers to handle sensitive data, sources familiar with the talks told CNBC.
The fact that this has only just become a possible reality now, and not decades ago, is beyond me, but better late than never, I suppose. The Americans voted en masse (not voting is a vote for the winner!) for Trump twice, and there’s no indication they won’t vote for such an anti-Europe basket case again. Their opinions and attitudes towards Europeans are clear: they dislike us deeply, and after the last few years, there’s no going back. Violating trust is easy; restoring it takes decades. Relying on the Americans for our digital infrastructure is, therefore, a monumentally stupid and self-defeating idea.
Of course, many members states are addicted to the cloud services from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, so there’s going to be many individual member states who simply won’t reduce their dependency on the Americans of their own volition. My own country of origin, The Netherlands, only recently signed off on the sale of its government ID services company and associated personal data to an American company, despite the vast majority of the Dutch House of Representatives telling them not to. As such, it makes sense for the EU to step in and simply making it illegal to hand over sensitive data to the Americans.
Of course, we’ve got a long way to go, and I’m sure many of any possible proposed restrictions will be watered down considerably by pressure form major member states. Addiction is a harsh disease.
A few weeks ago, we talked about a project within KDE to revive two of their classic themes, Oxygen and Air, and polish them up to make them usable on the current versions of KDE. The developers and designers working on this project say they’ve been utterly surprised by just how popular this news has proven to be, and Filip Fila published a blog post with some thoughts on this unexpected popularity. Why are people yearning so strongly for user interfaces from the past?
That’s the real story underneath the retro-yearning. It isn’t a simply story of people wanting their childhood from the 2000s back. It’s that a lot of ‘the new’ we’ve been offering doesn’t satisfy. It doesn’t have personality. It doesn’t feel warm. It doesn’t feel like it was made with the idea of being anything more than a clean product that gets the job done. The escapism towards the past is a symptom. A symptom of unmet needs, not mere sentimentality.
Fila uses modern architecture as an example, and I think it’s an apt one. While monumental modern architecture can easily be beautiful and striking, it’s the mundane buildings all around us that just don’t seem to elicit any positive emotions, no sense of belonging or safety. As Fila also notes, the decades-long swing to minimalism in both architecture and UI design isn’t merely because of a preference among designers, but also because minimalism is a hell of a lot cheaper to produce. A building with very little ornamentation and basic, straight lines is much easier, and thus cheaper, to design, construct, and maintain. The same applies to graphical user interface design.
There are some signs that the pendulum is starting to swing back towards more instead of less, in all aspects of design. More and more people are loudly demanding buildings to adopt more classical elements, and as we can all attest to here on OSNews, the longing for aspects of UI design from the ’90s and early 2000s to make a return is strong. And not just among us deep in the weeds, either; I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen normal people utterly confounded by modern UI design.
The news that Google is working to move Chrome OS to the Android technology stack, and that it wants to start putting Android on laptops, is not exactly news, as the company has been talking about it for years. At an Android event today, the company finally unveiled the culmination of all this work: Googlebooks.
We’re bringing together the best of Android, which comes with powerful apps on Google Play and a modern OS that’s designed for Intelligence, and ChromeOS, which comes with the world’s most popular browser. The result is Googlebook: a new category of laptops built with Gemini’s helpfulness at its core, designed to work seamlessly with the devices in your life and powered by premium hardware. We’re sharing a sneak peek into the Googlebook experience today and will have a lot more to share later this year.
The approach here seems very similar to Chromebooks, with Googlebooks being designed and built by various OEMs, but instead of Chrome OS they run Android in desktop mode. Of course, “AI” has been creamed all over these things, to the point where not even the venerable mouse cursor is safe: if you wiggle your cursor, it will turn into “Magic Pointer”, which will highlight various “AI” actions as you hover over stuff on your screen. Google also showed off an “AI”-based feature to create widgets, as well as the ability to access files on your phone right from a Googlebook.
That’s about all we know as far as functionality and features goes. They’re supposed to go on sale later this year, with models coming from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo.
Every single software product is dealing with the question about what to do with “AI”-generated code, but the question is particularly difficult to answer for open source operating systems like Linux distributions and the various BSDs, which often consist of a wide variety of software packages from hundreds to thousands of different developers. On top of that, they also have to ask the “AI” question for every layer of their offering, from the base install, to the official repositories, to community-run ones.
As users, we, too, are asking these same questions, wondering just how much “AI” taint we’re willing to spread across our computers. I understand the difficult position Linux distributions are in with regard to “AI”. I mean, when even the Linux kernel itself is tainted by “AI”, a no-“AI” policy is basically an empty gesture for them at this point. Personally, I find a policy of “we don’t do ‘AI’ in our work, but we don’t have control over the thousands of components we consist of” to be an entirely reasonable, if deeply unsatisfying, position to take. What else are they going to do? You can’t really be a Linux distribution without, you know, the Linux kernel, which is, as I’ve already said, utterly tainted by “AI” at this point.
Still, in the back of my mind, I always had a trump card: if all else fails, we’ll always have OpenBSD. Its project leader Theo de Raadt is deeply principled, every OpenBSD user and contributor I know hates “AI” deeply, and the project routinely sticks to their principles even when it’s difficult or inconvenient. Yes, this makes OpenBSD not the most ideal desktop operating system, but I’d rather use that than something that embraces the multitude of ethical, environmental, quality, and legal concerns regarding “AI” code completely.
Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that OpenBSD already contains slopcode in its base installation, with the project’s leaders and developers remaining oddly silent about it. My friend and OSNews regular Morgan posted this on Fedi a few days ago:
Nearly six weeks later, and the question of whether “AI” generated code in tmux — not tool-assisted bug finding, not refactoring, actual LLM-generated slop with questionable license(1) — that was consequently merged into OpenBSD base, is considered acceptable by the lead devs, remains unanswered. Despite Theo de Raadt’s concrete stance against any code of questionable license origin polluting the project — and the tmux merge was indeed questionable — it seems this is being swept under the rug. This makes me extremely uncomfortable; it’s like seeing a fox in the henhouse but the farmers are all looking the other way and no one can convince them to admit they can see it and root it out.
I really don’t know what to do being just a user; I feel like even if I tried to chime in on the mailing list I would just be ignored like the others trying to raise the alarm. I hope, as they do, that this is being discussed internally, away from the public list, and that a positive outcome is near. Maybe they are waiting for the 7.9 release before setting anything in stone.
Or maybe the “AI” disease has infected one of the last pure operating system projects we have left and there’s no going back.
I obviously share Morgan’s concerns, and like him, I’m also afraid that opening the door to a few drops of slop in base will quickly grow into a torrent of slop as time goes by. Yes, it’s just a patch to tmux, but it’s in base, and the “base” of a BSD is almost a sacred concept, and entirely the last place where you want to see code that raises ethical, environmental, quality, and legal concerns. For all we know, this patch of slop or the next one contains a bunch of GPL code because it just so happens that’s where the ball tumbling down the developer’s pachinko machine ended up.
GPL code that would then be in the base of a BSD.
I echo the call for the OpenBSD project to address this problem, and to set clear boundaries and guidelines regarding “AI” code, so users and developers alike know what level of quality and integrity we can expect from OpenBSD and its base installation going forward.
Microsoft is currently testing a brand new performance-enhancing feature in Windows 11.
Microsoft, too, is introducing something to Windows 11 called “low latency profile” and it this will work irrespective of the processor, be it AMD64 CPUs like Intel or AMD or ARM64 ones like from Qualcomm. Essentially what this new tech will do is apply a maximum available clock frequency boost for a very small span of time, like for one to three seconds, when a user launches any app. The idea is that the app launch time will reduce while the quick clock burst should not impact the overall efficiency of the system by much.
Unsurprisingly, boosting the processor’s clock speed to its maximum for a few seconds will make a menu or application open a little faster. I’m not entirely sure why anyone seems surprised by this, but here we are. Yes, the Start menu will load faster and applications will be ready quicker if you boost the processor to its full potential, but that does raise the question of why Windows 11 would need to do that just to open a menu or load an application in the first place.
According to Microsoft’s Scott Henselmann, who defended Microsoft’s approach (weirdly enough he did so on a nazi platform called “Twitter” that I’m obviously not linking to), every other modern operating system does the exact same thing, pointing specifically to macOS and GNOME and KDE on Linux. He also pointed out that the Start menu today does a lot more than the same Start menu back in Windows 95, including making network requests and rendering everything in HiDPI.
I just want a cascading menu of stuff I can run and don’t want my launcher to make network requests, but alas, I guess I’m old.
Anyway, I don’t know enough about the intricacies of how modern processors work to make any statements about how this affects battery life, but instinctively, you’d think this would not exactly be conducive to that. I also wonder if this will trigger a lot of laptops to spin up their fans whenever you open the Start menu, because the few seconds your processor goes full tilt raises its temperature just enough to make that happen. Once this new feature comes out of testing and is generally available, I’d be quite interested in seeing battery tests, as well comparisons to other operating systems to see how it fares.
Luckily, there’s really very little in the form of lock-in with GitHub, unless you really value your stars or whatever. There are countless alternatives, and if you’re a programmer, it’s probably absolutely trivial for you to run your own instance of any of the various available forges. If you’re still on GitHub, you should really be thinking about, and planning for, leaving, as it seems it’s circling the drain.
Big news from the Debian release team: Debian is going for reproducible package builds.
Aided by the efforts of the Reproducible Builds project, we’ve decided it’s time to say that Debian must ship reproducible packages. Since yesterday, we have enabled our migration software to block migration of new packages that can’t be reproduced or existing packages (in testing) that regress in reproducibility.
Reproducible means, in short, that you can verify that the source code used to build a package is indeed that source code. This provides a layer of defense against people tampering with code or otherwise trying to fiddle with the process between source code and final package on your system. This effort constitutes a tremendous amount of work, but it’s massively important.
ymawky is a small, static http web server written entirely in aarch64 assembly for macos. it uses raw darwin syscalls with no libc wrappers, serves static files, supports GET, HEAD, PUT, OPTIONS, DELETE, byte ranges, directory listing, custom error pages, and tries to be as hardened as possible.
why? why not? the dream of the 80s is alive in ymawky. everybody has nginx. having apache makes you a square. so why not strip every single convenience layer that computer science has given us since 1957? i wanted to understand how a web server actually works, something i know little about coming from a low-level/systems background. the risks that come up, the problems that need to be solved, the things you don’t think about when you’re writing python or c.
this (probably) won’t replace nginx, but it is doing something in the most difficult way possible.
Ada is incredibly well designed. One way this shows is that it takes the big, monolithic features of other languages and breaks them down into their constituent parts, so we can choose which portions of those features we want. The example I often reach for to explain this is object-oriented programming.
