Banan-OS: a hobby operating system in C++

This is my hobby operating system written in C++. Currently supports x86_64 and i686 architectures.

↫ Banan-OS git page

A hobby operating system as a learning experience, but for once not written in Rust, which in and of itself makes it more unique than you’d think. Despite being mostly a one-person hobby project, it’s ticked quite a few boxes already: SMP, network stack, copy-on-write memory, ELF loading, NVME and ATA support, PS/2 and USB peripheral support, a basic GUI, and a lot more.

Contributions are welcomed, too.

VEKOS: the Verified Experimental Kernel Operating System

VEKOS is an experimental operating system written in Rust that focuses on verification and security at its core. This is the first alpha release (v0.0.1) that demonstrates the basic architecture and key features of the system.

↫ VEKOS GitHub page

Hobby and experimental operating systems written in Rust are not exactly a novel concept, but that doesn’t mean each new one that comes up isn’t cool. This one is still in its very early stages, but focuses on something quite interesting: every filesystem and memory operation is cryptographically verified using a proof system. It’s already got basic file system operations, signal handling and a scheduler, a shell, and more.

Contributions are welcomed.

HarmonyOS Next gets container tool to run Android applications

HarmonyOS Next, the new version of Huawei’s mobile operating system, runs on a brand new microkernel, uses a new, homegrown programming language, and most notably in this duopolistic world, does not run Android applications. This won’t be much of an issue inside China, where Huawei can more easily make sure the most important Chinese applications are supported and ported over, but outside of China that might pose some problems, especially for Chinese tourists visiting other countries.

It turns out there’s a solution for this, called 出境易 (as Android Authority notes, this seems to translate to something like “Easy Abroad”), which is basically a containerised Android runtime using microG. It comes with its own built-in application store filled with a number of popular Android applications, and runs them on HarmonyOS Next.

The tool is called 出境易, which roughly translates to “Easy Abroad.” It’s apparently designed to aid Chinese tourists who travel abroad. The tool seems to create a container for Android apps to run in, which is not a new concept but is surprising to see pop up so quickly for the new operating system. When installed, the tool lets you install a number of Android apps from its self-contained app store, including Facebook, Instagram, Discord, Reddit, YouTube, Google Search, Google Maps, Uber, Chrome, Gmail, Spotify, Disney Plus, Netflix, Steam, and more. These Android apps show up in a folder in the home screen but they cannot be dragged out of the folder.

[…]

An early hands-on of the tool from YouTuber LL Techview shows that it works surprisingly well. Android apps launch quickly, run pretty smoothly, and even appear in the recents menu. It’s even possible to sign into your Google Account to use apps like Google Search and Gmail.

↫ Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority

There are limitations, of course, and they’re roughly the same as the ones found on any device running microG instead of Google Play Services – something I just wrote about in my review of /e/OS on a FairPhone 5: certain banking applications won’t work, anything that hooks too deeply into Play Services won’t run, that sort of stuff. On top of that, this tool also brings in some limitations of its own, like only whitelisted application being supported, notifications not working properly, and a few other issues.

This all feels very similar to what Jolla and Sailfish tried to do way back in 2014. Running Android applications as a side hustle was jank back then and I feel like it’s probably going to be jank today. Even just running Play Services in a restrictive sandbox – like I do with GrapheneOS on my daily driver, a Pixel 8 Pro – presents some issues, and microG adds even more compatibility issues on top. Putting all of this in a container will surely add an additional layer of jank, like it did on Sailfish OS.

Regardless, I’m 100% down with trying to get my hands on a HarmonyOS Next device if they ever become available in some form here in Sweden, as I feel like a review of what is the most serious attempt at breaking the Android-iOS duopoly in over a decade is something that belongs here on OSNews. If that time ever comes, I might set up another fundraiser to get it done.

Microsoft: we’re not lowering the Windows 11 system requirements

If you were secretly hoping Microsoft would lower the system requirements for Windows 11 so you could upgrade your or your family’s Windows 10 machines to Windows 11, you’re going to be in for some bad news. In a blog post, Microsoft detailed that its most stringent Windows 11 requirement – the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 – is here to stay and crucial to the future of Windows.

By instituting TPM 2.0 as a non-negotiable standard for the future of Windows, we elevate the security benchmark. It allows you and us to better align with the growing need for formidable data protection in the modern digital sphere.

[…]

In conclusion, TPM 2.0 is not just a recommendation—it’s a necessity for maintaining a secure and future-proof IT environment with Windows 11. And it’s an important part of the larger Zero Trust strategy, alongside Secure Boot, Credential Guard, and Windows Hello for Business.

↫ Steven Hosking at the Windows IT Pro Blog

So no, if you had the hope Microsoft would lower Windows 11’s system requirements in the face of the oncoming end of support deadline for the 60% of Windows users still using Windows 10, your hope has just been dashed. A more likely outcome here is that as the deadline grows closer, Microsoft will extend the deadline by another year, and if needed another, because leaving 60% of users without security updates and little to no path to upgrade is not going to be a good look for the marketing and legal departments.

If you really do want to upgrade to Windows 11, there’s a few options. There’s the enterprise-focused Windows 11 LTSC 2024 release, which does not require a TPM 2.0, regarding it as an optional feature instead. On top of that, LTSC is much more bare-bones, shipping without much of the stuff many of us more nerdy users aren’t interested in anyway. The big downside is that getting your hands on a legal copy of LTSC will be difficult, as it’s only available to volume licensing customers, which you most likely are not. Of course, you shouldn’t give a shit about Microsoft’s rules, so you can always use unapproved methods of getting a license.

Another option is the one I took for my parts-bin Windows 11 PC which I only use for League of Legends: I bought a cheap TPM 2.0 module from eBay, slotted it into my motherboard, and was on my merry way. Due to League of Legends’ required rootkit, a TPM 2.0 module is needed, so a few euros and days waiting later, I was ready to go. Do make sure you get the right type of TPM 2.0 module for your motherboard, as they’re not universally compatible.

The final option is to use one of the few remaining ways to circumvent Windows 11’s system requirements, which are sadly dwindling with every major update. Right now that means using a tool like Flyby11, which uses the Windows Server installer to bypass Windows 11’s system requirements. We’ll have to wait and see for how long that trick remains possible.

Convert NTFS to Btrfs and boot Windows off Btrfs

Ntfs2btrfs is a tool which does in-place conversion of Microsoft’s NTFS filesystem to the open-source filesystem Btrfs, much as btrfs-convert does for ext2. The original image is saved as a reflink copy at image/ntfs.img, and if you want to keep the conversion you can delete this to free up space.

↫ Mark Harmstone

An amazing piece of software that works on both Linux and Windows, and even, as described above, comes with the option of undoing the conversion if you so desire and haven’t removed the original image yet. Its developer, Mark Harmstone, of course stresses that while he thinks the tool is quite stable, he obviously makes no guarantees or claims about its stability. In other words, please don’t use this on sensitive data or in a production environment.

What makes this tool even more amazing is that you can combine it with two of Harmstone’s other tools to really pull some rabbits out of your hat. First, there’s his Btrfs driver for Windows, which, as the name implies, allows Windows to work with Btrfs-formatted drives. Second, and here’s where things get really spicy, there’s Quibble, his custom bootloader consisting of open source reimplementations of Windows’ own bootloader. Using these three tools together you can, if you’re lucky, boot and run Windows off a Btrfs drive.

That’s quite cool, and while perhaps not particularly useful due to its experimental nature, it’s still an awesome weekend project.

Intel board kicks out CEO, launches new budget desktop GPUs

This is a bit of an odd few days for Intel. Mere days after the board ousted its CEO Pat Gelsinger, once heralded as the chip giant’s messiah, they’re today launching two brand new desktop graphics cards. They’re aimed at the more budget-oriented consumer, and might very well be the last discrete graphics cards Intel makes, since this is one of the product lines on the chopping block.

Intel’s next — and possibly last — desktop graphics cards will begin arriving in just 10 days. Right on cue, the company has announced the budget $249 Arc B580 and $219 Arc B570, shipping December 13th and January 16th, respectively, as the “best-in-class performance per dollar” options in the GPU market.

They’re based on the same Xe2 “Battlemage” GPU architecture you’ll find in Intel’s Lunar Lake laptop chips but with more than double the graphics cores, up to 12GB of dedicated video memory, and up to 190W of power compared to their limited laptop forms — enough power to see the B580 slightly beat Nvidia’s $299 RTX 4060 and AMD’s $269 RX 7600, according to Intel’s benchmarks, but sometimes still trading blows.

↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge

As for Gelsinger’s dismissal, it seems the board forced him out after being frustrated with the slow progress the company was making in its turnaround. The fact that a finance person and a marketing person will together be interim CEOs seems to indicate the board is more interested in quick profit than a long-term turnaround, and with companies like Qualcomm being interested in acquiring Intel, the board’s short-term mentality might be winning out, and ousting Gelsinger is just paving the way for selling off parts of Intel until there’s nothing left.

Who knows, I might be reading way too much into all of this, but it feels like expecting an organisation as complex as a high-end processor makers to turn itself around in just a few years is incredibly shortsighted, and you’d think board members at Intel would understand that. If the goal is to maintain Intel as a separate, profitable entity making some of the world’s fastest processors, you’re going to need to give a CEO and leadership team more than just a few years to turn the ship around.

Within a few years we’ll know the board’s true intentions, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Intel being sold for parts over the coming years.

FreeBSD 14.2 released

FreeBSD 14.2 has been released, and as the version number suggests, this isn’t a major release with huge changes. Still, it does bring support for downloading and installing necessary firmware packages after installation, the latest versions of OpenZFS and OpenSSL, and much more.

FreeBSD 14.2 is available for the main architectures it supports – x86, PowerPC/POWER, ARM, and RISC-V, and can be downloaded from the usual location.

If not React, then what?

Rejecting an engrained practice of bullshitting does not come easily. Frameworkism preaches that the way to improve user experiences is to adopt more (or different) tooling from the framework’s ecosystem. This provides adherents with something to do that looks plausibly like engineering, except it isn’t. It can even become a totalising commitment; solutions to user problems outside the framework’s expanded cinematic universe are unavailable to the frameworkist. Non-idiomatic patterns that unlock significant wins for users are bugs to be squashed. And without data or evidence to counterbalance bullshit artists’s assertions, who’s to say they’re wrong? Orthodoxy unmoored from measurements of user outcomes predictably spins into abstruse absurdities. Heresy, eventually, is perceived to carry heavy sanctions.

It’s all nonsense.

↫ Alex Russell

I’m not a developer, but any application that uses frameworks like React that I’ve ever used tend to be absolute trainwrecks when it comes to performance, usability, consistency, and platform integration. When someone claims to have an application available for a platform I use, but it’s using React or Electron or whatever, they’re lying in my eyes – what they really have is a website running in a window frame, which may or may not even be a native window frame. Developing using these tools indicates to me a lack of care, a lack of respect for the users of your product.

I am militantly native. I’d rather use a less functional application than a Chrome web application cosplaying as a real application, and I will most likely not even consider using your service if all you have is a website-in-a-box. If you don’t respect me, I see no need to respect you. If you want an application on a specific platform, use that platform’s native tools and APIs to build it. Anything else tells me all I need to know about how much you truly care about the product you’re building.

The Hall SC-VGA-2 video processor, the Atari ST and NeXTSTEP: more tales of the unscreenshotable

This is the Hall Research Technologies SC-VGA-2, sold as a “VGA/HDTV Video Processor.” In addition to slicing, dicing and pureeing, apparently, it will take any of a bundle of input formats and both rescale and resample them on the fly into the VGA or HDTV signal you desire, including 60Hz rates. This came from a seller specializing in teleprompter equipment and Hall still sells an HDMI version with additional resolutions … for around US$500. However, this or the slightly newer SC-VGA-2A and SC-VGA-2B are all relatively common devices and found substantially cheaper used. Let’s try it out and show some sample output, including those delicious NeXTSTEP system messages and some ST grabs.

↫ Cameron Kaiser

With the obscurity of some of the hardware Cameron Kaiser details on his website, I’m not surprised he has some seriously unique needs when it comes to taking screengrabs. He couldn’t very well not take the device apart, and inside it appears to be a system with two small processors, at least one of which is an Intel 8051 8bit microcontroller. Kaiser goes into his usual great detail explaining and showing how the device works.

If you’ve got unique screengrabbing needs, this might be of interest to you.

MNT Pocket Reform Sculpt 24.10 preview image

Within in the last release cycle we worked on adding and extending the support for the i.MX8MP SoC as also found in one of the SoM options for the MNT Pocket Reform and are happy to show-case a first preview version of Sculpt running on this handy computing device.

↫ Josef Söntgen

If you have a Pocket Reform – I reviewed its bigger sibling earlier this year – you can now run Genode on it. Not everything is working flawlessly yet – most notably audio and NVMe need work – but networking is operational, so you can actually browse the web. I’m not sure how much overlap there is between Genode users and Pocket Reform owners, but at least both groups now know it’s an option.

The OSNews extra special discount bonanza extravaganza Black Friday super coverage

Today is “Black Friday”, which is the day where a lot of retailers, both online and offline, pretend to have massive discounts on things they either raised the prices for a few weeks ago, or for useless garbage they bought in bulk that’ll end up in a landfill within a year. Technology media happily partakes in this event, going full-mask off posting an endless stream of “stories” promoting these discounts. They’re writing ads for fake discounts, often for products from the very companies they’re supposed to report on, and dress them up as normal articles.

It’s sad and revealing, highlighting just how much of the technology media landscape is owned by giant media conglomerates.

OSNews does not partake. We’re independent, answer to nobody, and are mostly funded directly by you, our readers. If you want to keep it this way, and keep OSNews free from the tripe you see on every other technology site around this time, consider supporting us through Patreon, making a one-time donation through Ko-Fi, or buying some merch.

That’s it. That’s our extra special discount bonanza extravaganza Black Friday super coverage.

Cinnamon Desktop 6.4 released

The Cinnamon Desktop, the GTK desktop environment developed by the Linux Mint project, has just released version 6.4. The focus of this release is on nips and tucks in the default theme, dialogs, menus, and other user interface elements. They seem to have taken a few pages out of GNOME’s book, especially when it comes to dialogs and the OSD, which honestly makes sense considering Cinnamon is also GTK and most Cinnamon users will be running a ton of GNOME/Libadwaita applications.

There’s also a new night light feature to reduce eyestrain, vastly improved options for power profiles and management, and more. Cinnamon 6.4 will be part of Linux Mint’s next major release, coming in late December, but is most likely already making its way to various other distributions’ repositories.

So you want to write a KMail plugin?

Recently, I’ve been moving away from macOS to Linux, and have settled on using KDE Plasma as my desktop environment. For the most part I’ve been comfortable with the change, but it’s always the small things that get me. For example, the Mail app built into macOS provides an “Unsubscribe” button for emails.

[…]

Apparently this is also supported in some webmail clients, but I’m not interested in accessing my email that way. Unfortunately, I haven’t found an X11 or Wayland email client that supports this sort of functionality, so I decided to implement it myself. And anyway, I’m trying out Kontact for my mail at the moment, which supports plugins. So why not use this as an opportunity to build one?

↫ datagirl.xyz

Writing a Kmail plugin like this feels a bit like an arcane art, because the process is not documented as well as it could be, and I doubt that other than KDE developers themselves, very few people are interested in writing these kinds of plugins. In fact, I can’t find a single one listed on the KDE Store, and searching around I can’t find anything either, other than the ones that come with KDE. It seems like this particular plugin interface is designed more to make it easy for KDE developers to extend and alter Kmail than it is for third parties to do so – and that’s fine.

Still, this means that if some third party does want to write such a plugin, there’s some sleuthing and hacking to be done, and that’s exactly the process this article details. In the end, we end up with a working unsubscribe plugin, with the code on git so others can learn from it. While this may not interest a large number of people, it’s vital to have information like this out on the web for those precious few to find – so excellent work.

US Copyright Office strikes down proposed game preservation DMCA exception

A three-year fight to help support game preservation has come to a sad end today. The US copyright office has denied a request for a DMCA exemption that would allow libraries to remotely share digital access to preserved video games.

↫ Dustin Bailey at GamesRadar

This was always going to end in favour of the massive gaming industry with effectively bottomless bank accounts and more lawyers than god. The gist is that Section 1201 of the DMCA prevents libraries from circumventing the copy protection to make games available remotely. Much like books, libraries loan out books not just for research purposes, but also for entertainment purposes, and that’s where the issue lies, according to the Copyright Office, who wrote “there would be a significant risk that preserved video games would be used for recreational purposes”.

The games industry doesn’t care about old titles nobody wants to buy anymore and no consumer is interested in. There’s a long tail of games that have no monetary value whatsoever, and there’s a relatively small number of very popular older games that the industry wants to keep repackaging and reselling forever – I mean, we can’t have a new Nintendo console without the opportunity to buy Mario Bros. for the 67th time. That’d be ludicrous.

In order to protect the continued free profits from those few popular retro titles, the endless list of other games only a few nerds are interested in are sacrificed.

The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory

There have been some past rumblings on the internet about a capacitor being installed backwards in Apple’s Macintosh LC III. The LC III was a “pizza box” Mac model produced from early 1993 to early 1994, mainly targeted at the education market. It also manifested as various consumer Performa models: the 450, 460, 466, and 467. Clearly, Apple never initiated a huge recall of the LC III, so I think there is some skepticism in the community about this whole issue. Let’s look at the situation in more detail and understand the circuit. Did Apple actually make a mistake?

↫ Doug Brown

Even I had heard of these claims, and I’m not particularly interested in Apple retrocomputing, other than whatever comes by on Adrian Black or whatever. As such, it surprises me that there hasn’t been any definitive answer to this question – with the amount of interest in classic Macs you’d think this would simply be a settled issue and everyone would know about it. This vintage of Macs pretty much require recaps by now, so I assumed if Apple indeed soldered on a capacitor backwards, it’d just be something listed in the various recapping guides.

It took some very minor digging with the multimeter, but yes, one of the capacitors on this family of boards is soldered on the wrong way, with the positive terminal where the negative terminal should be. It seems the error does not lie with whomever soldered the capacitors on the boards – or whomever set the machine that did so – because the silkscreen is labeled incorrectly, too. The reason it doesn’t seem to be noticeable problem during the expected lifespan of the computer is because it was rated at 16V, but was only taking in -5V.

So, if you plan on recapping one of these classic Macs – you might as well fix the error.

Mozilla begs courts to allow Google search deal for Firefox to continue

The moment a lot of us has been fearing may be soon upon us. Among the various remedies proposed by the United States Department of Justice to address Google’s monopoly abuse, there’s also banning Google from spending money to become the default search engine on other devices, platforms, or applications.

“We strongly urge the Court to consider remedies that improve search competition without harming independent browsers and browser engines,” a Mozilla spokesperson tells PCMag.

Mozilla points to a key but less eye-catching proposal from the DOJ to regulate Google’s search business, which a judge ruled as a monopoly in August. In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering “something of value” to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices.

↫ Michael Kan at PC Mag

Obviously Mozilla is urging the courts to reconsider this remedy, because it would instantly cut more than 80% of Mozilla’s revenue. As I’ve been saying for years now, the reason Firefox seems to be getting worse is because of Mozilla is desperately trying to find other sources of revenue, and they seem to think advertising is their best bet – even going so far as working together with Facebook. Imagine how much more invasive and user-hostile these attempts are going to get if Mozilla suddenly loses 80% of its revenue?

For so, so many years now I’ve been warning everyone about just how fragile the future of Firefox was, and every one of my worries and predictions have become reality. If Mozilla now loses 80% of its funding, which platform Firefox officially supports do you think will feel the sting of inevitable budget cuts, scope reductions, and even more layoffs first? The future of especially Firefox on Linux is hanging by a thread, and with everyone lulled into a false sense of complacency by Chrome and its many shady skins, nobody in the Linux community seems to have done anything to prepare for this near inevitability.

With no proper, fully-featured replacements in the works, Linux distributions, especially ones with strict open source requirements, will most likely be forced to ship with de-Googled Chromium variants by default once Firefox becomes incompatible with such requirements. And no matter how much you take Google out of Chromium, it’s still effectively a Google product, leaving most Linux users entirely at the whim of big tech for the most important application they have.

We’re about to enter a very, very messy time for browsing on Linux.

Leaving big tech behind: Murena’s /e/OS on the Fairphone 5

There are so many ecological, environmental, and climate problems and disasters taking place all over the world that it’s sometimes hard to see the burning forests through the charred tree stumps. As at best middle-income individuals living in this corporate line-must-go-up hellscape, there’s only so much we can do turn the rising tides of fascism and leave at least a semblance of a livable world for our children and grandchildren. Of course, the most elementary thing we can do is not vote for science-denying death cults who believe everything is some non-existent entity’s grand plan, but other than that, what’s really our impact if we drive a little less or use paper straws, when some wealthy robber baron flying his private jet to Florida to kiss the gaudy gold ring to signal his obedience does more damage to our world in one flight than we do in a year of driving to our underpaid, expendable job?

Income, financial, health, and other circumstances allowing, all we can do are the little things to make ourselves feel better, usually in areas in which we are knowledgeable. In technology, it might seem like there’s not a whole lot we can do, but actually there’s quite a few steps we can take. One of the biggest things you, as an individual knowledgeable about and interested in tech, can do to give the elite and ruling class the finger is to move away from big tech, their products, and their services – no more Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, or Amazon. This is often a long, tedious, and difficult process, as most of us will discover that we rely on a lot more big tech products than we initially thought. It’s like an onion that looks shiny and tasty on the outside, but is rotting from the inside – the more layers you peel away, the dirtier and nastier it gets.

Also you start crying.

I’ve been in the process of eradicating as much of big tech out of my life for a long time now. Since four or five years ago, all my desktop and laptop PCs run Linux, from my dual-Xeon workstation to my high-end gaming PC (ignore that spare parts PC that runs Windows just for League of Legends. That stupid game is my guilty pleasure and I will not give it up), from my XPS 13 laptop to my little Home Assistant thin client. I’ve never ordered a single thing from Amazon and have no Prime subscription or whatever it is, so that one was a freebie. Apple I banished from my life long ago, so that’s another freebie. Sadly, that other device most of us carry with us remained solidly in the big tech camp, as I’ve been using an Android phone for a long time, filled to the brim with Google products, applications, and services. There really isn’t a viable alternative to the Android and iOS duopoly.

Or is there?

Well, in a roundabout way, there is an alternative to iOS and Google’s Android. You can’t do much to take the Apple out of an iPhone, but there’s a lot you can do to take the Google out of an Android phone. Unless or until an independent third platform ever manages to take serious hold – godspeed, our saviour – de-Googled Android, as it’s called, is your best bet at having a fully functional, modern smartphone that’s as free from big tech as you want it to be, without leaving you with a barely usable, barebones experience. While you can install a de-Googled ROM yourself, as there’s countless to choose from, this is not an option for everyone, since not everyone has the skills, time, and/or supported devices to do so.

Murena, Fairphone, and sustainable mining

This is where Murena comes in. Murena is a French company – founded by Gaël Duval, of Mandrake Linux fame – that develops /e/OS, a de-Googled Android using microG (which Murena also supports financially), which it makes available for anyone to install on supported devices, while also selling various devices with /e/OS preinstalled. Murena goes one step further, however, by also offering something called Murena Workspace – a branded Nextcloud offering that works seamlessly with /e/OS. In other words, if you buy an /e/OS smartphone from Murena, you get the complete package of smartphone, mobile operating system, and cloud services that’s very similar to buying a regular Android phone or an iPhone.

To help me test this complete package of smartphone, de-Googled Android, and cloud services, Murena loaned me a Fairphone 5 with /e/OS preinstalled, and while this article mostly focuses on the /e/OS experience, we should first talk a little bit about the relationship between Murena and Fairphone. Murena and Fairphone are partners, and Murena has been selling /e/OS Fairphones for a while now. Most of us will be familiar with Fairphone – it’s a Dutch company focused on designing and selling smartphones and related accessories that are are user-repairable and long-lasting, while also trying everything within their power to give full insight into their supply chain.

This is important, because every smartphone contains quite a few materials that are unsustainably mined. Many mines are destructive to the environment, have horrible working conditions, or even sink as low as employing children. Even companies priding themselves on being environmentally responsible and sustainable, like Apple, are guilty of partaking in and propping up such mining endeavours. As consumers, there isn’t much we can do – the network of supply chains involved in making a smartphone is incredibly complex and opaque, and there’s basically nothing normal people can do to really fully know on whose underpaid or even underage shoulders their smartphone is built.

This holiday season, Murena and Fairphone are collaborating on exactly this issue of the conditions in mines used to acquire the metals and minerals in our phones. Instead of offering big discounts (that barely eat into margins and often follow sharp price increases right before the holidays), Murena and Fairphone will donate €40 of every Fairphone sold through Murena to a Fairmined-certified Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM) project in Colombia; more specifically, the Iquira mine in Huila, an agromining cooperative that has achieved stellar results in responsible, sustainable, and safe mining.

Will buying a Fairphone with /e/OS like this change the world overnight? Will that €40 going to a few miners in Colombia instead of Apple’s or Google’s offshore effectively tax-exempt bank accounts have a material impact for the Pacific island nations on the verge of flooding permanently? Will it stop the endless forest fires in California? Will it stop the ongoing genocide in Ukraine? Will it prevent the utter destruction of what little nature is left in The Netherlands at the hands of industrial farming megacorps poisoning the soil and water with nitrogen and ammonia? No, but it will make you feel better, and give the finger to big tech, in one single purchase.

/e/OS: annoying to type, but great to use

If you have little to no experience with Android without Google, you might be worried about what you’re giving up, if things will work properly, or if it’s some sort of massive sea change from what you’re used to. The answer is simple: using a de-Googled Android device is an entirely boring affair in that it’s almost identical to using a regular Android device, except with Google’s products and services being optional, rather than mandatory. While nothing from Google comes preinstalled, that doesn’t mean you can’t choose to selectively install a few products or services from Google you’d still like to use, for instance because you’re not ready yet to move to an alternative, or because friends and family would really like you to stay on Google Meet or whatever (I’m sure those people exist).

Do you want to keep using Google Photos? No problem, just install it and it works just fine, exactly like you’re used to. Have a particular fondness for the official Gmail application? Works like normal. And so on. Buying a de-Googled /e/OS device does not have to be a clean break from everything Google; what it really does is give you the choice to use certain Google products, as opposed to regular Android which forces a whole slew of Google products and services down your throat because they come preinstalled thanks to agreements between Google and OEMs.

De-Googling goes much further than just removing Google’s applications. /e/OS also replaces various core services with privacy-respecting and open source ones, like using HERE’s geolocation services instead of Google’s, not using Google’s servers for things like connectivity checks and NTP, replacing Google Search with a custom SearX-based search engine, and much more that most people probably never think about.

Despite – or because of? – these changes, /e/OS is fully functional out of the box as a modern smartphone, including non-Google replacements for essentials like SMS, browsing, contacts, the phone dialer, and so on. Through Murena Workspace, you also get things like contacts sync, an online drive, calendar functionality, and so on – all privacy-focused, of course, so no data harvesting. The free package offers limited storage, of course, so if you want to make considerable use of it you do need to pay up, but the prices are very reasonable. On top of that, it’s just Nextcloud, so you can self-host the whole thing too if you want to.

Installing applications is also a rather uneventful affair. /e/OS comes with App Lounge, /e/OS’ own application store frontend that provides access to the Play Store, F-droid, and a set of progressive web apps. While you can sign into the Play Store to gain access to applications you already own, App Lounge also provides completely anonymous access to the Play Store. In other words, you have access to the same applications as you would have on Google Android, and they’re installed and updated in pretty much the same way. If you know how to find and install applications on Google Android, you know how to find and install applications on /e/OS. And if you don’t like the App Lounge’s interface, you can install an alternative like Aurora Store.

While a lot of things work without issues, there are still limitations to using de-Googled Android. /e/OS makes use of microG, an open source implementation of various proprietary parts of the Google Play Services, and while compatibility is very good and most people will get by without ever running into issues, there are still some limitations. Basically, anything that relies too heavily on Google Play Services runs the risk of not working, and in my case, that meant I ran into a few issues. Both of my smartwatches’ companion applications, for the Pixel Watch 2 and the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 Classic, would not work, meaning I couldn’t pair and use them with /e/OS. Out of all my usual Android applications, only one didn’t work: the eBay application. It loads the UI, but then perpetually tries and fails to load the content.

Another major limitation that might be a dealbreaker for some is the fact that buying Play Store applications, as well as in-application purchases in Play Store applications, do not work. There are some workarounds, but this is an important limitation you should be aware of before jumping in, and thankfully, Murena makes no secret of it, and states it upfront to make potential buyers aware of it.

There are also limitations that have nothing to do with Google Play Services, that are of a more structural nature and most likely can’t be addressed by further improvements to microG. One example of this is support for RCS – the Rich Communication Standard – that’s become Google’s default messaging service, and was recently embraced by Apple for the iPhone, too. Due to a variety of reasons not everybody seems to fully understand, getting RCS to work using microG without approval from Google and/or the carriers seems very unlikely, since RCS is not an open standard or open source. Using Google Pay’s tap-to-pay functionality in stores using NFC is also not going to work, since it requires Google’s blessing, which seems highly unlikely to be given (unless the EU forces them to, I guess).

A major concern for most people interested in switching to de-Googled Android is banking. This one’s really a very mixed bag, and depends entirely on whatever your bank decides to do. For me here in Sweden all my banking and national ID applications work without any issues, and while that seems to be the case for most countries, there are also some banks who will simply block any phone that isn’t running a fully stock Android from Google or one of the main OEMs. There’s a list on the /e/OS forums keeping track of various countries’ banking applications, so be sure to check that list and search the web to confirm whether or not your banking application works properly. This is another case where at least us EU citizens can perhaps look to the EU for a more permanent solution.

Conclusion

All in all though, I was quite surprised by how well /e/OS actually works out of the box. I expected many more applications to be unavailable or broken, but after a few weeks I was pleasantly surprised to realise that I wasn’t really missing Google’s version of Android on my Pixel 8 Pro at all. After the initial setup and excitement of no longer being tied to Google through my smartphone had worn off, I was left with a capable, solid, and entirely uneventful Android experience, including regular updates and security fixes.

At the same time, I don’t want to create the false impression that everything just works flawlessly, and as I detailed, there simply will be things that don’t work due to microG not supporting every Google Play Services API, or because of strict restrictions some applications enforce with regards to which devices they will run on. Before you make the jump from Google Android to /e/OS, I strongly advise you to take stock of which applications (and possibly, third party devices like a smart watch you might own) you truly rely on and which have no alternatives, and spend an evening searching the web and the Murena forums to figure out if there’s anything that doesn’t work and that you truly can’t live without. On top of that, also be sure to peruse the long list of support documents from Murena about /e/OS, just to be on the safe side.

I found /e/OS to be immensely impressive, and it highlighted for me that it’s definitely possible to have a smartphone that’s not tied to either Google or Apple. As such, in recent weeks, I have moved my Pixel 8 Pro away from Google’s Android to a de-Googled version of Android, while also removing a whole slew of other Google services and products from my life. If you want to do the same, a Fairphone 5 running /e/OS is an excellent starting point, especially right now when through buying one, you’re also helping some nice people in Colombia operate a sustainable, cooperative gold mine.

Neither will change the world, but they will make you feel better about yourself, while giving the finger to big tech. Seems like a great deal to me.

Managing third-party packages in 9front

Every now and then, news from the club I’m too cool to join, the plan9/9front community, pierces the veil of coolness and enters our normal world. This time, someone accidentally made a package manager for 9front.

I’ve been growing tired of manually handling random software, so I decided to find a simple way to automate the process and ended up making a sort of “package manager” for 9front¹. It’s really just a set of shell scripts that act as a frontend for git and keep a simple database of package names and URLs.

Running the pkginit script will ask for a location to store the source files for installed packages (/sys/pkg by default) which will then be created if non-existent.

And that’s it! No, really. Now you can provide a URL for a git repository to pkg/add.

↫ Kelly “bubstance” Glenn

As I somehow expected from 9front, it’s quite a simple and elegant system. I’m not sure how well it would handle more complex package operations, but I doubt many 9front systems are complex to begin with, so this may just be enough to take some of the tedium out of managing software on 9front, as the author originally intended.

One day I will be cool enough to use 9front. I just have to stay cool.

Microsoft Word is using you to train “AI”

Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.

If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.

↫ Dr. Casey Lawrence

The author of this article, Dr. Casey Lawrence, mentions the opt-out checkbox is hard to find, and they aren’t kidding. On Windows, here’s the full snaking path you have to take through Word’s settings to get to the checkbox: File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”. That is absolutely bananas. No normal person is ever going to find this checkbox.

Anyway, remember how the “AI” believers kept saying “hey, it’s on the internet so scraping your stuff and violating your copyright is totally legal you guys!”? Well, what about when you’re using Word, installed on your own PC, to write private documents, containing, say, sensitive health information? Or detailed plans about your company’s competitor to Azure or Microsoft Office? Or correspondence with lawyers about an antirust lawsuit against Microsoft? Or a report on Microsoft’s illegal activity you’re trying to report as a whistleblower? Is that stuff fair game for the gobbledygook generators too?

This “AI” nonsense has to stop. How is any of this even remotely legal?