Earlier this year, I needed to learn PowerShell scripting for one Windows-related project, and I have tried it out a few more times on Mac. It has quickly become one of my favorite tools for automation and scripting—taking on jobs that I would have otherwise tried to do with Node.js, Shortcuts, macOS Automator, or heaven forbid, Bash scripts.

I get it now. PowerShell is great, even if you don’t use it as your shell, and even if you’re on Mac or Linux.

↫ Corbin Davenport

I don’t use the shell often enough on any of my main machines to have much of an idea about the strenghths and weaknesses of PowerShell compared to more traditional shells, but this is definitely not the first time I’ve heard a lot of praise for it from people otherwise knee-deep in the UNIX and traditional shell world.

There really must be something to this, and since PowerShell is also available on Linux and macOS, it’s pretty straightforward to give it a go without having to deal with Windows.

Earlier this year, Garmin closed its Connect API developer program because it was being flooded with “AI”-generated applications to the point it couldn’t handle them anymore. What made it worse was that half of the applications were never actually used, not even once. It also didn’t help that Garmin treated every single application to the program the same way, whether it was from a hobbyist just wanting access to their own data, to a massive corporation developing a popular service used by god knows how many people.

Today, the company has relaunched the program, and it’s been considerably overhauled. While hobbyist use of the API is going to be free – which is way better than it was before – once you hit a thousand users, you’re going to have to start paying.

Still, Garmin’s shift here towards charging for API access will set a dangerous precedent for the industry. Especially for a company that bills itself as a (or the?) premium sports hardware provider. On the flip side, there’s simply no ignoring the flood of mostly AI apps that take up resources at Garmin and elsewhere to support. Heck, my inbox is flooded with these apps daily requesting reviews. It sounds like when Garmin shut off access to the API last spring, they were seeing inbound API requests at a daily scale that they’d previously only seen over a period of weeks. Simply put, there’s no good answer.

↫ Ray Maker at DC Rainmaker

The excesses of the easy availability of “AI” code generation impacts the entire industry. At least one good thing has come out of this: hobbyists can now access the Connect API developer program much easier than before.

Unlike traditional OSs that separate user applications from the kernel, a unikernel bundles everything into a single, isolated image that runs directly on a hypervisor (like KVM, BHyve, or OpenVMM). Because it removes unnecessary drivers and background services, a unikernel is extremely small, fast to boot, and efficient with resources.

Here, we will learn how to develop and deploy unikernels built using the OCaml language and the Solo5 unikernel. These are the two fundamental components that will then enable us to develop our own applications in the form of unikernels, which we can subsequently deploy using Albatross.

↫ Unikernels in OCaml

Some light reading for the weekend.

Graybeards like me remember trying to painstakingly type source code from a magazine. This is a very accurate account of what a young computer user in 1986 needed to do to get a new game for the Commodore 64, complete with an immersive emulation.

It’s time to install an app! But here in 1986, we still call them “programs,” not apps. So, you’ll want to set aside some time to get started installing a program.

Hot on the heels of Wine being ported to OpenBSD, we now have the release of OpenBSD 8.0. It adds hibernate support for arm64, switches the sparc64 toolchain to LLVM, and updates the DRM graphics drivers to Linux 6.18.53, which also adds support for Intel Arc A-Series (DG2/Alchemist) graphics cards. There’s a whole bunch of improvements, fixes, and changes for RISC-V and ARM in general, of course, as well as to the various Wi-Fi drivers. On top of that, it also comes with new versions of OpenSSH and LibreSSL, as well as a massive list of other improvements and fixes.

If you’ve never installed OpenBSD before, be sure to read this detailed guide to know what to do once everything’s installed, while listening to the official release song, of course.

Apparently, macOS 27 comes with a small mystery people are trying to figure out.

Recently, while troubleshooting a PATH issue, I noticed an entry for /pkg/env/global/bin. At first, I worried that something had gone horribly wrong. Turns out, this is part of macOS 27.0… though no one is sure what it’s for yet.

[…]

In a post about how macOS’s boot volume structure has been updated, Howard Oakley explains that the pkg directory was added to the Data volume in macOS 26.4, but not added to the root of the Signed System Volume until 27.0. He also notes that this is sort of a big deal.

The weird thing is, as far as I can tell, no one seems to know what this new directory is for! It’s odd that Apple would update their filesystem structure, add it to everyone’s PATH, and there not be some explicable reason.

↫ Gavin Anderegg

I guess we’ll find out eventually, but this does highlight something that I find extremely unsettling about this. With proprietary software like macOS, you literally are at the mercy of whatever Apple decides to do to “your” operating system. You install an update, and aside from all the documented changes, there’s going to be changes you simply have no idea what they’re for, or why they’re there. Don’t get me wrong, there’s obviously not something nefarious going on in this particular case, but it still feels wild to me that people just willingly accept this.

In the open source world, stuff like this simply does not happen. You’re not going to install a bunch of Fedora updates one day and find a mysterious, undocumented folder in your PATH. Such a change will be documented, but even in the unlikely event it’s not, you can just go through the commit history and find out exactly why the new folder is there, and what its intended purpose is or is going to be.

Considering the state of the world and the people corporations like Apple really answer to, I would not be comfortable with letting them dictate even something as simple as my PATH.

What if a regular, normal NetBSD installation is too plebeian for you?

This is a quick overview which attempts to synthesize DW Armstrong’s tutorial on NetBSD encryption with the cgdroot page from the NetBSD wiki in a single MBR partition, divided into multiple disklabel slices to preserve MBR entries.

↫ indigoparadox Web Zone

What if you need this?

Significant changes in this release include some significant binfmt_misc extensions, some group-scheduling work aimed at improving performance on large systems, the new failfs filesystem that fails all operations, the fchroot() system call, global per-CPU data for BPF programs, the completion of the sched_ext subscheduler feature, working-set tracking for virtual machines, alternative data-stream support in the ntfs3 filesystem, a long list of SMB server improvements, and much more.

↫ “corbet” at LWN.net

It’ll make it way to your distribution of choice soon enough.

Only a few day ago I linked to a massive collection of original Palm OS development resources, and today we can take a look at what it was like to put all of those resources into practice: the original source code for the Palm OS port of Lemmings. With these resources combined, there’s no excuse to not building any Palm OS applications. I’d really like a modern email client, a Fediverse client, and a slightly more modern browser surely wouldn’t hurt.

Get on it!

It’s been two years since my initial post about making GNOME OS an end-user general purpose OS. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve hit a major milestone!

TL;DR: We’re launching a new edition called “GNOME OS Preview”, which is built from the latest stable GNOME release. This means that GNOME OS is no longer just a nightly OS for GNOME developers and testers!

↫ Aaron Ardiri

A number of changes and improvements have made the move from nightly status to preview status possible. They’ve made GNOME OS handle environments with limited amounts of RAM much better – not a luxury, these days – including the ability to dynamically increase the swap space if needed. In addition, the work to make it much easier to install and test daily Flatpak builds of applications is now part of GNOME OS, as is the effort to make command-line utilities manageable in the same way as Flatpaks.

As the blog post notes, there’s still a ton of work left to do before GNOME OS is ready for everyone. They’re going to bet heavily on systemd-homed to enable, among other things, per-user disk encryption, and there’s a new installer coming, as well. They also want to ship GNOME’s preinstalled applications as Flatpaks, integrate delta updates, and much more. It all looks incredibly appealing, even if I am not the target user for something like GNOME OS.

OpenVMS isn’t exactly the easiest platform to get into, with even the first major hurdle – licensing! – being a bit of a complex issue. To address this and other issues people new to OpenVMS might run into, VSI, the company currently developing OpenVMS, launched its new VSI How-to Portal. For now, it covers things like licensing, installing and updating OpenVMS for x86, TCP/IP configuration, and setting up SSH. The company plans to expand the portal with more articles based on customer and user feedback, so hopefully more information will appear soon.

Most of us are probably not particularly not particularly experienced with OpenVMS, so having a portal like this can really help get you started.

Microsoft’s been claiming for a while now that they’re working on improving performance and responsiveness in Windows, with a particular focus on making more efficient use of memory. This is probably the only positive thing to come out of the RAM crisis Microsoft helped create and is currently still fueling. The company’s now claiming that Windows 11 is “up to 20% more responsive” thanks to these efforts.

The result is a Windows experience that’s up to 20% more responsive, with improvements you can feel as soon as you boot into your PC and extending to Start, File Explorer, Search, Snipping Tool, Microsoft 365, Edge and more.

A big part of that work is making smarter use of memory and system resources. We’ve improved memory management and efficiency across Windows to help keep more of your PC’s resources focused on what you’re actively doing. That work can make an especially meaningful difference on PCs with 8GB of memory. Windows can now keep up to 2GB more of your active data in memory instead of moving it to slower storage, helping your PC stay responsive as you open more apps or browser tabs. Windows is also making additional memory-saving improvements that reduce background memory use. For example, on PCs with 8GB of memory or less, Widgets load only when you open them, making more than 200 MB of memory available for your apps and other work. It’s one example of the broader work underway to reduce the Windows memory footprint and deliver a fast, responsive experience across the PCs people use every day, an area we’ve made an explicit focus for Windows.

↫ Navjot Virk on the Windows Blogs

If, for a moment, we take these claims at face value, they’re simply good news for every Windows 11 user, and legitimately the only good thing to come out of the RAM crisis. These kind of claims are always hard to measure, especially considering just how varied the Windows software and hardware ecosystem is, but I’m sure people good at benchmarking are going to try and find some more definitive answers here.

In the same blog post, Microsoft also highlights several other recent improvements it’s made to Windows 11, like the new search experience we talked about recently, a brand new Photos application, some new whiteboard-like application, and several more things. Considering how complex Windows’ versioning scheme and various branches have become, I have no idea when these features and improvements actually make their way to your machine.

On a slightly related note, Microsoft also unveiled that it’s bringing Microsoft Defender to Linux, with a particular focus on desktop Linux. Even Microsoft has to face the reality of the rising popularity of Linux on the desktop.

Ubuntu 26.10 has landed.

Ubuntu 26.10 brings significant progress for security, and strengthens the platform with the full adoption of Rust-based coreutils, post-quantum-ready package signing, and expanded TPM-backed full-disk encryption support. Enterprise authentication gains deeper integration with Microsoft Entra ID, including password and multi-factor authentication. Linux kernel 7.3 extends support for the latest hardware, alongside new RISC-V desktop images and optimized amd64v3 installation images.

↫ Ubuntu 26.10 release announcement

Of course, it comes with the latest version of GNOME, and the whole family of Ubuntu variants focusing on other desktops have also been updated. While I doubt many people here run Ubuntu, it’s still quite popular, and serves as the base for countless other distributions.

KDE turns 30 today, and they’re celebrating it with a brand new KDE Plasma release: version 6.8 is here. On the accessibility front, 6.8 brings a new dwell clicker function (meaning a click will register if the pointer is held still for a short while) and support for the Bikram Sambat calendar and the Amharic language. I always love it when I see support for new languages and scripts, especially when, as is the case here, it’s a language spoken as a first language by 25 million people.

The Plasma remote desktop has also been improved with bi-directional copy/paste, performance and quality improvements, and more, and you can now record microphone and audio while screen recording with Spectacle. In System Monitor, you can now assign processes and tasks to specific processors/cores, which is a great feature for people running intensive tasks but who would still like to, you know, do other things while those tasks are running.

KDE 6.8 drops support for X11, focusing entirely on Wayland. Of course, X11 applications will remain usable thanks to Xwayland, and KDE’s applications will continue to support X11 in case you’re using them outside of KDE. This release also further expands the Union theming system, now adding support for styling Qt Widgets. Union is still in beta, so you’ll have to enable it to test it. There’s a ton more, too, but these are some of the highlights.

KDE Plasma 6.8 will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.