The hottest and most promising operating system kernel in development, the GNU Hurd, has published another summary of its most recent quarter of development. Hurd has experimental support for 9pfs now, a work-in–progress port of OpenNTPD, the NTP daemon from OpenBSD, a port of Neovim, and a few more ports here and there.

Diving deeper into the actual kernel itself, there’s a major improvement to how the Hurd handles entries in /dev/:

Mikhail Karpov added some checks for mmap in several places. He also worked on adding storeio to the bootstrap chain. This is actually quite interesting. Currently the Hurd sets device entries in /dev/ statically. For example, I am writing this qoth on a Hurd machine that is using two /dev/ entries for my filesystem: /dev/wd0s1 for swap and /dev/wd0s5 for my root filesystem. However, /dev/wd0s1 through /dev/wd0s16 exist on my computer! Once Mikhail’s project is done, then the Hurd will dynamically populate SATA devices at boot time! No more need for static translators!

↫ The Hurd’s quartely report

The dhcpcd port we talked about earlier this year keeps improving too, which is quite important for future IPv6 support. Of course, there’s way more to dive into, and reading about a bunch of people developing their own thing without any regard for or interest in the mainstream always feels a little bit like a cold glass of tonic – the best soft drink – in the depths of hell. Keep at it.

Given that Android phones have been around for nearly two decades now, there comes a time when Google has to end support for one of its older software versions. For a couple of years now, Google Play services has been supported on devices running Android 6.0 Marshmallow or newer. That has changed over the past few weeks, with Google deciding to retire this software version after a nearly 11-year run.

↫ Chethan Rao at Android Authority

At some point, an operating system version needs to be left behind – and I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to no longer support Google Play Services on an operating system version that’s 11 years old. However, this is Android we’re talking about, and devices running Android 6.0 were probably sold much more recently than 11 years ago, when the operating system version was new. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if devices running Android 6.0 are still being sold today.

I doubt this is something that will affect many people who read OSNews, but there’s bound to be edge cases – Android 6.0 devices silently doing their job that are now just a little less useful. I’m thinking of really cheap tablets that can still play video just fine, retro gaming handhelds that don’t magically lose the ability to emulate SNES games, that sort of stuff. The numbers will be small, but if you happen to be among them, this can be a really annoying deprecation.

We all know the original Amiga was far ahead of its time, and the Amiga really doesn’t need more retrospectives and glazing. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t want more Amiga retrospectives and glazing.

I’m not sure I even saw an Amiga in person until 1987, but I knew just from reading about it that I wanted one. I wasn’t able to make it happen until 1991, so I was pretty late to the game. But even in 1991, an Amiga felt like living in the future. I could load several programs and switch between them effortlessly, with the only limit being the amount of memory I had. I could connect to a BBS with a terminal program, start a download, then switch it to the background, fire up a word processor, and do my homework while the download was happening. In some cases, I could even fire up a game and play a game while a download happened in the background. I could download stuff while I played Civilization, which was pretty great.

↫ David L. Farquhar

It’s 2026, I have an incredibly powerful Linux gaming computer, but since I grew up on DOS and Windows, to this day, I still feel the need the close every other application before launching a game. I don’t need to – modern operating systems handle such things just fine, mostly – but it’s so ingrained in me it’s hard to drop this habit. I wonder if people who grew up with more capable computers than whatever DOS nonsense I grew up with are less inclined to do things like this? Or did memory constraints act as an equaliser?

Anyway, the linked article doesn’t mention it, but the Amiga is still, somehow, going relatively strong for a platform that’s supposed to be dead. Modern(-ish) hardware is getting a bit harder to come by, but AmigaOS 4 and especially MorphOS are still actively being developed, and even running them in virtual machines on x86 has become about as easy as it could be.

This post is about the evolution of Futhark’s type checker, motivated by a large refactoring I am about to merge. It is probably mostly of interest to other language designers, and contains some lessons I wish I had known when we first got started – although I am not particularly well-read in the type checking literature, so it’s possible all of this is old hat.

↫ The Futhark Programming Language blog

That’s a clear introduction – you know what to expect.

What happens when programmers get to vote on a complete ban on slopcoded software on their code platform? Members of Codeberg were asked to vote on a proposal to completely ban slopcoded projects from Codeberg, and in what should not be a surprising outcome to anyone not overcome with “AI” hysteria, the vast majority voted in favour of the complete ban: over 70% of Codeberg members voted to ban slopcoded projects entirely (358 in favour, 144 against, 14 abstentions).

Of course, this is not a surprising outcome. Stripped down, programming is a form of artistic expression, and programming is no different than writing, painting, composing, or any other artistic endeavour. I think it’s safe to say writers, painters, composers, and similar creatives are against “AI”, so it’s only natural programmers feel the same; poll after poll shows the overwhelming majority of respondents – usually well over 70-80% – are against “AI”.

The pro-“AI” accounts on OSNews often try to paint my anti-“AI” position as extremist, but in reality, I’m just voicing how 70-80% of people clearly state they feel. I have zero skin in this game, zero outside pressure to please any bosses to get that promotion, zero pressure to conform to avoid getting laid off, zero pressure to not contradict upper-management. I can speak freely, openly, and without fear of retaliation. And as Nikhil Suresh explains in his harrowing from-the-trenches article AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making, that’s a massive asset.

The vast majority of people – including your friends, family, and co-workers – really hate “AI”. You can either accept this, or be left behind.

If you want to develop an application for AmigaOS 3.x but don’t want to deal with real hardware, virtualisation and emulation are your friends.

Apropos of nothing, I decided to set up an Amiga development environment. Since figuring things out wasn’t straightforward, I wrote down instructions for Linux about how to compile the first program and run it in an emulator. Enjoy!

↫ Daniel Kochmański

It’s a great guide, easy to follow, and you’ll be up and running quickly. The emulator the guide uses – AmiBerry, a fork of WinUAE – contains slopcode, so you may want to consider alternatives. This doesn’t change much for the guide though, as whatever tasks you need to do outside and inside AmigaOS itself remain unchanged.

Sam Altman seems to be making OpenAI way more non-profit than before:

Even as the AI bubble becomes a mainstream talking point on Wall Street, tech companies continue to peddle the fantasy that AI is poised to become an almost magical money-maker. Case in point, OpenAI wants you to believe that by 2030, it’ll be raking in $100 billion a year just from ads alone — even though it’s currently struggling to reach just $1 billion.

↫ Joe Wilkins at Futurism

The US tech giants fueling this “AI” bubble are trying to hide the true extent of their debt:

Hidden debt at U.S. tech giants swelled eightfold in four years to an estimated $1.65 trillion as artificial intelligence investments ballooned, a Nikkei study shows, exceeding actual debt and making it tougher for investors to assess risk.

[…]

The five companies’ hidden debt, which does not appear on balance sheets, totaled $1.65 trillion in the most recent quarter, exceeding the roughly $1.35 trillion in debt reflected on their balance sheets. The data includes some estimates.

↫ Kohei Yamada at Nikkei Asia

The bubble is expanding to comical proportions:

The American stock market is booming, thanks to artificial intelligence. Tech giants are borrowing billions to acquire AI talent, purchase chips and hardware, and construct data centers. And market watchers are starting to get worried. They see financiers bulldozing giant piles of money to private AI start-ups with no realistic path to profitability, tech companies reliant on other tech companies for revenue growth, and non-tech businesses without a lot to show for their AI investments. The value of AI-linked firms has climbed $27 trillion in the past three years—an astonishing amount, equivalent to 36 percent of the value of the entire U.S. stock market today. Although future earnings could justify those valuations, as Dominic Wilson and Vickie Chang of Goldman Sachs argued in a note to clients, the profit expectations require Panglossian optimism.

No less an authority than Sam Altman is arguing that we are in an AI bubble. The International Monetary Fund is citing it as a significant risk to financial stability and warning about what might happen when it bursts: diminished investment, tighter credit, reduced consumption, disrupted trade flows.

↫ Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic

I’m not worried, though.

I have it on good authority that “AI” increases productivity by 10x, so surely, none of the above is a problem. Any day now, we will be inundated with waves of brand new, high-quality, valuable software. Any day now, existing software will increase in quality by 10x, leading to a huge surge in software sales. Any day now, productivity in factories will increase rapidly thanks to “AI” freeing up workers’ time, driving prices down 10x, leaving consumers with 10x more money to spend. Any day now, everyone will be able to produce the next Citizen Kane or write the next Anna Karenina, causing an explosion in magnificent, timeless art that will have historians of the future marvel at our civilisation’s ingenuity and artistry.

In the meantime, these companies can just ask their “AI” how to become profitable. Should be table-stakes for a 10x force multiplier.

I’m not worried.

One of the cool features of JPEG files is that there’s the option to save low frequency components first. This means that a partially downloaded image will be displayed at low resolution instead of being cut off.

↫ maurycyz.com

Oh I know where this is going…

Doing this, I can get Chrome to render around 90 frames before giving up. Other browsers like Firefox have more patience, but a 90 scan image seems to work almost everywhere.

↫ maurycyz.com

Yes, you can abuse the mentioned feature to create a really odd type of video. Or animation? Well, it allows you to create something resembling a really low-resolution GIF. Useless, yes, but very novel.

The NLnet Foundation’s NGI0 Commons Fund supported an effort to add WPA3 support to OpenBSD, and the work’s payed off.

All drivers which support PMF can use WPA3, which are: iwm, iwx, and qwx. So far, I have tested this patch on iwx AX200 only. I will roll out this patch to more of my devices now. Help with testing is welcome.

There are both userland and kernel changes involved.

↫ Stefan Sperling

Only the second implementation of WPA3 will be supported, which requires some explanation:

WPA3 has a complicated history. There are two versions of WPA3. The initially standardized version suffered from side-channel leaks found by Mathy Vanhoef and dubbed “Dragonblood“. A revised and fixed version has been standardized and is mandatory in the 6 GHz band as of Wifi 6e (11ax) and mandatory on all bands as of Wifi 7 (11be).

↫ Stefan Sperling

Obviously, WPA3 is a very welcome addition to OpenBSD.

Speaking of OpenVMS and Alpha – and we like speaking about OpenVMS and Alpha, don’t we? – there’s now a port of DOSBox that runs on the Alpha version venerable operating system. Astr0baby has published both binaries and source code for the port, as well as a lovely set of screenshots to show it off working.

It was only a few weeks ago that we got a massively improved Alpha emulator, capable of running VMS, Windows 2000, and Tru64, including X11 support and a variety of other exciting features. Today, we’ve got another major emulation milestone (update: sadly, with “AI” support, so odds are this will fizzle out. Bummer!).

The emulation space is going crazy, after my previous post on Windows booting on DEC Alpha es40 emulator, there is now another huge breakthrough in the emulation of other non-x86 CPU emulation. Yufeng Gao with help from gdwnldsKSC (the man behind the updated es40-fork) has released version 0.1 of his Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots the Itanium version of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP 64-bit. No OpenVMS or HP-UX yet and Linux/BSD also don’t boot. But Windows is amazing already.

↫ Remy van Elst

Much like Alpha hardware, Itanium hardware is quite hard to come by – especially Itanium workstations are a nightmare to find; I think I’ve only ever seen one or two Itanium workstation come up for sale on eBay in recent years, and their rarity obviously commanded hefty prices. The sooner we are able to run Itanium version of operating systems comfortably in a virtualised environment the better. As long-time OSNews readers know, my heart beats for HP-UX, but the Itanium versions of Windows and VMS would be of more interest to most people, I’m sure.

Excellent news.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel and git, is employed by the Linux Foundation. This Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to, as the name obviously implies, the promotion of Linux. The primary use of the funds it collects is to “help fund the infrastructure and fellows, including Linus Torvalds, who help develop the Linux kernel”. The list of megacorporations donating most of the Foundation’s funds is long.

The Linux Foundation has twelve platinum members, which donate $500000 per year, followed by twelve gold members, who donate $100000 per year. Below these two primary tiers lie the silver peasants, who each donate $5000-$25000 per year, based on number of employees. Looking at the list of twelve platinum members, I noticed something interesting.

Of the twelve platinum companies, six are “AI” companies or companies with massive investments in “AI”: Google, Huawei, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM/Red Hat. Then there’s Samsung Electronics, which is raking in stupendous amounts of money thanks to the “AI” bubble. Additionally, one of the gold members is Anthropic, another major “AI” company and makers of “Claude”, the sloppiest of slopcoding tools.

Many of these companies are unimaginably deep in the red when it comes to “AI”, with very little indication they’re ever going to be able to recover any of it. The situation is particularly bad for Oracle and IBM/Red Hat. Oracle’s debt has been downgraded to one notch above junk status because of its “AI” spending, while IBM’s shares experienced the largest crash in its 115 year history only a few days ago. By the way, in the first half of 2025, “AI-related capital expenditures contributed 1.1% to [US] GDP growth, outpacing the U.S. consumer as an engine of expansion”.

Fun fact: since most of The Netherlands is effectively a swamp, most of the country’s buildings are built on massive wooden or concrete poles (piles) hammered deep into the ground until they hit something more stable than mushy clay and wet sand. Otherwise, buildings in the country would simply sink into the ground. Every Dutch person who ever lived near a construction site has heard the rhythmic kathunk, kathunk, kathunk, all day long, as the massive piledriver machines spread their gospel. I guess something reminded me of this just now.

Anyway, a large chunk of the funding the Linux Foundation, Linus Torvald’s employer, receives is coming from increasingly desperate companies frantically trying to convince a populace deeply skeptical and often downright hostile towards “AI” to spend money on “AI” before the bubble bursts.

For some reason, I thought this was interesting.

Rumours had been circulating for a while, but now it’s official: OnePlus is effectively retreating from the European and US markets.

Today, our hearts are undoubtedly heavy and mixed with emotion. As part of the proactive global strategy adjustment, OnePlus has decided to conclude new product rollouts in Europe and North America.

↫ OnePlus statement

Once OnePlus’ co-founder Carl Pei left the company (and founded Nothing), things have been feeling shaky for OnePlus, once the undisputed darling of the more technical part of the Android crowd. Their phones got more expensive, their minimalist, close-to-stock Android version got progressively worse, and they started lagging in updates, too. My OnePlus Watch 3, for instance, which was promised to get WearOS 6 at some point, but never got it – meanwhile, WearOS 7 has already been released. No, this news is not particularly surprising.

Luckily, the company claims it will honour its warranty and update support obligations for existing products in Europe and the US, which is nice, but also something they’re legally obligated to do (at least in the EU). A snag here is that the only update path the company offers is to ColorOS, from its parent company Oppo, which many more traditional Android and OnePlus users certainly won’t be happy about. Something is better than nothing, I suppose, and I’ll reserve judgment until I see what ColorOS 17 will be like on my other OnePlus product, a OnePlus Pad 3.

It’s just one more victim of western markets (illegally) consolidating on Apple and Samsung (while a few Pixels rummaging in the margins).

There’s a ton of interest in immutable, image-based versions of various Linux distributions, since they offer a number of benefits that make them a good fit for some users. Updates can’t really go wrong, rollback is easy, application management through Flatpak is more in line with systems like Android and iOS – they may not be advantages sought by everyone, but they clearly are by some. Still, there are also a number of annoying limitations, most notably around testing nightly releases of Flatpaks, testing system components, and installing command-line tools.

The team behind GNOME OS is addressing these issues. The first thing they’re working on in something they’ve preliminarily call Test Center, which makes it much easier to install nightly releases of Flatpaks alongside their regular versions. This is something you can already do today, but the flow is cumbersome and not exactly user-friendly; with Test Center, developers will be able to share a direct link to install test releases.

They intend to use this same Test Center for testing system components:

Our idea here is to use the same “Test Center” app mentioned above for installing and managing experiments at the system level as well. Similar to Flatpak bundles generated in CI, we generate system extension images (sysext) for every merge request. You can install experiments from a sharing link, and they will apply as a sysext over your existing system. Because those images are non-destructive overlays, you can always go back to the original system.

↫ Jordan, Jonas, and Tobias

The last and final issue is that of command-line tools, something Flatpak is simply not designed for. On this front, the GNOME OS team states they are working on a solution as well, but they’re not quite ready to go into much more detail at this point.

Regardless, these are very welcome improvements.