Humane is selling most of its company to HP for $116 million and will stop selling AI Pin, the company announced today.

AI Pins that have already been purchased will continue to function normally until 3PM ET on February 28th, Humane says in a support document. After that date, Pins will “no longer connect to Humane’s servers.” As a result, AI Pin features will “no longer include calling, messaging, AI queries / responses, or cloud access.” Humane is also encouraging users to download any pictures, videos, and notes stored on their Pins before they are permanently deleted at that shutdown time.

↫ Jay Peters at The Verge

I can’t think of a better example of “AI” being a planet-cooking hype bubble than the Humane failure everybody saw coming from a mile away.

HP can add this useless acquisition next to the Palm one.

AIDA64, the popular benchmarking tool for Windows, released a new version today. I don’t particularly care about benchmarking – even less so benchmarking on Windows – but this new release comes with an interesting line in the release notes.

Discontinued support for Windows 95, 98, Me

↫ AIDA64 v7.60 release notes

Seeing a widely-used, popular piece of software drop support for Windows 95, 98, and ME only in this, the year of our lord, 2025, is kind of amazing.

What might be somewhat more surprising though considering its research origins is that Unix almost since the very beginning had a comprehensive set of online reference documentation for all its commands, system calls, file formats, etc. These are the the manual- or man-pages. On Unix systems used interactively, the man-pages have historically always been installed, space permitting.

[…]

The way the manual pages have evolved and how they are used has changed over the decades. This set of posts is intended to give people unfamiliar with them an overview, as well as offer a review to seasoned users.

↫ Alex Bochannek

Right in this first article in the series there’s an interesting observation I never stopped and thought about: because the original creators of UNIX were writing the content of man pages with the very tools they were creating for UNIX, it led to a virtuous cycle. “Unix tools were used to document Unix, improving the documentation tools themselves as well.” I tend to use the internet now to learn how specific tools and commands work, but having such detailed man pages built right into the operating system was a huge deal pre-internet.

One of the reactions to my discussion of why Windows 95 setup used three operating systems (and oh there were many) was my explanation that an MS-DOS based setup program would be text-mode. But c’mon, MS-DOS could do graphics! Are you just a bunch of morons?

Yes, MS-DOS could do graphics, in the sense that it didn’t actively prevent you from doing graphics. You were still responsible for everything yourself, though. There were no graphics primitives aside from a BIOS call to plot a single pixel. Everything else was on you, and you didn’t want to use the BIOS call to plot pixels anyway because it was slow. If you wanted any modicum of performance, you had to access the frame buffer directly.

↫ Raymond Chen

And with everything the Windows 95 setup program needs that you’d have to create, you’d end up just… Developing a custom operating system in the first place. Since Microsoft already had Windows 3.x lying around, why not reuse parts of that to aid in the Windows 95 installation process? Honestly, all of it makes perfect sense, and I really don’t understand why anyone would seriously advocate for building a separate, entirely custom operating system just to install Windows 95 when Windows 3.x was right there.

Of course, these days things are a little different, but Windows still loads a different operating system during its installation. It’s called the Windows Preinstallation Environment, but it’s no longer based on Windows 3.x, obviously, and instead is a cut-down version of the Windows version you’re actually installing. The latest version of Windows PE is 10.0.26100.1, and it’s built from Windows 11 24H2. Windows PE also powers the Windows Recovery Environment, the menu you can boot into to perform various analyses, maintenance, and repair of your Windows installation.

Since Microsoft does not want Windows PE to be used a general purpose operating system, it comes with a few interesting limitations you can’t really circumvent. It has a non-configurable 72-hour time bomb, after which if will just shut off, and since PE runs entirely in memory, no changes are saved – unless you make any changes during the creation of the PE image. It also makes use of FAT32, so there’s a whole host of limitations there, and there’s a few other things Microsoft disabled. Since you an add drivers to a PE image, though, I wonder if you could sneak in a file system driver and circumvent FAT32’s limitations that way?

Unlike most (all?) other distributions with built-in Flatpak support, Fedora maintains its own repository of Flatpak applications. Everyone else defaults to using Flathub, where developers of applications themselves tend to publish their Flatpaks. Fedora’s ‘shadow Flathub’ sometimes leads to problems, with Fedora-made Flatpaks containing bugs and brokenness, while presenting themselves as official, developer-made Flatpaks. In turn, users complain to the developers, while the issues they experience are actually caused by Fedora making its own Flatpaks.

One of the applications this happened to is OBS, and over three weeks ago the OBS project requested that either the broken, unofficial Fedora Flatpak be removed, or that it be made clear that the Flatpak was third-party. This request seems entirely reasonable to me, and it would be fairly trivial for Fedora to do this. In fact, I think respecting this request is merely common decency. Sadly, the Fedora project thought differently, and just… Ignored the request.

And so the OBS project escalated the issue.

This is a formal request to remove all of our branding, including but not limited to, our name, our logo, any additional IP belonging to the OBS Project, from your distribution.

Failure to comply may result in further legal action taken. We expect a response within the next 7 business days (By Friday, February 21st, 2025).

↫ Joel Bethke

It seems this caught the attention of the Fedora project, as within less than 24 hours, a formal request was made by the maintainer of Fedora’s OBS RPM package to have the broken OBS Flatpak removed. It seems there’s no official process to follow for making such a request, but I hope it gets through and honoured, if only because, like I said above, it would be common decency to do so.

I do wish to go back to the original OBS complaint, though, as it poses the question most of you are asking yourselves at this point.

I would also like some sort of explanation on why someone thought it was a good idea to take a Flatpak that was working perfectly fine, break it, and publish it at a higher priority to our official builds. We spend an enormous amount of effort on our official Flatpak published to Flathub to ensure everything is working as well as it can be.

↫ Joel Bethke

Why does Fedora maintain its own shadow-Flathub, set at a higher priority than the real Flathub? There’s a few reasons, as detailed in this Fedora Magazine article from 2022. There’s the obvious stuff like Fedora only allowing free and open source software, whereas Flathub also allows proprietary software, meaning that if Fedora ships with the Flathub repository enabled and prioritised, it would violate Fedora’s policies. You can argue back and forth about this, but Fedora’s policy being what it is, I can see where they’re coming from. The article mentions Flathub will split proprietary applications from free and open source ones, but I can’t find any word on if this has happened already.

A second big difference are the sources where the Flatpaks are drawn from. While Flathub allows and all sources, with their packages reusing Debian packages, Ubuntu Snaps, tarballs, AppImages, and more, Fedora exclusively reuses its own RPM packages when creating its Flatpak packages. Furthermore, Fedora Flatpaks use the Docker-like OCI format to publish applications (which ties into the Fedora Registry), while Flathub uses OSTree. Lastly, Fedora Flatpaks use one, single, big underlying runtime, while Flathub has a number of different, smaller runtimes.

The issue here seems to be that the motivations for maintaining a Flatpak repository differ greatly between Flathub and Fedora, but one has to wonder how much of that actually matters to users. Maintaining your own, separate Flatpak repository that effectively duplicates the work developers do when publishing to Flathub is not only wasteful, but also prone to cause bugs, issues, and outdated Flatpaks – which in turn causes strife with the original developers of the applications who have to deal with problems causes not by their own work, but by Fedora – problems that they can’t even fix.

I don’t think this situation makes any sense to perpetuate, and it’s high time Fedora defaults to Flathub for Flatpak applications. It will reduce the workload on package maintainers, prevent needless packaging bugs, improve the experience for users, and make developers happier. It’s a no-brainer at this point.

Speaking of KDE, Plasma 6.3 has been released. It brings with it a ton of improvements aimed at digital artists, such as much improved management and configuration of drawing tablets. You can now map an area of the tablet’s surface to a part of the screen, change the functions of stylus buttons, customise the pressure curve and range of a stylus, and much more. The entire settings panel for drawing tablets has also been redesigned to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

Plasma 6.3 also completely overhauls KWin’s fraction scaling. Fractional scaling in KWin will not try to snap everything to your display’s pixel grid, to reduce blurriness and make everything look sharper. KWin’s zoom effect also makes use of these improvements, making for a pixel-perfect zoom feature with a pixel grid overlay, which is great for artists and designers. This will be a very welcome improvement for people using e.g. 125% or 150% scaling on their displays.

Hardware monitoring is much improved too, with System Monitor showing more information while using fewer resources, and KDE users on FreeBSD can now see GPU statistics too. There’s also a ton of small additions that are still quite welcome, like opening the menu editor instead of a properties dialog when clicking on Edit Application in a launcher menu’s context menu, the ability to clone panels, an option to turn of symbolic icons in Kickoff, a “Show Target” option in the context menu of symbolic links, and a lot more.

KDE Plasma 6.3 will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.

You might think the world of Linux distributions is a rather boring, settled affair, but there’s actually a ton of interesting experimentation going on in the Linux world. From things like NixOS with its unique packaging framework, to the various immutable distributions out there like the Fedora Atomic editions, there’s enough uniqueness to go around to find a lid for every pot. Oasis Linux surely falls into this category. One of its main unique characteristics is that it’s entirely statically linked.

All software in the base system is linked statically, including the display server (velox) and web browser (netsurf). Compared to dynamic linking, this is a simpler mechanism which eliminates problems with upgrading libraries, and results in completely self-contained binaries that can easily be copied to other systems.

↫ Oasis GitHub page

That’s not all it has to offer, though. It also offers fast and 100% reproducible builds, it’s mostly ISO C conformant, and it has minimal bootstrap dependencies – all you need is a “POSIX system with git, lua, curl, a sha256 utility, standard compression utilities, and an x86_64-linux-musl cross compiler”. The ISO C-comformance is a crucial part of one of Oasis’ goals: to be buildable with cproc, a small, very strict C11 compiler. It has no package manager, but any software outside of Oasis itself can be installed and managed with pkgsrc or Nix.

Another important goal of the project is to be extremely easy to understand, and its /etc directory is honestly a sight to behold, and as the project proudly claims, the most complex file in there is rc.init at a mere 16 lines. The configuration files are indeed incredibly easy to understand, which is a breath of fresh air compared to the archaic stuff in commercial UNIX or the complex stuff in modern Linux distributions that I normally deal with.

I’m not sure is Oasis would make for a good, usable day-to-day operating system, but I definitely like what they’re putting down.

The Redox project has posted its usual monthly update, and this time, we’ve got a major milestone creeping within reach.

Thanks to Anhad Singh for his amazing work on Dynamic Linking! In this southern-hemisphere-Redox-Summer-of-Code project, Anhad has implemented dynamic linking as the default build method for many recipes, and all new porting can use dynamic linking with relatively little effort.

This is a huge step forward for Redox, because relibc can now become a stable ABI. And having a stable ABI is one of the prerequisites for Redox to reach “Release 1.0”.

↫ Ribbon and Ron Williams

A major step forward for Redox, and one of those things not everyone might think about when they consider the state of an operating system. This wasn’t all of the news this month, though, as Redox also received a port of the LOVE game engine, which powers quite a few successful indie games, like the recent hit Balatro. Thanks to this port, you can now play Balatro on Redox, which is pretty cool – and highlights just how far Redox has already come. On top of these major two headlines, there’s a ton of improvements all over the operating system, mostly at the lower levels.

A complete guide to configuring FreeBSD as an audiophile audio server: setting up system and audio subsystem parameters, real-time operation, bit-perfect signal processing, and the best methods for enabling and parameterising the system graphic equalizer (equalizer) and high-quality audio equalization with FFmpeg filters. Linux users will also find useful information, especially in the context of configuring and personalising the MPD player and filters.

↫ Marcin Szewczyk-Wilgan

FreeBSD is a much more capable desktop and workstation operating system than it gets credit for, especially with the Linux world sucking all the air out of the room, but you do often need to do a little more and dive a little deeper into the operating system to get it to do what you want. In the case of audio, Szewczyk-Wilgan explains that he thinks it’s even ahead of Linux, due to being able to “precisely track the parameters of the audio device along with the system kernel parameters and modify them”, as well as FreeBSD having better support for real-time operation.

This guide is an incredibly detailed explanation of which options and configurations you should use in FreeBSD to turn it into an audio server. This clearly isn’t for everyone, and I assume most audio experts won’t be considering FreeBSD, but what this article demonstrates is that it’s very, very much possible to do so.

We had a bit of a bug caused by changes we made to make quotes look better, but we’ve fixed it now, so we’re back on track (you may need to do a force-reload in your browser). Sorry for the disruption – and if you want to stay up-to-date on such issues next time it (inevitably) happens, you should follow the OSNews Fedi account (or just bookmark it without following it, if you’re not interested in social media). Anyway, back to the news!

Fresh OS installs are bliss. But the joy fades quickly as installing and uninstalling programs leave behind a trail of digital debris. Even configuration management and declarative systems like NixOS miss crucial bits, like the contents of /var/lib or stray dotfiles. This debris isn’t just unsightly. It can be load-bearing, crucial to the functioning of your system, but outside of your control, and not preserved on rebuilds. Full system backups merely preserve this chaos. I wanted a clean slate, automatically, every boot.

“Erase your darlings” inspired an idea in the NixOS community: allowlisting files and directories that persist across reboots. Anything not on the list gets wiped. The simplest implementation involves mounting / as a tmpfs (i.e. in RAM), and then bind-mounting or symlinking the allowlisted items to a disk-backed filesystem.

↫ Tuxes.uk

I dabbled in NixOS over the past week or so, and while I find it intriguing and can definitely see a use for it, I also found it rather needlessly cumbersome and over-engineered for something as simple as a desktop system. I felt like I was taking a whole bunch of additional steps to do basic things, without needing any of the benefits Nix and NixOS bring. This doesn’t mean Nix and NixOS are bad – just that for me, personally, it doesn’t fill any need I have.

Taking the Nix concept as far as starting with a completely fresh installation on every boot sounds absolutely insane to me. Of course, it’s not entirely fresh on every reboot, as several applications and important configuration elements do survive the reboot, but it’s still quite drastic compared to what everyone else is doing. Unsurprisingly, there are a few issues; it’s hard to know what really needs and doesn’t need saving, there might be some unexpected issues because software doesn’t expect to be wiped, and so on.

Overall though, it seems to work susprisingly well, and for a specific type of person, this is definitely bliss.

It kind of goes by under the radar, but aside from HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX, there’s another traditional classic UNIX still in active development today: UnixWare (and its sibling, OpenServer). Owned and developed by Xinuos, UnixWare and other related code and IP was acquired by them when the much-hated SCO crashed and burned about 15 years ago or so, and they’ve been maintaining it ever since. About a year ago, Xinuos released Update Pack 1 and Maintenance Pack 1 for UnixWare 7 Definitive 2018, followed by similar update packs for OpenServer 6 later in 2024.

These update packs bring a bunch of bugfixes and performance improvements, as well as a slew of updated open source components, like new versions of SAMBA, sendmail, GCC and tons of other GNU components, OpenSSH and OpenSSL, and so, so much more, enabling a relatively modern and up-to-date build and porting environment. They can be installed through the patchck update utility, and while the Maintenance Pack is free for existing registered users, the Update Pack requires a separate license. UnixWare, while fully capable as a classic UNIX for workstations, isn’t really aimed at individuals or hobbyists (sadly), and instead focuses on existing enterprise deployments, where such licensing costs are par for the course.

UnixWare runs on x86, and can be installed both on real hardware as well as in various virtualised environments. I contacted Xinuos a few days ago for a review license, and they supplied me with one so I can experiment with and write about UnixWare. I’ve currently got it installed in a Linux kvm, where it runs quite well, including the full X11R6 CDE desktop environment and graphical administration tools. Installing updates is a breeze thanks to patchck automating the process of finding, downloading, and installing the correct ones. I intend to ask Xinuos about an optimal configuration for running UnixWare on real hardware, too.

Late last year, the MaXX Interactive Desktop, the Linux (and BSD) version of the IRIX desktop, sprung back to life with a new release and a detailed roadmap. Thanks to a unique licensing agreement with SGI, MaXX’ developer, Eric Masson, has been able to bring a lot of the SGI user experience over to Linux and BSD, and as promised, we have a new release: the final version of MaXX Interactive Desktop 2.2.0. It’s codenamed Octane, and anyone who knows their SGI history will chuckle at this and other codenames MaXX uses.

Like last year’s alpha release, 2.2.0 brings an Exposé-like overview features, initial freedesktop.org integration, tons of performance improvements and bug fixes, desktop notifications, and much more. For the next release, 2.3.0 they’re planning a new file manager, support for .desktop files, a ton of new preference panes, a quick search feature, and a whole bunch of lower-level stuff. With how serious the renewed development effort seems, I hope that some day, the project will consider building MaXX out to a full Linux distribution, to gain more control over the experience and ensure normal users don’t have to perform a manual installation.

After doing more digging than I feel like I should have needed to, I found my answer: it appears that due to concerns about the fact that acknowledging the existence of certain countries can be perceived as a nominally political stance, Microsoft has opted to just avoid the issue altogether by not including country flag emojis in Windows’ system font.

Problem solved! Can you imagine if, *gasp*, your computer could render a Taiwanese or Palestinian flag? The horror!

↫ Ryan Geyer

Silicon Valley corporations are nothing if not massive cowards, and this is just another one of the many, many examples that underline this. Firefox solves this by including the flags on its own, but Google refuses to do the same with Chrome, because, you guessed it, Google is also a cowardly organisation. There are some ways around it, as the linked article details, but they’re all clumsy and cumbersome compared to Microsoft just not being a coward and including proper flag emoji, even if it offends some sensibilities in pro-China or western far-right circles.

Your best bet to avoid such corporate cowardice is to switch to better operating systems, like any desktop Linux distribution. Fedora KDE includes both the Taiwanese and Palestinian flags, because the KDE project isn’t made up of cowards, and I’m sure the same applies to any GNOME distribution. If your delicate snowflake sensibilities can’t handle a Palestinian or Taiwanese flag emoji, just don’t type them.

Bitter sidenote: it turns out WordPress, what OSNews uses, doesn’t like emoji, either. Adding any emoji in this story, from basic ones to the Taiwanese or Palestinian flag, makes it impossible to save or publish the story. I have no idea if this is a WordPress issue, or an issue on our end, since WordPress does mention they have emoji support.

Geico, an American insurance company, is building a live-patching solution for the Linux kernel, called TuxTape.

TuxTape is an in-development kernel livepatching ecosystem that aims to aid in the production and distribution of kpatch patches to vendor-independent kernels. This is done by scraping the Linux CNA mailing list, prioritizing CVEs by severity, and determining applicability of the patches to the configured kernel(s). Applicability of patches is determined by profiling kernel builds to record which files are included in the build process and ignoring CVEs that do not affect files included in kernel builds deployed on the managed fleet.

↫ Presentation by Grayson Guarino and Chris Townsend

It seems to me something like live-patching the Linux kernel should be a standardised framework that’s part of the Linux kernel, and not several random implementations by third parties, one of which is an insurance company. There’s a base core of functionality for live-patching in the Linux kernel since 4.0, released in 2015, but it’s extremely limited and requires most of the functionality to be implemented separately, through things like Red Hat’s kpatch and Oracle’s Ksplice.

Geico is going to release TuxTape as open source, and is encouraging others to adopt and use it. There are various other solutions out there offering similar functionality, so you’re not spoiled for choice, and I’m sure there’s advantages and disadvantages to each. I would still prefer if functionality like this is a standard feature of the kernel, not something tied to a specific vendor or implementation.