This year, 2025, the KDE Community held its yearly conference in Berlin, Germany. On the way I reinstalled FreeBSD on my Frame.work 13 laptop in another attempt to get KDE Plasma 6 Wayland working. Short story: yes, KDE Plasma 6 Wayland on FreeBSD works.

↫ Adriaan de Groot

Adriaan de Groot is a long-time KDE developer and FreeBSD package maintainer, and he’s published a short but detailed guide on setting up a KDE Plasma desktop on FreeBSD using Wayland instead of X11. With the Linux world slowly but finally leaving X11 behind, the BSD world really has little choice but to follow, especially if they want to continue offering the two major desktop environments. Most of KDE and GNOME are focused on Linux, and the BSDs have always kind of tagged along for the ride, and over the coming years that’s going to mean they’ll have to invest more in making Wayland run comfortably on BSD.

Of course, the other option would be the KDE and GNOME experience on the BSDs slowly degrading over time, but I think especially FreeBSD is keen to avoid that fate, while OpenBSD and NetBSD seem a bit more hands-off in the desktop space. FreeBSD is investing heavily in its usability as a desktop operating system, and that’s simply going to mean getting Wayland support up to snuff. Not only will KDE and GNOME slowly depend more and more on Wayland, Xorg itself will also become less maintained than it already is.

Sometimes, the current just takes you where it’s going.

If you need to reinstall Windows 11, you’re most likely going to need to do a hell of a lot of post-install work to make Windows 11 somewhat manageable. There’s countless tools to make this process a little bit easier, and one of them, Flyoobe, just got a major update to aid in removing all the “AI” nonsense Microsoft is forcing down the throats of its users.

Starting off with version 1.7, people who hate the way Microsoft has been stuffing AI features into Windows 11 will be pleased to know that there is an OOBE view that allows you to discover and disable all AI and Copilot features after the installation of the OS. Moreover, the OOBE view that handles bloat removal has been enhanced too, and now allows presets ranging from Minimal to Full, along with the ability to load custom presets from GitHub.

↫ Usama Jawad at Neowin

If Microsoft actually cared about the users of its Windows operating system, they would simply include an advanced options view during installation, in which you could customise your installation. Instead, users have to rely on what are essentially hacks to get to a point where their operating system installation can serve their needs, which is batshit insane to me.

I’m glad projects like Flyoobe exists, but they shouldn’t have to.

Akademy 2025, KDE’s yearly developer and community event, this year held in Berlin, Germany. Amid all the various talks and informal meetings, the KDE project also officially unveiled the first alpha release of KDE Linux, a project they’ve been working on for a while now. KDE Linux will serve as a “reference implementation” of KDE Plasma and official KDE applications, for use by developers and regular users alike.

KDE Linux will have a quick update cycle, to ensure its users always have the latest releases of KDE Plasma and various other KDE applications and related technologies. It may, however, not be as optimised as other KDE distributions, and the intent of KDE Linux is not to compete with or replace other distributions. The goal is to show other distributions how KDE itself intends for its software to be presented.

So, what is KDE Linux based on?

KDE Linux is an “immutable base OS” Linux distro with a core created using Arch Linux packages — but it should not be considered part of the Arch family of distributions. Some very fundamental Arch technologies (like the pacman package manager!) have been removed. KDE software is then built on top of this core using KDE’s homegrown development tools and Flatpak.

KDE Linux leans on Systemd for a great deal of functionality. Updates are atomic and image-based, with the last 5 OS images cached on disk for safety. Only the Wayland session is supported. Apps primarily come from Flatpak and Snap.

↫ KDE Linux’ website

The overview of the KDE Linux’ architecture provides some more details. I like that it eschews GRUB in favour of systemd-boot (GRUB should be retired in this, the year of our lord 2025) and relies on systemd-sysupdate for operating system updates. Of note is that the mention of Snap is merely for convenience’s sake as an option; Snap is not a requirement, nor are any Snap packages installed by default.

Since this is the first alpha release, expect bugs and issues, and don’t use it on any production machines until they’re a few more releases in.

The European Commission today fined Google €2.95 billion for abusing its dominant position in the advertising technology market, despite the threat of trade retribution from U.S President Donald Trump.

The American tech giant is alleged to have distorted the market for online ads by favoring its own services to the detriment of competitors, advertisers and online publishers, the EU executive said in a press release.

↫ Jacob Parry at Politico

Not only does Google have to pay a pretty hefty fine – for corporate standards, as it’s still peanuts when looking at Google’s revenue, because class justice is real – the company also has to submit a plan within 60 days detailing how it’s going to end the illegal behaviour. Of course, Google is going to contest the fine, but the company is also running to daddy to cry and whine about how those damn Europeans won’t let it engage in illegal behaviour.

Last night, all the big US technology CEOs gathered for a dinner with Donald Trump, each taking turns gratuitously thanking and praising the big man for his amazing achievements during these first few months of his administration. Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and many more were all bending the knee and kissing the ring in what can only be described as a borderline pornographic display of fealty. Among them was, of course, the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, one day after Google laughed its way out of the courtroom.

“Well you had a very good day yesterday,” Trump said, calling on Pichai at the Thursday evening dinner. “Google had a very good day yesterday. Do you want to talk about that big day you had yesterday?”

[…]

“I’m glad it’s over,” Pichai responded to Trump, causing an eruption of laughter from the other table guests.

“It’s a long process,” Pichai said. “Appreciate that your administration had a constructive dialogue, and we were able to get it to some resolution.”

↫ Jennifer Elias at CNBC

Mind you, several of those “other table guests” are also being investigated by a variety of arms of the US government for monopoly abuse and antritrust violations, and I’m sure their laughter was almost entirely self-serving. If Google of all monopolies can slime its way out of any serious consequences, what hope does that leave that the other tech giants will ever have to face the consequences of their abuse?

At least the European Union seems to be mostly holding its head high so far, but one can’t help but wonder how long the Phoenician princess can hold off the bull. The fact of the matter is that the European and US economies are heavily intertwined, and we let ourselves become utterly dependent on the US for our defense, too, and with Trump not deterred by Pyrrhic victories, a fallout is definitely not out of the question.

I recently removed all advertising from OSNews, and one of the reasons to do so is that online ads have become a serious avenue for malware and other security problems. Advertising on the web has become such a massive security risk that even the very birthplace of the world wide web, CERN, now strongly advises its staff to use adblockers.

If you value your privacy and, also important, if you value the security of your computer, consider installing an ad blocker. While there is a plethora of them out there, the Computer Security Office’s members use, e.g. uBlock origin (Firefox) or Origin Lite (Chrome), AdblockPlus, Ghostery and Privacy Badger of the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation. They all come in free (as in “free beer”) versions for all major browsers and also offer more sophisticated features if you are willing to pay. Once enabled, and depending on your desired level of protection, they can provide another thorough layer of protection to your device – and subsequently to CERN.

↫ CERN’s Computer Security Office

I think it’s high time lawmakers take a long, hard look at the state of online advertising, and consider taking strong measures like banning online tracking and targeted advertising. Even the above-board online advertising industry is built atop dubious practices and borderline criminal behaviour, and things only get worse from there. Malicious actors even manage to infiltrate Google’s own search engine with dangerous ads, and that’s absolutely insane when you think about it.

I’ve reached the point where I consider any website with advertising to be disrespectful and putting its visitors at risk, willingly and knowingly. Adblockers are not just a nice-to-have, but an absolute necessity for a pleasant and safe browsing experience, and that should be an indicator that we need to really stop and think what we’re doing here.

As if Francesco P. Lovergine heard my prayers, he wrote an article detailing his experiences with using Guix. Considering he’s a longtime Debian developer, we’re looking at someone who knows a thing or two about Linux.

In the last few months, I have installed and upgraded my second preferred GNU/Linux system, GNU Guix, on multiple boxes. Regarding that system, I have already written a few introductory posts in the recent past. This is an update about my experiences as a user and developer. I still think Guix is a giant step forward in packaging and management, in comparison with Debian and other distributions, for elegance and inner coherence.

↫ Francesco P. Lovergine

Lovergine found some problems with Guix, most notably those stemming from a lack of manpower. It’s not a hugely popular package management system and associated distribution, so the team of developers behind it is relatively small, and this leads to issues like outdated packages, problems arising from updates, and possible security issues. There’s no specific security team, for instance, but at least it’s easy to roll back updates due to the nature of Guix.

Another problem, partially related to the lack of manpower, stems from the fact that the GNU Guix System uses some unusual systems, most notably GNU Shepard. This init system is an alternative to the widely-used systemd, alongside other alternatives like runit (which I use through Void Linux), but due to its relative lack of popularity, it can take some time for more complex packages to be made compatible with it. Especially some packages – like GNOME – that depend more and more on systemd are going to lag behind on Guix.

For anyone with decent Linux experience and a willingness to tinker, I don’t think any of these issues – and the others Lovergine mentions – are dealbreakers. Sure, you might not want to deploy the GNU Guix System on a production system or anything that requires solid, strong security, but for personal and enthusiast use it seems like an interesting and somewhat unorthodox Linux distribution.

Microsoft has been working on allowing driver developers to write Windows drivers in Rust, and the company has published a progress report detailing this effort. In the windows-drivers-rs GitHub repository you’ll find a bunch of Rust crates for writing Windows drivers in Rust.

Using these crates, driver developers can create valid WDM, KMDF, and UMDF driver binaries that load and run on a Windows 11 machine.

[…]

Drivers written in this manner still need to make use of unsafe blocks for interacting with the Windows operating system, but can take advantage of Rust’s rich type system as well as its safety guarantees for business logic implemented in safe Rust.  Though there is still significant work to be done on abstracting away these unsafe blocks (more on this below), these Rust drivers can load and run on Windows systems just like their C counterparts.

↫ Nate Deisinger at the Windows Driver Developer Blog

As mentioned above, there’s still work to be done with reducing the amount of unsafe Rust code in these drivers, and Microsoft is working on just that. The company is developing safe Rust bindings and abstractions, as well as additional safe structs and APIs beyond the Windows Driver Framework, but due to the complexity of Windows drivers, this will take a while.

Microsoft states that it believes memory-safe languages like Rust are the future of secure software development, but of course, in true Microsoft fashion, the company doesn’t want to alienate developers writing traditional drivers in C either.

In 9front, we host almost all parts of our development process on 9front — the git repositories, the mailing list, the ci/cd, the web site, and everything else. (The exception is #cat-v IRC) We use the system regularly, both when hacking on the system and in our personal use.

Personally, I write most of my code on Plan 9, read my emails there, and often drive Linux from there. I run my home network off of a 9front CPU server, and host my websites off it. I know other people around 9front do similar.

↫ Ori Bernstein

It clearly shows, too. If you dive into the 9front community, you’ll quickly realise everything runs on 9front, and that does create a sense that the operating system is capable, and that its developers have confidence and pride in their work. Exploring 9front myself, it feels awesome to see that all the documentation I’m reading is being hosted on 9front machines.

I’m going to relaunch the OSNews Gemini capsule, this time hosted on 9front, and since countless 9front users host their own Gemini capsules on 9front, I feel confident that I’ve got people to talk to when I need help. I just need the time to actually sit down and figure out the minutiae of 9front, because it truly is unique.

For an operating system that was once incredibly popular and expected to become a standard for a long time to come, it’s remarkable how little experience most people have with CP/M. In fact, many conventions and historical limitations you might be aware of – like the 8.3 filename convention of DOS – come straight from CP/M, as it influenced DOS considerably. It’s quite easy to emulate CP/M today, but it’s just old and different enough that getting into it might be a but confusing, but that’s where Eerie Linux’s introduction to CP/M comes into play.

This article is just what the headline promises: an introduction to the CP/M operating system. No previous knowledge of 1970s and early ’80s operating systems is required. However, some familiarity with Linux or a BSD-style operating system is assumed, as the setup process suggested here involves using a package manager and command-line tools. But why explore CP/M in the 2020s? There are (at least) two good reasons: 1) historical education 2) gaining a better understanding of how computers actually work.

↫ Eerie Linux

This article is a great way to get up and running with CP/M fairly quickly, and I intend to do just that when I find some time to mess around with it. What are some of the core, crucial applications that one should try on CP/M? Things people would be using back when CP/M was properly in use?

My goal with this article is to share my perspectives on the web, as well as introduce many aspects of modern HTML/CSS you may not be familiar with. I’m not trying to make you give up JavaScript, I’m just trying to show you everything that’s possible, leaving it up to you to pick what works best for whatever you’re working on.

I think there’s a lot most web developers don’t know about CSS.

And I think JS is often used where better alternatives exist.

So, let me show you what’s out there.

 ↫ Lyra Rebane

As someone who famously can’t program, the one thing I like about CSS is that I find it quite readable and generally easy to figure out how I can change things like colours, fonts, and so on. Of course, anything more complex will still break my brain, but even the more complex elements are still at least nominally readable, and it’s often quite easy to determine what a piece of CSS does, even if I don’t know how to manipulate it or how to get even close to any desired result. It’s like how the fact I learned Latin and French in high school makes it possible for me to nominally understand a text in Spanish, even if I have never spent a single second studying it.

JavaScript, on the other hand, is just a black box, incomprehensible gibberish I can’t make heads or tails of, which in my mind goes against what the web is supposed to be about. The web is supposed to be an open platform in more ways than one, and the ability to make a website should not be hidden behind complex programming languages or website builder gatekeepers. The fact JavaScript is a resource hog and misused all over the place sure doesn’t help, either.

If you want to know more about the current state of CSS, the linked article by Lyra Rebane is a great place to start. I wish I had the skills to finally give OSNews a full makeover, but alas, I don’t.

The months keep slipping through our fingers, during this, our slow but relentless march towards the inevitability of certain death, so it’s time for another month of improvements to Redox, the general-purpose microkernel operating system written in Rust. This past month the work to bring various components of system76’s COSMIC desktop environment to Redox continues, with COSMIC Reader making its way to Redox. Jeremy Soller, creator of the Redox project and one of its primary engineers, will be using COSMIC Reader running on Redox to hold a presentation about Redox at RustConf.

Aside from that important port, this month – in the middle of Summer on in this hemisphere – seems to mostly consist of a ton of smaller bugfixes and improvements. Relibc, Redox’ C standard library, has seen a ton of work, as usual, a few ports were fixed and updated, like vim and OpenSSH, Orbital now has fullscreen support, and so, so much more.

DistroWatch’s Jesse Smith is bringing some attention to an issue I have never encountered and had never heard of, and it has to do with antivirus software on Windows. It seems it’s not uncommon for antivirus software on Windows to mark Linux ISOs as malware or otherwise dangerous, and it seems people are reporting these findings to DistroWatch, for some reason. DistroWatch makes it clear they don’t host any of the ISOs, and that close to all of these warnings from antivirus software are false positives.

So why do multiple Windows virus scanners report that they find malware in Linux downloads? Putting aside the obvious conspiracy theories about anti-virus vendors not wanting to lose customers, what is probably happening is the scanners are detecting an archive file (the ISO) which contains executable code, and flagging it as suspicious. Some of the code is even able to change the disk layout, which is something that looks nasty from a security point of view. It’s entirely understandable that a malware scanner which sees an archive full of executable code that could change the way the system boots would flag it as dangerous.

↫ Jesse Smith at DistroWatch

I wonder how many people curious about Linux downloaded an ISO, only to delete is after their Windows antivirus marked it as dangerous. I can’t imagine the number to be particularly high – if you’re downloading a Linux ISO, you’re probably knowledgeable enough to figure out it’s a false positive – but apparently it’s a big enough issue that DistroWatch needs to inform its readers about it, which is absolutely wild to me.

I stumbled upon an LWN.net article from 2023, in which Lars Wirzenius, a long-time Debian developer and friend of Linus Torvalds, recalls the very early days of Linux – in fact, before it was even called Linux. There’s so many fun little stories in here, like how the Linux kernel started out as a multitasking demo written in x86 assembly, which did nothing more than write As and Bs on the screen, or the fact Linux was originally called Freax before Ari Lemmke, one of the administrators of ftp.funet.fi, opted for the name “Linux” when uploading the first release.

However, my favourite story is about what installing Linux was like during those early days.

During this time, people were interested in trying out this new thing, so Linus needed to provide an installation method and instructions. Since he only had one PC, he came to visit to install it on mine. Since his computer had been used to develop Linux, which had simply grown on top of his Minix installation, it had never actually been installed before. Thus, mine was the first PC where Linux was ever installed. While this was happening, I was taking a nap, and I recommend this method of installing Linux: napping, while Linus does the hard work.

↫ Lars Wirzenius at LWN.net

The entire article is a joy to read, and since it’s from 2023, I’m sure I’m late to the party and none of it is news to many of you. On a more topical note, Wirzenius published a short article today detailing why he still uses Debian, after all these decades.

I am a huge fan of my Rock 5 ITX+. It wraps an ATX power connector, a 4-pin Molex, PoE support, 32 GB of eMMC, front-panel USB 2.0, and two Gen 3×2 M.2 slots around a Rockchip 3588 SoC that can slot into any Mini-ITX case. Thing is, I never put it in a case because the microSD slot lives on the side of the board, and pulling the case out and removing the side panel to install a new OS got old with a quickness.

I originally wanted to rackmount the critter, but adding a deracking difficulty multiplier to the microSD slot minigame seemed a bit souls-like for my taste. So what am I going to do? Grab a microSD extender and hang that out the back? Nay! I’m going to neuralyze the SPI flash and install some Kelvin Timeline firmware that will allow me to boot and install generic ARM Linux images from USB.

↫ Interfacing Linux

Using EDK2 to add UEFI to an ARM board is awesome, as it solves some of the most annoying problems of these ARM boards: they require custom images specifically prepared for the board in question. After flashing EDK2 to this board, you can just boot any ARM Linux distribution – or Windows, NetBSD, and so on – from USB and install it from there. There’s still a ton of catches, but it’s a clear improvement.

The funniest detail for sure, at least for this very specific board, is that the SPI flash is exposed as a block device, so you can just use, say the GNOME Disk Utility to flash any new firmware into it. The board in question is a Radxa ROCK 5 ITX+, and they’re not all that expensive, so I’m kind of tempted here. I’m not entirely sure what I’d need yet another computer for, honestly, but it’s not like that’s ever stopped any of us before.