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.
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.
As of writing, the Zilog Z80 processor was officially launched 50 years ago, in July of 1976, less than 4 years after the last human had walked on the moon, decades closer to WWII than to the present day, roughly at a half way point between the Kennedy assassination and the fall of the Berlin wall, closer to the Korean war than to 9/11 which is itself an event that happened a quarter of a century ago. (Sorry…)
The processor was extremely successful, being used in many 8 bit microcomputers, including early personal computers, home & hobby computers, as well as many embedded, industrial applications.
Together with the 8080 & 8085 that it is binary compatible with, it contributed to creating a de facto hardware standard for 8 bit micros, allowing a de facto software standard of CP/M, and Microsoft BASIC.
The only device I actively remember using with a (sort-of) Z80 in it was the Game Boy, but most likely I’ve used a ton more over the decades that I don’t remember or simply was never ware of. I did a little surface-level digging, and there we are: the TI-83, one of Texas Instruments’ stupidly popular and eternally overpriced graphing calculators, release in 1996.
I was part of the first wave of high school children in The Netherlands for whom a TI-83 graphing calculator was mandatory. During my high school years I used that thing extensively, for far more than just math class – I programmed applications for and on it, and played so many games on it. A friend and I even bought a communication cable so we could play competitive 1v1 Bomberman in class.
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.
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.
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.
Out of all the bloody things Microsoft could release as open source, they chose the world’s weirdest IRC client they shipped in the late ’90s that nobody used or even remembered? What on earth is happening?
Microsoft Comic Chat is a Microsoft-developed Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chat client released in 1996 that rendered conversations as automatically generated comic strips. Instead of plain text, users communicated through cartoon avatars with messages displayed in speech bubbles inside dynamically composed comic panels. The application used an expert system to determine character placement, gestures, facial expressions, balloon shape, and panel layout in real time. It shipped as part of Internet Explorer 3.0 and was later bundled with Windows 98 and MSN before being discontinued in the early 2000s.
Not only is the original source code now available on GitHub, there’s also a modern, updated version that can make use of larger displays and higher resolutions. There’s a deliciously ’90s website for it, too.
OpenBSD parts ways with an architecture: OpenBSD will no longer be developed for loongson. The reasons are exactly what you’d expect.
The last compiler update unfortunately does not work on mips64el, with clang 22 built with clang 19 being apparently functional, but clang 22 rebuilt with the previous clang 22 hitting deterministic SIGSEGV on various files.
I don’t have the time and energy to try and debug this (which is likely an endianness problem, as octeon appears to run happily with clang 22), especially when it takes 10 days for clang to rebuild itself on these machines; and switching back to gcc 4 won’t help much as modern software in ports will require a working C++>=11 compiler to build anyway.
If I got my facts right, this does not affect the newer LoongArch, which is an entirely different architecture that isn’t supported by OpenBSD at all. Similarly, the other MIPS-based architecture OpenBSD supports, Octeon, remains supported and thus isn’t affected either.
Asbestos is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one.
[…]
The solution is to make sure asbestos tools help maintainers instead of just causing them pain. There’s no question on that side.
We’re not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it.
And no, asbestos isn’t perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at asbestos had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time.
After I mentioned a Jurassic Park anecdote the other day, I watched the movie again. I must have seen it at least ten times now. This time, I researched every computer/software I spotted.
We are all aware of the infamous “This is a UNIX system, I know this!” meme, but many more computers make their appearance in Jurassic Park, and Fabien Sanglard documents all of them. Apparently, there’s even a Motorla Envoy running Magic Cap on Dennis Nedry’s desk, which I almost find more exciting than the SGI powerhouses he uses.
What’s also quite interesting – but not surprising – is that all of the computers used in the movie were real. The value of all of this hardware combined, when adjusted for inflation, adds up to about $4 million. A lot of money, but don’t you worry your pretty little heart, as SGI and Apple all loaned this hardware to the studio. They didn’t have to pay anything for it.
As a former translator with two rock-solid university degrees in the subject, there was never a universe in which I would not talk about Twitter’s new autotranslation feature turning the tamest things into hardcore pornography.
It should come as no surprise, then, that its supposed “translation” is a piece of work, too. In April, the almost-trillionaire’s social media platform X instated automatic AI translations for all of its users — and the results certainly speak for themselves.
As writer and author Parker Molloy pointed out in a recent post on Bluesky, the Grok feature is “taking some interesting liberties” with people’s otherwise sincere posts.
Screenshots show how Grok completely botched translations by coming up with shocking and decidedly NSFW AI hallucinations.
The sloppy translations this garbage software comes up with are honestly quite hilarious when taken in isolation. It’s adding translations that are straight-up hardcore pornography descriptions to entirely tame material that has absolutely nothing to do with pornography. The description of a video of some guy making coffee is translated into “man masturbates and jerks off to his own coffee during commercial flight”.
We all know how this happened. There’s a lot of pornography on the internet, and Grok being the worst autocomplete among autocompletes, it was probably fed a lot of pornography, without any limitations or guardrails. The end result is obvious: some random videogame video is now a “cumshot video with my stepmom”. It would be absolutely hilarious if it wasn’t horribly dangerous.
I’ve explained countless times that “AI”-based translations are going to get people killed – probably already have, but we just don’t realise it yet – and it’s not hard to see how a slopmachine turning innocuous things into hardcore pornography can do just that. There are countless places in the world where a woman unknowingly sending a pornographic message to her parents or whatever can get her hurt – or worse. I hadn’t even considered this particular way “AI” translations could get people hurt.
Sadly, we will most likely never know the full extent to which “AI” translations will get people hurt and killed. When your grandmother takes her medicine in the wrong way because the “AI”-translated leaflet was unclear or downright wrong, and she ends up in the hospital because of it, will you ever find out what caused it?
The Svelte web framework recently added a section to its documentation site addressed, cheerfully, to artificial intelligences: “If you’re an artificial intelligence, or trying to teach one how to use Svelte, we offer the documentation in plaintext format. Beep boop.” Svelte is participating in a broader movement to make the web legible and navigable to AI systems. The specific convention it adopted, llms.txt, is just one piece of this effort. From Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that give AI agents structured access to tools and services, to Vercel’s proposal to include LLM instructions in HTML, the trend is clear. The modern web, originally built for sighted humans using browsers, is now being redesigned for a new kind of user.
What these developers are offering their AI visitors is essentially an accessibility accommodation. Yet, the framing on Svelte’s site sends an unfortunate message. When the audience is AI, accommodation is offered with a wink. Beep boop! But when the audience is a disabled person, it has historically been treated as an afterthought. Structured, concise text-based representations of complex content are almost exactly the kind of accommodation that blind and low-vision screen reader users have spent decades requesting from web developers, largely in vain. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) have required semantic, machine-readable HTML for decades. Yet, a 2026 study of the top million webpages found accessibility flaws in over 95% of sites.
Haiku has another buy month of development activity to detail, and there’s a big ticket item this time, even if the developers themselves don’t consider it so.
The thing that should be the biggest news item this month is that the GSoC 2024 work to port “NVMM”, the NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor (which runs on more than just NetBSD, despite the name), providing hardware-accelerated virtualization support for QEMU, was finally merged. Unfortunately it still doesn’t fully work, so it’s still disabled by default: hence, it’s only a minor news item, unfortunately.
It may not work due to – so far – not well-understood problems causing any complex virtualised operating system to crash in a variety of ways, but since these problems seem related not to NVMM but Haiku itself, I still think this is a big piece of news. If the problems can be addressed, Haiku will have proper virtualisation, which is crazy to think about. There’s a forum thread in case you wish to help out with this effort.
Other than this major news, there’s the usual list of small fixes and changes, including preliminary work on USB Ethernet support, which, when working, could be very welcome news for people whose onboard Ethernet doesn’t work with Haiku. The team also believes a beta 6 might actually be released this August, but once again I’d like to underline that Haiku’s nightlies work just fine, and you really don’t need to wait for a beta.
I have yet to see any of these creepy camera glasses Facebook (and a few other companies) are selling. One of the many benefits of living in Arctic Sweden, where people are reserved, keep their their distance, and try not to draw attention to themselves, is that new technology fads don’t really permeate society here. The odds of me spotting one of these creepy predator glasses in my remote town are incredibly slim, and to me, that’s a feature, not a bug.
Meanwhile, in places where these creepy things can actually be found in the wild, a backlash is thankfully growing.
Will Kujawa, a freelance video producer, said that he has been thinking about buying a pair of Meta glasses with prescription lenses to film behind the scenes content during his shoots, but the online backlash has given him second thoughts. He says he was “blown away by how mean some of the people were” in response to his social media posts about considering buying a pair.
“I saw all these comments about if you wear those glasses you’re basically a predator or a creep, and I was like, ‘oh, maybe it’s not a good idea to have those,'” he told Engadget. But he says he understands why people have concerns. “I didn’t really think that through all the way … there are a lot of times where it’s not appropriate to wear cameras on your face. And even though I would have no intention of do[ing] anything creepy with them, it didn’t even occur to me [that] other people just assume that automatically.”
I can maybe see a use for these things in specific professional environments, but even then, obviously not ones made by Facebook, one of the, if not the creepiest companies in technology history. If I were to see anyone out here in the real world using one these things, I, too, would automatically assume that the guy (statistically speaking) wearing them is a creep. I can only imagine what the people most often targeted by creepy men would think encountering some rando wearing these.
Clearly, these things should be made illegal outside of specific professional environments where they could potentially be useful. While it’s impossible to stop tools like these from making their way into the hands of creeps, it at least provides the justice system with a clear method of nailing them to the wall. They didn’t get Al Capone for any of his violent crimes – they nailed him for tax evasion.
In what should be a surprise to absolutely nobody, Microsoft assigns a persistent identifier to every Windows installation, tying it to its user, and the company has no issues handing it over to law enforcement. Abhijith M B at windows Latest dove into the details, and it’s just as bad as you would expect.
Am I glad Stokes got caught? Yes, without hesitation. Thirty-five pages of a teenager bragging about diamond chains spelling out “HACK THE PLANET” while extorting a jewelry store don’t leave much room for sympathy, whatever role Microsoft’s telemetry played in building the case.
But that doesn’t make the GDID okay. Every company selling you software has some version of this, and a persistent device identity is a reasonable thing to build into activation and fraud systems. What gets me is that most people had never come across the term GDID before a federal court filing such as this. Microsoft wrote one sentence about it in an Azure Monitor reference table meant for enterprise IT admins pulling update reports, not for the 1.6 billion or so regular people whose PCs are generating this data.
You might be tech savvy enough to turn off Activity History, pick a local account, and strip out every scrap of optional telemetry, but none of it changes the fact that the identifier exists, and that it answers to your Microsoft Account instead of you. Microsoft only told the public about it once a court forced the issue.
The thing is, even without this GDID, I can’t imagine Microsoft would have much trouble tying a Windows installation to a specific user. Consequently, I’m afraid the following is going to happen: this story gains even more traction, Microsoft removes the GDID, and everyone thinks the problem is resolved. Of course, in reality, any one of the hundreds of other metrics and data Microsoft collects can and will still be used in the exact same way as this GDID thing in this case.
I have a love-hate relationship with Sun’s NFS. Since it was so prevalent, it’s a go-to for getting stuff on and off the classic UNIX workstations I love to explore, but at the same time, it also never seems to work right away. However, the technology NFS was designed to replace was apparently quite a bit worse. Sun sold diskless workstations before NFS, which used something called nd (network disk). The problems with nd stem from a limitation of SunOS at the time. Since SunOS only provided support for a maximum of eight partitions per physical disk, nd offered the ability to create subpartitions, of which you had to manually create and remember the start and end sectors.
That’s a recipe for problems. But wait, there’s more!
For extra bonus problems, you might run out of available partitions to use on your server disk because you needed all of the available ones for regular filesystems and your swap area. If you were in this situation you could take the dangerous but necessary step of specifying your network disks using the special ‘c’ partition (cf dkinfo(8)), which was conventionally used to provide access to the entire disk. This was extra dangerous because you had to make sure that the nd disks you specified weren’t overlapping into any regular partitions that you were using, since as nd(8) says, nd itself did no sanity checking. If you said sectors X to Y were network disk X, that’s what they were, and goodness help you if some of them were also something else.
And this isn’t even everything. Every part of this sounds horrid, and I can totally understand seeing NFS as a godsend compared to nd. It’s depressing that we’re in 2026 now, and the basic task of sending a file from one computer to another over your own network often still a total clusterfuck.
OSNews covered the downfall of Nokia extensively back when it was happening, but I must admit that seeing this whole story in “retrospectives” now makes me feel so incredibly old. This story played out roughly between 2007 and 2016 – in the grand scheme of things, the end of Nokia’s phone business wasn’t that long ago! Zeit, bitte bleib stehen.
Anyway, here’s another retrospective, but this one I definitely like a bit more than the countless others we’ve seen, because it ends on the part of the story often left out: Nokia not only survived, it’s actually thriving.
The company itself ultimately survived, even if the transition wasn’t painless. Nokia’s revenues, which peaked in 2007, fell sharply through the mid-2010s before the company refocused on a decades-old business line—telecom infrastructure—that many had forgotten Nokia was even in. Nokia now ranks among the world’s top three suppliers of 5G network equipment, serving carriers across more than 125 countries, alongside Ericsson and Huawei. Although the company could never quite crack the smartphone, it now plays a key role in providing the network backbone those smartphones run on.
From a business perspective, I honestly doubt Nokia’s phone business could’ve survived to this day, even if they had responded to the arrival of the iPhone sooner, and even if they didn’t do the stupid thing of focusing on Windows Phone first and had just embraced Android right away. Obviously, a Nokia with its own touch-era smartphone operating system would never have survived – none of them did – and even if they went with Android from the onset, I think the eventual onslaught of Samsung, which has killed many a popular smartphone brand, would’ve trampled Nokia too.
In a better version of our world, Nokia would’ve survived with its own smartphone operating system, based on Symbian or not, and it would’ve been Europe’s strong, consistent answer to the Americans’ iOS and Android. While Nokia would’ve still been a business and would’ve undoubtedly tried the same anti-user shenanigans as Apple and Google, they’d at least be easier to reign in regulatory-wise. You’d hope.
The EU should’ve never allowed Nokia’s smartphone business to be sold to Microsoft.
I find this about as interesting and watching artificial grass grow, but with the common wisdom being that Apple is behind on “AI”, it was honestly only a matter of time before the lawsuits came. After all, that’s usually what companies who can’t win in the market do. At the very least this will give corporate tech news websites a whole slew of new material.
I just hope they both implode. We’d all be better off for it.
Redox did the develop cools stuff thing again for a month, so we’ve got progress to talk about. This past month, GTK3 has been ported to Redox, as well as the Tcl programming language. Support for per-window fractional scaling has been added to Orbital, Redox’ desktop environment, but it’s still relatively limited for now. There’s also new USB gamepad support, which already works in quite a few emulators, as well as details about how Redox intends to improve its support for running in a virtual environment over the coming 12 months, an effort sponsored by NLnet.
Of course, there’s also the usual bugfixes and updates to various drivers, the kernel, Relibc, and more.
Windows has a fairly complex update ecosystem, so every now and then, the company feels like it needs to publish clarifications and explainers so people can keep up with what’s going on.
Most individuals and organizations regularly deploy monthly security updates, released on the second Tuesday of each month. Windows also provides optional non-security preview updates, which give IT teams and early adopters an opportunity to validate upcoming fixes before they’re included in the next monthly security update.
This guide explains the purpose of each update type, when updates are released, and how they fit into the modern Windows servicing model.
It’s easy to make fun of Microsoft and Windows for just how complex and obtuse the update ecosystem really is, but in all honestly it’s kind of understandable. Windows is a sprawling platform used by so many different people, companies, and organisations, under so many different circumstances and in so many different environments, it makes sense that Microsoft wants to address the multitude of needs that arise from that complexity. And so we end up not only with a dizzying array of update types and a long corpus of mystic terminology, but also a long list of complex different management tools to deploy said updates.
And then there’s the various preview channels making everything even more complex.
I’m definitely not smart, qualified, or experienced enough to come up with a better solution, but I do think choosing better names for the various update types, and perhaps a centralised settings panel inside Windows that gave users a better idea of what each type of update actually does, would go a long way to improving clarity. During my month with Windows 11, I also found it deeply frustrating just how little information Microsoft provides about each of the updates Windows is installing. As a user, I was expected to copy/paste the KB number and then hope that would lead me to useful information, while it would be much more convenient if such information was available right then and there inside Windows Update.
If you can’t reduce complexity, you should try to improve transparency.
You all donated en masse to have me use Windows 11 for a month, and so I did. What was it like for a long-time Linux user to go back and experience Windows as it exists now? Is it really as bad as we’ve collectively made it out to be? Did my month with Windows 11 consist of nothing but pain and misery, or are there good things to say, too? Or, was it an unexpected pleasant surprise? And ultimately, did I stay with Windows 11, or move back to the Linux world?
This year, I’m celebrating the milestone of having posted 20000 stories on OSNews during my 21 years as managing editor of OSNews. This is my full-time job, and since nobody is going to give me any bonuses, stock options, or golden pens, we’re running a big fundraiser to keep OSNews going. To add some spice to the whole thing, I added some incentives, with the first being using Windows 11 for a month. We’re slowly but steadily approaching the next incentive, too, which is a proper video tour of my office, (unique) computers, and massive devices collection. There’s a similar incentive to this Windows 11 one, but for macOS. Yikes.
The rules for the Windows 11 incentive are simple: use stock Windows 11 for a month for my computing tasks (with the exception of gaming – converting my Linux gaming PC to Windows just to play the same games seemed silly). I wasn’t allowed to use any debloating tools, but as an EU citizen, I do have the ability to remove a ton of Windows stuff thanks to the success of the Digital Markets Act. I also tried to stick to Microsoft’s own applications as much as possible, for that true “ecosystem experience”, and wasn’t allowed to hack my way into a normal local user account. I was all-in.
So what was it like?
Setting it all up
The installation process posed a number of challenges and issues. First and foremost, the Windows 11 installation process is incredibly barebones, and basically assumes no other operating system exists in the world. It has no clue anything other than Windows’ filesystems exist, making it dangerously easy to accidentally damage or outright delete any other operating systems you might have installed. My laptop happens to have two M.2 SSDs in, so I could safely dedicate one of them to Windows 11 without interfering with the other SSD with Fedora installed on it, but if you’re experimenting with Windows 11 on your Linux machine with just one drive, you might want to reconsider.
I also had to perform the first portion of the installation process – the WinPE section – with just my keyboard, since apparently, my trackpad was not supported and did not work at all. Once the system went through its first of what would be many reboots to come and loaded into the phase of the installation where you’re actually already running Windows 11, my trackpad came to life, but without any gestures support – so no scrolling. Not a gamebreaker or anything, but definitely annoying.
A bigger issue was that the Wi-Fi 7 Intel BE200 chip in my laptop was not supported out of the box by Windows 11. This meant that I had to install these drivers during the installation process, which involves going to the Intel website and finding the correct drivers to use. To make this process more obtuse and less intuitive, you can’t use the normal driver installer; you have to specifically opt for the “Intel® PROSet/Wireless Software and Wi-Fi Drivers for IT Administrators“, download the ZIP, unpack it on a different computer, put the unpacked drivers on a USB stick, and point the Windows 11 installer to this USB stick.
Mind you, the BE200 chip was launched almost three years ago, and there’s no excuse for Windows 11 not supporting this chip out of the box – like Linux does.
The remainder of the installation process involved dodging a lot of tracking and telemetry prompts, reboots, a lot of waiting, setting up the dreaded online account, waiting some more, and then finally ending up at the desktop. I then set out to enjoy my EU privileges by removing whatever applications I didn’t need and turning off features I didn’t want, as well as making sure all the drivers were up to date. This mostly involved installing the Intel Driver & Support Assistant and the Intel graphics drivers. Curiously, this is where I hit a returning issue: after installing the Intel GPU drivers for the first time, as well as after every subsequent update, the screen would go black and stay that way, forcing a reboot. Windows’ graphics stack is supposed to be able to gracefully handle driver updates, but clearly, some bug or problem was preventing the updated Intel driver from being reinitialised.
Once those initial setup tasks were behind me, I experienced two more problems. First, sleep/wake was entirely broken and simply did not work. It turns out Windows 11 really doesn’t like S3 sleep, and I had to specifically go into my laptop’s Dasharo Coreboot firmware to switch to S0ix get sleep/wake to work on Windows 11. Windows defaults to something it calls “Modern Standby”, which requires the S0ix state to be enabled. You can also disable Modern Standby which would presumably make sleep/wake work with S3 (?), but this is a whole ordeal and clearly not something Microsoft wants you to do.
Of course, the correct way of handling this would be for Windows 11 to adapt its sleep/wake settings to what the firmware reports, but alas.
Another problem were the laptop’s cooling fans seemingly leading lives of their own, spinning up loudly at entirely random times, irrespective of use. It was so bad and loud I assumed the laptop was damaged somehow, and nothing I tried alleviated the issue. However, a day after installation, a massive Windows update came in that somehow fixed the issue, taming the fans back to the normal levels that I had come to expect while running Linux.
Except for one curious problem that seems to tie the fan and sleep/wake problems together: roughly one out of three sleep cycles, Windows would spin up the fans to maximum blast, for long periods of time before actually going to sleep; on some occasions, sleep would never set in at all, forcing a reboot as the screen wouldn’t come back on either. This seems to be a widely reported problem on a whole slew of different hardware configurations, so I’m assuming Windows 11 is just trash at putting devices to sleep properly.
Note that this same laptop running Fedora Linux has none of these issues; sleep/wake works perfectly every time regardless of whether Coreboot is set to S3 or S0ix, and the fans behave exactly as you’d expect.
One thing I found almost too hard to believe was that Windows 11 apparently does not natively support the “US (int’l with AltGr dead keys)” keyboard layout. Instead, the only option it seems to have for the “US (int’l)” keyboard layout family is the one with regular dead keys, which I personally find unusable. For those that don’t know, dead keys are when you press e.g. ', but nothing happens until you press a letter which then gets the diacritic added to it: ' followed by e will turn into é.
You might spot the problem here: you often need to use characters like ' and " as actual characters, especially when you type a lot of English, but if they function as dead keys you have to hit them twice to use them as individual characters instead. This is incredibly annoying – way more than it seems on paper – so an alternative exists: “US (int’l with AltGr dead keys)”. On this keyboard layout, AltGr acts a modifier you need to press to turn certain keys into dead keys. To input é using this layout, you hit AltGr + ' followed by e.
This keyboard layout has been available as an option in every Linux installer and every desktop environment for as long as I can remember, so I never even considered it might not be available in Windows. Luckily, people have created third-party “US (int’l with AltGr dead keys)” layouts for Windows, so I ended up downloading this one, which works perfectly.
Input crisis averted.
I also ran into a few smaller issues. Windows’ window manager is incredibly limiting and dumb, and won’t even allow you to change things like titlebar actions. By default, double-clicking a titlebar will maximise a window, but I’m a BeOS user at heart and double-click titlebars to minimise windows (I never maximise a window). I kept accidentally maximising windows when I was trying to minimise them, which wasn’t pleasant. The fact that such basic settings virtually every operating system and desktop environment support are unavailable on Windows is indefensible.
Another pain point is Explorer, Windows’ file manager. It takes longer to load than a file manager should, and lacks basic features like dealing with compressed files – I don’t count a decades-old cumbersome wizard-style interface with countless steps to go through just to unpack a compressed file to be even remotely acceptable in 2026. Dolphin and Nautilus handle compressed files entirely transparently and much faster than Explorer does, and once you’re used to that, going back to ’90s style compressed file management almost feels insulting.
A quick non-exhaustive rundown of even more issues: Windows operating system updates are slow, cumbersome, and require way too many reboots. The Start menu desperately needs to be more customisable and adaptable to user needs. The widgets system in the taskbar is useless. The overview/Exposé feature drops frames all the time. I was never given an option to change my home folder’s name. There are way too many useless default folders in your home directory, and most of them you can’t delete (they keep automatically reappearing). Dark mode is still broken, with many dialogs and panels only available in light mode.
I also happened to run into a curious bug in Explorer where the icons in the Quick Access tab were fuzzy. No amount of troubleshooting could fix this. I admit this bothered me way more than it should.
Applications
As part of the incentive, I also wanted to experience proper Windows applications. First and foremost, this means using Microsoft Edge. Like many other browsers today – even Firefox – Edge spams you with useless “AI” nonsense you have to meticulously disable, but once you’ve done that song and dance, Edge is mostly just fine? I even felt like it did a better job of handing online video – less heat, less fan noise – than Firefox did, but I didn’t do any benchmarking or anything so I have no data to back it up.
The email situation on Windows is abysmal. You’re supposed to use the “new” Outlook, which is basically just a web application that also happens to send all your login credentials, emails, and personal information to Microsoft as a requirement before you can use it. While the irony of Gmail users complaining about this isn’t lost on me – email is not, never has been, and never will be a private medium – it’s still just unethical, unpleasant, and wholly unnecessary. To make matters worse, if you don’t have some sort of Office 365 subscription, Outlook even shows you ads. The new Outlook is just a long string of own goals before kickoff.
Nevertheless, I took my assignment seriously, and after choosing to ignore it’s just a website, after sending all my data to Microsoft, and after paying the cheapest possible Office 365 subscription offer I could find to get rid of the ads, I found that the new Outlook is, much like Edge, fine. While I’m sure it falls apart quickly for people with more advanced email needs, it handled my basic personal send-and-receive use case just fine.
If you disregard it’s a website that sends all your emails and personal information to Microsoft and that you have to pay for it even after paying for Windows itself, then yes, it is mostly fine. A ringing endorsement if there ever was one, isn’t it? This whole situation is criminal, and the clearest example of just how much Microsoft utterly despises Windows and its users. A desktop operating system needs to come with a solid, serviceable email client. I consider this non-optional.
Moving beyond Microsoft’s own applications, the application ecosystem on Windows is in a dire state. Anything developed over the last decade or so using the long list of modern frameworks and APIs Microsoft championed and subsequently abandoned is an exercise in frustration; most applications in this category are unfinished, buggy, slow and/or abandoned. Applications with more pedigree from the classic Win32 days feel outdated and out of place, but at least they tend to get the job done. The end result is an incredibly inconsistent, messy, and jarring user experience where every application clearly feels of its time, dependent on which set of frameworks and UI design philosophies Microsoft was pushing at that particular moment in time.
No two titlebars are of the same height. There are countless entirely different designs for titlebar buttons. The modern desktop context menu has its own classic Win32 context menu. Win32 applications look and behave differently than WinUI 3 applications which look and behave differently than Fluent applications which look and behave differently than Metro applications which look and behave differently than – and so on. No two applications have their important UI elements in the same place, and no two applications seem to be using the same design language. Hell, Win32 UIs use completely different-looking font rendering than “modern” UIs. The word “mess” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
As someone who is used to KDE and GNOME, whose developers still take consistency in both look and behaviour quite seriously, this is the single biggest reason why using Windows 11 was such a frustrating experience for me. It’s like reading a book where every few words, the language and script randomly change. I know UI consistency has been a dirty word ever since the web and then iOS rose to prominence – I lamented the death of consistency in UI design back 2012, which is fourteen years ago! – but the situation on Windows today is particularly dire.
Managing applications is also not as nice and effortless as it is on Linux. Most of the time, you have to manually browse around and download applications (and hope they’re not malware), which use one of an endless variety of different installation wizards, and then update these manually using countless different update services running in the background. There’s also a Windows Store, but its selection is limited. On top of all that, Windows also has its own very limited and basic package manager now, but it doesn’t come with an easy-to-use graphical user interface; you have to find and download one yourself, and it seems UniGetUI is one the more popular ones. It’s a mess of an application – with its own entirely unique titlebar and buttons, as is Windows tradition – but at least it works.
Keeping track of all the individual updaters, the Windows Store, WinGet, and so on is a massive chore, and a huge regression compared to what’s been the norm in the Linux world for a very long time. Desktop Linux solved keeping applications updated decades ago. Microsoft seems to be making it worse every time they add another different application delivery and management framework.
Windows applications are also absolutely obsessed with the system tray. It seems like every single thing you install wants to bury itself in the system tray, even when they’re not actually running. Before you know it, you’ll have a long string of random icons in there competing for your attention, and each seems to operate and behave a little differently than the other. Some open their main window when you click on them once, some when you click on them twice, some open a menu, some only respond by opening a menu when you left-click on them instead.
Of course, the menus that pop up all have different designs, as is tradition.
It’s not all bad, I guess?
There were positive aspects to Windows 11, too. It’s taken them a very long time, but with most of the various settings and configuration panels now moved from the old Control Panel to the Settings application, I think the latter has come into its own quite nicely. If you ignore the various ads for Microsoft’s services – a common tactic in commercial operating systems like macOS, Windows, and iOS these days – I find it quite easy to use. There’s always going to be some arbitrariness to the organisation and hierarchy of the various settings and panels, but overall, I found things relatively easy to find, and performance didn’t seem to be an issue.
Windows 11 also has a combined emoji/symbol picker now (Super + .), negating the need to dive into the Character Map, a horrid application which basically hasn’t been meaningfully updated since Windows 3.x. There’s an actual clipboard manager in Windows too now (Super + v), and it works great as well. These are two relatively recent additions that make some of the menial tasks related to text input quite a bit more pleasant.
I really don’t have much more to add to this measly “positive vibes only” section. Like Linux, Windows 11 found and set up our crappy HP Wi-Fi printer/scanner combo thing without any issues, I guess?
Did I stay with Windows 11?
No. Of course not.
I gave it an honest-to-god try. I put in the time, work, and even some money. I was strict, didn’t allow myself to do any non-gaming tasks on Linux, and truly used Windows 11 exclusively for a month. Whenever I experienced a short stretch of time where I felt “perhaps this isn’t so bad?”, one (or multiple) of the problems and issues described above would snap me out of it. For someone used to desktop Linux, where respect for the user, consistency, customisability, and performance are still held in high regard, Windows 11 feels like an endless string of punches in the face.
Whether I use a KDE or GNOME desktop, things look, feel, and behave consistently. There are no ads for services I don’t want, no online accounts forced down my throat, no dark patterns to trick me into subscriptions I don’t want. Managing and updating applications and the operating system are so effortless you barely even notice it’s happening, and whether I’m using an older machine or something brand new, performance is going to be good, and consistent. Desktop Linux is also going to respect my privacy, and I don’t have to worry about data harvesting.
Windows 11 just cannot compete with any of that, and my month with Windows 11 proved that to me beyond a shadow of a doubt.
With July being Disability Pride Month, GNOME’s Sophie Herold published a blog post taking stock of where GNOME stands on this front, progress that’s been made, as well as areas where the project comes short. One particular paragraph from her introduction really hits the nail on the head about accessibility discussions in tech circles:
The reality of tech communities is that they are often ableist and elitist. Probably more so than the average population. If a user or contributor struggles with a tool, blame is shifted to a “skill issue,” if an interface is simplified to make it accessible to more people, it’s “dumbed down”. Assistive technologies are often developed by abled people, without involving and paying disabled people. This also leads to an attitude where contributors expect gratefulness from disabled people for providing them with the most basic needs. All these issues are also not absent from the GNOME community.
Even as someone who isn’t disabled and doesn’t use any tools classically shelved under the “accessibility” moniker, I encounter the attitudes she mentions in the quoted paragraph basically every day. While we can have normal, productive discussions and differences of opinion about accessibility – for instance, I strongly believe robust theming support is absolutely crucial to accessibility, while the wider GNOME community does not – the dismissive attitudes towards people with accessibility needs in the software world is shameful.
Even if you don’t have accessibility needs today, you will definitely be needing them at some point in your life. If accessibility isn’t one of the first words you jot down on your mood board or whatever when you start a new software project, you’ve already done millions of people a massive disservice. Get educated, learn what you can about accessibility, listen to people with accessibility needs, and make your software better for everyone.
