Getting hardware to run AmigaOS 4.1 or MorphOS on isn’t always easy, cheap, or even possible in the first place. Luckily, there’s now an incredibly easy and straightforward way to emulate these two operating systems: Kyvos, developed by George Sokianos.

Kyvos is a user-friendly frontend for Qemu, designed to streamline the creation of AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS emulated environments on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Pronounced “kee-vos,” this name is inspired by the Greek word “κύβος,” meaning cube, symbolizing these virtual systems running within the host OS.

Setting up an AmigaOS 4 or MorphOS system is effortless with Kyvos—just a few clicks, and you’re ready to go. A helpful wizard guides users in locating or downloading necessary dependencies, including Qemu and 7zip binaries.

↫ George Sokianos

Of course, nothing is stopping you from following guides online to build your own Qemu virtual machine and associated complex command to start it, but Kyvos takes all that work out of your hands and makes it incredibly easy, all wrapped in a nice graphical user interface. It’s available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

All you need is Kyvos – which is free, but Ko-Fi donations are appreciated – and a copy of either AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition or MorphOS. Based on a toot by Hyperion, the developers of AmigaOS 4.1, you need the version for the AmigaOne board specifically, which will set you back about €30 for a boxed copy (I’ve asked if there are any download versions for sale as well). A copy of MorphOS costs about €79, and can be bought from inside MorphOS after installation. Note that you can also use MorphOS without a license, but it will slow down its performance after about 30 minutes until you reboot.

I’m stoked to try this out, as I’ve been wanting to review both of these operating systems again, since my previous reviews of Amiga OS 4 (from 2009) and MorphOS (also from 2009) are horribly outdated at this point. MorphOS on old Apple PowerPC hardware just doesn’t cut it – believe me, I’ve tried – and AmigaOS 4 hardware is quite expensive and outdated at this point. Until – and let’s face it, if – the Mirari comes out, easy emulation through Qemu might be an option.

Stuck at the bottom of NVIDIA’s announcement of its latest graphics driver update is a section about the company’s plan for Windows 10 support. As we all know, Windows 10 will become end-of-life in October of this year, and like so many others, NVIDIA needs to deal with this. Before we get to Windows 10, though, NVIDIA also reminds users that a few very popular GPU generations will no longer receive driver updates after October of this year.

The company notes that GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures will Game Ready Driver in October 2025, after which they’ll only get quarterly security updates for another three years. These three architectures roughly correspond to the GeForce GTX 7xx, 9xx, and 10xx series and their mobile counterparts, as well as a few other higher-end cards from the same generations. The full list is available to see if your GPU will receive its last driver update in a few months.

As for Windows 10 support, the company notes:

Also, we’re extending Windows 10 Game Ready Driver support for all GeForce RTX GPUs to October 2026, a year beyond the operating system’s end-of-life, to ensure users continue to receive the latest day-0 optimizations for new games and apps.

↫ Andrew Burnes at nvidia.com

Considering half of Windows users are still using Windows 10, this is probably the correct policy by NVIDIA. Ideally this support would last even longer than just that one year, but with a company like NVIDIA you kind of have to take what you can get, because generous they are not.

Last week-end, I was invited to the UNIX Social Camp in Dijon, France to talk about the reasons I still use OpenBSD these days and why should others do so; or at least, have a look at OpenBSD.

↫ Joel Carnat

Here’s my short pitch as to why you should use OpenBSD: it’s the closest you’ll get to a traditional, classic UNIX, while still using a modern and maintained operating system. OpenBSD just makes sense, and every time I run into some issue or I want to know how something in OpenBSD works, the answers always make me go “well that makes sense”.

That’s rare in modern computing, and we need to cherish it.

Are you still using LinkedIn, the website where failed tech startup entrepreneurs go to die and “AI” influencers try to sell you on the latest version of the chatbot Florpium like a Utah mom trying to sell leggings that are totally not an MLM? If you are, and the other ten thousand reasons not to use the website incarnation of an ad for a personal injury lawyer along I-11 in Henderson, Nevada, weren’t enough, Microsoft just handed you another one.

LinkedIn removed transgender-related protections from its policy on hateful and derogatory content. The platform no longer lists “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited conduct. While “content that attacks, denigrates, intimidates, dehumanizes, incites or threatens hatred, violence, prejudicial or discriminatory action” is still considered hateful, addressing a person by a gender and name they ask not be designated by is not anymore.

Similarly, the platform removed “race or gender identity” from its examples of inherent traits for which negative comments are considered harassment. That qualification of harassment is now kept only for behaviour that is actively “disparaging another member’s […] perceived gender”, not mentioning race or gender identity anymore.

↫ Matti Schneider at the Open Terms Archive

Microsoft joined the chorus of pathetic, spineless US tech companies bowing to far-right extremism long ago, and this is just another sign that Microsoft, like so many other US tech companies, is pulling an IBM. They did learn from the best, after all, and it doesn’t surprise me one bit that all of these CEOs click their heels like the good little brownshirts that they are.

Anyway, LinkedIn has no value to anyone with even a gram of self-respect, and Microsoft’s other products are such utter trash they basically have to make you upgrade at the barrel of a gun. For those using their products – do you hate yourself that much?

You deserve so much more.

Microsoft is finally changing the way Task Manager reports CPU utilisation to make it consistent across the different tabs. So apparently this has been gradually rolling out to the 34 different Windows 11 beta dev preview testing alpha release candidate service pack 4 channels since early this year, but then stopped the roll-out to fix some issues. These issues seem fixed now, as the roll-out restarted this week. It”s an important change that I think y’all will care about.

From the original announcement of the change back in February:

We are beginning to roll out a change to the way Task Manager calculates CPU utilization for the Processes, Performance, and Users pages. Task Manager will now use the standard metrics to display CPU workload consistently across all pages and aligning with industry standards and third-party tools. For backward compatibility, a new optional column called CPU Utility is available (hidden by default) on the Details tab showing the previous CPU value used on the Processes page.

↫ Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc at the Windows Blogs

Before this change, Task Manager’s Processes tab didn’t take the number of processor cores into account when calculating PCU usage, so you could see a process at 100% CPU usage even if it was only using one core. These new changes standardise CPU usage reporting across all tabs, taking the number of CPU cores into account properly.

Rejoice.

RISC-V has been supported in the upstream Linux kernel since 2017. But without a common hardware baseline, ensuring compatibility across builds and distros hasn’t been easy. The ecosystem was in need of a compelling, clearly defined hardware target – something both software and hardware teams could rally around to produce silicon capable of running stable, enterprise-grade software.

This target arrived in October 2024 with the ratification of the application-class RVA23 Profile – RISC-V-speak for a baseline configuration, similar to microarchitecture feature levels in x86. The culmination of years of progress, RVA23 brings together the work done to shape the ISA and standardize key extensions such as vector, bit manipulation and hypervisor.

↫ James De Vile at RISC-V International’s blog

Such a standard, stable baseline is incredibly welcome, and RISC-V working to have everything part of the upstream Linux kernel is crucial. Having to deal with out-of-tree patches and drivers and specific builds for specific boards is a nightmare – look at Linux on ARM – and hinders adoption of RISC-V.

The European Union is in the process of testing an age-verification application, which people can use to verify their age in a privacy-preserving manner (in theory, of course). There’s countless important discussions to be had about whether or not age verification, privacy-preserving or not, is even something we should want, but that’s a topic for another time and for people smarter than I. For now, several member states are currently testing the application on a voluntary basis, and the application itself is open source, with the code hosted on GitHub.

Aside from the obvious concerns about just how private such an application can even be, and concerns about whether or not we should even want something like this, there’s another major problem: the application intends to make use of and require application and device verification by using the proprietary tools for such functionality from Google and Apple, built into Android and iOS, respectively. Listed as future “features”:

App and device verification based on Google Play Integrity API and Apple App Attestation

↫ The application’s GitHub page

This is a massive problem. For reasons that should be obvious to anyone with at least six functioning neurons, the European Union, as well as countless other countries, are trying to reduce their dependency on US technology companies. As such, it’s indefensible to then require anyone who needs to use age verification in the European Union to use an application that will only work on Google-approved Android devices and even then, only when installed from the Google Play Store, with the only alternative being, of all things, Apple’s iOS.

This means that the EU will require anyone who needs age verification to have either a Google or an Apple account, and can only use Google-approved Android or iOS. This application would not work on, say, GrapheneOS or any other non-Google-approved Android ROM – in fact, even if you were to compile the application yourself, you wouldn’t be able to actually use it because it wouldn’t be installed from the Google Play Store. Of course, any mobile operating other than Android or iOS need not apply either.

The danger of tying age verification to Google and Apple did not go by unnoticed, and a GitHub issue raised the issue a few weeks ago.

I would like to strongly urge to abandon this plan. Requiring a dependency on American tech giants for age verification further deepens the EU’s dependency on America and the USA’s control over the internet. Especially in the current political climate I hope I do not have to explain how undesirable and dangerous that is.

↫ TheLastProject in the GitHub issue

The comment thread attached to the issue is long, but during the two weeks since the issue was raised, nobody from the application’s team has answered or even acknowledged people’s concerns, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in this being taken seriously. I just hope that with this entire project being in the early testing phases, at least someone manages to realise tying this to Google and Apple is one of the dumbest ideas in a long, long time.

Have a Samsung phone (outside of the United States), and want to unlock the bootloader? Well, soon you won’t be able to do so anymore, as Samsung seems to be removing this option from their phones – including already sold models being upgraded to One UI 8.

Bootloader unlocking is a popular way to breathe new life into older devices, by loading unofficial software onto a device, like custom ROMs, gaining root access, custom kernels, etc. This option will be taken away from users with One UI 8.

[…]

This means not only is the OEM Unlock not visible in Settings anymore, but the bootloader doesn’t even contain any of the code required to unlock itself. This means a workaround to brute force it open is not possible at all, unless Samsung updates the bootloader to add this logic back in.

↫ Josh Skinner at SammyGuru

And so, the ongoing process of locking down Android to a point where it becomes nigh-on indistinguishable from iOS’ locked-down, anti-user nature continues unabated. Samsung is the default choice for Android users in a lot of places around the world, and seeing them, too move ever closer to fully locking down their phones is terrible news for consumers. We should be striving for less restrictive computing, not more.

Combined with persistent rumours that Google is looking into effectively taking Android closed source, leaving only a stub AOSP behind, the future of Android as an least somewhat “open” platform looks quite grim indeed.

This article will explain in details about the fundamental issues that held back accessibility in GNOME Calendar since the very beginning of its existence, the progress we have made with accessibility as well as our thought process in achieving it, and the now and future of accessibility in GNOME Calendar.

↫ Hari “TheEvilSkeleton” Rana

You’d think it would be easy to make a “simple” calendar application properly accessible, but boy would you be wrong. In this article, Hari “TheEvilSkeleton” Rana details just how much work had to be done in order to turn GNOME Calendar from entirely inaccessible into an accessible application, and considering the length of the article, you can see it wasn’t a weekend effort.

There were apparently two primary reasons why making GNOME Calendar accessible was so hard. First, maximising GNOME Calendar’s performance optimisations had significant negative implications for accessibility, and two, the effectively endless flexibility a calendar needs to offer makes it very difficult to create a usable accessibility tree. Both the events on a calendar as well as the zooming view of a calendar lead to a ton of complexity in creating this tree.

GNOME Calendar uses a ton of custom widgets, and these all needed specific, individual solutions to be made accessible. As an example, the article mentions that while it was possible to use the keyboard to create an event, it was not possible to use the keyboard to select created events. Obviously, even this one shortcoming alone effectively makes the entire application inaccessible to anyone relying solely on keyboard navigation.

The article goes into great detail how both the above widget and countless other widgets were changed to make them accessible to both the keyboard and screen reader. If you’re working on GTK applications, or even applications using other toolkits, Rana’s article is a great resource to start to understand the complexities and creative thinking needed to implement accessibility in software properly.

You’ve seen them everywhere, especially on older computer equipment: the classic 9-pin serial connector. You probably know it as a DB9. It’s an iconic connector for makers, engineers, and anyone who’s ever used an RS232 serial device. Here’s a little secret, though: calling it a DB9 is technically wrong. The correct name is actually DE9.

↫ Christo-boots with the-pher at Sparkfun Electronics

I honestly had no idea, and looking through the Wikipedia page, it seems this isn’t the only common misnomer when it comes to D-sub connectors.

The Linux Terminal app that Google introduced earlier this year is one of the most exciting new features in Android, not for what it currently does but for what it can potentially do. The Terminal app lets you boot up an instance of Debian in a virtual machine, allowing you to run full-fledged Linux apps that aren’t available on Android. Unfortunately, the current version of the Terminal app is limited to running command line programs, but that’s set to change in the near future. In the new Android Canary build that Google released today, the Terminal app now lets you run graphical Linux apps.

↫ Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority

It comes with Weston, the reference implementation of a Wayland compositor, allowing you to run a basic graphical environment and accompanying applications. It won’t be long before you can take your Pixel, connect a display, and run KDE. Neat, but so many devils are in so many details here, and there’s so many places where this can fall apart entirely if the wrong decisions are made.

I have stumbled upon the most Microsoft support document of all time.

Support for the Microsoft Store installation type of Microsoft 365 Apps is ending. New feature updates will stop in October 2025 and security updates will end in December 2026.

If you have the Microsoft Store installation type of Microsoft 365 Apps, you must upgrade to the Click-to-Run installation type for continuing new features and security updates. The following steps show how you can upgrade the installation type of Microsoft 365 products on a PC from the Microsoft Store to Click-to-Run.

↫ End of support for the Microsoft Store installation type of Microsoft 365 Apps

There is so much to unpack here.

First, if you’re not neck-deep in Microsoft lore, you might not even know what Microsoft 365 Apps even are. Remember Office 365, the subscription version of Microsoft Office? It’s called Microsoft 365 now, for some inexplicable reason, but you probably haven’t noticed because it is a stupidly confusing, nondescript name that nobody out in the real world uses. Adding to the confusion, in 2022, Microsoft announced it would phase out the Office name in favour of calling both the subscription version and the regular, buy-once-run-forever version “Microsoft 365”, but then changed their mind a year later, and as such, the regular, buy-once-run-forever version is now still called Office.

Oh and there’s also the “Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)” (at Office.com?) which I think is what used to be called the mobile iOS/Android Office application, which existed alongside the individual mobile Office applications on these platforms (because that was a thing, too – maybe still is?)? I don’t know man, I merely have two university degrees, which clearly isn’t enough to understand any of this 4D office suite chess.

Anyway, the Microsoft 365 Apps (so the subscription version of what was temporarily formerly known as Microsoft Office) can be installed either through the Microsoft Store, which is the application store bundled with Windows that you never use, or through something called Click-to-Run. Apparently, Microsoft is discontinuing the Microsoft Store version of the Microsoft 365 Apps, and is urging everyone to move to the Click-to-Run version of the Microsoft 365 Apps.

Alright, we’re getting really, really deep into the very darkest crevices of the Microsoft Cinematic Universe lore now.

The Microsoft Store version of the Microsoft 365 Apps is almost entirely identical to the Click-to-Run version of the Microsoft 365 Apps, except for one tiny part: the exact packaging method of the applications. Whereas the Microsoft Store version is packaged and delivered in Microsoft’s Appx packaging format (designed for the Universal Windows Platform or UWP), the Click-to-Run version is packaged and delivered through, well, Click-to-Run. So, what is that, exactly?

Click-to-Run is an entirely custom application streaming technology specifically designed for and exclusively used by Microsoft Office. You download a very small installer, which then proceeds to download the various Microsoft 365 applications like Word, Excel, and so on, which you can then start using well before the entire download is finished. The technology is similar to Microsoft App-V. It’s actually remarkably difficult to find detailed documentation about Click-to-Run, which is odd considering Microsoft is usually quite decent at providing documentation for its technologies.

So what Microsoft is announcing in this support document is that if you have Microsoft 365 Apps installed through the Microsoft Store, you’re going to have to switch to the Click-to-Run version. You can check which installation type you’re using by going to File > Account (it might be called Office Account, because everything is made up and nothing is real) – under Product information locate the About button, where it’ll list the installation type.

If your installation type is Microsoft Store, you need to switch to the Click-to-Run version to keep receiving updates. To do so, download the Click-to-Run installer and run it, which will automatically remove the Microsoft Store version of the Microsoft 365 Apps and replace them with the Click-to-Run versions. The reason they’re making you do this is that the Click-to-Run version offers enterprises and corporate customers more control over deployment, update schedules, configuration options, and so on. The Microsoft Store version is more suited for normal consumers, but Microsoft doesn’t care about those, and never has, and never will.

Why is Microsoft?

The work towards making the 64bit version of AROS a viable choice is continuing, as is the work on AROS’ web browser, and developer Krzysztof ‘deadwood’ Śmiechowicz gave an update a few days ago detailing the progress that’s been made – and it’s extensive.

First, the beta version of Odyssey 3.0, the web browser for AROS, can now load a whole slew of important websites, like YouTube, Google Docs, and Discord, which is a big deal for an alternative operating system like AROS. Odyssey uses Apple’s WebKit as its browser engine, and it’s obviously important to make sure it runs on the 64bit version of AROS.

Speaking of 64bit, more and more applications are being recompiled to add 64bit support, with the stated goal being to have at least the best application in each category available in 64bit. A major issue is that certain pieces of hardware that work in 32bit do not yet work in 64bit. As a temporary solution, they’re going to make use of the virtualisation route AROS Portable uses to plug the gaps in 64bit hardware support until such support is realised. AROS Portable is basically a Linux distribution that runs a virtual copy of the 32bit version of AROS.

It’s clear that a lot of work is happening in the 64bit space for AROS, which is crucial for the long-term viability of the project. AROS is still the easiest and most accessible way to get a taste of an Amiga-like experience since it runs on plain x86 hardware, so it’s important to keep that dream alive.

One of the things lacking from the FreeBSD installation routine is the easy installation of a full desktop experience, from X11 all the way up to a login manager, desktop environment, and its applications. It seems this might finally change for FreeBSD 15.0, as the FreeBSD Foundation’s Laptop Support and Usability Improvements project is working on adding support for this to bsdinstall, the FreeBSD installer.

Based on a goal set out in this GitHub issue, the way this will work is that through a set of dialogs (which you can check out on GitLab) in the FreeBSD installer, the user can select to install KDE, which will then guide the user through installing the correct graphics driver and adding users to the video group. Once the installation is finished, the computer will reboot and load directly into SDDM, allowing you to log into the installed KDE Plasma desktop environment.

For FreeBSD 15.0, our goal is to extend the FreeBSD installer to offer a minimal KDE-based desktop as an install option. The initial concept is a low-interaction installation process that, upon completion, brings the user directly to a KDE graphical login screen.

↫ FreeBSD Foundation Laptop Update – June 2025

Future plans for desktop users in the FreeBSD installers are more elaborate, and will include additional desktop environments to choose from, the ability to install sets of desktop applications during FreeBSD’s installation, and yes, even opting for Wayland instead of X11, because FreeBSD developers know which way the wind is blowing.

This is excellent news, and will make installing a FreeBSD-based desktop a lot easier for a ton of people. Work isn’t fully completed just yet, but even if the developers miss their FreeBSD 15.0 target, it’ll just move on to one of the follow-up releases.