As someone who cut their teeth on Maemo (the N800/N900 still live in my basement) and carried the first Jolla dev device, I like to pull out my SailfishOS phones every few months to see how things are progressing. Here’s where I’m at in September 2025.

↫ Nick Schmidt

I was one of the very first people to review the original Jolla Phone way back in 2014, and I also happen to own the quite rare Jolla Tablet, so I was definitely a serious backer and believer in the platform back when it first entered the market. Sadly, the pace of improvements was slow, and failed adventures and mismanagement eventually led to the platform almost dying out. It’s only in recent years that they’ve been back on track and Sailfish OS is a more serious option again, but reading through Nick Schmidt’s findings, it seems the same problems still haunt the platform.

And we all know what the main problem will be: application availability. In your day-to-day use, you’re going to be spending a lot of time using the Android compatibility layer, because native Sailfish applications simply don’t pull their weight. This leads to the age-old problem of any operating system that loses focus on native applications and opts to go all-in on compatibility layers or ports instead, and int he case of Sailfish that means: why run Sailfish to run Android applications poorly, when you can also just run Android? And why develop native applications, when your Android build can run using the compatibility layer? OS/2 (with Windows applications) and Haiku (with Qt/GTK applications) suffer from the same problem.

Apparently, the Jolla C2 phone is not exactly great either, and doesn’t showcase Sailfish properly, and Sailfish’s keyboard is still unpleasant to use, a problem I also had in my original review so many years ago. There are some bright spots, too; the swipe-based navigation is still great, and apparently Wi-Fi connectivity is much more stable now. Still, it seems like Sailfish is suffering from more or less exactly the kind of problems you’d expect a small platform to suffer from, and whether or not you can deal with those problems is a more a question of dedication than just altering some use patterns.

Android and iOS, though illegal practices, have sucked all the air out of the room, and I doubt we’re ever going to get any of it back.

Open AI has recently announced deals worth $600 Billion with Nvidia, AMD, and Oracle. OpenAI is able to spend hundreds of billions of dollars they do not have because those companies are paying that same money back to OpenAI via investment. The infinite money glitch means that stocks keep going higher as more circular revenue cycles between the same players.

↫ Sasha Yanshin

The scam is so brazen, so public, so obvious. The foxes aren’t just in the hen house – they bought the whole goddamn hen house.

Text ads on the search results page will now be grouped with a single “Sponsored results” label. This new, larger label stays visible as people scroll, making it clear which results are sponsored — upholding our industry-leading standards for ad label prominence. We’re also adding a new “Hide sponsored results” control that allows you to collapse text ads with a single click if you want to focus only on organic results. In our testing, we found that the new design helps people navigate the top of the page more easily. The new design keeps the size of ads the same and you’ll still never see more than four text ads in a grouping.

↫ Omkar Muralidharan on Google’s Ads and Commerce Blog

I guess this is an improvement, but I doubt this will convince anyone to turn off their ad blocker or switch back to Google from another search engine. The option to collapse sponsored results is especially welcome, but I wish they’d gone a step further and added an option in settings to permanently collapse them – which, of course, is never going to happen. Removing any and all “AI” summaries would be nice, too, but with the entire technology industry pushing stringent “AI” KPIs on employees, that’s not going to happen, either.

Regardless, it’s still an improvement to Google’s results page, and while we may not realise it in our little bubble here, the number of people whose search experience this will improve is absolutely massive. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Google make a change to their search results page that doesn’t make it substantially worse, so I’ll take what I can get.

Are you still using your Amiga with the 1.3 version of Kickstart, but would you prefer an updated version of Workbench with a long list of additional features, improvements, and other niceties? Old Blue Workbench is a Workbench replacement for Amigas running Kickstart 1.3 written by Mats Eirik Hansen. It adds a ton of features and improvements, such as enhanced menus in the Workbench 2.0 style, improved windows with things like lasso select, icon sorting, and more, and browser windows for navigating the filesystem. You can also add a dock with drag and drop support, launch applications at startup, define your own menus, and a whole lot more.

It’s free, and if I had an old Amiga I would love to try this out.

The LineageOS project has released version 23 of their AOSP-based Android variant. LineageOS 23 is based on the initial release of Android 16 – so not the QPR1 release that came later – because Google has not made the source code for that release available yet. Like other, similar projects, LineageOS also suffers from Google’s recent further lockdown of Android; not only do they not have access to Android 16 QPR1’s source code, they also can’t follow along with the latest security patches for Android due to changes Google made to the patch release process, and without the device trees for Pixel devices, Pixels are now no longer supported any better than other Android devices.

LineageOS 23 brings many of the same features Android 16 brought, and comes with updated versions of LineageOS’ own camera application and music player, as well as a new TV launcher. They’ve also worked hard to make it much easier to run LineageOS in QEMU, they’ve improved support for running mainline kernels, they’ve made it easier to merge security fixes and updates for various kernel versions, and much more.

Update instructions can be found on the devices page, and specifically note that if you’re using an unofficial LineageOS build, you’ll need to perform the original installation again. With LineageOS being the Debian of the Android world, you can expect a ton of these unofficial versions to pop up over the coming months for devices LineageOS does not officially support.

With iOS 26, Apple seems to be leaning harder into visual design and decorative UI effects — but at what cost to usability? At first glance, the system looks fluid and modern. But try to use it, and soon those shimmering surfaces and animated controls start to get in the way. Let’s strip back the frost and look at how these changes affect real use.

↫ Raluca Budiu

I have not yet used Apple’s new “Liquid Glass” graphical user interface design, so here’s the usual disclaimer that my opinions are, then, effectively meaningless. That being said, the amount of detailed articles about the problems with Liquid Glass – from bugs to structural design problems – are legion, and this article by Raluca Budiu is an excellent example.

There are so many readability problems, spacing issues, odd animations that don’t actually convey anything meaningful, performance issues, and tons of bugs. It feels like it was made not by user interface specialists, but by marketeers, who were given too little time to boot. It feels incoherent and messy, and it’s going to take Apple a long, long time to mold and shape it into something remotely workable.

What if you are forced to use Windows, but want to use a real operating system instead? You could use WSL2 to use Linux inside Windows, but what if FreeBSD is more your thing? It turns out someone is working on making FreeBSD usable using WSL2.

This repository hosts work-in-progress efforts to run FreeBSD inside Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) with minimal to no changes to the FreeBSD base system. The project builds on the open-source components of WSL2 to enable FreeBSD to boot and run seamlessly in a Windows environment.

↫ WSL for FReeBSD GitHub page

The project is experimental, and definitely not ready for production use. It’s also important to note that this project is not part of Microsoft or FreeBSD. At this point in time, FreeBSD boots using WSL2 with basic functionality, and work is currently focused on networking, I/O, and process management.

A lot of open source projects are struggling what to do with the “AI” bubble, and Fedora is no different. This whole past year, the project’s been struggling to formulate any official policies on the use of “AI”, and LWN.net’s Joe Brockmeier has just done an amazing job summarising the various positions, opinions, and people influencing this process. His conclusion:

There appears to be a growing tension between what Red Hat and IBM would like to see from Fedora versus what its users and community contributors want from the project. Red Hat and IBM have already come down in favor of AI as part of their product strategies, the only real questions are what to develop and offer to the customers or partners.

The Fedora community, on the other hand, has quite a few people who feel strongly against AI technologies for various ethical, practical, and social reasons. The results, so far, of turning people loose with generative AI tools on unsuspecting open-source projects has not been universally positive. People join communities to collaborate with other people, not to sift through the output of large language models. It is possible that Red Hat will persuade Fedora to formally endorse a policy of accepting AI-assisted content, but it may be at the expense of users and contributors.

↫ Joe Brockmeier at LWN.net

Reading through Brockmeier’s excellent article, the various forces pulling and pushing on Fedora become quite clear, and the fact we’ve got IBM/Red Hat in favour of “AI”, and Fedora’s community of developers and users against it, shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Wherever “AI” makes an appearance, it’s almost exclusively a top-down process with corporate interests pushing “AI” hard on a largely indifferent userbase. It seems Fedora is no different.

The massive rift between IBM/Red Hat on one side, and the Fedora community on the other is probably best illustrated by a remark from Graham White, technical lead for the Granite AI agents at IBM. One of the earlier policy proposals referenced “AI” slop, and White was offended by this, stating:

I’ve been working in the industry and building AI models for a shade over 20 years and never come across “AI slop”. This seems derogatory to me and an unnecessary addition to the policy.

↫ Graham White, as quoted by Joe Brockmeier at LWN.net

Us regular users are bombarded with “AI” slop every day, and I just can’t understand how disconnected from reality you must be to not only deny it’s a problem, but to deny its existence entirely, when virtually every single Google query will drop you in “AI” muck. If such denial is commonplace within IBM/Red Hat, it’s really no wonder there’s such a big rift between them and Fedora. It is wholly unsurprising, then, that Fedora is having such a hard time formulating an “AI” policy.

The current version of the proposed policy seems to view “AI” and its use in or by Fedora mildly positively, which certainly has me, as a Fedora/KDE user, on edge. I don’t want “AI” anywhere near my operating system for a whole variety of reasons, and if the upcoming vote on the new policy ends up in favour of it, I might have to consider moving away from Fedora.

Servo, the Rust-based browsing engine spun off from Mozilla, keeps making progress every month, and this made Ignacio Casal Quinteiro wonder: what if we make a GTK widget so we can test Servo and compare it to WebKitGTK?

As part of my job at Amazon I started working in a GTK widget which will allow embedding a Servo Webview inside a GTK application. This was mostly a research project just to understand the current state of Servo and whether it was at a good enough state to migrate from WebkitGTK to it. I have to admit that it is always a pleasure to work with Rust and the great gtk-rs bindings. Instead, Servo while it is not yet ready for production, or at least not for what we need in our product, it was simple to embed and to get something running in just a few days. The community is also amazing, I had some problems along the way and they were providing good suggestions to get me unblocked in no time.

↫ Ignacio Casal Quinteiro

The code is now out there, and while not yet ready for widespread use, this will make it easier for GTK developer to periodically assess the state of Servo, hopefully some day concluding it can serve as a replacement for WebKitGTK.

Earlier this year, popular NAS vendor Synology announced it would start requiring some of its more expensive models to only use Synology-branded drives. It seems the uproar this announcement caused has had some real chilling effect on sales, and the company just cancelled its plans.

Synology has backtracked on one of its most unpopular decisions in years. After seeing NAS sales plummet in 2025, the company has decided to lift restrictions that forced users to buy its own Synology hard drives. The policy, introduced earlier this year, made third-party HDDs from brands like Seagate and WD practically unusable in newer models such as the DS925+, DS1825+, and DS425+. That change didn’t go over well. Users immediately criticised Synology for trying to lock them into buying its much more expensive drives. Many simply refused to upgrade, and reviewers called out the move as greedy and shortsighted. According to some reports, sales of Synology’s 2025 NAS models dropped sharply in the months after the restriction was introduced.

↫ Hilbert Hagedoorn at Guru3D.com

If you want to screw over your users to make a few more euros, it’s generally a good idea to first assess just how locked-in your users really are. Synology is but one of many companies making and selling NAS devices, and even building one yourself is stupidly easy these days. There’s an entire cottage industry of motherboards and enclosures specifically designed for this purpose, and there are countless easy-to-use software options out there, too.

In other words, nobody is really locked into Synology, so any unpopular move by the company was bound to make people look elsewhere, only to discover there are tons of competing options to choose from. The market seems to have spoken, and Synology can only respond by reversing its decision. Honestly, I had almost forgotten what a healthy tech market with tons of competing options looks like.

It was good while it lasted, I guess.

Arduino will retain its independent brand, tools, and mission, while continuing to support a wide range of microcontrollers and microprocessors from multiple semiconductor providers as it enters this next chapter within the Qualcomm family. Following this acquisition, the 33M+ active users in the Arduino community will gain access to Qualcomm Technologies’ powerful technology stack and global reach. Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech professionals, students, educators, and hobbyists will be empowered to rapidly prototype and test new solutions, with a clear path to commercialization supported by Qualcomm Technologies’ advanced technologies and extensive partner ecosystem.

↫ Qualcomm’s press release

Qualcomm’s track record when it comes to community engagement, open source, and long-term support are absolutely atrocious, and there’s no way Arduino will be able to withstand the pressures from management. We’ve seen this exact story play out a million times, and it always begins with lofty promises, and always ends with all of them being broken. I have absolutely zero faith Arduino will be able to continue to do its thing like it has.

Arduino devices are incredibly popular, and it makes sense for Qualcomm to acquire them. If I were using Arduino’s for my open source projects, I’d be a bit on edge right now.

Bradford Morgan White has published an excellent retrospective of QNX, the realtime microkernel operating system focused on embedded use cases. The final paragraph made me sad, though.

QNX is a fascinating operating system. It was extremely well designed from the start, and while it has been rewritten, the core ideas that allowed it survive for 45 years persist to this day. While I am sad that Photon was deprecated, the reasoning is sound. Most vendors using QNX either do not require a GUI, or they implement their own. For example, while Boston Dynamics uses QNX in their robots, they don’t really need Photon, and neither do SpaceX’s Falcon rockets. While cars certainly have displays, most vehicle makers desire their screen interfaces to have a unique look and feel. Of course, just stating these use cases of robots, rockets, and cars speaks to the incredible reliability and versatility of QNX. Better operating systems are possible, and QNX proves it.

↫ Bradford Morgan White at Abort Retry Fail

Way back in 2004, before I even joined OSNews properly, I wrote about QNX as a desktop operating system, because back then I went through a short stint where I used QNX and its amazing Photon MicroGUI as my primary desktop. Back then, there was a short-lived but very enthusiastic community using QNX on desktops, sharing tips and findings, supported by one or two QNX employees who tried their best to support this fledgling community in the face of corporate indifference.

Eventually, these QNX employees left the company, and QNX started making it clearer than ever that they were not, in any way, interested in people using QNX on desktops, and in all honesty, they were most likely correct. However, I still think we had something special there, and had QNX’ management decided to help us out, it could’ve grown into something more sustainable. An open source QNX and Photon could’ve had an impact.

Using QNX on the desktop back then was much easier than you might imagine, with graphical package managers, capable browsers and email clients, a massive pile of open source packages, pretty great performance, and little to no need to ever leave the GUI and use a CLI. If your hardware was properly supported, you could have a great experience.

One of the very small “what-ifs” form the early 2000s.

Every single “vibe coding is the future,” “the power of AI,” and “AI job loss” story written perpetuates a myth that will only lead to more regular people getting hurt when the bubble bursts. Every article written about OpenAI or NVIDIA or Oracle that doesn’t explicitly state that the money doesn’t exist, that the revenues are impossible, that one of the companies involved burns billions of dollars and has no path to profitability, is an act of irresponsible make believe and mythos.

↫ Edward Zitron

The numbers are clear. People aren’t paying for “AI”, and those that do, are using up way more resources than they’re actually paying for. The profits required to make all of this work just aren’t realistic in any way, shape, or form. The money being pumped around doesn’t even exist. It’s a scam of such utterly massive proportions, it’s easier for many of us to just assume it can’t possibly be one. Too big to fail? Too many promises to be a scam.

It’s going to be a bloodbath, but as usual when the finance and tech bros scam entire sectors, it’s us normal folk who will be left to foot the bill. Let’s blame immigrants some more while we implement harsh austerity measures to bail out the billionaire class. Again.

Your lovely host, late last night:

Google claims they won’t be sharing developer information with governments, but we all know that’s a load of bullshit, made all the more relevant after whatever the fuck this was. If you want to oppose the genocide in Gaza or warn people of ICE raids, and want to create an Android application to coordinate such efforts, you probably should not, and stick to more anonymous organising tools.

↫ Thom Holwerda

Let’s check in with how that other walled garden Google is trying to emulate is doing.

Apple has removed ICEBlock, an app that allowed users to monitor and report the location of immigration enforcement officers, from the App Store.

“We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps,” Apple said in a statement to Business Insider. “Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store.”

↫ Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert, Peter Kafka, and Kwan Wei Kevin Tan for Business Insider

Oh.

Apple and Google are but mere extensions of the state apparatus. Think twice about what device you bring with you the next time you wish to protest your government’s actions.