Many federal policy changes are well known before they are announced. Hints in speeches, leaks, and early access to reporters at major publications all pave the way for the eventual confirmation. But on Thursday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) dropped a big one that seemed to take everyone by surprise. Starting in 2026, any scientific publication that receives federal funding will need to be openly accessible on the day it’s published. The move has the potential to further shake up the scientific publishing industry, which has already adopted preprint archives, similar mandates from other funding organizations, and greatly expanded access to publications during the pandemic. Aaron Schwartz died trying to make this happen.

We have ended up in a world where UNIX and Windows have taken over, and most people have never experienced anything else. Over the years, though, many other system designs have come and gone, and some of those systems have had neat ideas that were nevertheless not enough to achieve commercial success. We will take you on a tour of a variety of those systems, talking about what makes them special. In particular, we’ll discuss IBM i, with emphasis on the Single Level Store, TIMI, and block terminals Interlisp, the Lisp Machine with the interface of Smalltalk OpenGenera, with a unique approach to UI design TRON, Japan’s ambitious OS standard. This is an hour-long watch, but I’m getting some coffee and snacks ready this weekend. This seems like total OSNews bait.

It’s been a long journey these past few months trying to find a modern, compatible, FreeBSD laptop, and getting it to work well enough for daily use (everything except for gaming). For the past few months, I’ve been documenting my journey using this laptop, then I left the framework laptop and switched to a Thinkpad X260, and then a Thinkpad X1C7. This gave me perspective on what is considered “FreeBSD compatible”.. After experiencing what that “compatibility” meant, and the work needed to get those machines up and running, I decided to come back to the framework laptop with that perspective, and try to get FreeBSD running on it again in a smoother capacity. I’ve finally succeeded! Everything isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good, and will hold you until even better support comes to the machine. I can now pretty much say that you can use this laptop in a production capacity for your every day stuff. Getting FreeBSD to fully support a modern laptop for desktop use seems like what it was like to get desktop Linux up and running smoothly on a desktop about twenty years ago. I love the idea of desktop FreeBSD, but I feel like there’s a long way to go, and I wonder if the people actually developing and contributing to FreeBSD are really focused on it (which is, of course, their prerogative).

The WWDC 2019 had a major impact on the UI toolkit landscape: while the venerable AppKit APIs remained available, Apple removed the old Carbon APIs and introduced 2 brand new frameworks: Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI. Apple sporadically mentioned some apps built with these new UI toolkits. In this article, I try to bring a better overview of Apple’s use of AppKit, Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI in the different versions of macOS, from macOS Mojave to macOS Ventura. Really great visualisation, and shows that the march to SwiftUI continues – however, I’m not entirely sure macOS users should be happy about that.

A colleague of mine shared a story from Windows XP product support. A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops. I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem. Not an artistic judgement. One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops. And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video! What’s going on? I did not see that one coming.

All the remixes use less memory than the default GNOME edition. To be honest, we didn’t expect that. The last time we did this comparison, in 2013, Kubuntu scoffed the most RAM – and as before, it still uses the most disk. KDE Plasma 5 really has slimmed down its memory footprint impressively, although it’s still no lightweight. The KDE, MATE, and Budgie editions are quite close in resource usage so in those terms, there’s not a lot to choose between them. That means it’s down to your personal preferences. All credit to the Lubuntu team: their remix remains the lightest by quite some margin, both in memory and disk usage. Saying that, it does use an old version of the LXQt desktop. There is a repository to install a newer version, but that’s a big ask for a non-techie user. These differences seem minute and insignificant to me, especially once you start loading a browser with a few tabs or a few documents, and any of these small RAM differences will melt like snow in the Sahara.

Linux hardware projects are made or broken by their community support. PINE64 has made some brilliant moves to build up a mobile Linux community, and has also made some major mistakes. This is my view on how PINE64 made the PinePhone a success, and then broke that again through their treatment of the community. I want to start by pointing out that this is me leaving PINE64 and not the projects I’m involved in like postmarketOS. This is just a sad story. I hope some of the problems can be mended in time.

As it turns out, our guesstimation was probably pretty spot on, as there are now multiple reports alleging that Microsoft is going to be making Windows 11 22H2 (codenamed Sun Valley 2 or SV2) public on the 20th of September. It will be apparently be served via the Windows Update option in the Settings. For those on Windows 11 21H2, which is the original release, it should be a seamless upgrade process as the system requirements haven’t changed. I guess this Windows version gobbledygook means something to someone, but I lost track a long time ago.

Today, Google is releasing Android 13 for Google Pixel smartphones, following months of developer previews and beta releases. It’s an update that polishes a lot of the changes that Android 12 brought to the table, while also introducing a ton of small, helpful features across the board that aims to improve privacy, security, and usability. Alongside the update, the company has also announced that Android 13’s source code is now available in AOSP. It’ll be a while before Android 13 lands in most of our hands.

Apple is set to expand ads to new areas of your iPhone and iPad in search of its next big revenue driver. Let’s begin with the current state of play: Apple’s advertising efforts today consist of display ads inside of its News and Stocks apps, as well as inside the App Store, across the iPhone, iPad and Mac. The App Store also has Google-like search ads. And more recently, Apple put advertising inside of TV+ for its “Friday Night Baseball” deal with Major League Baseball. I believe that the iPhone maker will eventually expand search ads to Maps. It also will likely add them to digital storefronts like Apple Books and Apple Podcasts. And TV+ could generate more advertising with multiple tiers (just as Netflix Inc., Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. are doing with their streaming services). So that was the plan all along. First, Apple tried to cut a deal with Facebook – one of the two online advertising giants (Apple already gets billions a year from the other, Google) – to get in on the online ad revenue. Second, when that fell through, Apple went on a privacy crusade against Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Google) to harm its online advertising business. Third, Apple is now going to expand its own ad business by adding even more ads to iOS. And all along the way, millions fell for it. John Gruber, a few years ago: My concern, again, is what happens if the drive to increase services revenue takes precedence over Apple’s “Prime Directive”: to put product design and experience above all else. Well, now you know.

Apple and Meta may not be the best of friends right now, but at one point, Apple was in discussions with the social media company about how it could make more money from its presence on the App Store, according to The Wall Street Journal. Apple reportedly argued that it deserved a cut of certain portions of Facebook’s ad revenue. The specific ads in question were boosted posts, which let users pay to have their posts reach more people, the WSJ reports. Apple apparently argued boosted posts are in-app purchases, which it famously takes a portion of; Meta argued that they were ads, from which Apple doesn’t get a share. It seems that Meta won out. So Apple was perfectly fine with profiting off Facebook’s anti-privacy business model, and only when Facebook declined did Apple go on its holier-than-thou privacy crusade against Facebook’s ads business. Apple’s privacy position is pure marketing, and any time Apple needs to choose between money and privacy, money wins every time. Whether it’s Google paying Apple billions to be the default search provider on iOS, Apple handing over all Chinese users’ data to the Chinese government, or now, in dealing with Facebook, Apple will choose money over privacy every time. Apple repeatedly calls privacy “a fundamental human right“, but human rights should not be for sale. It’s yet another illustration of corporations being above the law – Apple is allowed to just lie left, right, and centre without any legal repercussions.

Federal election regulators voted Thursday to allow Google to proceed with a plan to make it easier for campaign emails to bypass spam filters. Google’s proposal to run a pilot project changing the filters for political emails came after intense Republican criticism that spam filters were biased against conservatives, a charge the tech giant denies. In a sign of public disgust with spam, the Federal Election Commission received thousands of public comments urging it to deny the request. But a majority of the six-member commission decided that Google’s project did not constitute an improper in-kind political contribution that would violate federal campaign finance laws. This reminds me of Twitter admitting it won’t ban nazis because that would mean banning accounts of Republican politicians. I remember the days being biased against nazis was a good thing. Times sure do change.

But still, CP/M was, for a while, the industry-standard microcomputer OS, making Digital Research a powerful and important company. Wealthy companies that lose dominance over a market they formerly controlled don’t tend to just give up. Digital Research put a substantial R&D effort into expanding and enhancing CP/M, creating a large family of OSes. It had some significant wins and big sales. Some of those products are still in use. All those products are arguably “CP/M derivatives”, and as such, Bryan Sparks’ 2001 edict might have just open-sourced them all. One of the many giants we lost along the way.

The /e/ OS operating system provides a user-friendly alternative to Android for people who want the Android experience without the reliance on Google and associated manufacturer-related applications and telemetry. Compared to LineageOS, /e/ provides a more unified experience out of the box, with a suitable suite of default open source applications and a system-based application store. Despite the fact that /e/ borrowed from various pre-existing open source projects to create its default applications, none looks out of place. It’s a good choice for people looking to de-Google, but the rather lacklustre device support is a big problem, forcing you to buy a new device if you want to give this a go. That’s not really /e/’s fault, of course, but it’s an issue nonetheless.