Kate, KDE’s programming-focused text editor, is, of course, a Qt application, and is also available on a variety of other platforms. Christoph Cullmann, one of the developers of Kate, published a short blog post with screenshots of Kate running on the three biggest platforms – Linux/BSD, Windows, and macOS. Sadly, while Haiku gets a mention, there’s no screenshot of the Haiku version of Kate. Still, it’s interesting to see the family resemblance.

VMS Software, the company developing OpenVMS, has announced some considerable changes to its licensing program for hobbyists, and the news is, well, bad. The company claims that demand for hobbyist licenses has been so high that they were unable to process requests fast enough, and as such, that the program is not delivering the “intended benefits”. Despite this apparent high demand, contributions from the community, such as writing and porting open-source software, creating wiki articles, and providing assistance on their forums, “has not matched the scale of the program”. Now, I want to stop them right here. The OpenVMS hobbyist program was riddled with roadblocks, restrictions, unclear instructions, restrictive licensing, and similar barriers to entry. As such, it’s entirely unsurprising that the community around a largely relic of an operating system – with all due respect – simply hasn’t grown enough to become self-sustainable. The blame here lies entirely with VMS Software itself, and not at all with whatever community managed to form around OpenVMS, despite the countless restrictions. So, you’d expect them to expand the program, right? Perhaps embrace open source, or make the various versions and releases more freely and easily available? No, they’re going to do the exact opposite. To address not getting enough out of their community, they’re going to limit that community’s options even more. First, they’re ending the community program for the Alpha and Itanium (which they call Integrity, since it covers HP’s Integrity machines), effective immediately, so they won’t be granting any new licenses for these architectures. Existing licenses will continue to work until 2025. Effective immediately, we will discontinue offering new community licenses for non-commercial use for Alpha and Integrity. Existing holders of community licenses for these architectures will get updates for those licenses and retain their access to the Service Portal until March 2025 for Alpha and December 2025 for Integrity. All outstanding requests for Alpha and Integrity community licenses will be declined. ↫ VMS Software announcement This sucks, but with both Alpha and Itanium being end-of-life, there’s at least some arguments that can be made for ending the program for these architectures. Much less defensible are the changes to x86-64 community licensing, which basically just come down to more bureaucracy for both users and VMS Software. For x86 community licenses, we will be transitioning to a package-based distribution model (which will also replace the student license that used to be distributed as a FreeAXP emulator package). A vmdk of a system disk with OpenVMS V9.2-2 and compilers installed and licensed will be provided, along with instructions to create a virtual machine and the SYSTEM password. The license installed on that system will be valid for one year, at which point we will provide a new package. While this may entail some inconvenience for users, it enables us to continue offering licenses at no cost, ensuring accessibility without compromising our sustainability. ↫ VMS Software announcement The vibe I’m getting from this announcement is that by offering some rudimentary and complicated form of community licensing, OpenVMS hoped to gain the advantages of a vibrant open source community, without all the downsides. They must’ve hoped that by throwing the community a bone, they’d get them to do a bunch of work for them, and now that this is not panning out, they’re taking their ball and going home. That’s entirely within their right, of course, but I doubt these changes are going to make anyone more excited to dig into OpenVMS. All of this feels eerily similar to the attempts by QNX – before being acquired by BlackBerry – to do pretty much the same thing. QNX also tried a similar model where you needed to sign up and jump through a bunch of hoops to get QNX releases, and the company steeped it in talks of building a community, but of course it didn’t pan out because people are simply not interested in a one-way relationship where you’re working for free for a corporation who then takes your stuff and uses it to sell their, in this case, operating system. This particular mistake is made time and time again, and it seems VMS Software simply did not learn this lesson.

For quite a while now, you might have noticed various people recommending a search engine called “Kagi”. From random people on the internet, to prominent bloggers like John Gruber and David Pierce, they’ve all been pushing this seemingly new search engine as a paid-for alternative to Google that respects your privacy. Over the past few months to a year, though, more and more cracks started to appear in Kagi’s image, and I’ve been meaning to assemble those cracks and tie a bow on them. Well, it turns out I don’t have to, because lori (I’m not aware of their full name, so I’ll stick to lori) already did it for me in a blog post titled “Why I lost faith in Kagi“. Even though I knew all of these stories, and even though I was intending to list them in more or less the same way, it’s still damning to see it all laid out so well (both the story itself, as well as the lovely, accessible, approachable, and simple HTML, but that’s neither here nor there). Lori’s summary hits on all the pain points (but you should really read the whole thing): Between the absolute blase attitude towards privacy, the 100% dedication to AI being the future of search, and the completely misguided use of the company’s limited funds, I honestly can’t see Kagi as something I could ever recommend to people. Is the search good? I mean…it’s not really much better than any other search, it heavily leverages Bing like DDG and the other indie search platforms do, the only real killer feature it has to me is the ability to block domains from your results, which I can currently only do in other search engines via a user script that doesn’t help me on mobile. But what good is filtering out all of the AI generated spamblogs on a search platform that wants to spit more AI generated bullshit at me directly? Sure I can turn it off, but who’s to say that they won’t start using my data to fuel their own LLM? They already have an extremely skewed idea of what counts as PII or not. They could easily see using people’s searches as being “anonymized” and decide they’re fine to use, because their primary business isn’t search, it’s AI. ↫ lori at lori’s blog The examples underpinning all these pain points are just baffling, like how the company was originally an “AI” company, made a search engine that charges people for Bing results, and now is going full mask-off with countless terrible, non-working, privacy-invasive “AI” tools. Or that thing where the company spent one third of their funding round of $670,000 on starting a T-shirt company in Germany (Kagi is US-based) to print 20,000 free T-shirts for their users that don’t even advertise Kagi. Or that thing where they claimed they “forgot” to pay sales tax for two years and had to raise prices to pay their back taxes. And I can just keep on going. To make matters worse, after publication of the blog post, Kagi’s CEO started harassing lori over email, and despite lori stating repeatedly they wanted him to stop emailing them, he just kept on going. Never a good look. The worst part of it, though, is the lack of understanding about what privacy means, while telling their users they are super serious about it. Add to that the CEO’s “trust me, bro” attitude, their deals with the shady and homophobic crypto company Brave, and many other things, and the conclusion is that, no, your data is not safe at Kagi at all, and with their primary business being “AI” and not search, you know exactly what that means. Do not use Kagi.

There was a time when it thought that Alexa would yield a robust ecosystem of apps, or Alexa Skills, that would make the voice assistant an integral part of users’ lives. Amazon envisioned tens of thousands of software developers building valued abilities for Alexa that would grow the voice assistant’s popularity—and help Amazon make some money. But about seven years after launching a rewards program to encourage developers to build Skills, Alexa’s most preferred abilities are the basic ones, like checking the weather. And on June 30, Amazon will stop giving out the monthly Amazon Web Services credits that have made it free for third-party developers to build and host Alexa Skills. The company also recently told devs that its Alexa Developer Rewards program was ending, virtually disincentivizing third-party devs to build for Alexa. ↫ Scharon Harding at Ars Technica I’ve never used Alexa – Amazon doesn’t really have a footprint in either The Netherlands or Sweden, so I never really had to care – but I always thought the Skills were the reason it was so loved. It seemingly makes no sense to me to start killing off this feature, but then, I’m assuming Amazon has the data to back up the fact people aren’t using them. It sucks, I guess? Can someone who uses Alexa fill in the blanks for me here?

DwarFS is a read-only file system with a focus on achieving very high compression ratios in particular for very redundant data. DwarFS also doesn’t compromise on speed and for my use cases I’ve found it to be on par with or perform better than SquashFS. For my primary use case, DwarFS compression is an order of magnitude better than SquashFS compression, it’s 6 times faster to build the file system, it’s typically faster to access files on DwarFS and it uses less CPU resources. ↫ DwarfFS GitHub page DwarfFS supports both Linux, macOS, and Windows, but macOS and Windows support is experimental at this point. It seems to have higher compression ratios at faster speeds than various alternatives, so if you have a use case for compression file systems – give DwarfFS a look.

With the recent release of OpenBSD 7.5, I decided to run through my personal OpenBSD “installer” for laptop/desktop devices. The project is built off of the dwm tiling window manager and only installs a few basic packages. The last time I updated it was with the release of 7.3, so it’s been due for an minor rework. While making these minor changes, I remembered how incredibly easy the entire install process for OpenBSD is and how cozy the entire operating system feels. All the core systems just work out the box. Yes, you need to “patch” in WiFi with a firmware update, so you’ll need an Ethernet connection during the initial setup. Yes, the default desktop environment is not intuitive or ideal for newcomers. But the positives heavily outweigh the negatives (in my opinion). ↫ Bradley Taunt OpenBSD has a very dedicated community, and I’ve noticed they tend to be very helpful and friendly. It’s making me curious about trying it out, and both this article and the helpful posts it links to will be a great way to start.

Hurd, the kernel that is supposed to form the basis of the GNU operating system, is perpetually a research project that doesn’t get anywhere close to being a replacement for Linux, but that doesn’t mean the project doesn’t make progress and has a place in the world of operating systems. Their most recent major improvement has been porting GNU Hurd to AArch64, spearheaded by Hurd developer Sergey Bugaev. Since then, however, I have been (some may say, relentlessly) working on filling in the missing piece, namely porting GNU Mach (with important help & contributions by Luca D.). I am happy to report that we now have an experimental port of GNU Mach that builds and works on AArch64! While that may sound impressive, note that various things about it are in an extremely basic, proof-of-concept state rather than being seriously production-ready; and also that Mach is a small kernel (indeed, a microkernel), and it was designed from the start (back in the 80s) to be portable, so most of the “buisness logic” functionality (virtual memory, IPC, tasks/threads/scheduler) is explicitly arch-independent. Despite the scary “WIP proof-of-concept” status, there is enough functionality in Mach to run userland code, handle exceptions and syscalls, interact with the MMU to implement all the expected virtual memory semantics, schedule/switch tasks and threads, and so on. Moreover, all of GNU Mach’s userspace self-tests pass! ↫ Sergey Bugaev On top of all this, glibc works on the AArch64 port, and several important Hurd servers work as well, namely ext2fs, exec, startup, auth, and proc, as a do a number of basic UNIX programs. This is an exceptional effort, and highlights that while people tend to make fun of Hurd, it’s got some real talent working on it that bring the platform forward. While we may not see any widely usable release any time soon, every bit of progress helps and is welcome. Speaking of progress, the progress report for GNU Hurd covering the first quarter of 2024 has also been published, and it lists a number of other improvements and fixes made aside from the AArch64 port. For instance, the console will now use xkbcommon instead of X11 for handling keyboard layouts, which reduced code complexity a lot and improved keyboard layout coverage, to boot. The port of GDB to the 64 bit version of Hurd is also progressing, and SMP has seen a ton of fixes too. Another awesome bit of news comes from, once again, Sergey Bugaev, as he announced a new Hurd distribution based on Alpine Linux. Work on this project has only recently begun, but he’s already had some success and about 299 Alpine packages are available. His reasons for starting this new project is that while Debian GNU/Hurd is a great base to work from for Hurd users and developers, Debian is also a bit strict and arcane in its packaging requirements, which might make sense for Debian GNU/Linux, but is annoying to work with when you’re trying to get a lot of low-level work done. For now, there’s no name yet, and he’s asking for help from the Hurd community for name ideas, hosting, and so on. That’s a lot of GNU Hurd progress this quarter, and that’s good news.

I didn’t want to spend too much time on this thing, but I feel like we can all use a good laugh at a stupid product hyped only by the tech media. The Verge reviewed the Humane AI pin, and entirely predictably, it’s a complete and utter trashfire. But until all of that happens, and until the whole AI universe gets better, faster, and more functional, the AI Pin isn’t going to feel remotely close to being done. It’s a beta test, a prototype, a proof of concept that maybe someday there might be a killer device that does all of these things. I know with absolute certainty that the AI Pin is not that device. It’s not worth $700, or $24 a month, or all the time and energy and frustration that using it requires. It’s an exciting idea and an infuriating product.  AI gadgets might one day be great. But this isn’t that day, and the AI Pin isn’t that product. I’ll take my phone back now, thanks. ↫ David Pierce at The Verge It takes dozens of seconds to reply to any query, the battery is severely lacking, the answers you get are mostly wrong or useless, sending text messages is effectively broken, and tons of promised features don’t work because they’re not implemented. In another video review, MrMobile also shows the device overheating all the time, a problem that’s common to all of the devices. I don’t think trashfire is harsh enough to describe this junk.

The classic Win32 ListView supports incremental search: You can start typing the name of an item to search for it. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. ↫ Raymond Chen Gather ’round, children, Mr Chen is telling a story.

Independent browser companies in the European Union are seeing a spike in users in the first month after EU legislation forced Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft and Apple to make it easier for users to switch to rivals, according to data provided to Reuters by six companies. The early results come after the EU’s sweeping Digital Markets Act, which aims to remove unfair competition, took effect on March 7, forcing big tech companies to offer mobile users the ability to select from a list of available web browsers from a “choice screen.” ↫ Supantha Mukherjee and Foo Yun Chee I can’t believe this is even remotely surprising. A lot of especially Apple fans and people from outside of the European Union complained left, right, and centre about the choice screen and how it was ugly, unnecessary, and would just confuse users. These are interesting claims, considering the fact that setting up a modern smartphone such as the iPhone takes the user through 40-50 setup screens chockful of confusing choices to make, so adding one more surely wouldn’t make a difference. Of course giving users the option to choose a different default browser would lead to an increase in browsers other than Safari (iOS) or Chrome (Android) being set as the default. I’m pretty sure quite a few users learned, through the choice screen, for the first time, that there even are different browsers to choose from, and that some of those might offer features and benefits they didn’t even know they could enjoy. That’s the whole point of this endeavour: informing users that they have a choice, something Apple, Google, and others would rather you either do not have, or at least not know about. It’s far too early to tell if these spikes are a one-off thing, or if the rise in browsers other than Safari on iOS and Chrome on Android is more structural. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the latter, and even if the numbers remain in the single digits or low double digits, it will still lead to an increase in competition, and a more vibrant mobile browser market. Good news, regardless.

The company is seemingly contemplating on whether to add a new “Recommended” button on the Taskbar. Interestingly, it is unfinished at the moment, or perhaps Microsoft is just not sure if it should proceed with this button at all. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Well, this is something I never knew. Over on the retrocomputing section of StackExchange, someone asked why the second phase of the Windows 98 installation looked decidedly different from the third phase, even though they’re both graphical phases (the first phase is textual). The answer turns out to be both surprising, and entirely predictable. The first phase is a DOS program called DOSSETUP.BIN, which is the infamous blue part of the installation. The second part, however, is what we’re interested in here, and if the first phase is DOS, and the third phase is Windows 98 itself… What do you think the second phase is running? Yeah, exactly. Basically, because it is running under Windows 3.1 at that point. The second uses this minimal Windows 3.1 to run a Windows 3 program, W98SETUP.BIN (specified as the “shell” in SYSTEM.INI). This starts by copying more files to support all the information-gathering during setup, and various other niceties including the 3D look shown in your screenshot (the contents of the PRECOPY CABs); it ends by copying most of Windows 98, setting the system up so that it will boot Windows 98 from the target drive, and rebooting. ↫ Stephen Kitt So, in order to install Windows 98, you first run DOS, followed by Windows 3.1, ending in Windows 98. I have no idea why this is so funny to me, especially since it fits entirely within expectations of how Microsoft does things.

The HP 200 LX was a successful palmtop computer introduced in 1994. HP continued to sell it through 1999, an unusually long run for a 1990s computer model. In this blog post, we’ll dig into this largely forgotten form factor and why it became such a quiet success. ↫ Dave Farquhar These devices are incredibly cool, but I disagree that they disappeared, as the blog post states. Just recently I reviewed my main laptop, a very small Chuwi MiniBook (2023) with the N100, and in that article I also listed some other similar options that are still being made and sold today, from companies like GPD and OneNetbook.

If you haven’t already heard of Beeper, welcome! Beeper is a universal chat app for Android, iOS and desktop. Our goal is to build the best chat app on earth. Beeper is built on an open source chat protocol called Matrix. Over time, we’ll help people migrate from proprietary, siloed chat networks to an open standard for chat. If you’re interested in learning about this, we’ve written more about our intentions. ↫ Beeper team Beeper is just great. Because I’m European and have ties to two different countries with vastly different chat preferences, as well as a number of friends living all over Europe and the US, I’ve always had to deal with at least four different instant messaging applications. Beeper, and especially the recent completely redesigned Android version, is so good and seamless that I no longer need to use the individual applications at all. It’s not perfect – the new Android version (the iOS version is old and outdated compared to the Android one) still has some issues. If you receive a video and play it, it doesn’t maximise unless you perform a very delicate zoom in pinch. Sometimes, sending video fails. Some emoji replies on some services look huge and pixellated. I’m sure these are all relatively low-hanging fruit types of bugs that’ll get fixes over the coming weeks and months now that the application is out of beta. However, the actual core of the application has been working amazingly well for me. Beeper also has another major announcement. I’m excited to announce that Beeper has been acquired by Automattic. This acquisition marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter as we continue our mission to create the best chat app on earth. ↫ Eric Migicovsky Automattic is the company behind WordPress, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and a whole load of other products and services. Beeper seems like a good fit, since Automattic recently also acquired Texts.com, another multi-platform messaging client.