Monthly Archive:: October 2026
Over the years, I learned about many gotchas and strange differences between keyboard handling on Mac and Windows – pertinent especially to web apps, which use the same codebase to cater to both. I thought it might be helpful to someone if I compile them all in one place. ↫ Marcin Wichary I knew most of these, but it’s still nice to have such a reference at hand when needed.
In this article. I am going to explain the different steps the I/O manager follows when initializing an I/O operation starting from determining the right target, choosing the right path and finally sending the request to be processed by the right drivers. To make it easier I choose to focus on read requests only since the major steps are common by all types of requests. ↫ Win-Ware A very in-depth look at Windows’ I/O Manager.
At OSNews, we love us a hobby operating system project. I started a small experiment: writing a very basic kernel in Swift, and running on QEMU. The goal is obviously not to replace Linux or any other popular kernel, but just to have fun and understand what is required to make a program run without an operating system underneath it. Actually I made a similar experiment years before with arOS 10 years ago. For the moment, the kernel does only one thing: it prints a message through QEMU and then waits forever, which is enough for a first deep dive. ↫ Carette Antonin This is effectively a “hello world” kernel, as it doesn’t actually do much else at this point. Still, there’s a ton of details in the article for the aspiring kernel developers among you.
Whenever Microsoft starts messing with something like the search function in Windows, a lot of people are going to be holding their breath and expecting the worst. Well, get ready, because they’re redesigning the whole thing. In July, we shared how we are improving the Windows Search Box with less clutter and more control. We introduced a calmer home screen, removed promotional content from web results, and gave you more choice over whether web and Microsoft Store suggestions appear. Today, we’re carrying those investments forward with a new Windows Search experience built on WinUI 3. This modern foundation makes Windows Search faster and more efficient with resources, while delivering an even more streamlined and focused design. ↫ Anshul Rawat at the Windows Blogs The company claims this new version of search is faster and uses less memory, which, if true, are very welcome improvements. It’s also just a single column of results now, and they’re adding inline previews for things like weather and files on your machine, as well as for answers to all kinds of queries you might normally go to an online search engine for. You can now also use search to perform all kinds of tasks in Windows, like turning on dark mode, managing windows, and so on. All of this can be done using relatively natural language, and Microsoft claims they’ve implemented better detection of typing errors and synonyms, which is quite welcome. Weirdly enough, though, it’s not yet integrated into the Start menu, since it’s a preview just for testers, but that’s something they’re working on for future releases. Judging by the videos and screenshots, I’m actually kind of positively surprised. This looks quite decent and nice, and if the promised performance improvements actually materialise, this may actually be an upgrade to search worth looking forward to. Of course, this is still Microsoft, so it’s just as likely they’ll screw up somewhere between now and when this goes live to regular users. Still, I think it looks decent.
Chimera Linux is a relatively new Linux distribution, and quite a unique on at that, as it combines the core tools from FreeBSD, the LLVM toolchain, and the Musl C library instead of the usual suspects. Despite being relatively new, it still has some serious pedigree as the project was started by Nina “q66”, who was part of the Void Linux team. At Void, she maintained the various PowerPC/POWER ports of the distribution until Chimera became her sole focus. Nina published a detailed blog post today about how the Chimera team builds the tooling for their distribution, as well as the goals it’s trying to achieve. It covers everything from a bit of personal history, the rationale behind the project, who it’s catering to, how its tooling works and why, and the infrastructure they’ve built that underpins it all. There’s a lot to process here, with one of the most interesting little details – at least to me, as someone who has two POWER9 machines – the fact that Chimera started with the ppc64le target only. The article is an incredibly interesting look at not just the how of Chimera, but also the why, which makes for some really fascinating reading.
KDE contributor and developer Niccolò Venerandi has published an article about COSMIC, System76’s brand new desktop environment. It’s been almost a year since I’ve last tried COSMIC; though development since then has mostly been centered around stability (going from late alpha to stable releases now!) there have been a fair bit of user-facing changes too which I adore. I thus have to ask myself: should I switch to COSMIC? The answer obviously is no, but that’s just because I got addicted to KDE Plasma, so let’s try to be more objective here. ↫ Niccolò Venerandi Honestly, this is one of the best “reviews” I’ve seen of COSMIC, and paints System76’s hard work in a really positive light. Venerandi spots countless really nice touches he’d love to see adopted by KDE, while also hitting on what I agree is COSMIC’s biggest shortcoming at this point: there’s basically no ecosystem around it. COSMIC uses its own Rust-based toolkit instead of GTK or Qt, but of course, there’s very few other applications that actually use said toolkit. The end result is that if you run COSMIC, you’re going to have to supplement it with countless GTK and Qt application, none of which will inherit all the nice features, touches, and graphics from COSMIC. This isn’t really a complaint about COSMIC itself or the work its developers are putting into it, but more a fact of life for such a new desktop environment using an otherwise unpopular (as of right now) toolkit. This may very well change in the future, but for now, if you choose to run COSMIC, you’re going to have to accept a very inconsistent and messy desktop. This won’t matter to everyone, but it sure does matter to me, and it’s the one reason why at this point I have zero interest in running COSMIC. I really hope this changes in the future – competition is good – but it’s going to be a long road.
Speaking of Windows and performance, how about that RAM crisis? Microsoft is feeling the squeeze too, and is apparently doing work up and down the Windows stack to improve its memory consumption. Microsoft’s Windows chief Pavan Davuluri has admitted that the rising cost of memory is pushing the company to make Windows 11 use less RAM. Microsoft is working on the Windows memory manager, memory compression, WinUI 3 and WebView2, and has made “memory optimization for 8GB and above” an official priority for the rest of 2026. ↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest This might be the only positive consequence of the RAM crisis.
To this day, Windows retains full support for the old MS-DOS 8.3 filename limitation, and it does this by creating 8.3 aliases for files with longer names. Apparently, this has a measurable effect on performance, so naturally, people are going to turn it off to make their Windows installations perform better. According to the user, this resulted in noticeably smoother scrolling in Tile view. They subsequently repeated the process on several folders they regularly use and reported that searching through files became much faster. The user also claimed that external hard drives became faster and that browsing an Android directory over USB or FTP behaved more like a regular Windows folder, including when copying large numbers of music files. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin You can disable this legacy feature in Windows per volume or globally, but Microsoft is warning users not to do so. Even in 2026, applications and registry entries may depend on 8.3 filenames being available, so removing them can lead to unexpected outcomes. It’s just one of those things you wouldn’t expect to still be around or have a measurable impact in the days of fast SSDs, but there’s enough credibly evidence out there to suggest that yes, it actually does negatively affect performance. If you’re doing a lot of file operations in Windows, it might be worthwhile to do some testing of your own to see if you can speed things up. Or, you know, you can just not use a house of cards disguised as a serious operating system.
Apple’s macOS has a Full Disk Access permission, designed to allow backup applications full access to, well, the disk, so they can perform their job properly. Apple posted a notice on its website that it’s going to further restrict this permission, because some applications were abusing this permission to gain access to users’ messages, emails, and so on, which it obviously isn’t intended for. What kind of applications, you may ask? Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action. Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy. ↫ Announcement from Apple This was prompted by a story a few weeks ago, where Facebook’s Muse “AI” tool was apparently reading people’s private messages and other data, and even sent messages on users’ behalf, without informing its users. It’s incredibly naive to think Facebook software in 2026 would not do creepy things, so I’m honestly not at all surprised. It makes sense in Apple’s worldview to further restrict permissions in response, but I’m sure more experienced macOS users are not going to like this.
The KDE project recently brought back its classic Oxygen and Air themes, but what if you prefer something… A little older? A modern recreation of the classic KDE 3 desktop experience for KDE Plasma 6, built entirely using Qt 6 and Qt Quick, with full support for Wayland and fractional scaling. ↫ Klassik GitHub page Neat.
I like squirrels. Apparently, there’s a SquirrelOS. It’s a small hobby OS learning project from five years ago, developed by Immanuel Daviel A. Garcia. A simple DOS like OS made in Assembly and C with a ported version of Stephen Brennan’s Shell. ↫ SquirrelOS GitHub page Why do I like squirrels? I don’t know man, they’re just cute.
