Budgie 10.10 released
Budgie has fallen a bit by the wayside in recent years, but it’s still in development and making steady progress. The project’s just released Budgie 10.10, the final release in the 10.x series which also marks the end of the transition to Wayland. Budgie 10.10 is a brand new release series for Budgie Desktop, marking our first release to migrate Budgie from X11 to Wayland. This release series brings to a close just over a decade of Budgie 10 development; we are formally putting Budgie 10 … ⌘ Read more

OpenBSD on the Sharp Zaurus SL-C3100
OpenBSD on a Sharp Zaurus Linux-based PDA from 2005? Of course, why not? Installing OpenBSD was easy. The instructions in INSTALL.zaurus are pretty straightforward. My 5.6 install was smooth. Installing sets took ~10-15 minutes. The Microdrive is really slow. I’ll replace it with a CF card soon, which should be slightly faster (and more reliable). ↫ goldfish Of course, it includes a working X desktop, which is neat and makes the device a lot more useful. I h … ⌘ Read more

GNU/Hurd gets dhcpcd port, further SMP improvements
Since we entered a new year, we also entered a new quarter, and that means a new quarterly report from the Hurd, the project that aims to, to this day, developer a kernel for the GNU operating system. Over the course of the fourth quarter of 2025, an important undertaking has been to port dhcpcd to Hurd, which will ultimately bring IPv6 support to Hurd. For now, the port only supports IPv4, only works on Ethernet, and is still ge … ⌘ Read more

MenuetOS 1.58.00 released
MenuetOS, the operating system written in x86-64 assembly, released version 1.58.00. Since the last time we talked about MenuetOS, the included X server has been improved, networking performance has been increased, there’s now native versions of classic X utilities like XEyes, XCalc, and others, and more. There’s also the usual smaller improvements and bug fixes. ⌘ Read more

The world is on fire, so let’s look at pretty Amiga desktops
There’s so much shit going on in the world right now, and we can all use a breather. So, let’s join Carl Svensson and look at some pretty Amiga Workbench screenshots. Combining my love for screenshots with the love for the Amiga line of computers, I’ve decided to present a small, curated selection of noteworthy Amiga Workbenches – Workbench being the name of the Amiga’s desktop environment. ↫ Carl Svensson I love … ⌘ Read more

Improving the Flatpak graphics drivers situation
The solution the Flatpak team is looking into is to use virtualisation for the graphics driver, as the absolute last-resort option to keep things working when nothing else will. It’s a complex and interesting solution to a complex and interesting problem. ⌘ Read more

Firefox on POWER9: the JIT of it
Four years ago, I reviewed a truly fully open source desktop computer, from operating system down to firmware: the Raptor Blackbird, built entirely around IBM’s POWER9 processor. The overall conclusion was that using was mostly an entirely boring experience, which was a very good thing – usually ideologically-fueled computers come with a ton of downsides and limitations for average users, but Raptor’s POWER9 machines bucked this trend by presenting a bog-standard, ru … ⌘ Read more

Google takes next big leap in killing AOSP, significantly scales back AOSP contributions
About half a year ago, I wrote an article about persistent rumours I’d heard from Android ROM projects that Google was intending to discontinue the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). AOSP has been gutted by Google over the years, with the company moving more and more parts of the operating system into closed-source, non-AOSP components, like Google Play Se … ⌘ Read more

Redox gets basic Linux DRM support
Since we moved to a new year, we also moved to a new month, and that means a new monthly report from Redox, the general purpose operating system written in Rust. The report obviously touches on the news we covered a few weeks ago that Redox now has the first tidbits of a modesetting driver for Intel hardware, but in addition to that, the project has also taken the first steps towards basic read-only APIs from Linux DRM, in order to use Linux graphics drivers. AR … ⌘ Read more

Gentoo looks back on a successful 2025
Happy New Year 2026! Once again, a lot has happened in Gentoo over the past months. New developers, more binary packages, GnuPG alternatives support, Gentoo for WSL, improved Rust bootstrap, better NGINX packaging, … As always here we’re going to revisit all the exciting news from our favourite Linux distribution. ↫ Gentoo’s 2025 retrospective We don’t talk about Gentoo very often, and I consider that a good thing. Gentoo is just Gentoo, doing its thing, … ⌘ Read more

Box64 0.4.0 released
The new version brings a ton of new enhancements and fixes to all 3 supported platforms, with Steam running not only on Arm64, but also on RiSC-V and on Loongarch! And this is the Linux version of Steam, not the Windows one (but the Windows one works too if you really prefer that one). While Box32 (used to run Steam) is still experimental and unstable, stability did improve. Still, expect some crashes when downloading things with steam. And it’s not all, Battle.net is also getting stable, … ⌘ Read more

Instead of fixing Windows, Microsoft tells users how to do menial cleanup of junk files
Ever noticed your computer acting sluggish or warning you about low storage? Temporary files could be the sneaky culprit. Windows creates these files while installing apps, loading web pages, or running updates. Left unchecked, they pile up and hog valuable space. Luckily, clearing them out is easier than cleaning your kitchen junk drawer. Let’s explore Stora … ⌘ Read more

The late arrival of 16-bit CP/M
The way the histories of CP/M, DOS, Microsoft, and the 8086 intertwine would be worthy of an amazing film if it wasn’t for the fact it would be very hard to make it interesting screen material. Few OEMs were asking for an 8086 version of CP/M. One that did was SCP – the same company that helped Microsoft design SoftCard. They needed a disk operating system for their 8086 board released in November 1979. In April 1980, after CP/M-86 was still nowhere to be seen, they l … ⌘ Read more

It’s hard to justify macOS Tahoe’s icons
We’ve talked about just how bad Apple’s regular icons have become, but what about the various icons Apple now plasters all over its menus, buttons, and dialogs? They’ve gotten so, so much worse. In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that. But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users … ⌘ Read more

CheriBSD: FreeBSD for CHERI-enabled platforms
CheriBSD is a Capability Enabled, Unix-like Operating System that extends FreeBSD to take advantage of Capability Hardware on Arm’s Morello and CHERI-RISC-V platforms. CheriBSD implements memory protection and software compartmentalization features, and is developed by SRI International and the University of Cambridge. ↫ CheriBSD website This obviously raises the question – what exactly is CHERI? The FreeBSD Foundation has an article about t … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft quietly kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet
Up until now, it’s always remained possible to activate Windows offline, by calling a phone number, going through a lengthy phase of entering digits on your phone dialpad, and carefully listening to and entering a string of numbers on the device you’re trying to activate. For a while, even, this was, as far as I can tell, one of the easiest ways to fix activation issues cau … ⌘ Read more

Desktop Classic System wants to bring some classic Mac OS to MATE and Debian
Desktop Classic System is an operating system based on Debian and a customized version of the MATE Desktop Environment that hearkens back to, but is not a direct copy of, the classic Mac OS. DCS seeks to provide and sometimes even improve upon the conceptual simplicity offered by the old Macintosh. ↫ Desktop Classic System website I’m usually not particularly interested in report … ⌘ Read more

KDE developer onboarding is good now
KDE developer Herz published a detailed look at the immense amount of work they’ve done cleaning up the developer onboarding documentation for KDE. All that just to say that I’m finally content with the state of beginner onboarding docs in our KDE Developer Platform. That is to say, all the beginner docs fixes I wanted to add to Develop are either already there or have merge requests ready or almost ready. ↫ Herz at rabbitictranslator.com Judging by the arti … ⌘ Read more

The scariest boot loader code
It shouldn’t be surprising that the HP-UX FAQ eventually grew an entry for “how can I make a 712 run headless”. It was possible, and to do it you had to change the firmware “console” path. The 712 firmware would not allow you to do this, to keep you locked to a keyboard and frame buffer console, but some of the HP-UX standalone tools could be used to change this without the firmware getting in the way, so the FAQ recipe was roughly “abort the boot sequence, at the BOOT_A … ⌘ Read more

IceWM 4.0.0 brings alt+tab improvements
IceWM, the venerable X11 window manager, has released a new version, bumping the version number to 4.0.0. This release brings a big update to the alt+tab feature. The Alt+Tab window switcher can now handle large numbers of application windows in both horizontal and in vertical mode. Type the first letter of an application class name in Alt+Tab, to select the next instance window of that application class. Select an application by pressing one of the num … ⌘ Read more

Haiku gets accelerated NVIDIA graphics driver
The new year isn’t even a day old, and Haiku developer X512 dropped something major in Haiku users’ laps: the first alpha version of an accelerated NVIDIA graphics drivers for Haiku. Supporting at least NVIDIA Turing and Ampere GPUs, it’s very much in alpha state, but does allow for proper GPU acceleration, with the code surely making its way to Haiku builds in the near future. Don’t expect a flawless experience – this is alpha software – b … ⌘ Read more

HP-UX hits end-of-life today, and I’m sad
It’s 31 December 2025 today, the last day of the year, but it also happens to mark the end of support for the last and final version of one of my favourite operating systems: HP-UX. Today is the day HPE puts the final nail in the coffin of their long-running UNIX operating system, marking the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux. HP-UX’ ver … ⌘ Read more

loss32: let’s build a Win32/Linux
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, Win32/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, loss32 Win32 plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning system made useful by WINE, the ReactOS userland, and other vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by Microsoft. ↫ The loss32 homepage Joking introduction aside, this is exactly what y … ⌘ Read more

Windows 2 for the Apricot PC/Xi
Nina Kalinina has been on an absolute roll lately, diving deep into VisiOn, uncovering Bellcore MGR, installing Linux on a PC-98 machine, and much more. This time, she’s ported Windows 2 to run on a machine it was never supposed to run on. I bought my first Apricot PC about three years ago, when I realised I wanted an 8086-based computer. At the time, I knew nothing about it and simply bought it because it looked rad and the price was low. I had no idea that it was no … ⌘ Read more

What an unprocessed photo looks like
I knew digital cameras and phones had to do a lot of processing and other types of magic to output anything human eyes can work with, but I had no idea just how much. This is wild. ⌘ Read more