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  US lawmakers push for age verification at the operating system level Encryption backdoors, social media bans for children, creepy age verification for applications - what will they think of next? The latest brilliant idea by US lawmakers sure is a hell of a doozy: legally mandated age verification in every single operating system. Colorado's SB26-051, introduced https://www.osnews.com/story/144501/us-lawmakers-push-for-age-verification-at-the-operating-system-level/ #ClownCar

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  “Hardening changes for ReFS volumes on removable media” Are you aware of ReFS, Microsoft's next-generation file system for Windows? I'm sure the average OSNews reader is, but I really wonder how many people are using it out in the wider world, even though Microsoft keeps improving it. Since earlier this year, Windows Server and Windows 11 can boot from ReFS volumes, and it's use https://www.osnews.com/story/146145/hardening-changes-for-refs-volumes-on-removable-media/...

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  ESA targets Anbernic emulation handhelds as “superfake” piracy enablers The ESA - not, not the cool one - a lobby group made up of various videogame and entertainment companies, has asked the US Trade Representative (USTR) to add Anbernic to its list of companies that are supposedly notorious for engaging in and facilitating piracy. If you're unaware, Anbernic is o https://www.osnews.com/story/146148/esa-targets-anbernic-emulation-handhelds-as-superfake-piracy-enablers/ #Legal

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  Haiku’s latest activity report contains a ton of smaller fixes and improvements You know the drill by now - a new month, a new Haiku activity report. This past month doesn't seem to have any big ticket items, but instead contains a long list of smaller but still welcome fixes. Various filesystem drivers saw some work, a few bugs in virtio drivers were fixed, https://www.osnews.com/story/146150/haikus-latest-activity-report-contains-a-ton-of-smaller-fixes-and-improvements/ #Haiku

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  KDE Plasma 6.8 released KDE turns 30 today, and they're celebrating it with a brand new KDE Plasma release: version 6.8 is here. On the accessibility front, 6.8 brings a new dwell clicker function (meaning a click will register if the pointer is held still for a short while) and support for the Bikram Sambat calendar and the Amharic language. I always love it when I see support for new languages and scripts, especia https://www.osnews.com/story/146152/kde-plasma-6-8-released/ #KDE

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  Ubuntu 26.10 released Ubuntu 26.10 has landed. Ubuntu 26.10 brings significant progress for security, and strengthens the platform with the full adoption of Rust-based coreutils, post-quantum-ready package signing, and expanded TPM-backed full-disk encryption support. Enterprise authentication gains deeper integration with Microsoft Entra ID, including password and multi-factor authentication. Linux kernel 7.3 e https://www.osnews.com/story/146158/ubuntu-26-10-released/ #Ubuntu

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  Costa: a modern, maintained graphical shell for DOS Graphical user interfaces for DOS were a dime-a-dozen back in the '90s, but of course faded into irrelevance as time went on. But what if you still run DOS today, and want a maintained graphical shell instead of the rather limited DOS command line? Costa is a small and lightweight application which runs on top of MS-DOS or compatibl https://www.osnews.com/story/146160/costa-a-modern-maintained-graphical-shell-for-dos/ #OSNews

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  Microsoft claims Windows 11 is now “up to 20% more responsive” Microsoft's been claiming for a while now that they're working on improving performance and responsiveness in Windows, with a particular focus on making more efficient use of memory. This is probably the only positive thing to come out of the RAM crisis Microsoft helped create and is currently still fueling. Th https://www.osnews.com/story/146167/microsoft-claims-windows-11-is-now-up-to-20-more-responsive/ #Windows

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  VSI launches how-to portal for OpenVMS OpenVMS isn't exactly the easiest platform to get into, with even the first major hurdle - licensing! - being a bit of a complex issue. To address this and other issues people new to OpenVMS might run into, VSI, the company currently developing OpenVMS, launched its new VSI How-to Portal. For now, it covers things like licensing, installing and updating OpenVM https://www.osnews.com/story/146169/vsi-launches-how-to-portal-for-openvms/ #OSNews

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  GNOME OS moves to preview stage It’s been two years since my initial post about making GNOME OS an end-user general purpose OS. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve hit a major milestone! TL;DR: We’re launching a new edition called “GNOME OS Preview”, which is built from the latest stable GNOME release. This means that GNOME OS is no longer just a nightly OS for GNOME developers and testers! ↫ Aa https://www.osnews.com/story/146176/gnome-os-moves-to-preview-stage/ #Gnome

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  Inside the Intel 8087 chip: floating-point addition and subtraction In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, a chip that made floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. Although the 8087 supports advanced operations such as tangents, square roots, and logarithms, this article focuses on basic arithmetic operations: addition and subtraction. The 8087 https://www.osnews.com/story/146189/inside-the-intel-8087-chip-floating-point-addition-and-subtraction/ #Intel

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  Linux 7.3 released Significant changes in this release include some significant binfmt_misc extensions, some group-scheduling work aimed at improving performance on large systems, the new failfs filesystem that fails all operations, the fchroot() system call, global per-CPU data for BPF programs, the completion of the sched_ext subscheduler feature, working-set tracking for virtual machines, alternative data-stream sup https://www.osnews.com/story/146191/linux-7-3-released/ #Linux

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  Single-partition encrypted NetBSD 11 root What if a regular, normal NetBSD installation is too plebeian for you? This is a quick overview which attempts to synthesize DW Armstrong's tutorial on NetBSD encryption with the cgdroot page from the NetBSD wiki in a single MBR partition, divided into multiple disklabel slices to preserve MBR entries. ↫ indigoparadox Web Zone What if you need thi https://www.osnews.com/story/146193/single-partition-encrypted-netbsd-11-root/ #NetBSD

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  Apple adds mystery folder to your PATH and everyone is apparently just okay with that Apparently, macOS 27 comes with a small mystery people are trying to figure out. Recently, while troubleshooting a PATH issue, I noticed an entry for /pkg/env/global/bin. At first, I worried that something had gone horribly wrong. Turns out, this is part of macOS 2 https://www.osnews.com/story/146198/apple-adds-mystery-folder-to-your-path-and-everyone-is-apparently-just-okay-with-that/ #macOS

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  OpenBSD 8.0 released Hot on the heels of Wine being ported to OpenBSD, we now have the release of OpenBSD 8.0. It adds hibernate support for arm64, switches the soarc64 toolchain to LLVM, and updates the DRM graphics drivers to Linux 6.18.53, which also adds support for Intel Arc A-Series (DG2/Alchemist) graphics cards. There's a whole bunch of improvements, fixes, and changes for RISC-V and ARM in general, of cour https://www.osnews.com/story/146200/openbsd-8-0-released/ #OpenBSD

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  Apple stops pretending macOS is UNIX Early 2025, I wrote about how I think macOS' UNIX certification was basically a lie. It required so many convoluted and cumbersome changes to macOS that literally nobody applies to their system that it the certification had kind of become a farce. At the end of the article I wondered for how much longer Apple would be playing this little charade to hammer macOS thr https://www.osnews.com/story/146203/apple-stops-pretending-macos-is-unix/ #macOS

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  Wine ported to OpenBSD, runs modern Windows games In what is quite a major achievement, Wine has been ported and made to work on OpenBSD. We have since tested several dozens of 64-bit Windows software, mostly successfully. See screenshots, livestream recordings for example. Even the Remaster of The Witcher 3 which released just last month runs, and runs well (requires adding in vkd3d https://www.osnews.com/story/146195/wine-ported-to-openbsd-runs-modern-windows-games/ #OpenBSD

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  Source code for the Palm OS port of Lemmings Only a few day ago I linked to a massive collection of original Palm OS development resources, and today we can take a look at what it was like to put all of those resources into practice: the original source code for the Palm OS port of Lemmings. With these resources combined, there's no excuse to not building any Palm OS applications. I'd really https://www.osnews.com/story/146187/source-code-for-the-palm-os-port-of-lemmings/ #Mobile

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  Palm OS developer archive: Palm OS development resources, SDKs, documentation, and utilities This repository contains approximately 1 GB of historical Palm OS development material, collected over many years of working with the platform. The archive includes a mixture of publicly distributed development resources, personal development material, te https://www.osnews.com/story/146174/palm-os-developer-archive-palm-os-development-resources-sdks-documentation-and-utilities/ #Mobile

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  The holy quinity of UNIX workstations Many of us are interesting in retrocomputing. There's such a rich history of eras and machines to choose from, and countless niches and nuances to get lost in. Some people make it easy for themselves and are into old computers that are readily available at low prices, like the Commodore 64 or mid-'90s Macs, while others make it a bit harder on themselves by focusi https://www.osnews.com/story/146092/the-holy-quinity-of-unix-workstations/ #Unix

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  Windows gets a new Run dialog With Windows being as old and long-running as it is, there's a ton of old and outdated bits and pieces lurking in every nook and cranny. I have always found these old relics fascinating, especially now that over the past few years, Microsoft has attempted to replace some of those bits and pieces with modern replacements (not always to great success, but that's another story). https://www.osnews.com/story/144883/windows-gets-a-new-run-dialog/ #Windows

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  MotifCentral: all things Motif/Xt/Xlib Over the last few days and weeks or so, a few of the people I follow and interact with on Fedi have been talking about centralising information, tools, applications, and expertise from the Motif (and Xt, Xlib, and X11) ecosystem. There's a ton of information, resources, and actively maintained applications out there, but it's all spread out and sometimes difficul https://www.osnews.com/story/146041/motifcentral-all-things-motif-xt-xlib/ #Unix

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  JagOS ‘Spot’ turns Atari Jaguar into the unreleased Atari Painter prototype computer Can you run an operating system with a graphical user interface and applications on the Atari Jaguar? Well, you can. A long time running idea and work-in-progress, I'd like to finally announce the current version of JagOS 'Spot' for the Atari Jaguar, running from https://www.osnews.com/story/146020/jagos-spot-turns-atari-jaguar-into-the-unreleased-atari-painter-prototype-computer/ #OSNews

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  The BeBox: one of the most beautifully overbuilt computers of the 1990s Late 2000. There is a grey and blue tower PC on my dorm-room desk like nothing anybody who walks into the room has ever seen. The Be logo on the front, a 3.5″ floppy peeking out the bottom of the drive bays, and the vertical grille that hides two columns of green LEDs (blinkenlights) dancing with https://www.osnews.com/story/144950/the-bebox-one-of-the-most-beautifully-overbuilt-computers-of-the-1990s/ #Haiku

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  Switching to GNU Guix: a beginner’s perspective Want to run something a little more exotic on your server? How about GNU Guix? It has been a month since migrating my home server to GNU Guix. Managing OS state declaratively through Git has eliminated configuration drift, and Guile Scheme provides a cohesive environment that complements Emacs. While adapting to a smaller package ecosystem https://www.osnews.com/story/145960/switching-to-gnu-guix-a-beginners-perspective/ #Linux

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  Publishing schematics before “open source” was a word: 55 years of Akizuki Denshi, Japan’s legendary parts Store Akihabara, Tokyo’s famous “Electric Town,” is overflowing with foreign tourists these days, drawn by anime shops, maid cafes, and duty-free electronics megastores. But there is one storefront most of them walk p https://www.osnews.com/story/145723/publishing-schematics-before-open-source-was-a-word-55-years-of-akizuki-denshi-japans-legendary-parts-store/ #Hardware

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  Thanks to the EU’s Digital Markets Act, EU citizens are getting copy and paste between iOS and Windows The European Union's Digital Markets Act keeps delivering for EU citizens. Apple is working on a new feature that will support cross-device copy and paste between iOS devices and Windows PCs. Microsoft asked for the feature usin https://www.osnews.com/story/145708/thanks-to-the-eus-digital-markets-act-eu-citizens-are-getting-copy-and-paste-between-ios-and-windows/ #Apple

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  But can your calculator run Linux? Don't have enough computing devices on your wish list yet? Do you have a need for a graphing calculator? No? What if it can run Linux and even Windows 10? I see I've got your attention. The HP Prime is a graphing calculator on the market since 2013, with a hardware revision in 2018 (the G2 model). It has a touch screen and as far as I can find, most people are ha https://www.osnews.com/story/145685/but-can-your-calculator-run-linux/ #Hardware

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  Corporate players in Amiga community sign various agreements to clear up some of the decades-old licensing and ownership mess Few things in technology are more complex, convoluted, and riddled with literally decades of drama than the Amiga community. Luckily for all of us, a significant step forward has been m https://www.osnews.com/story/145687/corporate-players-in-amiga-community-sign-various-agreements-to-clear-up-some-of-the-decades-old-licensing-and-ownership-mess/ #AmigaAROS

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  IBM i (OS/400): the database operating system Today, I wanted to show you one of the most fascinating and surprising operating systems ever created. It’s not another Unix, Linux, or Windows. It is an architecture that went its own way and proved that systems engineering design can look completely different. I’m talking about IBM’s child, which for many might be synonymous with “boring banking s https://www.osnews.com/story/145681/ibm-i-os-400-the-database-operating-system/ #IBM