With Google closing up Android at a rapid pace, there’s some renewed interest in mobile platforms that aren’t either iOS or Android, and one of those is Ubuntu Touch. It’s been steadily improving over the years under the stewardship of the UBports Foundation, and today they released Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.0. Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.0 is the first release of Ubuntu Touch which is based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, a major upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04. This might not be as big compared to our last upgrad...| OSnews
Microsoft is reorganising the Windows teams. Again. For those unaware, the Windows organization has essentially been split in two since 2018. Teams that work on the core of Windows were moved under Azure, and the rest of the Windows team (those that focused on top level features and user experiences) remained under the Windows org. That is finally changing, with Davuluri saying that the Windows client and server teams are now going to operate under the same roof once again. “This change un...| OSnews
This article is intended to be a comprehensive guide to writing your first GNOME app in Lua using LuaGObject. The article assumes that you already understand Lua and want to get started with building beautiful native applications for GNOME. I also assume you know how to use a command line to install and compile software. Having some knowledge of the C programming language, as well as the Make, Gettext, and Flatpak software will be helpful, but shouldn’t be required to understand this guid...| OSnews
Have you ever heard of the Encore 91 computer system, developed and built by Encore Computer Corporation? I stumbled upon the name of this system on the website for the Macintosh like virtual window manager (MLVWM), an old X11 window manager designed to copy some of the look and feel of the classic Mac OS, and wanted to know more about it. An old website from what appears to be a reseller of the Encore 91 has a detailed description and sales pitch of the machine still online, and it’s a gre...| OSnews
Unite is an operating system in which everything is a process, including the things that you normally would expect to be part of the kernel. The hard disk driver is a user process, so is the file system running on top of it. The namespace manager is a user process. The whole thing (in theory, see below) supports network transparency from the ground up, you can use resources of other nodes in the network just as easily as you can use local resources, just prefix them with the node ID. In the...| OSnews
Some time ago, I described Windows 3.0’s WinHelp as “a program for browsing online help files.” But Windows 3.0 predated the Internet, and these help files were available even if the computer was not connected to any other network. How can it be “online”? ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing I doubt this will be a conceptual problem for many people reading OSNews, but I can definitely understand especially younger people finding this a curious way of looking at the word “online...| OSnews
What if you have a PC-98 machine, and you want to run Linux on it, as you do? I mean, CP/M, OS/2, or Windows (2000 and older) might not cut it for you, after all. Well, it turns out that yes, you can run Linux on PC-98 hardware, and thanks to a bunch of work by Nina Kalinina – yes, the same person from a few days ago – there’s now more information gathered in a single place to get you started. Plamo Linux is one of the few Linux distributions to support PC-98 series. Plamo 3.x is the la...| OSnews
A few months ago, Microsoft finally blinked and provided a way for Windows 10 users to gain “free” access to the Windows 10 Extended Security Update program. For regular users to gain access to this program, their options are to either pay around $30, pay 1000 Microsoft points, or to sign up for the Windows Backup application to synchronise their settings to Microsoft’s computers (the “cloud”). In other words, in order to get “free” access to extended security updates for Window...| OSnews
The contributions of Sun Microsystems to the world of computing are legion – definitely more than its ignominious absorption into Oracle implies – and one of those is NFS, the Network File system. This month, NFS more or less turned 40 years old, and in honour of this milestone, Russel Berg, Russ Cox, Steve Kleiman, Bob Lyon, Tom Lyon, Joseph Moran, Brian Pawlowski, David Rosenthal, Kate Stout, and Geoff Arnold created a website to honour NFS. This website gathers material related to the ...| OSnews
If you download YouTube videos, there’s a real chance you’re using yt-dlp, the long-running and widely-used command-line program for downloading YouTube videos. Even if you’re not using it directly, many other tools for downloading YouTube videos are built on top of yt-dlp, and even some media players which offer YouTube playback use it in the background. Now, yt-dlp has always had a built-in basic JavaScript “interpreter”, but due to changes at YouTube, yt-dlp will soon require a p...| OSnews
MorganThe TI-99/4A was my very first computer at six years old in 1983. Apparently my father had had a good year at work and he was able to splurge on us that Christmas. I was told I could have a bunch of less expensive toys, or a computer and nothing else. So of course I said I wanted a computer! I had no idea what I would get until I opened it Christmas morning, and I vividly remember telling my little brother who I shared a room with that the TV was now “mine” when I needed to “do co...| OSnews
Google’s grip on Android keeps tightening. In what will certainly be another step that we will look back upon as just another nail in the coffin, Google is going to require every Android developer to register with Google, even if they don’t publish anything in the Play Store. In other words, even if you develop Android applications ad only make them available through F-Droid or GitHub, you’ll still have to register with Google and hand over a bunch of personal information and a small fe...| OSnews
The consequences of Google requiring developer certification to install Android applications, even outside of Google’s own Play Store, are starting to reverberate. F-Droid, probably the single most popular non-Google application repository for Android, has made it very clear that Google’s upcoming requirement is most likely going to mean the end of F-Droid.| OSnews
If you’re still running old versions of Windows from Windows 2000 and up, either for restrocomputing purposes or because you need to keep an old piece of software running, you’ve most likely heard of Legacy Update. This tool allows you to keep Windows Update running on Windows versions no longer supported by the service, and has basically become a must-have for anyone still playing around with older Windows versions. The project released a fairly major update today. Legacy Update 1.12 fea...| OSnews
It’s no secret that Google wants to bring Android to laptops and desktops, and is even sacrificing Chrome OS to get there. It seems this effort is gaining some serious traction lately, as evidenced by a conversation between Rick Osterloh, Google’s SVP of platforms and devices, and Qualcomm’s CEO, Christiano Amon, during Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit. Google may have just dropped its clearest hint yet that Android will soon power more than phones and tablets. At today’s Snapdragon S...| OSnews
Apple’s first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable under the hood, the outer shell — the visual user interface — was jarringly bad. Without much experience in desktop UX, Apple’s first OS looked like a Fisher-Price toy: heavily rounded corners, mismatched colors, inconsistent details and very low information density. Obviously, the tool was designed mostly for ki...| OSnews
GrapheneOS is a security and privacy-focused mobile operating system based on a modified version of Android (AOSP). To enhance its protection, it integrates advanced security features, including its own memory allocator for libc: hardened malloc. Designed to be as robust as the operating system itself, this allocator specifically seeks to protect against memory corruption. This technical article details the internal workings of hardened malloc and the protection mechanisms it implements to ...| OSnews
The 1980s saw a flurry of graphical user interfaces pop up, almost all of them in some way made by people who got to see the work done by Xerox. Today’s topic is no exception – GEM was developed by Lee Jay Lorenzen, who worked at Xerox and wished to create a cheaper, less resource-intensive alternative to the Xerox Star, which he got to do at DRI after leaving Xerox. His work was then shown off to Atari, who were interested in using it.| www.osnews.com
A very exciting set of kernel patches have just been proposed for the Linux kernel, adding multikernel support to Linux.| OSnews
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Last night, my wife looks up from her computer, troubled. She tells me she can’t log into her computer running Windows 11, as every time she enters the PIN code to her account, the login screen throws up a cryptic error: “Your credentials could not be verified”. She’s using the correct PIN code, so that surely isn’t it. We opt for the gold standard in troubleshooting and perform a quick reboot, but that doesn’t fix it. My initial instinct is that since she’s using an online acco...| OSnews
Basically, if you have Microsoft 365 desktop applications installed – read my article about some deep Microsoft lore to figure out what that means – Microsoft is going to force-install all the Copilot stuff onto your computer, whether you like it or not. Thanks to more robust consumer protection legislation in the European Union/EEA, like the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, this force-install will not take place there. Administrators managing Office 365 deployments get an op...| OSnews
More than three years in the making, with a concerted effort starting last year, my CPU-time profiler landed in Java with OpenJDK 25. It’s an experimental new profiler/method sampler that helps you find performance issues in your code, having distinct advantages over the current sampler. This is what this week’s and next week’s blog posts are all about. This week, I will cover why we need a new profiler and what information it provides; next week, I’ll cover the technical internals ...| OSnews
2025-09-13 5:01 pm| www.osnews.com
Who doesn’t love a desktop-oriented hobby operating system to start off the weekend?| OSnews
One of the most annoying things I encountered while trying out Windows 11 a few months ago was the utterly broken dark mode; broken since its inception nine years ago, but finally getting some fixes. One of the smaller but downright disturbing issues with dark mode on Windows 11 is that when Explorer is in dark mode, it will flash bright white whenever you open a new window or a new tab. It’s like the operating system is throwing flashbangs at you every time you need to do some file managem...| OSnews
A little over a year ago, DC District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google is a monopolist and violated US antitrust law. Today, Mehta ruled that while Google violated the law, there won’t be any punishment for the search giant. They don’t have to divest Chrome or Android, they can keep paying third parties to preload their services and products, and they can keep paying Apple €20 billion a year to be the default search engine on iOS.| OSnews
A version of Windows that’s often overlooked, and often probably entirely unknown, is Windows/386. When Microsoft released 2.x, they did so in two very different variants: Windows/286 and Windows/386. The former would run on anything from a 8088 and up, but wouldn’t make use of any of the new features of the 386, while the latter, as its name implies, was optimised for the 386 and introduced a ton of advanced features to the platform. Windows/386 laid the groundwork for the much more succ...| www.osnews.com
Up until now, Google developed several components of Android out in the open, as part of AOSP, while developing everything else behind closed doors, only releasing the source code once the final new Android version was released. This meant that Google had to merge the two branches, which lead to problems and issues, so Google decided it’s now moving all development of Android behind closed doors.| OSnews
With the release of Android 16, Google changed how it developed Android. Development is now taking place behind closed doors, with the code dropped after the corresponding version has been released to Pixel devices. Well, it turns out this wasn’t the only thing Google has changed about Android development. As the developers of CalyxOS, a popular de-Googled Android ROM, dove into the Android 16 AOSP source code, they realised something very important was missing: the device-specific source c...| OSnews
A story that’s been persistently making the rounds since the CrowdStrike event is that while several airline companies were affected in one way or another, Southwest Airlines escaped the mayhem because they were still using windows 3.1. It’s a great story that fits the current zeitgeist about technology and its role in society, underlining that what is claimed to be technological progress is nothing but trouble, and that it’s better to stick with the old. At the same time, anybody who d...| OSnews
I’ve long been warning about the dangers of relying on just one browser as the bullwark against the onslaught of Chrome, Chrome skins, and Safari. With Firefox’ user numbers rapidly declining, now stuck at a mere 2% or so – and even less on mobile – and regulatory pressure possibly ending the Google-Mozilla deal with makes up roughly 80% of Mozilla’s income, I’ve been warning that Mozilla will most likely have to start making Firefox worse to gain more temporary revenue. As the si...| OSnews
There’s no denying that the browser is the single-most important application on any operating system, whether that be on desktops and laptops or on mobile devices. Without a capable, fast, and solid browser, the usefulness of an operating system decreases exponentially, to the point where I’m quite sure virtually nobody’s going to use an operating system for regular, normal use if it doesn’t have a browser. Having an at least somewhat useable browser is what elevates an operating syst...| www.osnews.com