MaXX Interactive Desktop 2.2.0 released
Late last year, the MaXX Interactive Desktop, the Linux (and BSD) version of the IRIX desktop, sprung back to life with a new release and a detailed roadmap. Thanks to a unique licensing agreement with SGI, MaXX’ developer, Eric Masson, has been able to bring a lot of the SGI user experience over to Linux and BSD, and as promised, we have a new release: the final version of MaXX Interactive Desktop 2.2.0. It’s codenamed Octane, and anyone who knows the … ⌘ Read more

Rotary Tool
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China announces retaliatory tariffs on US + 2 more stories
China reveals tariffs on U.S. goods; Google faces antitrust action; EU establishes new trade zones; astronauts create oxygen in space; technology aids lunar missions. ⌘ Read more

Why Upstart from Ubuntu failed
Upstart was an event-based replacement for the traditional System V init (sysvinit) system on Ubuntu, introduced to bring a modern and more flexible way of handling system startup and service management. It emerged in the mid-2000s, during a period when sysvinit’s age and limitations were becoming more apparent, especially with regard to concurrency and dependency handling. Upstart was developed by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, with the aim of reducing boot time … ⌘ Read more

The dumb reason why flag emojis aren’t working on your site in Chrome on Windows
After doing more digging than I feel like I should have needed to, I found my answer: it appears that due to concerns about the fact that acknowledging the existence of certain countries can be perceived as a nominally political stance, Microsoft has opted to just avoid the issue altogether by not including country flag emojis in Windows’ system font. Problem solved! Can y … ⌘ Read more

TuxTape: a kernel livepatching solution
Geico, an American insurance company, is building a live-patching solution for the Linux kernel, called TuxTape. TuxTape is an in-development kernel livepatching ecosystem that aims to aid in the production and distribution of kpatch patches to vendor-independent kernels. This is done by scraping the Linux CNA mailing list, prioritizing CVEs by severity, and determining applicability of the patches to the configured kernel(s). Applicability of patches i … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks for sharing. I really enjoyed it. The beginning part about the history of life on Earth was fun to watch having just read Dawkin’s old book The Selfish Geene, and now I want to read more about archaea. The end of the talk about what might be going on on Mars made me a bit hopeful someone will find some good evidence.

GTK announces X11 deprecation, new Android backend, and much more
Since a number of GTK developer came together at FOSDEM, the project figured now was as good a time as any to give an update on what’s coming in GTK. First, GTK is implementing some hard cut-offs for old platforms – Windows 10 and macOS 10.15 are now the oldest supported versions, which will make development quite a bit easier and will simplify several parts of the codebase. Windows 10 was released in 2 … ⌘ Read more

Run Linux inside a PDF file via a RISC-V emulator
You might expect PDF files to only be comprised of static documents, but surprisingly, the PDF file format supports Javascript with its own separate standard library. Modern browsers (Chromium, Firefox) implement this as part of their PDF engines. However, the APIs that are available in the browser are much more limited. The full specfication for the JS in PDFs was only ever implemented by Adobe Acrobat, and it contains some ridicul … ⌘ Read more

The GNU Guix System
GNU Guix is a package manager for GNU/Linux systems. It is designed to give users more control over their general-purpose and specialized computing environments, and make these easier to reproduce over time and deploy to one or many devices. ↫ GNU Guix website Guix is basically GNU’s approach to a reproducible, functional package manager, very similar to Nix because, well, it’s based on Nix. GNU also has a Linux distribution built around Nix, the GNU Guix System, which is fully ‘libre’ as al … ⌘ Read more

Stromatolites
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@sorenpeter@darch.dk It depends on your requirements. If you just want to put your code somewhere for yourself, simply push it over SSH on a server and call it good. That’s what I do with lots of repos. If you want an additional web UI for read access for the public, cgit comes to mind (a mate uses that). Prologic runs Gitea, which offers heaps more functionality like merge requests.

Trump imposes tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China + 1 more story
Donald Trump imposes significant tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, leading to immediate retaliatory measures. China initiates construction of a massive military command center near Beijing to boost its military capabilities. ⌘ Read more

This Sculpt OS video walkthrough explains how to use Sculpt OS
We talk about the Genode project and Sculpt OS quite regularly on OSNews, but every time I’ve tried using Sculpt OS, I’ve always found it so different and so unique compared to everything else that I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I assume this stems from nothing but my own shortcomings, because the Genode project often hammers on the fact that Sculpt OS is in daily-driver use by a lot of people with … ⌘ Read more

Building a (T1D) smartwatch from scratch
If you have type 1 diabetes, you need to keep track of and manage your blood glucose levels closely, as if these levels dip too low, it can quickly spiral into a medical emergency. Andrew Childs’ 9 year old son has type 1 diabetes, and Childs was unhappy with any of the current offerings on the market for children to keep track of their blood glucose levels. Most people suggested an Apple Watch, but he found the Apple Watch “too much device” for a kid, … ⌘ Read more

Let’s Encrypt ends support for expiration notification emails
Since its inception, Let’s Encrypt has been sending expiration notification emails to subscribers that have provided an email address to us. We will be ending this service on June 4, 2025. ↫ Josh Aas on the Let’s Encrypt website They’re ending the expiration notification service because it’s costly, adds a ton of complexity to their systems, and constitutes a privacy risk because of all the email addresses the … ⌘ Read more

The Heirloom Project
The Heirloom Project provides traditional implementations of standard Unix utilities. In many cases, they have been derived from original Unix material released as Open Source by Caldera and Sun. Interfaces follow traditional practice; they remain generally compatible with System V, although extensions that have become common use over the course of time are sometimes provided. Most utilities are also included in a variant that aims at POSIX conformance. On the interior, technologies for th … ⌘ Read more

Android 16’s Linux Terminal will soon let you run graphical apps, so of course we ran Doom
Regardless, the fact that Android’s Linux Terminal can run graphical apps like Doom now is good news. Hopefully we’ll be able to run more complex desktop-class Linux programs in the future. I tried running GIMP, for example, but it didn’t work. Eventually, Android should be able to run Linux apps as well as Chromebooks can, as I believe one of the goals … ⌘ Read more

AlphaMove
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Doomsday Clock hits 89 seconds + 4 more stories
The Doomsday Clock moves to 89 seconds; Germany’s Bundestag passes new immigration plan; Scientists succeed in DNA storage using 5D crystal; AI report highlights emerging dangers; NASA discovers life’s building blocks in asteroid samples. ⌘ Read more

Apple’s macOS UNIX certification is a lie
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a someone mentioning macOS is a UNIX approaches 1. In fact, it was only late last year that The Open Group announced that macOS 15.0 was, once again, certified as UNIX, continuing Apple’s long-standing tradition of certifying macOS releases as “real” UNIX®. What does any of this actually, mean, though? Well, it turns out that if you actually dive into Apple’s conformance statements for macOS’ … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.14 with Rust: “We are almost at the ‘write a real driver in Rust’ stage now”
With the Linux 6.13 kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman described the level of Rust support as a “tipping point” for Rust drivers with more of the Rust infrastructure having been merged. Now for the Linux 6.14 kernel, Greg describes the state of the Rust driver possibilities as “almost at the “write a real driver in rust” stage now, depending on what you want to do.“ ↫ Michael … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI doesn’t like it when you use “their” generated slop without permission
OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property. ↫ Cristina Criddle and Eleanor Olcott for the FT This is more ironic than writing a song called Ironic that lists situations that aren’t actually … ⌘ Read more

Reading “Man’s search for meaning” by Viktor E. Frankl

OpenAI Says It Has Evidence DeepSeek Used Its Model To Train Competitor
OpenAI says it has evidence suggesting Chinese AI startup DeepSeek used its proprietary models to train a competing open-source system through “distillation,” a technique where smaller models learn from larger ones’ outputs.

The San Francisco-based company, along with partner Microsoft, blocked suspected DeepSeek accounts from accessing … ⌘ Read more

@Prologic@twtxt.net Threema states the findings of that security research are all plugged. Still reading on it. Truth is that my family is difficult to get away from WhatsApp. And yes, I plan to buy them a license key.

Humidifier Review
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@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Something is broken with the TLS:

$ curl https://remix.girlonthemoon.xyz
curl: (35) error:14094438:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:tlsv1 alert internal error

Google Maps is run by cowards
Google, on its Google Maps naming policy, back in 2008: By saying “common”, we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage. Google, today, in 2025: Google has confirmed that Google Maps will soon … ⌘ Read more

New human-like species discovered in China + 3 more stories
Scientists propose a new human-like species based on ancient fossils; oceans warm four times faster than in the 1980s; researchers recreate endosymbiosis significantly in the lab; CIA updates its Covid-19 origins assessment, hinting at a lab leak. ⌘ Read more

Reviving a dead audio format: the return of ZZM
Long-time readers will know that my first video game love was the text-mode video game slash creation studio ZZT. One feature of this game is the ability to play simple music through the PC speaker, and back in the day, I remember that the format “ZZM” existed, so you could enjoy the square wave tunes outside of the games. But imagine my surprise in 2025 to find that, while the Museum of ZZT does have a ZZM Audio section, it recommends t … ⌘ Read more

The invalid 68030 instruction that accidentally allowed the Mac Classic II to successfully boot up
A bug in the ROM for the Macintosh II was recently discovered that causes a crash when booting in 32-bit mode. Doug Brown discovered and documented the bug while playing with the MAME debugger. Why did it never show up before? It seems a quirk in Motorola’s 68030 CPU inadvertently fixes it when executing an illegal instruction that shou … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d stumbled upon #FrankenPHP while reading through #Caddy stuff and thought maybe it’s bit overkill for what i need it for but then again, it will be just a “One container in for two out”, that’s win in my book 😆

PebbleOS becomes open source, new Pebble device announced
Eric Migicovsky, founder of Pebble, the original smartwatch maker, made a major announcement today together with Google. Pebble was originally bought by Fitbit and in turn Fitbit was then bought by Google, but Migicovsky always wanted to to go back to his original idea and create a brand new smartwatch. PebbleOS took dozens of engineers working over 4 years to build, alongside our fantastic product and QA teams. Repro … ⌘ Read more

Chinese researchers just built an open-source rival to ChatGPT in 2 months, and Silicon Valley is freaked out
Speaking of “AI”, the Chinese company DeepSeek has lobbed a grenade dead-centre into the middle of the “AI” bubble, and it’s been incredibly entertaining to watch. DeepSeek has released several new “AI” models, which seem to rival or even surpass OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT models – but with a massive twist: DeepSeek, b … ⌘ Read more

AI bots paralyze Linux news site and others
Apparently, since the beginning of the year, AI bots have been ensuring that websites can only respond to regular inquiries with a delay. The founder of Linux Weekly News (LWN-net), Jonathan Corbet, reports that the news site is therefore often slow to respond. The AI scraper bots cause a DDoS, a distributed denial-of-service attack. At times, the AI bots would clog the lines with hundreds of IP addresses simultaneously as soon as they decided … ⌘ Read more

Muons
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AI achieves self-replication in new study + 2 more stories
AI self-replication demonstrated by researchers; ICC seeks warrants against Taliban leaders for women’s rights; CERN’s new Flash radiotherapy could revolutionize cancer treatment. ⌘ Read more

When a sole maintainer steps down, Linux drivers become orphans
The Linux kernel has become such an integral, core part of pretty much all aspects of the technology world, and corporate contributions to the kernel make up such a huge chunk of the kernel’s ongoing development, it’s easy to forget that some parts of the kernel are still maintained by some lone person in Jacksonville, Nebraska, or whatever. Sadly, we were reminded of this today when the sole maintainer of … ⌘ Read more

Android 16 Beta 1 has started rolling out for Pixel devices
Basically, this seems to mean applications will no longer be allowed to limit themselves to phone size when running on devices with larger screens, like tablets. Other tidbits in this first beta include predictive back support for 3-button navigation, support for the Advanced Professional Video codec from Samsung, among other things. It’s still quite early in the release process, so more is sure to come, and some … ⌘ Read more

T. Rex Evolution
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Fusion reactor breaks 1,000 seconds record + 3 more stories
Chinese scientists break nuclear fusion record with 1,066 seconds at 100 million Celsius; US launches $500 billion AI infrastructure The Stargate Project; AI-designed drugs from Isomorphic Labs set for clinical trials by 2026; New AI method shows 90-100% accuracy in early breast cancer detection. ⌘ Read more

Snowdrop OS: a homebrew operating system from scratch, in x86 assembly language
Snowdrop OS was born of my childhood curiosity around what happens when a PC is turned on, the mysteries of bootable disks, and the hidden aspects of operating systems. It is a 16-bit real mode operating system for the IBM PC architecture. I designed and developed this homebrew OS from scratch, using only x86 assembly language. ↫ Snowdrop OS’ website I have created and includ … ⌘ Read more

NixBSD: an unofficial NixOS fork with a FreeBSD kernel
NixBSD is an attempt to make a reproducible and declarable BSD, based on NixOS. Although theoretically much of this work could be copied to build other BSDs, all work thus far has been focused on building a FreeBSD distribution. ↫ NixBSD GitHub page Look, it’s my job to make sure I use and am familiar with as many operating systems and related tools as possible. As much as you guys support OSNews on Patreon or Ko-Fi, it’s g … ⌘ Read more

SDL 3.2.0 released
SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer, has released version 3.2.0 of its development library. In case you don’t know what SDL is: Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware via OpenGL and Direct3D. It is used by video playback software, emulators, and popular games including Valve‘s award winning catalog and many Humble Bundle games. ↫ SDL website This new release has a lot of impr … ⌘ Read more

Unit Circle
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One-third of Arctic carbon sinks now emit + 2 more stories
Trump vows to restore trust in government during inauguration; Arctic carbon sinks now contribute to emissions; NATO deploys Norwegian F-35s to bolster defense ⌘ Read more

9front “THIS TIME DEFINITELY” released
The operating system I’m not cool enough to run has pushed out a new release: 9front “THIS TIME DEFINITELY” is now available. 9front is a fork of plan9, created after plan9 languished at Bell Labs. This release enables gefs, the new file system, in the installer, “ip/ipconfig now support dhcpv6 dynamic allocations and handles prefix expirations”, and it comes with some smaller changes, too, of course. Despite every piece of evidence to the contrary, I am s … ⌘ Read more

Right to root access
I believe consumers, as a right, should be able to install software of their choosing to any computing device that is owned outright. This should apply regardless of the computer’s form factor. In addition to traditional computing devices like PCs and laptops, this right should apply to devices like mobile phones, “smart home” appliances, and even industrial equipment like tractors. In 2025, we’re ultra-connected via a network of devices we do not have full control over. Much of this has t … ⌘ Read more

How UNIX spell ran in 64kB RAM
How do you fit a 250kB dictionary in 64kB of RAM and still perform fast lookups? For reference, even with modern compression techniques like gzip -9, you can’t compress this file below 85kB. In the 1970s, Douglas McIlroy faced this exact challenge while implementing the spell checker for Unix at AT&T. The constraints of the PDP-11 computer meant the entire dictionary needed to fit in just 64kB of RAM. A seemingly impossible task. ↫ Abhinav Upadhyay They still managed to … ⌘ Read more