As cool as the organizer was, it was extremely limited in pretty much every way. Psion had got many things right in the first go, as reviewers were quick to admit, and that made iterating on the design somewhat easy. The Organiser II CM released in 1986 was built on the Hitachi HD6303X (Motorola 6803) clocked at 920kHz with 8K RAM and 32K ROM. The screen was a much improved dot matrix LCD with two lines of sixteen characters. This version also shipped with a little piezo beeper built in, and an expansion slot on the top. The expansion slot could allow for a wired power adapter, a serial cable, a bar code reader, a telephone dialer, and even a USB port. Given the reputation of the first model for ruggedness and the coverage of the same quality in the second model, this particular model sold quite well to companies who needed handheld computers for inventory and other purposes. The Organizer II XP launched the same year, and this model had 32K RAM and a backlit screen while otherwise being the same machine. Given that both of these models had significantly more RAM than their predecessor, the programming capabilities were greatly enhanced with a new language, OPL, which was similar to BASIC.
The Psion Organiser II is the very root of all mobile computing today. This may seem like hyperbole – but trust me, it really is. I have an Organiser II LZ64 with a 32k datapak (memory card), and while it may look like a calculator, this little machine from 1986 already contains the very skeleton of the graphical user interface Palm would eventually popularise, and the iPhone and Android would take to extraordinary heights.
Turn on an Organiser II, and you’re greeted by a home screen with a grid of applications (no icons, though, of course – just labels) with a selector you moved around with the cursor keys. Hit the EXE key, and the application would load up, ready to be used; hit the home button (the ON key if my memory serves) and it would take you back to the home screen. This basic paradigm, of a grid of applications as a home screen you always return to, survives to this day, and is used by billions of people on their Android and iOS devices, both smartphones and tablets.
People with little to no knowledge of the history of mobile computing – or people spreading corporate propaganda – often seem to act as if the release of the iPhone was the big bang of mobile computing, and that it materialised out of thin air because Steve Jobs alone willed it into existence. The reality is, though, that there is a direct line from the early Psion devices, through to Palm OS, the iPhone, and later Android. There were various dead end branches along the way, too, like the Newton, like Symbian, like the original Windows PocketPC, and so on – but that direct line from early Psion to that fancy Pixel 8 Pro or whatever you have today is solidly visible to anyone without an agenda.
I love my Organiser II. It’s approaching 40 years old now, and it still works without a single hitch. There’s barely a scratch on it, the display is bright, the pixels are clear, the characteristic sliding cover feels as solid today as it did when it rolled off the factory line. This is where mobile computing began.
In a few days, 29 June, FreeDOS will turn 30. This happens to make it one of the oldest, continuously active open source projects in the world, originally created because Jim Hall had heard Microsoft was going to kill DOS when the upcoming Windows 95 was going to be released. After seeing the excitement around Linux, he decided it an open source DOS would be a valuable time investment.
I still used DOS, and I didn’t want to stop using DOS. And I looked at what Linux had achieved: people from all over the world shared source code with each other to make this full operating system that worked just like Unix. And I thought “If they can do that with Linux, surely we can do the same thing with DOS.”
I asked around on a discussion board (called Usenet) if anyone had made an “open source” DOS, and people said “No, but that’s a good idea .. and you should do it.” So that’s why I announced on June 29, 1994, that I was starting a new project to make an open source version of DOS that would work just like regular DOS.
For an open source implementation of what was a dead end and now is a dead operating system, FreeDOS has been remarkably successful. Not only are there countless people using FreeDOS on retro hardware, it’s also a popular operating system for DOS gaming and running old DOS applications in virtual machines. On top of that, many motherboard makers and OEMs use FreeDOS to load firmware update tools, and some of them even offered FreeDOS as the preinstalled operating system when buying new hardware.
With the ever-increasing popularity of retrocomputing and gaming, FreeDOS clearly has a bright future ahead of itself.
The European Commission has informed Microsoft of its preliminary view that Microsoft has breached EU antitrust rules by tying its communication and collaboration product Teams to its popular productivity applications included in its suites for businesses Office 365 and Microsoft 365.
Chalk this one up in the unsurprising column, too. Teams has infested Office, and merely by being bundled it’s become a major competitor to Slack, even though everyone who has to use it seems to absolutely despise Teams with a shared passion rivaling only Americans’ disgust for US Congress.
On a mildly related note, I’m working with a friend to set up a Matrix server specifically for OSNews users, so we can have a self-hosted, secure, and encrypted space to hang out, continue conversations beyond the shelf life of a news item, suggest interesting stories, point out spelling mistakes, and so on. It’ll be invite-only at first, with preference given to Patreons, active commenters, and other people I trust. We intend to federate, so if everything goes according to plan, you can use your existing Matrix username and account.
The transition to Wayland is nearing completion for most desktop Linux users. The most popular desktop Linux distribution in the world, Ubuntu, has made the call and is switching its NVIDIA users over to Wayland by default in the upcoming release of Ubuntu 24.10.
The proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver has been the hold-out on Ubuntu in sticking to the GNOME X.Org session out-of-the-box rather than Wayland as has been the default for the past several releases when using other GPUs/drivers. But for Ubuntu 24.10, the plan is to cross that threshold for NVIDIA now that their official driver has much better Wayland support and has matured into great shape. Particularly with the upcoming NVIDIA R555 driver reaching stable very soon, the Wayland support is in great shape with features like explicit sync ready to use.
This is great news for the Linux desktop, as having such a popular Linux distribution defaulting the users of the most popular graphics card brand to X.org created a major holdout. None of this obviously means that Wayland is perfect or that all use cases are covered – accessibility is an important use case where tooling simply hasn’t been optimised yet for Wayland, but work is underway – and for those of us who prefer X.org for a variety of reasons, there are still countless distributions offering it as a fallback or as the default option.
It seems the success of the Framework laptops, as well the community’s relentless focus on demanding repairable devices and he ensuing legislation, are starting to have an impact. It wasn’t that long ago that Microsoft’s Surface devices were effectively impossible to repair, but with the brand new Snapdragon X Elite and Pro devices, the company has made an impressive U-turn, according to iFixIt. Both the new Surface Laptop and Surface Pro are exceptionally easy to repair, and take cues from Framework’s hardware.
Microsoft’s journey from the unrepairable Surface Laptop to the highly repairable devices on our teardown table should drive home the importance of designing for repair. The ability to create a repairable Surface was always there but the impetus to design for repairable was missing. I’ll take that as a sign that Right to Repair advocacy and legislation has begun to bear fruit.
The new Surface devices contain several affordances to make opening them up and repairing them easier. They take cues from Framework in that inside screws and components are clearly labeled to indicate what type they are and which parts they’re holding in place, and there’s a QR code that leads to online repair guides, which were available right away, instead of having to wait months to forever for those to become accessible. The components are also not layered; in other words,you don’t need to remove six components just to get to the SSD, or whatever – some laptops require you to take out the entire mainboard just to get access to the fans to clean them, which is bananas.
Microsoft technically doesn’t have to do any of this, so it’s definitely praiseworthy that their hardware department is going the extra kilometre to make this happen. The fact that even the Surface Pro, a tablet, can be reasonably opened up and repaired is especially welcome, since tablets are notoriously difficult to impossible to repair.
Microsoft has made OneDrive slightly more annoying for Windows 11 users. Quietly and without any announcement, the company changed Windows 11’s initial setup so that it could turn on the automatic folder backup without asking for it.
Now, those setting up a new Windows computer the way Microsoft wants them to (in other words, connected to the internet and signed into a Microsoft account) will get to their desktops with OneDrive already syncing stuff from folders like Desktop Pictures, Documents, Music, and Videos. Depending on how much is stored there, you might end up with a desktop and other folders filled to the brim with shortcuts to various stuff right after finishing a clean Windows installation.
Today, the European Commission has informed Apple of its preliminary view that its App Store rules are in breach of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), as they prevent app developers from freely steering consumers to alternative channels for offers and content.
In addition, the Commission opened a new non-compliance procedure against Apple over concerns that its new contractual requirements for third-party app developers and app stores, including Apple’s new “Core Technology Fee”, fall short of ensuring effective compliance with Apple’s obligations under the DMA.
File this in the category for entirely expected news that is the opposite of surprising. Apple has barely even been maliciously compliant with the DMA, and the European Commission is entirely right in pursuing the company for its continued violation of the law. The DMA really isn’t a very complicated law, and the fact the world’s most powerful and wealthiest corporation in the world can’t seem to adapt its products to the privacy and competition laws here in the EU is clearly just a bunch of grandstanding and whining.
In fact, I find that the European Commission is remarkably lenient and cooperative in its dealings with the major technology giants in general, and Apple in particular. They’ve been in talks with Apple for a long time now in preparation for the DMA, the highest-ranking EU officials regularly talked with Apple and Tim Cook, they’ve been given ample warnings, instructions, and additional time to make sure their products do not violate the law – as a European Union citizen, I can tell you no small to medium business or individual EU citizen gets this kind of leniency and silk gloves treatment. Everything Apple is reaping, it sowed all by itself.
As I posted on Mastodon a few days ago:
The EU enacted a new law a while ago that all bottle caps should remain attached to the bottle, to combat plastic trash.
All the bottle and packaging makers, from massive multinationals like Coca Cola and fucking Nestlé to small local producers invested in the development of new caps, changing their production lines, and shipping the new caps. Today, a month before the law goes into effect, it’s basically impossible to find a bottle without an attached cap.
I don’t know, I thought this story was weirdly relevant right now with Apple being a whiny bitch. Imagine being worse than Coca Cola and motherfucking Nestlé.
Apple is in this mess and facing insane fines as high as 10% of their worldwide turnover because spoiled, rich, privileged brats like Tim Cook are not used to anyone ever saying “no”. Silicon Valley has shown, time and time again, from massive data collection for advertising purposes to scraping the entire web for machine learning, that they simply do not understand consent. Now that there’s finally someone big, strong, and powerful enough to not take Silicon Valley’s bullshit, they start throwing tamper tantrums like toddlers.
Apple’s public attacks on the European Union – and their instructions to their PR attack dogs to step it up a notch – are not doing them any favours, either. The EU is, contrary to just about any other government body in the Western world, ridiculously popular among its citizens, and laws that curb the power of megacorps are even more popular. I honestly have no idea who’s running their PR department, because they’re doing a terrible job, at least here in the EU.
I can’t believe this is considered something I need to write about, but it’s still a very welcome new feature that surprisingly has taken this long to become available: iOS and iPadOS 18 now allow you to format external storage devices.
Last year when I began testing iPadOS 17 betas, I noticed the addition of options for renaming and erasing external drives in the Files app. I watched these options over the course of the beta cycle for iPadOS 17 to see if any further changes would come. The one I watched most closely was the “Erase” option for external drives. This option uses the same glyph as the Erase option in Disc Utility on macOS. In Disc Utility on the Mac, in order to reformat an external drive, you first select the “Erase” option, and then additional options appear for selecting the new format you wish to reformat the drive with. When I saw the “Erase” option added in the Files app on iPadOS, I suspected that Apple might be moving towards adding these reformatting options into the Files app on iPadOS. And I’m excited to confirm that this is exactly what Apple has done in iPadOS 18!
It was soon confirmed this feature is available in iOS 18 as well. You can only format in APFS, ExFAT and FAT, so it’s not exactly a cornucopia of file systems to choose from, but it’s better than nothing. This won’t magically fix all the issues a lot of people have with especially iPadOS when it comes to feeling constrained when using their expensive, powerful tablets with detachable keyboards, but it takes away at least one tiny reason to keep a real computer around.
One of my biggest concerns regarding the state of the web isn’t ads (easily blocked) or machine learning (the legal system isn’t going to be kind to that), but the possible demise of Firefox. I’ve long been worried that with the seemingly never-ending downward marketshare spiral Firefox is in – it’s at like 3% now on desktop, even less on mobile – Mozilla’s pretty much sole source of income will eventually pull the plug, leaving the already struggling browser effectively for dead. I’ve continuously been warning that the first casualty of the downward spiral would be Firefox on platforms other than Windows and macOS.
So, what do we make of Mozilla buying an online advertising analytics company?
Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for the advertising industry by ensuring user privacy while delivering effective advertising solutions.
They way Mozilla explains buying an advertising network is that the company wants to be a trailblazer privacy-conscious online advertising, since the current brand of online advertising, which relies on massive amounts of data collection, is unsustainable. Anonym instead employs a number of measures to ensure that privacy is guaranteed, from anonymous analytics to employing differential privacy when it comes to algorithms, ensuring data can’t be used to tack individual users.
I have no reason to doubt Mozilla’s intentions here – at least for now – but intentions change, people in charge change, and circumstances change. Having an ad network integrated into the Mozilla organisation will surely lead to temptations of weakening Firefox’ privacy features and ad-blocking abilities, and just overall I find it an odd acquisition target for something like Mozilla, and antithetical to why most people use Firefox in the first place.
What really doesn’t help is who originally founded Anonym – two former Facebook executives, backed by a load of venture capital. Do with that little tidbit of information as you please.
Windows 3.0 Enhanced Mode introduced the ability to run MS-DOS programs in a virtual machine. This by itself was already quite an achievement, but it didn’t stop there. It also let you put the MS-DOS session in a window, and run it on the screen along with your other Windows programs.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, professor emeritus of Computer Science at VU Amsterdam, receives the ACM Software System Award for MINIX, which influenced the teaching of Operating Systems principles to multiple generations of students and contributed to the design of widely used operating systems, including Linux.
Tanenbaum created MINIX 1.0 in 1987 to accompany his textbook, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. MINIX was a small microkernel-based UNIX operating system for the IBM PC, which was popular at the time. It was roughly 12,000 lines of code, and in addition to the microkernel, included a memory manager, file system and core UNIX utility programs. It became free open-source software in 2000.
Definitely a deserved award for Tanenbaum, and it’s a minuscule bit of pride that VU Amsterdam happens to be my Alma mater. He also wrote an article for OSNews way back in 2006, detailing MINIX 3, which is definitely a cool notch to have on our belt.
There’s really a Linux distribution for everyone, it seems. EasyOS sounds like it’s going to be some Debian derivative with a theme or something, but it’s truly something different – in fact, it has such a unique philosophy and approach to everything I barely know where to even start.
Everything in EasyOS runs in containers, in the distribution’s own custom container format, even entire desktop environments, and containers are configured entirely graphically. EasyOS runs every application in RAM, making it insanely fast, and you can save the contents of RAM to disk whenever you want. You can also choose a special boot option where the entire session is only loaded in RAM, with disk access entirely disabled, for maximum security.
Now things are going to get weird. In EasyOS, you always run as root, which may seem like a stupid thing to do, and I’m sure some people will find this offputting. The idea, however, is you run every application as its own user (e.g. Firefox runs as the “firefox” user), entirely isolated from every other user, or in containers with further constraints applied. I honestly kind of like this approach.
If these first few details of what EasyOS is going for tickles your fancy, I really urge you to read the rest of their detailed explanation of what, exactly, EasyOS is going for. It’s an opinionated distribution, for sure, but it’s opinionated in a way where they’re clearly putting a lot of thought into the decisions they make. I’m definitely feeling the pull to give it a try and see if it’s something for me.
Ever since the introduction of especially Apple Intelligence, the company has been in hot water over the sourcing of its training data – Apple admitted it’s been scraping everyone’s data for years and now used it to train its AI features. This will obviously have included vasts amounts of data from European websites and citizens, and with the strict EU privacy laws, there’s a very real chance that such scraping is simply not legal. As such, it’s simpler to just not comply with such stricter privacy laws than to design your products with privacy in mind.
As Steven Troughton-Smith quips:
How many EU-based sites did Apple scrape to build the feature it now says it can’t ship in the EU because of legal uncertainty?
Other massive corporations like Google and Facebook seem to have little issue shipping AI features in the EU, and have been doing so for quite a while now. And mind you, as Tim Cook has been very keen to reiterate in every single interview for the past two years or so, Apple has been shipping AI features similar to what they announced at WWDC for years as well, but it’s only now that the European Union is actually imposing regulations on them – instead of letting corporatism run wild – that it can no longer ship such features in the EU?
Apple is throwing its users under the bus because Tim Cook is big mad that someone told him no. As I keep reiterating, consent is something Silicon Valley simply does not understand.
It should be no secret to anyone reading OSNews that I’m not exactly a fan of Windows. While I grew up using MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 9x, the move to Windows XP was a sour one for me, and ever since I’ve vastly preferred first BeOS, and then Linux. When, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Wine community and Valve gaming on Linux became a boring, it-just-works affair, I said goodbye to my final gaming-only Windows installation about four or so years ago.
However, I also strongly believe that in order to be able to fairly criticise or dislike something, you should at least have experience with it. As such, I decided it was time for what I expected was going to be some serious technology BDSM, and I installed Windows 11 on my workstation and force myself to use it for a few weeks to see if Microsoft’s latest operating system truly was as bad as I make it out to be in my head.
Installing Windows 11
Technically speaking, my workstation is not supported by Windows 11. Despite packing two Intel Xeon E5 V4 2640 CPUs for a total of 20 cores and 40 threads, 32 GB of ECC RAM, an AMD Radeon Pro w5700, and the usual stuff like an M.2 SSD, this machine apparently did not meet the minimum specifications for Windows 11 since it has no TPM 2.0 security chip, and the processors were deemed too old. Luckily, these limitations are entirely artificial and meaningless, and using Ventoy, which by default disables these silly restrictions, I was able to install Windows 11 just fine.
During installation, you run into the first problem if you’re coming from a different operating system – even after all these years, Windows still does not give a single hootin’ toot about any existing operating systems or bootloaders on your machine. This wasn’t an issue for me since I was going to allow Windows to take over the entire machine, but for those of used to have control over what happens when we install our operating systems, be advised that your other operating systems will most likely be rendered unbootable.
The tools you have access to during installation for things like disk partitioning are also incredibly limited, and there’s nothing like the live environments you’re used to from the Linux world – all you get is an installer. In addition, since Windows only really supports FAT and NTFS file systems, your existing ext4, btrfs, UFS, or ZFS partitions used by your Linux or BSD installs will not work at all in Windows. Again – be advised that Windows is a very limited operating system compared to Linux or BSD.
Once the actual installation part is done, you’re treated to a lengthy – and I truly mean lengthy – out of box experience. This is where you first get a glimpse of just how much data Microsoft wants to collect from its Windows users, and it stands in stark contrast to what I’m used to as a Linux user. On my Linux distribution of choice, Fedora KDE, there’s really only KDE’s opt-in, voluntary User Feedback option, which only collects basic system information in an entirely anonymous way. Windows, meanwhile, seems to want to collect pretty much everything you do on your machine, and while there’s some prompts to reduce the amount of data it collects, even with everything set to minimum it’s still quite a lot.
Once you’re past the out of box experience, you can finally start using your new Windows installation – but actually not really. Unlike a Linux distribution, where all your hardware is detected automatically and will use the latest drivers, on Windows, you will most likely have to do some manual driver hunting, searching the web for PCI and vendor IDs to hopefully locate the correct drivers, which isn’t always easy. To make matters worse, even if Windows Update installs the correct drivers for you, those are often outdated, and you’re better off downloading the latest versions straight from the vendors’ websites. This is especially problematic for motherboard drivers – motherboard vendor websites often list horribly outdated drivers.
Updating Windows 11
Once you have all the drivers installed and updated, which often requires several reboots, you might notice that your system seems to be awfully busy, even when you’re not actually doing anything with it. Most likely, this means Windows Update is running in the background, sucking up a lot of system resources. If you’re used to Linux or BSD, where updating is a quick and centralised process, updating things on Windows is a complete and utter mess. Instead of just updating everything all at once, Windows Update will often require several different rounds of updates, marked by reboots.
You’ll also discover that Windows Update is not only incredibly slow both when it comes to downloading and installing, but that it’s also incredibly buggy. Updates will randomly fail to install for no apparent reason, and there’s a whole cottage industry of useless ML and SEO content on the internet trying to “help” you fix these issues. On my system, without doing anything, Windows Update managed to break itself in less than 24 hours – it listed 79 (!) driver updates related to the two Xeon processors (I assume it listed certain drivers for every single of the 40 threads), but every single one of them, save for one or two, would fail to install with a useless generic error code. Every time I tried to install them, one or two more would install, with everything else failing, until eventually the update process just hung the entire system. A few days later, the listed updated just disappeared entirely from Windows Update. The updates had no KB numbers, so it was impossible to find any information on them, and to this day, I have no idea what was going on here.
Even after battling your way through Windows Update, you’re not done actually updating your system. Unlike, say, something like Fedora or literally any other Linux distribution, where both the system and applications are updated from a single location and with a single operation, some Windows applications are updated through the Microsoft Store instead. This application is slow, takes a long time to load, and it, too, is slow at actually updating and installing applications. Why Windows doesn’t just do what modern, well-designed desktop-ready operating systems do and properly centralise updates is beyond me. A major missed opportunity.
Oh but we’re not done yet. Even after battling your way through Windows Update and the Microsoft Store, you’ll eventually discover that a huge array of Windows applications and drivers need to be updated manually. As in, yes, they come with their own updaters that you need to keep track of and run manually to keep your applications and drivers updated. This is apparently some weird, archaic holdover from the days before the internet, where you would install applications offline, and only install updates if you could get your hands on them. Why this hasn’t been fixed and properly centralised over the past 30 years is beyond me. If you’re used to the convenience of package managers keeping your system nice and updated with little user input, this feels like going several decades back in time.
Windows 11 does come with a very rudimentary package manager you can use in the terminal, but it’s not exactly the most useful package manager you’ve ever seen. If you install, say, something like Neofetch using this tool, it’ll just download the installer, run it like normal, opening up the installer UI that steals focus, and then drop you back to the terminal. It’s not exactly elegant, and because it can only be used to install applications listed in the Winget repository, it’s not a replacement or alternative for managing all your applications – it’s just yet another place to manage applications.
So, in order to keep your Windows 11 system updated, you need to keep an eye on Windows Update, the Windows Store, individual updaters for applications you’ve installed, and possibly Winget if you’re using it. Coming from a platform that effectively solved updates decades ago, this feels utterly broken and archaic, and I can’t believe this is considered “ready for the desktop” by some. Compare this entire Byzantine process to my Linux distribution of choice, Fedora KDE: I open Discover, hit update, reboot (optional). Done. The entire operating system, from system, drivers, to applications, from RPM to – god forbid – Flatpak, is updated, and it rarely takes more than a few minutes.
First impressions
Now that everything’s finally sorted, you scrounged up and updated all your drivers, you rebooted a few times, and Windows Update is done hogging the system, you can finally start to take a proper look around your new operating system. At first glance, it actually looks kind of nice – I definitely like the most recent version of Windows’ theme, and some of the blur and animations are quite nice. Sadly, you’ll quickly discover it’s all a massive ruse.
The first thing I noticed is that there’s a lot of lag in the Windows user interface, which, considering the Radeon Pro w5700 and 160Hz 4K display I’m using, really shouldn’t be there. Something as simple as right-clicking the desktop to bring up the context menu takes a few noticeable moments, after which the menu suddenly gains another option and expands; some AMD Software: PRO Edition software shortcut. This entry alone adds like a full second or more to loading the context menu, which is just wild to me. Whether I’m using KDE, GNOME, Xfce, or anything else on Linux or BSD – I’ve never seen a context menu being anything but instant. I eventually figured out you can remove this AMD entry to speed up the context menu (what a sentence…), but only by modifying the registry.
Or take something like opening the file manager, Explorer. For some reason, the bottom two-thirds of the window renders instantly, but the top third, where the titlebar, toolbar, and tab bar are, renders a full second later. These are just two examples, but you’ll find similar stutters all over the operating system. KDE or GNOME, running on this very same machine, show no stutters whatsoever, and even on something like my mini-laptop with a paltry Intel N100 do I never experience stutters in KDE.
The second thing I quickly noticed is just how inconsistent the Windows user interface really is. There are two competing ‘themes’ at work in Windows, what I (probably wrongly) refer to as the Win32 and modern theme. The Win32 theme is the same as it’s been for several years now, and comes straight from the olden days, just tarted up with some rounded window corners here, some more white there, but it’s mostly just what you know. The modern theme is the one Microsoft prefers to show off in marketing, which is indeed quite nice, but only used in parts of the operating system.
The end result is so many inconsistencies and weirdness I barely know where to start.
One of the first inconsistencies that jumps out at you is that Windows seems to be using two different methods of rendering fonts. In Win32, they are smaller and use ClearType, while in modern applications, they are bigger and don’t use ClearType. But this is just the beginning, and as you start using Windows 11, you’ll notice this operating system is defined by inconsistency.
There are basically two different versions of every type of UI element – a Win32 one, and a modern one. Sometimes, they’re even present in the same application. Explorer, for instance, is a Win32 application, but it’s wrapped in a modern theme, so it looks (mostly) like a modern application, but feels like a Win32 one. Context menus are either Win32 or modern, as are settings panels, dialog windows, and so on.
But it gets worse. Even the modern variants of these UI elements are inconsistent between each other. There are a variety of modern (context) menu designs, and they all look and behave differently. Some fade in, some slide down. Some have rounded corners, some are square. Some have icons, some have not. There’s some menus with a black border, which most others lack. Some have a blue-ish selection, others are grey. And mind you – this is just talking about menus!
Four titlebars from Microsoft applications, four different titlebar heights. Kill me now.
Nothing embodies the deep, jarring inconsistency more than the fact that some context menus… Have context menus. The desktop context menu, for instance, has its own context menu, called “Show more options”, which opens another context menu. The first one is one of the various modern designs, the second one is a Win32 one. The second one mostly replicates the items from the first menu, so I’m guessing it’s there for some odd backwards compatibility reason.
A context menu with its own context menu encapsulates the current state of Windows more than any article ever could.
Do note that much like the lag and stutter examples I mentioned earlier, these are all just examples – you can find way more of them by just using Windows 11 for like ten minutes. And if you really want to have a good laugh – enable Windows 11’s dark mode, and you’re in for random windows just not supporting it, windows opening in white and as they load their contents turn dark, or windows that flash white when opening, which is always very much appreciated when using dark mode in a dark environment.
None of these issues exist on the platforms I’m used to. A KDE desktop or a GNOME desktop is consistent, almost to a fault, in either light or dark mode. If you learn how to use one GNOME application, you pretty much know how to use them all – they look the same, feel the same, and have their important elements and functions in the same place. KDE definitely went through a bit of a rough patch in this regard, but ever since roughly the second half of the KDE Plasma 5 lifecycle, and especially now with Plasma 6, it’s also incredibly consistent.
You may not care about consistency, but that’s probably just because you’re not used to it. Once you’ve become accustomed to a graphical user interface where things are where you expect them to be, where things look, feel, and behave the same, and where you’re never faced with jarring inconsistencies, it’s really hard to go back to something as downright messy as Windows 11. I hear macOS is, sadly, also moving in the direction of Windows 11, due to things like AppKit, SwiftUI, Catalyst, and UIKit applications all running side-by-side, while all looking and feeling different from each other. Linux desktops really are the last bastion of consistent user interface design, it seems.
Shovelware and built-in applications
Windows 11 comes loaded with a lot shovelware. When you first open the Start menu, it’s littered with all kinds of garbage like mobile games, LinkedIn, Spotify, and god knows what else, and it seems the selection of shovelware you get depends on when you install Windows 11 and in what region you live. Most often, these are actually just little shortcuts that when clicked tell Windows to download the application in question. It definitely takes a while to uninstall them all.
Thanks to living in the European Union, I also get to remove a whole bunch of other preinstalled stuff people outside of the EU cannot remove, which is a nice bonus. However, since there’s no easy package management, and because some applications can only be removed from a legacy control panel that’s harder to find, it’s a nuisance that takes a lot of time post-installation.
Right! Windows 11 has two different settings applications. The new, fancy one, and the old one you may remember from older versions of Windows, called Control Panel. I swear I’m not making this up. Okay, back to the topic at hand.
The applications that come preinstalled with Windows are actually quite nice. The modern versions of Windows mainstays Notepad, Paint, and so on look great, work well, and offer a host of features their old counterparts never got due to a serious lack of development on them on Microsoft’s part. You now get tabs in Notepad, countless new editing features in Paint, the ability to record the screen in the Snipping Tool, and so on – features people have been asking for for sometimes decades have now finally come to Windows’ base applications, and that’s great.
Windows now finally also has a more capable terminal application. While in the olden times you were stuck with an emulated DOS prompt, the new Windows Terminal application now defaults to PowerShell, which is infinitely more capable than what came before while still usable with the same basic commands as the DOS prompt. I’m not much of a command line user, so I can’t say much about how PowerShell compares to common UNIX shells, but as a casual user, I have no issues with it.
The Terminal application allows you to open either PowerShell or DOS shells in tabs. It also has an option for launching an Azure Cloud Shell, but that’s not something I’ll ever need. In addition to all of these, you can also install Windows Subsystem for Linux, which will install an entire Ubuntu distribution, so you can use its shell inside the Terminal application as well. It’s just a good terminal application, and a massive improvement over only having access to the basic DOS command prompt.
Once you move beyond the applications that come bundled with Windows 11, however, things start to get messy again. The Microsoft Store contains only a small subset of the available Windows applications, and since the store is littered with crapware and shovelware, unfinished or unmaintained proof of concepts, and other junk, it’s a slog to find anything valuable. The more common way of installing applications on Windows is something that may seem alien to us Linux users – you browse the web to find applications and download them.
How do you know if anything you download is trusted? Well, that’s the thing – you don’t. You just have to wade through Google or your preferred search engine, and hope for the best that what you find isn’t adware or some other malicious piece of software. You’ll also have to deal with “installers”, which are little pieces of software that take you through the process of installing the application you found, step by step. They often look and feel quite outdated, originating from the Windows XP, or worse, Windows 9x days. And yes, this means most of those applications will come with their own update mechanisms too, often running in the background, that you have to keep track of.
You can also use the aforementioned Winget, which weirdly enough might be the best way to install applications on Windows these days. You just have to hope the application you want is in the Winget repository, which is really not that different from dealing with packages on Linux, except that there’s only a little over 4000 packages in the Winget repository, which is a far cry from the vast software library available in the Fedora, Debian, or Void repositories.
In other words, you’ll be juggling between the Microsoft Store, browsing the web and downloading installers, and Winget, and neither of those three are optimal. Coming from a modern, desktop-ready platform like Linux, this all feels cumbersome, archaic, dangerous, and tedious. Application management on Windows is decades behind the state of the art that us Linux users are used to, and it’s absolutely wild that this is considered acceptable.
As a final note about applications for us Linux users, you’ll be surprised to learn that Windows 11 does not, by default, come with an office suite. If you need to perform office work, you’ll either need to download LibreOffice (or an alternative) manually, or buy or subscribe to Microsoft Office. Luckily, LibreOffice is available in the Winget repository, so installing it is as simple as opening the Terminal application and executing winget install TheDocumentFoundation.LibreOffice. Neat, but I found that for me, LibreOffice on Windows felt like it came straight out of 2005, with lag and stutter, blurry icons on my 4K display, ugliness and all. Manually switching to the SVG version of the icon set fixed at least some of that.
Am I the owner?
There’s one thing you can’t escape when using Windows 11: the feeling that you’re not the owner of your operating system, but a mere renter. And let me tell you – Microsoft is a shit landlord. The advertising inside Windows 11 is absolutely insane, and if you’re used to a platform without any advertising at all – which, at this point, is really only the Linux desktop, since macOS is riddled with Apple ads and upsells as well – this is a massively jarring experience.
I already mentioned the various shortcuts in the Start menu post-installation, which are really just ads for shovelware games, Spotify, and other services. OneDrive is another name you’ll encounter often, as Microsoft really, really wants you to use its cloud storage service, and is not shy about shoving it in your face everywhere, from the system tray to setting it as the default storage location for documents in Microsoft Office. Speaking of Office – Redmond really, really wants you to subscribe to Office 365, the subscription version of their office suite. Trials come preinstalled, it’s in the Settings application, and probably in a few other places I forgot about. And it gets so much worse. You need PC Game Pass! Please use Bing! You need Microsoft Rewards (whatever the hell those are)! You need CoPilot Pro! Please use Bing! Please! I know where you sleep. Ư̷̙̰̖̣̿͑ŝ̸͎̖̻̺̽e̵̛̘̽͗̋ ̴̫͓̮͗ͅB̸͉͍̬̍ì̵̟͒̈́͋n̵̯̒g̶̦̫̖̜̈́.̴̧̡̖͉̼͠ ̷͓͕͋̿̈́N̸͈͓̈͒̈́͜ö̵͕̲w̶̤͆̄̒̊.
The first thing I did after installing Windows 11 is use a little script I found to purge everything CoPilot off the machine. Not only do I not wish to be beaten over the head with this stuff at every turn, I also have deep moral objections to machine learning tools like CoPilot, both regarding the questionable way they source their training data and their impact on the environment. The fact that one most resort to registry hacks and scripts just to remove unwanted applications and features is absolutely bizarre from the perspective of a Linux user.
Nowhere does the question of ownership over what should be your computer come more to the forefront than when trying to delete the Videos folder from your home directory. One of first things I do after any installation is remove the predefined folders in my home directory that I don’t use, as I really don’t want them littering around for no reason. As it turns out, while there’s quite a few you can delete on Windows, the Videos folder is special, and even after granting administrative privileges, Windows simply will not allow you to delete it.
I cannot delete a folder in my home directory on my computer.
If this is “ready for the desktop”, I’m glad Linux is not
If you’re used to a better designed, more modern, more capable, and more well-rounded, optimised desktop operating system like Linux, whether you’re using KDE, GNOME, Xfce, or even one of the smaller desktop environments, using Windows 11 feels like going back in time, and handing over control of the journey to get there to someone else, far away, who actually owns your computer.
So, so many basic things that are effortless on a modern Linux distribution are slow, fragile, fractured, and disjointed chores on Windows 11. Updating your computer is no longer a mindless, quick thing you barely notice you do, but a slow chore interrupted by reboots and breakage spread out over countless manual tools and individual updaters. Installing software is a balancing act of several, individually incompetent installation avenues, like trying to spin multiple egg-shaped plates on bent sticks. All while every new window, menu, dialog, or panel you open looks and feels different form the one that came before, with billboards blaring commercials at you for shit you don’t want or need, but can’t always get rid of.
And there’s so many more issues I haven’t even touched upon, like the bizarre installation footprint of the operating system, which takes up considerably more space than what us Linux users are used to, or the complete and utter lack of any customisation options for things like the taskbar or window controls, or the general unpleasantness of using Explorer, or how hard Microsoft tries to get you to use Edge, or how there’s still two different Program Files folders, or how Windows applications, even Microsoft ones, never respect the rules about where user files should be stored, or… It just never ends, but I just got tired of making myself sad.
Windows 11 is many things to many people, but ready for the desktop it surely is not.
Somehow, this folder bugged out. I don’t know how to fix it.
ExectOS is a preemptive, reentrant multitasking operating system that implements the XT architecture which derives from NT architecture. It is modular, and consists of two main layers: microkernel and user modes. Its’ kernel mode has full access to the hardware and system resources and runs code in a protected memory area. It consists of executive services, which is itself made up on many modules that do specific tasks, a kernel and drivers. Unlike the NT, system does not feature a separate Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) between the physical hardware and the rest of the OS. Instead, XT architecture integrates a hardware specific code with the kernel. The user mode is made up of subsystems and it has been designed to run applications written for many different types of operating systems. This allows us to implement any environment subsystem to support applications that are strictly written to the corresponding standard (eg. DOS, or POSIX). Thanks to that ExectOS will allow to run existing software, including Win32 applications.
What ExectOS seems to be is an implementation very close to what Windows NT originally was – implementing the theory of Windows NT, not the reality. It’s clearly still in very early development, but in theory, I really like the idea of what they’re trying to achieve here. Windows NT is, after all, in and of itself not a bad concept – it’s just been tarred and feathered by decades of mismanagement from Microsoft. Implementing something that closely resembles the original, minimalist theories behind NT could lead to an interesting operating system for sure.
ExectOS is open source, contains its own boot loader, only runs on EFI, and installation on real hardware, while technically possible, is discouraged.
Today just so happens to be the 40th birthday of X, the venerable windowing system that’s on its way out, at least in the Linux world. From the original announcement by Robert W. Scheifler:
I’ve spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W. The code seems fairly solid at this point, although there are still some deficiencies to be fixed up.
We at LCS have stopped using W, and are now actively building applications on X. Anyone else using W should seriously consider switching. This is not the ultimate window system, but I believe it is a good starting point for experimentation. Right at the moment there is a CLU (and an Argus) interface to X; a C interface is in the works. The three existing applications are a text editor (TED), an Argus I/O interface, and a primitive window manager. There is no documentation yet; anyone crazy enough to volunteer? I may get around to it eventually.
Reading this announcement email made me wonder if way back then, in 1984, the year of my birth, there were also people poo-pooing this new thing called “X” for not having all the features W had. There must’ve people posting angry messages on various BBS servers about how X is dumb and useless since it doesn’t have their feature in W that allows them to use an acoustic modem to send a signal over their internal telephone system by slapping their terminal in just the right spot to activate their Betamax that’s hotwired into the telephone system.
I mean, W was only about a year old at the time, so probably not, but there must’ve been a lot of complaining and whining about this newfangled X thing, and now, 40 years later, long after it has outgrown its usefulness, we’re again dealing with people so hell-bent on keeping an outdated system running but hoping – nay, demanding – others to do the actual work of maintaining it.
X served its purpose. It took way too long, but we’ve moved on. Virtually every new Linux user since roughly 12-24 months ago will most likely never use X, and never even know what it was. They’re using a more modern, more stable, more performant, more secure, and better maintained system, leading to a better user experience, and that’s something we should all agree on is a good thing.
Framework, the company making modular, upgradeable, and repairable laptops, and DeepComputing, the same company that’s making the DC ROMA II RISC-V laptop we talked about last week, have announced something incredibly cool: a brand new RISC-V mainboard that fits right into existing Framework 13 laptops.
Sporting a RISC-V StarFive JH7110 SoC, this groundbreaking Mainboard was independently designed and developed by DeepComputing. It’s the main component of the very first RISC-V laptop to run Canonical’s Ubuntu Desktop and Server, and the Fedora Desktop OS and represents the first independently developed Mainboard for a Framework Laptop.
For a company that was predicted to fail by a popular Apple spokesperson, it seems Framework is doing remarkably well. This new mainboard is the first one not made by Framework itself, and is the clearest validation yet of the concept put into the market by the Framework team. I can’t recall the last time you could buy a laptop powered by one architecture, and then upgrade to an entirely different architecture down the line, just by replacing the mainboard.
The news of this RISC-V mainboard has made me dream of other possibilities – like someone crazy enough to design, I don’t know, a POWER10 or POWER11 mainboard? Entirely impossible and unlikely due to heat constraints, but one may dream, right?
There’s incredibly good news for people who use accessibility tools on Linux, but who were facing serious, gamebreaking problems when trying to use Wayland. Matt Campbell, of the GNOME accessibility team, has been hard at work on an entirely new accessibility architecture for modern free desktops, and he’s got some impressive results to show for it already.
I’ve now implemented enough of the new architecture that Orca is basically usable on Wayland with some real GTK 4 apps, including Nautilus, Text Editor, Podcasts, and the Fractal client for Matrix. Orca keyboard commands and keyboard learn mode work, with either Caps Lock or Insert as the Orca modifier. Mouse review also works more or less. Flat review is also working. The Orca command to left-click the current flat review item works for standard GTK 4 widgets.
One of the major goals of the project was to enable such accessibility support for Flatpak applications without having to pass an exception for the AT-SPI bus. what this means is that the new accessibility architecture can run as part of a Flatpak application without having to break out of their sandbox, which is obviously a hugely important feature to implement.
There’s still a lot of work to be done, though. Something like the GNOME shell doesn’t yet support Newton, of course, so that’s still using the older, much slower AT-SPI bus. Wayland also doesn’t support mouse synthesizing yet, things like font, size, style, and colour aren’t exposed yet, and there’s a many more limitations due to this being such a new project. The project also isn’t trying to be GNOME-specific; Campbell wants to work with the other desktops to eventually end up with an accessibility architecture that is truly cross-desktop.
The blog post further goes into great detail about implementation details, current and possible future shortcomings, and a lot more.
After the very successful release of KDE Plasma 6.0, which moved the entire desktop environment and most of its applications over to Qt 6, fixed a whole slow of bugs, and streamlined the entire KDE desktop and its applications, it’s now time for KDE Plasma 6.1, where we’re going to see a much stronger focus on new features. While it’s merely a point release, it’s still a big one.
The tentpole new feature of Plasma 6.1 is access to remote Plasma desktops. You can go into Settings and log into any Plasma desktop, which is built entirely and directly into KDE’s own Wayland compositor, avoiding the use of third party applications of hacky extensions to X.org. Having such remote access built right into the desktop environment and its compositor itself is a much cleaner implementation than in the before time with X.
Another feature that worked just fine under X but was still missing from KDE Plasma on Wayland is something they now call “persistent applications” – basically, KDE will now remember which windows you had open when you closed KDE or shut down your computer, and open them back up right where you left off when you log back in. It’s one of those things that got lost in the transition to Wayland, and having it back is really, really welcome.
Speaking of Wayland, KDE Plasma 6.1 also introduces two major new rendering features. Explicit sync removes flickering and glitches most commonly seen on NVIDIA hardware, while triple buffering provides smoother animations and screen rendering. There’s more here, too, such as a completely reworked edit desktop view, support for controlling keyboard LED backlighting traditionally found in gaming laptops, and more.
KDE Plasma 6.1 will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough, but of course, you can compile and install it yourself, too.
I’ve always found the world of DOS versions and variants to be confusing, since most of it took place when I was very young (I’m from 1984) so I wasn’t paying much attention to computing quite yet, other than playing DOS games. One of the variants of DOS I never quite understood where it was from until much, much later, was DR-DOS. To this day, I pronounce this as “Doctor DOS”.
If you’re also a little unclear on what, exactly, DR-DOS was, Bradford Morgan White has an excellent article detailing the origins and history of DR-DOS, making it very easy to get up to speed and expand your knowledge on DOS, which is surely a very marketable skill in the days of Electron and Electron for Developers.
DR DOS was a great product. It was superior to other DOS versions in many ways, and it is certainly possible that it could have been more successful were it not for Microsoft Windows having been so wildly successful. Starting with Windows 95, the majority of computer users simply didn’t much care about which DOS loaded Windows so long as it worked. There’s quite a bit of lore regarding legal battles and copyrights surrounding CP/M and DOS involving Microsoft and Digital Research. This has been covered in previous articles to some extent, but I am not really certain how much would have changed had Microsoft and Digital Research got on. Gates and Kildall had been quite friendly at one point, and we know that the two mutually chose not to work together due to differences in business practices and beliefs. Kildall chose to be quite a bit more friendly and less competitive while Gates very much chose to be competitive and at times a bit ruthless. Additionally, Kildall sold DRI rather than continue the fight, and DRI had never really attempted to combine DR DOS with GEM as a cohesive product to fight Windows before Windows became the ultimate ruler of the OS market following Windows 3.1’s release. Still, it was an absolutely brilliant product and part of me will always feel that it ought to have won.
I can definitely imagine an alternative timeline in which Digital Research managed to combine DR-DOS with GEM in a more attractive way, stealing Microsoft’s thunder before Gates’ balls got rolling properly with Windows 3.x. It’s one of the many, many what-ifs in this sector, but not one you often hear or read about.
To lock subscribers into recurring monthly payments, Adobe would typically pre-select by default its most popular “annual paid monthly” plan, the FTC alleged. That subscription option locked users into an annual plan despite paying month to month. If they canceled after a two-week period, they’d owe Adobe an early termination fee (ETF) that costs 50 percent of their remaining annual subscription. The “material terms” of this fee are hidden during enrollment, the FTC claimed, only appearing in “disclosures that are designed to go unnoticed and that most consumers never see.”
There’s a sucker for every corporation, but I highly doubt there’s anyone out there who would consider this a fair business practice. This is so obviously designed to hide costs during sign-up, and then unveil them when the user considers quitting. If this is deemed legal or allowed, you can expect everyone to jump on this bandwagon to scam users out of their money.
It goes further than this, though. According to the FTC, Adobe knew this practice was shady, but continued it anyway because altering it would negatively affect the bottom line. The FTC is actually targeting two Adobe executives directly, which is always nice to hear – it’s usually management that pushes such illegal practices through, leaving the lower ranks little choice but to comply or lose their job.
Stuff like this is exactly why confidence in the major technology companies is at an all-time low.
Cinnamon, the popular GTK desktop environment developed by the Linux Mint project, pushed out Cinnamon 6.2 today, which will serve as the default desktop for Linux Mint 22. It’s a relatively minor release, but it does contain a major new feature which is actually quite welcome: a new GTK frontend for GNOME Online Accounts, part of the XApp project. This makes it possible to use the excellent GNOME Online Accounts framework, without having to resort to a GNOME application – and will come in very handy on other GTK desktops, too, like Xfce.
The remainder of the changes consist of a slew of bugfixes, small new features, and nips and tucks here and there. Wayland support is still an in-progress effort for Cinnamon, so you’ll be stuck with X for now.
Less than a month after 3.5.0, IceWM is already shipping version 3.6.0. Once again not a major, earth-shattering release, it does contain at least one really cool feature that I think it pretty nifty: if you double-click on a window border, it will maximise just that side of the window. Pretty neat.
For the rest, it’s small changes and bug fixes for this venerable window manager.
It seems that if you want to steer clear from having Facebook use your Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. data for machine learning training, you might want to consider moving to the European Union.
Meta has apparently paused plans to process mounds of user data to bring new AI experiences to Europe.
The decision comes after data regulators rebuffed the tech giant’s claims that it had “legitimate interests” in processing European Union- and European Economic Area (EEA)-based Facebook and Instagram users’ data—including personal posts and pictures—to train future AI tools.
These are just the opening salvos of the legal war that’s brewing here, so who knows how it’s going to turn out. For now, though, European Union Facebook users are safe from Facebook’s machine learning training.
The project doesn’t seem to really publish any changelogs or release notes, so it’s difficult to figure out what, exactly, is going on at the moment. The roadmap indicates they’ve already got a solid base going to work from, such as mlibc, bash, GCC/G++, X and an X window manager, and more – with things like Wayland, networking, and more on the roadmap.
I have a feeling Microsoft is really starting to feel some pressure about its plans to abandon Windows 10 next year. Data shows that 70% of Windows users are still using Windows 10, and this percentage has proven to be remarkably resilient, making it very likely that hundreds of millions of Windows users will be out of regular, mainstream support and security patches next year. It seems Microsoft is, therefore, turning up the PR campaign, this time by publishing a blog post about myths and misconceptions about Windows 11.
The kind of supposed myths and misconceptions Microsoft details are exactly the kind of stuff corporations with large deployments worry about at night. For instance, Microsoft repeatedly bangs the drum on application compatibility, stating that despite the change in number – 10 to 11 – Windows 11 is built on the same base as its predecessor, and as such, touts 99.7% application compatibility. Furthermore, Microsoft adds that if businesses to suffer from an incompatibility, they can use something call App Assure – which I will intentionally mispronounce until the day I die because I’m apparently a child – to fix any issues.
Apparently, the visual changes to the user interface in Windows 11 are also a cause of concern for businesses, as Microsoft dedicated an entire entry to this, citing a study that the visual changes do not negatively impact productivity. The blog post then goes on to explain how the changes are actually really great and enhance productivity – you know, the usual PR speak.
There’s more in the blog post, and I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more and more of this kind of PR offensive as the cut-off date for Windows 10 support nears. Windows 10 users will probably also see more and more Windows 11 ads when using their computers, too, urging them to upgrade even when they very well cannot because of missing TPMs or unsupported processors. I don’t think any of these things will work to bring that 70% number down much over the next 12 months, and that’s a big problem for Microsoft.
I’m not going to make any predictions, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft will simply be forced by, well, reality to extend the official support for Windows 10 well beyond 2025. Especially with all the recent investigations into Microsoft’s shoddy internal security culture, there’s just no way they can cut 70% of their users off from security updates and patches.
It’s not a complete history, rather a couple of larger breadcrumbs stuck together with git. I didn’t do source code management much back in the days, and there are still some intermediate dev bits scattered across my backup drive that I cannot even date properly, but three branches I pushed (along with binaries, btw; feel free to fire up that qemu of yours and see how it crashes!) should contain major parts of what was done.
It may not carry the same import as Doom for the SNES, but it’s still great to see such continuity 15 years apart. I hope Natalenko manages to recover the remaining bits and bobs too, because you may never know – someone might be interested in picking up this 15 year old baton.
The complete source code for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) version of Doom has been released on archive.org. Although some of the code was partially released a few years ago, this is the first time the full source code has been made publicly available.
The code was very close to being lost forever, down to a corrupted disk that had to be fixed. It’s crazy how much valuable, historically relevant code we’re just letting rot away for no reason.
Howard Oakley has written an interesting history of secure enclaves on the Mac, and when he touches upon “exclaves”, a new concept that doesn’t have a proper term yet, he mentions something interesting.
While an enclave is a territory entirely surrounded by the territory of another state, an exclave is an isolated fragment of a state that exists separately from the main part of that state. Although exclave isn’t a term normally used in computing, macOS 14.4 introduced three kernel extensions concerned with exclaves. They seem to have appeared first in iOS 17, where they’re thought to code domains isolated from the kernel that protect key functions in macOS even when the kernel becomes compromised. This in turn suggests that Apple is in the process of refactoring the kernel into a central micro-kernel with protected exclaves. This has yet to be examined in Sequoia.
I’m not going to add too much here since I’m not well-versed enough in the world of macOS to add anything meaningful, but I do think it’s an interesting theory worth looking into by people who posses far more knowledge about this topic than I do.
Sometimes you come across a story that’s equally weird and delightful, and this is definitely one of them. Oleksandr Natalenko posted a link on Mastodon to a curious email sent to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, which apparently gets sent to the LKML every single year. The message is very straightforward.
Is it possible to write a kernel module which, when loaded, will blow the PC speaker?
Since this gets sent every year, it’s most likely some automated thing that’s more of a joke than a real request at this point. However, originally, there was a real historical reason behind the inquiry, as Schlemihl Schalmeier on Mastodon points out. They link to the original rationale behind the request, posted to the LKML after the request was first made, all the way back in 2007.
At the time, the author was helping a small school system manage a number of Linux workstations, and the students there were abusing the sound cards on those workstations for shenanigans. They addressed this by only allowing users with root privileges access to the sound devices. However, kids are smart, and they started abusing the PC speaker instead, and even unloading the PC speaker kernel module didn’t help because the kids found ways to abuse the PC speaker outside of the operating system (the BIOS maybe? I have no idea).
And so, the author notes, the school system wanted them to remove the PC speakers entirely, but this would be a very fiddly and time-consuming effort, since there were a lot of PCs, and of course, this would all have to be done on-site – unlike the earlier solutions which could all be done remotely.
So, the idea was raised about seeing if there was a way to blow the PC speaker by loading a kernel module. If so, a mass-deployment of a kernel module overnight would take care of the PC speaker problem once and for all.
So, that’s the original story behind the request. It’s honestly kind of ingenious, and it made me wonder if the author got a useful reply on the LKML, and if such a kernel module was ever created. The original thread didn’t seem particularly conclusive to me, and the later yearly instances of the request don’t seem to yield much either. It seems unlikely to me this is possible at all.
Regardless, this is a very weird bit of Linux kernel lore, and I’d love to know if there’s more going on. Various parts of the original rationale seem dubious to me, such as the handwavy thing about abusing the PC speaker outside of the operating system, and what does “abusing” the PC speaker even mean in the first place?
As Natalenko notes, it seems there’s more to this story, and I’d love to find out what it is.
Brussels is set to charge Apple over allegedly stifling competition on its mobile app store, the first time EU regulators have used new digital rules to target a Big Tech group.
The European Commission has determined that the iPhone maker is not complying with obligations to allow app developers to “steer” users to offers outside its App Store without imposing fees on them, according to three people with close knowledge of its investigation.
This was always going to happen for as long as Apple’s malicious compliance kept dragging on. The rules in the Digital Markets Act are quite clear and simple, and despite the kind of close cooperation with EU lawmakers no normal EU citizen is ever going to get, Apple has been breaking this law from day one without any intent to comply. European Union regulators have given Apple far, far more leeway and assistance than any regular citizen of small business would get, and that has to stop.
The possible fines under the DMA are massive. If Apple is found guilty, they could be fined for up to 10% of its global revenue, or 20% for repeated violations. This is no laughing matters, and this is not one of those cases where a company like Apple could calculate fines as a mere cost of doing business – this would have a material impact on the company’s numbers, and shareholders are definitely not going to like it if Apple gets fined such percentages.
As these are preliminary findings, Apple could still implement changes, but if past behaviour is any indication, any possibly changes will just be ever more malicious compliance.
Former employee says software giant dismissed his warnings about a critical flaw because it feared losing government business. Russian hackers later used the weakness to breach the National Nuclear Security Administration, among others.
Google’s own Project Zero security research effort, which often finds and publishes vulnerabilities in both other companies’ and its own products, set its sights on Android once more, this time focusing on third-party kernel drivers.
Android’s open-source ecosystem has led to an incredible diversity of manufacturers and vendors developing software that runs on a broad variety of hardware. This hardware requires supporting drivers, meaning that many different codebases carry the potential to compromise a significant segment of Android phones. There are recent public examples of third-party drivers containing serious vulnerabilities that are exploited on Android. While there exists a well-established body of public (and In-the-Wild) security research on Android GPU drivers, other chipset components may not be as frequently audited so this research sought to explore those drivers in greater detail.
They found a whole host of security issues in these third-party kernel drivers in phones both from Google itself as well as from other companies. An interesting point the authors make is that because it’s getting ever harder to find 0-days in core Android, people with nefarious intent are looking at other parts of an Android system now, and these kernel drivers are an inviting avenue for them. They seem to focus mostly on GPU drivers, for now, but it stands to reason they’ll be targeting other drivers, too.
As usual with Android, the discovered exploits were often fixed, but the patches took way, way too long to find their way to end users due to the OEMs lagging behind when it comes to sending those patches to users. The authors propose wider adoption of Android APEX to make it easier to OEMs to deliver kernel patches to users faster.
I always like the Project Zero studies and articles, because they really take no prisoners, and whether they’re investigating someone else like Microsoft or Apple, or their own company Google, they go in hard, do not surgarcoat their findings, and apply the same standards to everyone.
After initially announcing it was going to change its Recall feature and then pulling the preview Windows release containing the feature, Microsoft has now given in almost entirely and is delaying Recall altogether. Instead of shipping it on every new Copilot+ PC, they’re going to release it as an optional feature for Windows Insiders.
Today, we are communicating an additional update on the Recall (preview) feature for Copilot+ PCs. Recall will now shift from a preview experience broadly available for Copilot+ PCs on June 18, 2024, to a preview available first in the Windows Insider Program (WIP) in the coming weeks. Following receiving feedback on Recall from our Windows Insider Community, as we typically do, we plan to make Recall (preview) available for all Copilot+ PCs coming soon.
It’s incredible just how much Microsoft has bungled the launch of this feature, as it’s now almost overshadowing everything else that comes with these new ARM laptops. They rushed to shove machine learning into a major feature, and didn’t stop to think about the consequences.
Speaking of PCs that don’t use x86 chips, Canonical and DeepComputing today announced a new RISC-V laptop running Ubuntu, available for pre-order in a few days. It’s the successor to the DC-ROMA, which shipped last year.
Adding to a long list of firsts, the new DC-ROMA laptop II is the first to feature SpacemiT’s SoC K1 – with its 8-cores RISC-V CPU running at up to 2.0GHz with 16GB of memory. This significantly doubled its overall performance and energy efficiency over the previous generation’s 4-cores SoC running at 1.5GHz. Moreover, SpacemiT’s SoC K1 is also the world’s first SoC to support RISC-V high performance computing RVA 22 Profile RVV 1.0 with 256 bit width, and to have powerful AI capabilities with its customised matrix operation instruction based on IME Group design principle!
This second-generation DC-ROMA RISC-V laptop also features an all-metal casing making it more durable, as well as improving heat dissipation and more on its premium class look and feel compared to previous generation.
The DC-ROMA II is clearly aimed at developers, as it has what is essentially a GeekPort on the side of the laptop, to aid in porting and debugging software. Aside from that and the RISC-V processor, it’s a rather mid-range kind of device, and no pricing has been published yet so I’m not sure if this is something I could afford for an OSNews review. Once the preorders go live in a few days, we’ll know more.
If you’d like to see this RISC-V laptop make an appearance on OSNews, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do.
In the last 8 months Qualcomm has made a lot of interesting claims for their high-performance Windows-on-Arm SoC – many of which will be put to the test in the coming weeks. But beyond all the performance claims and bluster amidst what is shaping up to be a highly competitive environment for PC CPUs, there’s an even more fundamental question about the Snapdragon X that we’ve been dying to get to: how does it work?
Ahead of next week’s launch, then, we’re finally getting the answer to that, as today Qualcomm is releasing their long-awaited architectural disclosure on the Snapdragon X SoC. This includes not only their new, custom Arm v8 “Oryon” CPU core, but also technical disclosures on their Adreno GPU, and the Hexagon NPU that backs their heavily-promoted AI capabilities. The company has made it clear in the past that the Snapdragon X is a serious, top-priority effort for the company – that they’re not just slapping together a Windows SoC from their existing IP blocks and calling it a day – so there’s a great deal of novel technology within the SoC.
I cannot wait until AnandTech can move beyond diving into information provided by Qualcomm, and can start doing their own incredibly in-depth benchmarks and research. Assuming the effort succeeds, the Snapdragon X line will most likely form the backbone of ARM PCs for years – if not decades – to come, meaning that when you and I go shopping for a new laptop, this chip will be the one heavily promoted by stores and outlets.
How closely independent benchmarks line up with Qualcomm’s eight months of promises and cherry-picked benchmarks will also tell us a lot about how trustworthy the company will be about the performance of its chips going forward. In smartphones – where we mostly see Qualcomm today – performance simply doesn’t matter as much, but when you’re dealing with laptops, and in the future possibly even desktops, performance suddenly matters a lot more, and Qualcomm’s claims will be facing a level of scrutiny and detail I don’t think they’ve ever really had to deal with before.
PC enthusiasts don’t mess around.
If the Linux support turns out to be as solid as Qualcomm claims, and if the performance figures they’ve been putting out are verified by quality independent reviewers like the people at AnandTech, I honestly don’t think my next laptop will be using x86. I just hope weird companies like Chuwi will release a version of their MiniBook X with one a Qualcomm chip, because I’ll be damned if I go back to anything larger than 10″.
Two days ago, I broke the news that Mozilla removed several Firefox extensions from the add-on store in Russia, after pressure from Russian censors. Mozilla provided me with an official statement, which seemed to highlight that the decision was not final, and it seems I was right – today, probably helped by the outcry our story caused, Mozilla has announced it’s reversing the decision. In a statement sent to me via email, an unnamed Mozilla spokesperson says:
In alignment with our commitment to an open and accessible internet, Mozilla will reinstate previously restricted listings in Russia. Our initial decision to temporarily restrict these listings was made while we considered the regulatory environment in Russia and the potential risk to our community and staff.
As outlined in our Manifesto, Mozilla’s core principles emphasise the importance of an internet that is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. Users should be free to customise and enhance their online experience through add-ons without undue restrictions.
By reinstating these add-ons, we reaffirm our dedication to:
– Openness: Promoting a free and open internet where users can shape their online experience. – Accessibility: Ensuring that the internet remains a public resource accessible to everyone, regardless of geographical location.
We remain committed to supporting our users in Russia and worldwide and will continue to advocate for an open and accessible internet for all.
↫ Mozilla spokesperson via email
I’m glad Mozilla reversed its decision, because giving in to a dictatorship never ends well – it starts with a few extensions today, but ends up with the kind of promotional tours for China that Tim Cook goes on regularly. Firefox is a browser that lives or dies by its community, and if that community is unhappy with the course of Mozilla or the decisions it makes, especially ones that touch on core values and human rights, it’s not going to end well for them.
That being said, this does make me wonder what would’ve happened if the forum thread that started all this died in obscurity and never made its way to the media. Would Mozilla have made the same reversal?
Surprisingly quietly, in the middle of Apple’s WWDC, Google’s ChromeOS team has made a rather massive announcement that seems to be staying a bit under the radar. Google is announcing today that it is replacing many of ChromeOS’ current relatively standard Linux-based subsystems with the comparable subsystems from Android.
To continue rolling out new Google AI features to users at a faster and even larger scale, we’ll be embracing portions of the Android stack, like the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks, as part of the foundation of ChromeOS. We already have a strong history of collaboration, with Android apps available on ChromeOS and the start of unifying our Bluetooth stacks as of ChromeOS 122.
The benefits to Google here are obvious: instead of developing and maintaining two variants of the Linux kernel and various related subsystems, they now only have to focus on one, saving money and time. It will also make it easier for both platforms to benefit from new features and bugfixes, which should benefit users of both platforms quite a bit.
As mentioned in the snippet, the first major subsystem in ChromeOS to be replaced by its Android counterpart is Bluetooth. ChromeOS was using the BlueZ Bluetooth stack, the same one used by most (all?) Linux distributions today, which was initially developed by Qualcomm, but has now switched over to using Fluoride, the one from Android.
According to Google, Fluoride has a number of benefits over BlueZ. It runs almost entirely in userspace, as opposed to BlueZ, where more than 50% of the code resides in the kernel. In addition, Fluoride is written in Rust, and Google claims it has a simpler architecture, making it easier to perform testing. Google also highlights that Fluoride has a far larger userbase – i.e., all Android users – which also presents a number of benefits.
Google performed internal tests to measure the improvements as a result from switching ChromeOS from BlueZ to Fluoride, and the test results speak for themselves – pairing is faster, pairing fails less often, and reconnecting an already paired device fails less often. With Bluetooth being a rather problematic technology to use, any improvements to the user experience are welcome.
At the end of Google’s detailed blog post about the switch to Fluoride, the company notes that it intends for the project as whole – which is called Project Floss – to be a standalone open source project, capable of running on any Linux distribution.
We aspire to position Project Floss as a standalone open source project that can reach beyond the walls of Google’s own operating system in a way where we can maximize the overall value and agility of the larger Bluetooth ecosystem. We also intend to support the Linux community as a whole with the goal that Floss can easily run on most Linux distributions.
If Fluoride can indeed deliver tangible, measurable benefits in Bluetooth performance on Linux desktops, I have no doubt quite a few distributions will be more than willing to switch over. Bluetooth is used a lot, and if Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and so on, can improve the Bluetooth experience by switching over, I’m pretty sure they will, or at least consider doing so.
The new Windows on ARM Copilot+ PC thing, running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Pro chips, isn’t even out the door yet, and we’re already dealing with legal proceedings.
But the main conversation among conference attendees was over how a contract dispute between Arm Holdings and Qualcomm, which work together to make the chips powering these new laptops, could abruptly halt the shipment of new PCs that industry leaders expect will make Microsoft and its partners billions of dollars.
The basic gist of the story is as follows. Qualcomm acquired a company named Nuvia, founded by former Apple processor engineers, in order to gain new technology to build its Snapdragon X Elite and Pro chips. Nuvia was planning on developing ARM chips for servers, but after the acquisition, Qualcomm changed their plans and repurposed their technology for use in laptops – the new X chips. ARM claims that Nuvia was only granted a license for server use, and not laptop use. Qualcomm, meanwhile, argued that it has a broad license to use ARM for pretty much anything, and as such, that any possible restrictions Nuvia had are irrelevant.
While this all sounds like very rich corporations having a silly legal slapfight, it could have real consequences. If the legal case goes very, very wrong for Qualcomm, it could halt the sale of devices powered by the Snapdragon X chips well before they’re even shipping. I doubt it’ll get that far – it rarely does, and there’s some big names and big reputations at play here – but it does highlight the absurdity of how the ARM ecosystem works.
Speaking of the ARM ecosystem, Qualcomm isn’t the only ARM chip makers dying to break into the PC market. Qualcomm currently has a weird exclusivity agreement with Microsoft where it’s the only ARM chip supplier for PCs, but that agreement is running out soon. Another player that’s ready to storm this market once that happens is MediaTek, who is also developing a chip geared towards Microsoft’s Copilot+ specifications, with a release target of 2025. Let’s hope MediaTek will be as forthcoming with Linux support as Qualcomm surprisingly has been, but I have my sincerest doubt.
The extensible scheduler “sched_ext” code has proven quite versatile for opening up better Linux gaming performance, more quickly prototyping new scheduler changes, Ubuntu/Canonical has been evaluating it for pursuing a more micro-kernel like design, and many other interesting approaches with it. Yet it’s remained out of tree but that is now changing with the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle.
Linus Torvalds as the benevolent dictator for life “BDFL” of the Linux kernel announced he intends to merge the sched_ext patches for Linux 6.11 even though there has been some objections by other kernel developers. Torvalds feels the sched_ext code is ready enough and provides real value to the mainline Linux kernel. It’s not worth dragging out sched_ext continuing to be out-of-tree.
I haven’t felt the need to mess around with the Linux scheduler in a long, long time – I have some vague memories of perhaps well over a decade ago where opting for a different scheduler could lead to better desktop-focused performance characteristics, but the details in my brain are so fuzzy that it may just be a fabricated or confabulated memory.
This is an attempt to turn OpenBSD into a Whonix or Tails alternative, although if you really need that level of privacy, use a system from this list and not the present guide. It is easy to spot OpenBSD using network fingerprinting, this can not be defeated, you can not hide the fact you use OpenBSD to network operators.
I did this guide as a challenge for fun, but I also know some users have a use for this level of privacy.
It’s likely not a coincidence that Microsoft also quietly pulled the build of the Windows 11 24H2 update that it had been testing in its Release Preview channel for Windows Insiders. It’s not unheard of for Microsoft to stop distributing a beta build of Windows after releasing it, but the Release Preview channel is typically the last stop for a Windows update before a wider release.
The company doesn’t actually mention why the release was pulled, but the reason is pretty obvious if you connect the dots. I’m at least glad Microsoft is taking the complaints seriously, and while I don’t personally think Recall is a good idea, if a user gives their consent and uses it knowingly and willingly, I don’t see any problems with it.
A few days ago, I was pointed to a post on the Mozilla forums, in which developers of Firefox extensions designed to circumvent Russian censorship were surprised to find that their extensions were suddenly no longer available within Russia. The extension developers and other users in the thread were obviously not amused, and since they had received no warning or any other form of communication from Mozilla, they were left in the dark as to what was going on.
I did a journalism and contacted Mozilla directly, and inquired about the situation. Within less than 24 hours Mozilla got back to me with an official statement, attributed to an unnamed Mozilla spokesperson:
Following recent regulatory changes in Russia, we received persistent requests from Roskomnadzor demanding that five add-ons be removed from the Mozilla add-on store. After careful consideration, we’ve temporarily restricted their availability within Russia. Recognizing the implications of these actions, we are closely evaluating our next steps while keeping in mind our local community.
↫ Mozilla spokesperson via email
I and most people I talked to already suspected this was the case, and considering Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, it’s not particularly surprising it would go after browser extensions that allow people to circumvent state censorship. Other totalitarian dictatorships like China employ similar, often far more sophisticated methods of state control and censorship, too, so it’s right in line with expectations.
I would say that I’m surprised Mozilla gave in, but at the same time, it’s highly likely resisting would lead to massive fines and possible arrests of any Mozilla employees or contributors living in Russia, if any such people exist, and I can understand a non-profit like Mozilla not having the means to effectively stand up against the Russian government. That being said, Mozilla’s official statement seems to imply they’re still in the middle of their full decision-making process regarding this issue, so other options may still be on the table, and I think it’s prudent to give Mozilla some more time to deal with this situation.
Regardless, this decision is affecting real people inside Russia, and I’m sure if you’re using tools like these inside a totalitarian dictatorship, you’re probably not too fond of said dictatorship. Losing access to these Firefox extensions through the official add-store will be a blow to their human rights, so let’s hope the source code and ‘sideloaded’ versions of these extensions remain available for them to use instead.
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote has come to a close — and the company had a whole lot to share. We got our first look at the AI features coming to Apple’s devices and some major updates across the company’s operating systems.
If you missed out on watching the keynote live, we’ve gathered all the biggest announcements that you can check out below.
Most of the stuff Apple announced aren’t particularly interesting – a lot of catch-up stuff that has become emblematic of companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft when it comes to their operating systems. The one thing that did stand out is Apple’s approach to offloading machine learning requests to the cloud when they are too difficult to handle on device. They’ve developed a new way of doing this, using servers with Apple’s own M chips, which is pretty cool and harkens back the days of the Xserve.
In short, these server are using the same kind of techniques to encrypt and secure data on iPhones, but now to encrypt and secure the data coming in for offloaded machine learning requests.
The root of trust for Private Cloud Compute is our compute node: custom-built server hardware that brings the power and security of Apple silicon to the data center, with the same hardware security technologies used in iPhone, including the Secure Enclave and Secure Boot. We paired this hardware with a new operating system: a hardened subset of the foundations of iOS and macOS tailored to support Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads while presenting an extremely narrow attack surface. This allows us to take advantage of iOS security technologies such as Code Signing and sandboxing.
Apple also provided some insight into where its training data is coming from, and it claims it’s only using licensed data and “publicly available data collected by our web-crawler”. The words “licensed” and “publicly available” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and I’m not entirely sure what definitions of those terms Apple is using. There are enough people out there who feel every piece of data – whether under copyright, available under an open source license, or whatever – is fair, legal game for ML training, so who knows what Apple is using based on these statements alone.
From Apple’s presentations yesterday, as well as any later statements, it’s also not clear when machine learning requests get offloaded in the first place. Apple states they try to run as much as possible on-device, and will offload when needed, but the conditions under which such offloading happens are nebulous and unclear, making it hard for users to know what’s going to happen when they use Apple’s new machine learning features.
I’ve long been waiting for a powerful ARM laptop that can run Linux comfortably, and it seems that with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite SoC, that’s finally going to happen. We talked earlier about how for once, Qualcomm is taking Linux support for their new laptop-focused processors very seriously, and that promise and associated effort is paying dividend. Tuxedo, a popular Linux OEM from Germany, has announced it’s working on a laptop with the Snapdragon X Elite chip, and they showed off a working prototype at Computex in Taiwan.
We have been working with a first prototype for some time, which will soon be replaced by a second one. The development is still in the alpha stage, as some drivers are still missing, which will hopefully be available with the next two kernel versions.
It is quite conceivable that an ARM notebook from TUXEDO will be under your Christmas tree in 2024. However, there are still too many pieces of the hardware, software and delivery capability puzzle missing to even begin to set a release date. TUXEDO for ARM will come, but we don’t yet know exactly when.
Their timeline of more Qualcomm drivers making it into the next two kernel versions lines up with Qualcomm’s own timeline, so it seems we’re mostly just waiting for them to finish their Linux drivers and add them to the kernel. This is quite exciting, and a much better option for Linux users than buying a Windows version of an X Elite or Pro laptop and hoping for the best.
NetBSD 10 was released recently, so a lot of people are experimenting with it and writing down their thoughts. I’ve got two of those for you today, to help you in case you, too, want to install NetBSD 10 and play around with, or just use, it.
First, what if you want to install NetBSD 10 on a UEFI system, but with full disk encryption in case your device gets stolen? It turns out there are countless guides for installing with full-disk encryption on MBR-based systems, but once you use UEFI – as you should be – things get a lot more complicated. The NetBSD installer is apparently rather basic, and a better solution is to drop to a shell and install NetBSD that way instead, and even then, full disk encryption with UEFI is actually not possible, as it seems the root file system – where the operating system itself resides – cannot be encrypted.
The restriction is in the root file-system. It needs to be in plain-text and in a regular partition. It seems to me that rootfs in CGD or LVM is not well supported.
This seems like something the NetBSD team may need to take a look at, since full disk encryption should be an easy option to choose, even, or especially in 2024, on UEFI systems. Such encryption is easily achieved on Linux or Windows systems, and it seems odd to me that NetBSD is lagging behind a bit here. In the meantime, the linked guide will be a good jumping-off point for those of you interested in going a similar route.
The second article I want to highlight concerns NetBSD 10 on the Pinebook Pro, the inexpensive ARM laptop that normally ships with Linux. It turns out there’s a NetBSD 10 image for this device, so installation is quite a bit more straightforward than the more exotic setup I mentioned earlier. It seems most of the hardware works quite well out of the box, with the inly exception being the on-board Wi-Fi, which the author addressed with a USB W-Fi dongle.
Other than that, NetBSD is running well on the Pinebook Pro for the author, which is great to read since that makes this cheap device a great starting point for people interested in running NetBSD.
Last night, I ran through the ZFSBootMenu documentation guide for Void and followed it both on a VM and then on an external SATA HDD plugged through a USB case, taking some notes and getting a general idea of the process.
The Void installer does not support ZFS out of the box, so the Void Handbook itself recommends the ZFSBootMenu documentation before its own (a manual chroot installation) when it comes to doing a ZFS-on-root install. This guide from ZFSBootMenu is what we’ll be following throughout this post.
There’s a ton of good stuff in this lengthy, detailed, and helpful blog post. First, it covers Void Linux, which is one of the best signifiers of good taste, classy style, and generally being a good person. Void is not necessarily underappreciated – it gets a lot of mentions in the right places – but I do feel there are a lot more people for whom Void Linux would be a perfect fit but who don’t yet know about it. So, time for a very short introduction.
Void Linux is distribution with its own unique and very user-friendly package manager that’s an absolute joy to use. Unlike many other custom, more obscure package formats, the Void repositories are vast, generally some of the most up-to-date, and you’ll be hard-pressed to be asking for some piece of software that isn’t packaged. Void eschews systemd in favour of runit, and while I personally have no issues with systemd, diversity is always welcome and runit is, in line with everything else Void, easy to grasp and use. Lastly, while Void also comes in a GNU libc flavour, it feels like the “real” Void Linux is the one using musl.
Second is a tool I had never heard of: ZFSBootMenu. The name is rather self-explanatory, but in slightly more detail: it’s a self-contained small Linux-based bootloader that detects any Linux kernels and initramfs images on ZFS file systems, which can then be launched using kexec. It makes running Linux on ZFS quite a bit easier, especially for systems that don’t over ZFS as an option during installation, like, in this case, Void Linux.
And that’s what the linked post is actually about: setting up a root-on-ZFS Void EFI installation. It’s a great companion article for anyone trying something similar.
Now that we have the MenuetOS 64 disk image file (M6414490.IMG), it is time to analyze! We will analyze the image file both statically and dynamically. Static analysis is reading and analyzing code without running it, whereas dynamic analysis is running the code and watching how it changes registers and memory during execution. Each analysis mode compliments the other; there are some things that can only be discerned through code execution, like register values or stack layout at a specific point in time during execution. Static analysis is useful for “filling in the blanks” when executing code to understand what the code should do next (or just did). Since MenuetOS 64 is written in Intel x64 assembly, our static analysis will consist of memory mapped disassembly in Ghidra. After reading this post, readers should understand how to launch a MenuetOS 64 virtual machine using QEMU as well as how to attach a debugger (gdb) to QEMU in order to debug while code is executing. Also, readers should understand how MenuetOS 64 begins the boot process as control of execution is passed to MenuetOS 64 code from the virtualization firmware.
This is an old post – from late 2022 – but a great read nonetheless, and considering MenuetOS doesn’t change very much from year to year, it’s still mostly relevant.
The very short version: Unix PIDs do start at 0! PID 0 just isn’t shown to userspace through traditional APIs. PID 0 starts the kernel, then retires to a quiet life of helping a bit with process scheduling and power management. Also the entire web is mostly wrong about PID 0, because of one sentence on Wikipedia from 16 years ago.
There’s a slightly longer short version right at the end, or you can stick with me for the extremely long middle bit!
But surely you could just google what PID 0 is, right? Why am I even publishing this?
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