One of the ways in which Windows (and macOS) trails behind the Linux and BSD world is the complete lack of centralised, standardised application management. Windows users still have to scour the web to download sketchy installers straight from the Windows 95 days, amassing a veritable collection updaters in the process, which either continuously run in the background, or annoy you with update pop-ups when you launch an application. It’s an archaic nightmare users of supposedly modern computers should not have to be dealing with.

Microsoft has tried to remedy this, but in true Microsoft fashion, it did so halfheartedly, for instance with the Windows Package Manager, better known as winget. Instead of building an actual package manager, Microsoft basically just created a glorified script that downloads the same installers you download manually, and runs them in unattended mode in the background – it’s a download manager masquerading as a proper application management framework.

To complicate matters, winget is only available as a command-line tool, meaning 99% of Windows users won’t be using it. There’s no graphical frontend in Windows, and it’s not integrated into Windows Update, so even if you strictly use winget to install your applications – which will be hard, as there’s only about 1400 applications that use it – you still don’t have a centralised place to upgrade your entire operating system and all of its applications.

It’s a mess, and Microsoft intends to address it. Again. This time, they’re finally doing what should have been the goal from the start: allowing applications to be updated through Windows Update.

Built on the Windows Update stack, the orchestration platform aims to provide developers and product teams building apps and management tools with an API for onboarding their update(s) that supports the needs of their installers. The orchestrator will coordinate across all onboarded products that are updated on Windows 11, in addition to Windows Update, to provide IT admins and users with a consistent management plane and experience, respectively.

↫ Angie Chen on the Windows IT Pro Blog

Sounds good, but hold on a minute – “orchestration platform”? So this isn’t the existing winget, but integrated into Windows Update, where it should’ve been all along? No, what we’re looking at here is Microsoft’s competitor to Microsoft’s winget inside Microsoft’s Windows Update, oh and there’s also the Windows Store. In other words, once this rolls out, it’ll be yet another way to manage applications, existing inside Windows Update, and alongside winget (and the Windows Store).

They way it works is surprisingly similar to winget: application developers can register an update executable with the orchestrator, and the orchestrator will periodically run this update executable to check for updates. In other words, this looks a hell of a lot like a mere download manager for existing updaters. What it’s definitively not, however, is winget – so if you’re a Windows application developer, you now not only have to register your application to work with winget, but also register it with this new orchestrator to work with Windows Update.

This thing is so incredibly Microsoft.

It’s been 9 years since we disrupted Genode’s API. Back then, we changed the execution model of components, consistently applied the dependency-injection pattern to shun global side effects, and largely removed C-isms like format strings and pointers. These changes ultimately paved the ground for sophisticated systems like Sculpt OS.

Since then, we identified several potential areas for further safety improvements, unlocked by the evolution of the C++ core language and inspired by the popularization of sum types for error propagation by the Rust community. With the current release, we uplift the framework API to foster a programming style that leaves no possible error condition unconsidered, reaching for a new level of rock-solidness of the framework. Section The Great API hardening explains how we achieved that. The revisited framework API comes in tandem with a new tool chain based on GCC 14 and binutils 2.44.

↫ Genode OS Framework 25.05 release notes

This new release also brings a lot of progress on the integration of the TCP/IP stacks ported from Linux and lwIP, improvements to the Intel and VESA drivers, better power management of their Intel GPU multiplexer, and more. They’ve also added support for touchscreen gestures, file modification times support milliseconds now, and support for the seL4 kernel has been improved. Many of these changes will find their way into the next SculptOS release, or, in some cases, were already added.

Microsoft’s Recall feature, which takes screenshots of the contents of your screen every few seconds, saves them, and then runs text and image recognition to extract information from them, has had a rocky start. Even now that it’s out there and Microsoft deems it ready for everyone to use, it has huge security and privacy gaps, and one of them is that applications that contain sensitive information, such as the Windows Signal application, cannot ‘opt out’ of having their contents scraped.

Signal was rather unhappy with this massive privacy risk, and decided to do something about it. It’s called screen security, and is Windows-only because it’s specifically designed to counter Windows Recall.

If you attempt to take a screenshot of Signal Desktop when screen security is enabled, nothing will appear. This limitation can be frustrating, but it might look familiar to you if you’ve ever had the audacity to try and take a screenshot of a movie or TV show on Windows. According to Microsoft’s official developer documentation, setting the correct Digital Rights Management (DRM) flag on the application window will ensure that “content won’t show up in Recall or any other screenshot application.” So that’s exactly what Signal Desktop is now doing on Windows 11 by default.

↫ Joshua Lund on the Signal blog

Microsoft cares more about enforcing the rights of massive corporations than it does about respecting the privacy of its users. As such, everything is in place in Windows to ensure neither you nor Recall can take screenshots of, I don’t know, the Bee Movie, but nothing has been put in place to protect your private and sensitive messages in a service like Signal. This really tells you all you need to know about who Microsoft truly cares about, and it sure as hell isn’t you, the user.

What Signal is doing is absolutely brilliant. By turning Windows’ digital rights management features against Recall to protect the privacy of Signal users, Signal has made it impossible – or at least very hard – for Microsoft to address this. Of course, this also means that taking screenshots of the Signal application on Windows for legitimate purposes is more cumbersome now, but since you can temporarily turn screen security off to take a screenshot means it’s not impossible.

I almost want other Windows developers to employ this same trick, just to make Recall less valuable, but that’s probably not a great idea considering how much it would annoy users just trying to take legitimate screenshots. My uneducated guess is that this is exactly why Microsoft isn’t providing developers with the kind of fine-grained controls to let Recall know what it can and cannot take screenshots of: Microsoft must know Recall is a feature for shareholders, not for users, and that users will ask developers to opt-out of any Recall snooping if such APIs were officially available.

Microsoft wants to make it has hard as possible for applications to opt out of being sucked into the privacy black hole that is Recall, but in doing so, might be pushing developers to use DRM to achieve the same goal. Just delicious.

Signal also signed off with a scathing indictment of “AI” as a whole.

“Take a screenshot every few seconds” legitimately sounds like a suggestion from a low-parameter LLM that was given a prompt like “How do I add an arbitrary AI feature to my operating system as quickly as possible in order to make investors happy?” — but more sophisticated threats are on the horizon.

The integration of AI agents with pervasive permissions, questionable security hygiene, and an insatiable hunger for data has the potential to break the blood-brain barrier between applications and operating systems. This poses a significant threat to Signal, and to every privacy-preserving application in general.

↫ Joshua Lund on the Signal blog

Heed this warning.

Windows NT 4 doesn’t virtualise well. This guide shows how to do it with Proxmox with a minimal amount of pain.

↫ Chris Jones

Nothing to add, other than I love the linked website’s design.

Highlights of Linux 6.15 include Rust support for hrtimer and ARMv7, a new setcpuid= boot parameter for x86 CPUs, support for sched_ext to count and report internal events, x86 Intel and AMD PMU enhancements, nested virtualization support for VGICv3 on ARM, and support for emulating FEAT_PMUv3 on Apple Silicon.

↫ Marius Nestor at 9To5Linux

On top of these highlights, there’s also a ton of other changes, from the usual additions of new drivers, to better support for RISC-V, and so much more.

A Linux kernel driver that turns a rotary phone dial into an evdev input device.

↫ Stefan Wiehler

The year of Linux on the desktop is finally here. Thanks to Oleksandr Natalenko for pointing this gem out.

Who doesn’t love a bug bounty program? Fix some bugs, get some money – you scratch my back, I pay you for it. The CycloneDX Rust (Cargo) Plugin decided to run one, funded by the Bug Resilience Program run by the Sovereign Tech Fund. That is, until “AI” killed it.

We received almost entirely AI slop reports that are irrelevant to our tool. It’s a library and most reporters didn’t even bother to read the rules or even look at what the intended purpose of the tool is/was.

This caused a lot of extra work which is why we decided to abandon the program. Thanks AI.

↫ Lars Francke

On a slightly related note, I had to do search the web today because I’m having some issues getting OpenIndiana to boot properly on my mini PC. For whatever reason, starting LightDM fails when booting the live USB, and LightDM’s log is giving some helpful error messages. So, I searched for "failed to get list of logind seats" openindiana, and Google’s automatic “AI Overview” ‘feature’, which takes up everything above the fold so is impossible to miss, confidently told me to check the status of the logind service… With systemctl.

We’ve automated stupidity.

We are today officially deprecating two installation methods and three legacy CPU architectures. We always strive to have Home Assistant run on almost anything, but sometimes we must make difficult decisions to keep the project moving forward. Though these changes will only affect a small percentage of Home Assistant users, we want to do everything in our power to make this easy for those who may need to migrate.

↫ Franck Nijhof on the Home Assistant blog

Home Assistant is quite popular among the kind of people who read OSNews, and this news might actually hit our little demographic particularly hard. The legacy CPU architectures they’re removing support for won’t make much of a difference, as we’re talking 32bit x86 and 32bit ARM, although that last one does include version 1 and 2 of the Raspberry Pi, which were quite popular at the time. Do check to make sure you’re not running your Home Assistant installation on one of those.

The bigger hit is the deprecation of two installation methods: Home Assistant Core and Home Assistant’s Supervised installation method. In Core, you’re running it in a Python environment, and with Supervised, you’re installing the various components that make up Home Assistant manually. Supervised is used to install Home Assistant on unsupported operating systems, like the various flavours of BSD. What this means is that if you are running Home Assistant on, say, OpenBSD, you’re going to have to migrate soon.

Apparently, these installation methods are not used very often, and are difficult for Home Assistant to support. These changes do not mean you can no longer perform these installation methods; it just means they are not supported, will be removed from the documentation, and new issues with these methods will not be accepted. Of course, anyone is free to take over hosting any documentation and guides, as Home Assistant is open source.

Home Assistant generally wants you to use Home Assistant OS, which is basically a Linux distribution designed to run Home Assistant, either on real hardware (which is what I do, on an x86 thin client) or in a container.

On numerous occasions, we’ve talked about the issue facing non-GNOME GTK desktops, like Xfce, MATE, and Cinnamon: the popularity of Libadwaita. With more and more application developers opting for GNOME’s Libadwaita because of the desktop environment’s popularity, many popular GTK applications now look like GNOME applications instead of GTK applications, and they just don’t mesh well with traditional GTK desktops. Since Libadwaita is not themeable, applications that use it can’t really be made to feel at home on non-GNOME GTK desktops, unless said desktops adopt the entire GNOME design language, handing over control ovr their GUI design to outsiders in the process.

The developers of Libadwaita, as well as the people behind GNOME, have made it very clear they do not intend to make Libadwaita themeable, and they are well within their rights to make that decision. I think it’s a bad decision – themeing is a crucial accessibility feature – but it’s their project, their code, and their time, and I fully respect their decision, since it’s really not up to GNOME to worry about the other GTK desktops. So, what are the developers of Xfce, MATE, and Cinnamon supposed to do?

Well, how about taking matters into their own hands? Clement Lefebvre, the lead developer of Linux Mint and its Cinnamon desktop environment, has soft-forked Libadwaita to add theme support to the library. They’re calling it LibAdapta.

libAdapta is libAdwaita with theme support and a few extra.

It provides the same features and the same look as libAdwaita by default.

In desktop environments which provide theme selection, libAdapta apps follow the theme and use the proper window controls.

↫ LibAdapta’s GitHub page

The reason they consider libAdapta a “soft-fork” is that all it does is add theme support; they do not intended to deviate from Libadwaita in any other way, and will follow Libadwaita’s releases. It will use the current GTK3 theme, and will fallback to the default Libadwaita look and feel if the GTK3 theme in question doesn’t have a libadapta-1.0 directory. This seems like a transparent and smart way to handle it.

I doubt it will be long before libAdapta becomes a default part of a lot of user instructions online, GTK theme developers will probably add support for it pretty quickly, and perhaps even of a lot of non-GNOME GTK desktop environments will add it by default. It will make it a lot easier for, say, the developers of MATE to make use of the latest Libadwaita applications, without having to either accept a disjointed, inconsistent user experience, or adopt the GNOME design language hook, line, and sinker and lose all control over the user experience they wish to offer to their users.

I’m glad this exists now, and hope it will prove to be popular. I appreciate the pragmatic approach taken here – a relatively simple fork that doesn’t burden upstream, without long feature request threads where everybody is shouting at each other that needlessly spill over onto Fedi. This is how open source is supposed to work.

This article isn’t meant to be technical. Instead, it offers a high-level view of what happened through the years with GhostBSD, where the project stands today, and where we want to take it next. As you may know, GhostBSD is a user-friendly desktop BSD operating system built with FreeBSD. Its mission is to deliver a simple, stable, and accessible desktop experience for users who want FreeBSD’s power without the complexity of manual setup. I started this journey as a non-technical user. I dreamed of a BSD that anyone could use.

↫ Eric Turgeon at the FreeBSD Foundation’s website

I’m very glad to see this article published on the website of the FreeBSD Foundation. I firmly believe that especially FreeBSD has all the components to become an excellent desktop alternative to desktop Linux distributions, especially now that the Linux world is moving fast with certain features and components not everyone likes. FreeBSD could serve as a valid alternative.

GhostBSD plays an important role in this. It offers not just an easily installable FreeBSD desktop, but also several tools to make managing such an installation easier, like in-house graphical user interfaces for managing Wi-Fi and other networks, backups, updates, installing software, and more. They also recently moved from UFS to ZFS, and intend to develop graphical tools to expose ZFS’s features to users.

GhostBSD can always use more contributors, so if you have the skills, interest, and time, do give it a go.

Jwno is a highly customizable tiling window manager for Windows 10/11, built with Janet and ❤️. It brings to your desktop magical parentheses power, which, I assure you, is not suspicious at all, and totally controllable.

↫ Jwno documentation

Yes, it’s a Lisp system, so open your bag of spare parentheses and start configuring and customising it, because you’re going to need it if you want to use Jwno to its fullest.

In general, Jwno works as a keyboard driven tiling window manager. When a new window shows up, it tries to transform the window so it fits in the layout you defined. You can then use customized key bindings to modify the layout or manipulate your windows, rather than drag things around using the mouse. But, since a powerful generic scripting engine is built-in, you can literally do anything with it.

↫ Jwno documentation

It’s incredibly lightweight, comes as a single executable, integrates perfectly with Windows’ native virtual desktop and window management features, has support for REPL, and much more.

I genuinely believe making games without a big “do everything” engine can be easier, more fun, and often less overhead. I am not making a “do everything” game and I do not need 90% of the features these engines provide. I am very particular about how my games feel and look, and how I interact with my tools. I often find the default feature implementations in large engines like Unity so lacking I end up writing my own anyway. Eventually, my projects end up being mostly my own tools and systems, and the engine becomes just a vehicle for a nice UI and some rendering…

At which point, why am I using this engine? What is it providing me? Why am I letting a tool potentially destroy my ability to work when they suddenly make unethical and terrible business decisions? Or push out an update that they require to run my game on consoles, that also happens to break an entire system in my game, forcing me to rewrite it? Why am I fighting this thing daily for what essentially becomes a glorified asset loader and editor UI framework, by the time I’m done working around their default systems?

↫ Noel Berry

Interesting and definitely unique perspective, as I feel most game developers just pick one of the existing big engines and work from there. I’m not saying either option is wrong, but I do feel like the dependence on the popular engines can potentially harm the game industry as a whole, as it reduced diversity, drains valuable knowledge and expertise, and leaves developers – especially smaller ones – at the mercy of a few big players.

Perhaps not every game needs to be made in Unity or Unreal.

Mainframes still play a vital role in today, providing extremely high uptime and low latency for financial transactions. Telum II is IBM’s latest mainframe processor, and is designed unlike any other server CPU. It only has eight cores, but runs them at a very high 5.5 GHz and feeds them with 360 MB of on-chip cache. IBM also includes a DPU for accelerating IO, along with an on-board AI accelerator. Telum II is implemented on Samsung’s leading edge 5 nm process node.

IBM’s presentation has already been covered by other outlets. Therefore I’ll focus on what I feel like is Telum (II)’s most interesting features. DRAM latency and bandwidth limitations often mean good caching is critical to performance, and IBM has a often deployed interesting caching solutions. Telum II is no exception, carrying forward a virtual L3 and virtual L4 strategy from prior IBM chips.

↫ Chester Lam at Chips and Cheese

If you’ve been keeping track, you can possibly deduce that I’m bit of a sucker for IBM’s mainframes and big POWER machines. These Telum II processors are absolutely wild.

I recently learned something that blew my mind; you can run a full desktop Linux environment on your phone.

[…]

That’s a graphical environment via X11 with real window management and compositing, Firefox comfortably playing YouTube (including working audio), and a status bar with system stats. It launches in less than a second and feels snappy.

↫ Hold the Robot

In and of itself, this is a neat trick most of us are probably aware of. Running a full Linux distribution on an Android phone using chroot is an awesome party trick, but I doubt many people take this concept to its logical conclusion by connecting it up to a display, keyboard, and mouse, and use it as their mobile workstation. Well, the author of this article did, and he took it even one step further by replacing the display part of the logical conclusion with AR glasses.

The AR glasses in question were a pair of Xreal Air 2 Pro, which put a 120Hz 1080p display in front of your eyes using Sony micro-OLED panels. This will create the illusion of a 130″ screen with a 46° field of view, from a pair of glasses that honestly do not feel that much more massive than regular sunglasses or some of the thicker glasses frames some people like. I’m honestly kind of impressed this is possible these days.

Add in a keyboard and mouse, and you’ve got a mobile workstation that takes up very little space, especially since you’re carrying your phone with you at all times anyway. Of course, you have to be comfortable with using Linux – no Windows or macOS here – and the software side of the equation requires more setup and fiddling than I thought it would, but the end result is exactly like using a regular Linux desktop, but on your phone and a pair of AR glasses instead of on a laptop or desktop.

If I had the cash to throw around on fun side projects like this (you can help with that, actually, through Ko-Fi donations), I would totally order a pair of these Xreal glasses to try this out.