There’s a ton of “cloud operating systems” out there, which basically are really fancy websites that try to look and feel like an operating system. There’s obviously a ton of skill and artistry involved in making these, but I always ignore them because they’re not really operating systems. And let’s be honest here – how many people are interested in booting their PC, loading their operating system, logging in, starting their browser, and logging into a website to see a JavaScript desktop that’s slower and more cumbersome than what they are already using to power their browser anyway?

Still, that doesn’t mean they can’t have any interesting ideas or other aspects worth talking about. Take OS Yamato for instance; yes, it’s one of those cloud operating systems, this time aimed at your mobile device, but it has something interesting that stood out to me. The system is partly ephemeral, and objects that haven’t been altered or opened in a year will simply be deleted from the system.

Each data object (note, photo, contact…) includes a lastOpenedAt timestamp. After 330 days, it shows a [wilting flower] icon — a sign of digital wilting. After 365 days, it’s automatically deleted.

↫ OS Yamato GitHub page

The project definitely sounds more like an art installation than something anybody is supposed to seriously use in their day-to-day lives, and seems to ask the question: just how important are all those digital scraps you collect over the years, really? If you haven’t bothered to open something in a year, is it really worth saving? For instance, from the moment I started my translation career in 2011 up until I quit in 2024, I saved every single translation I ever made, neatly organized in folders, properly backed up to multiple locations. I still have this archive, still make sure it’s safe, but I never actually use it for anything, never open a single one of the files, I honestly don’t even really care that much about it.

So why am I still wasting so much energy in keeping it around?

That seems to be the question OS Yamato poses, and there’s something to be said for being less anal about which digital scraps we keep around, and why. It hasn’t convinced me – yet – to delete my translation archive or perform any other pruning, but it did plant a seed.

Markdown – or, more accurately, incompatible variants of Markdown – is everywhere, but that doesn’t mean everybody likes it. It’s the lowest common denominator of light markup languages, with a lot of well-documented issues, and Karl Voit decided to write a long and detailed article about the Markdown’s shortcomings.

Just to make sure we’re on the same page here: I do not want to take away awesome workflows that are made possible by using an LML like Markdown. I just want to mention that the very same kind of workflows are possible by using a better designed LML.

Unfortunately, some issues mentioned here do seem very subtle and minor. However, their consequences are not. With LMLs getting more and more popular and gaining wider use in tools, we really should make sure that our LML choice is a really good one. Personal feelings aside.

↫ Karl Voit

Voit clearly has a preference for a specific alternative LML, but that doesn’t mean the points they make in the article are any less valid. The world of Markdown is chaotic, with a seemingly endless number of varieties and dialects, perfectly illustrated by the Markdown Monster. To make matters worse, the Markdown syntax is quite ambiguous, further complicating how you’re supposed to write it, and how tools are supposed to process it. The end result is that documents you write in Markdown today might be difficult to process decades from now, which isn’t exactly conducive to its intended function.

Voit mentions more issues, but this is the main gist.

There’s one major issue – at least for me – that Voit doesn’t go into, and that’s a problem I have with any of these simple markup languages I’ve tried: their syntaxes rely on some of the most annoying and cumbersome characters to type. There’s a lot of weird keyboard clawing you need to do to enter the characters required by the syntax, and it just makes for an uncomfortable typing experience for me. I wish someone would design one of these syntaxes with typability in mind, making sure to only use characters that are easy to type. While this probably imposes some pretty hefty restrictions during the design of such a syntax, I think it can make for a much more elegant typing experience.

As a result, I do not use Markdown or any of its alternatives.

Google is managing to achieve what Microsoft couldn’t: killing the open web. The efforts of tech giants to gain control of and enclose the commons for extractive purposes have been clear to anyone who has been following the history of the Internet for at least the last decade, and the adopted strategies are varied in technique as they are in success, from Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (EEE) to monopolization and lock-in.

What I want to talk about in this article is the war Google has been waging on XML for over a decade, why it matters that they’ve finally encroached themselves enough to get what they want, and what we can do to fight this.

↫ Oblomov (I can’t discern the author’s preferred name)

Google’s quest to destroy the open web – or at the very least, aggressively contain it – is not new, and we’re all aware of it. Since Google makes most of its money from online advertising, what the company really wants is a sanitised, corporate web that is deeply centralised around as few big players as possible. The smaller the number of players that have an actual influence on web, the better – it’s much easier for Google to find common ground with other megacorps like Apple or Microsoft than with smaller players, open source projects, and individuals who actually care about the openness of the web.

One of Google’s primary points of attack is XML and everything related to it, like RSS, XMLT, and so on. If you use RSS, you’re not loading web pages and thus not seeing Google’s ads. If you use XSLT to transform an RSS feed into a browsable website, you’re again not seeing any ads. Effectively, anything that we can use to avoid online advertising is a direct threat to Google’s bottom line, and thus you can be certain Google will try to remove, break, or otherwise cripple it in some way.

The most recent example is yet another attempt by Google to kill XSLT. XSLT, or Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations, is a language which allows you to transform any XML document – like an RSS feed – into other formats, like HTML, plaintext, and tons more. Google has been trying to kill XSLT for over a decade, but it’s such an unpopular move that they had to back down the first time they proposed its removal.

They’re proposing it again, and the feedback has been just as negative.

And we finally get to these days. Just as RSS feeds are making a comeback and users are starting to grow skeptic of the corporate silos, Google makes another run to kill XSLT, this time using the WHATWG as a sock puppet. Particularly of note, the corresponding Chromium issue was created before the WHATWG Github issue. It is thus to no one’s surprise that the overwhelmingly negative reactions to the issue, the detailed explanations about why XSLT is important, how instead of removing it browsers should move to more recent versions of the standard, and even the indications of existing better and more secure libraries to base such new implementations on, every counterpoint to the removal have gone completely ignored.

[…]

In the end, the WHATWG was forced to close down comments to the Github issue to stop the flood of negative feedback, so that the Googler could move on to the next step: commencing the process of formalizing the dismissal of XSLT.

↫ Oblomov (I can’t discern the author’s preferred name)

At this point in time, there’s really no more web standards as we idealise them in our head. It’s effectively just Google, and perhaps Apple, deciding what is a web “standard” and what isn’t, their decisions guided not by what’s best for a healthy and thriving open web, but by what’s best for their respective bottom lines. The reason the web looks and feels like ass now is not because we wanted it to be so, but because Google and the other technology giants made it so. Everyone is just playing by their rules because otherwise, you won’t show up in Google Search or your site won’t work properly in mobile Safari.

This very detailed article and the recent renewed interest in XSLT – thanks for letting everyone know, Google! – has me wondering if OSNews should use XSLT to create a pretty version of our RSS feed that will render nicely even in browsers without any RSS support. It doesn’t seem too difficult, so I’ll see if I can find someone to figure this out (I lack the skills, obviously). We’ve already removed our ads, and I think our RSS feed is full-article already anyway, so why not have a minimal version of OSNews you could browse to in your browser that’s based on our RSS feed and XSLT?

If you’re interested in developing for and programming on MS-DOS and other variants of the venerable operating system, SuperIlu has collected the various tools and applications they use and like for this very task. In case you’re wondering who SuperIlu is – they are the developer of things like DOStodon, a Mastodon client for DOS, DOjS, and much more.

This is my short list of interesting resources for MS-DOS development. This is neither meant to be unbiased nor exhaustive, it is just a list of software/tools I know and/or use. The focus is on free and open source software.

↫ SuperIlu at GitHub

None of the items on the list are abandonware, so there’s no risk of relying on things that are no longer being developed. With most of the items also being free and open source software, you can further be assured you’re safe from the odd rugpull. If you’re into DOS development, this is a treasure trove.

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One of the most hated “features” of Windows is its update system – it’s slow, error-prone, and most annoyingly of all, tends to interrupt users at the worst possible times. This last issue is apparently so common it’s basically a recognisable meme, among both tech enthusiasts as well as regular users. The root cause of the problem is that because Microsoft wants to force users to install updates, you can only postpone them for a short while, after which Windows will install updates, even if you’re about to start a presentation.

Microsoft is now bringing this approach to the Microsoft Store. Up until now, the Microsoft Store allowed you to install updates whenever you pleased, but that’s no longer the case. Just like Windows Update, you now only have the option to postpone application updates for a short while, after which they will be installed. There’s no registry hack to turn this off or revert back to the old behaviour.

Be advised in case you’re using applications from the Microsoft Store for anything critical that starting soon, they will just update in the middle of whatever you’re doing. Splendid.

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We all know the earlier versions of Windows NT were available not only for x86, but also for MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC (and there were unreleased ports to SPARC and Clipper). While we have the operating systems archived and available, applications properly compiled for the non-x86 versions of Windows NT can be a bit harder to come by. For instance, while Microsoft Word for MIPS and Alpha have been available for a while, we apparently never had a copy of Microsoft Word for PowerPC archived.

Until now. Antoni Sawicki was pointed to an eBay auction for a copy of Microsoft Office Standard 4.2, and the photographed box clearly said it contained version for x86, Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC. He decided to buy it, and it did, indeed, contain the PowerPC version of Microsoft Word. Of course, he made this version of Office available online for posterity.

An excellent find, and good to see we have people willing to spend money just to ensure software isn’t lost to time.

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It’s weekend, you might be visiting friends or relatives, and perhaps some of them are curious about switching away from Windows or macOS to Linux. There’s countless guides out there about this very topic, but to help you along a bit and cut through the avalanche of “AI” and SEO slop, here’s a true beginners’ guide to desktop Linux written by KDE developer Akseli Lahtinen, second most famous developer out of Finland after Linus Torvalds.

There has been quite a surge in interest towards desktop Linux lately. The userbase, atleast according to some metrics, seems to be climbing.

I realised today that it’s been 4 years for me since I did the switch. I have gathered some know-how that maybe a complete newbie could find useful. I also try to untangle some jargon I’ve learned: It may not be exactly technically correct, but this is meant for a more regular user anyway.

↫ Akseli Lahtinen

This won’t be particularly interesting for most people who read a site like OSNews, but it’s a great roundup for newcomers in your circle.

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Ever wanted to know everything about a specific 8×19 font Intel used for the POST and BIOS screens on its motherboards? OS/2 Museum’s Michal Necasek has you covered.

The obvious remaining question is, who came up with 8×19 fonts for BIOS use? Was it really Intel? Or was it someone else? Note that the Intel boards were used by many OEMs (including but not limited to AST, Dell, Gateway, HP, Micron, Packard Bell) so just because an OEM system uses an 8×19 font doesn’t mean there isn’t Intel behind it.

↫ Michal Necasek

Great weekend reading, as always, from Necasek.

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An internal Meta Platforms document detailing policies on chatbot behavior has permitted the company’s artificial intelligence creations to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” generate false medical information and help users argue that Black people are “dumber than white people.”

These and other findings emerge from a Reuters review of the Meta document, which discusses the standards that guide its generative AI assistant, Meta AI, and chatbots available on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, the company’s social-media platforms.

↫ Jeff Horwitz at Reuters

The only way one can describe the examples of allowed behaviour towards minors is absolutely fucked up. If I’d find any person talking to my kids like Facebook and Zuckerberg apparently think it’s okay to talk to children, I’d be calling the police to file a report. I know I shouldn’t be surprised considering it’s Facebook and Zuckerberg, a company with a history of knowingly inciting violence and genocide and a founder who created his website to creep on women, but the lows to which this company and its founder are willing to go are just so unimaginable to even people with just a modicum of morality, I just can’t wrap my brain around it.

The treatment of people of colour isn’t any better. Facebook will happily argue for you that black people are dumber than white people without so much as batting an eye. Again, none of this should be surprising considering it’s Facebook, but add to it the fact that “AI” is the endgame for totalitarians, and it all makes even more sense. These tools are explicitly designed to generate totalitarian propaganda, because they’re trained on totalitarian propaganda, i.e., most of the internet. The examples of “AI” being fascist and racist are legion, and considering the people creating them – Zuckerberg, Altman, Musk, and so on – all have clear fascist and totalitarian tendencies or simply are overtly fascist, we, again, shouldn’t be surprised.

Totalitarians hate artists and intellectuals, because artists and intellectuals are the ones who tend to not fall for their bullshit. That’s why one of the first steps taken by any totalitarian regime is curtailing the arts and sciences, from Pol Pot to Mao, from Trump to Orban. Promoting “AI” as a replacement for exactly these groups in society – “AI” generating “art” to replace artists, “AI” doing “research” to replace actual scientists – fits within the totalitarian playbook like a perfectly fitted glove.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. This apparently also applies to “AI”.

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Hi, FAB 2025 is still happening in Prague and it has been a wonderful event. It’s been great to meet so many people from our community at home, in Czechia! But during my chats with the attendee’s, there was one topic which was emerging time and time again, and that is the state of open hardware. I cannot talk about all of the open hardware, but I can share experience from 3D printing. And it is not good! Open hardware in 3D printing is dead – you just don’t know it yet. This is an opinion piece, imagine we are talking about this topic over a cold Pilsner…

↫ Josef Prusa

What happens when the Chinese government lists 3D printing as an industry it wants to dominate? Well, an explosion in bogus patents and the death of tons of smaller, local brands, leaving only major players from China and perhaps one or two bigger non-Chinese brands. That’s the conclusion by Josef Prusa, founder of Prusa Research, a major 3D printer maker from Prague, Czechia. Prusa’s printers used to be entirely open source, but starting in 2023, this is no longer the case – ostensibly because being open source hardware meant that competitors were copying their work wholesale without contributing anything back, or worse, stealing their work entirely and keeping it all closed, despite the copyleft license in use.

Looking at the numbers, it seems clear that smaller companies will not be able to deal with the onslaught of bogus patents, as fighting patent infringement claims in court and getting patents invalidated, even if prior art exists in abundance, is prohibitively expensive and incredibly time-consuming. It’s a game of really expensive whack-a-mole against people with far deeper pockets than you.

Still, this whole thing does taste a bit sour considering Prusa’s abandonment of its open source roots and ideals. There’s a business to be run here, I understand that, but principles do matter, and if not even a company priding itself on producing open source hardware stands by its ideals, why should anyone else?

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We’re not done with the AROS news quite yet, as Andrzej Subocz published another update with the latest news from the AROS community. Some of it we already covered, but a lot it we haven’t. For instance, there’s the initial version of a partitioning tool for AROS, called QuickPart. For now, it’s in read-only mode, but once it’s complete, it will allow users to do, well, partitioning. Work has also begun on porting SDL2 to AROS, replacing the aging SDL 1.2 version currently available.

On top of all that, there’s a lot of work on new and improved network drivers for the 64bit version, an extensive amount of changes and improvements to the build system, C library, datatypes, and much more. Subocz’ full report has many more details, so head on over and read up.

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Covering the Amiga world is always a bit of a crapshoot, since for what is surely an incredibly small segment of the computing world, it happens to be incredibly complex, with multiple competing Amiga-ish operating systems and hardware platforms, all worsened by many empty promises and bitter animosity flying every which way. This makes it hard for an outsider to get a firm grasp on what’s going on, but as always, I’ll try my best.

The news here is that AmiKit has released a new browser for the classic 68k Amiga that can load modern websites. The browser is called AmiBrowser.

AmiBrowser is an HTML 5 capable web browser built for 68K with Zune/MUI. It
uses ARM libraries to power the native rendering of the web pages.

↫ AmiKit press release

AmiBrowser is exclusive to AmiKit’s own Amiga-like hardware, the A600 GS and A1200 NG, both of which are replacement boards for the original Amiga 600 and 1200, respectively. How do these machines work? Well, they come in the shape of their original counterparts, but with far fewer chips, and one crucial addition: a little Orange Pi Zero 3 (in the case of the A1200 NG, at least) daughterboard that contains the actual ARM SoC that powers the machine.

The way this setup works is that the Orange Pi Zero 3 boots into a minimal Linux environment with a launcher-like interface, which can in turn load up the Amiberry classic 68K Amiga emulator that can communicate with its ARM Linux host. It’s inside this 68K emulator where the actual operating system runs. This Amiga-like operating system is called AmiBench, which is, very simply put, a modified variant of the 68K version of AROS, combined with libraries and components that can make use of the ARM processor.

And so we finally arrive at this new browser. This new browser runs the Chromium Embedded Framework in the host Linux environment on the ARM processor, forwarding its rendering towards a native 68K Amiga/AROS application that’s running inside the 68K emulator. In between the CEF running on the Linux host and the native Amiga 68K application running inside the emulator sits a glue layer that takes care of the communication between the two sides. It’s an interesting approach to a very difficult problem: how do you run a modern browser on a hardware platform – 68K, in this case – that is horribly outdated and far too slow to deal with modern websites?

It’s an interesting approach, but it also feels a little bit like a house of cards. That being said, if the choice is between no access to the modern web and shaky access to the modern web, I’d still choose the latter.

Earlier today, I made the decision to remove all advertising from OSNews. From here on out, you will no longer see any ads, cookie banners, and other ad-related privacy-invasive technologies on this website. While this means a hit to my income, making OSNews even more reliant on our Patreon supporters and Ko-Fi donors, it genuinely feels liberating. I should’ve made this decision years ago. Read on for how you can support us, and our big fundraiser.

I have always been open and honest about my dislike for the modern online advertising industry. It’s incredibly privacy-invasive, a massive security risk, generally lacking in taste, and genuinely intrusive. As such, despite running ads on OSNews, I have always advocated for the concept of “your computer, your rules”, meaning only you, the user, gets to decide what gets run on your computer and displayed on your screen. This includes the use of ad-blockers.

I have a Pi-Hole, and you can pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Because of this, maintaining ads on OSNews became untenable. Everything about the ads on our site, from the actual ads themselves to the annoying cookie banners talking about “our 1500 partners”, gave me the ick, as the young, hip people say, and I’ve been considering turning them off for a long time. Today, after yet another reader rightfully pointing out how absurd our cookie banner was, I finally made the call. One email to our owner, David Adams, later, and we’re now entirely ad-free, for everyone.

This is a hit to my income, and as such, I kindly ask anyone capable of doing so to support the continued existence of OSNews. How can you support OSNews?

• You can become an OSNews Patreon, and get some comment bling if you so desire.
• You can make individual donations through Ko-Fi. For this purpose, I’ve set an incredibly ambitious, long-term fundraiser goal of €5000.
• You can buy our merch! T-shirts, mugs, sweaters – with amazing designs and top-notch quality.

We’ve been online since 1997, meaning soon we’ll be hitting our 30-year anniversary. Very few websites can boast about such a long, uninterrupted existence, and despite all the changes both the industry and the world at large have gone through, OSNews is still here, doing what it has always done. The removal of ads means we’re even more dependent on you, dear readers, but I’m confident in saying that we’ll make it another 30 years.

Thank you for all your continued support over the decades, and let’s keep going. Without icky ads.

Apple, back in June of this year:

This is our broadest software design update ever. Meticulously crafted by rethinking the fundamental elements that make up our software, the new design features an entirely new material called Liquid Glass. It combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity only Apple can achieve, as it transforms depending on your content or context.

↫ Apple’s WWDC press release

Today, iGerman00, detailing their merge request for adding Liquid Glass effects to a KWin plugin:

Added a Concave (lens) refraction mode for a more “Liquid Glass” look, it’s a lot closer than the current implementation. Also added a Refraction Corner Radius slider (0–200px, 30 steps) to shape the SDF independently of edge size. Because the concave implementation is a bit “weaker”, I’ve raised the maxima to 30 for the relevant sliders. Added some UI logic for irrelevant options between modes.

↫ iGerman00’s merge request

One of the world’s wealthiest companies, outdone by a random “amateur hobbyist developer“. Not only does this merge request recreate Apple’s Liquid Glass effects, it does so with a detailed settings panel to control every aspect of the effect, something Apple obviously won’t allow you to do.

“Only Apple” my ass.