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Debian GNU/Hurd 2025 released with Rust, 64bit support, and more

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The Hurd, the collection of services that run atop the GNU Mach microkernel, has been in development for a very, very long time. The Hurd is intended to serve as the kernel for the GNU Project, but with the advent of Linux and its rapid rise in popularity, it’s the Linux kernel that became the defacto kernel for the GNU Project, a combination we’re supposed to refer to as GNU/Linux. Unless you run Alpine, of course. Or you run any other modern Linux distribution, which probably contains more non-GNU code than it does GNU code, but I digress.

The Hurd is still in development, however, and one of the more common ways to use The Hurd is by installing Debian GNU/Hurd, which combines the Debian package repositories with The Hurd. Debian GNU/Hurd 2025 was released yesterday, and brings quite a few large improvements and additions.

This is a snapshot of Debian “sid” at the time of the stable Debian “Trixie” release (August 2025), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release.

↫ Samuel Thibault

About 72% of the Debian archive is available for Debian GNU/Hurd, for both i386 and amd64. This indeed means 64bit support is now available, which makes use of the userland disk drivers from NetBSD. Support for USB disks and CD-ROM was added, and the console now uses xkb for keyboard layout support. Bigger-ticket items are working SMP support and a port of the Rust programming language. Of course, there’s a ton more changes, fixes, improvements, and additions as well.

You can either install Debian GNU/Hurd using the Debian installer, or download a pre-installed disk image for use with, say, qemu.

OSNews goes ad-free, for everyone, and we need your support

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?

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.

KWin gets Liquid Glass effects “Only Apple” can make

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.

Firefox’ new “AI” features cause CPU spikes and battery drain

Almost three weeks ago, Mozilla released Firefox 141 that, among other features like memory optimizations for Linux and a built-in unit converter, brought controversial AI-enhanced tab groups.

Powered by a local AI model, these groups identify related tabs and suggest names for them. There is even a “Suggest more tabs for group” button that users can click to get recommendations.

Now, several users have taken to the Firefox subreddit to complain about high CPU usage when using the feature, as well as express their disappointment in Mozilla for adding AI to the browser.

David Uzondu at NeoWin

Is anybody even asking for “AI” features in Firefox? Of the six people still left using Firefox, does even one of them want a chatbot in Firefox? Is any Firefox user the type of user to use some nebulous “AI” tool to organize their open tabs? Seeing these kinds of frivolities in Chrome or Edge or whatever makes sense, but in Firefox?

At least they’re easy to disable through about:config – just set both browser.ml.chat.enabled and browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled to false. I mean, I guess I can understand Mozilla trying to ride the hype bubble, but at least make this nonsense opt-in, instead of asking users to dig around in obtuse config flags.

KDE improves focus stealing prevention on Wayland

You click a link in your chat app, your browser with a hundred tabs comes to the front and opens that page. How hard can it be? Well, you probably know by now that Wayland, unlike X, doesn’t let one application force its idiot wishes on everyone else. In order for an application to bring its window to the front, it needs to make use of the XDG Activation protocol.

In essence, an application cannot take focus, it can only receive focus. In the example above, your chat app would request an XDG Activation token from the compositor. It then asks the system to open the given URL (typically launching the web browser) and sends along the token. The browser can then use this token to activate its window.

Kai Uwe

After explaining exactly how this mechanism works, KDE developer Kai Uwe details the issue that not every application yet properly supports the XDG Activation protocol, and some that do have bugs that, say, might make an application discard its token too early. In other words, it’s time to start testing.

You’ll need to use the latest git master brach of KWin, and enable set the “Focus Stealing Prevention” option in Window Management to “Extreme”. When set to “Extreme”, KWin will exclusively activate windows that request activation with a valid token. They’ve already found and fixed a number of issues in KDE using this method, but more are bound to found, particularly in third-party applications.

They’re planning on turning on KWin’s focus stealing prevention on Wayland with forgiving settings at first, but increase the strictness of the feature as time progresses and issues are fixed.

GNOME 49 backlight changes

One of the things I’m working on at Red Hat is HDR support. HDR is inherently linked to luminance (brightness, but ignoring human perception) which makes it an important parameter for us that we would like to be in control of.

Sebastian Wick

A really interesting look at how GNOME is going to handle screen brightness.

GitHub becomes part of Microsoft’s “AI” organisation

It seems Microsoft is absorbing GitHub deeper into Microsoft. GitHub’s CEO Thomas Dohmke is stepping down, and GitHub will be integrated into a new department within Microsoft. Which department will become the new stewards of GitHub, and the massive pile of open source code it’s hosting?

You already know.

Still, after all this time, my startup roots have begun tugging on me and I’ve decided to leave GitHub to become a founder again. GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon. I’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we’ve built as a remote-first organization spread around the world.

Thomas Dohmke

GitHub will become part of a new “AI” engineering group inside Microsoft, led by a former Facebook executive, Jay Parikh. As The Verge notes, this new group includes platform and development tools and Dev Div teams, “with a focus on building an AI platform and tools for both Microsoft and its customers”. In other words, Microsoft is going to streamline taking your code and sucking it up into its “AI” slop machines.

If you’re hosting code on GitHub, the best time to move it somewhere else was yesterday, but if you haven’t yet, the second best time is today. Unless you want your code to be sucked up into Microsoft and regurgitated to sloppify Windows and Office, you should be moving your code to GitHub alternatives.

DisplayPort is better than HDMI, and I will die on this hill

Over the years, we’ve seen a good number of interfaces used for computer monitors, TVs, LCD panels and other all-things-display purposes. We’ve lived through VGA and the large variety of analog interfaces that preceded it, then DVI, HDMI, and at some point, we’ve started getting devices with DisplayPort support. So you might think it’s more of the same. However, I’d like to tell you that you probably should pay more attention to DisplayPort – it’s an interface powerful in a way that we haven’t seen before.

Arya Voronova at HackADay

DisplayPort is a better user experience in every way compared to HDMI. I am so, so sad that HDMI has won out in the consumer electronics space, with all of its countless anti-user features as detailed in the linked article. I refuse to use HDMI when DisplayPort is available, so all of my computers’ displays are hooked up over DP. Whenever I did try to use HDMI, I always ran into issues with resolution, refresh rates, improper monitor detection, and go knows what else. Plug in a DP cable, and everything always just works.

Sadly, in consumer electronics, DisplayPort isn’t all that common. Game consoles, Hi-Fi audio, televisions, and so on, all push HDMI hard and often don’t offer a DisplayPort option at all. It takes me back to the early-to-late 2000s, when my entire audio setup was hooked up using optical cables, simply because I was a MiniDisc user and had accepted the gospel of optical cables. Back then, too, I refused to buy or use anything that used unwieldy analog cables. Mind you, this had nothing to do with audio quality – it was a usability thing.

If anyone is aware of home audio devices and televisions that do offer DisplayPort, feel free to jump into the comments.

Zig’s lovely syntax

It’s a bit of a silly post, because syntax is the least interesting d detail about the language, but, still, I can’t stop thinking how Zig gets this detail just right for the class of curly-braced languages, and, well, now you’ll have to think about that too.

On the first glance, Zig looks almost exactly like Rust, because Zig borrows from Rust liberally. And I think that Rust has great syntax, considering all the semantics it needs to express (see “Rust’s Ugly Syntax”). But Zig improves on that, mostly by leveraging simpler language semantics, but also through some purely syntactical tasteful decisions.

Alex Kladov

Y’all know full well I know very little about programming, so there’s much interesting stuff I can add here. The only slightly related frame of reference I have is how some languages – as in, the ones we speak – have a pleasing grammar or spelling, and how even when you can’t actually speak a language, some of them intrinsically look attractive and pleasing when you see them in written form.

I mean, you can’t look at Scottisch Gaelic and not notice it just looks pleasing:

Dh’ éirich mi moch air mhaduinn an-dé
‘S gun ghearr mi’n ear-thalmhainn do bhrìgh mo sgéil
An dùil gu ‘m faicinn fhéin rùn mo chléibh
Och òin gu ‘m faca ‘s a cùl rium féin.

Mo Shùil Ad Dhèidh by Donald MacNicol

I have no idea if programmers can look at programming languages the same way, but I’ve often been told there’s more overlap between programming languages and regular language than many people think. As such, it wouldn’t surprise me if some programming languages look really pleasing to programmers, even if they can’t use them because they haven’t really learned them yet.

Debian 13 released

Debian has released its latest version, Debian 13 “trixie”.

This release contains over 14,100 new packages for a total count of 69,830 packages, while over 8,840 packages have been removed as obsolete. 44,326 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for trixie is 403,854,660 kB (403 GB), and is made up of 1,463,291,186 lines of code.

Debian 13 release announcement

I’m never quite sure what to say about new Debian releases, as Debian isn’t exactly the kind of distribution to make massive, sweeping changes or introduce brand new technologies before anyone else. That being said, Debian is a massively important cornerstone of the Linux world, forming the base for many of the most popular Linux distributions.

At some point, you’re going to deal with Debian 13.

AOL announces it’s ending its dial-up internet service

AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans. As a result, on September 30, 2025 this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued.

AOL support document

I’ve seen a few publications writing derisively about this, surprised dial-up internet is still a thing, but I think that’s misguided and definitely a bit elitist. In a country as large as the United States, there’s bound to be quite a few very remote and isolated places where dial-up might be the best or even only option to get online. On top of that, I’m sure there are people out there who use the internet so sparingly that dial-up may suit their needs just fine.

I genuinely hope this move by AOL doesn’t cut a bunch of people off of the internet without any recourse, especially if it involves, say, isolated and lonely seniors to whom such changes may be too difficult to handle. Access to the internet is quite crucial in the modern world, and we shouldn’t be ridiculing people just because they don’t have access to super high-speed broadband.

Windows Settings and Control Panel: 13 years and counting

Remember the old Windows Control Panel? It’s still there, in your up-to-date Windows 11 installation, as a number of settings still cannot be changed in the “new” Settings application. In the latest Insider Preview for Windows 11 in the Dev Channel, Microsoft moved another long list of settings from the Control Panel to Settings.

The focus is very much on time and language this time around. A whole slew of more niche features related to the clock, such as adding additional clocks to the Notification Center or changing your time synchronisation server, can now be done in Settings. Format settings for time and date have also been moved into Settings, which is a welcome change for anyone dealing with mysterious cases where Windows somehow insists on using anything but the sane 24-hour clock.

As for language settings, things like enabling Unicode UTF-8 support is now available in Settings as well, and you can now copy existing language and regions settings from one user to another, and to the welcome screen. Lastly, keyboard settings like the character repeat/delay rate and blink rates are now also in Settings.

It’s absolutely wild to me that Windows still has two separate places to change settings, and that countless settings dialogs still look like they came straight from Windows 95. It’s a reply fractured user experience, and one that’s been in place since the release of Settings in Windows 8, 13 years ago.

The curve Windows is graded on compared to its competitors has basically become a circle. People write entire treatises about how Linux is not ready for the desktop because of some entirely arbitrary and nebulous reasons, while at the same time Windows users are served a hodgepodge of 30 years of random cruft without anyone even so much as raising an eyebrow.

I’ve long argued that if you truly take a step back and look at the landscape of desktop operating systems today, and you were to apply the same standards to all of them, there’s no chance in hell Windows can be considered “ready for the desktop”. The fact Windows has had two competing settings applications 13 years now with no end in sight is just one facet of that conclusion, but definitely an emblematic one.

LVFS to nudge large corporations to fund and contribute to the project

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), which provides device makers and OEMs with the infrastructure to upload and distribute firmware files to Linux users, as well as support during this process, is taking bold steps to ensure large companies contribute to the project. LVFS is the infrastructure behind fwupd, the tool users actually use to download and install firmware updates.

While Richard Hughes, the maintainer of LVFS, is employed by Red Hat to work on the project, and the Linux Foundation provides the hosting costs, there’s just not enough people and resources dedicated to the project. They’re going to take measures to address this.

This year there will be a fair-use quota introduced, with different sponsorship levels having a different quota allowance. Nothing currently happens if the quota is exceeded, although there will be additional warnings asking the vendor to contribute. The “associate” (free) quota is also generous, with 50,000 monthly downloads and 50 monthly uploads. This means that almost all the 140 vendors on the LVFS should expect no changes.

Vendors providing millions of firmware files to end users (and deriving tremendous value from the LVFS…) should really either be providing a developer to help write shared code, design abstractions and review patches (like AMD does) or allocate some funding so that we can pay for resources to take action for them. So far no OEMs provide any financial help for the infrastructure itself, although two have recently offered — and we’re now in a position to “say yes” to the offers of help.

Richard Hughes

In other words, functionality is going to be reduced for vendors who make extensive use of LVFS, but who don’t provide any financial or development support. I think this is an excellent incentive to get corporations who effectively freeload off a free infrastructure without providing anything in return to step up. It seems the measures are explicitly designed to target only the very few major users of LVFS, leaving the smaller companies unaffected.

Funding in open source is a major issue, and as open source becomes ever more popular and used by more and more large companies with excessive amounts of revenue, the strain on maintainers and developers is going to keep increasing. I’m entirely on board with efforts to encourage funding and contributions, as long as they fall within the confines of the terms of the open source licenses in use.

“Why I prefer human-readable file formats”

Choosing human-readable file formats is an act of technological sovereignty. It’s about maintaining control over your data, ensuring long-term accessibility, and building systems that remain comprehensible and maintainable over time. The slight overhead of human readability pays dividends in flexibility, durability, and peace of mind.

These formats also represent a philosophy: that technology should serve human understanding rather than obscure it. In choosing transparency over convenience, we build more resilient, more maintainable, and ultimately more trustworthy systems.

↫ Adële

It’s hard not to agree with this sentiment. I definitely prefer being able to just open and read things like configuration files as if they’re text files, for all the same reasons Adële lists in their article. It just makes managing your system a lot easier, since I means you won’t have to rely on the applications the files belong to to make any changes.

I think this also extends to other areas. When I’m dealing with photo or music library tools, I want them to use the file system and directories in a human-readable way. Having to load up an entire photo management application just to sort some photos seems backwards to me; why can’t I use my much leaner file manager to do this instead? I also want emails to be stored as individual files in directories matching mailboxes inside my email client, just like BeOS used to do back in the day (note that this is far from exclusive to BeOS). If I load up my file manager, and create a new directory inside the root mail directory I designated and copy a few email files into it, my email client should reflect that.

As operating systems get ever more locked down, we’re losing the human-readability of our systems, and that’s not a good development.

If you don’t like current macOS, why not keep using Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks?

With Apple’s desktop operating systems straying ever further from what some of us consider its heyday, it’s no surprise people long for the days before Apple started relentlessly focusing on services revenue, bringing iOS paradigms to macOS, and dropping its Aqua design language for whatever they’re doing now. Some people take this longing and channel it into something a bit more concrete, and an example of this is a website I stumbled upon on Fedi: Mavericks Forever.

Mavericks Forever is a detailed guide to, as the name implies, keep using Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks. It covers everything from hardware options to security patches, browser choices, and so, so much more. It even goes as far as adding more recent emoji releases, custom security patches, and visual customisations. There’s a ton to go over here, and of course, you don’t have to implement every single suggestions.

I ostensibly like pain, because I’ve had a soft spot for the trash can Mac Pro ever since they came out. Now that they are wholly and completely outdated by Apple standards, their prices are probably dropping rapidly, so I may have to grab one from eBay or whatever and follow this guide for a modern-ish Mavericks setup. I do actually like the Mac OS X of old quite a bit, I would love to have a usable version of it that I can use when I feel like it.

If only to remember the good old days.

Google ends Steam for Chromebook effort

In 2022, Google launched a major push for gaming Chromebooks, including a version of Steam for ChromeOS. Steam for ChromeOS remained in Google’s nebulous “beta” state ever since, however, and today Google is doing a Google by killing Steam for ChromeOS altogether.

Entering “Steam” into the ChromeOS Launcher starts the install process like before, but there’s now an intermediary message: “The Steam for Chromebook Beta program will conclude on January 1st, 2026. After this date, games installed as part of the Beta will no longer be available to play on your device. We appreciate your participation in and contribution to learnings from the beta program, which will inform the future of Chromebook gaming.”

↫ Abner Li at 9To5Google

Chromebooks are cheap devices for students, and while there are expensive, powerful Chromebooks, I doubt they sell in any meaningful numbers to justify spending any time on maintaining Steam for ChromeOS. Of course, Steam for ChromeOS is just the Linux version of Steam, but Google did maintain a list of “compatible” games, so the company was at least doing something. The list consists of 99 games, by the way.

It’s just another example of Google seemingly having no idea what it wants to do with its operating systems, made worse in this case because Google actually had OEMs make and sell Chromebooks with gaming features. Sure, Android games still exist and can be run on ChromeOS, but I doubt that’s what the six people who bought a gaming Chromebook for actual gaming had in mind when they bought one.

Developing your first KDE application

Akseli Lahtinen, a KDE developer who works on various components of the KDE Plasma desktop environment, had never actually made his own KDE application from scratch – until now. He created a to-do application, called KomoDo (available on Flathub), that makes use of the todo.txt format, and penned a blog post detailing his experiences. Of course, as a KDE developer, he’s got a head start and access to people who know their stuff, but that doesn’t mean it was a walk in the park.

If you’re thinking of developing a KDE application, Lahtinen’s blog post is a great place to start.

Age verification: what’s the harm?

Welcome, friends, to my grubby little corner of the internet. A corner so strewn with obscenity that the UK government has decided you must prove you’re a grown-up before you can access certain parts of it. The UK’s new Online Safety Act has come into force, so UK people might have noticed a bunch of websites suddenly demanding you take a selfie, share your credit card details, or jump through another hoop to prove that you’re over 18. Quite a few of my friends have been discussing this in the pub, because for understandable reasons people who aren’t embedded in the world of online pornography or internet law are suddenly curious about why the internet is now so very broken. They’re also often convinced that the government will change its mind and therefore no one really needs to worry. I’ve had this conversation so many times now that I reckon I’ve got the basis for a fairly solid layperson’s guide to age verification: what it is, how it affects you, and why we absolutely, genuinely do need to worry.

↫ Girl on the Net

Girl on the Net basically published the definitive guide on why age verification online, as currently implemented in the United Kingdom, and explored by the United States and the European Union, is such a terrible idea. It’s a privacy disaster, a clear onramp for Christian extremists to go after LGBTQ+ content, it doesn’t “protect the children”, it’s easily circumvented, breaks accessibility, casts such a wide net that it even hits sites like Wikipedia, and so, so much more.

Whenever anyone online tries to sell you on age verification as a means to “think of the children”, you can just point them to the linked article. If, after reading it, they still believe this is the way to protect children from seeing naked people (while leaving the door to the most brutal forms of violent content wide open, of course, as is tradition), they will have either ulterior motives, or are some form of extremist you can’t argue with anyway.

The demonization of sexual content and the sex workers that produce it as a means to introduce strict authoritarian control over the internet is something that will never go away. “Think of the children” is an incredibly powerful rallying cry for authoritarians to scare sheltered boomers into accepting pretty much any draconian measure, regardless of efficacy, and I doubt we will ever definitely win this fight.

But we won’t have to sit down and accept it.

That time Microsoft forgot the southern hemisphere’s seasons are opposite to the northern hemisphere’s

Whether you like Microsoft and its products or not, the one thing we can all agree on is that the company is absolutely terrible at naming things. Sometimes I feel like managers at Microsoft get their bonuses based on how many times they can rename products, because I find it hard to accept that they’re really that inept at product naming in Redmond. I mean, just look at my recent article about the most Microsoft support document of all time. Bonkers.

While the list of examples of confusing, weird, unclear, and strange Microsoft product names is long, let’s go back to that weird moment in time where Windows updates were suddenly given names like the “Fall Creators Update”. As with every naming scheme Microsoft introduces, this one was short-lived, but for once, we have an explanation. Raymond Chen explains:

It was during an all-hands meeting that a senior executive asked if the organization had any unconscious biases. One of my colleagues raised his hand. He grew up in the Southern Hemisphere, where the seasons are opposite from those in the Northern Hemisphere. He pointed out that naming the updates Spring and Fall shows a Northern Hemisphere bias and is not inclusive of our customers in the Southern Hemisphere.

The names of the semiannual releases were changed the next day to be hemisphere-neutral.

↫ Raymond Chen

If you live in the northern hemisphere – and you can’t live much more north than I do – you don’t often have to think about how the seasons in the southern hemisphere are reversed. We all know it – I assume, at least – but it’s not something that we’re confronted with very often, as our media, movies, books, and so on, all tend to be made in and for consumers in the northern hemisphere. I’m assuming that people in the southern hemisphere are much more acutely aware of this issue, because their media is probably dominated by stories set in the northern hemisphere, too.

It’s wild that Microsoft ever went with a seasonal naming scheme to begin with, and that it somehow slipped through the cracks for a while before anyone spoke up.