Over the last few days and weeks or so, a few of the people I follow and interact with on Fedi have been talking about centralising information, tools, applications, and expertise from the Motif (and Xt, Xlib, and X11) ecosystem. There’s a ton of information, resources, and actively maintained applications out there, but it’s all spread out and sometimes difficult to find, and so Thomas Adam – one of the core developers of FVWM, among other things, as well as creator of CoW (FVWM for Wayland, more or less) – has created an effort to centralise all of this.

Motif Central brings together information about Motif, Xt, Xlib and X11: how they fit together, how to program with them, and where to find the manuals, examples and historical material that explain them.

Begin with the X programming stack, build your first Motif application, or explore the programming resources. The history pages describe the libraries’ origins, while the archive guide helps you navigate older documentation.

↫ MotifCentral

There’s been a whole flurry of activity around Motif lately, including the updated and maintained fork we talked about a few weeks ago. The people loosely collaborating on MotifCentral also submitted patches to CDE to make sure it works on the new Motif fork, with the CDE developers setting up a build pipeline for easier testing. Making sure CDE, the classic Motif desktop environment, works well with the maintained Motif fork quite a few people seem to be rallying around is a worthwhile effort.

We’re still quite far from a complete(-ish) modern Motif ecosystem, but it’s very heartwarming to see just how many people are actually still interested in it. My perhaps misguided hope is that we can somehow get to a modernised Motif/CDE desktop environment and applications, making it possible to more easily run a modern Motif environment on Linux and the BSDs.

One may dream.

Windows 11 received its September update on the 8^th of this month, and within days Microsoft had acknowledged or investigated problems involving Remote Desktop, USB audio, Linux and WSL-based apps like Claude Cowork, and enterprise domain issues. Windows Latest also found File History failures, Explorer.exe crashes, and AMD GPU instability, with an emergency update following on September 14 that still did not fix everything.

This got us curious, and we looked back across the nine monthly updates released from January through September 2026 and, rather unsurprisingly, Windows 10 update history isn’t infected with nearly as many bugs as that of Windows 11.

↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest

Of course, Windows 10 also isn’t getting nearly as much attention from Microsoft, but that’s kind of the whole point, isn’t it? Whenever Microsoft touches something, especially over the last 5 years or so, it’s one cascade of failures after the other, eroding trust in Windows’ updates even more (if that’s even possible). In that light, why would you want to use Windows 11 and all the headaches that come with it, when Windows 10 is right there, still being supported, albeit without the latest bells and whistles that only seem to break Windows 11 anyway?

If you really do need or want to use Windows, consider switching back to Windows 10 whenever the usual Windows reinstallation time draws near. You won’t lose much, but will gain quite a bit in the process. Of course, this won’t be a responsible or usable choice forever, but at this point in time, I definitely think it’s the optimal choice for quite a few people.

It’s time for an overview of another month of Redox OS progress, and over the month of August – they’re a bit late, don’t believe the publication date – they’ve implemented multicore support for ARM, and considerably improved the I/O performance for the NVMe driver, RedoxFS, and RAMFS by implementing a ring buffer communication API. There’s also initial support for NUMA-based memory management, QEMU is now working on Redox, and much more.

Of course, there’s also the usual long list of improvements to the kernel, relibc, drivers, and more.

Can you run an operating system with a graphical user interface and applications on the Atari Jaguar? Well, you can.

A long time running idea and work-in-progress, I’d like to finally announce the current version of JagOS ‘Spot’ for the Atari Jaguar, running from the RetroHQ GameDrive.

I’m slow at releasing things and try not to announce in-progress stuff due to lack of free time but would like to push this along. Maybe it’ll motivate me to work on it more if the interest is there or just release it as-is if not. The idea is based on the unreleased Atari Jaguar Painter Computer prototype, that a merged Falcon with Jaguar chipset-based computer would have found its way into consumer hands after the Falcon030.

↫ Clint Thompson

The screenshots and YouTube video are quite impressive, but as it’s not actually released, it’s difficult to really say anything more about this project for now. I hope there’s enough interest to get this project’s code out there so it can be further improved and expanded.

Raymond Chen, longtime Microsoft employee and author of the very popular The Old New Thing blog, published an interesting post about the Win32 scrollbar. It turns out there’s actually quite a few interesting shortcuts and useful hidden features, like clicking inside a scrollbar while holding down shift will make the content jump to that point. Halfway through the article, though, Chen laments how nobody really uses proper Win32 scrollbars anymore.

Sadly, almost nobody uses Win32 scroll bars any more. Everybody uses frameworks that provide their own custom scroll bars.

↫ Raymond Chen

And as you might expect, none of these scrollbars work like the Win32 one, making even something as basic as the scrollbar a fragmented mess. He doesn’t just blame things like Electron, either, as Microsoft’s own WinUI framework, which is used for most “new” Windows UI developed by Microsoft for Windows 11, also uses custom scrollbars that do not work like the Win32 one does.

Great, so by the time I learn about a shortcut for scroll bars (Shift+click), the ecosystem has fragmented so much that I can’t even rely on it working.

↫ Raymond Chen

Modern computing is depressing.

The Solaris branch for paying customers has been updated to SRU95.

Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU95 updates a broad set of platform, runtime, developer, networking, desktop, and open source components. Notable updates include Ansible Core to 2.21.1, Apache HTTP Server to 2.4.67, Apache Tomcat to 9.0.120, BIND to 9.20.23, Django to 5.2.15, Elixir to 1.20.1, Erlang to 28.5.0.2, Firefox to 140.10.0esr, Go to 1.25.11, ImageMagick to 7.1.2-27, MySQL 8.4 to 8.4.10, NSS to 3.125, OpenSSH to 10.4p1, Rust to 1.96.0, SQLite to 3.53.2, Thunderbird to 140.10.0esr, and Vim to 9.2.0513.

Additional updates include CMake, CUPS, Cython, GnuTLS, libarchive, libexpat, pip, rsync, and a range of Python modules, X11 libraries, graphics libraries, printing components, and desktop utilities.

↫ Colin Kavanagh at the Oracle Solaris Blog

One of the major changes is the deprecation and removal of NTLM authentication of local users; only NTLMv2 is supported now for security reasons. This release also brings GCC 16, with GCC 13 being removed in the next version. The detailed release notes go into some of the more low-level, esoteric changes in Solaris 11.4 SRU 95.

A few months ago, Google announced it was going to put Android on laptops (and eventually, desktops), serving as eventual replacements for Chromebooks. Unlike those, though, these new Android laptops wouldn’t be low-quality, cheap, underpowered devices for school children to spill milk on, but devices actually competitive with Windows and macOS laptops. Today, the company finally allowed the press to use these new things.

Google describes Googlebook as a “totally fresh approach to computing,” bringing together Android, ChromeOS, Gemini, and premium laptop hardware from major manufacturers.

The idea is to create a laptop that feels more natural to use for Android phone users while retaining what makes a desktop OS useful, such as a full Chrome browser, desktop apps, a proper file manager, Linux support, and a full terminal environment.

Google is also trying to solve some of the biggest problems Android users have had when moving between their phone and laptop, and make the two devices feel like part of the same ecosystem.

↫ Adamya Sharma at Android Authority

I’ve been looking at some of the videos of people using and playing with these new Android laptops, and to be honest, I’m not impressed. I’m seeing quite a bit of jank, a complete lack of consistency, and apparently, a lack of Android applications optimised for desktop use. The close integration with your Android phone are nice, but of course, this also means another dollop of slimy lock-in, as I highly doubt Google will make it easy or even possible at all for, say, iPhones or other platforms to integrate quite as nicely as Android devices will.

Worse yet, there’s the elephant in the room: for just how long will Google care about this new platform? These laptops start at $900 and go all the way up to $1300 (and will be considerably more expensive here in Europe), which is a lot to ask for something Google might get bored of and abandon in a few years’ time. Ten or more years ago, in a slightly more innocent time, I might’ve been excited about Google bringing Android to laptops and desktops, but in 2026, I just can’t be bothered to care.

Also, and this doesn’t really matter, but “Googlebook OS”?

The GIMP will never magically become software beloved by artists—not without radically changing its culture, and making the artists the ones who call the shots. The GIMP will remain what it has always set out to be: a tinkerer’s toolbox, more concerned with the purity of its software politics than with garnering a loyal userbase of photographers and designers.

But because everyone insisted to poise it as a viable Photoshop killer, Linux is left with an obvious hole in its software offering, a hole nobody managed to fill with their own challenger.

↫ Aria Salvatrice

Excellent article, and spot-on conclusion.

Speaking of unsexy programming, we’ve got a new Java release.

Featuring thousands of performance, stability, security, and productivity improvements, Java 27 (Oracle JDK 27) provides a strong foundation for continued Java innovation. To help organizations prepare for more secure communications in a post-quantum world, Java 27 advances its post-quantum cryptography (PQC) capabilities with hybrid key exchange for TLS 1.3.

↫ Oracle press release

The OpenJDK release page has more information.

Look, nobody’s going to argue .NET is sexy, but the truth of the matter is that it’s quite popular in less visible circles, so any new release is going to have a big impact on a ton of people and product. In other words, performance improvements in .NET 11 are going to matter.

In contrast, .NET 11 is actually one higher, one louder. The sections that follow are full of real improvements. A bounds check removed, an allocation that no longer happens, a lock that isn’t taken, a loop that runs in fewer cycles than it did a year ago, a comparison folded to a constant here, a redundant check hoisted out of a loop there, a couple of instructions fused into one, a syscall sidestepped, an array copy handed off to SIMD, and on and on. That’s how real performance work goes, accumulating gain after gain, each compounding on the last, until the whole thing is measurably, provably louder. And so, in this post, as I’ve done in past years with .NET 10, .NET 9, .NET 8, .NET 7, .NET 6, .NET 5, .NET Core 3.0, .NET Core 2.1, and .NET Core 2.0 before it, we’ll take an unhurried tour through hundreds of them.

↫ Stephen Toub at Microsoft’s Dev Blogs

My eyes glaze over at all of this, but even here on OSNews, there’s going to be countless people working with .NET at their jobs.

Ubuntu has been replacing core utilities with Rust rewrites, and it’s now completed the process.

cp, mv and rm were held back on their GNU versions in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS due to a crop of TOCTOU (time-of-check to time-of-use) issues that needed to be fixed in the uutils versions. 

With those issues resolved upstream, Ubuntu 26.10 finishes the job. The ‘Stonking Stingray’ ships a full set of Rust core utilities, which encompasses common command-line tools like ls, cat, chmod and  du.

↫ Joey Sneddon at OMG! Ubuntu

I’m definitely not qualified enough to make any useful remarks about this, but the idea of replacing such foundational, battle-tested utilities with brand new ones, even when written in a memory-safe language, does make feel a little hesitant. Still, at least this way Ubuntu users can work out any issues so that if and when other distributions – like the one I use, Fedora – follows suit.

When I used Windows for a month because you people paid me to do so, the utter lack of consistency in the way applications and the operating system itself looks, feels, and behaves was a major sticking point. It turns out, though, that I was only scratching the surface of just how bad things really are on Windows. Case in point: the new WinUI Notepad application that replaced the classic Win32 one. I had no idea just how bad it really is.

It’s been seven weeks since I last complained about something in Windows on this blog. That feels like too long, so here’s a post about menus – specifically, the menu bar in the modern version of Notepad in Windows 11.

That menu bar has, unfortunately, quite a few regressions compared to the menu bar in the old Win32 version of Notepad.

↫ Reupen Shah

I’m not going to spoil any of it, because there’s no way you’d believe any of it without the videos Shah provides. I’m aghast.

Apple releases its yearly cluster of operating system updates today, with the two most prominent of course being macOS and iOS/iPadOS. These new versions focus heavily on Apple’s “AI” stuff, but there are a few actual improvements and changes to the actual operating systems as well.

Across both iOS and macOS, users now have a slider to affect how transparent or opaque the “Liquid Glass” design is across the operating system.

And on the macOS side especially, Apple has made numerous small design tweaks to address user feedback, which has been accumulating since Liquid Glass was introduced. There’s nothing radically new in terms of design here, but this is a much-needed polish pass.

Across all the releases, but in particular macOS and also iOS, there are a bunch of quality-of-life or performance improvements. For example, macOS now supports HDR for all system UI elements and gets more robust support for a wider range of display modes for external monitors.

↫ Samuel Axon at Ars Technica

If you’re not into “AI”, there’s not a lot of meat on these bones, but at least you can turn the “AI” nonsense off through a switch buried deep in the settings applications of Apple’s operating systems (which will probably be flicked back on whenever the next update comes).

Want to run something a little more exotic on your server? How about GNU Guix?

It has been a month since migrating my home server to GNU Guix. Managing OS state declaratively through Git has eliminated configuration drift, and Guile Scheme provides a cohesive environment that complements Emacs. While adapting to a smaller package ecosystem and managing substitute timing requires occasional adjustments, the stability, reproducibility, and container isolation make it a dependable foundation.

↫ Wai Hon

I’m definitely noticing an increase in interest in Guix lately.