KDE contributor and developer Niccolò Venerandi has published an article about COSMIC, System76’s brand new desktop environment.

It’s been almost a year since I’ve last tried COSMIC; though development since then has mostly been centered around stability (going from late alpha to stable releases now!) there have been a fair bit of user-facing changes too which I adore. I thus have to ask myself: should I switch to COSMIC? The answer obviously is no, but that’s just because I got addicted to KDE Plasma, so let’s try to be more objective here.

↫ Niccolò Venerandi

Honestly, this is one of the best “reviews” I’ve seen of COSMIC, and paints System76’s hard work in a really positive light. Venerandi spots countless really nice touches he’d love to see adopted by KDE, while also hitting on what I agree is COSMIC’s biggest shortcoming at this point: there’s basically no ecosystem around it. COSMIC uses its own Rust-based toolkit instead of GTK or Qt, but of course, there’s very few other applications that actually use said toolkit.

The end result is that if you run COSMIC, you’re going to have to supplement it with countless GTK and Qt application, none of which will inherit all the nice features, touches, and graphics from COSMIC. This isn’t really a complaint about COSMIC itself or the work its developers are putting into it, but more a fact of life for such a new desktop environment using an otherwise unpopular (as of right now) toolkit. This may very well change in the future, but for now, if you choose to run COSMIC, you’re going to have to accept a very inconsistent and messy desktop.

This won’t matter to everyone, but it sure does matter to me, and it’s the one reason why at this point I have zero interest in running COSMIC. I really hope this changes in the future – competition is good – but it’s going to be a long road.

Speaking of Windows and performance, how about that RAM crisis? Microsoft is feeling the squeeze too, and is apparently doing work up and down the Windows stack to improve its memory consumption.

Microsoft’s Windows chief Pavan Davuluri has admitted that the rising cost of memory is pushing the company to make Windows 11 use less RAM. Microsoft is working on the Windows memory manager, memory compression, WinUI 3 and WebView2, and has made “memory optimization for 8GB and above” an official priority for the rest of 2026.

↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest

This might be the only positive consequence of the RAM crisis.

Apple’s macOS has a Full Disk Access permission, designed to allow backup applications full access to, well, the disk, so they can perform their job properly. Apple posted a notice on its website that it’s going to further restrict this permission, because some applications were abusing this permission to gain access to users’ messages, emails, and so on, which it obviously isn’t intended for.

What kind of applications, you may ask?

Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action. Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy.

↫ Announcement from Apple

This was prompted by a story a few weeks ago, where Facebook’s Muse “AI” tool was apparently reading people’s private messages and other data, and even sent messages on users’ behalf, without informing its users. It’s incredibly naive to think Facebook software in 2026 would not do creepy things, so I’m honestly not at all surprised. It makes sense in Apple’s worldview to further restrict permissions in response, but I’m sure more experienced macOS users are not going to like this.

The KDE project recently brought back its classic Oxygen and Air themes, but what if you prefer something… A little older?

A modern recreation of the classic KDE 3 desktop experience for KDE Plasma 6, built entirely using Qt 6 and Qt Quick, with full support for Wayland and fractional scaling.

↫ Klassik GitHub page

Neat.

Google launched its Googlebooks platform a week ago, and a lot of people were wondering what this meant for Chrome OS and Chromebooks. Since Googlebooks and its Android-based Googlebook OS lack the management frameworks markets like schools require, Chromebooks will continue to be available for now, until such time Googlebooks catch up in that regard. However, in a support document, Google states that update support for all Chromebook devices will end in 2034:

ChromeOS devices will continue to receive regular updates and security patches through mid-2034. For qualifying devices purchased today whose 10-year support lifecycle extends beyond 2034, Google is committed to supporting your transition to Googlebook OS, with many devices offering direct migration paths.

↫ Google support document

Google promised 10 years of updates for all Chromebooks, and it’s now breaking that promise for anyone buying a Chromebook between now and whenever the last Chromebook rolls off the production line. Sadly, we live in a world where corporations are free to make and break whatever promises they want virtually free of consequences, and as society we’re so used to it that anti-consumer behaviour like this barely elicits a shrug.

Google does state that “many newer commercial Chromebook models will be capable of upgrading to Googlebook OS”, but that, too, is just another promise – and a vague, one at that – so who knows how many devices will actually be capable of upgrading out in the real world. On top of that, we have no idea if Googlebooks will just be yet another in a long line of quickly abandoned Google tablet/laptop projects, further adding to the uncertainty.

Stuff like this should not be legal.

In June 2008 Apple announced Mac OS X Snow Leopard, proudly boasting that it would have “no new features”. Instead of piling on new things, Snow Leopard aimed to build on the success of its predecessor, Leopard, opting to focus on under-the-hood performance and stability improvements throughout the system.

18 years later, Apple is taking a similar approach with macOS 27. Golden Gate aims to fix the missteps of last year’s Tahoe, promising an expansive set of improvements and “a more responsive and delightful experience”.

Does it hold up? Here are just some of the bugs I’ve encountered in my daily use over the past couple of weeks.

↫ Chester at SquareOrbits

I’m getting some real Windows 11 vibes from this long list of bugs and issues, further underlining my perception that Apple completely lost the plot when it comes to Mac OS X (in the past) and MacOS (today). These are not the kind of things you’d find in the heydays of Mac OS X, back when I was a devout user, and makes me glad I abandoned ship long, long ago (around the time of the Intel transition). I don’t see stuff like this in GNOME or KDE, and while not nearly as bad as Windows 11, the cracks are obvious.

I am by no means an expert at how Apple is run and how it organises itself, but as a layperson I do wonder if the company is simply trying to do too much – too many different platforms, too many different crucial components it all develops internally, too many different markets to please. Things are going to fall through the cracks when you try to keep this many plates spinning.

Microsoft has announced WSL containers for developers who aren’t already using Docker, Podman, or Rancher on their Windows workstations.

WSL containers is now generally available! Check out this blog post to learn more about this overall feature enabling seamless access to Linux containers on Windows via the new “wslc.exe” command. This new Linux container platform comes with multiple architectures changes compared to WSL, which we’ll detail in this post.

↫ Pierre Boulay at the Microsoft Dev Blogs

If you already have WSL installed, you can run wsl -update to get this new container feature, or you can download it straight from GitHub.

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.

One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan (myself included) must show up and try to explain the concept of screens. Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we’ll tell you, and one can drag them, we’ll say, and other Amiga users rally in agreement, while non-Amiga users probably still don’t get what’s so great about screens. Until now, when this text has been written, in the hope of converting unsuspecting normies into full-blown Amiga screen lovers.

↫ Carl Svensson

A deeply technical look at not just how the Amiga managed to achieve this stunning functionality way back in the ’80s on machines with 7MHz and less RAM than a keyfob, but also how this functionality can be useful. I’ve always found the concept of screens on the Amiga quite interesting, and Svensson’s article does a great job at demystifying the whole concept.

Of course, expect a lot of lovely Amiga OS screenshots.

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.

Qualcomm, yesterday, promising Linux support for the new Snapdragon X2 processors:

Linux on Snapdragon X2 Series is moving from early bring-up toward a more complete upstream developer experience. Core support is landing, Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU work is progressing, and real laptops with Snapdragon X2 Series processors are already beginning to boot Linux.

↫ Qualcomm’s promises from 2026

Interesting, but I feel like I’ve heard these exact words before. Qualcomm, two years ago, promising Linux support for the then-new Snapdragon X processors:

It’s been our priority not only to support Linux on our premium-tier SoCs, but to support it pronto. In fact, within one or two days of publicly announcing each generation of Snapdragon 8, we’ve posted the initial patchset for Linux kernel support. Snapdragon X Elite was no exception: we announced on October 23 of last year and posted the patchset the next day. That was the result of a lot of pre-announcement work to get everything up and running on Linux and Debian.

↫ Qualcomm’s empty promises from 2024

These promises were not at all kept. Two years later, Linux support for Snapdragon X laptops is still spotty, broken, and limited, confined to just a few bespoke Ubuntu builds, which don’t even offer full support either. It’s a complete mess, effectively unusable, and highlights once again that big technology companies are compulsive liars. I have little faith in these new promises, but who knows – maybe this time it’ll be different.

Probably not, though.

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.

It is impossible to go anywhere in a technology space online without hitting a wave of commentary about how stupid GDPR is. It was written by bureaucrats who don’t understand the amazing potential of unrestricted technology. These US-based critiques almost always lean on the oldest trick in cyberlibertarianism: we don’t have time to regulate, we must simply adapt and ride the wave. Nobody has time for government.

Of all GDPR’s consequences, none gets more attention than the cookie banner, which critics present as the inevitable result of government meddling. Blaming GDPR for the cookie banner is like blaming the health inspector for the roaches. The banner is deliberate vandalism, a dark pattern engineered to exhaust you before you can learn anything about the surveillance apparatus humming behind the “OK.” Ironically the banner designed to hide the machine has taught the public more about the machine than a thousand podcasts ever will. Even non-technical people stop at “your data is shared with 996 partners.”

↫ Mat Duggan

There is so much misinformation about the cookie banner, it’s honestly quite hard to believe it’s not deliberately spread. You don’t need a cookie banner for functional cookies, so as long as you don’t share your users’ data with anyone else, you don’t need a cookie banner at all. On top of that, most cookie banners you encounter are actually not compliant with the GDPR at all, because they don’t present a single-click option to block your data from being shared with those 996 partners.

What the cookie banner has done is inform millions – maybe even billions – of people the world over of just how insipid the online advertising and data harvesting industry really is. It put the issue on the map, and by now, everyone, no matter their level of computer literacy, is fully aware of what’s happening to their data every time they see one of these (non-compliant) banners. No else had the guts to do this – except for the European Union.

The wider GPDR has set the baseline for online privacy protections, and while we have a long way to go before we’ve fully solved this issue, the EU at least gave us a good point to jump off from. Smoking and asbestos weren’t banned in a day, either.

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”?