In a few days, 29 June, FreeDOS will turn 30. This happens to make it one of the oldest, continuously active open source projects in the world, originally created because Jim Hall had heard Microsoft was going to kill DOS when the upcoming Windows 95 was going to be released. After seeing the excitement around Linux, he decided it an open source DOS would be a valuable time investment. I still used DOS, and I didn’t want to stop using DOS. And I looked at what Linux had achieved: people from all over the world shared source code with each other to make this full operating system that worked just like Unix. And I thought “If they can do that with Linux, surely we can do the same thing with DOS.” I asked around on a discussion board (called Usenet) if anyone had made an “open source” DOS, and people said “No, but that’s a good idea .. and you should do it.” So that’s why I announced on June 29, 1994, that I was starting a new project to make an open source version of DOS that would work just like regular DOS. ↫ Jim Hall For an open source implementation of what was a dead end and now is a dead operating system, FreeDOS has been remarkably successful. Not only are there countless people using FreeDOS on retro hardware, it’s also a popular operating system for DOS gaming and running old DOS applications in virtual machines. On top of that, many motherboard makers and OEMs use FreeDOS to load firmware update tools, and some of them even offered FreeDOS as the preinstalled operating system when buying new hardware. With the ever-increasing popularity of retrocomputing and gaming, FreeDOS clearly has a bright future ahead of itself.

The European Commission has informed Microsoft of its preliminary view that Microsoft has breached EU antitrust rules by tying its communication and collaboration product Teams to its popular productivity applications included in its suites for businesses Office 365 and Microsoft 365. ↫ European Commission press release Chalk this one up in the unsurprising column, too. Teams has infested Office, and merely by being bundled it’s become a major competitor to Slack, even though everyone who has to use it seems to absolutely despise Teams with a shared passion rivaling only Americans’ disgust for US Congress. On a mildly related note, I’m working with a friend to set up a Matrix server specifically for OSNews users, so we can have a self-hosted, secure, and encrypted space to hang out, continue conversations beyond the shelf life of a news item, suggest interesting stories, point out spelling mistakes, and so on. It’ll be invite-only at first, with preference given to Patreons, active commenters, and other people I trust. We intend to federate, so if everything goes according to plan, you can use your existing Matrix username and account. I’ll keep y’all posted.

It seems the success of the Framework laptops, as well the community’s relentless focus on demanding repairable devices and he ensuing legislation, are starting to have an impact. It wasn’t that long ago that Microsoft’s Surface devices were effectively impossible to repair, but with the brand new Snapdragon X Elite and Pro devices, the company has made an impressive U-turn, according to iFixIt. Both the new Surface Laptop and Surface Pro are exceptionally easy to repair, and take cues from Framework’s hardware. Microsoft’s journey from the unrepairable Surface Laptop to the highly repairable devices on our teardown table should drive home the importance of designing for repair. The ability to create a repairable Surface was always there but the impetus to design for repairable was missing. I’ll take that as a sign that Right to Repair advocacy and legislation has begun to bear fruit. ↫ Shahram Mokhtari The new Surface devices contain several affordances to make opening them up and repairing them easier. They take cues from Framework in that inside screws and components are clearly labeled to indicate what type they are and which parts they’re holding in place, and there’s a QR code that leads to online repair guides, which were available right away, instead of having to wait months to forever for those to become accessible. The components are also not layered; in other words,you don’t need to remove six components just to get to the SSD, or whatever – some laptops require you to take out the entire mainboard just to get access to the fans to clean them, which is bananas. Microsoft technically doesn’t have to do any of this, so it’s definitely praiseworthy that their hardware department is going the extra kilometre to make this happen. The fact that even the Surface Pro, a tablet, can be reasonably opened up and repaired is especially welcome, since tablets are notoriously difficult to impossible to repair.

Microsoft has made OneDrive slightly more annoying for Windows 11 users. Quietly and without any announcement, the company changed Windows 11’s initial setup so that it could turn on the automatic folder backup without asking for it. Now, those setting up a new Windows computer the way Microsoft wants them to (in other words, connected to the internet and signed into a Microsoft account) will get to their desktops with OneDrive already syncing stuff from folders like Desktop Pictures, Documents, Music, and Videos. Depending on how much is stored there, you might end up with a desktop and other folders filled to the brim with shortcuts to various stuff right after finishing a clean Windows installation. ↫ Taras Buria at NeoWin Just further confirmation that Windows 11 is not ready for the desktop.

I can’t believe this is considered something I need to write about, but it’s still a very welcome new feature that surprisingly has taken this long to become available: iOS and iPadOS 18 now allow you to format external storage devices. Last year when I began testing iPadOS 17 betas, I noticed the addition of options for renaming and erasing external drives in the Files app. I watched these options over the course of the beta cycle for iPadOS 17 to see if any further changes would come. The one I watched most closely was the “Erase” option for external drives. This option uses the same glyph as the Erase option in Disc Utility on macOS. In Disc Utility on the Mac, in order to reformat an external drive, you first select the “Erase” option, and then additional options appear for selecting the new format you wish to reformat the drive with. When I saw the “Erase” option added in the Files app on iPadOS, I suspected that Apple might be moving towards adding these reformatting options into the Files app on iPadOS. And I’m excited to confirm that this is exactly what Apple has done in iPadOS 18! ↫ Kaleb Cadle It was soon confirmed this feature is available in iOS 18 as well. You can only format in APFS, ExFAT and FAT, so it’s not exactly a cornucopia of file systems to choose from, but it’s better than nothing. This won’t magically fix all the issues a lot of people have with especially iPadOS when it comes to feeling constrained when using their expensive, powerful tablets with detachable keyboards, but it takes away at least one tiny reason to keep a real computer around. Baby steps, I guess.

One of my biggest concerns regarding the state of the web isn’t ads (easily blocked) or machine learning (the legal system isn’t going to be kind to that), but the possible demise of Firefox. I’ve long been worried that with the seemingly never-ending downward marketshare spiral Firefox is in – it’s at like 3% now on desktop, even less on mobile – Mozilla’s pretty much sole source of income will eventually pull the plug, leaving the already struggling browser effectively for dead. I’ve continuously been warning that the first casualty of the downward spiral would be Firefox on platforms other than Windows and macOS. So, what do we make of Mozilla buying an online advertising analytics company? Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for the advertising industry by ensuring user privacy while delivering effective advertising solutions. ↫ Laura Chambers They way Mozilla explains buying an advertising network is that the company wants to be a trailblazer privacy-conscious online advertising, since the current brand of online advertising, which relies on massive amounts of data collection, is unsustainable. Anonym instead employs a number of measures to ensure that privacy is guaranteed, from anonymous analytics to employing differential privacy when it comes to algorithms, ensuring data can’t be used to tack individual users. I have no reason to doubt Mozilla’s intentions here – at least for now – but intentions change, people in charge change, and circumstances change. Having an ad network integrated into the Mozilla organisation will surely lead to temptations of weakening Firefox’ privacy features and ad-blocking abilities, and just overall I find it an odd acquisition target for something like Mozilla, and antithetical to why most people use Firefox in the first place. What really doesn’t help is who originally founded Anonym – two former Facebook executives, backed by a load of venture capital. Do with that little tidbit of information as you please.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum, professor emeritus of Computer Science at VU Amsterdam, receives the ACM Software System Award for MINIX, which influenced the teaching of Operating Systems principles to multiple generations of students and contributed to the design of widely used operating systems, including Linux. Tanenbaum created MINIX 1.0 in 1987 to accompany his textbook, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. MINIX was a small microkernel-based UNIX operating system for the IBM PC, which was popular at the time. It was roughly 12,000 lines of code, and in addition to the microkernel, included a memory manager, file system and core UNIX utility programs. It became free open-source software in 2000. ↫ VU Amsterdam website Definitely a deserved award for Tanenbaum, and it’s a minuscule bit of pride that VU Amsterdam happens to be my Alma mater. He also wrote an article for OSNews way back in 2006, detailing MINIX 3, which is definitely a cool notch to have on our belt.

There’s really a Linux distribution for everyone, it seems. EasyOS sounds like it’s going to be some Debian derivative with a theme or something, but it’s truly something different – in fact, it has such a unique philosophy and approach to everything I barely know where to even start. Everything in EasyOS runs in containers, in the distribution’s own custom container format, even entire desktop environments, and containers are configured entirely graphically. EasyOS runs every application in RAM, making it insanely fast, and you can save the contents of RAM to disk whenever you want. You can also choose a special boot option where the entire session is only loaded in RAM, with disk access entirely disabled, for maximum security. Now things are going to get weird. In EasyOS, you always run as root, which may seem like a stupid thing to do, and I’m sure some people will find this offputting. The idea, however, is you run every application as its own user (e.g. Firefox runs as the “firefox” user), entirely isolated from every other user, or in containers with further constraints applied. I honestly kind of like this approach. If these first few details of what EasyOS is going for tickles your fancy, I really urge you to read the rest of their detailed explanation of what, exactly, EasyOS is going for. It’s an opinionated distribution, for sure, but it’s opinionated in a way where they’re clearly putting a lot of thought into the decisions they make. I’m definitely feeling the pull to give it a try and see if it’s something for me.

It should be no secret to anyone reading OSNews that I’m not exactly a fan of Windows. While I grew up using MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 9x, the move to Windows XP was a sour one for me, and ever since I’ve vastly preferred first BeOS, and then Linux. When, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Wine community and Valve gaming on Linux became a boring, it-just-works affair, I said goodbye to my final gaming-only Windows installation about four or so years ago. However, I also strongly believe that in order to be able to fairly criticise or dislike something, you should at least have experience with it. As such, I decided it was time for what I expected was going to be some serious technology BDSM, and I installed Windows 11 on my workstation and force myself to use it for a few weeks to see if Microsoft’s latest operating system truly was as bad as I make it out to be in my head. Installing Windows 11 Technically speaking, my workstation is not supported by Windows 11. Despite packing two Intel Xeon E5 V4 2640 CPUs for a total of 20 cores and 40 threads, 32 GB of ECC RAM, an AMD Radeon Pro w5700, and the usual stuff like an M.2 SSD, this machine apparently did not meet the minimum specifications for Windows 11 since it has no TPM 2.0 security chip, and the processors were deemed too old. Luckily, these limitations are entirely artificial and meaningless, and using Ventoy, which by default disables these silly restrictions, I was able to install Windows 11 just fine. During installation, you run into the first problem if you’re coming from a different operating system – even after all these years, Windows still does not give a single hootin’ toot about any existing operating systems or bootloaders on your machine. This wasn’t an issue for me since I was going to allow Windows to take over the entire machine, but for those of used to have control over what happens when we install our operating systems, be advised that your other operating systems will most likely be rendered unbootable. The tools you have access to during installation for things like disk partitioning are also incredibly limited, and there’s nothing like the live environments you’re used to from the Linux world – all you get is an installer. In addition, since Windows only really supports FAT and NTFS file systems, your existing ext4, btrfs, UFS, or ZFS partitions used by your Linux or BSD installs will not work at all in Windows. Again – be advised that Windows is a very limited operating system compared to Linux or BSD. Once the actual installation part is done, you’re treated to a lengthy – and I truly mean lengthy – out of box experience. This is where you first get a glimpse of just how much data Microsoft wants to collect from its Windows users, and it stands in stark contrast to what I’m used to as a Linux user. On my Linux distribution of choice, Fedora KDE, there’s really only KDE’s opt-in, voluntary User Feedback option, which only collects basic system information in an entirely anonymous way. Windows, meanwhile, seems to want to collect pretty much everything you do on your machine, and while there’s some prompts to reduce the amount of data it collects, even with everything set to minimum it’s still quite a lot. Once you’re past the out of box experience, you can finally start using your new Windows installation – but actually not really. Unlike a Linux distribution, where all your hardware is detected automatically and will use the latest drivers, on Windows, you will most likely have to do some manual driver hunting, searching the web for PCI and vendor IDs to hopefully locate the correct drivers, which isn’t always easy. To make matters worse, even if Windows Update installs the correct drivers for you, those are often outdated, and you’re better off downloading the latest versions straight from the vendors’ websites. This is especially problematic for motherboard drivers – motherboard vendor websites often list horribly outdated drivers. Updating Windows 11 Once you have all the drivers installed and updated, which often requires several reboots, you might notice that your system seems to be awfully busy, even when you’re not actually doing anything with it. Most likely, this means Windows Update is running in the background, sucking up a lot of system resources. If you’re used to Linux or BSD, where updating is a quick and centralised process, updating things on Windows is a complete and utter mess. Instead of just updating everything all at once, Windows Update will often require several different rounds of updates, marked by reboots. You’ll also discover that Windows Update is not only incredibly slow both when it comes to downloading and installing, but that it’s also incredibly buggy. Updates will randomly fail to install for no apparent reason, and there’s a whole cottage industry of useless ML and SEO content on the internet trying to “help” you fix these issues. On my system, without doing anything, Windows Update managed to break itself in less than 24 hours – it listed 79 (!) driver updates related to the two Xeon processors (I assume it listed certain drivers for every single of the 40 threads), but every single one of them, save for one or two, would fail to install with a useless generic error code. Every time I tried to install them, one or two more would install, with everything else failing, until eventually the update process just hung the entire system. A few days later, the listed updated just disappeared entirely from Windows Update. The updates had no KB numbers, so it was impossible to find any information on them, and to this day, I have no idea what was going on here. Even after battling your way through Windows Update, you’re not done actually updating your system. Unlike,

ExectOS is a preemptive, reentrant multitasking operating system that implements the XT architecture which derives from NT architecture. It is modular, and consists of two main layers: microkernel and user modes. Its’ kernel mode has full access to the hardware and system resources and runs code in a protected memory area. It consists of executive services, which is itself made up on many modules that do specific tasks, a kernel and drivers. Unlike the NT, system does not feature a separate Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) between the physical hardware and the rest of the OS. Instead, XT architecture integrates a hardware specific code with the kernel. The user mode is made up of subsystems and it has been designed to run applications written for many different types of operating systems. This allows us to implement any environment subsystem to support applications that are strictly written to the corresponding standard (eg. DOS, or POSIX). Thanks to that ExectOS will allow to run existing software, including Win32 applications. ↫ ExectOS website What ExectOS seems to be is an implementation very close to what Windows NT originally was – implementing the theory of Windows NT, not the reality. It’s clearly still in very early development, but in theory, I really like the idea of what they’re trying to achieve here. Windows NT is, after all, in and of itself not a bad concept – it’s just been tarred and feathered by decades of mismanagement from Microsoft. Implementing something that closely resembles the original, minimalist theories behind NT could lead to an interesting operating system for sure. ExectOS is open source, contains its own boot loader, only runs on EFI, and installation on real hardware, while technically possible, is discouraged.

Framework, the company making modular, upgradeable, and repairable laptops, and DeepComputing, the same company that’s making the DC ROMA II RISC-V laptop we talked about last week, have announced something incredibly cool: a brand new RISC-V mainboard that fits right into existing Framework 13 laptops. Sporting a RISC-V StarFive JH7110 SoC, this groundbreaking Mainboard was independently designed and developed by DeepComputing. It’s the main component of the very first RISC-V laptop to run Canonical’s Ubuntu Desktop and Server, and the Fedora Desktop OS and represents the first independently developed Mainboard for a Framework Laptop. ↫ The DeepComputing website For a company that was predicted to fail by a popular Apple spokesperson, it seems Framework is doing remarkably well. This new mainboard is the first one not made by Framework itself, and is the clearest validation yet of the concept put into the market by the Framework team. I can’t recall the last time you could buy a laptop powered by one architecture, and then upgrade to an entirely different architecture down the line, just by replacing the mainboard. The news of this RISC-V mainboard has made me dream of other possibilities – like someone crazy enough to design, I don’t know, a POWER10 or POWER11 mainboard? Entirely impossible and unlikely due to heat constraints, but one may dream, right?

There’s incredibly good news for people who use accessibility tools on Linux, but who were facing serious, gamebreaking problems when trying to use Wayland. Matt Campbell, of the GNOME accessibility team, has been hard at work on an entirely new accessibility architecture for modern free desktops, and he’s got some impressive results to show for it already. I’ve now implemented enough of the new architecture that Orca is basically usable on Wayland with some real GTK 4 apps, including Nautilus, Text Editor, Podcasts, and the Fractal client for Matrix. Orca keyboard commands and keyboard learn mode work, with either Caps Lock or Insert as the Orca modifier. Mouse review also works more or less. Flat review is also working. The Orca command to left-click the current flat review item works for standard GTK 4 widgets. ↫ Matt Campbell One of the major goals of the project was to enable such accessibility support for Flatpak applications without having to pass an exception for the AT-SPI bus. what this means is that the new accessibility architecture can run as part of a Flatpak application without having to break out of their sandbox, which is obviously a hugely important feature to implement. There’s still a lot of work to be done, though. Something like the GNOME shell doesn’t yet support Newton, of course, so that’s still using the older, much slower AT-SPI bus. Wayland also doesn’t support mouse synthesizing yet, things like font, size, style, and colour aren’t exposed yet, and there’s a many more limitations due to this being such a new project. The project also isn’t trying to be GNOME-specific; Campbell wants to work with the other desktops to eventually end up with an accessibility architecture that is truly cross-desktop. The blog post further goes into great detail about implementation details, current and possible future shortcomings, and a lot more.

I’ve always found the world of DOS versions and variants to be confusing, since most of it took place when I was very young (I’m from 1984) so I wasn’t paying much attention to computing quite yet, other than playing DOS games. One of the variants of DOS I never quite understood where it was from until much, much later, was DR-DOS. To this day, I pronounce this as “Doctor DOS”. If you’re also a little unclear on what, exactly, DR-DOS was, Bradford Morgan White has an excellent article detailing the origins and history of DR-DOS, making it very easy to get up to speed and expand your knowledge on DOS, which is surely a very marketable skill in the days of Electron and Electron for Developers. DR DOS was a great product. It was superior to other DOS versions in many ways, and it is certainly possible that it could have been more successful were it not for Microsoft Windows having been so wildly successful. Starting with Windows 95, the majority of computer users simply didn’t much care about which DOS loaded Windows so long as it worked. There’s quite a bit of lore regarding legal battles and copyrights surrounding CP/M and DOS involving Microsoft and Digital Research. This has been covered in previous articles to some extent, but I am not really certain how much would have changed had Microsoft and Digital Research got on. Gates and Kildall had been quite friendly at one point, and we know that the two mutually chose not to work together due to differences in business practices and beliefs. Kildall chose to be quite a bit more friendly and less competitive while Gates very much chose to be competitive and at times a bit ruthless. Additionally, Kildall sold DRI rather than continue the fight, and DRI had never really attempted to combine DR DOS with GEM as a cohesive product to fight Windows before Windows became the ultimate ruler of the OS market following Windows 3.1’s release. Still, it was an absolutely brilliant product and part of me will always feel that it ought to have won. ↫ Bradford Morgan White I can definitely imagine an alternative timeline in which Digital Research managed to combine DR-DOS with GEM in a more attractive way, stealing Microsoft’s thunder before Gates’ balls got rolling properly with Windows 3.x. It’s one of the many, many what-ifs in this sector, but not one you often hear or read about.

To lock subscribers into recurring monthly payments, Adobe would typically pre-select by default its most popular “annual paid monthly” plan, the FTC alleged. That subscription option locked users into an annual plan despite paying month to month. If they canceled after a two-week period, they’d owe Adobe an early termination fee (ETF) that costs 50 percent of their remaining annual subscription. The “material terms” of this fee are hidden during enrollment, the FTC claimed, only appearing in “disclosures that are designed to go unnoticed and that most consumers never see.” ↫ Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica There’s a sucker for every corporation, but I highly doubt there’s anyone out there who would consider this a fair business practice. This is so obviously designed to hide costs during sign-up, and then unveil them when the user considers quitting. If this is deemed legal or allowed, you can expect everyone to jump on this bandwagon to scam users out of their money. It goes further than this, though. According to the FTC, Adobe knew this practice was shady, but continued it anyway because altering it would negatively affect the bottom line. The FTC is actually targeting two Adobe executives directly, which is always nice to hear – it’s usually management that pushes such illegal practices through, leaving the lower ranks little choice but to comply or lose their job. Stuff like this is exactly why confidence in the major technology companies is at an all-time low.