Monthly Archive:: November 2022

Plan 9 is an operating system designed by Bell Labs. It’s the OS they wrote after Unix, with the benefit of hindsight. It is the most interesting operating system that you’ve never heard of, and, in my opinion, the best operating system design to date. Even if you haven’t heard of Plan 9, the designers of whatever OS you do use have heard of it, and have incorporated some of its ideas into your OS. Plan 9 is a research operating system, and exists to answer questions about ideas in OS design. As such, the Plan 9 experience is in essence an exploration of the interesting ideas it puts forth. Most of the ideas are small. Many of them found a foothold in the broader ecosystem — UTF-8, goroutines, /proc, containers, union filesystems, these all have their roots in Plan 9 — but many of its ideas, even the good ones, remain unexplored outside of Plan 9. As a consequence, Plan 9 exists at the center of a fervor of research achievements which forms a unique and profoundly interesting operating system. I’ve never used Plan 9, but whenever I read about I feel like it makes sense, like that’s how things are supposed to be. I’m sure its approaches present their own unique challenges, problems, and idiosyncrasies, but the idealised reality in articles like these make me want to jump in.

The Zeal Operating System is a modernized, professional fork of the 64-bit Temple Operating System. Guiding principles of development include transparency, full user control, and adherence to public-domain/open-source implementations. ZealOS strives to be simple, documented, and require as little of a knowledge gap as possible. One person should be able to comprehend the entire system in at least a semi-detailed way within a few days of study. Simplify, don’t complicate; make accessible, don’t obfuscate. Yes, somebody picked up Terry Davis‘ baton and ran with it. This makes me happy – it seemed wrong for TempleOS to remain but an inanimate memorial.

The AMD EPYC 9004 series, codenamed “Genoa” is nothing short of a game-changer. We use that often in the industry, but this is not a 15-25% generational improvement. The new AMD EPYC Genoa changes the very foundation of what it means to be a server. This is a 50-60% (or more) per-socket improvement, meaning we get a 3:2 or 2:1 consolidation just from a generation ago. If you are coming from 3-5 year-old Xeon Scalable (1st and 2nd Gen) servers to EPYC, the consolidation potential is even more immense, more like 4:1. This new series is about much more than just additional cores or a few new features. AMD EPYC Genoa is a game-changer, and we are going to go in-depth as to why in this article. These are absolutely monster processors, and widen the already existing gap between AMD and Intel in the server space even more.

We are bringing process filtering to Task Manager. This is the top feature request from our users to filter/search for processes. You can filter either using the binary name, PID or publisher name. The filter algorithm matches the context keyword with all possible matches and displays them on the current page. The filter is also applied as you switch between pages. You can also use the keyboard shortcut ALT + F to focus on the filter box. This is a helpful feature if you want to single out a process or a group of processes and want to take action or just monitor the performance of the filtered processes. I am baffled by how slowly new, actually useful features seem to be added to Windows these days. Weren’t all the changes in development and release cycles supposed to speed up the development of Windows? It feels like it’s a small trickle of minor features here and there, that then get massive press attention because… Well, at least something is happening. But nice, I guess. A feature present on virtually every other platform for decades.

On Monday, a German Redditor named c-wizz announced that they had found a very rare 66-year-old Librascope LGP-30 computer (and several 1970 DEC PDP-8/e computers) in their grandparents’ basement. The LGP-30, first released in 1956, is one of only 45 manufactured in Europe and may be best known as the computer used by “Mel” in a famous piece of hacker lore. This is the vintage computing version of finding a 33 Stradale in a shed in the Italian countryside.

Microsoft is now promoting some of its products in the sign-out flyout menu that shows up when clicking the user icon in the Windows 11 start menu. This new Windows 11 “feature” was discovered by Windows enthusiast Albacore, who shared several screenshots of advertisement notifications in the Accounts flyout. The screenshots show that Microsoft promotes the OneDrive file hosting service and prods users to create or complete their Microsoft accounts. Apple and Microsoft are actively ruining their operating systems just to squeeze a few more lousy coin out of their trapped users. What dreadful places to work they must be, with bean counters looking over every programmer’s shoulder to find ever more places to stuff in ads.

LXQt 1.2 is here about seven months after LXQt 1.1 and it’s a major update to the lightweight desktop environment that introduces initial support for the Wayland display server in an attempt to keep up with the times and the new technologies most GNU/Linux distributions are adopting these days. Still based on the long-term supported Qt 5.15 LTS open-source application framework, LXQt 1.2 also improves its file manager component with a new search history feature that offers separate lists for name and content searches. Users can search the maximum number of history items in Preferences > Advanced > Search. I’m glad Wayland support is spreading out to smaller, less popular desktop environments too. Once you go Wayland, you stay Wayland.

Microsoft’s PowerToys for Windows 11 and Windows 10 has been updated with a new feature called ‘File LockSmith’. So what exactly is File Locksmith? In technical terms, it is a Windows shell extension that lets you check which files are in use and by which processes. Up until today, it was not possible to find out which particular process is using the file on Windows. While Task Manager lets you eliminate processes, it cannot tell you what’s using your files or preventing file transfer. In fact, File Explorer will block your attempts to delete a file or folder in use by a process or app. I lost count of how many times Windows would just stubbornly refuse to delete a file or directory because it was in use by some process, while not telling me which damn process we’re dealing with. Isn’t it absolutely bananas that it’s 2022 and you have to download some shell extension to get this basic functionality?

AMD is gearing up to launch its next-generation Radeon RX 7000-series GPUs next month, and today the company shared more details about the cards’ pricing, performance levels, and the new RDNA 3 GPU architecture that will power all of its graphics cards for the next couple of years. The launch begins at the high end, with the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT. AMD will launch both of these GPUs on December 13, with the 7900 XTX starting at $999 and the XT starting at $899 (cards made by AMD’s partners will surely push these prices upward a bit). Both of these price tags undercut Nvidia’s RTX 4000 series, which starts at $1,599 for the top-tier GeForce RTX 4090 and $1,199 for the RTX 4080. Graphics cards have become insanely expensive. While AMD’s prices undercut NVIDIA, they’re still bonkers expensive. Assuming you’ll be able to even find them at these prices to begin with.

Today, amid a sea of internet companies and products that routinely put profits ahead of people, Mozilla is unveiling an ambitious new venture capital fund to transform technology investment — and the internet more broadly. Yes, this is exactly what the only browser standing between us and complete Chrome dominance needs. Can you taste the sarcasm?

Window outlines! Yet another KDE contribution by yours truly! This was fun. Not easy at all, but fun. I’m pretty happy how they turned out. A small feature, but a fun read to learn how, exactly, it was implemented.

Mastodon is interesting. On the surface it might just seem like a Twitter clone, but it’s based on a federated protocol called ‘ActivityPub’. What this means in practice is that there’s no central server. There’s many instances. Each of these instances is managed by different people, and many of them focus on specific interests. With email, it doesn’t matter which provider you go with Thanks to universal SMTP standards that every server uses, you can exchange messages with everyone else. This is the same with Mastodon. You’re not siloed into a single instance, and you can follow people from any other instance. Unlike email, it appears that with Mastodon you can actually migrate to different instances if you don’t like your current one. I’ve left Twitter behind, too, and am having a much better time on Mastodon ever since. I plan on setting up a proper OSNews account on Mastodon as well, but that requires some coordination with Adam (our admin) and David (OSNews’ owner) that I haven’t gotten round to yet. You can follow me here if you so desire.