fidzu : Operating Systems

I was a long-time Bitwarden user, until a year or so ago when I started migrating my passwords first to Firefox/LibreWolf, and recently from there to a KeePass database I can transfer and use with whatever password manager application is compatible with KeePass' file format. It seems I was accidentally on time, as it's come out over the last few days that Bitwarden is probably going down the drain soon. In February, the company got a new CEO, and in March, it doubled its Premium price, announcing the hike deep in a feature announcement. The new CEO seems to be a bellwether for what's to come for Bitwarden. He's a merger and acquisitions guy, with a history of gutting companies and selling them for parts, and changes to Bitwarden's website also indicate where it's headed. The phrase "Always free" disappeared from the personal password manager page in mid-April. It used to sit prominently under the plan selector. The free plan still exists - for now - but the commitment language is gone. And then there's the values rewrite. Bitwarden used to define its culture with the acronym GRIT: Gratitude, Responsibility, Inclusion, and Transparency. After May 4th, that changed. GRIT now stands for Gratitude, Responsibility, Innovation, and Trust. Inclusion and Transparency are out. Innovation and Trust are in. ↫ Patrick Boyd The "Always free" motto quietly reappeared on the site after its removal was uncovered and went viral on Fedi. The change in CEO, the changes in values, and the removal (and reappearance) of Bitwarden's well-known and oft-repeated commitment to its free plan have all been quiet. No announcements, no blog posts, no posts on social media - but they did change a four-year old blog post by Bitwarden's former CEO to change that GRIT acronym. You don't need to be an honors student to figure out where this is going, and what the new CEO's plans are for Bitwarden. Do as I did, and get your passwords out of BitWarden. I strongly suggest using an open format that can be used by any compatible password manager, with KeePass' formats being the obvious choice. This way your passwords are truly yours, and not dependent on someone's continued commitment to free plans or proprietary services that can unexpectedly change hands. Bitwarden is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, but with all of the above, one has to wonder how long that's going to remain a thing.

20 May 2026 11:21pm GMT

Printing on Linux, macOS, and even on Windows seems to be pretty much a solved problem, but what about printing on OpenBSD? Anyway, to do so I would need to set up my HP OfficeJet printer, connected wirelessly to the network, on OpenBSD. I chose to do this using HPLIP and CUPS as they are both in ports, I am familiar with how they work, and my printer is old enough that its PPD (driver) file is included in the slightly older version of HPLIP that is ported to OpenBSD. However, after installing both packages, starting the relevant services via rcctl including Avahi, and launching CUPS and finding the printer, I could not get it to install properly. Either it would error out at the end saying the printer couldn't be added and advise me to check the CUPS error log, or it would seemingly successfully add the printer but I couldn't print anything and couldn't adjust the printer settings. ↫ Morgan at his blog Only very tangentially related, but my personal crowning achievement in computing is somehow making it possible for my PA-RISC c8000 workstation running HP-UX 11i v1 to print to my modern all-in-one HP printer thing, some random HP consumer junker we bought on a whim because it was a returned item and cheap. It took some messing around, but ever since I've been able to just print stuff right from any application on HP-UX over the network, wirelessly. Note that the c8000 and HP-UX 11i v1 are almost two decades out of date compared to the printer, but by trying out promising device files included in HP-UX I managed to get it all to work. I never need it, but I am fairly sure I'm one of the very few people in the world who can reliably print from an HP-UX 11i v1 workstation to a modern throwaway HP junker over Wi-Fi. Put that on my tombstone.

20 May 2026 7:57pm GMT

⁂ A little progress bar to keep track of our fundraiser! ⁂ ➡️ Donate through Ko-Fi ➡️ Donate through SEPA transfer ➡️ Why a fundraiser? Note that I have to update it manually, and that it includes both Ko-Fi donations, as well as direct bank transfers. Yes, if your country is part of SEPA (EU, more or less), you can now do a safe direct bank transfer using IBAN to a dedicated bank account. This avoids any third parties. Use your bank's application or website (Name: Thom Holwerda - IBAN: SE08 8000 0820 1684 4657 8414 - BIC: SWEDSESS).

20 May 2026 7:45pm GMT

This is a virtual museum of operating systems (and standalone applications) running under emulation, implemented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM. A custom emulator-independent launcher is provided, and all OSes and emulators are pre-installed and pre-configured. The launcher includes a snapshot feature to quickly revert broken installations back to a working state. Hypervisor installers and shortcuts to run the VM on Windows, macOS, and Linux are also included. ↫ Andrew Warkentin's Virtual OS Museum These types of preconfigured archives exist in the gaming world, but I've never seen something like this for operating systems. The amount of love, work, and care that have gone into this effort must've been immense, as it contains more than 1700 installs, more than 520 platforms, and more than 570 distinct operating systems, all wrapped into a single download, with a nice launcher on top to make using all of this as easy as possible. You can either download the full offline version at 121GB zipped, or a version that downloads each image as you fire them up for the first time at 14GB zipped. The contents span just about everything from early mainframes to desktop operating systems to all kinds of mobile platforms, from the late 1940s to today. I haven't yet found the time to download the whole thing, but I am absolutely going to, as there are so many names in here that I've been wanting to play around with for ages, but just never got the time to set up virtual machines or emulators for. This is going to be an amazing resource for the kinds of people who read OSNews.

19 May 2026 10:57pm GMT

We can inter Google Search to the Google Graveyard. At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined "intelligent search box" - what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago. Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch "information agents" to gather information on a user's behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs. ↫ Sarah Perez at TechCrunch The attack on online search has been ongoing for a long time, and it has already resulted in most people with a higher-than-average interest in technology to either no longer use Google, or just to not use online search at all. I used DuckDuckGo for a long time, until I switched to Startpage somewhere last year, and I have never looked back. Startpage (and many others like it) is a very simple, basic search engine: it just gives you a list of links. That's it. That's all I ever want from a search engine, as the task of then vetting each link for relevancy, accuracy, trustworthiness, and so on, is up to me, where it very well belongs. I do not want - and the world should not want - a massive technology corporation like Google, with a deeply vested, existential interest in guiding you towards websites from the companies that pay them for ads, to guide your online browsing experience. Google Search is already riddled with ads, but at least they're labeled and somewhat obvious. With these new "AI" chatbot-style interfaces, not only are its sources nebulous and tucked away, if they even exist at all, but they also just make shit up, fail at the most basic of tasks, and generally just suck at what they're supposed to be doing. This will make online search with Google worse. Worse yet, this will make it even easier for the billionaire Epstein class to sow dissent among the population, creating rifts and hatred where none should exist, solely to keep the peasants occupied fighting each other so they don't turn their anger towards the real reason their lives suck. Panem et circenses has transformed into divide et impera, and these nebulous chatbots with complex, invisible levers and dials will only make the divide easier.

19 May 2026 9:36pm GMT

The following is a hands-on introduction to Futhark through a collection of commented programs, listed in roughly increasing order of complexity. You can load the programs into the interpreter to experiment with them. For a conventional introduction to the language, Parallel Programming in Futhark may be a better choice. For more examples, you can check our implemented benchmarks. We also maintain a list of projects using Futhark. Some of the example programs use directives for plotting or rendering graphics. ↫ Futhark homepage As a non-programmer, I just think the name is cool.

19 May 2026 9:13pm GMT

The world's best BSD (I'm kidding, I love them all equally) has released version 7.9, now available through your update tools and on mirrors the world over. OpenBSD 7.9 brings a ton of changes, fixes, and improvements, such as delayed hibernation support on amd64. This will allow OpenBSD laptops to briefly wake up from sleep, to then immediately drop into hibernation. A small but incredibly welcome change is that sysupgrade will now handle low space on /usr more gracefully, which will make quite a few people who once hit that limit very happy. OpenBSD 7.9 also brings VA-API and open Widevine support to its Chromium (and derivatives) port, and OpenBSD can now run as a guest under Apple's hypervisor for M-series Macs. There's initial low-level support for the FUSE API, the maximum support processor count on amd64 has been raised from 64 to 255, there's improved support for managing complex core configurations in the scheduler, and many more changes. There's also the usual new versions of LibreSSL and OpenSSH, of course, but that's a given.

19 May 2026 5:25pm GMT

To celebrate my 21 years and 20000 posts as OSNews' managing editor, it's time for a massive fundraiser: €1 for every story I've posted over the past 21 years, for a long-term total goal of €20000. Because OSNews is ad-free and independent, I rely entirely on your donations and support for my income and OSNews' continued survival. Your donations ensures OSNews remains free of ads, corporate influence, and other commercial interests that have ruined so many great websites. Why support OSNews? I want to make sure I can run OSNews for another two decades and another 20000 posts, and I need your help to do so. Since my wife, who has a tough, underpaid job in elderly care, is largely unable to work due to health reasons caused by that very same job, my income has become a lot more crucial for our kids, my wife, and myself. With OSNews readers being more skeptical of subscription-like things like our Patreon than most people, it's exactly these one-time donations that make up the bulk of your support. To sweeten the deal, I've come up with a bunch of silly incentives that will unlock at certain thresholds: I know many of you don't really care about incentives and silly things like these, but I think they're fun and add some interesting things to donate to. The donations already started coming in, so we've got a small head start. Also, if anyone has any idea on how to add a cool progress bar to OSNews to keep track of the donations and incentives, please let me know. I'm sure some of you can whip something up or point me to something. OSNews was founded in 1997, so we're almost 30 years old. Let's keep this wonderful little corner of the people-focused web alive for just a euro per post. Everyone here deserves it, because y'all are great. ♥️

18 May 2026 5:53pm GMT

Big news from the Haiku forums: the Haiku ARM port is running on M1 Macs now. This is bare metal, no VM. m1n1+u-boot deal with the Apple-specific parts of booting, so we can boot UEFI images from USB like any PC. ↫ smrobtzz on the Haiku forums USB is apparently broken, but all 8 cores are functional, and it boots to a desktop. It's still early days, for the ARM port in general and the M1 Mac port specifically, but it's a great start.

18 May 2026 5:49pm GMT

I've seen some wild projects in my day, but this one is definitely up there as one of the more ambitious. Stock Microsoft Windows CE 2.11 running on a real Nintendo 64. A custom HAL drops the unmodified nk.lib kernel onto VR4300, brings up the CE 2.11 GWES desktop and shell, mounts the EverDrive-64 X7's SD card under \SDCard, treats the N64 controller as a mouse, plays sound through the N64 AI hardware via the standard CE wave stack, and runs third-party CE 2.11 EXEs straight off the SD card. This is a hobby reverse-engineering project: there is no official CE 2.11 port to N64 from Microsoft. Everything below the unmodified nk.lib (HAL, OAL, display driver, FSD, kbd/mouse PDD, wave PDD, RDP-accelerated GDI fill, ed64-X7 driver) is part of this repo. ↫ ThroatyMumbo Getting a fully operational desktop on Windows CE 2.11 is a lot harder than it appears at first sight, because this earlier version of Windows CE didn't come with many of the reference implementations of components that later versions would add. OEMs were supposed to develop their own user interfaces for Windows CE 2.11, so the entire desktop you see here on this N64 port - window manager, taskbar, file manager, and so on - consists of custom code developed by ThroatyMumbo, using the standard Windows CE APIs. That's not all, though, as the same applies to the various drivers needed to make Windows CE 2.11 talk to the hardware in the Nintendo 64. Windows CE 2.11 contains the interfaces for drivers but OEMs were supposed to write their own device drivers. So ThroatyMumbo did: the display driver, input drivers, sound driver, cartridge driver, and so on, are all written from scratch. Absolutely incredible. Note: it seems "AI" has been involved in this project, but it's unclear to what extent. I didn't see any telltale signs, but readers have reached out to me about this. The result of all this is that you can now run Windows CE 2.11, including a familiar shell, on your N64, and run any Windows CE applications as well. Absolutely wild.

18 May 2026 3:32pm GMT

There is one specific way in which the non-corporate open source projects typically document how their infrastructure work: not at all, and Flathub is no different. The full picture likely lives only in my brain, and while it could be sorted out by anyone (especially in this LLM age, yay or nay), why should it only be me thinking at night about all the single points of failure? Like any system that evolved naturally, it's all over the place. It's tempting to tell its history chronologically, but even then, it's difficult to find a good entry point. Instead, this post focuses on what happens when users call flatpak install; later entries will cover the website and, finally, the build infrastructure. Buckle up! ↫ Bart Piotrowski As time goes by and more and more issues with Flatpak are addressed, I feel my attitude towards the technology change somewhat. I'm still very much a traditional package manager type of person, and will opt for my distribution's repository if the versions they have are up-to-date, but I'm no longer audibly groaning if an application I want is only really available as a Flatpak. For the increasing number of normal, average users switching to Linux, Flatpak is probably the right way to go, especially since it can easily coexist with your traditional package manager. The only part of the linked article that made me raise my eyebrow was the reliance on Fastly, which seems to form an important linchpin of the whole Flathub stack. Fastly is an American company, and while they support Flathub entirely for free, the state of the world does have me wonder if this couldn't evolve into a problem in a myriad of ways, perhaps through questionable people acquiring Fastly or through pressures from the clown car US administration. I'm sure it's all fine, but it's hard not to think of these things in this day and age.

18 May 2026 3:02pm GMT

Microsoft is finally rolling out one of the most requested set of features to Windows 11: a movable and resizable taskbar. Windows 11 did away with the ability to move the taskbar to any side of the screen, as well as a various other taskbar customization options, that had been there since the very first iteration of the taskbar in Windows 95. Now they're finally bringing it back. Microsoft is finally rolling out two of the most requested features: the ability to move the taskbar and make it smaller, so you have more screen space. I tested Windows 11's new movable taskbar integration, and it's just as good as the original Windows 10 version, which let you move the taskbar to the top or sides. ↫ Mayank Parmar at Windows Latest It works exactly as you'd expect it to, with icons, text, menus, and other user interface elements adapting to their new location on the sides or top of the screen. I feel absolutely stupefied that I need to make a news item about this in this, the year of Our Lady 2026, but I know a lot of people stuck on Windows 11 were really missing these basic features. Rejoice.

18 May 2026 2:49pm GMT

Almost exactly 21 years ago, in June 2005, at a mere 20 years old, I took over the managing editor role at OSNews from Eugenia. I had already published a few articles in the years prior, and had given Eugenia enough confidence to suggest me as her replacement. It was, and is, a great honour. In those 21 years and more than 20000 posts, I've seen a lot of beautiful things. Linux grew from a curiosity among nerds into a popular desktop operating system, and often a better choice for gaming than Windows. The BSDs flourish steadily, growing into even stronger and capable alternatives to desktop Linux than they already were. On the commercial side of things, new offerings challenged the hegemony of Microsoft and Windows. While Android and Chrome OS are at best merely tolerated, the idea that a newcomer would produce not one, but two operating systems that would successfully take on Microsoft and Apple seemed unimaginable when I started in 2005. While many alternative operating systems of the early 2000s faded away, we've also seen success stories there. Haiku evolved from an unusable, unstable promise on the horizon into a stable, daily-drivable operating system. The unique Genode Framework and Sculpt OS keep exploring and redefining the boundaries of what a general purpose operating system should be. Redox has exploded onto the scene, and keeps making massive strides almost every month. OS/2 is still actively updated, maintained, and sold. The Amiga will outlast us all. Internet culture, too, is changing, and while things definitely look bleak right now, there are sparks of hope and joy. The general attitude towards the big technology companies among the general public has shifted from admiration to mistrust and dislike, corporate social media seems to be crumbling, and the youngest generations absolutely despise the latest hype, "AI". All is certainly not lost, and sometimes I feel shimmers of hope that the pendulum may swing back to a more people-focused web, a web we've been part of since 1997. In those 21 years and more than 20000 posts, I've also seen a lot of hypes come and go, hypes that if I didn't embrace them, I'd surely be left behind. The "pivot to video", the cryptocurrency mania, NFTs, virtual reality and the metaverse, "AI" - all technologies and concepts I recognised for the hypes that they were, and consequently ridiculed and ignored, much to the dismay of many believers. I've got the angry emails and comments to prove it. This illustrates something about OSNews that I value and hold dear: OSNews doesn't jump on bandwagons, doesn't frantically try to follow the latest trends, doesn't cave under the pressure of big money interests. OSNews is constant, stable, deliberate, patient. Since 1997, we've covered the technology industry with interest, excitement, and wonder - tempered by a healthy dose of skepticism. When you follow this industry for almost three decades, you learn to spot the patterns and see the threads before anyone else does. That's not to say we haven't gone through changes. The most significant changes to OSNews happened in recent years, where instead of working on the site on a mostly voluntary basis with a pittance of ad revenue coming my way, I've turned my work for OSNews into my job. As part of this change, I removed all advertising from our website, morphing OSNews into a fully reader-funded endeavour. No ads, no corporate interests, no media network breathing down my neck. OSNews is a truly independent technology news website, a rarity these days. I don't have to keep corporate overlords or advertisers happy, and you'd be surprised to learn just how rare that is on the modern web. The OSNews website itself is fairly unchanging too, having gone through only a handful of redesigns since its founding in 1997. We've been using our current design, developed by Adam Scheinberg, for as long as I can remember (10-15 years?), and thanks to our independent, ad-free nature, any possible future redesign would only make the site simpler and even faster than it already is. There's no redesign in the cards at the moment, but rest assured, if it ever comes, we'll buck the trend of websites getting ever more complex and demanding and make OSNews lighter and even faster. And yes, despite commenters making up far less than one percent of our readership, I'll always opt to keep them. We might be a site of lurkers, but comments are a core part of OSNews. Even the annoying ones. Especially the annoying ones. That being said, there's going to be a small change to our design, rolling out today (it might take a few reloads for it to appear). To mark my 21 years and 20000 posts, OSNews is getting a new-ish logo, which combines the classic, intertwined beveled "O-S" from the early 2000s with the modern logo we've been using over the past 15 years or so. The O and S are intertwined once again, highlighting the continuity and stability I want OSNews to bring in this chaotic industry (I can write corporatese if I want to). Fun fact: this "new" logo was actually designed like 20 years ago, and we've had it in our back pocket ever since. Why create something new and of the times, when you've got something great sitting right there? Aside from the new logo, I'll be running a big fundraiser to mark this occasion early next week, with some silly incentives at various thresholds. If we reach the ultimate goal - a euro for every story I've posted - I'll overcome some very deep-rooted fears and anxieties, and tattoo the OSNews logo on my body, as my very first tattoo. OSNews has been part of my life for more than two decades, and I have every intention to add at least another two - having such a core part of my life immortalised on my body only makes sense. I've written about my anxiety disorder and how it affects me

16 May 2026 2:32pm GMT

Google recently launched something called Health Coach, an "AI" thing that's part of the company's new Fitbit products. Let's check in with how that's going. Put simply, Google's paid replacement for Fitbit Premium immediately began hallucinating, even admitting to having made up the data before asking if, you know, maybe I'm the one who actually forgot to input a run. Remember, this is my very first report from this thing, making for an awful first impression. Even after this correction, the run data continues to exist within the AI-powered home screen layout, despite no record actually appearing within my account. It's not exactly a great advertisement for a platform that costs $10 per month or $100 annually. ↫ Will Sattelberg at 9To5Google The entire US' - and thus much of the world's - economic growth is built on this trash. What could possibly go wrong?

15 May 2026 8:53pm GMT

One of the top pieces of customer feedback in the graphics driver area is clear: "Windows Update downgrades my drivers." Today, we are announcing a policy change to how display drivers are published through Windows Update - allowing 2-Part HWID + Computer Hardware ID (CHID) targeting for new devices. This change gives customers more control over their display driver of choice while preserving OEM control over the devices they ship. ↫ Garrettd at Microsoft's Hardware Dev Center Windows Update randomly downgrading your graphics drivers seems to be a common enough occurrence that its supposed fix deserves its own feature announcement and blog post. This is a real operating system that runs on most of the world's PCs.

15 May 2026 8:47pm GMT

The EU's Digital Markets Act has been in effect for a mere two years, but despite all the obstructionism, malicious compliance, and steady stream of lies from US tech companies and Apple in particular, it seems this rather basic consumer protection legislation is already bearing fruit. In a two-year review report on the DMA, the European Commission notes that alternative browser usage has soared, data portability solutions are spreading, alternative application stores are growing, and much more. On top of that, end users can now opt out of companies combining various data sources for profiling, and a "significant share" of EU users have apparently done so. Furthermore, end users in the EU can now remove preinstalled applications (whereas American users cannot) and they can download their data from big technology companies and authorise other companies to use that data. Mozilla published a blog post detailing how it has profited from the Digital Markets Act, and it ain't no peanuts: every ten seconds, someone on iOS chooses Firefox on iOS' browser choice screen, which amounts to more than six million Firefox users on iOS. They also tend to stick with Firefox on iOS, as retention is five times higher when this browser is chosen through a browser choice screen. Academic analysis points the same way. Independent researchers compared Firefox daily active users in the EU with 43 non-EU countries. Comparing the 15 months before and after browser choice screens rolled out on iOS, they found that Firefox daily active users (DAU) were 113% higher in the EU than it would have been without the DMA. On Android, it was 12% higher. The smaller Android effect is due to the fact that Firefox usage there started from a much higher base, and the Android rollout has been more uneven than on iOS. The research also shows that the DMA's effect is growing over time. ↫ Gemma Petrie and Tasos Stampelos on the Mozilla blog Both the underlying data in the EC report and the data Mozilla provides indicates that the Digital Markets Act is having real and tangible effects, for end users, developers, and companies alike. The neverending barrage of anti-EU and anti-DMA propaganda from Apple, the US government, and their PR attack dogs seems to have been weirdly justified, from the American perspective: basic consumer protection legislation does, indeed, work to lessen the stranglehold major technology companies have on our lives. And considering just NVIDIA's market cap alone is now equal to more than 17% of the United States' GDP, it makes sense the Americans are unhappy with the DMA. That's going to make one hell of a sound when it pops.

14 May 2026 8:47pm GMT