fidzu : Operating Systems

At its Build conference, Microsoft announced coreutils for Windows. Coreutils for Windows is a Microsoft-maintained set of UNIX-style command-line utilities that run natively on Windows - the same commands and pipelines you use on Linux, macOS, and WSL. It ships as a single multi-call binary that exposes each utility under its standard name (cat.exe, grep.exe, find.exe, and so on), giving you the everyday tools developers already use on other platforms to script, automate, and process text. For the full list, see Commands. The goal is to remove friction when moving between Linux, macOS, WSL, containers, and Windows. The same commands, flags, and pipelines work the same way, so existing scripts and habits carry over without translation. Each command supports the standard --help flag for full syntax and options. ↫ Windows Developer Tools website It's a port of the Rust-based rewrite of the GNU coreutils, findutils, and grep. There are a few caveats though, since these ports have to deal with a number of Windows-isms. The first thing that comes to mind for most of us are path separators; these ports will handle both the correct and incorrect Windows/DOS one, but since some tools may output only the incorrect one this may affect piping. You should also take into account things like Windows' ACLs vs. POSIX permission bits, the lack of /dev/null, and a few other oddities. Furthermore, there are a bunch of commands that rely on POSIX-only concepts, so those aren't included, and a few other commands that aren't useful on Windows are excluded as well. Since a number of commands conflict with built-in commands from cmd.exe and PowerShell, which commands run will depend on the shell, the PATH order, and PowerShell's alias table. Everything's in preview, and installable through WinGet.

03 Jun 2026 10:29pm GMT

On the Vogon forums, user MarkDastedt posted an interesting bit of source code he discovered on an old company DVD: a very basic, very rudimentary implementation of multicore support for DOS. Another user, dartfrog, took a closer look and had this to say: Interesting stuff nonetheless. A worker core is running with no interrupt handlers, no page tables, no memory protection, and no OS. That's about as close to bare metal as you can get, meanwhile the other core is still running DOS. Fascinating. ↫ MarkDastedt at the Vogon forums It's effectively a simple demo, but according to other users in the thread, it fits in neatly with sporadic other attempts to bring some form of SMP or multicore-awareness to DOS. For instance, Michael Chourdakis worked on something similar to this demo for a series of articles now only available on the Wayback Machine. It makes for a cool demo, but moving from this to something robust and usable in DOS is not an easy task. Still, the possibilities are definitely there, even if you don't implement full, modern SMP or multicore support. You could have specific DOS applications offloading dedicated tasks to different cores, but as others in the same thread note, individual cores are already stupidly powerful for anything DOS can do, making the use case for additional cores rather moot.

03 Jun 2026 9:20pm GMT

A hobby operating system, not written in Rust, not targeting Qemu, not targeting a Raspberry Pi. Yes, it still happens. Serena OS is what you get when modern operating system design and implementation meets vintage hardware like the Amiga computers. It is based on dispatch queues rather than threads, supports multiple users, is inspired by POSIX, yet retains its own character, is strongly object-oriented in terms of design and implementation and prepared for a cross platform future. ↫ Serena OS GitHub page Serena OS supports most (all?) of the classic Amigas, but the 500, 600, and 2000 need at least 1MB of RAM and a 68020 accelerator. It has code privilege separation between kernel and userspace, basic memory management, its own custom file system, drivers for input devices and graphics, an interactive console with VT52 and VT100 support, and much more. It also comes with a C99-compatible libc, and has its own shell. Note that "AI" chatbot Claude is listed as a contributor to the project.

03 Jun 2026 7:48pm GMT

Andrew Tridgell, developer of rsync, has published a blog post addressing the massive surge in "AI" code submissions and the string of regressions supposedly caused by them. He explains rsync was flooded with "AI"-generated security reports, and he couldn't handle the volumes anymore. As this flood started to get more intense I realised I needed to raise the defences on rsync a lot - we needed much more thorough test suites, code coverage analysis, CI testing on a lot more platforms, deliberate and thorough scanning for possible security issues (so I find at least some of them before other people!) and the addition of a whole lot of defence-in-depth hardening techniques. This is all a huge amount of work. I'm retired (though my wife may dispute that!) and I'd rather be out sailing than working on rsync security issues, so I have reached for several AI tools to help with what needs to be done. I have absolutely no regrets about doing that, although from the storm of anti-AI rage it's clear that many people think I should be hung up by my toe nails and flogged for even considering doing this. ↫ Andrew Tridgell The entire rsync codebase is around 65k lines, and the recent flood of "AI"-generated submissions amount to +16k/-6k lines of code within a few weeks. That's an absolutely insane amount of changes in a really short time to a project that most people deemed stable and "done". If you take a look at the activity graph, it's clear that a project that was silently and carefully doing its job is seeing a massive amount of changes, almost exclusively generated by "AI", all in recent weeks. It's no surprise, then, that people get annoyed when something they deemed "done" and stable is suddenly causing issues for them because its maintainer decided to open the slopgates. Tridgell is, of course, an incredibly accomplished and capable programmer, but so is Kent Overstreet and he thinks his "AI" girlfriend is sentient and conscious, he reprogrammed it after someone convinced his "AI" girlfriend was lesbian and trans, and he thinks that he gave his "AI" girlfriend an orgasm, so being an accomplished and capable programmer doesn't mean you're immune from "AI"-hyperbole, or worse, "AI"-induced psychosis. Tridgell's blog post already has all the usual talking points from "AI" techbros about how the tools sucked last but they're good now, trust me I know how these tools work, humans are actually the same as these "AI" tools, really what is intelligence anyway, and yeah we got a whole slew of new issues caused by the "AI" code but more "AI" code will surely fix that, and so on. There's some red flags that give me the ick, because I've seen them all before from people entirely losing themselves in "AI" hype. Tridgell also takes pot shots at openrsync, a reimplmentation of rsync developed by the OpenBSD team, also shipped by default on macOS. Openrsync has nothing to do with any of the current issues rsync is facing, as the project was started way back in 2018 or so. Taking pot shots at this project in this particular blog post feels childish and unnecessary, and reeks of insecurity; focus on the issues your own project is facing before attacking some other project. This feels like another red flag. Quite a few people have experienced regressions with rsync in recent weeks, but it seems like more are going to come as the slopgates will remain open, and will probably be opened even further. For such a cornerstone open source project, that raises a lot of questions, and I'm sure there's quite a few people pondering if they should, perhaps, switch to openrsync - just like Apple did.

03 Jun 2026 6:03pm GMT

WinUtils started in 1996-1997 as a way to build my programming chops. I was poking around the Windows 95 shell APIs, found the file operation functions, and thought it would be cool to have CLI tools that called them instead of doing raw file I/O. The payoff was practical: because the operations went through the shell, the same confirmation prompts, progress dialogs, and Recycle Bin behavior you got from Windows Explorer came along for free. ↫ Code Naked Code Naked - their alias, not mine - recently dug these old executables and code back up, and published them on GitHub. Back then, though, there were no centralised distribution platforms, so they just uploaded them to various download and shareware websites and kept track of the download tickers. Very neat little tools, and fun to have them immortalised.

03 Jun 2026 2:52pm GMT

Google is adding a switch to allow website owners to opt out of being featured in their "AI" overviews and related slopsearch results. With this new toggle in Search Console, website owners can decide if they want their site to appear in and help ground responses in our generative AI Search features (like AI Overviews, AI Mode or AI Overviews in Discover). Sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features. This control will not be used as a ranking signal for search results outside of these generative AI Search features. This work builds on our long history of designing tools, like snippet controls and Google-Extended, that give websites more choice. ↫ Mrinalini Loew at Google's The Keyword blog While it's nice of Google to offer such an opt-out to website owners, their claim that opting out won't effect your regular search ranking rings hollow to me. I simply just do not trust Google in any way, shape, or form to not weaponise their "AI" against anyone who doesn't want to be sucked up, regurgitated, and spat out in one of their slopsearch tools. On top of that, regular Google Search is dead anyway, so even if they keep their promise, it's moot because Google users are going to be force-fed the slopsearch tools instead of the regular Google Search. I honestly have no idea how much traffic OSNews gets from Google at this point, and while I can look it up, I just don't really care, and think it's probably not that much. I could opt us out, but the real problem is that such an opt-out won't stop Google's slopbots - or anyone else's slopbots - from taking our writing and training their "AI" tools on it, so what's the point of going through the effort? I doubt Google is relevant enough for us.

03 Jun 2026 2:22pm GMT

With KDE Plasma 6.7 almost ready for release, developers have moved on to working on 6.8, and with that release comes probably one of the biggest deprecations in KDE's history: as of today, the X11 session is gone from KDE. Of course, this change won't make it to people's computers until 6.8 actually releases, but as far the code goes, the X11 session is gone. Once 6.8 is actually released, you will only be able to log into a Wayland KDE session. This won't affect KDE applications running in other X11 desktop environments, and of course, X11 applications will keep working in KDE as well thanks to XWayland. It's also important to note that this won't affect anyone sticking to older versions of KDE Plasma; it's not like X11 session support will be yanked retroactively. From here on out, a lot of X11 code will be removed from KDE, and developers will be able to focus on just one code path, instead of accommodating the lowest common denominator in X11. Our internal metrics within KDE show that over 95% of users of Plasma 6.6 are on Wayland, with a gradual increase every release. The metrics also show that basically no one is testing or developing Plasma on X11 anymore. The platform was already, for all intents and purposes, abandoned by KDE contributors. ↫ David Edmundson The transition from legacy X11 to Wayland has been a long, painful journey, but I'm glad we're finally reaching the destination. If you're still having issues with KDE on Wayland, be sure you're using an up-to-date distribution - not an LTS one - and see how that goes for you.

02 Jun 2026 6:08pm GMT

Yesterday, a slew of Instagram accounts, including some high profile ones like the Obama White House account, seemingly got hacked. Look, I'm no spring chicken. I've spent almost a decade and a half identifying vulnerabilities and exploits at unicorn scale, but this is hands down the most unserious, "almost too stupid to be true" of them all. ↫ Sid at 0xsid.com …it's "AI" isn't it? All the attacker needs to kick this off is your account username. Then, they hop on a VPN or proxy close to your city so Instagram's security algorithms don't suspect a thing. (You can quite easily get this from your public profile or "About" section or a hundred other ways.) Once it looks like the request is coming from the correct region, they tell the Meta support AI that the account is hacked and ask it to send the verification codes to an arbitrary email address they control. ↫ Sid at 0xsid.com It's "AI". Yes, all that you need to do to gain control over big, massively popular Instagram accounts is ask Facebook's "AI" to send the verification codes to whatever email address you desire. That's it. There's no other steps, no other checks, no other verification. And the worst part is that this isn't even a hack; this is "AI" working entirely as intended. And these tools are now coding the Linux kernel, LLVM, systemd, PulseAudio, rsync, your browser, and so much more. What could possibly go wrong?

02 Jun 2026 2:23pm GMT

You're a smart cookie, so you opted to buy a copy of Microsoft Office for macOS back in 2019 or 2021, eschewing the Office 365 subscription, so you could keep on using Office 2019/2021 forever if you wanted to. Just like in the old days. I've got some bad news. Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion (2026) is a scheduled remote degradation of perpetually-licensed Microsoft Office software for macOS and iOS, set for July 13, 2026 when a license-validation certificate used by the Office apps expires. After Office 2019 for Mac reached end of support in October 2023, Microsoft assured customers their installed apps would "continue to function." The July 13, 2026 conversion instead drops the apps into a Microsoft-defined "reduced functionality mode," in which files can be opened and viewed but not edited or saved. By May 30, 2026, the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft's site; the "continue to function" clause was removed. ↫ Consumer Rights Wiki Microsoft's advice to the users they're stealing from is to keep using the applications as mere viewers, switch to the free Office 365 web applications, pay for a 365 subscription, or buy a brand new regular copy of Office 2024. None of these make any sense, and clearly, all of this should be illegal, but it's not because the software industry is a clown show. Proprietary software is unethical.

01 Jun 2026 5:52pm GMT

It was an open secret that NVIDIA was working on an ARM-based system-on-a-chip for laptops and desktops, and today at Computex 2026 the company unveiled what it's been working on. It's surely a beast, and unsurprisingly, it's lathered in "AI" buzzwords. At full strength, this chip offers up to 20 Arm CPU cores, a Blackwell GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, 128GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and up to 300 GB/s of memory bandwidth. That powerful CPU and GPU, connected over NVLink C2C, and the large memory pool give AI agents and 120-billion-parameter models plenty of power and space for long-running tasks with context lengths stretching to a million tokens, according to Nvidia. RTX Spark will power high-end laptops from partners including Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, and MSI - and notably, a new Surface Ultra laptop from Microsoft. Nvidia says it's worked with those partners to create "the most extraordinary laptops ever built," with tandem OLED G-Sync displays, "all-day" battery life, premium aluminum chassis with large glass touchpads. ↫ Jeffrey Kampman at Tom's Hardware I couldn't care less about the "AI" nonsense, but the chip itself seems like an absolute monster for laptops and mini PCs. With that much power and a solid NVIDIA GPU, these are also great for gaming and creative tasks, making them feel like the first true competition in the PC space to Apple's M series of chips. They're planned for late 2026, and tellingly, there's no pricing information just yet.

01 Jun 2026 1:33pm GMT

My favorite metonymic technology term is "cron job": even though cron may not literally be the daemon that executes actions on a schedule, we apply the term to anything that walks like a cron and quacks like a cron. As Patrick McKenzie likes to point out, cron jobs are one of the most eminently useful computing primitives. They offer utility that's almost immediately obvious for plenty of use cases that almost everybody has: do this every day; do that once a month. And yet. You probably shouldn't use literal cron (or its more modern cousins) for scheduled tasks! In 2026 there are more modern options available, and my favorite is the humble systemd timer. I love systemd timers. If you don't love them yet, maybe I can show you the reasons why you should love them, too. ↫ Tyler Langlois These are just timers. They are not consuming your computer or taking over the open source world. They do not phone home to Red Hat. These are just timers.

01 Jun 2026 1:16pm GMT

Almost exactly 18 months after 3.19, the MorphOS team has released MorphOS 3.20. This is a major release, as it adds support for the upcoming Mirari PowerPC motherboards, which we talked about when that project was first announced. I'm quite excited about the Mirari, and can't wait to have one, and MorphOS is the one operating system I really want to run it on. I have an almost mint condition PowerBook G4 17″ specifically for MorphOS, but the hardware is simply too outdated to keep up with modern demands, which is sad, because MorphOS can clearly keep up if it had modern hardware. So, MorphOS 3.20 adds support for the Mirari platform and its various components, like its thermal management solution, networking, and so on. MorphOS 3.20 also expands the number of support Radeon graphics cards, improved support for various HDMI and DisplayPort ports, better support for multiple monitors, and overall better graphics performance in general. There's also SFS2 support throughout the operating system so MorphOS now supports file sizes of up to 4GB and partition sizes of up to 2TB. The Ambient UI has also seen extensive work to improve performance and stability, as well as add a bunch of new features. Several new applications and utilities are included in MorphOS 3.20, such as DriveImager, MirrorBackup, SMARTDoctor, OFHTTP, OFHash, OFDNS, Replace, and Automator for scripting and controlling MUI applications. Iris has been updated to version 1.53 and now includes the new Contacts companion application for CalDAV-based address books. FlowStudio received extensive improvements for project management, printing, Markdown support, and development workflows. Networking and connectivity have also been improved with updates to OpenSSH 10.3p1, TLS 1.3 support in RDesktop, expanded SMB2 filesystem improvements, and improved USB, audio and multimedia subsystem stability. Numerous system libraries and frameworks including MUI, ixemul, Cairo, Harfbuzz, Freetype, OpenSSL4, and ObjFWRT have been updated or significantly modernized. ↫ MorphOS 3.20 release announcement Of course, there's also the long list of smaller changes, bugfixes, and performance improvements. MorphOS has wide support for Apple PowerPC hardware, which is probably your best bet for using the operating system for now, at least until the Mirari becomes available for purchase.

31 May 2026 9:21pm GMT

A sad, painful, and infuriating read for this calm Sunday. In recent years, a lot of attention has gone into improving the output side of the accessibility story on Wayland - screen readers and the like - but apparently, the input side has languished. People with reduced mobility need affordances and tools to use computers, but those aren't ready for Wayland. A popular set of tools here is Talon Voice, which allows people with reduced mobility to create powerful hands-free input methods. The examples the article gives are incredibly cool, and it's easy to see how Talon would become a cornerstone for people with reduced mobility who needs hands-free (or hands-fewer?) computer input methods. So what's going wrong here? Talon requires deep integration with the window manager and compositor to carry out even the most basic of its duties, and Wayland offers… Absolutely no way to perform any of those actions. Frustrated by the endless lack of progress towards a real set of solutions for the entire ecosystem, and inundated by an endless series of requests for Wayland support which he cannot provide, Aegis, the main (and only) developer of Talon, has made a declaration: Enough. Talon Voice will imminently remove ALL Linux support from the public release, as X11 continues to sunset and users are switched to an environment in which their system can no longer function, with no option to go back. ↫ Insane Rambles About Technology So not only will Talon not gain Wayland support any time soon, its developers are even removing X11 support from it. What this means is that even if you decide to stick to X11 because Wayland doesn't fulfill your needs, you're eventually going to run into a brick wall. This is merely annoying if you need to use a different application for remote desktop or whatever, but it's absolutely devastating when it involves the very input method you use to use your computer in the first place. There is some important nuance here though that the article doesn't mention. The article takes the word of Talon's developers as gospel, but in my conversations with KDE developers, a different story emerges. What they tell me is that Wayland implements all the APIs needed for Talon to work, but that Talon's developers are simply not interested in using them. Apparently, KDE developers and others have tried to contact Talon's developers, but their offers to help are being ignored. They're being told Talon is simply not interested in supporting Wayland, "end of story". So, the story here seems to be a lot more complex than just "Wayland bad", and I'm getting a bit of a vibe that the Talon developers are, despite claims to the contrary in the article, indeed removing X11 support out of spite. Talon is entirely within their right to not want to work on Wayland support, but then just be honest with your users and say so, instead of pinning everything on "Wayland bad", being dishonest about Wayland's capabilities, and ignoring offers of help and support from some of the most knowledgeable and capable developers in the field. Of course, that's absolutely of no relevance to people like the author of this article who depend on these tools to use their computers. They're caught in the middle of a transition and experiencing the worst byproducts, and that's a huge failure on everybody's end - Wayland, Talon, and desktop environments alike. I hope the parties involved can sort this out quickly, because everyone deserves equal access to computers, doubly so in the open source world.

31 May 2026 2:04pm GMT

The Alliance for Open Media has published the first version of the AV2 specification. AV2 is the next-generation video coding specification from the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). Building on the foundation of AV1, AV2 is engineered to provide superior compression efficiency, enabling high-quality video delivery at significantly lower bitrates. It is optimized for the evolving demands of streaming, broadcasting, and real-time video conferencing. This specification serves as the definitive technical reference for AV2 implementations. It outlines the bitstream syntax, semantics, and decoding processes required to ensure full conformance. AV2 provides enhanced support for AR/VR applications, split-screen delivery of multiple programs, improved handling of screen content, and an ability to operate over a wider visual quality range. ↫ AV2 website Do you remember when the video codec wars - open vs. closed - were raging all across the web, for years? Even back then I argued that open would win, as it usually does, and over 15 years later the most widely-used video codecs on the planet being open is just a normal fact of life nobody writes or talks about anymore. VP8, VP9, AV1, and now this upcoming AV2 are all open and royalty-free, the by far largest video platform, YouTube, serves them by default, and the video codec problem is a solved problem, relegated to the spinning disk drive of history. I was told I was an idealist and that this would never happen, and yet, here we are.

31 May 2026 1:09pm GMT

When Cameron Kaiser speaks, we listen. In 1982, as we mentioned at length with our history of the DEC Professional, Digital Equipment Corporation attempted to keep their PDP-11 minicomputer market-relevant by turning the venerable architecture into a largely incompatible desktop microcomputer. But that wasn't the only PDP-series mini it happened to, and it wasn't even the first: the PDP-8 actually got the shrink-ray treatment several years before, and not content to merely make it into a smaller general purpose computer, DEC turned it into a word processor. ↫ Cameron Kaiser at Old Vintage Computing A word processor that's still sort of a PDP-8 inside, and that could run CP/M or even DOS using a Z80 or 8086 expansion card.

31 May 2026 6:39am GMT

A beautiful TUI might not be particularly accessible, and there's effectively zero consistency between how different TUI applications look, feel, and behave, but damn if an amazing TUI isn't a work of art. Case in point: El Poblador. This is a TUI version of Settles of Catan, written in Go. That's it. That's the post.

30 May 2026 7:41pm GMT