fidzu : Operating Systems

I totally forgot you could do this, but back in the Windows 9x days, you could hold down shift while clicking restart, and it would perform a sort-of "soft" restart without going through a complete reboot cycle. What's going on here? The behavior you're seeing is the result of passing the EW_RESTART­WINDOWS flag to the old 16-bit Exit­Windows function. What happens is that the 16-bit Windows kernel shuts down, and then the 32-bit virtual memory manager shuts down, and the CPU is put back into real mode, and control returns to win.com with a special signal that means "Can you start protected mode Windows again for me?" The code in win.com prints the "Please wait while Windows restarts…" message, and then tries to get the system back into the same state that it was in back when win.com had been freshly-launched. ↫ Raymond Chen There's a whole lot more involved behind the curtains, of course, and if conditions aren't right, the system will still perform a full reboot cycle. Chen further notes that because WIN.COM was written in assembly, getting back to that "freshly-launched" state wasn't always easy to achieve. I only vaguely remember you could hold down shift and get a faster "reboot", but I don't remember ever really using it. I've been digging around in my memories since I saw this story yesterday, and I just can't think of a scenario where I would've realised in time that I could do this.

20 Jan 2026 8:08pm GMT

Xous is a microkernel operating system designed for medium embedded systems with clear separation of processes. Nearly everything is implemented in userspace, where message passing forms the basic communications primitive. ↫ Xous website It's written in Rust, and it's been around for a while - so much so it's sponsored by NLnet and the EU. The Xous Book provides a ton more details and information, with a strong focus on the kernel. You can run Xous in hosted mode on Linux, Windows, or macOS, inside the Renode emulator, or on the one supported hardware device, the Precursor. Obviously, the code's open and on GitHub (which they should really be moving to a European solution now that the Americans are threatening the EU with war over Greenland).

20 Jan 2026 7:31pm GMT

Have you noticed how it seems like how the "light mode" of your graphical user interface of choice is getting lighter over time? It turns out you're not crazy, and at least for macOS, light mode has indeed been getting lighter. You can clearly see that the brightness of the UI has been steadily increasing for the last 16 years. The upper line is the default mode/light mode, the lower line is dark mode. When I started using MacOS in 2012, I was running Snow Leopard, the windows had an average brightness of 71%. Since then they've steadily increased so that in MacOS Tahoe, they're at a full 100%. ↫ Will Richardson While this particular post only covers macOS, I wouldn't be surprised to discover similar findings in Windows, GNOME, and KDE. The benefit of using KDE is that it's at least relatively easy to switch colour schemes or themes, but changing colours in Windows is becoming a hidden feature, and GNOME doesn't support it out of the box at all, and let's not even get started about macOS. I think "light mode" should be "grey mode", and definitely lament the lack of supported, maintained "grey modes" in both KDE and GNOME. There's a reason that graphical user interfaces in the era of extensive science-based human-computer interaction research opted for soft, gentle greys (ooh, aah, mmm), and I'm convinced we need to bring it back. The glaring whites we use today are cold and clinical, and feel unpleasant to the point where I turn down the brightness of my monitor in a way that makes other colours feel too muted. Or perhaps I'm out of touch.

20 Jan 2026 4:06pm GMT

If only it was that simple - cue the rollercoaster ride. What an absolutely garish state of affairs lies behind this simple radio button on a website. I'm also well aware OSNews has a certain amount of complexity it might not need, and while I can't fix that, I am at least working on a potential solution.

20 Jan 2026 3:47pm GMT

I'm not particularly interested in photo editing or management, professional or not, but one thing I do know is that many people who are miss one application in particular: Aperture. Discontinued over a decade ago, people still lament its loss, and Daniel Kennett explains to us layman why that's the case. Aperture's technical brilliance is remarkable in how quiet it is. There's no BEHOLD RAINBOW SPARKLE ANIMATIONS WHILE THE AI MAKES AUNT JANICE LOOK LIKE AN ANTHROPOMORPHISED CARROT, just an understated dedication to making the tool you're using work for you in exactly the way you want to work. It's the kind of monumental engineering effort that the user is unlikely to ever notice, simply because of how obvious it is to use - if I want to zoom in to this photo, I point at it with the zoom thing. Duh. Sure, it's a tiny thumbnail inside a small thumbnail of a page in a book… but how else would it work? And that is why Aperture was so special. It was powered by some of the most impressive technology around at the time, but you'd never even know it because you were too busy getting shit done. ↫ Daniel Kennett I half-expected to get some wishy-washy vibes-based article about some professional photo management tool, but instead, I came away easily and clearly understanding what made Aperture such a great tool. Beng able to access any set of tools wherever you are, without having to take a photo to a certain specific place in the user interface makes perfect sense to me, and the given counterexample from the modern Photos application instantly feels cumbersome and grating. At this point it's clear Aperture's never coming back, but I'm rather surprised nobody seems to have taken the effort to clone it. It seems there's a market out there for something like this, but from what I gather Lightroom isn't what Aperture fans are looking for, and any other alternatives are simply too limited or unpolished. There's a market here, for sure. What other alternatives to Aperture exist today?

20 Jan 2026 3:41pm GMT

There's cursed computing, and then there's cursed computing. It turns out that you can render GNOME's windows with the compositor from Windows 7, dwm.exe. Yes. tl;dr of how this clusterfuck works: this is effectively just x11 forwarding an x server from windows to linux. the fun part is a) making gnome run with an already existing window manager (namely dwm.exe lol), b) making gnome run over x11 forwarding (it is Not a fan, last time it tried running gnome on windows this is what broke it and made it quit trying), and c) actually ripping out parts of the gnome compositor again to make dwm instead of gnome render window decorations to achieve ✨️aero gnome✨️ ↫ ⬡-49016 at Mastodon This is already one of the most cursed things I've ever seen, but then things got so much worse. How about Windows 7's dwm.exe, but composited by GNOME? I need an adult.

18 Jan 2026 12:04pm GMT

Virtualisation is a lot older than you might think, with (one of?) the first implementation(s) being IBM's VM/CMS, the line of operating systems that would grow to include things like System/370, System/390, all the way up until IBM/Z, which is still being developed and sold today; only recently IBM released the IBM z17 and z/OS 3.2, after all. The VM series of operating systems is designed exclusively for mainframes, and works by giving every user their own dedicated virtual machine running on top of the Control Program, the hypervisor. Inside this virtual machine the user can run a wide variety of operating systems, from the simple, single-user classics like IBM's Conversational Monitor System, to more complex systems like Linux or AIX. Early versions of VM were released as open source and are now in the public domain, and enthusiasts have continued to build upon it and expand it, with the latest incarnations being the VM/370 Community Edition releases. They contain the Control Program and Conversational Monitor System, augmented by various fixes, improvements, and other additions. You can run VM in an emulator like Hercules, and continue on from there - but what, exactly, can you do with it? That's where Fun things to do with your VM/370 machine comes in. This article will give you an introduction to the system, and a number of first and later steps you can take while exploring this probably alien environment. If you've always dreamt of using an early IBM mainframe, this is probably the easiest way to do so, because buying one is a really, really bad idea.

18 Jan 2026 10:47am GMT

ChaosBSD is a fork of FreeBSD. It exists because upstream cannot, and should not, accept broken drivers, half-working hardware, vendor trash, or speculative hacks. We can. ↫ ChaosBSD GitHub page This is an excellent approach to testing drivers that simply aren't even remotely ready to be included in FreeBSD-proper. It should be obvious that this is not, in any way, meant to be used as a production operating system, as it will contain things that are broken and incomplete on purpose. The name's also pretty great.

17 Jan 2026 10:18pm GMT

This is a book intended to teach someone the Java language, from scratch. You will find that the content makes heavy use of recently released and, for the moment, preview features. This is intentional as much of the topic ordering doesn't work without at least Java 21. ↫ Modern Java GitHub page Some light reading for the weekend. This sure is one hell of a detailed book.

17 Jan 2026 10:13pm GMT

Since Wayland is still quite new to a lot of people, it's often difficult to figure out which features the Wayland compositor you're using actually supports. While the Wayland Explorer is a great way to browse through the various protocols and their status in various compositors, there's now an easier way. The Wayland protocols table makes it very easy to see what your favourite compositor supports, which compositors support the protocol you really want supported before leaving X11 behind, and much more. Roughly speaking, there's a set of stable core Wayland protocols, as well as a slew of unstable core Wayland protocols that are still in development, but may already be supported by various compositors. On top of that, compositors themselves also have a ton of protocols they themselves introduced and support, but which aren't supported by anything else - yet, as they may be picked up by other compositors and eventually become part of Wayland's core protocols. Keeping tabs on specific protocols and their support status is mostly only interesting for developers and people with very specific needs, since mature compositors provide a complete set of features most users never have to worry about. Still, that doesn't mean there aren't really cool features cooking, nor does it mean that one specific accessibility-related protocol isn't incredibly important to keep track of. These websites provide an easy way to do so.

16 Jan 2026 10:08pm GMT

Excellent news for OpenBSD users who are tied to macOS: you can now run OpenBSD using Apple's Hypervisor. Following a recent series of commits by Helg Bredow and Stefan Fritsch, OpenBSD/arm64 now works as a guest operating system under the Apple Hypervisor. ↫ Peter N. M. Hansteen at the OpenBSD Journal If you have an M1 or M2 Mac and want to get rid of macOS entirely, OpenBSD can be run on those machines natively, too.

16 Jan 2026 8:20pm GMT

Speaking of NixOS' use of 9P, what if you want to, for whatever inexplicable reason, use macOS, but make it immutable? Immutable Linux distributions are getting a lot of attention lately, and similar concepts are used by Android and iOS, so it makes sense for people stuck on macOS to want similar functionality. Apple doesn't offer anything to make this happen, but of course, there's always Nix. And I literally do mean always. Only try out Nix if you're willing to first be sucked into a pit of despair and madness before coming out enlightened on the other end - I managed to only narrowly avoid this very thing happening to me last year, so be advised. Nix is no laughing matter. Anyway, yes, you can use Nix to make macOS immutable. But managing a good working environment on macOS has long been a game of "hope for the best." We've all been there: a curl | sh here, a manual brew install there, and six months later, you're staring at a broken PATH and a Python environment that seems to have developed its own consciousness. I've spent a lot of time recently moving my entire workflow into a declarative system using nix. From my zsh setup to my odin toolchain, here is why the transition from the imperative world of Homebrew to the immutable world of nix-darwin has been both a revelation and a fight. ↫ Carette Antonin Of course it's been a fight - it's Nix, after all - but it's quite impressive and awesome that Nix can be used in this way. I would rather discover what electricity from light sockets tastes like than descend into this particular flavour of Nix madness, but if you're really sick of macOS being a pile of trash for - among a lot of other things - homebrew and similar bolted-on systems held together by duct tape and spit, this might be a solution for you.

16 Jan 2026 12:09am GMT

If you're only even remotely aware of the operating system Plan 9, you'll most likely know that it takes the UNIX concept of "everything is a file" to the absolute extreme. In order to make sure all these files - and thus the components of Plan 9 - can properly communicate with one another, there's 9P, or the Plan 9 Filesystem Protocol. Several Plan 9 applications are 9P file servers, for instance, and even things like windows are files. It's a lot more complicated than this, of course, but that's not relevant right now. Since Plan 9 wasn't exactly a smashing success that took the operating system world by storm, you might not be aware that 9P is actually implemented in a few odd places. My favourite is how Microsoft turned to 9P for a crucial feature of its Windows Subsystem for Linux: accessing files inside a Linux VM running on Windows. To put it briefly: a 9P protocol file server facilitates file related requests, with Windows acting as the client. We've modified the WSL init daemon to initiate a 9P server. This server contains protocols that support Linux metadata, including permissions. A Windows service and driver that act as the client and talks to the 9P server (which is running inside of a WSL instance). Client and server communicate over AF_UNIX sockets, since WSL allows interop between a Windows application and a Linux application using AF_UNIX as described in this post. ↫ Craig Loewen at Microsoft's Dev Blogs This implementation is still around today, so if you're using Windows Subsystem for Linux, you're using a little bit of Plan 9 as glue to make it all come together. Similarly, if you're using QEMU and sharing files between the host and a VM through the VirtFS driver, you're also using 9P. Both NixOS and GNU Guix use 9P when they build themselves inside a virtual machine, too, and there's probably a few other places where you can run into 9P. I don't know, I thought this was interesting.

15 Jan 2026 11:53pm GMT

Are you a normal person and thus sick of all the nonsensical, non-browser stuff browser makers keep adding to your browser, but for whatever reason you don't want to or cannot switch to one of the forks of your browser of choice? Just the Browser helps you remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from desktop web browsers. The goal is to give you "just the browser" and nothing else, using hidden settings in web browsers intended for companies and other organizations. This project includes configuration files for popular web browsers, documentation for installing and modifying them, and easy installation scripts. Everything is open-source on GitHub. ↫ Just The Browser's website It comes in the form of scripts for Windows, Linux, or macOS, and can be used for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox. It's all open source so you can check the scripts for yourself, but there are also manual guides for each browser if you're not too keen on running an unknown script. The changes won't be erased by updates, unless the specific settings and configuration flags used are actually removed or altered by the browser makers. That's all there's to it - a very straightforward tool.

14 Jan 2026 12:42am GMT

Despite December being the holiday month, Haiku's developers got a lot of things done. A welcome addition for those of us who regularly install Haiku on EFI systems is a tool in the installer that will copy the EFI loader to the EFI system partition, so fewer manual steps are needed on EFI systems. Support for touchpads from Elantech has also been improved, and the FreeBSD driver compatibility layer and all of its Ethernet and WiFi drivers have been updated to match the recent FreeBSD 15 release. Of course, there's also the usual long list of smaller fixes, improvements, and changes. As for a new release milestone, beta 6 seems to be on the way. Not quite. There has been some discussion on the mailing list as the ticket list gets smaller, but there's still at least some more regressions that need to be fixed. But it looks like we'll be starting the release process in the next month or two, most likely… ↫ Haiku's December 2025 activity report To be fair, though, Haiku's nightly releases are more than able to serve their duties, and waiting for a specific release if you're interested in trying out Haiku is really not needed. Just grab the latest nightly, follow the installation instructions, and you're good to go. The operating system supports updating itself, so you'll most likely won't need to reinstall nightlies all the time.

14 Jan 2026 12:30am GMT

It's no secret that the Windows 95 installer uses a heavily stripped-down Windows 3.10 runtime, but what can you actually do with it? How far can you take this runtime? Can it run Photoshop? It is a long-standing tradition for Microsoft to use a runtime copy of Windows as a part of Windows Setup. But the copy is so stripped-down, it cannot run anything but the setup program (winsetup.bin). OR IS IT? A mini-challenge for myself: create a semi-working desktop only based on runtime Windows 3.10 shipped with Windows 95 installer but not using any other Microsoft products. ↫ Nina Kalinina A crucial limitation here is that Kalinina is not allowing herself to use any additional Microsoft products, so the easy route of just copying missing DLLs and other files from a Windows 95 disk or whatever is not available to her; she has to source any needed files from other sources. This may seem impossible, but during those days, tons of Windows (and even DOS) applications would ship with various Microsoft DLLs included, so there are definitely places to get Windows DLLs that aren't coming directly from Microsoft. As an example, since there's no shell of any kind included in the stripped-down Windows 3.10 runtime, Kalinina tried Calmira and WinBar, which won't work without a few DLLs. Where to get them if you can't get them straight from Microsoft? Well, it turns out programs compiled with later version of MSVC would include several of these needed DLLs, and AutoCad R12 was one of them. WinBar would now start and work, and while Calmira would install, it didn't work because it needs the Windows Multimedia Subsystem, which don't seem to be included in anything non-Microsoft. It turns out you can take this approach remarkably far. Things like Calculator and Notepad will work, but Pain or Paintbrush will not. Larger, more complex applications work too - Photoshop 2.5.1 works, as does Netscape, but without any networking stack, it's a little bit moot. Even Calmira XP eventually runs, as some needed DLLs are found inside "Mom For Windows 2.0", at which point the installation starts to look and feel a lot like a regular Windows 3.x installation, minus things like settings panels and a bunch of default applications. Is this useful? Probably not, but who cares - it's an awesome trick, and that alone makes it a worthwhile effort.

13 Jan 2026 9:00pm GMT