fidzu : Operating Systems

Wherever in the world you go, the smartphone landscape is dominated by Android and iOS, and while this has always been problematic, recent events have made the dependency on two American tech giants for what is probably our most personal computing device even more problematic than it already was. We use our smartphones to keep our secrets, do our banking, interact with our governments, share our deepest thoughts with our friends and family, and a whole lot more. Having this invaluable tool the vast majority of us depend on tied entirely to Google and Apple is not just bad for the market, it's also a downright threat to the national security of anyone not living in the US. Here in Europe, there's been an awakening lately, with governments, companies, and people alike finally realising that having our entire digital infrastructure controlled by foreign, adversarial interests is a terrible idea. Sadly, breaking free from our Android and iOS chains is not so easy. The most ideal solution would be a truly open source alternative smartphone operating system, but that's a hard sell for 99.9% of smartphone users who need the applications required to do their finances, talk to their friends, or interact with their governments. The cold and harsh truth is that with very few exceptions, these applications simply do not (yet) exist for smartphone operating systems that aren't Android or iOS. The only viable alternative at this point in time is to take whatever's left of the Android Open Source Project, remove anything that ties it to Google and its services, fill in the gaps with alternative services and applications, and sell it as a Google-free or de-Googled Android platform. There's several projects in this space, and with Europe drunkenly stumbling out of the technological hole it dug itself into, it's no surprise that two of the more popular alternatives to Apple or Google-controlled smartphones come from Europe (and from the same country, no less). Today, we're taking a look at one of these: iodéOS. Iodé is a company based in Toulouse, France, which focuses on offering a Google-free Android called iodéOS, either preinstalled on phones you can buy, or as a ROM you can install yourself on supported devices. As a company, iodé makes its money through selling devices with iodéOS preinstalled, through an optional premium subscription (that I didn't take a look at), and through donations, and all of their code is published as open source on their Gitlab instance hosted in France. Iodé loaned me a Fairphone 6 with iodéOS preinstalled, one of he many smartphones and tablets they sell through their online store for review. This isn't going to be an Android review; you already know what Android is like, and there's no need for me to rehash any of that. Instead, I want to focus on the things that make using de-Googled Android different from using Google Android. Don't be afraid of microG There are various ways to go about making a de-Googled Android variant, and iodéOS chose the LineageOS route, with microG installed on top. For those unaware, microG is a project which aims to replace the various proprietary parts of Google Play Services, required by many Android applications, with open source reimplementations. While it doesn't offer 100% compatibility, it works exceptionally well, and you'll be hard-pressed to find applications just don't work at all with microG. IodéOS updates its microG installation through a dedicated F-Droid repository that's obviously enabled by default, so you don't have to do anything yourself. Using microG instead of Google Play Services doesn't mean you have to rely solely on whatever's available in F-Droid, since there are a variety of alternative Play Store frontends available. IodéOS ships with the Aurora Store, which is an open-source frontend to the Play Store that can be used with or without a Google account. If you use it with your Google account, you'll gain access to whatever applications you already own, including paid ones, but you won't be able to buy applications inside Aurora. You can, however, buy an application on the Play Store website, after which it will show up in Aurora as well, assuming you're logged in with the same account. Aurora also comes with something something called FakeStore, which is sadly an important part of the puzzle; it's a stub application that has the same package name as the real Play Store. Some applications check whether the Play Store is available before working properly, so this is sadly needed to ensure maximum compatibility. The only issue I sometimes ran into with Aurora is that it would load up its listings, but then any application I tapped on said it was unavailable. When this happened, reloading the Aurora application always fixed the issue. Annoying, but not gamebreaking. A few things did not work for me when using microG on iodéOS, and they're exactly the things you'd expect not to work. If you have a WearOS device, you're out of luck; WearOS devices simply do not work when using microG, but there is a bounty to add support for it. If you want to use a smartwatch with iodéOS, there are various options available, such as Garmin devices, which is what I used during my testing and it worked flawlessly. Another feature from "regular" Android that simply won't work is RCS. There's only one RCS client available on Android, Google Messages, and as you can imagine, Google is in no rush to allow devices without Google Play Services to register for and use RCS messaging. Tying to register with Google Messages will fail, and there are no other RCS clients available (save for a few China and India-specific clients). There's a microG bounty for this, too, but no luck so far. Of course, there are countless messaging platforms that work just fine on iodéOS - regular SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, and so on - and especially if you're European, it's unlikely RCS support matters to you at all. I just don't

05 Jul 2026 9:29pm GMT

Colour me positively surprised, as I had no idea Alpha emulation had progressed this much. As you might know, I'm involved a bit in the OpenVMS community and the Alpha emulation side via AXPBox. AXPBox (github) is a fork of the es40 alpha emulator by Camiel Vanderhoeven (who is now Chief Architect at VSI, the company that makes OpenVMS, for x86 nowdays). There have been many forks of es40 in the past and recently a new one has popped up with some great new features. Like speedups via a JIT compiler, S3 graphics port from MAME and ARC support, resulting in the ability to run Windows 2000 for the DEC Alpha. ↫ Remy van Elst Not only can you run the unreleased Alpha version of Windows 2000 on this forked emulator, it's also capable of running OpenVMS and Tru64 UNIX. In fact, both OpenVMS and Tru64 can run their full X11 CDE desktops on the emulator as well, which is incredibly cool and a huge milestone. As the name of the original emulator implies, it's emulating an AlphaServer Es40 from the turn of the century, which should be fast enough for enthusiast use. The last AlphaStation ever made, the ES47, is still very high on my list of computers I desperately want but will never have - they are incredibly rare, and whenever they do come up for sale, incredibly expensive. If you have one, consider yourself lucky, and please, write about it! Tell the world!

05 Jul 2026 8:27pm GMT

LineageOS, the de-Googled Android ROM that serves as the backbone for pretty much the entire custom Android ROM community, has published an article about what the Android developer verification changes mean for them. I really like the factual tone of their article, especially this part: Critics such as F-Droid, EFF, and "Keep Android Open" point out that this also happens to route every install path through Google-controlled infrastructure, hands Google a kill switch over any app or developer worldwide, and arrives shortly after Google's antitrust lawsuits. Both things can be true at once: real fraud is a problem and the restriction of developers is a convenient side effect of solving it this way - and we're not in a position to pretend we know Google's internal reasoning. We're just telling you what they've said and what it changes; you can weigh the "why" yourself. ↫ Nolen Johnson on the LineageOS website For LineageOS, these new verification measures don't really mean much, as they don't affect the project's work or software. The developer verification infrastructure is a separate application that is part of Google Mobile Services, and LineageOS does not ship GMS nor does it ever intend to. As such, they don't have to do anything, as this won't be an issue unless LineageOS users choose to install a GApps package that happens to include the developer verification infrastructure. If Google were to move the developer verification infrastructure into Play Services in the future, LineageOS makes it clear they'll disable it globally, as they have done with a number of other "annoying Play Services-provided over-the-air update implementations". There really isn't much more they can do; the rest is up to users and projects that use LineageOS as their base.

05 Jul 2026 8:11pm GMT

The Nintendo Entertainment System. Is it the platonic ideal of an 8-bit video game system? Well, only because it's so prominent and successful- it's actually kind of an oddball in its expandability and design. But there's something else about it. The picture is a bit… wobbly. Well, over composite video anyway. Let's dig in and learn a little big more about the nitty-gritty of composite video. ↫ Nicole Branagan As usual, the information density in this article by Branagan is kind of remarkable, especially when you consider it never overwhelms you. Such a great read.

05 Jul 2026 7:56pm GMT

A fairly big moment for the ReactOS project: it has just received its very first system call from NT6. The system call that has been added is NtGetCurrentProcessorNumberEx, which is used for returning the processor number of the logical processor that a caller is running on. It's unclear how long it will take ReactOS to become compatible with Windows Vista software, but it took Microsoft around half a decade to develop Vista after the release of XP and marked a major upgrade, even if it didn't land well with users at the time. ↫ Paul Hill at Neowin It's a milestone for sure, but not one that's going to make a huge difference for ReactOS at this moment in time. Still, it's a sign of things to come, even if the very nature of the ReactOS project means that whatever things are coming tend to take a while to arrive.

03 Jul 2026 9:38pm GMT

For how often people invoke it, the concept of "hell" in Christianity is remarkably vague and nebulous, as both the Old and New Testament barely go into detail about the concept. As such, I'm glad Microsoft has now given us a clear vision of hell and what, exactly, it looks like, ending centuries of denominational disagreements. Microsoft is currently selling the idea of Windows and Copilot as two separate things: an OS and an assistant riding along on top of it. However, a leaked video shows Project Aion, an internal prototype where Copilot doesn't just sit inside Windows, it becomes Windows, swallowing the Start menu, the taskbar, and three decades of desktop conventions in the process. The footage is reportedly two years old, so Aion is most likely dead by now. But it's the clearest look yet at how far Microsoft was willing to take its agentic AI ambitions. ↫ Alfonso Maruccia at Techspot Everything about this is dreadful. Obviously replacing the entire shell with "AI" nonsense is the main crime against usability here, but on top of that, this new shell is all just websites, all the way down, so everything is slow and stuttery. Since this runs on something called "Win3", which appears to be a very minimal, stripped-down version of Windows intended to only run the Edge browser engine, you can't run Win32 applications. If you do try to run a Win32 application, it will load the application in a remote virtual machine running in the cloud, which I;m sure does wonder for performance, responsiveness, and latency. We can all thank the lord this project is two years old and most likely cancelled by now, but we have no way of knowing if Microsoft is still intending for this to be the future direction of Windows. Since people don't want to use "AI" of their own volition, it only makes sense in the technology industry's sick, twisted mind to force people into using "AI" with efforts like this. Consent has never been Silicon Valley's strength, after all. At the time of writing, Microsoft is 225 billion dollars in the red on "AI", so I wouldn't be surprised if attempts to replace the regular Explorer shell with something "AI"-based is still very much on the table in Redmond.

03 Jul 2026 12:56pm GMT

NetBSD is the only BSD without a Vulkan stack (Mesa and Lavapipe), but that's about to change. The effort to bring Vulkan to NetBSD is now in beta, with prebuilt binaries coming soon. Mesa configures, compiles, links, installs, and registers the Lavapipe software Vulkan driver on NetBSD 10.1 amd64, against LLVM 19.1.7. The driver (libvulkan_lvp.so, ~17 MB) installs into /usr/pkg/lib, and its ICD manifest (advertising Vulkan API 1.4) installs into /usr/pkg/share/vulkan/icd.d/, so a Vulkan loader on the system can discover it. ldd resolves every dependency cleanly. The entire process - environment setup, dependency builds, the Mesa build, and installation - is automated end to end and reproducible on a fresh install. ↫ vulkan-netbsd GitHub page It's important to note that the next step in the process is to port the Vulkan loader, which is required to actually run Vulkan applications. This entire effort is still ongoing and seems to be handled mostly by Dean Howell alone, so expect breakage and incomplete documentation as development progresses. Still, this is a hugely important effort, and seeing it this far along is great news.

03 Jul 2026 12:10pm GMT

EveryMac turned 30. On July 2, 1996, EveryMac.com launched. Thirty years is a long time - and a great deal has changed since then - but what has not changed is that EveryMac.com has been there to provide you with detailed info on every Mac from the original 128k to the current line. Thank you very much for your support through the years. ↫ EveryMac news item I thought OSNews was pretty unique with its founding in 1997, so it's great to see another enthusiast's website as old as ours. Amazing company to be in, too - EveryMac is an indispensable, tirelessly maintained, and stupidly accurate resource that I use countless times each year. Here's to another 30 years.

03 Jul 2026 12:03pm GMT

The clock is ticking for Android as a (somewhat) open platform. If you are running Android 8 or higher, a virus has been installed on your device and is silently awaiting remote activation. Over the past few months, devices around the world have been infected with this novel strain, with as many as 4 billion Android handsets and tablets estimated to have already been contaminated, meaning that around half of all humanity may be at risk from this threat. Disguising itself as the innocuously-titled "Android Developer Verifier" (ADV) process, this trojan horse runs surreptitiously in the background as a system service with full root privileges, quietly awaiting an activation signal. The service cannot be blocked, disabled, or removed. Unlike a commonplace bit of malware, this extraordinary strain won't be detected and neutralized by Play Protect (the malware scanning and remediation service that is installed on all Android Certified devices). In fact, Play Protect is itself the vector through which this virus is transmitted and installed. That is because it is Google themselves who is propagating ADV. And once activated, this malevolent process has exactly one goal: to block you from running software by developers who haven't been approved centrally by Google. ↫ The F-Droid news website If nobody steps up, if no regulator takes on Google in this matter, we could very well be looking at the end of F-Droid and similar open source application repositories on Android. I use F-Droid, and in fact, one of the most important and most-used application on my Pixel 10 Pro comes from F-Droid: Fennec. This Firefox fork is not available through any Google-sanctioned means, and I could just wake up one day and have the browser on what is supposed to be my phone stop working. Age verification, tying crucial services to iOS and Google Android, killing the ability to install your own software on your phone, purposefully making people hopelessly addicted to and dependent on "AI", and so much more - we're facing a multi-pronged attack designed to beat us into submission and give up on the idea of Free computing. I have to admit I've lost all hope we'll be able to win this battle, as the combined interests of technology megacorporations and our own governments are just too powerful to fight. I feel like we're living in the computing end times.

02 Jul 2026 11:20pm GMT

What if you need to do very low-level testing involving the very guts of Windows NT, but don't need most of the userland that sits on top? In fact, what if that userland only slows you down and complicates the work you're trying to do? The solution is Windows PE (Windows Preinstallation Environment). It is an official, stripped-down environment distributed with every Windows ISO image. It runs entirely in RAM, requires as little as 512 MB of memory, and lacks support for DirectX, the PowerShell subsystem, or the standard graphical shell (Explorer). Booting by default with NT AUTHORITY\\SYSTEM privileges makes it an ideal test harness for both of these tasks. The following analysis focuses on the low-level mechanisms of WinPE, as well as BCD and QEMU modifications that allow transforming this system into an ultra-fast, idempotent testing environment. ↫ Piotr Bednarski Now, the kind of work Bednarski does isn't the most common of tasks, but I've often wondered just how far you can get by bolting on whatever WinPE will allow you to. There were various unofficial third-party tools that built Windows live CDs based on WinPE, but I think most of those have died out by now. If you look hard enough, you can also find some other utilities people made for WinPE, including even some rudimentary web browsers. Regarding web browsers, modern efforts seem to run into issues. WinPE is not really meant for any advanced functionality, but I really do wonder how capable you can make it without turning it into regular Windows.

02 Jul 2026 10:57pm GMT

M/PC is a concatenative operating system for Varvara, inspired by Openfirmware, designed to manage files on system without a file browser. It uses the postfix notation, meaning that the function success their operands. ↫ M/PC website I'm not going to pretend to really understand what any of this means.

02 Jul 2026 10:33pm GMT

Recently, there has been a surge in slopcoded new/hobby "operating systems". Such slopcoded projects - which, due to the nature of "AI" tools, effectively consist of stolen code - will not be featured on OSNews and submitting them is fruitless. Other websites may choose to employ lower standards, as is their prerogative, but OSNews will not. I obviously cannot guarantee nothing will ever slip through the cracks, but I will take utmost care to ensure OSNews remains free of these so-called "sloperating systems". Plagiarism, license-washing, and code theft have no place in the world of enthusiast and hobby operating systems.

01 Jul 2026 10:27pm GMT

European governments are rolling out digital identity wallets, which are to be used by citizens to access services, and to verify their age online. As reported by Follow the Money and Android Authority, there is a serious problem with this: these wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple. These are known as Google Play Integrity API, and Apple's Managed Device Attestation. Such safety services (known as "remote attestation") are used to ensure that wallet apps run on hardware that is not tampered with. In this article we explain why the EU-wallet case is part of a bigger problem: by embedding these safety services in public infrastructure, Europe risks making society dependent on private companies while serving their corporate interests. ↫ Danny Lämmerhirt Setting aside the age verification nonsense, the fact that some European government are tying their identification services to iOS and Google Android is absolutely bonkers, especially in this day and age. There's endless talk about reducing European dependence on the American tech giants who seem all too eager to do roll over when the Trump regime so much as glances in their general direction, and yet, they seem to want to effectively force us citizens to use American tech products. Essential online tools, like banking, government services, communication services, digital driver's licenses, and more, should not require the use of iOS or Google Android.

01 Jul 2026 10:21pm GMT

There's a lot you can say about macOS, but one thing Apple used to be incredibly good at were making beautifully crafted, detailed icons. As with almost every other aspect of macOS, this deteriorated sharply over the years, with the recent macOS releases with Liquid Glass being an absolute low point. Not only have they become bland and featureless, Apple also started forcing every icons to have the exact same rounded-rectangle shape, making them even harder to distinguish from one another. Rogue Amoeba, a company with a long history of developing applications with beautiful iconography, published a blog post pleading Apple to go back to proper icon design. With last year's release of MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple made a mess of app icons. In the first betas of MacOS 27 (Golden Gate), however, there are signs of a turnaround. We're urging Apple to continue making improvements, by restoring the ability for MacOS app icons to have distinct shapes. ↫ Paul Kafasis at the Rogue Amoeba blog I really hope Apple will turn its icon ship around.

01 Jul 2026 10:13pm GMT

If you have a Sega Mega Drive, you obviously want to run Linux on it. That's something you can do now. You do need to have an EverDrive, but don't worry, the port in question contains a custom fork of Qemu for those of us that don't. I don't know what else to say, other than I wonder why nobody did this sooner.

01 Jul 2026 6:59pm GMT

There's something poetic about the World Cup taking place in North America while Microsoft keeps scoring own goals like this. Microsoft updated its Surface buying guide to describe 8GB RAM as "great for everyday use like browsing, streaming, schoolwork, and productivity apps." A companion FAQ adds that 16GB or more is what unlocks Copilot+ PC features. No acknowledgment that, for two years, Microsoft was the loudest voice telling everyone that 16GB was non-negotiable for a good Windows 11 experience. What makes this infuriating is that Microsoft is one of the biggest reasons why the RAM situation got so bad in the first place. ↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest This industry is a joke.

29 Jun 2026 11:33pm GMT