fidzu : Operating Systems

BlueOS kernel is written in Rust, featuring security, lightweight, and generality. It is compatible with POSIX interfaces and supports Rust's standard library. ↫ BlueOS kernel GitHub page This is the kernel for the BlueOS operating system, developed by Vivo, a Chinese consumer electronics company. Sadly, all of the websites and documentation for BlueOS are written in Mandarin, making it virtually impossible to really get a grip on what they're developing, and I certainly don't trust Google Translate or whatever enough to give me a proper, trustworthy, and accurate translation. I hope the company either hires some translators, or perhaps enthusiasts with the right skillset can provide some more insight over the coming years. It seems similar to Huawei's HarmonyOS Next, and it's apparently shipping on one of Vivo's smartwatches.

30 Jul 2025 7:10pm GMT

Last week-end, I was invited to the UNIX Social Camp in Dijon, France to talk about the reasons I still use OpenBSD these days and why should others do so; or at least, have a look at OpenBSD. ↫ Joel Carnat Here's my short pitch as to why you should use OpenBSD: it's the closest you'll get to a traditional, classic UNIX, while still using a modern and maintained operating system. OpenBSD just makes sense, and every time I run into some issue or I want to know how something in OpenBSD works, the answers always make me go "well that makes sense". That's rare in modern computing, and we need to cherish it.

30 Jul 2025 6:57pm GMT

Are you still using LinkedIn, the website where failed tech startup entrepreneurs go to die and "AI" influencers try to sell you on the latest version of the chatbot Florpium like a Utah mom trying to sell leggings that are totally not an MLM? If you are, and the other ten thousand reasons not to use the website incarnation of an ad for a personal injury lawyer along I-11 in Henderson, Nevada, weren't enough, Microsoft just handed you another one. LinkedIn removed transgender-related protections from its policy on hateful and derogatory content. The platform no longer lists "misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals" as examples of prohibited conduct. While "content that attacks, denigrates, intimidates, dehumanizes, incites or threatens hatred, violence, prejudicial or discriminatory action" is still considered hateful, addressing a person by a gender and name they ask not be designated by is not anymore. Similarly, the platform removed "race or gender identity" from its examples of inherent traits for which negative comments are considered harassment. That qualification of harassment is now kept only for behaviour that is actively "disparaging another member's perceived gender", not mentioning race or gender identity anymore. ↫ Matti Schneider at the Open Terms Archive Microsoft joined the chorus of pathetic, spineless US tech companies bowing to far-right extremism long ago, and this is just another sign that Microsoft, like so many other US tech companies, is pulling an IBM. They did learn from the best, after all, and it doesn't surprise me one bit that all of these CEOs click their heels like the good little brownshirts that they are. Anyway, LinkedIn has no value to anyone with even a gram of self-respect, and Microsoft's other products are such utter trash they basically have to make you upgrade at the barrel of a gun. For those using their products - do you hate yourself that much? You deserve so much more.

30 Jul 2025 6:47pm GMT

Adjusted for the inevitable progress of time, the Common Desktop Environment or CDE is the best desktop environment of all time, and no, I will not be taking question at this time. OpenBSD wasn't yet graced by CDE's presence, but this is currently changing as the first commit for porting CDE to OpenBSD has appeared. It's still rough around the edges and very slightly tested. I wouldn't use is as a daily driver, it's old unsecure code but it's fun if you want to bring back memories. ↫ Antoine at the openbsd-ports mailing list On top of that, this being the initial commit also means there's probably bugs and other issues lurking in the code, so caution is definitely advised.

30 Jul 2025 10:55am GMT

Microsoft is finally changing the way Task Manager reports CPU utilisation to make it consistent across the different tabs. So apparently this has been gradually rolling out to the 34 different Windows 11 beta dev preview testing alpha release candidate service pack 4 channels since early this year, but then stopped the roll-out to fix some issues. These issues seem fixed now, as the roll-out restarted this week. It"s an important change that I think y'all will care about. From the original announcement of the change back in February: We are beginning to roll out a change to the way Task Manager calculates CPU utilization for the Processes, Performance, and Users pages. Task Manager will now use the standard metrics to display CPU workload consistently across all pages and aligning with industry standards and third-party tools. For backward compatibility, a new optional column called CPU Utility is available (hidden by default) on the Details tab showing the previous CPU value used on the Processes page. ↫ Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc at the Windows Blogs Before this change, Task Manager's Processes tab didn't take the number of processor cores into account when calculating PCU usage, so you could see a process at 100% CPU usage even if it was only using one core. These new changes standardise CPU usage reporting across all tabs, taking the number of CPU cores into account properly. Rejoice.

30 Jul 2025 10:45am GMT

RISC-V has been supported in the upstream Linux kernel since 2017. But without a common hardware baseline, ensuring compatibility across builds and distros hasn't been easy. The ecosystem was in need of a compelling, clearly defined hardware target - something both software and hardware teams could rally around to produce silicon capable of running stable, enterprise-grade software. This target arrived in October 2024 with the ratification of the application-class RVA23 Profile - RISC-V-speak for a baseline configuration, similar to microarchitecture feature levels in x86. The culmination of years of progress, RVA23 brings together the work done to shape the ISA and standardize key extensions such as vector, bit manipulation and hypervisor. ↫ James De Vile at RISC-V International's blog Such a standard, stable baseline is incredibly welcome, and RISC-V working to have everything part of the upstream Linux kernel is crucial. Having to deal with out-of-tree patches and drivers and specific builds for specific boards is a nightmare - look at Linux on ARM - and hinders adoption of RISC-V.

30 Jul 2025 10:21am GMT

This release includes some Ext4 performance improvements; XFS support for large atomic writes; support for USB audio offload; support for zero-copy send TCP payloads from DMABUF memory; various futex improvements; initial support for Intel Trusted Domain Extensions; automatic weighted interleaved memory allocation policy; support for sending coredumps over an AF_UNIX socket, and make easier to build your kernel optimized for your local CPU. As always, there are many other features, new drivers, improvements and fixes. ↫ KernelNewbies: Linux 6.16 You'll get it eventually, usually when the first few point releases iron out any troubling issues.

28 Jul 2025 7:32pm GMT

The European Union is in the process of testing an age-verification application, which people can use to verify their age in a privacy-preserving manner (in theory, of course). There's countless important discussions to be had about whether or not age verification, privacy-preserving or not, is even something we should want, but that's a topic for another time and for people smarter than I. For now, several member states are currently testing the application on a voluntary basis, and the application itself is open source, with the code hosted on GitHub. Aside from the obvious concerns about just how private such an application can even be, and concerns about whether or not we should even want something like this, there's another major problem: the application intends to make use of and require application and device verification by using the proprietary tools for such functionality from Google and Apple, built into Android and iOS, respectively. Listed as future "features": App and device verification based on Google Play Integrity API and Apple App Attestation ↫ The application's GitHub page This is a massive problem. For reasons that should be obvious to anyone with at least six functioning neurons, the European Union, as well as countless other countries, are trying to reduce their dependency on US technology companies. As such, it's indefensible to then require anyone who needs to use age verification in the European Union to use an application that will only work on Google-approved Android devices and even then, only when installed from the Google Play Store, with the only alternative being, of all things, Apple's iOS. This means that the EU will require anyone who needs age verification to have either a Google or an Apple account, and can only use Google-approved Android or iOS. This application would not work on, say, GrapheneOS or any other non-Google-approved Android ROM - in fact, even if you were to compile the application yourself, you wouldn't be able to actually use it because it wouldn't be installed from the Google Play Store. Of course, any mobile operating other than Android or iOS need not apply either. The danger of tying age verification to Google and Apple did not go by unnoticed, and a GitHub issue raised the issue a few weeks ago. I would like to strongly urge to abandon this plan. Requiring a dependency on American tech giants for age verification further deepens the EU's dependency on America and the USA's control over the internet. Especially in the current political climate I hope I do not have to explain how undesirable and dangerous that is. ↫ TheLastProject in the GitHub issue The comment thread attached to the issue is long, but during the two weeks since the issue was raised, nobody from the application's team has answered or even acknowledged people's concerns, which doesn't exactly inspire confidence in this being taken seriously. I just hope that with this entire project being in the early testing phases, at least someone manages to realise tying this to Google and Apple is one of the dumbest ideas in a long, long time.

28 Jul 2025 6:12pm GMT

Have a Samsung phone (outside of the United States), and want to unlock the bootloader? Well, soon you won't be able to do so anymore, as Samsung seems to be removing this option from their phones - including already sold models being upgraded to One UI 8. Bootloader unlocking is a popular way to breathe new life into older devices, by loading unofficial software onto a device, like custom ROMs, gaining root access, custom kernels, etc. This option will be taken away from users with One UI 8. This means not only is the OEM Unlock not visible in Settings anymore, but the bootloader doesn't even contain any of the code required to unlock itself. This means a workaround to brute force it open is not possible at all, unless Samsung updates the bootloader to add this logic back in. ↫ Josh Skinner at SammyGuru And so, the ongoing process of locking down Android to a point where it becomes nigh-on indistinguishable from iOS' locked-down, anti-user nature continues unabated. Samsung is the default choice for Android users in a lot of places around the world, and seeing them, too move ever closer to fully locking down their phones is terrible news for consumers. We should be striving for less restrictive computing, not more. Combined with persistent rumours that Google is looking into effectively taking Android closed source, leaving only a stub AOSP behind, the future of Android as an least somewhat "open" platform looks quite grim indeed.

28 Jul 2025 12:01pm GMT

Becoming friendlier to desktop users is one of the goals of the FreeBSD project at the moment, as we recently saw with the new ability to install a full KDE Plasma desktop environment during FreeBSD's initial installation. This is just one small piece of a larger effort, though, to improve, modernise, and possibly even replace the current FreeBSD installer entirely. As such, Pierre Pronchery, a Security Engineer for the FreeBSD Foundation and member of their team as a Userland Software Developer, published a blog post today with more information around this effort. The article goes into great detail to compare the installation procedures of other operating systems to that of FreeBSD, and the conclusion is that FreeBSD is lagging behind in quite a few areas. Among other shortcomings, the FreeBSD installer has no support for different languages, very little accessibility features, no niceties like progress bars or lists of steps, and most notably, no graphical mode. Some of these are already being addressed. The current FreeBSD installer (a combination of bsddialog, bsdconfig, and bsdinstall) consists of a number of shell scripts with some small C programs here and there, and the downside of this is that this is really only suitable for creating very basic steps and user interfaces. As an example, Pronchery mentions values during network setup, like network mask, DNS server or gateway, can't be prepopulated with the most likely values, which puts quite a burden on the user. This specific issue is being worked on by one of the original creators of bsddialog, and the solution they settled on is adding Lua scripting, which would give developers an avenue to fix some of these shortcomings. As far as a possible graphical installer goes, Pronchery looked at the various options out there, both from the Linux world and the few graphical installers that exist for a few desktop-oriented FreeBSD distributions, but for a variety of reasons, none of them proved to be particularly suitable for FreeBSD. As such, Pronchery created a quick proof-of-concept for a graphical installer by implementing bsddialog as a GTK+ application which he calls gbsddialog. It's important to note that this proof-of-concept is not suitable for FreeBSD, as GTK+ is licensed under the LGPL, but it does illustrate that by "simply" reimplenting bsddialog using a graphical toolkit, you can get quite a long way to a usable FreeBSD installer that mimics the traditional installer quite well. The article covers a number of other topics, such as setting up a development environment to make it more straightforward and easier to work on the FreeBSD installer, as well as various steps that need to be taken to improve the accessibility of the installer. It concludes with a mention of the possibility of a complete rewrite of the installer, but such decisions are of course not made by a single person and require a lot more discussion and input. Regardless, the amount of work being done to improve FreeBSD for generic desktop use is exciting, as we need a viable, competitive alternative to that other open source desktop operating system.

25 Jul 2025 11:01pm GMT

This article will explain in details about the fundamental issues that held back accessibility in GNOME Calendar since the very beginning of its existence, the progress we have made with accessibility as well as our thought process in achieving it, and the now and future of accessibility in GNOME Calendar. ↫ Hari "TheEvilSkeleton" Rana You'd think it would be easy to make a "simple" calendar application properly accessible, but boy would you be wrong. In this article, Hari "TheEvilSkeleton" Rana details just how much work had to be done in order to turn GNOME Calendar from entirely inaccessible into an accessible application, and considering the length of the article, you can see it wasn't a weekend effort. There were apparently two primary reasons why making GNOME Calendar accessible was so hard. First, maximising GNOME Calendar's performance optimisations had significant negative implications for accessibility, and two, the effectively endless flexibility a calendar needs to offer makes it very difficult to create a usable accessibility tree. Both the events on a calendar as well as the zooming view of a calendar lead to a ton of complexity in creating this tree. GNOME Calendar uses a ton of custom widgets, and these all needed specific, individual solutions to be made accessible. As an example, the article mentions that while it was possible to use the keyboard to create an event, it was not possible to use the keyboard to select created events. Obviously, even this one shortcoming alone effectively makes the entire application inaccessible to anyone relying solely on keyboard navigation. The article goes into great detail how both the above widget and countless other widgets were changed to make them accessible to both the keyboard and screen reader. If you're working on GTK applications, or even applications using other toolkits, Rana's article is a great resource to start to understand the complexities and creative thinking needed to implement accessibility in software properly.

25 Jul 2025 8:50pm GMT

You've seen them everywhere, especially on older computer equipment: the classic 9-pin serial connector. You probably know it as a DB9. It's an iconic connector for makers, engineers, and anyone who's ever used an RS232 serial device. Here's a little secret, though: calling it a DB9 is technically wrong. The correct name is actually DE9. ↫ Christo-boots with the-pher at Sparkfun Electronics I honestly had no idea, and looking through the Wikipedia page, it seems this isn't the only common misnomer when it comes to D-sub connectors.

25 Jul 2025 8:30pm GMT

Last year the European Union introduced legislation to greatly improve the transparency around political advertising, specifically on social media and websites. The law mandates a few very basic requirements that tend to already apply to many other forms of political advertising, like clearly labeling who paid for the ad and how much was spent, which election or referendum they're about, and which targeting techniques were used. In addition, data used for targeting may only be collected from the person being targeted, and the person targeted has to give explicit permission specifically for political advertising. Furthermore, a whole slew of data types are not allowed to be used, such as data that may reveal ethnic or racial origin or political opinions. Lastly, an obvious one: starting three months before an election of referendum, third country sponsors are banned from advertising. It seems these rather basic, elementary requirements are too much for Facebook, as the company today announced it's going to stop offering political advertising in the European Union altogether in October of this year. The company cries on its blog: Despite extensive engagement with policymakers to share these concerns, we have been left with an impossible choice: alter our services to offer an advertising product which doesn't work for advertisers or users, without guarantee that our solution would be viewed as compliant, or stop allowing political, electoral and social issue ads in the EU. We're not the only company to have been forced into this position. Once again, we're seeing regulatory obligations effectively remove popular products and services from the market, reducing choice and competition. ↫ Sad Facebook As the link in Facebook's above lament points out, Google has also decided to stop offering political advertising in the European Union, for the exact same reasons. Facebook and Google are clearly trying to frame this as "bad", but the only people the removal of hyper-targeted political advertising is bad for are threat actors trying to unduly and illegally influence elections, and of course, for the bottom line of Facebook and Google. Neither of these are of any relevance to the proper execution of fair and free elections, and people all across the European Union will be better off without these two advertising giants providing an easy avenue for shady organisations and foreign entities to unduly influence our elections. Basically, cry me a river Zuck. Nobody likes you.

25 Jul 2025 2:18pm GMT

The Linux Terminal app that Google introduced earlier this year is one of the most exciting new features in Android, not for what it currently does but for what it can potentially do. The Terminal app lets you boot up an instance of Debian in a virtual machine, allowing you to run full-fledged Linux apps that aren't available on Android. Unfortunately, the current version of the Terminal app is limited to running command line programs, but that's set to change in the near future. In the new Android Canary build that Google released today, the Terminal app now lets you run graphical Linux apps. ↫ Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority It comes with Weston, the reference implementation of a Wayland compositor, allowing you to run a basic graphical environment and accompanying applications. It won't be long before you can take your Pixel, connect a display, and run KDE. Neat, but so many devils are in so many details here, and there's so many places where this can fall apart entirely if the wrong decisions are made.

24 Jul 2025 11:18pm GMT

I have stumbled upon the most Microsoft support document of all time. Support for the Microsoft Store installation type of Microsoft 365 Apps is ending. New feature updates will stop in October 2025 and security updates will end in December 2026. If you have the Microsoft Store installation type of Microsoft 365 Apps, you must upgrade to the Click-to-Run installation type for continuing new features and security updates. The following steps show how you can upgrade the installation type of Microsoft 365 products on a PC from the Microsoft Store to Click-to-Run. ↫ End of support for the Microsoft Store installation type of Microsoft 365 Apps There is so much to unpack here. First, if you're not neck-deep in Microsoft lore, you might not even know what Microsoft 365 Apps even are. Remember Office 365, the subscription version of Microsoft Office? It's called Microsoft 365 now, for some inexplicable reason, but you probably haven't noticed because it is a stupidly confusing, nondescript name that nobody out in the real world uses. Adding to the confusion, in 2022, Microsoft announced it would phase out the Office name in favour of calling both the subscription version and the regular, buy-once-run-forever version "Microsoft 365", but then changed their mind a year later, and as such, the regular, buy-once-run-forever version is now still called Office. Oh and there's also the "Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)" (at Office.com?) which I think is what used to be called the mobile iOS/Android Office application, which existed alongside the individual mobile Office applications on these platforms (because that was a thing, too - maybe still is?)? I don't know man, I merely have two university degrees, which clearly isn't enough to understand any of this 4D office suite chess. Anyway, the Microsoft 365 Apps (so the subscription version of what was temporarily formerly known as Microsoft Office) can be installed either through the Microsoft Store, which is the application store bundled with Windows that you never use, or through something called Click-to-Run. Apparently, Microsoft is discontinuing the Microsoft Store version of the Microsoft 365 Apps, and is urging everyone to move to the Click-to-Run version of the Microsoft 365 Apps. Alright, we're getting really, really deep into the very darkest crevices of the Microsoft Cinematic Universe lore now. The Microsoft Store version of the Microsoft 365 Apps is almost entirely identical to the Click-to-Run version of the Microsoft 365 Apps, except for one tiny part: the exact packaging method of the applications. Whereas the Microsoft Store version is packaged and delivered in Microsoft's Appx packaging format (designed for the Universal Windows Platform or UWP), the Click-to-Run version is packaged and delivered through, well, Click-to-Run. So, what is that, exactly? Click-to-Run is an entirely custom application streaming technology specifically designed for and exclusively used by Microsoft Office. You download a very small installer, which then proceeds to download the various Microsoft 365 applications like Word, Excel, and so on, which you can then start using well before the entire download is finished. The technology is similar to Microsoft App-V. It's actually remarkably difficult to find detailed documentation about Click-to-Run, which is odd considering Microsoft is usually quite decent at providing documentation for its technologies. So what Microsoft is announcing in this support document is that if you have Microsoft 365 Apps installed through the Microsoft Store, you're going to have to switch to the Click-to-Run version. You can check which installation type you're using by going to File > Account (it might be called Office Account, because everything is made up and nothing is real) - under Product information locate the About button, where it'll list the installation type. If your installation type is Microsoft Store, you need to switch to the Click-to-Run version to keep receiving updates. To do so, download the Click-to-Run installer and run it, which will automatically remove the Microsoft Store version of the Microsoft 365 Apps and replace them with the Click-to-Run versions. The reason they're making you do this is that the Click-to-Run version offers enterprises and corporate customers more control over deployment, update schedules, configuration options, and so on. The Microsoft Store version is more suited for normal consumers, but Microsoft doesn't care about those, and never has, and never will. Why is Microsoft?

23 Jul 2025 11:00pm GMT

Wayback, the recently announced tool that will allow you to run a legacy X11 desktop environment on top of Wayland, has just announced its first release, version 0.1. As the version number implies, there be dragons here, but the developers state some of them already use Wayback on a day-to-day basis. Still, there's no multi-monitor support yet, quite a few X.org options are just stubs for now, there's no mouse-locking, and so on. Since the initial announcement and the first progress report a few weeks ago, Wayback has become an official part of FreeDesktop.org, which indicates the wider desktop Linux community is definitely interested in what Wayback has to offer. It's also been split into several different parts to mimic X.org's structure, several distributions have picked it up and packaged it already, and ton more changes have been made. It definitely seems like Wayback has a good chance of becoming a simpler, more straightforward replacement for X.org, greatly reducing the maintenance burden of Linux distributions. Not having to keep the full legacy X.org stack around alongside Wayland is going to save a lot of people a lot of time.

23 Jul 2025 6:11pm GMT