fidzu : Operating Systems

On its own, the title of this post is just a true piece of trivia, verifiable with the built-in subst tool (among other methods). Here's an example creating the drive +:\ as an alias for a directory at C:\foo: The +:\ drive then works as normal (at least in cmd.exe, this will be discussed more later): However, understanding why it's true elucidates a lot about how Windows works under the hood, and turns up a few curious behaviors. ↫ Ryan Liptak Fascinating doesn't even begin to describe this article, but at the same time, it also makes me wonder at what point maintaining this drive letter charade becomes too burdensome, clunky, and complex. Internally, Windows NT does not use drive letters at all, but for the sake of backwards compatibility and to give the user what they expect, a whole set of abstractions has been crafted to create the illusion that modern versions of Windows still use the same basic drive letter conventions as DOS did 40 years ago. I wonder if we'll ever reach a point where Windows no longer uses drive letters, or if it's possible today to somehow remove or disable these abstractions entirely, and run Windows NT without drive letters, as Cutler surely intended. Vast swaths of Windows programs would surely curl up in fetal position and die, including many core components of the operating system itself - as this article demonstrates, very few parts of Windows can handle even something as mundane as a drive letter outside of A-Z - but it'd make for a great experiment. Someone with just the right set of Windows NT skills must've tried something like this at some point, either publicly or inside of Microsoft.

01 Dec 2025 9:06pm GMT

What do you do if you develop a lightweight browser that doesn't support JavaScript, but you once chose GitHub as the home for your code? You're now in the unenviable position that your own browser can no longer access your own online source repository because it requires JavaScript, which is both annoying and, well, a little awkward. The solution is, of course, obvious: you move somewhere else. That's exactly what the Dillo browser did. They set up a small VPS, opted for cgit as the git frontend for its performance and small size, and for the bug tracker, they created a brand new, very simple bug tracker. To avoid this problem, I created my own bug tracker software, buggy, which is a very simple C tool that parses plain Markdown files and creates a single HTML page for each bug. All bugs are stored in a git repository and a git hook regenerates the bug pages and the index on each new commit. As it is simply plain text, I can edit the bugs locally and only push them to the remote when I have Internet back, so it works nice offline. Also, as the output is just an static HTML site, I don't need to worry about having any vulnerabilities in my code, as it will only run at build time. ↫ Rodrigo Arias Mallo There's more considerations detailed in the article about Dillo's migration, and it can serve as inspiration for anyone else running a small open source project who wishes to leave GitHub behind. With GitHub's continuing to add more and more complexity and "AI" to separate open source code from its licensing terms, we may see more and more projects giving GitHub the finger.

01 Dec 2025 8:04pm GMT

Landlock is a Linux API that lets applications explicitly declare which resources they are allowed to access. Its philosophy is similar to OpenBSD's unveil() and (less so) pledge(): programs can make a contract with the kernel stating, "I only need these files or resources - deny me everything else if I'm compromised." It provides a simple, developer-friendly way to add defense-in-depth to applications. Compared to traditional Linux security mechanisms, Landlock is vastly easier to understand and integrate. This post is meant to be an accessible introduction, and hopefully persuade you to give Landlock a try. ↫ prizrak.me blog I had no idea this existed, even though it seems to plug a hole in the security and sandboxing landscape on Linux by not requiring any privileges and by being relatively simple and straightforward to use. There's even an additional "supervisor" proposal that would bring Android-like permissions not just to, say, desktop applications (see Flatpak), but to every process trying to access anything for the first time. I'm not knowledgeable enough to make any statements about Landlock compared to any other options we have for securing desktop Linux in a user-friendly, non-intrusive manner, but I definitely like its simplicity.

01 Dec 2025 7:46pm GMT

Only a few weeks ago, the CHRP variants of Mac OS 7.6 and 8 were discovered and uploaded to the internet for posterity, but we're already seeing the positive results of this event unfold: Mac OS 7.x can now run on the Mac Mini G4 - natively. The very short of it is as follows. First, the CHRP release of Mac OS 8 contains a ROM file that allows Mac OS 8 to boot on the G4 Mac Mini. Second, the CHRP release of 7.6 contains a System Enabler that allows 7.6 earlier versions to run by using the aforementioned ROM file. Third, the ROM has been modified to add compatibility with as many Mac models as possible. There's a lot more to it, of course, but the end result is that quite a few more older, pre-9.x versions of Mac OS can now run on G4 and G3 Macs, which is quite cool. Of course, there are limitations. Note that, although I describe many of these as "stable", I mean you can use much of it normally (sound/video/networking aside) without it crashing or misbehaving, at least not too hard, but that is not to say everything works, because that is just not the case. For example, when present, avoid opening the Apple System Profiler, unless you want a massive crash as it struggles trying to profile and gather all the information about your system. Some other apps or Control Panels might either not work, or work up to a certain point, after which they might freeze, requiring you to Force Quit the Finder to keep on going. And so on. ↫ Jubadub at Mac OS 9 Lives Issues or no, this is amazing news, and great work by all involved.

30 Nov 2025 8:28am GMT

The release 25.11 wraps up our year of "rigidity, clarity, performance" with a bouquet of vast under-the-hood improvements. Genode's custom kernel received special tuning of its new CPU scheduler for Sculpt-OS workloads, and became much more scalable with respect to virtual-memory management. Combined, those efforts visibly boost the performance of Sculpt OS on performance-starved hardware like the PinePhone or the i.MX8-based MNT Reform laptop. On account of improving clarity, our new configuration format - now named human-inclined data (HID) - proliferates throughout Genode's tooling. We are also happy to report that almost all Genode components have become interoperable with both XML and HID by now. ↫ Genode OS Framework 25.11 release notes The Genode Framework 25.11 also brings a major change to how important shared components that aren't strictly part of the framework are handled, such as ports like libSDL, sqlite, or gnutls. Before, these could only be built with the Genode build system, which was suboptimal because this isn't designed for building individual components. Several changes have been made to now enable the use of multiple build systems and the Goa SDK, which should make it a lot easier to these crucial components to become the responsibility of wider parts of the community. There's way more, of course, such as the usual driver improvements, including the addition of support for serial-to-USB adapters.

29 Nov 2025 9:48am GMT

During a Dell earnings call, the company mentioned some staggering numbers regarding the amount of PCs that will not or cannot be upgraded to Windows 11. "We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven't been upgraded," said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell's slice of machines. "And we have another 500 million that are four years old that can't run Windows 11." He sees this as an opportunity to guide customers towards the latest Windows 11 machines and AI PCs, but warns that the PC market is going to be relatively flat next year. ↫ Tom Warren at The Verge The monumental scale of the Windows 10 install base that simply won't or cannot upgrade to Windows 11 is massive, and it's absolutely bonkers to me that we're mostly just letting them get away with leaving at least a billion users out in the cold when it comes to security updates and bug fixes. The US government (in better times) and the EU should've 100% forced Microsoft's hand, as leaving this many people on outdated, unsupported operating system installations is several disasters waiting to happen. Aside from the dangerous position Microsoft is forcing its Windows 10 users into, there's also the massive environmental and public health impact of huge swaths of machines, especially in enterprise environments, becoming obsolete overnight. Many of these will end up in landfills, often shipped to third-world countries so we in the west don't have to deal with our e-waste and its dangerous consequences directly. I can get fined for littering - rightfully so - but when a company like Microsoft makes sweeping decisions which cause untold amounts of dangerous chemicals to be dumped in countless locations all over the globe, governments shrug it off and move on. At least we will get some cheap eBay hardware out of it, I guess.

28 Nov 2025 9:57pm GMT

So my love for the Common Desktop Environment isn't exactly a secret, so let's talk about the project's latest release, CDE 2.5.3, released a few days ago. As the version number suggests, this first new version in two years is a rather minor release, containing only a few bug fixes. For instance, CDE's window manager dtwm picked up support for more mouse buttons, its file manager dtfile now uses sh to find files instead of ksh, and a few more of these rather minor, but welcome, changes and bugfixes. Ever since CDE was released as open source over thirteen years ago, and while considerable work has been done to make it build, install, and run on modern platforms, that's kind of where the steam ran out. CDE isn't being actively developed to build upon its strengths and add new and welcome features and conveniences, but is instead kept in a sort of buildable stasis. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this - it keeps CDE accessible on modern platforms, and that's a huge amount of work that deserves respect and gratitude - but it'd be nice if we lived in a world where there was enough interest (and time and money) to have people work on actually improving it. Of course, the reality is that there'd be very little interest in such an improved CDE, and that's exactly why it isn't happening. On top op the current work the CDE team is doing, you'd need to not only develop new features, but also improve the Motif toolkit to make such new features possible, and make sure such improvements don't break anything else. With such an old codebase, that can't possible be an easy task. Still, I will continue to daydream of a slightly more modernised CDE with some additional niceties we've come to expect over the past 30 years, even if I know full well it's futile.

28 Nov 2025 9:37pm GMT

Moss is a Unix-like, Linux-compatible kernel written in Rust and Aarch64 assembly. It features a modern, asynchronous core, a modular architecture abstraction layer, and binary compatibility with Linux userspace applications (currently capable of running most BusyBox commands). ↫ Moss' GitHub page I mean, hobby operating systems and kernels written in Rust aren't exactly the most unique right now, but that doesn't make them any less interesting for the kinds of people that frequent a site called OSNews. Moss has quite a few things going for it, including support for enough Linux system calls to run most BusyBox commands, complex memory and process management, use of Rust's async/await model in the kernel, and much more.

28 Nov 2025 9:16pm GMT

I love my job. I make a great salary, there's a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five days a week, from morning to night, outside work, I'm actually a really good person. ↫ Emily Bressler at McSweeney's The tech industry is full of people like this.

26 Nov 2025 10:53pm GMT

The KDE project has made the call. Well folks, it's the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included. ↫ The Plasma Team They're following in the footsteps of the GNOME project, who will also be leaving the legacy windowing system behind. What this means in practice is that official KDE X11 support will cease once KDE Plasma 6.7 is no longer supported, which should be somewhere early 2027. Do note that the KDE developers intend to release a few extra bugfix releases in the 6.7 release cycle to stabilise the X11 session as much as possible for those people who are going to stick with KDE Plasma 6.7 to keep X11 around. For people who wish to keep using X11 after that point, the KDE project advises them to switch to LTS distributions like Alma Linux, which intend to keep supporting Plasma X11 until 2032. Xwayland will handle virtually all X11 applications running inside the Wayland session, including X11 forwarding, with similar functionality implemented in Wayland through Waypipe. Also note that this only applies to Plasma as a whole; KDE applications will continue to support X11 when run in other desktop environments or on other platforms. As for platforms other than Linux - FreeBSD already has relatively robust Wayland support, so if you intend to run KDE on FreeBSD in the near future, you'll have to move over to Wayland there, as well. The other BSD variants are also dabbling with Wayland support, so it won't be long before they, too, will be able to run the KDE Plasma Wayland session without any issues. What this means is that the two desktop environments that probably make up like 95% of the desktop Linux user base will now be focusing exclusively on Wayland, which is great news. X11 is a legacy platform and aside from retrocomputing and artisanal, boutique setups, you simply shouldn't be using it anymore. Less popular desktop environments like Xfce, Cinnamon, Budgie, and LXQt are also adding Wayland support, so it won't be much longer before virtually no new desktop Linux installations will be using X11. One X down, one more to go.

26 Nov 2025 10:51pm GMT

With all the problems Windows is facing, I think one area where Microsoft can make some easy, quick gains is by drastically improving Explorer, Windows' file manager. It seems that in the latest developer releases, they're doing just that. The most impactful change - possibly - is that Microsoft is going to preload Explorer. We're exploring preloading File Explorer in the background to help improve File Explorer launch performance. This shouldn't be visible to you, outside of File Explorer hopefully launching faster when you need to use it. If you have the change, if needed there is an option you can uncheck to disable this called "Enable window preloading for faster launch times" in File Explorer's Folder Options, under View. ↫ Windows Insider Program Team Microsoft is also reordering the context menu in Explorer, and while this may seem like a small set of changes, the new context menu does look much tidier and less busy. They achieve this by moving a few top-level items to a submenu, and reordering some other elements. Sadly, the context menu still retains its own context menu ("Show more options"), which is a traditional Win32 menu - which I still think is one of the most Windows of Windows things of all time. Regardless, I hope these small changes make Explorer more bearable to use for those of you still using Windows, because we all know you need it.

26 Nov 2025 9:56pm GMT

Google has made it very clear that it's intending to bring Android to laptops and desktops, and replace Chrome OS with Android in the process. We now have a codename, and some more information about what this will look like in practice. Over the weekend, a tipster on Telegram named Frost Core shared a link to an intriguing Google job listing for a 'Senior Product Manager, Android, Laptop and Tablets.' While we already know Google is bringing Android to the PC, the listing explicitly states that the role involves 'working on a new Aluminium, Android-based, operating system.' This effectively confirms that Aluminium is the codename for the new unified platform. The name appears to be a nod to the project's roots: like Chromium (the open-source version of ChromeOS), Aluminium is a metal ending in '-ium.' The choice of the British spelling - emphasizing the 'Al' prefix - likely pays homage to Android serving as the project's foundation." ↫ Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority So we have the codename, and of course, what we also have is a strong focus on "AI", which will be "at the core" of desktop Android. Further details uncovered in job openings include a focus not just on entry-level hardware, but also midrange and premium laptops and desktops, as well as Chrome OS being replaced by this new desktop Android variant. I somehow doubt existing Chrome OS devices will be updated to this new desktop Android variant, so Chrome OS will continue to exist as a product for at least quite a few years to come. I still have a considerable amount of doubt that Google would be able to pull this off in a successful way. It's already hard enough to get anyone to buy any laptop that isn't running Windows or macOS, and I doubt the Android operating system has the kind of pull with consumers to make them consider switching to it on their laptops or desktops. Enthusiasts will surely eat it up - if only to try - but without any clear, massive success, this desktop Android thing runs the real risk of ending up at Google's graveyard. These Android laptops can be incredible products, but even if they are, I just won't trust Google to remain interested in it.

25 Nov 2025 11:11pm GMT

You may have noticed a sharp increase in problems and issues in Windows recently - following the rise of the "AI" hype cycle, entirely coincidentally, I'm sure - and it seems Microsoft is finally starting to acknowledge just how bad Windows has become. On the positive side though, following all that backlash, Microsoft acknowledged Windows has issues, and as if on cue, the company in a new support article has admitted that there are problems on almost every major Windows 11 core feature. The issues are related to XAML and this impacts all the Shell components like the Start Menu, Taskbar, Explorer, and Windows Settings. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin It's wild how many core components like this have apparently been broken due to these problems since July of this year. This means countless Windows users have been experiencing weird issues on a daily basis in multiple components for four months now, which is absolutely wild. On top of all the more structural problems in Windows, I wonder how people can get anything done at all - only a few days ago, I had to manually clean out the Installer folder in the Windows folder on my wife's gaming PC, because for some inexplicable reason, Windows decided to permanently store 18GB's worth (!) of past Adobe Acrobat updates and installers in there. It's impossible to reliably say that Microsoft's incessant focus on crypto NFTs "AI" lies at the root of all of these problems, but if 30% of "new" code in Microsoft is indeed regurgitated by "AI", it's hard not to conclude as such.

24 Nov 2025 11:12am GMT

I suspect that many people who take an interest in Internet privacy don't appreciate how hard it is to resist browser fingerprinting. Taking steps to reduce it leads to inconvenience and, with the present state of technology, even the most intrusive approaches are only partially effective. The data collected by fingerprinting is invisible to the user, and stored somewhere beyond the user's reach. On the other hand, browser fingerprinting produces only statistical results, and usually can't be used to track or identify a user with certainty. The data it collects has a relatively short lifespan - days to weeks, not months or years. While it probably can be used for sinister purposes, my main concern is that it supports the intrusive, out-of-control online advertising industry, which has made a wasteland of the Internet. ↫ Kevin Boone My view on this matter is probably a bit more extreme than some: I believe it should be illegal to track users for advertising purposes, because the data collected and the targeting it enables not only violate basic privacy rights enshrined in most constitutions, they also pose a massive danger in other ways. This very same targeting data is already being abused by totalitarian states to influence our politics, which has had disastrous results. Of course, our own democratic governments' hands aren't exactly clean either in this regard, as they increasingly want to use this data to stop "terrorists" and otherwise infringe on basic rights. Finally, any time such data ends up on the black market after data breaches, criminals, organised or otherwise, also get their hands on it. I have no idea what such a ban should look like, or if it's possible to do this even remotely effectively. In the current political climate in many western countries, which are dominated by the wealthy few and corporate interests, it's highly unlikely that even if such a ban was passed as lip service to concerned constituents, any fines or other deterrents would probably be far too low to make a difference anyway. As such, my desire to have targeted online advertising banned is mostly theory, not practice - further illustrated by the European Union caving like cowards on privacy to even the slightest bit of pressure. Best I can do for now is not partake in this advertising hellhole. I disabled and removed all advertising from OSNews recently, and have always strongly advised everyone to use as many adblocking options as possible. We not only have a Pi-Hole to keep all of our devices at home safe, but also use a second layer of on-device adblockers, and I advise everyone to do the same.

24 Nov 2025 10:51am GMT

We need to consume. The average American now holds onto their smartphone for 29 months, according to a recent survey by Reviews.org, and that cycle is getting longer. The average was around 22 months in 2016. While squeezing as much life out of your device as possible may save money in the short run, especially amid widespread fears about the strength of the consumer and job market, it might cost the economy in the long run, especially when device hoarding occurs at the level of corporations. ↫ Kevin Williams at CNBC Line must go up. Ļ̷̩̺̾i̶̼̳͍͂̒ͅn̵͕̉̾e̴̞͛̓̀̍ ̴͙̙̥͋͐m̸͚̉̆u̴̖̰̪̽̔ͅs̶̨̛̾ţ̷̢̂͛̆͝ ̵̱̐̓̾̔͜ğ̷͕̮̮͆o̷̟͈̐̏̄͝ ̷̢̨̞̉u̴̢̪̭̱̿͑͛̌p̴͈̜̫̖̌.

24 Nov 2025 9:28am GMT

For the past 18 months, the Linux OEM Tuxedo Computers has been working on bringing a Snapdragon X Elite ARM laptop to market, but now they cancelled the project due to complications. Development turned out to be challenging due to the different architecture, and in the end, the first-generation X1E proved to be less suitable for Linux than expected. In particular, the long battery runtimes-usually one of the strong arguments for ARM devices-were not achieved under Linux. A viable approach for BIOS updates under Linux is also missing at this stage, as is fan control. Virtualization with KVM is not foreseeable on our model, nor are the high USB4 transfer rates. Video hardware decoding is technically possible, but most applications lack the necessary support. Given these conditions, investing several more months of development time does not seem sensible, as it is not foreseeable that all the features you can rightfully expect would be available in the end. In addition, we would be offering you a device with what would then be a more than two-year-old Snapdragon X Elite (X1E), whose successor, the Snapdragon X2 Elite (X2E), was officially introduced in September 2025 and is expected to become available in the first half of 2026. ↫ Tuxedo's announcement Back when Qualcomm was hyping up these processors, the company made big claims about supporting Linux equally to Windows, but those promises have turned out to be absolutely worthless. Tuxedo already highlighted the problems it was dealing with half a year ago, and now it seems these problems have become impossible to overcome - at least for now. This is a shame, bu also not entirely unexpected, since there's no way a small Linux OEM can do the work that Qualcomm promised it would do for its own chip. All this sadly means we still don't really have proper Linux support for modern ARM laptops, which is a crying shame. The problem isn't so much Linux itself, but the non-standardised world of ARM hardware. Large OEMs are willing to do the work to make Windows work, but despite recent successes, desktop Linux is nowhere near as popular as Windows, so there's little incentive for OEMs (or Qualcomm) to step up their game. It is what it is.

24 Nov 2025 9:21am GMT