fidzu : Operating Systems

The slow but steady march to the grave for the Android Open Source Project continues. Every few months Google hammers another big nail in the coffin of Android as an open source effort, and I've documented them all here on OSNews (nail, nail, nail, nail, nail), coming to the conclusion long ago that for all intents and purposes, Android is no longer an open source operating system. The latest move, however, is just petty. According to GrapheneOS on , Google has apparently replaced public, instant code downloads for Pixel phone drivers with a manual request form. Instead of publishing code directly to open developer platforms where anyone can grab it, Google now requires developers to fill out a Google Form and wait for someone to send them a Google Drive link. What used to take a couple of hours is now taking weeks. ↫ Hillary Keverenge at Android Authority I'm perhaps misremembering, but I vaguely recall discussions decades ago about what, exactly, it meant to "make source code available", as open source licenses state in a variety of words. Would mailing a paper print-out by classic post satisfy such requirements? Could you write the source code on a brick and throw it through the user's window? Could you hire a church choir to sing it? These are all silly examples, but before everyone had internet access, this was a relevant question. The widespread availability of the internet and software like git solved these issues, which makes it all the more petty that Google now requires an actual application process, waiting times, and Google Drive dumps just to get access to the source code for Pixel drivers. Google is clearly trying to kill whatever's left of the Android Open Source Project's rotting corpse, only barely technically complying with any license requirements only because they're obligated to. The Android team at Google must be a hoot at parties.

11 Aug 2026 10:45pm GMT

The GNOME Shell user interface has mostly seen minor refinements and quality of life updates in recent cycles, but on the design side we've explored a lot of longer-term things we'd like to do. Some of these we have relatively complete plans for, others are more vague ideas that need more research and prototyping. As always, getting things like these implemented depends on developer capacity and interest (and sometimes funding). While each of these ideas may require additional discussion, prototyping, and testing, we (the design team) have collected them all together here to share our longer-term vision and to give each idea more visibility. ↫ Tobias Bernard on the GNOME blog There's quite a few good ideas in there, with most of them already being available in the form of various extensions. I'm not entirely sure if I'm a huge fan of copying Android and iOS by moving notifications into the quick settings dropdown thing, but it's not like having them in the clock/calendar dropdown thing is any better. I only use notifications as they arrive and never look at the place where they end up - that's a mobile thing for me - so I don't think I'll really care either way. Things like editable quick settings, transparent top bar on certain backgrounds, the improved window drag and drop in the Exposé view, the alt+tab experiments, and some of the others do seem quite interesting though, and anything that reduces the number of GNOME extensions I need to install and keep updated gets a big thumbs up from me. If you wish to work on any of these suggestions, working on GNOME Shell has gotten a lot easier recently. In the past, GNOME Shell was significantly harder to contribute to and test than apps since you needed to use tools like jhbuild. This has changed in the past year: You can now easily build and test your branch in a nested session from Builder using Mutter Devkit. If you use GNOME OS, you can even build a sysext to install your branch on your host system. This allows daily driving experimental branches easily, which is super helpful for evaluating changes to everyday workflows. ↫ Tobias Bernard on the GNOME blog That's quite neat.

11 Aug 2026 10:18pm GMT

This was bound to happen. According to a new report from Taiwanese publication United Daily News (UDC,) Microsoft is raising the cost of Windows license fees for hardware makers by a much higher amount than normal. According to the report, certain OEMs are seeing licensing price hikes of between 7% and 10%. ↫ Zac Bowden at Windows Central Like every other tech company diving head-first into "AI", Microsoft is losing money on its gamble head-over-fist, with no profitability in sight. Since admitting betting the company on "AI" was a mistake is out of the question, Microsoft has to extract the money from somewhere else to make up for it. The cost of Windows licenses for OEMs is an obvious lever to pull, as OEMs really have nowhere else to turn to (yes, desktop Linux is making gains, but not in any meaningful numbers), so they'll take hit and pass the cost on to consumers. The end result will be that prices for laptops will increase even more than they already have thanks to the "AI"-induced RAM and component crisis, creating a double-whammy of price increases caused by "AI", either directly or indirectly. It's just another category of products we can add to the cost of living crisis that's causing untold harm and damage to hardworking people all over the world. The price of incompetence is rarely paid for by the incompetent.

11 Aug 2026 12:34pm GMT

I found some ambiguous wording in the c89(/c90) standard, where GCC and Clang disagree on the interpretation. It concerns the behavior of implicit function declarations, which were removed in c99, so this was never disambiguated. ↫ Sebastian at sebsite I am not going pretend to understand any of this.

11 Aug 2026 12:17pm GMT

Enlightenment desktop is a low on resources desktop environment without sacrificing on visuals. NetBSD support for this BSD-licensed desktop has been left a few years behind. The aim of this project is to port the newest version of the desktop to pkgsrc and commit upstream portability fixes when necessary to ease future versions updates for NetBSD. ↫ Dimitris Gounaridis on the NetBSD blog Enlightenment seems like a natural fit for NetBSD, so I'm glad they dedicated a GSoC project to getting the existing, outdated port up to snuff. The project is not complete as there's a few issues to work out before it can be packaged for easy installation, but this is great progress already.

11 Aug 2026 11:52am GMT

Akihabara, Tokyo's famous "Electric Town," is overflowing with foreign tourists these days, drawn by anime shops, maid cafes, and duty-free electronics megastores. But there is one storefront most of them walk past without a glance: Akizuki Denshi Tsusho. It may be one of those pockets of Japan that foreign visitors never see. Step inside and the narrow aisles are packed - not with tourists, but with Japanese customers hunting for electronic parts. It is a scene that has repeated itself here for more than 50 years. For readers outside Japan, imagine something between Adafruit, SparkFun, and a discount surplus warehouse. If you start tinkering with electronics in Japan, Akizuki's website is the one you will open before any other. Generations of Japanese engineers, students, and hobbyists have treated it as the default source for parts, the way you might default to Digi-Key or Mouser. ↫ Gakuto Ochi and an uncredited translator I've long been fascinated by places like Akizuki Denshi Tsusho and other places like it in South Korea and China's Shenzhen. An unending labyrinth of unimaginable amounts of technology stacked floor to ceiling. Whether they be like Akizuki, which focuses on the tiniest of electrical components, or more like the malls in Shenzhen, which seem to focus more on assembled parts, the idea of browsing through them in wonder draws me in like a moth to a flame. I'm sad these places don't exist anymore (or in most cases, never did) closer to home, but perhaps someday I'll have enough time and funds to visit Tokyo or Shenzen and let myself be overwhelmed by things I don't understand, and people speaking languages entirely alien to me.

11 Aug 2026 11:45am GMT

Cookies are ancient technology, and in no way necessary of even particularly desirable to track you. Modern fingerprinting doesn't need them at all. A live demonstration of everything a website learns about you before you click anything with no cookies. It reads you during the connection and in the first two seconds of JavaScript, then narrates what it found back to you in plain English, as if a stranger were describing you out loud. The argument isn't "look how creepy this site is." It's: the site you visit after this one can do all of it too, and won't tell you. ↫ Kuber Mehta Also note, as the demonstration does, that if some of the things it determines about you are wrong, that doesn't really matter. In fact, it may actually make fingerprinting and tracking you easier; as long as fingerprinting consistently gets the same things wrong in the same way, it becomes a valuable part of the fingerprint, like a small scar obscuring part of your real thumb's fingerprint. Online tracking of people should be illegal.

10 Aug 2026 9:11pm GMT

Back in 2014, Microsoft released the source code to the first Windows version of Word, version 1.1a. Now, Justin Marshall has ported this code to modern versions of Windows, so you can run it as if it were any other modern application. This project is a fully working native Windows x64 port of Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, whose historical codename was Opus. It builds the original Word source and resources together with modern replacements for the 16-bit assembly, segmented-memory, and Win16 platform boundaries. The result is the original Word application and user experience running as a 64-bit Windows executable. This is not an emulator or a reimplementation using a modern editor control. ↫ Justin Marshall Neat endeavour.

10 Aug 2026 1:18pm GMT

Top supplier of great articles Nicole Branagan is at it again. We're back into the strip mahjong games today, here going back to 1991. Video System is a company that's probably best known in retro-gaming circles for Aero Fighters/Sonic Wings, but mahjong games (usually branded Idol Mahjong) were one of their bigger moneymakers. And there's something interesting going on here- Idol Mahjong Final Romance 2-R-4 Special re-releases the final three games in the series, which all also got contemporary console releases, but the first game in the series has never been seen outside of its original arcade launch. Why? ↫ Nicole Branagan Look, you're not going to get something like this from anyone else.

10 Aug 2026 1:09pm GMT

The European Union's Digital Markets Act keeps delivering for EU citizens. Apple is working on a new feature that will support cross-device copy and paste between iOS devices and Windows PCs. Microsoft asked for the feature using Apple's EU interoperability request system for developers, which Apple implemented to comply with the Digital Markets Act. Apple began evaluating the request in March, and on June 26, proposed a project plan. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors According to Apple, this minor feature is going to cost Apple "significant engineering effort"; I'd estimate it'll cost them about one to two golden statues.

08 Aug 2026 7:50pm GMT

IceWM, the venerable X11 window manager, has put up a new maintenance release, version 4.1.0. It's got a small number of fixes, two very minor new features, as well a few updated translations. That's it.

08 Aug 2026 7:25pm GMT

There's been a small flurry of articles from a variety of sources, all talking about more or less the same thing: Microsoft is trying to explain why Windows 11 is as difficult to develop as it is, in turn justifying why it's become such a mess over the years. I'm picking this one from Windows Central, which is an interview with Microsoft's CVP of Design and Research for Windows and Devices, Marcus Ash. Taking the long, still ongoing transition from the Control Panel to the Settings application as an example, Ash explains why this is such a long and difficult process. Unsurprisingly, Ash says that the reason this has taken so long is that Microsoft prides itself on compatibility with legacy tooling and workflows, so it can't just rush in and modernize everything without first ensuring the modern replacements maintain functionality with what came before. ↫ Zac Bowden at Windows Central This isn't really news to anyone. One of Windows' prized strong points is its often excellent backwards compatibility. This doesn't just apply to individual applications, but also to things like software makers adding settings panels to Control Panel, or complex business applications expecting certain entry points into the Control Panel to exist - and much, much more, all over the operating system. I'm exaggerating, but you can't so much as move a single pixel in the taskbar without breaking some component of some obscure corporate middleware suite from 1999 that somehow still functions as the beating heart of like 187 Fortune 500 companies. Sometimes I wonder if Microsoft is going about this the wrong way entirely. Of course, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I feel like Microsoft has so man tools at its disposal to deal with this issue that it's not really using to their fullest potential. Specifically, Windows itself has a number of incredibly capable tools in its toolbox to make sure any application ever written for Windows and even DOS, regardless of how many bits it requires, can run. Windows has advanced and highly capable tools for virtualisation and containerisation, and on top of that, Windows NT has a very capable personalities system that feels underutilised, too. Couldn't these tools be harnessed to effectively isolate the entire backwards compatibility problem from the actual Windows operating system people use, and turn them into optional components installed and activated when required by an older application? Isolating backwards compatibility this way would then leave the Windows team much less shackled and more free to improve Windows at every level without having to worry so much about maintaining backwards compatibility. If the components an older application needs are virtualised, containerised, or part of a Windows NT personality and thus frozen in time, the Windows team would be free to work on the "current" version of said component without breaking the application in question. I feel like Microsoft has tried to use these technologies to address backwards compatibility in the past, but in true Microsoft fashion, it always seems to do so halfheartedly, without any real coherent vision behind it. Again, I wish to reiterate I'm by no means qualified enough to make any definitive statements about this, but it sure does feel like Microsoft is underutilising a lot of the tools it already has at its disposal.

06 Aug 2026 10:20pm GMT

Once upon a time in the mysterious lands of Mexico, starting in Fall 1996 and through Spring 1997, I coded a windowed operating system in 32-bit machine code, fit it into a floppy, and jumped in excitement as it boot up. Of course, I knew it was a great thing because you couldn't boot Windows 3.1 or GEM from a floppy disk, but I was very far from knowing how so cool it was. Unfortunately, not a thing I could give away for everyone to see, as it was written for a homebrew computer based on the Am29000 processor. Let's go back to my memories, some notes, and the ride of discovering again what I forgotten. ↫ Óscar Toledo Gutiérrez Trying to summarise this absolute gem of an article and all of the amazing effort and skill involved would be a huge disservice to Óscar Toledo Gutiérrez. I enjoyed this so much. Be sure to try out his custom emulator of a custom computer to run his custom operating system.

06 Aug 2026 9:28pm GMT

Two years ago, I was Porting my JavaScript Game Engine to C for No Reason. I have since found a reason: making a new N64 game! The result is Xibalba 64 - a Wolfenstein 3D-like FPS. Modretro agreed to publish the game as a physical launch title for their M64 (a modern N64 clone), complete with cartridge, packaging and manual! ↫ Dominic Szablewski The article details the development process, from setting up the correct tooling to actually getting the game to play on a real Nintendo 64, and everything in between - including optimising the game to get it to run at a steady 60fps. The biggest issue is that the Nintendo 64 is quite a complex and quirky console, and in order to develop for it, you needed access to Nintendo's officially sanctioned platform library, libultra. These days, though, there's an open source alternative, libdragon, enabling homebrew development. It's awesome that, thanks to the hard work of volunteers, people can still develop top-notch games for something like the Nintendo 64. If we had left it up to Nintendo, we'd be seeing nothing of the sort today.

06 Aug 2026 9:06pm GMT

Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, has been updated with the release of Milestone 41. According to the release notes, it contains the latest security fixes from Illumos, but beyond that it's just a number of small point releases for certain components. Still, it's a new release, and Tribblix rocks, so here we are.

05 Aug 2026 10:22pm GMT

Few things in technology are more complex, convoluted, and riddled with literally decades of drama than the Amiga community. Luckily for all of us, a significant step forward has been made today: several of the key corporate players in the community have struck agreements to settle their legal disputes. CIC licenses software and documentation for Commodore's 8-bit computers from Amiga. In return, Amiga is permitted to continue using the Commodore trademarks in a "historical or descriptive context," such as old documentation, copyright notices in existing software, or as symbols on a keyboard. The agreement with Hyperion does not change the status of AmigaOS 4 - which was never a point of contention, according to Amiga - but it does specify exactly which code and trademarks the Belgian company is permitted to use . But Hyperion's involvement in the 68k market will end on December 31, 2027: the licensee may continue to distribute versions of AmigaOS 3 until then, including the as-yet-unreleased AmigaOS 3.3. After that, Hyperion will deliver source code, revision history, and documentation for AmigaOS 3.1.4 and its updates, including all fixes and updates, but excluding AmigaOS 4 code backported into AmigaOS 3.2 or 3.3, to Amiga Corporation and release the developers involved in the project from all obligations to Hyperion. Amiga itself will then take over further development of AmigaOS 3 in the future. ↫ Post on amiga-news.de Hyperion is the company most known for developing AmigaOS 4, and with these agreements in place, they claim they can finally spend time focusing on getting AmigaOS 4.2 out the door. These agreements will also consolidate most of the AmigaOS 3.x code and IP under a single banner, which should make its status quite a bit clearer going forward. Whether or not any of this is actually good and beneficial to the Amiga platform as a whole and its individual branches - 3.x and 4.x, in particular - is anyone's guess. I don't think there's anyone here on OSNews who wouldn't be interested in, say, an affordable and - most importantly - available AmigaOS 4 machine. While I have no clue if clearing up some of the licensing, IP, and ownership confusions will aid in getting new AmigaOS 4 hardware, it surely won't make it any harder.

04 Aug 2026 9:52pm GMT