fidzu : Operating Systems

Up until now, it's always remained possible to activate Windows offline, by calling a phone number, going through a lengthy phase of entering digits on your phone dialpad, and carefully listening to and entering a string of numbers on the device you're trying to activate. For a while, even, this was, as far as I can tell, one of the easiest ways to fix activation issues caused by replacing one component too many, causing Windows activation to think you had a new machine. Phone activation was always remarkably more lenient and forgiving than online activation. Well, as part of Microsoft's crusade to make Windows progressively more shit, it seems phone activation is going away. However, that seems to no longer work on Windows 11 or 10 or Windows 7 either, as another user Ben Kleinberg has documented on his YouTube channel. Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: "Support for product activation has moved online. For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh" ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin They're going after your local, non-online account, they're going after offline activation - what's next in line on the chopping block? Are they going to actively start blocking the various debloat tools that make Windows 11 at least slightly less of a block of concrete chained around your neck? Please switch to a real operating system.

05 Jan 2026 12:43pm GMT

Desktop Classic System is an operating system based on Debian and a customized version of the MATE Desktop Environment that hearkens back to, but is not a direct copy of, the classic Mac OS. DCS seeks to provide and sometimes even improve upon the conceptual simplicity offered by the old Macintosh. ↫ Desktop Classic System website I'm usually not particularly interested in reporting on random Linux distributions, but any one of them that defaults to a proper spatial file manager is one that I will highlight. I'm not entirely sure if this is just a supported feature of MATE's file manager, or something more custom - there are some patches to Caja here, as mentioned - but spatial file managers are a dying breed and that's a shame. They're hard to implement and even harder to get right, which is probably why few people take on the challenge. Other than that, DCS isn't particularly revolutionary or special, but I'd love for more Linux distributions to look back at what we've lost, and see if we can bring those things back.

04 Jan 2026 11:12am GMT

KDE developer Herz published a detailed look at the immense amount of work they've done cleaning up the developer onboarding documentation for KDE. All that just to say that I'm finally content with the state of beginner onboarding docs in our KDE Developer Platform. That is to say, all the beginner docs fixes I wanted to add to Develop are either already there or have merge requests ready or almost ready. ↫ Herz at rabbitictranslator.com Judging by the article, KDE's developer documentation really were in need of major work, and it's great to see that thankless task being done. One of the areas where KDE lags behind GNOME is that the latter has a more vibrant application ecosystem, with tons of great GNOME applications under active development. Now, I'm not saying it's the state of KDE's documentation is the sole reason for this, but I'm sure it wasn't helping either. Improving documentation is not a particularly glamorous task, but it's vitally important nonetheless.

04 Jan 2026 10:47am GMT

It shouldn't be surprising that the HP-UX FAQ eventually grew an entry for "how can I make a 712 run headless". It was possible, and to do it you had to change the firmware "console" path. The 712 firmware would not allow you to do this, to keep you locked to a keyboard and frame buffer console, but some of the HP-UX standalone tools could be used to change this without the firmware getting in the way, so the FAQ recipe was roughly "abort the boot sequence, at the BOOT_ADMIN> prompt, do not start the HP-UX kernel but some diagnostic tool, and then at the tools prompt, type a magic sequence without any mistake or you'll be very, very, very sorry". There was no exaggeration in these words: the magic sequence is conspath 2/0/4.0x283, which is everything but intuitive and easy to remember. ↫ Miod Vallat What a great story.

04 Jan 2026 12:57am GMT

IceWM, the venerable X11 window manager, has released a new version, bumping the version number to 4.0.0. This release brings a big update to the alt+tab feature. The Alt+Tab window switcher can now handle large numbers of application windows in both horizontal and in vertical mode. Type the first letter of an application class name in Alt+Tab, to select the next instance window of that application class. Select an application by pressing one of the number keys. Select an application by mouse in Alt+Tab in horizontal mode. Support navigating the quick switch with all navigation keys. Press the menu button on Alt+Tab to open the system menu. QuickSwitchPreview is a new mode to preview applications. These previews are updated while the quick switch is active. ↫ IceWM 4.0 release notes On top of this major set of improvements to alt+tab, there's the usual list of bug fixes and small changes, as well as a bunch if updated translations.

03 Jan 2026 4:04pm GMT

The new year isn't even a day old, and Haiku developer X512 dropped something major in Haiku users' laps: the first alpha version of an accelerated NVIDIA graphics drivers for Haiku. Supporting at least NVIDIA Turing and Ampere GPUs, it's very much in alpha state, but does allow for proper GPU acceleration, with the code surely making its way to Haiku builds in the near future. Don't expect a flawless experience - this is alpha software - but even then, this is a major milestone for Haiku.

01 Jan 2026 4:40pm GMT

It's 31 December 2025 today, the last day of the year, but it also happens to mark the end of support for the last and final version of one of my favourite operating systems: HP-UX. Today is the day HPE puts the final nail in the coffin of their long-running UNIX operating system, marking the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux. HP-UX' versioning is a bit of a convoluted mess for those not in the know, but the versions that matter are all part of the HP-UX 11i family. HP-UX 11i v1 and v2 (also known as 11.11 and 11.23, respectively) have been out of support for exactly a decade now, while HP-UX 11i v3 (also known as 11.31) is the version whose support ends today. To further complicate matters, like 11i v2, HP-UX 11i v3 supports two hardware platforms: HP 9000 (PA-RISC) and HP Integrity (Intel Itanium). Support for the HP-UX 11i v3 variant for HP 9000 ended exactly four years ago, and today marks the end of support for HP-UX 11i v3 for HP Integrity. And that's all she wrote. I have two HP-UX 11i v1 PA-RISC workstations, one of them being my pride and joy: an HP c8000, the last and fastest PA-RISC workstation HP ever made, back in 2005. It's a behemoth of a machine with two dual-core PA-8900 processors running at 1Ghz, 8 GB of RAM, a FireGL X3 graphics card, and a few other fun upgrades like an internal LTO3 tape drive that I use for keeping a bootable recovery backup of the entire system. It runs HP-UX 11i v1, fully updated and patched as best one can do considering how many patches have either vanished from the web or have never "leaked" from HPE (most patches from 2009 onwards are not available anywhere without an expensive enterprise support contract). The various versions of HP-UX 11i come with a variety "operating environments" you can choose from, depending on the role your installation is supposed to fulfill. In the case of my c8000, it's running the Technical Computing Operating Environment, which is the OE intended for workstations. HP-UX 11i v1 was the last PA-RISC version of the operating system to officially support workstations, with 11i v2 only supporting Itanium workstations. There are some rumblings online that 11i v2 will still work just fine on PA-RISC workstations, but I have not yet tried this out. My c8000 also has a ton of other random software on it, of course, and only yesterday I discovered that the most recent release of sudo configures, compiles, and installs from source just fine on it. Sadly, a ton of other modern open source code does not run on it, considering the slightly outdated toolchain on HP-UX and few people willing and/or able to add special workarounds for such an obscure platform. Over the past few years, I've been trying to get into contact with HPE about the state of HP-UX' patches, software, and drivers, which are slowly but surely disappearing from the web. A decent chunk is archived on various websites, but a lot of it isn't, which is a real shame. Most patches from 2009 onwards are unavailable, various software packages and programs for HP-UX are lost to time, HP-UX installation discs and ISOs later than 2006-2009 are not available anywhere, and everything that is available is only available via non-sanctioned means, if you know what I mean. Sadly, I never managed to get into contact with anyone at HPE, and my concerns about HP-UX preservation seem to have fallen on deaf ears. With the end-of-life date now here, I'm deeply concerned even more will go missing, and the odds of making the already missing stuff available are only decreasing. I've come to accept that very few people seem to hold any love for or special attachment to HP-UX, and that very few people care as much about its preservation as I do. HP-UX doesn't carry the movie star status of IRIX, nor the benefits of being available as both open source and on commodity hardware as Solaris, so far fewer people have any experience with it or have developed a fondness for it. HP-UX didn't star in a Steven Spielberg blockbuster, it didn't leave behind influential technologies like ZFS. Despite being supported up until today, it's mostly forgotten - and not even HPE itself seems to care. And that makes me sad. When you raise your glasses tonight to mark the end of 2025 and welcome the new year, spare a thought for the UNIX everyone forgot still exists. I know I will.

31 Dec 2025 10:09pm GMT

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, Win32/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, loss32 Win32 plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning system made useful by WINE, the ReactOS userland, and other vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by Microsoft. ↫ The loss32 homepage Joking introduction aside, this is exactly what you think it is: a Linux kernel with the Windows user interface running on top through Wine. I'm sure quite a few of use mused about this very concept at some point in time, but hikari_no_yume went a step further and created this working concept. It's rough around the edges and needs a ton of work, but I do think the idea is sound and could offer real benefits for certain types of users. It's definitely a more realistic idea than ReactOS, a project that's perpetually chasing the dragon but never coming even close to catching it. Not having to recreate the entire Windows NT kernel, drivers, and subsystems, and using Linux instead, is simply a more realistic approach that could bring results within our lifetimes. The added benefit here is that this could still run Linux applications, too, of course. hikari_no_yume is looking for help with the project, and I hope they find it. This is a great idea, with an absolutely amazing name, too.

30 Dec 2025 1:39pm GMT

Nina Kalinina has been on an absolute roll lately, diving deep into VisiOn, uncovering Bellcore MGR, installing Linux on a PC-98 machine, and much more. This time, she's ported Windows 2 to run on a machine it was never supposed to run on. I bought my first Apricot PC about three years ago, when I realised I wanted an 8086-based computer. At the time, I knew nothing about it and simply bought it because it looked rad and the price was low. I had no idea that it was not IBM PC-compatible, and that there were very few programs available for it. I have been on a quest to get a modern-ish word processor and spreadsheet program for it ever since. Which eventually made me "port" Windows 2 on it. In this post, I will tell you the story of this port. ↫ Nina Kalinina To get Windows 2 working on the Apricot, Kalinina had to create basic video, keyboard, and mouse drivers, allowing Windows 2 to boot into text mode. I wasn't aware of this, but Windows 2 in text mode is funky: it's rendering all the text you would see in a full Windows 2 user interface, just without any of the user interface elements. Further developing the video driver from scratch turned out to be too big of an undertaking for now, so she opted to extract the video driver from Windows 1 instead - which required a whole other unique approach. The keyboard and mouse drivers were extracted from Windows 1 in the same way. The end result is a fully working copy of Windows 2, including things like Word and Excel, which was the original goal in the first place. There aren't many people around doing stuff like this, and it's great to see such very peculiar, unique itches being scratched. Even if this is only relevant for exactly one person, it's still been worth it.

30 Dec 2025 1:26pm GMT

I knew digital cameras and phones had to do a lot of processing and other types of magic to output anything human eyes can work with, but I had no idea just how much. This is wild.

30 Dec 2025 1:05pm GMT

There's been endless talk online about just how bad Apple's graphical user interface design has become over the years, culminating in the introduction of Liquid Glass across all of the company's operating systems this year. Despite all the gnawing of teeth and scathing think pieces before the final rollout, it seems the average Apple user simply doesn't care as much about GUI design as Apple bloggers thought they did, as there hasn't been any uproar or stories in local media about how you should hold off on updating your iPhone. The examples of just how bad Apple's GUI design has become keep on coming, though. This time it's Howard Oakley showing once again how baffling the macOS UI is these days. If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn't have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to the interface changes brought in macOS Tahoe with Liquid Glass. After three months of strong feedback during beta-testing, I was disappointed when Tahoe was released on 15 September to see how little had been addressed. When 26.1 followed on 3 November it had only regressed, and 26.2 has done nothing. Here I summarise my opinions on where Tahoe's overhaul has gone wrong. ↫ Howard Oakley at The Eclectic Light Company Apple bloggers and podcasters are hell-bent on blaming Apple's terrible GUI design over the past 10 years on one man. Their first target was Jony Ive, who was handed control over not just hardware design, but also software design in 2012. When he left Apple, GUI design at Apple would finally surely improve again, and the Apple bloggers and podcasters let out a sigh of relief. History would turn out different, though - under Ive's successor, Alan Dye, Apple's downward trajectory in this area would continue unabated, culminating in the Liquid Glass abomination. Now that Alan Dye has left Apple, history is repeating itself: the very same Apple bloggers and podcasters are repeating themselves - surely now that Alan Dye is gone, GUI design at Apple will finally surely improve again. The possibility that GUI design at Apple does not hinge on the whims of just one person, but that instead the entire company has lost all sense of taste and craftmanship in this area does not cross their minds. Everyone around Jony Ive and Alan Dye, both below, alongside, and above them, had to sign off on Apple's recent direction in GUI design, and the idea that the entire company would blindly follow whatever one person says, quality be damned, would have me far more worried as an Apple fan. At this point, it's clear that Apple's inability to design and build quality user interfaces is not the fault of just one fall guy, but an institutional problem. Anyone expecting a turnaround just because Ive Dye is gone isn't seeing the burning forest through the trees.

28 Dec 2025 11:58am GMT

We're all familiar with things like marquee and blink, relics of HTML of the past, but there are far more weird and obscure HTML tags you may not be aware of. Luckily, Declan Chidlow at HTMLHell details a few of them so we can all scratch shake our heads in disbelief. But there are far more obscure tags which are perhaps less visually dazzling but equally or even more interesting. If you're younger, this might very well be your introduction to them. If you're older, this still might be an introduction, but also possibly a trip down memory lane or a flashback to the horrors of the first browser war. It depends. ↫ Declan Chidlow at HTMLHell I think my favourite is the dir tag, intended to be used to display lists of files and directories. We're supposed to use list tags now to achieve the same result, but I do kind of like the idea of having a dedicated tag to indicate files, and perhaps have browsers render these lists in the same way the file manager of the platform it's running on does. I don't know if that was possible, but it seems like the logical continuation of a hypothetical dir tag. Anyway, should we implement bgsound on OSNews?

28 Dec 2025 11:22am GMT

If you're building a package manager and git-as-index seems appealing, look at Cargo, Homebrew, CocoaPods, vcpkg, Go. They all had to build workarounds as they grew, causing pain for users and maintainers. The pull request workflow is nice. The version history is nice. You will hit the same walls they did. ↫ Andrew Nesbitt It's wild to read some of these stories. I can't believe CocoaPods had 16000 directories contained in a single directory, which is absolutely bananas when you know how git actually works. Then there's the issue that git is case-sensitive, as any proper file system should be, which causes major headaches on Windows and macOS, which are dumb and are case-insensitive. Even Windows' path length limits, inherited from DOS, cause problems with git. There just so many problems with using git for a package managers' database. The basic gist is that git is not a database, and shouldn't be used as such. It's incredulous to me that seasoned developers would opt for "solutions" like this.

27 Dec 2025 12:57pm GMT

Christmas is already behind us, but since this is an announcement from 11 December - that I missed - I'm calling this a very interesting and surprising Christmas present. The team and I are beyond excited to share what we've been cooking up over the last little while: a full desktop environment running on QNX 8.0, with support for self-hosted compilation! This environment both makes it easier for newly-minted QNX developers to get started with building for QNX, but it also vastly simplifies the process of porting Linux applications and libraries to QNX 8.0. ↫ John Hanam at the QNX Developer Blog What we have here is QNX 8.0 running the Xfce desktop environment on Wayland, a whole slew of build and development tools like clang, gcc, git, etc.), a ton of popular code editors and IDEs, a web browser (looks like GNOME Web?), access to all the ports on the QNX Open-Source Dashboard, and more. For now, it's only available as a Qemu image to run on top of Ubuntu, but the plan is to also release an x86 image in the coming months so you can run this directly on real hardware. This isn't quite the same as the QNX of old with its unique Photon microGUI, but it's been known for a while now that Photon hasn't been actively developed in a long time and is basically abandoned. Running Xfce on Wayland is obviously a much more sensible solution, and one that's quite future-proof, too. As a certified QNX desktop enthusiast of yore, I can't wait for the x86 image to arrive so I can try this out properly. There are downsides. This image, too, is encumbered by annoying non-commercial license requirements and sign-ups, and this also wouldn't be the first time QNX starts an enthusiast effort, only to abandon it shortly after. Buyer beware, then, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

27 Dec 2025 10:12am GMT

We've got more X11-related news this day, the day of Xmas. Phoenix is a new X server, written from scratch in Zig (not a fork of Xorg server). This X server is designed to be a modern alternative to the Xorg server. ↫ Phoenix' readme page Phoenix will only support a modern subset of the X11 protocol, focusing on making sure modern applications from roughly the last 20 years or so work. It also takes quite a few pages out of the Wayland playbook by not having a server driver interface and by having a compositor included. On top of that, it will isolate applications from each other, and won't have a single framebuffer for all displays, instead allowing different refresh rates for individual displays. The project also intends to develop new standards to support things like per-monitor DPI, among many other features. That's a lot of features and capabilities to promise for an X server, and much like Wayland, the way they aim to get there is by effectively gutting traditional X and leaving a ton of cruft behind. The use of Zig is also interesting, as it can catch some issues before they affect any users thanks to Zig's runtime safety option. At least it's not yet another thing written in Rust like every other project competing with an established project. I think this look like an incredibly interesting project to keep an eye on, and I hope more people join the effort. Competition and fresh, new ideas are good, especially now that everything is gravitating towards Wayland - we need alternatives to promote the sharing of ideas.

25 Dec 2025 2:52pm GMT

Wayback, the tool that will allow you to run a legacy X11 desktop environment on top of Wayland, released a new version just before the Christmas. Wayback 0.3 overhauls its custom command line option parser to allow for more X.org options to be supported, and its manual pages have been cleaned up. Other fixes merely include fixing some small typos and similar small changes. Wayback is now also part of Alpine Linux' stable releases, and has been made available in Fedora 42 and 43. Wayback remains alpha software and is still under major development - it's not yet ready for primetime.

25 Dec 2025 10:42am GMT