Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems?
Way back in April of this year, I linked to a question and answer about why some parts of the Windows 98 installer looked older than the other parts. It turns out that in between the MS-DOS (the blue...
View ArticleFLTK 1.4.0 brings Wayland support
FLTK 1.4.0 has been released. This new version of the Fast Light Toolkit contains some major improvements, such as Wayland support on both Linux and FreeBSD. X11 and Wayland are both supported by...
View ArticleWindows 365 Link: a thin client from Microsoft
One of my favourite devices that never took on in the home is the thin client. Whenever I look at a fully functional Sun Microsystems thin client setup, with Sun Rays, a Solaris server, and the...
View Article“Why I stopped using OpenBSD”
I’ve linked to quite a few posts by OpenBSD developer Solène Rapenne on OSNews, mostly about her work for and knowledge of OpenBSD. However, she recently posted about her decision to leave the OpenBSD...
View ArticleOpenVMS V9.2-3 released
VMS Software, the company migrating OpenVMS to x86 (well, virtualised x86, at least) has announced the release of OpenVMS 9.2-3, which brings with a number of new features and changes. It won’t...
View ArticleMicrosoft pushes full-screen ads for Copilot+ PCs on Windows 10 users
Windows 10’s free, guaranteed security updates stop in October 2025, less than a year from now. Windows 10 users with supported PCs have been offered the Windows 11 upgrade plenty of times before. But...
View ArticleLinux to lose support for Apple and IBM’s failed PowerPC Common Hardware...
Ah, the Common Hardware Reference Platform, IBM’s and Apple’s ill-fated attempt at taking on the PC market with a reference PowerPC platform anybody could build and expand upon while remaining...
View ArticleWhat’s in a Steam Deck kernel anyway?
Valve, entirely going against the popular definition of Vendor[pejorative], is still actively working on improving and maintaining the kernel for their Steam Deck hardware. Let’s see what they’re up...
View ArticleIntroduction to Bismuth VM
This is the first post in what will hopefully become a series of posts about a virtual machine I’m developing as a hobby project called Bismuth. This post will touch on some of the design fundamentals...
View ArticleThe rare POWER Indigo 2
This is a Silicon Graphics workstation from 1995. Specifically, it is an ‘Teal’ Indigo 2 (as opposed to a ‘Purple’ Indigo 2, which came later). Ordinarily that’s rare enough – these things were about...
View ArticleMaXX Interactive Desktop springs back to life with new release and updated...
I had to dive into our archive all the way back to 2017 to find the last reference to the MaXX Interactive Desktop, and it seems this wasn’t exactly my fault – the project has been on hiatus since...
View ArticleUsing (only) a Linux terminal for my personal computing in 2024
A month and a bit ago, I wondered if I could cope with a terminal-only computer. […] The only way to really find out was to give it a go. My goal was to see what it was like to use a terminal-only...
View ArticleMicrosoft Word is using you to train “AI”
Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on...
View ArticleManaging third-party packages in 9front
Every now and then, news from the club I’m too cool to join, the plan9/9front community, pierces the veil of coolness and enters our normal world. This time, someone accidentally made a package...
View ArticleLeaving big tech behind: Murena’s /e/OS on the Fairphone 5
There are so many ecological, environmental, and climate problems and disasters taking place all over the world that it’s sometimes hard to see the burning forests through the charred tree stumps. As...
View ArticleMozilla begs courts to allow Google search deal for Firefox to continue
The moment a lot of us has been fearing may be soon upon us. Among the various remedies proposed by the United States Department of Justice to address Google’s monopoly abuse, there’s also banning...
View ArticleThe capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
There have been some past rumblings on the internet about a capacitor being installed backwards in Apple’s Macintosh LC III. The LC III was a “pizza box” Mac model produced from early 1993 to early...
View ArticleUS Copyright Office strikes down proposed game preservation DMCA exception
A three-year fight to help support game preservation has come to a sad end today. The US copyright office has denied a request for a DMCA exemption that would allow libraries to remotely share digital...
View ArticleSo you want to write a KMail plugin?
Recently, I’ve been moving away from macOS to Linux, and have settled on using KDE Plasma as my desktop environment. For the most part I’ve been comfortable with the change, but it’s always the small...
View ArticleCinnamon Desktop 6.4 released
The Cinnamon Desktop, the GTK desktop environment developed by the Linux Mint project, has just released version 6.4. The focus of this release is on nips and tucks in the default theme, dialogs,...
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