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  • Literally Windows on arm: here is Windows running on the Pixel Watch 3

    10:19am By Thom Holwerda
    Right off the bat, there is not that much use for a Pixel Watch with Windows on it. The project, as the maker says, is for “shits and giggles” and more like an April Fool’s joke. However, it shows how capable modern smartwatches are, with the Pixel Watch…
  • FreeDOS: history, legacy, and a valuable resource for old machines

    10:07am By Thom Holwerda
    FreeDOS is a free and open‐source operating system designed to be compatible with MS‑DOS. Developed to keep the DOS experience alive even after Microsoft ended support for MS‑DOS, FreeDOS has grown into a complete environment that not only preserves…
  • Nova Custom: this week’s sponsor

    Mon 11:22am By Thom Holwerda
    Nova Custom, based in The Netherlands, makes laptops focused on privacy, customisation, and freedom. Nova Custom laptops ship with either Linux, Windows, or no operating system, and they’re uniquely certified for Qubes OS (the V54 model will be certified…
  • The 32bit RISC OS needs to be ported to 64bit to survive, seeks help

    Sun 7:29pm By Thom Holwerda
    RISC OS, the operating system from the United Kingdom originally designed to run on Acorn Computer’s Archimedes computers – the first ARM computers – is still actively developed today. Especially since the introduction of the Raspberry Pi, new life was…
  • Microsoft makes it even harder to use a local account on Windows 11

    Sun 7:08pm By Thom Holwerda
    Do you want to install Windows 11 without internet access or without an online Microsoft Account? It seems Microsoft really doesn’t want you to, as it has removed a very common and popular way of bypassing this requirement. In the release notes for the…
  • Blue95: Fedora Atomic Xfce converted to a Windows 95 desktop

    Sun 4:20pm By Thom Holwerda
    Blue95 is a modern and lightweight desktop experience that is reminiscent of a bygone era of computing. Based on Fedora Atomic Xfce with the Chicago95 theme. ↫ Blue95 GitHub page Exactly as it says on the tin. This is by far the easiest way to get the…
  • Microsoft releases Windows 11 roadmap tool to help make sense of Windows 11’s development

    Sun 4:14pm By Thom Holwerda
    I’ve complained about the utter inscrutability of the Windows release process for a long time, with Microsoft seemingly using channels, build numbers, code names, date-based version numbers, and so on interchangeably, making it incredibly hard to keep track…
  • US government’s attack on free speech, science, and research is causing a brain drain

    Mar 26, 2025, 2:55 pm By Thom Holwerda
    How do you create a brain drain and lose your status as eminent destination for scientists and researchers? The United States seems to be sending out questionnaires to researchers at universities and research institutes outside of the United States, asking…
  • KDE developers show off SDDM replacement

    Mar 26, 2025, 2:53 pm By Thom Holwerda
    KDE’s login manager, SDDM, has its share of problems, and as such, a number of KDE developers are working on replacement to fix many of these long-standing issues. So, what exactly is wrong with SDDM as it exists today? With SDDM, power management is…
  • Google moves all Android development behind closed doors

    Mar 26, 2025, 10:58 am By Thom Holwerda
    Up until now, Google developed several components of Android out in the open, as part of AOSP, while developing everything else behind closed doors, only releasing the source code once the final new Android version was released. This meant that Google had to…
  • How NixOS and reproducible builds could have detected the xz backdoor for the benefit of all

    Mar 25, 2025, 6:08 pm By Thom Holwerda
    Some more light reading: While it was already established that the open source supply chain was often the target of malicious actors, what is stunning is the amount of energy invested by Jia Tan to gain the trust of the maintainer of the xz project, acquire…
  • Playing multimedia with Dillo

    Mar 24, 2025, 5:32 pm By Thom Holwerda
    What if you want to use a web browser like Dillo, which lacks JavaScript support and can’t play audio or video inside the browser? Dillo doesn’t have the capability to play audio or video directly from the browser, however it can easily offload this task…
  • The seL4 microkernel: an introduction

    Mar 24, 2025, 2:45 pm By Thom Holwerda
    This whitepaper provides an introduction to and overview of seL4. We explain what seL4 is (and is not) and explore its defining features. We explain what makes seL4 uniquely qualified as the operating-system kernel of choice for security- and safety-critical…
  • ReactOS 0.4.15 released

    Mar 22, 2025, 10:20 am By Thom Holwerda
    It’s been over three years since the last ReactOS release, but today, in honour of the first commit to the project by the oldest, still active contributor, the project released ReactOS 0.4.15. Of course, there’s been a steady stream of nightly releases, so…
  • Nvidia Linux GPU driver ported to Haiku

    Mar 22, 2025, 5:13 am By Thom Holwerda
    Nvidia releasing its Linux graphics driver as open source is already bearing fruit for alternative operating systems. As many people already knows, Nvidia published their kernel driver under MIT license: GitHub – NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules: NVIDIA Linux…
  • SoftBank acquires Ampere Computing

    Mar 22, 2025, 5:01 am By Thom Holwerda
    SoftBank Group Corp. today announced that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a leading independent silicon design company, in an all-cash transaction valued at $6.5 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, Ampere will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of…