Microsoft grants stay of execution for Windows 10 users: use OneDrive, and get one additional free year of security updates 24 Jun 2025, 10:06 pm

For a while now I’ve been wondering if Microsoft would blink when it comes to Windows 10’s rapidly approaching end of support date. Only a few weeks ago, Microsoft at the very least twitched by extending support for Microsoft Office on Windows 10, which should’ve been an indication of what was to come. Today, Microsoft actually blinked: regular consumers wishing to keep using Windows 10 after support ends in October will now be able to sign up for an additional year of security updates.

Microsoft is making this possible by allowing Windows 10 users to sign up for the Windows 10 Extended Security Update program for one year of extended updates, for free. This program is normally only available to paying enterprise customers, and this marks the first time the company is letting regular consumers make use of it. The “for free” requires some serious caveats, though, as depending on how you look at it, it’s not free at all. You options are to either pay around $30, pay 1000 Microsoft points, or to sign up for the Windows Backup application to synchronise your settings to Microsoft’s computers (the “cloud”).

This last option is technically free, but not only does the free tier include just 5GB of online storage, it also makes use of OneDrive, so if you’re using OneDrive to store your documents and other files you may need to pay for additional storage. On top of that, anything that requires the use of OneDrive is simply not “free”, and only allows Microsoft to further get its claws in you. If Sartre was alive today, Huis clos would’ve declared “L’enfer, c’est OneDrive” instead.

Regardless, it’s the stay of execution many Windows 10 users have been waiting for, even if it isn’t entirely perfect. Sure, choosing between an unmaintained Windows 10, Windows 11, and using OneDrive is about as pleasant as shoving shards of glass underneath your fingernails, and I have a feeling quite a few people are about to find out.

IceWM 3.8.0 released 24 Jun 2025, 9:34 pm

IceWM, the venerable X11 window manager, has released version 3.8.0, with some small tweaks, bug fixes, and changes. The theme menu now loads faster, the processor and memory graphs use less processor cycles, among other small tidbits.

If you want to keep using KDE and GNOME, you’re going to have to move to Wayland 23 Jun 2025, 11:42 pm

With the transition from X11 to Wayland in full swing, from popular distributions removing X11 sessions altogether and the two major desktop environments planning for the removal of X11 support as well, there’s a ton of questions people are dealing with. Both the KDE and GNOME project published detailed blog posts about the matter.

First, KDE’s Nathan Graham makes it very clear that KDE Plasma’s X11 sessions continues to be maintained. This means KDE Plasma will continue to work on X11, major bugs in the session (e.g. can’t log in) will be fixed, and really bad regressions in the session may eventually be fixed. That being said, minor bugs will probably not be fixed unless someone pays for it, and new features in the X11 session will not happen at all, unless someone pays for it.

KDE currently has no time frame for when X11 support will be dropped from KDE Plasma, and Graham doesn’t expect it to happen within the next two years. The KDE project maintains a list of known significant issues with KDE Plasma on Wayland, and KDE plans on addressing everything on that list before removing X11 support. Graham notes that in the end, dropping X11 support from KDE Plasma is mostly up to distributions, as it wouldn’t make any sense to drop it if distributions aren’t on board. At the moment, about 70-80% of KDE Plasma users are using Wayland, he notes.

On the GNOME side of things, Jordan Petridis also detailed GNOME’s position on Wayland and X11. GNOME will be disabling the X11 session in GNOME 49, with a full removal of the X11 code in GNOME 50. This won’t break any X11 applications (on either GNOME or KDE), since even if they don’t have a Wayland backend, they’ll run just fine using XWayland, which is an X server running on top of Wayland. XWayland isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

According to Petridis, the Wayland session is as functional as the X11 session, and “in plenty of cases a lot more capable and efficient”. He further adds that “there’s some niche workflows that are only possible on X11, but there isn’t any functionality regression”. Basically, if you’re using your spacebar as a heater, you might run into problems.

As for accessibility, Wayland is actually doing pretty great.

There has been a lot of concerned trolling and misinformation specifically around this topic sadly from people that don’t care about it and have been abusing the discourse as a straw man argument. Drowning all the people that rely on it and need to be heard. Thankfully Aaron of fireborn fame wrote recently a blogpost talking about all this in detail and clearing up misconceptions.

↫ Jordan Petridis

Finally, Petridis summarises why the Linux desktop world is moving to Wayland:

No, the Xorg Server is still very much maintained, however its development is halted. It still receives occasional bugfixes and there are timely security releases when needed.

The common sentiment, shared among Xorg, Graphics, Kernel, Platform and Application developers is that any future development is a dead-end and shortcomings can’t be addressed without breaking X11. That’s why the majority of Xorg developers moved on to make a new, separate, thing: Wayland.

↫ Jordan Petridis

This pill is so hard to swallow for some people that they go full bananas and start seeing red hats and Illuminati symbols everywhere, losing their minds and spiraling deep into ludicrous conspiracy theories. The truth of the matter is, however, blatantly banal: the people developing X.org realised long ago that meaningfully improving it would irrevocably break it, and as such they developed something new so they wouldn’t have to break X11. That’s it.

X.org will continue to exist and live on in its maintained state, and desktops relying on it will continue to function. If you want to keep using GNOME and KDE, though, you’ll have to drop X11, because the kinds of features and improvements these desktops want to deliver are not possible without breaking X11. Would you want an X11 that’s broken for everyone, or an X11 that keeps working as-is, while those that want to move on do so somewhere else?

Asterinas: a new Linux-compatible kernel project 23 Jun 2025, 10:54 pm

Asterinas is a new Linux-ABI-compatible kernel project written in Rust, based on what the authors call a “framekernel architecture”. The project overlaps somewhat with the goals of the Rust for Linux project, but approaches the problem space from a different direction by trying to get the best from both monolithic and microkernel designs.

↫ Ronja Koistinen at LWN.net

Ronja Koistinen has done an outstanding job diving into this new operating system kernel and approach to kernel architecture, including its intended focus and goals. Head on over to the source and read it over there.

The X Window System didn’t immediately have X terminals 23 Jun 2025, 8:01 pm

For a while, X terminals were a reasonably popular way to give people comparatively inexpensive X desktops. These X terminals relied on X’s network transparency so that only the X server had to run on the X terminal itself, with all of your terminal windows and other programs running on a server somewhere and just displaying on the X terminal. For a long time, using a big server and a lab full of X terminals was significantly cheaper than setting up a lab full of actual workstations (until inexpensive and capable PCs showed up). Given that X started with network transparency and X terminals are so obvious, you might be surprised to find out that X didn’t start with them.

↫ Chris Siebenmann

I did indeed assume X terminals were part of the ecosystem from day one, but it makes sense that it took a while, and that they didn’t enter the scene until X had established itself as the standard windowing system in the UNIX world. I’ve been trying to get my hands on specifically the last HP X terminal, but they’re hard to find and often very expensive. I’d love to get a taste of a proper networked X environment on real UNIX, in the way people actually used to use it professionally.

As a sidenote, Siebenmann is doing such an excellent job with these stories about UNIX, X11, and related matters. He’s like the Raymond Chen of the UNIX world.

postmarketOS v25.06 released with systemd 23 Jun 2025, 7:51 pm

This is it, the one that adds systemd to postmarketOS! We have talked about the decision at length on this blog, make sure to read the initial announcement if this is the first time you are hearing about this.

↫ postmarketOS v25.06 release announcement

While adding systemd to postmarketOS is certainly the tentpole feature of this release, it also updates the various user interfaces – GNOME’s and KDE’s mobile shells and applications – and moves to Alpine Linux 3.22 as its base. The mobile user interfaces for both Firefox and Thunderbird have been updated as well, there’s a ton of improvements and additions for individual devices, and a lot more.

PostmarketOS, in case you are unaware, is a Linux distribution optimised for smartphones, focused on running mobile shells and applications. It’s not ready for prime-time quite yet, and device support will probably be the biggest hurdle for anyone wanting to try it out.

YouTube’s new anti-adblock measures 22 Jun 2025, 7:56 am

Over the past few months, YouTube has been trying another round of anti-adblock measures. Currently the anti-adblock stuff is being A/B tested, and one of my accounts is in the experimental group. I wrote a filter that partially avoids one of the anti-adblock measures, fake buffering, on uBlock Origin (and Brave browser, since it uses the same filter rules). (It’s already in the default filter lists, you don’t need to manually add the filter.)

One thing that people have ran into is “fake buffering”, where videos will take a while to load due to a lot of buffering, but only at the very start of the video (there’s no mid-video fake buffering). As I’ll explain, the fake buffering is 80% of the length of the ads you would’ve seen, so even with fake buffering you’re still saving time using an adblocker.

↫ iter.ca

The battle between YouTube on one side, and users wanting a non-shitty experience without paying for YouTube Premium on the other, is unlikely to end any time soon. Your computer, your rules, so I’m on the side of the people wanting to block ads on YouTube – the same applies to OSNews if you don’t want to pay for our ad-free version – but I’m still intrigued to find out just how far Google is willing to go.

I sometimes see YouTube with ads at other people’s homes. It’s a nightmare.

Cosmoe, BeOS/Haiku on Linux, returns from 18 year hiatus 21 Jun 2025, 12:10 am

It’s 2025, and we’re going to talk about BeOS, AtheOS, Cosmoe, and OpenBeOS, all in one news item, right here, right now, on OSNews.

In the very early 2000s, Cosmoe was a unique project that started out as a merger of the AtheOS userland with the Linux kernel. AtheOS, in turn, was one of the quintessential hobby operating systems of the golden age of the advanced hobby operating systems, the early 2000s. AtheOS would eventually be abandoned in 2002, but would be forked into Syllable and continue development until it, too, was eventually abandoned in 2012.

Cosmoe was the brainchild of Bill Hayden, and originally consisted of the AtheOS userland running on top of the Linux kernel, in order to address the lack of supported hardware a custom operating system kernel inevitably has to deal with. Not long after the start of Cosmoe, AtheOS was abandoned, as mentioned above, but a new project had entered the scene: OpenBeOS, now known as Haiku. Hayden switched gears, and instead started porting the parts that made up OpenBeOS to run on the Linux kernel.

This project progressed nicely, but in 2007 Cosmoe came to a halt (ironically, our last item about Cosmoe is “Cosmoe is back“) as Hayden had no more free time left to work on it, being a father of five, and so he decided to put the project on hold indefinitely. That is, until last year, when everything changed.

In mid-2024, my 3rd son Joshua, not even born when I started this project but who is now in college studying to be a programmer himself, had some questions about operating systems. I decided to dust off Cosmoe and see if I could get it running again, to show him what I had worked on. At first it would only compile and run on extremely old 32-bit versions of Mandrake Linux from 2007. But I had caught the bug again. Not only had I forgotten how fun Cosmoe was to program, but the intervening 17 years of progress made by OpenBeOS (now Haiku) made the certain aspects of this revival come at lightning speed. Day by day, week by week, I got it running on newer versions of Linux, and re-synchronized it with ever-more-recent releases of Haiku. After about 2 months of late-night effort, I had a version of Cosmoe that was 64-bit compatible, ran on multiple modern Linux releases, and was almost completely up-to-date with the latest Haiku source changes.

↫ Cosmoe’s history page

We’re halfway through 2025 now, and Cosmoe now exists as two separate, but related projects. There’s Cosmoe Classic, which is the updated and modernised incarnation of Cosmoe’s original concept: Haiku’s userland running on top of the Linux kernel. In its current form, it runs inside an SDL window on your Linux desktop, as there’s no native video driver. Cosmoe Classic, however, is not what Hayden is focusing on.

Instead, Hayden is focusing on the new Cosmoe, which takes the same idea – the Haiku userland running on a Linux kernel – but implements it in a completely different way:

Cosmoe is a C++ class library that allows developers to build rich, native Linux apps with the easy-to-use BeOS API. This library is a light-weight, serverless version of Cosmoe Classic which targets the Wayland compositor on Linux.

↫ Cosmoe’s GitLab page

What Cosmoe on Wayland (to differentiate it from Cosmoe Classic) allows you to do is run BeOS/Haiku applications on Linux, provided you are running Wayland. The project is in an alpha state, but once compiled, it comes with a few BeOS/Haiku sample applications you can run right on your Wayland-based Linux desktop. Hayden states that about 95% of the BeOS API is implemented in Cosmoe, with the TODO file giving an idea of what tasks need to be done to improve compatibility and implement other improvements.

The return of Cosmoe is certainly not something I saw coming, but I’m incredibly excited. I’m not entirely sure about the usefulness of running Haiku applications on Wayland on Linux, but who the hell cares – this is an awesome project, with a ton of cherished history behind it that gives me butterflies in my stomach. It’s absolutely beautiful to see a project like this come back to life in 2025.

Cosmoe is back. Again.

libxml2 maintainer ends embargoed vulnerability reports, citing unsustainable burden 20 Jun 2025, 9:35 pm

The lone volunteer maintainer of libxml2, one of the open source ecosystem’s most widely used XML parsing libraries, has announced a policy shift that drops support for embargoed security vulnerability reports. This change highlights growing frustration among unpaid maintainers bearing the brunt of big tech’s security demands without compensation or support.

[…]

Wellnhofer’s blunt assessment is that coordinated disclosure mostly benefits large tech companies while leaving maintainers doing unpaid work. He criticized the OpenSSF and Linux Foundation membership costs as a financial barrier to single person maintainers gaining additional support.

↫ Sarah Gooding

The problem is that, according to Wellnhofer, libxml2 was never supposed to be widely used, but now every major technology company with billions in quarterly revenue are basically expecting an unpaid maintainer to fix the security issues – many of which questionable – they throw his way.

The point is that libxml2 never had the quality to be used in mainstream browsers or operating systems to begin with. It all started when Apple made libxml2 a core component of all their OSes. Then Google followed suit and now even Microsoft is using libxml2 in their OS outside of Edge. This should have never happened. Originally it was kind of a growth hack, but now these companies make billions of profits and refuse to pay back their technical debt, either by switching to better solutions, developing their own or by trying to improve libxml2.

The behavior of these companies is irresponsible. Even if they claim otherwise, they don’t care about the security and privacy of their users. They only try to fix symptoms.

↫ Nick Wellnhofer

It’s wild that a library never intended to be widely used in any critical infrastructure is now used all over the place, even though it just does not have the level of quality and security needed to perform such a role. These are the words of Wellnhofer himself – an addition to the project’s readme now makes this point very clear, and I absolutely love the wording:

This is open-source software written by hobbyists, maintained by a single
volunteer, badly tested, written in a memory-unsafe language and full of
security bugs. It is foolish to use this software to process untrusted data.
As such, we treat security issues like any other bug. Each security report
we receive will be made public immediately and won’t be prioritized.

↫ libxml2’s readme

If you want libxml2 to fulfill a role it was never intended to fulfill, make it happen. With contributions. With money. Don’t just throw a whole slew of security demands a sole maintainer’s way and hope he will do the work for you.

rou2exOS: a DOS-like hobby operating system written in Rust 20 Jun 2025, 9:15 pm

rou2exOS is a 64-bit DOS-like operating system (OS). The system is mainly written in Rust, but some portion of x86 assembly is used as well (inline + freestanding code for the stage2 kernel loading).

↫ Blog post about rou2exOS at blog.vxn.dev

It can do basic VGA operations, comes with a very barebones networking stack, realtime clock support, a FAT12 driver, and a few more tidbits. It’s a rewrite of the previous iteration of the hobby operating system.

Jolla kills €25 yearly subscription for updates, guaranteeing five years of free updates instead 19 Jun 2025, 8:20 pm

Welcome news coming out of Jolla, the company that develops Sailfish OS. Up until now, if you bought their Jolla C2 smartphone, you had to pay a yearly subscription fee in order to get updates (with the first year included in the purchase price). Today they’ve announced their dropping this construction, and they now guarantee five years of free updates.

We’re happy to announce that from now onwards long-term Sailfish OS updates are included free-of-charge to all Jolla C2 devices for a minimum of 5 years. This applies also to everybody who have already purchased the Jolla C2.

↫ Announcement at the Jolla forums

People don’t like subscriptions, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Jolla was simply running into a lot of resistance to this subscription model from potential customers. Nobody likes subscriptions, and I think that counts doubly so for the kinds of people interested in buying a phone like the C2 with Sailfish OS.

Liberux Nexx: a Linux smartphone built in Europe 18 Jun 2025, 11:51 pm

With the possibility that Google is going to make some big changes to the open source status of Android, the importance of smartphones that don’t run either iOS or (some form of) Android is definitely increasing. Linux on smartphones is not as complete as iOS or Android, and I personally think one of the primary reasons for that is a lack of easy access to devices that don’t require manual installation or other forms of hackery, only to then end up with a partially supported device because the device in question was never originally designed to run regular Linux.

A few companies are trying to change this, developing Linux-first smartphones instead. One of the newcomers here is Liberux, a Spanish company who just unveiled the crowdfunding campaign for their Liberux Nexx, a Debian-powered smartphone with excellent specifications and some unique additions you won’t find on any other smartphone. It’s powered by an octa-core Rockchip RK3588S (four Cortex-A76 cores and four Cortex-A55 cores up to 2.4 GHz), 32 GB LPDDR4x RAM, tons of expendable storage, and a 6.34″ 2400×1080 OLED display.

At the top of the device sit something you won’t find on many other smartphones: dedicated hardware switches to physically cut power to the modem, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip, and the microhone/camera array. When all three switches are disabled, a number of other features, like GPS and sensors, are also turned off. On top of all this, various internal components are designed to be replaceable and possibly even upgradeable, with manufacturing of the device taking place in Europe – which probably refers to assembly, but still. The device is supposed to become open source, too.

It will run Debian 13 with a customised version of the mobile GNOME Shell using a standard Linux kernel. Android applications will also be supported using Waydroid, which you’ll most likely have to rely on for things like banking and other application categories exclusive to iOS and Android. Liberux promises that any development done on both the Linux distribution and other related applications will be done openly, which is something we can hold them to quite easily.

I’m always weary of crowdfunding campaigns, and all the usual caveats, warnings, and concerns still apply here. I’m highlighting this campaign because I feel like many of the kinds of people who read OSNews are longing for a modern, capable smartphone that runs not iOS or Android, but proper Linux, even if Linux on smartphones isn’t quite there yet to go toe-to-toe with the two duopolists. For more information on the device and the people involved, be sure to read LINMOB.net’s excellent interview with Liberux.

Liberux has told me they want to send over a review device once development has reached a point where that’s possible. So, assuming the crowdfunding campaign is successful, you can look forward to a review of the Liberux Nexx on OSNews somewhere between now and mid-2026.

Resurrecting a dead Torrent tracker and finding 3 million peers 18 Jun 2025, 9:20 pm

Kian Bradley was downloading something using BitTorrent, and noticed that quite a few trackers were dead.

Most of the trackers were totally dead. Either the hosts were down or the domains weren’t being used.

That got me thinking. What if I picked up one of these dead domains? How many clients would try to connect?

Kian Bradley

It turns out the answer is a lot.

Accessibility programming doesn’t feel accessible 18 Jun 2025, 9:16 pm

Accessibility is something that doesn’t get nearly enough attention, especially considering because not only will we need accessibility features eventually as we grow older, but also because a lot of accessibility features are just helpful even if you don’t technically need them. Given these facts, it’s a shame that accessibility is usually an afterthought, doubly so on open source desktops, a problem we recently talked about.

But what if you don’t just need to use a few applications as, say, a blind person, but also actually program as a blind person? Acidic Light, accessibility engineer at KDE e.V., has published a blog post about how screen readers actually work, and what it’s like to program while blind, and the conclusions are not exactly great.

I truly feel that, based on my experience with KDE and my experience actually delving into the weeds with AccessKit in a custom UI system, that accessibility programming just isn’t accessible. Unless you happen to already understand the way each platform works, trying to find resources on how to actually let a screen reader know your UI exists is just painful. It’s going to involve reading code other people have already written. It’s going to involve hours, if not days, if not weeks of research and painful debugging. You likely won’t be able to ask many people for help, because they’ll know as much as you do.

↫ Acidic Light

If the people who know most what is needed to make a program accessible have so many problems actually making programs accessible, because the tooling, documentation, and institutional knowledge just isn’t there, what hope do other programmers have to make their code accessible? If a blind programmer can’t scratch their own itch, so to speak, we’re never going to reach a point where accessibility becomes a given.

I’m very happy awareness of accessibility is growing, but I feel like this isn’t the first time we’ve seen an increase in accessibility awareness only for it to eventually fizzle out without meaningful improvements for those that need it the most. I really hope it sticks this time.

KDE Plasma 6.4 released 17 Jun 2025, 2:44 pm

A new version of Plasma is here, and it feels even more like /home, as it becomes smoother, friendlier and more helpful.

Plasma 6.4 improves on nearly every front, with progress being made in accessibility, color rendering, tablet support, window management, and more.

↫ KDE Plasma 6.4 release announcement

KDE Plasma 6.4 comes with a big improvement in window and virtual desktop management, allowing you to create entirely custom tiled configurations per virtual desktop. Accessibility was another focus of this release, as we talked about a few weeks ago, bringing number pad mouse pointer navigation, improved desktop zoom, screen readers improvements, better contrast i the dark theme, tons of little legibility improvements across the desktop environment and its applications, and more.

Furthermore, there’s now finally a dedicated page in Settings for animations, so you no longer have to dig your way through the oddly placed and obtuse Desktop Effects page. Notifications have been improved as well, with new additions like a speed graph in file transfer notifications or Plasma notifying you when you’re trying to use a muted microphone input. KRunner can now visualise colours when searching for a hex code, Spectacle has received some love, various widgets have been touched up, and much more.

There’s a brand new HDR wizard, support for Extended Dynamic Range, and the addition of the P010 video color format. System Monitor will now show usage information for Intel and AMD GPUs, and Info Center will show raw sensor data from the sensors in your device. There’s a ton more, as this is a fairly major release.

You can download and compile KDE Plasma 6.4 now, or just wait a few days until it lands in your distribution’s repository.

Haiku’s development activity seems to be shifting from the operating system to its applications 17 Jun 2025, 2:21 pm

I hate how these months keep going down like vodka-martinis on an Italian beach, but at least we get another progress report for Haiku every time. Aside from the usual small changes and bug fixes, the most important of which is probably allowing the EXT4 driver to read and write again, there’s this little paragraph at the end which definitely stands out.

This month was a bit lighter than usual, it seems most of the developers (myself included) were busy with other things… However, HaikuPorts remained quite active: most months, at this point, there are more commits to HaikuPorts than Haiku, and sometimes by a significant margin, too (for May, it was 52 in Haiku vs. 258 in HaikuPorts!). I think overall this is a sign of Haiku’s growing maturity: the system seems stable enough that the porters can do their work without uncovering too many bugs in Haiku that interrupt or halt their progress.

↫ Haiku activity report for May

I definitely hope that this positive read is correct, as it would be a shame for the project to run into declining activity and contributions just as it seems to be serving as a solid base for quite a wide variety of applications. I’ve definitely been seeing more and more people giving Haiku a try lately and coming away impressed, but of course, that’s just anecdotal and I have no idea if that means Haiku has reached a certain point of maturity.

One thing that definitely does indicate Haiku is a lot more stable and generally usable than most people think is the massive amount solid ports the platform can handle, from Firefox to LibreOffice, and everything in between. I think a lot of people would be surprised by just how far they can get with their day-to-day computing needs with Haiku, assuming their hardware can boot Haiku and is properly supported, of course.

My opinion on Haiku has not changed, but I’m a random idiot you shouldn’t be listening to. The cold and harsh truth is that old people like me who want their BeOS boomerware but in 2025, are a small minority who are impossible to please. The Haiku team’s focus on getting modern software ported to Haiku, instead or trying to convince people to code brand new native Haiku applications, is objectively the correct choice to ensure the viability of the platform going forward.

If Haiku wishes to fully outgrow its hobby status, looking towards the future is a far better approach than clinging to the past, and unsurprisingly, Haiku’s developers are more than smart enough to realise that.