The chaos in the US is affecting open source software and its developers 7 Feb 2026, 9:20 pm

It was only a matter of time before the illegal, erratic, inhumane, and cruel behaviours and policies of the second Trump regime were going to affect the open source world in a possibly very visible way. Christian Hergert, longtime GNOME and Linux contributor, employed by Red Hat, wanted to leave the US with his family and move to Europe, but requests to remain employed by Red Hat were denied. As such, he decided to end his employment at Red Hat and push on with the move. However, without employment, his work on open source software is going to suffer.

While at their in-person visa appointment in Seattle, US border patrol goons shot two people only a few blocks away, underlining the urgency with which people might want to consider getting out of the US, even if it means losing employment. Regardless, the end result is that quite a bit of user-facing software that millions of people use every day is going to be affected.

This move also means a professional shift. For many years, I’ve dedicated a substantial portion of my time to maintaining and developing key components across the GNOME platform and its surrounding ecosystem. These projects are widely used, including in major Linux distributions and enterprise environments, and they depend on steady, ongoing care.

For many years, I’ve been putting in more than forty hours each week maintaining and advancing this stack. That level of unpaid or ad-hoc effort isn’t something I can sustain, and my direct involvement going forward will be very limited. Given how widely this software is used in commercial and enterprise environments, long-term stewardship really needs to be backed by funded, dedicated work rather than spare-time contributions.

↫ Christian Hergert

The list of projects for which Hergert is effectively the sole maintainer is long, and if you’re a Linux user, odds are you’re using at least some of them: GNOME’s text editor, GNOME’s terminal, GNOME’s flagship IDE Builder, and tons of lower-level widely-used frameworks and libraries like GtkSourceView, libspelling, libpeas, and countless others. While new maintainers will definitely be found for at least some of these, the disruption will be real and will be felt beyond these projects alone. There’s also the possibility that Hergert won’t be the only prolific open source contributor seeking to leave the US and thus reducing their contributions, especially if a company like Red Hat makes it a policy not to help its employees trying to flee whatever mess the US is in.

Stories like these illustrate so well why the “no politics!” crowd is so utterly misguided. Politics governs every aspect of our lives, especially so if you’re part of a minority group currently being targeted by the largest and most powerful state apparatus in the world, and pretending to be all three wise monkeys at once is not going to make any of that go away. Even if you’re not directly targeted because you’re not transgender, you’re not brown, you’re not an immigrant, or not whatever else they fancy targeting today, the growing tendrils of even an incompetent totalitarian regime will eventually find you and harm you.

More so than any other type of software, open source software is made by real humans, and as these totalitarian tendrils keep growing, more and more of these real humans will be affected, no matter how incompetent these tendrils might be. You can’t run away and hide from that reality, even if it makes you uncomfortable.

Commission trials European open source communications software: Matrix 7 Feb 2026, 10:32 am

“As part of our efforts to use more sovereign digital solutions, the European Commission is preparing an internal communication solution based on the Matrix protocol,” the spokesperson told Euractiv.

Matrix is an open source, community-developed messaging protocol shepherded by a non-profit that’s headquartered in London. It’s already widely used for public messengers across Europe, with the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces all using tools built on the protocol.

↫ Maximilian Henning at Euractiv

Right now, most government agencies and institutions in Europe are effectively entirely reliant on Microsoft for their digital infrastructure, and that’s not a tenable situation going forward with the Americans being openly hostile towards Europe, up to and including threatening to invade European countries. Europe needs its own digital infrastructure, and opting to build those around open source tools is the obvious way to go.

Of course, this isn’t an easy process, but two platitudes apply here: Rome wasn’t built in a day, and every journey begins with a first step. By opting to use existing open source tools, though, these efforts will have a massive head start, and will hopefully lead to a flurry of increased activity for the open source projects in question. In this particular case it’s Matrix, which can surely need some additional work and eyeballs, if my use of the protocol is any indication.

“I now assume that all ads on Apple News are scams” 7 Feb 2026, 10:18 am

What does it look like when a hardware and software company descends into an obsession with recurring services revenue to please its shareholders? Look no further than Apple, who has turned its Apple News service into a vehicle for scam ads.

These fake “going out of business ads” have been around for a few years, and even the US Better Business Bureau warns about them, as they take peoples’ money then shut down. Does Apple care? Does Taboola care? Does Apple care that Taboola serves ads like this? My guess: no, no, and no.

↫ Kirk McElhearn

While serving obvious scams to users is already bad enough, the real kicker is that even if you are a paying user of Apple News, you still get served ads, including the scams. Of course, massive corporations like Apple are free too just scam you, since they’re effectively immune from any legal consequences, so it’s unlikely the scamming will stop as long as it makes line go up.

On an entirely unrelated note, OSNews is entirely free of ads, so there’s no scams here. OSNews is fully funded by our readers through single donations on Ko-Fi or by becoming a Patreon.

Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech’s “top priority” 5 Feb 2026, 9:52 pm

I nominate this for the “Most Expected News Of The Decade” award.

Today, The Tech Oversight Project published a new report spotlighting newly unsealed documents in the 2026 social media addiction trials. The documents provide smoking-gun evidence that Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok all purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing, and how that mass youth addiction was core to the companies’ business models. The documents contain internal discussions among company employees, presentations from internal meetings, expert testimony, and evidence of Big Tech coordination with tech-funded groups, including the National Parent Teachers Association (PTA) and Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), in attempts to control the narrative in response to concerned parents.

↫ The Tech Oversight Project

Modern social media companies are not entirely different from tobacco companies. They and everyone else know full well just how dangerous social media is, and how being addicted to it has disastrous consequences for the people involved. Tobacco companies, too, knew how dangerous smoking was decades before the general population was aware, and yet they kept pushing cigarettes, even to kids, deaths be damned. In fact, they’re still doing the same thing today with “vapes”, and we’re kind of letting it happen all over again.

Social media is directly responsible for genocides, extreme polarisation, the spread of endless amounts of lies causing parents to harm their children, mass generation of child pornography, and much, much more. All of this is not a coincidence, mere side-effects, unintended consequences – social media are designed and optimised specifically to achieve these goals, like cigarettes and now “vapes” are designed specifically to be as addictive as possible. The people responsible – social media companies, their executives, their employees – need to face justice, answer for what they’ve done, and face the legal consequences.

Of course, that’s not going to happen. Billionaires and their megacorporations are untouchable, too big to fail, too closely tied to especially the current regime in the US. I don’t think social media bans for people under 16 are the answer, since they tend to come with onerous and invasive online identity checks and because they cut vulnerable people off from their support networks, but it’s clear we need to do something.

Microsoft has killed widgets six times 5 Feb 2026, 12:13 am

Gadgets, desk accessories, widgets – whatever you they were called, they were a must-have feature for various operating systems for a while. Windows in particular has tried making them happen six times, and every time, they failed to really catch on and ended up being killed, only for the company to try again a few years later.

Microsoft has been trying to solve the same UX problem since 1997: how to surface live information without making you launch an app. They’ve shipped six different implementations across nearly 30 years. Each one died from a different fundamental flaw – performance, security, screen space, privacy, engagement. And each death triggered the same reflex: containment.

↫ Pavel Osadchuk

There’s quite a few memories in this article. I never actually used Active Desktop back when it came out, because I seem to remember the channels feature was either not available in The Netherlands or the available channels were American stuff we didn’t care about. The sidebar in Vista had a lot of potential, and I did like the feature, but there weren’t a lot of great widgets and we hadn’t entered the era of omnipresent notifications begging for out attention just yet, so use cases remained elusive.

Now Metro, that’s where things came together, at least for me. I was en enthusiastic Windows Phone user – I imported two Windows Phone devices from the US to be an early adopter – and I still consider its live tiles with notifications and other useful information to be the most pleasant user interface for a mobile device, bar none. It may have taken Microsoft six tries, but they nailed it with that one, and I’m still sad the Windows Phone user interface lost out to whatever iOS and Android offered.

On desktops and laptops, though, it’s a different story, and I don’t think the Metro tiles concept ever made any sense there. Widgets as they exist in Windows now mostly seem like an annoying distraction, and I’ve never seen anyone actually use them. Does anyone even keep them enabled at all?

Microsoft Research releases LiteBox, a new library operating system 4 Feb 2026, 11:56 pm

Microsoft Research, in collaboration with various others, has just released LiteBox, a library operating system.

LiteBox is a sandboxing library OS that drastically cuts down the interface to the host, thereby reducing attack surface. It focuses on easy interop of various “North” shims and “South” platforms. LiteBox is designed for usage in both kernel and non-kernel scenarios.

LiteBox exposes a Rust-y nix/rustix-inspired “North” interface when it is provided a Platform interface at its “South”. These interfaces allow for a wide variety of use-cases, easily allowing for connection between any of the North–South pairs.

↫ LiteBox GitHub Page

Suggested use-cases are running unmodified Linux applications on Windows, sandboxing Linux applications on Linux, running OP-TEE applications on Linux, and more. It’s written in Rust, and the code is available on GitHub under an MIT license.

Zig replaces third-party C code with Zig’s own code 3 Feb 2026, 9:56 pm

Over the past month or so, several enterprising contributors have taken an interest in the zig libc subproject. The idea here is to incrementally delete redundant code, by providing libc functions as Zig standard library wrappers rather than as vendored C source files. In many cases, these functions are one-to-one mappings, such as memcpy or atan2, or trivially wrap a generic function, like strnlen.

So far, roughly 250 C source files have been deleted from the Zig repository, with 2032 remaining.

With each function that makes the transition, Zig gains independence from third party projects and from the C programming language, compilation speed improves, Zig’s installation size is simplified and reduced, and user applications which statically link libc enjoy reduced binary size.

↫ Andrew Kelley on the Zig Devlog

The goal is to replace all of the musl, wasi-libc, and MinGW-w64 C code bundled in Zig with new Zig code.

Rust in the NetBSD kernel seems unlikely 3 Feb 2026, 9:47 pm

Rust is everywhere, and it’s no surprise it’s also made its way into the lowest levels of certain operating systems and kernels, so it shouldn’t be surprising that various operating system developers have to field questions and inquiries about Rust. NetBSD developer Benny Siegert wrote a blog post about this very subject, and in it, details why it’s unlikely Rust will find its way into the NetBSD base system and/or the kernel

First, NetBSD is famed for its wide architecture and platform support, and Rust would make that a lot more troublesome due to Rust simply not being available on many platforms NetBSD supports. Rust release cycles also aren’t compatible with NetBSD, it would draw a lot of dependency code into the base system, and keeping Rust and its compiler toolchain working is a lot of work that falls on the shoulders of a relatively small group of NetBSD developers.

Note that while NetBSD does tend to take a more cautious approach to these matters than, say, Linux or FreeBSD, the operating system isn’t averse to change on principle. For instance, not only is Lua part of the base system, it’s even used in the NetBSD kernel due to its ability to rapidly develop and prototype kernel drivers. In short, while it doesn’t seem likely Rust will make it into the NetBSD base system, it’s not an impossibility either.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Amiga UNIX 3 Feb 2026, 12:10 am

We recently talked about Apple’s pre-Mac OS X dabblings in UNIX, but Apple wasn’t the only computer and operating system company exploring UNIX alternatives. Microsoft had the rather successful Xenix, Atari had ASV, Sony had NEWS, to name just a very small few. The Amiga, too, wanted in on the UNIX action, and as such, released Amiga UNIX, based on AT&T System V Release 4. The Amiga UNIX website is dedicated to everything you would ever want to know about this operating system.

This site is dedicated on preserving Amix’s history and sharing information and instructions on what Amix is, how to install it (either on real hardware or in emulation) and what can you do with it. Mainly, it tries to cater to people who wish to run AMIX for whatever reason on their hardware. By documenting experiences with it, it is hoped that subsequent SVR4 junkies will find the way more smooth than it might have been without any guidance at all. For even a relatively experienced modern Unix or GNU/Linux administrator, System V UNIX is sufficiently different to present difficulty in installation and administration. Not so much in moving around between directories, and using common utilities that persist to this day – although many of those are hoary and somewhat forgetful in their retirement – but of doing more in depth tasks and understanding the differences.

↫ The Amiga Unix Wiki

If you wish to run Amiga UNIX yourself, you’ll either have to have one of the original two models sold with it – the 2500UX and 3000UX – or one of the Amigas that meets the minimum requirements. Another option is, of course, emulation, and WinUAE has support for running Amiga UNIX.

Firefox nightly gets “AI” kill switch 2 Feb 2026, 8:34 pm

After a seemingly endless stream of tone deaf news from Mozilla, we’ve finally got some good news for Firefox users. As the company’s been hinting at for a while on social media now, they’ve added an “AI” kill switch to the latest Firefox nightly release, as well as a set of toggles to disable specific “AI” features.

You can choose to use some of these and not others. If you don’t want to use AI features from Firefox at all, you can turn on the Block AI enhancements toggle. When it’s toggled on, you won’t see pop-ups or reminders to use existing or upcoming AI features. 

Once you set your AI preferences in Firefox, they stay in place across updates. You can also change them whenever you want.

↫ Ajit Varma at the Mozilla blog

I’m particularly enamoured with the specific mention that the setting will remain unaffected by updates. It’s incredibly sad that Mozilla even has to mention this, but they have nobody to blame but themselves for that one. None of this is enough to draw me away from Librewolf and back to Firefox, but at least it gives those of us who prefer to keep using Firefox the option to disable all of this “AI” nonsense. Also, there’s no Librewolf for POWER9, so I have to use Firefox somewhere.

It’s unlikely Chrome or Safari will get such clear “AI” kill switches, so it might become a reason for some to switch to Firefox from Chrome or Safari.

Audio on hp300 2 Feb 2026, 8:18 pm

In the late 1980s, with the expansion of the Internet (even though it was not open to commercial activities yet) and the slowly increasing capabilities of workstations, some people started to imagine the unthinkable: that, some day, you may use your computer to record voice messages, send them over the Internet, and the recipient could listen to these messages on his own computer.

That was definitely science fiction… until workstation manufacturers started to add audio capabilities to their hardware.

↫ Miod Vallat

A great story detailing how the audio hardware in the HP 9000/425e was made to work on OpenBSD and NetBSD.

OpenVMS 9.2-3 x64 now has local console on OPA0 1 Feb 2026, 9:10 am

I previously covered x64 OpenVMS release on VMware. This was insanely cool achievement for the operating system. While it had no practical ramification there was one small annoyance. The OS console was on a serial port. In VMware it meant another VM connected via named pipe.

Now OpenVMS x64 supports (limited?) local console on OPA0.

↫ Virtually Fun

I think this has been available for a while now – since 2024 – but we hadn’t covered it yet. That same 2024 post also indicates CDE and DECWindows work now, a side effect of a C/C++ compiler bugfix. Sadly, VSI has made it clear that desktop support is not at all on their list of things to spend time on, so don’t expect graphics support to improve meaningfully other than by accident like in this case.

Guix System first impressions as a Nix user 1 Feb 2026, 8:54 am

But NixOS isn’t the only declarative distro out there. In fact GNU forked Nix fairly early and made their own spin called Guix, whose big innovation is that, instead of using the unwieldy Nix-language, it uses Scheme. Specifically Guile Scheme, GNU’s sanctioned configuration language. I’ve been following Guix for a bit, but it never felt quite ready to me with stuff like KDE being only barely supported and a lot of hardware not working out of the box.

However, now that (after three years) Guix announced its 1.5.0 release with a lot of stuff stabilized and KDE finally a first-party citizen, I figured now is the best time to give it a fresh shot. This post captures my experiences from installation to the first 3-4 days.

↫ Nemin’s blog

If you’re interested in Guix, but aren’t quite sure if you want to take the plunge, this article does a great job of showing you the ropes, listing what issues you might run into, some pitfalls to avoid, and so on.

Microsoft gestures vaguely in the general direction of fleeting promises to improve Windows 11 30 Jan 2026, 10:37 pm

It’s no secret that Windows 11 isn’t exactly well-liked by even most of its users, and I’m fairly sure that perception has permeated into the general public as well. It seems Microsoft is finally getting the message, and they’re clearly spooked: the company has told The Verge that they have heard the complaints, and intend to start fixing many of the issues people are having.

The feedback we’re receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people. This year, you will see us focus on addressing pain points we hear consistently from customers: improving system performance, reliability, and the overall experience of Windows.

↫ Pavan Davuluri, head of Windows, to The Verge

This entire statement is utterly meaningless. I have zero faith in words; only actions will do. Microsoft has made many promises over the years, and they have a history of simply not following through on them. Up until this year is over and there have been material improvements in Windows 11 that we can measure, see, and point to, nothing has changed between the day before the statement and the day after. Anyone taking this at face value and reporting it as such is an idiot.

This means that at the end of this year, Windows 11 should be faster, more stable, experience far fewer breaking updates, have fewer – nay – zero ads, a far more consistent user interface, proper local account support, and more. If these things haven’t become reality once the countdown runs out and on 31 December, Microsoft lied to our faces once more.

Until then, don’t use Windows.

Ariel OS: a library operating system for IoT devices written in Rust 30 Jan 2026, 1:52 pm

Operating systems written in Rust – especially for embedded use – are quite common these days, and today’s example fits right into that trend.

Ariel OS is an operating system for secure, memory-safe, low-power Internet of Things (IoT). It is based on Rust from the ground up and supports hardware based on 32-bit microcontroller architectures (Cortex-M, RISC-V, and Xtensa). For a quick overview of our motivations and what we plan next, check our roadmap.

Ariel OS builds on top of existing projects from the Embedded Rust ecosystem, including Embassy, esp-hal, defmt, probe-rs, sequential-storage, and embedded-test. While those provide high-quality building blocks for a wide range of embedded applications, such projects do not provide the high level of integration that developers know from contemporary C-based operating systems for microcontrollers, such as RIOT or Zephyr for instance.

↫ Ariel OS GitHub page

There’s bound to be a microcontroller you can get your hands on that Ariel OS supports, and since it’s licensed under either a MIT or Apache 2.0 license, you can get going right away.

Mac OS and Windows NT-capable ROMs discovered for Apple’s unique AIX Network Server 29 Jan 2026, 11:50 pm

As most of you will know, Mac OS X (or Rhapsody if you count the developer releases) wasn’t Apple’s first foray into the world of UNIX. The company sold its own UNIX variant, A/UX, from 1988 to 1995, which combined a System V-based UNIX with a System 7.0.1 desktop environment and application compatibility, before it acquired NeXT and started working on Rhapsody/Mac OS X. As a sidenote, I don’t know if the application compatibility layer was related to the Macintosh Application Environment for UNIX, which I have running on my HP-UX machines.

That’s not the only time Apple dabbled with UNIX, though – Apple’s unique Apple Network Server product from 1996 also came with UNIX, but time it wasn’t one from Apple itself, but rather from its enemy-turned-friend IBM: AIX. The Network Server shipped with a slightly customised version of IBM’s AIX operating system; regular AIX straight from IBM wouldn’t work. The more things change, the more they stay the same I guess.

Since the Apple Network Server was built around a modified Power Macintosh 9500 – there’s much more to the hardware, but that’s the short of it – so you would expect the Network Server to also be able to run regular Mac OS for PowerPC, right? Apple even sold server products running plain Mac OS at the time, so it’d make sense, but nothing about Apple in the ’90s made any sense whatsoever, so no, use of plain Mac OS was locked out through the ROM. And let’s not even get started about other PowerPC operating systems of the time, like, of all things, Windows NT – something Apple supposedly demonstrated at some point.

But was that always the case?

Well, we’ve got new ROMs straight from a former Apple employee, and after flashing them to a supported ROM chip, the Apple Network Sever can now run classic Mac OS. On top of that, and even more miraculous, the Windows NT-capable ROMs have also been discovered.

I’ll give you a spoiler now: it turns out the NT ROM isn’t enough to install Windows NT by itself, even though it has some interesting attributes. Sadly this was not unexpected. But the pre-production ROM does work to boot Mac OS, albeit with apparent bugs and an injection of extra hardware. Let’s get the 700 running again (call it a Refurb Weekend) and show the process.

↫ Cameron Kaiser

While it’s great news to see that Mac OS can now be run on the Network Server, I’m personally much more interested in the story behind the Windows NT ROMs. The idea that Apple would sell a computer running Windows NT out of the box is wild to think about now, but considering the desperate state the company was in at the time, all options must’ve been on the table. Sadly, as Kaiser discovered, the Windows NT ROMs in and of themselves are not enough to run Windows NT. However, they appear to be much farther along in the development process than even the Mac OS-capable ROMs, which is fascinating.

When Jobs talked Gil Amelio into canning the ANS as well, the ROM initiative naturally went out the window with it. However, while the existing 2.0 Mac OS ROMs are only known on an unmarked development flash stick similar to mine, these final 2.26NT ROMs appear almost production-ready with fully printed labels, suggesting they had reached a very late stage of development.

↫ Cameron Kaiser

Despite not being able to boot Windows NT for PowerPC as-is, most likely because there’s no compatible ARC or HAL, Kaiser did discover a ton of interesting details, like how this ROM configures the Network Server to run in little endian mode, which is all Windows NT for PowerPC ever supported, making this the very first time a PowerPC machine did so. I’m hoping Kaiser manages to track down the necessary components to make Windows NT bootable on the ANS, as one of the most unique curiosities in Apple history.

There’s a ton more details in the article, as per usual Kaiser standards, and it’s an absolute joy to read.