Google cancels plans to require Android application certification outside of the Play Store 13 Nov 2025, 3:28 pm

Only a few months ago, Google announced it was going to require that all Android applications – even those installed outside of the Play Store – had to be verified. This led to a massive backlash, and it seems our protests and complaints have had effect: the company announced a change in plans today, and will, in fact, not require certification for installing applications outside of the Play Store.

Based on this feedback and our ongoing conversations with the community, we are building a new advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn’t verified. We are designing this flow specifically to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren’t tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer. It will also include clear warnings to ensure users fully understand the risks involved, but ultimately, it puts the choice in their hands. We are gathering early feedback on the design of this feature now and will share more details in the coming months.

↫ Matthew Forsythe Director at the Android Developers Blog

While this is great news, I’m still concerned this is only temporary. Companies like Google have a tendency to announce some draconian measure to test the waters, walk it back in response to backlash, only to then reintroduce it through some sneaky backdoor a year later when nobody’s looking. Installing whatever we want on the devices we own should be a protected right, not something graciously afforded to us by our corporate overlords.

If you think this is the end of this story, you’re a fool.

Big news for small OpenBSD /usr partitions 13 Nov 2025, 3:19 pm

Ever ran into issues using sysupgrade on OpenBSD because /usr ran out of space? OpenBSD developers are trying to address this issue.

Firstly, Stuart Henderson (sthen@) modified the installer to increase free space prior to installing. […] Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) modified sysupgrade(8) so that, if space is too tight, it will fail gracefully rather than risk leaving the administrator with a broken system.

↫ OpenBSD Journal

These are very welcome additions.

Valve brings x86 gaming to ARM Linux with FEX 13 Nov 2025, 3:16 pm

Valve announced a few new devices yesterday. There’s a new Steam console, which is essentially just a tiny PC with SteamOS installed – think of it as a Steam Deck without a display. Second, Valve finally released a new Steam Controller to go with the Steam console, which has taken them long enough. Lastly, there’s a brand new Steam VR headset, the Steam Frame. Other websites with actual access to these new devices will do a better job of covering them than I ever could, but I do want to highlight something crucially important about the Steam Frame: it contains a Snapdragon ARM processor, but can still run Steam and all of its games. How does this work?

Well, after developing Proton to allow Windows games to run on Linux, Valve “introduced” FEX, which will allow you to run x86 Windows games on ARM Linux. I put the quotation marks there because FEX was an existing project Valve invested heavily into in recent times, and it’s now at the point where Valve seems confident enough it will be capable of running enough x86 games on ARM Linux. As such, the Steam Frame runs full SteamOS with KDE Plasma, you can run x86 Steam games, and as an additional bonus, you can install Android APKs as well.

I’ve yet to even try VR, because I’m not particularly interested in buying into any locked-down platform. The Steam Frame may be the first VR device I’ll buy – depending on price, of course – and the Steam console definitely looks like a great addition to the living room, too. My wife and I have little to no interesting in buying an Xbox or PS5, but having easy, no-hassle access to our massive Steam libraries on our TV will be awesome.

VMS/XDE: an OpenVMS x86 development environment for Linux and Windows/WSL 11 Nov 2025, 3:34 pm

VMS/XDE is an OpenVMS x86 development environment for Linux and WIndows (via WSL). It provides a familiar user experience for OpenVMS developers working in Linux and Windows yet offers 100% binary and file system compatilibilty with OpenVMS.

VMS/XDE includes OpenVMS V9.2-3 user, supervisor and executive mode operating system environments and a set of x86 native compilers and layered products geared towards OpenVMS software development and testing.

↫ VMS/XDE website

VMS/XDE is a beta version, and comes with the usual annoying OpenVMS x86 time bombs, this time exploding on 3 January 2026. If you intend to use the finalised commercial version after the beta period ends, you’ll have to employ the same licenses as regular OpenVMS. It’s a bit of a mess, but that’s the OpenVMS way, sadly – and I don’t blame them, either, as I’m sure they’re hamstrung by a ton of agreements and restrictions imposed upon them by HP.

Regardless, VMS/XDE brings a zero setup OpenVMS environment to the operating system you’re already using, making it easier to develop and cross-compile for the platform. I still have absolutely no clue just how many people OpenVMS is still relevant for, but I absolutely adore the fact VMS Software Inc. is working on this. In a world where so many of its former competitors are being held hostage by corporate indifference, it’s refreshing to see VMS still moving forward.

Plasma Mobile 6.5 keeps improving 11 Nov 2025, 3:26 pm

As part of the KDE Plasma 6.5 release, we also got a new release of Plasma Mobile. As there’s a lot of changes, improvements, and new features in Plasma Mobile 6.5, the Plasma Mobile Team published a blog post to highlight them all. The biggest improvement is probably the further integration of Waydroid, a necessary evil to run Android applications until the Plasma Mobile ecosystem manages to become a bit more well-rounded. Waydroid can now be managed straight from the settings application and the quick settings dropdown.

Furthermore, the lockscreen has been improved considerably, there’s been a ton of polish for the home screen and the user interface in general, the quick settings panel can now be customised to make it fit better on different form factors, the first early test version of the new Plasma mobile keyboard is included, and so much more. This is definitely a release I would want to try out, but since I don’t have any of the supported devices, I’m a bit stuck.

This is, of course, one of the two major problems facing proper mobile Linux: the lack of device support. It’s improving due to the tireless work of countless volunteers, but they’re always going to be swimming upstream. The other major problem is, of course, application availability, but at least Waydroid can bridge the gap for the adventurous among us.

Tribblix m38 released 11 Nov 2025, 6:41 am

Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, has released a new version. Milestone 38 isn’t the most consequential release of all time, but it does bring a few small changes accompanied by the usual long list of updated open source packages. The zap install command now installs dependencies by default, while zap create-user will now restrict new home directories to mode 0700 by default.

Meanwhile, int16h at Cryogenix published an article about using a Bhyve VM running FreeBSD to act as a Wi-Fi bridge for laptops with 802.11xx chips that Tribblix doesn’t support. This is a great, albeit somewhat convoluted option if your hardware uses any Wi-Fi chips Tribblix doesn’t support. There’s honestly a solution for everything, isn’t there?

Setting up a combined 68k/PA-RISC HP-UX 9 cluster 10 Nov 2025, 10:47 pm

Jonathan Pallant got lucky and managed to score a massive haul of ’90s UNIX workstations, one of which was an HP 9000 Model 340, a HP-UX workstation built around a Motorola 68030 processor at 16.7 MHz. It doesn’t come with a hard drive or even a floppy controller, though, so he decided to borrow a PA-RISC-based HP 9000 Model 705 to set up an HP-UX 9 cluster. But wait, how does that work, when we’re dealing with two entirely different architectures?

What’s more fun though, is putting it into a cluster with the Model 705 and network booting it.

Yes, that a 68030 machine network booting from a PA-RISC machine … and sharing the same root filesystem. But aren’t PA-RISC binaries and 68K binaries quite different? Oh yes, they really are. So, how does that work?

↫ Jonathan Pallant

HP-UX is far more interesting and fascinating than a lot of people give it credit for, and while my interest lies with HP-UX 11i, I find what Pallant is doing here with HP-UX 9 just as fascinating. You first need to install HP-UX 9 for PA-RISC on the 700 series machine, convert it to a cluster server, and then install HP-UX 9 for 68k on top of that PA-RISC installation. After this is done, you effectively end up with a single root file system that contains both PA-RISC and 68k binaries, and you can network boot the 68k-based Model 340 right from it – using the same root filesystem on both machines.

Absolutely wild.

No, these are not universal binaries or some other trick you might know of from more modern system. In fact, installing the 68k version of HP-UX 9 “into” the PA-RISC HP-UX 9 cluster server, you end up with something called a Context Dependent Filesystem. To get a better idea of what this means and how this works, you should really head on over to Pallant’s excellent article for all the details.

Ironclad 0.7.0 and 0.8.0 released, adds RISC-V support 9 Nov 2025, 8:20 pm

We’ve talked about Ironclad a few times, but there’s been two new releases since the 0.6.0 release we covered last, so let’s see what the project’s been up to. As a refresher, Ironclad is a formally verified, hard real-time capable kernel written in SPARK and Ada. Versions 0.7.0 and 0.8.0 improved support for block device caching, added a basic NVMe driver, added support for x86’s SMAP, switched from KVM to NVMM for Ironclad’s virtualization interface, and much, much more. In the meantime, Ironclad also added support for RISC-V, making it usable on any 64 bit RISC-V target that supports a Limine-protocol compatible bootloader.

The easiest way to try out Ironclad is to download Gloire, a distribution that uses Ironclad and the GNU tools. It can be installed in both a virtual machine and on real hardware.

Mac OS 7.6 and 8 for CHRP releases discovered 9 Nov 2025, 7:59 pm

For those of us unaware – unlikely on OSNews, but still – for a hot minute in the second half of the ’90s, Apple licensed its Mac OS to OEMs, resulting in officially sanctioned Mac clones from a variety of companies. While intended to grow the Mac’s market share, what ended up happening instead is that the clone makers outcompeted Apple on performance, price, and features, with clones offering several features and capabilities before Apple did – for far lower prices. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he killed the clone program almost instantly.

The rather abrupt end of the clone program means there’s a number of variants of the Mac OS that never made their way into the market, most notable variants intended for the Common Reference Hardware Platform, or CHRP, a standard defined by IBM and Apple for PowerPC-based PCs. Thanks to the popular classic Mac YouTuber Mac84, we now have a few of these releases out in the wild.

These CDs contain release candidates for Mac OS 7.6 and Mac OS 8 for CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) systems. They were created to support CHRP computers, but were never released, likely due to Steve Jobs returning to Apple in September 1997 and eliminating the Mac Clone program and any CHRP efforts.

↫ Mac OS 7.6/8 CHRP releases page

Mac84 has an accompanying video diving into more detail about these individual releases by booting and running them in an emulator, so we can get a better idea of what they contain.

While most clone makers only got access to Mac OS 7.x, some of them did, in fact, gain access to Mac OS 8, namely UMAX and Power Computing (the latter of which was acquired by Apple). It’s not the clone nature of these releases that make them special, but the fact they’re CHRP releases is. This reference platform was a failure in the market, and only a few of IBM’s own machines and some of Motorola’s PowerStack machines properly supported it. Apple, meanwhile, only aid minor lip service to CHRP in its New World Power Macintosch machines.

FreeBSD now builds reproducibly and without root privilege 9 Nov 2025, 7:18 pm

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has completed work to build FreeBSD without requiring root privilege. We have implemented support for all source release builds to use no-root infrastructure, eliminating the need for root privileges across the FreeBSD release pipeline. This work was completed as part of the program commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency.

↫ FreeBSD Foundation blog

This is great news in and of itself, but there’s more: FreeBSD has also improved build reproducability. This means that given the same source input, you should end up with the same binary output, which is an important part of building a verifiable chain of trust. These two improvements combined further add to making FreeBSD a trustworthy, secure option – something it already is anyway.

In case you haven’t noticed, the FreeBSD project and its countless contributors are making a ton of tangible progress lately on a wide variety of topics, from improving desktop use, to solidifying Wi-Fi support, to improving the chain of trust. I think the time is quite right for FreeBSD to make some inroads in the desktop UNIX-y space, especially for people to whom desktop Linux has strayed too far from the traditional UNIX philosphy (whatever that means).

LXQt 2.3.0 released 8 Nov 2025, 8:46 am

LXQt, the other Qt desktop environment, released version 2.3.0. This new version comes roughly six months after 2.2.0, and continues the project’s adoption of Wayland.

The enhancement of Wayland support has been continued, especially in LXQt Panel, whose Desktop Switcher is now enabled for Labwc, Niri, …. It is also equipped with a backend specifically for Wayfire. In addition, the Custom Command plugin is made more flexible, regardless of Wayland and X11.

↫ LXQt 2.3.0 release announcement

The screenshot utility has been improved as well, and lxqt-qdbus has been added to lxqt-wayland-session to make qdbus commands easier to use with all kinds of Wayland compositors.

WINE gaming in FreeBSD Jails with Bastille 8 Nov 2025, 8:28 am

FreeBSD offers a whole bunch of technologies and tools to make gaming on the platform a lot more capable than you’d think, and this article by Pertho dives into the details. Running all your games inside a FreeBSD Jail with Wine installed into it is pretty neat.

Initially, I thought this was going to be a pretty difficult and require a lot of trial and error but I was surprised at how easy it was to get this all working. I was really happy to get some of my favorite games working in a FreeBSD Jail, and having ZFS snapshots around was a great way to test things in case I needed to backtrack.

↫ Pertho at their blog

No, this isn’t as easy as gaming on Linux has become, and it certainly requires a ton more work and knowledge than just installing a major Linux distribution and Steam, but for those of us who prefer a more traditional UNIX-like experience, this is a great option.

Tape containing UNIX v4 found 7 Nov 2025, 12:29 am

A unique and very important find at the University of Utah: while cleaning out some storage rooms, the staff at the university discovered a tape containing a copy of UNIX v4 from Bell Labs. At this time, no complete copies are known to exist, and as such, this could be a crucial find for the archaeology of early UNIX. The tape in question will be sent to the Computer History Museum for further handling, where bitsavers.org will conduct the recovery process.

I have the equipment. It is a 3M tape so it will probably be fine. It will be digitized on my analog recovery set up and I’ll use Len Shustek’s readtape program to recover the data. The only issue right now is my workflow isn’t a “while you wait” thing, so I need to pull all the pieces into one physical location and test everything before I tell Penny it’s OK to come out.

↫ bitsavers.org

It’s amazing how we still manage to find such treasures in nooks and crannies all over the world, and with everything looking good so far, it seems we’ll soon be able to fill in more of UNIX’ early history.

There is no such thing as a 3.5 inch floppy disk 6 Nov 2025, 7:21 pm

Wait, what?

The term 3.5 inch floppy disc is in fact a misnomer. Whilst the specification for 5.25 inch floppy discs employs Imperial units, the later specification for the smaller floppy discs employs metric units.

The standards for these discs are […] all of which specify the measurements in metric, and only metric. These standards explicitly give the dimensions as 90.0mm by 94.0mm. It’s in clause 6 of all three.

↫ Jonathan de Boyne Pollard

Even the applicable standard in the US, ANSI X3.171-1989, specifies the size in metric. We could’ve been referring to these things using proper measurements instead of archaic ones based on the size of a monk’s left testicle at dawn at room temperature in 1375 or whatever nonsense imperial or customary used to be based on. I feel dirty for thinking I had to use “inches” for this.

If we ever need to talk about these disks on OSNews from here on out, I’ll be using proper units of measurement.

Servo ported to Redox 6 Nov 2025, 7:03 pm

Redox keeps improving every month, and this past one is certainly a banger. The big news this past month is that Servo, the browser engine written in Rust, has been ported to Redox. It’s extremely spartan at the moment, and crashes when a second website is loaded, but it’s a promising start. It also just makes sense to have the premier Rust browser engine running on the premier Rust operating system. Htop and bottom have been ported to Redox for much improved system monitoring, and they’re joined by a port of GoAccess.

The version of Rust has been updated which fixed some issues, and keyboard layout configuration has been greatly improved. Instead of a few hardcoded layouts, they can now be configured dynamically for users of PS/2 keyboards, with USB keyboards receiving this functionality soon as well. There’s more, of course, as well as the usual slew of low-level changes and improvements to drivers, the kernel relibc, and more.

MacOS 26’s new icons are a step backwards 6 Nov 2025, 6:51 pm

On the new MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple has mandated that all application icons fit into their prescribed squircle. No longer can icons have distinct shapes, nor even any fun frame-breaking accessories. Should an icon be so foolish as to try to have a bit of personality, it will find itself stuffed into a dingy gray icon jail.

↫ Paul Kafasis

The downgraded icons listed in this article are just… Sad. While there’s no accounting for tastes, Apple’s new glassy icons are just plain bad, void of any whimsy, and lacking in artistry. Considering where Apple came from back when it made beautifully crafted icons that set the bar for the entire industry.

Almost seems like a metaphor for tech in general.