Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system 7 Apr 2026, 2:01 pm

From 2024, but still accurate and interesting:

Plan 9 is unique in this sense that everything the system needs is covered by the base install. This includes the compilers, graphical environment, window manager, text editors, ssh client, torrent client, web server, and the list goes on. Nearly everything a user can do with the system is available right from the get go.

↫ moody

This is definitely something that sets Plan 9 apart from everything else, but as moody – 9front developer – notes, this also has a downside in that development isn’t as fast, and Plan 9 variants of tools lack features upstream has for a long time. He further adds that he think this is why Plan 9 has remained mostly a hobbyist curiosity, but I’m not entirely sure that’s the main reason. The cold and harsh truth is that Plan 9 is really weird, and while that weirdness is a huge part of its appeal and I hope it never loses it, it also means learning Plan 9 is really hard.

I firmly believe Plan 9 has the potential to attract more users, but to get there, it’s going to need an onboarding process that’s more approachable than reading 9front’s frequently questioned answers, excellent though they are. After installing 9front and loading it up for the first time, you basically hit a brick wall that’s going to be rough to climb. It would be amazing if 9front could somehow add some climbing tools for first-time users, without actually giving up on its uniqueness. Sometimes, Plan 9 feels more like an experimental art project instead of the capable operating system that it is, and I feel like that chases people away.

Which is a real shame.

Anos: a hobby microkernel operating system written in C 7 Apr 2026, 1:33 pm

Anos is a modern, opinionated, non-POSIX operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU-Linux) for x86_64 PCs and RISC-V machines.

Anos currently comprises the STAGE3 microkernel, SYSTEM user-mode supervisor, and a base set of servers implementing the base of the operating system. There is a (WIP) toolchain for Anos based on Binutils, GCC (16-experimental) and Newlib (with a custom libgloss).

↫ Anos GitHub page

It’s written in C, runs on both x86-64 and RISC-V, and can run on real hardware too (but this hasn’t been tested on RISC-V just yet). For the x86 side of things, it’s strictly 64 bit, and requires a Haswell (4th Gen) chip or higher.

The 499th patch for 2.11BSD released 7 Apr 2026, 1:16 pm

This year sees 35 years since 2.11BSD was announced on March 14, 1991 – itself a slightly late celebration of 20 years of the PDP-11 – and January 2026 brought what looks to be the venerable 16-bit OS’s biggest ever patch!

Much of the 1.3 MB size is due to Anders Magnusson, well-known for his work on NetBSD and the Portable C Compiler. Since 2.11BSD’s stdio was not ANSI compliant, he’s ported from 4.4BSD.

↫ BigSneakyDuck at Reddit

There’s an incredible amount of work in here on this old variant of BSD, including fixes for old bugs and tons of other changes. This, the 499th patch for 2.11BSD, is so big, in fact, that vi on 2.11BSD can’t handle the size of the files, so you’re going to need to cut them up with sed, for which instructions are included.

It’s quite unique to see such a big update on the 35th anniversary of an operating system.

KDE is bringing back its classic Oxygen and Air themes 6 Apr 2026, 11:31 pm

Anyone remember the KDE 4.0 themes Oxygen and Air? Well, several KDE developers have been working tirelessly to bring them back, which means they’re patching it up, fixing bugs, and generally making these classic themes work well in the current releases of KDE Plasma 6.

The last post regarding work on fixing Oxygen was a month and a half ago. With all that’s happened in between, it feels like so much more time has actually passed. With this post, I’d like to do a sort of mid-term update summing up all of the improvements done so far. These improvements are not just my work, but also, as you’ll see, the work of the lead Oxygen designer Nuno Pinheiro, of several seasoned KDE developers, and of new contributors to Oxygen as well.

↫ Filip Fila

The effort to bring these themes back go much beyond just making them nominally work; the developers and designers are also making sure the themes work properly with all the new features that have come to KDE since the 4.x and 5.x days, like adaptive and floating panels, various forms of blur, and a ton more – which includes making sure the themes are fully compatible with Wayland, which introduced a slew of new visual glitches and issues to these old themes in recent years.

They are also working on improving, updating, and expanding the Oxygen icon set, which should surely bring back a ton of memories. This work involves not just designing new icons for applications and other things that didn’t exist back when Oxygen was current, but also fixing old icons that look blurry on modern setups, addressing cases where monochrome and colourful icons mismatch, and so on. They’re clearly taking this very seriously.

It seems to be an organic effort more and more people got involved with as time passed, and they’re aiming to have these themes ready for Plasma 6.7, to be released in June of this year. You can already try the current versions today, but they do require the absolute latest version of KDE Plasma to work properly. More improvements are planned for the coming weeks.

This whole thing brings a massive smile to my face, and is such a perfect illustration of why I love the KDE project and its approach and spirit. At this point in time, I personally can’t imagine using any other desktop environment.

“I used AI. It worked. I hated it.” 6 Apr 2026, 7:48 pm

This is a great post, but obviously it hasn’t convinced me:

The folks waving their arms and yelling about recent models’ capabilities have a point: the thing works. This project finished in three weeks. Compare that to Ringspace, a similarly-sized project that took me about six months of nights and early mornings to complete, while not doing my day job or being Dad to an amazing, but demanding toddler. I simply could not have built this project as well or as quickly without help. And as other developers have noted, this is the help that’s showing up.

I’m not entirely onboard with Mike Masnick’s optimistic view of this technology’s democratizing power. I don’t think it’s as easy to separate the tech from its provenance or corporate control. But CertGen, my certificate application, exists now. It didn’t and couldn’t without the help of a tool like Claude Code. Open source in particular needs to reckon with this, because the current situation of demanding developers starve and bleed themselves dry without support isn’t tenable. We need to grapple with this. I’m not yet sure how it all breaks down, and anyone who says they do is lying, foolish, or fanatical.

↫ Michael Taggart

If you disregard that “AI” models are trained on stolen data, that such data was prepared by exploited workers, that “AI” data centres have a hugely negative impact on the environment, that “AI” data centers are distorting the entire computing market, that “AI” models they feed the endless firehose of intentional misinformation, that they are wreaking havoc in education, that they increase your reliance on American big tech companies, that you pay “AI” companies for taking your work, that “AI” models are a vital component in the technofascist wet dreams of their creators, that they are the cornerstone of politicians’ dream of ending anonymity, and that they contribute to racist and abusive policing, then yes, sometimes, they produce code that works and isn’t total horseshit.

It’s a deeply depressing reversed “what have the Romans ever done for us?” that makes me sad, more than anything. I’ve seen so many otherwise smart, caring, and genuine people just shove all of these massive downsides aside for the mere novelty, the peer pressure, the occasional sense that their “lines of code” metric is going up.

It’s the digital equivalent of rolling coal.

Adobe secretly modifies your hosts file for the stupidest reason 5 Apr 2026, 1:59 pm

If you’re using Windows or macOS and have Adobe Creative Cloud installed, you may want to take a peek at your hosts file. It turns out Adobe adds a bunch of entries into the hosts file, for a very stupid reason.

They’re using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already installed when you visit on their website.

When you visit https://www.adobe.com/home, they load this image using JavaScript:

https://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png

If the DNS entry in your hosts file is present, your browser will therefore connect to their server, so they know you have Creative Cloud installed, otherwise the load fails, which they detect.

They used to just hit http://localhost:<various ports>/cc.png which connected to your Creative Cloud app directly, but then Chrome started blocking Local Network Access, so they had to do this hosts file hack instead.

↫ thenickdude at Reddit

At what point does a commercial software suite become malware?

TinyOS: ultra-lightweight RTOS for IoT devices 4 Apr 2026, 7:32 am

An ultra-lightweight real-time operating system for resource-constrained IoT and embedded devices. Kernel footprint under 10 KB, 2 KB minimum RAM, preemptive priority-based scheduling.

↫ TinyOS GitHub page

Written in C, open source, and supports ARM and RISC-V.

Redox gets new CPU scheduler 4 Apr 2026, 7:28 am

Another major improvement in Redox: a brand new scheduler which improves performance under load considerably.

We have replaced the legacy Round Robin scheduler with a Deficit Weighted Round Robin scheduler. Due to this, we finally have a way of assigning different priorities to our Process contexts. When running under light load, you may not notice any difference, but under heavy load the new scheduler outperforms the old one (eg. ~150 FPS gain in the pixelcannon 3D Redox demo, and ~1.5x gain in operations/sec for CPU bound tasks and a similar improvement in responsiveness too (measured through schedrs)).

↫ Akshit Gaur

Work is far from over in this area, as they’re now moving on to “replacing the static queue logic with the dynamic lag-calculations of full EEVDF“.

Open source office suites erupt in forking and licensing drama 4 Apr 2026, 7:21 am

You’d think if there was one corner of the open source world where you wouldn’t find drama it’d be open source office suites, but it turns out we could not have been more wrong. First, there’s The Document Foundation, stewards of LibreOffice, ejecting a ton of LibreOffice contributors.

In the ongoing saga of The Document Foundation (TDF), their Membership Committee has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners. That includes over thirty people who have contributed faithfully to LibreOffice for many years. It is interesting to see a formal meritocracy eject so many, based on unproven legal concerns and guilt by association. This includes seven of the top ten core committers of all time (excluding release engineers) currently working for Collabora Productivity. The move is the culmination of TDF losing a large number of founders from membership over the last few years with: Thorsten Behrens, Jan ‘Kendy’ Holesovsky, Rene Engelhard, Caolan McNamara, Michael Meeks, Cor Nouws and Italo Vignoli no longer members. Of the remaining active founders, three of the last four are paid TDF staff (of whom none are programming on the core code).

↫ Micheal Meeks

The end result seems to be that Collabora is effectively forking LibreOffice, which feels like we’re back where we were 15 years ago when LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice. There seems to be a ton of drama and infighting here that I’m not particularly interested in, but it’s sad to see such drama and infighting result in needless complications for developers, end users, and distributors alike.

As if this wasn’t enough, there’s also forking drama in OnlyOffice land, the other open source office suite, licensed under the AGPL. This ope source office suite has been forked by Nextcloud and IONOS into Euro-Office, in pursuit of digital sovereignty in the EU. It’s also not an entirely unimportant detail that OnlyOffice is Russian, with most of its developers residing in Russia.

Anyway, the OnlyOffice team has not taken this in stride, claiming there’s a violation of the AGPL license going on here, specifically because OnlyOffice adds contradictory attribution terms to the AGPL. It’s a complicated story, but it does seem most experts in this area seem to disagree with OnlyOffice’s interpretation.

We’re in for another messy time.

How Microsoft vaporized a trillion dollars 4 Apr 2026, 6:42 am

This is the first of a series of articles in which you will learn about what may be one of the silliest, most preventable, and most costly mishaps of the 21st century, where Microsoft all but lost OpenAI, its largest customer, and the trust of the US government.

↫ Axel Rietschin

It won’t take long into this series of articles before you start wondering how anyone manages to ship anything at Microsoft. If even half of this is accurate, this company should be placed under some sort of external oversight.

Big-endian testing with QEMU 3 Apr 2026, 8:05 pm

I assume I don’t have to explain the difference between big-endian and little-endian systems to the average OSNews reader, and while most systems are either dual-endian or (most likely) little-endian, it’s still good practice to make sure your code works on both. If you don’t have a big-endian system, though, how do you do that?

When programming, it is still important to write code that runs correctly on systems with either byte order (see for example The byte order fallacy). But without access to a big-endian machine, how does one test it? QEMU provides a convenient solution. With its user mode emulation we can easily run a binary on an emulated big-endian system, and we can use GCC to cross-compile to that system.

↫ Hans Wennborg

If you want to make sure your code isn’t arbitrarily restricted to little-endian, running a few tests this way is worth it.

How to turn anything into a router 1 Apr 2026, 7:43 pm

I don’t like to cover “current events” very much, but the American government just revealed a truly bewildering policy effectively banning import of new consumer router models. This is ridiculous for many reasons, but if this does indeed come to pass it may be beneficial to learn how to “homebrew” a router.

Fortunately, you can make a router out of basically anything resembling a computer.

↫ Noah Bailey

I genuinely can’t believe making your own router with Linux or BSD might become a much more widespread thing in the US. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing – it’ll teach some people something new – but it just feels so absurd.

Microsoft Copilot is now injecting ads into pull requests on GitHub 30 Mar 2026, 9:14 pm

Why do so many people keep falling for the same trick over and over again?

With an over $400 billion gap between the money invested in AI data centers and the actual revenue these products generate, Silicon Valley slowly returned to the tested and trusted playbook: advertising.

Now, ads are starting to appear in pull requests generated by Copilot. According to Melbourne-based software developer Zach Manson, a team member used the AI to fix a simple typo in a pull request. Copilot did the job, but it also took the liberty of editing the PR’s description to include this message: “⚡ Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast.”

↫ David Uzondu at Neowin

It turns out that Microsoft has added ads to over 1.5 million Copilot pull requests on GitHub, and they’re even appearing on GitLab, one of the GitHub alternatives. The reasoning is clear, too, of course: “AI” companies and investors have poured ungodly amounts of money in “AI” that is impossible to recover, even with paying customers. As such, the logical next step is ads, and many “AI” companies are already starting to add advertising to their pachinko machines. It was only a matter of time before Copilot would start inserting ads into the pull requests it ejaculates over all kinds of projects.

This isn’t the first time a once-free service turns on its users, but it’s definitely one of the quickest turnarounds I’ve ever seen. Usually it takes much longer before companies reach the stage of putting ads in their products to plug any financial bleeding, but with the amount of money poured into this useless black hole, it really shouldn’t be surprising we’re already there. I’m sure Copilot’s competitors, like Claude, will soon follow suit.

They’re enshittifying Git, and developers are just letting it happen. No wonder worker exploitation is so rampant in Silicon Valley.

Capability-based security for Redox: namespace and CWD as capabilities 30 Mar 2026, 9:02 pm

By reimplementing these features using capabilities, we made the kernel simpler by moving complex scheme and namespace management out of it which improved security and stability by reducing the attack surface and possible bugs. At the same time, we gained a means to support more sandboxing features using the CWD file descriptor. This project leads the way for future sandboxing support in Redox OS. As the OS continues to move toward capability-based security, it will be able to provide more modern security features.

↫ Ibuki Omatsu

Redox seems to be making the right decisions at, crucially, the right time.

The curious case of retro demo scene graphics 30 Mar 2026, 8:35 pm

Of course, it was only a matter of time before the time-honoured tradition of the demoscene also got infected by “AI”.

For me personally, generative AI ruins much of the fun. I still enjoy creating pixel art and making little animations and demos. My own creative process remains satisfying as an isolated activity. Alas, obvious AI generated imagery – as well as middle-aged men plagiarizing other, sometimes much younger, hobbyist artists – makes me feel disappointed and empty. It’s not as much about effort as it is about the loss of style and personality; soul, if you will. The result is defacement, to echo T. S. Eliot, rather than inspired improvement. Even in more elaborate AI-based works, it’s hard to tell where the prompt ends and the pixelling begins.

↫ Carl Svensson

A wonderful explanation of the rather unique views on originality, stealing, plagiarism, and related topics within the demoscene, which certainly diverge from many other places.

Running a Plan 9 network on OpenBSD 27 Mar 2026, 7:40 pm

This guide describes how you can install a Plan 9 network on an OpenBSD machine (it will probably work on any unix machine though). The authentication service (called “authsrv” on Plan 9) is provided by a unix version: authsrv9. The file service is provided by a program called “u9fs”. It comes with Plan 9. Both run from inetd. The (diskless) cpu server is provided by running qemu, booted from only a floppy (so without local storage). Finally, the terminal is provided by the program drawterm. The nice thing about this approach is that you can use all your familiar unix tools to get started with Plan 9 (e.g. you can edit the Plan 9 files with your favorite unix editor). I’m assuming you have read at least something about Plan 9, for example the introduction paper Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

↫ Mechiel Lukkien

If you’re running OpenBSD, you’re already doing something better than everyone else, and if you want to ascend to the next level, this is a great place to start. Of course, the final level, where you leave your earthly roots behind and become a being of pure enlightened energy, is running Plan 9 on real hardware as the universe intended, but let’s not put the cart before the horse.

One day, all of humanity will just be an endless collection of interconnected cosmic Plan 9 servers, more plentiful than the stars in the known universe.