Haiku gets accelerated NVIDIA graphics driver 1 Jan 2026, 4:40 pm

The new year isn’t even a day old, and Haiku developer X512 dropped something major in Haiku users’ laps: the first alpha version of an accelerated NVIDIA graphics drivers for Haiku. Supporting at least NVIDIA Turing and Ampere GPUs, it’s very much in alpha state, but does allow for proper GPU acceleration, with the code surely making its way to Haiku builds in the near future.

Don’t expect a flawless experience – this is alpha software – but even then, this is a major milestone for Haiku.

HP-UX hits end-of-life today, and I’m sad 31 Dec 2025, 10:09 pm

It’s 31 December 2025 today, the last day of the year, but it also happens to mark the end of support for the last and final version of one of my favourite operating systems: HP-UX. Today is the day HPE puts the final nail in the coffin of their long-running UNIX operating system, marking the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux.

HP-UX’ versioning is a bit of a convoluted mess for those not in the know, but the versions that matter are all part of the HP-UX 11i family. HP-UX 11i v1 and v2 (also known as 11.11 and 11.23, respectively) have been out of support for exactly a decade now, while HP-UX 11i v3 (also known as 11.31) is the version whose support ends today. To further complicate matters, like 11i v2, HP-UX 11i v3 supports two hardware platforms: HP 9000 (PA-RISC) and HP Integrity (Intel Itanium). Support for the HP-UX 11i v3 variant for HP 9000 ended exactly four years ago, and today marks the end of support for HP-UX 11i v3 for HP Integrity.

And that’s all she wrote.

I have two HP-UX 11i v1 PA-RISC workstations, one of them being my pride and joy: an HP c8000, the last and fastest PA-RISC workstation HP ever made, back in 2005. It’s a behemoth of a machine with two dual-core PA-8900 processors running at 1Ghz, 8 GB of RAM, a FireGL X3 graphics card, and a few other fun upgrades like an internal LTO3 tape drive that I use for keeping a bootable recovery backup of the entire system.

It runs HP-UX 11i v1, fully updated and patched as best one can do considering how many patches have either vanished from the web or have never “leaked” from HPE (most patches from 2009 onwards are not available anywhere without an expensive enterprise support contract). The various versions of HP-UX 11i come with a variety “operating environments” you can choose from, depending on the role your installation is supposed to fulfill. In the case of my c8000, it’s running the Technical Computing Operating Environment, which is the OE intended for workstations.

HP-UX 11i v1 was the last PA-RISC version of the operating system to officially support workstations, with 11i v2 only supporting Itanium workstations. There are some rumblings online that 11i v2 will still work just fine on PA-RISC workstations, but I have not yet tried this out. My c8000 also has a ton of other random software on it, of course, and only yesterday I discovered that the most recent release of sudo configures, compiles, and installs from source just fine on it. Sadly, a ton of other modern open source code does not run on it, considering the slightly outdated toolchain on HP-UX and few people willing and/or able to add special workarounds for such an obscure platform.

Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to get into contact with HPE about the state of HP-UX’ patches, software, and drivers, which are slowly but surely disappearing from the web. A decent chunk is archived on various websites, but a lot of it isn’t, which is a real shame. Most patches from 2009 onwards are unavailable, various software packages and programs for HP-UX are lost to time, HP-UX installation discs and ISOs later than 2006-2009 are not available anywhere, and everything that is available is only available via non-sanctioned means, if you know what I mean. Sadly, I never managed to get into contact with anyone at HPE, and my concerns about HP-UX preservation seem to have fallen on deaf ears. With the end-of-life date now here, I’m deeply concerned even more will go missing, and the odds of making the already missing stuff available are only decreasing.

I’ve come to accept that very few people seem to hold any love for or special attachment to HP-UX, and that very few people care as much about its preservation as I do. HP-UX doesn’t carry the movie star status of IRIX, nor the benefits of being available as both open source and on commodity hardware as Solaris, so far fewer people have any experience with it or have developed a fondness for it. HP-UX didn’t star in a Steven Spielberg blockbuster, it didn’t leave behind influential technologies like ZFS. Despite being supported up until today, it’s mostly forgotten – and not even HPE itself seems to care.

And that makes me sad.

When you raise your glasses tonight to mark the end of 2025 and welcome the new year, spare a thought for the UNIX everyone forgot still exists. I know I will.

loss32: let’s build a Win32/Linux 30 Dec 2025, 1:39 pm

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, Win32/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, loss32 Win32 plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning system made useful by WINE, the ReactOS userland, and other vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by Microsoft.

↫ The loss32 homepage

Joking introduction aside, this is exactly what you think it is: a Linux kernel with the Windows user interface running on top through Wine. I’m sure quite a few of use mused about this very concept at some point in time, but hikari_no_yume went a step further and created this working concept. It’s rough around the edges and needs a ton of work, but I do think the idea is sound and could offer real benefits for certain types of users.

It’s definitely a more realistic idea than ReactOS, a project that’s perpetually chasing the dragon but never coming even close to catching it. Not having to recreate the entire Windows NT kernel, drivers, and subsystems, and using Linux instead, is simply a more realistic approach that could bring results within our lifetimes. The added benefit here is that this could still run Linux applications, too, of course.

hikari_no_yume is looking for help with the project, and I hope they find it. This is a great idea, with an absolutely amazing name, too.

Windows 2 for the Apricot PC/Xi 30 Dec 2025, 1:26 pm

Nina Kalinina has been on an absolute roll lately, diving deep into VisiOn, uncovering Bellcore MGR, installing Linux on a PC-98 machine, and much more. This time, she’s ported Windows 2 to run on a machine it was never supposed to run on.

I bought my first Apricot PC about three years ago, when I realised I wanted an 8086-based computer. At the time, I knew nothing about it and simply bought it because it looked rad and the price was low. I had no idea that it was not IBM PC-compatible, and that there were very few programs available for it.

I have been on a quest to get a modern-ish word processor and spreadsheet program for it ever since. Which eventually made me “port” Windows 2 on it. In this post, I will tell you the story of this port.

↫ Nina Kalinina

To get Windows 2 working on the Apricot, Kalinina had to create basic video, keyboard, and mouse drivers, allowing Windows 2 to boot into text mode. I wasn’t aware of this, but Windows 2 in text mode is funky: it’s rendering all the text you would see in a full Windows 2 user interface, just without any of the user interface elements. Further developing the video driver from scratch turned out to be too big of an undertaking for now, so she opted to extract the video driver from Windows 1 instead – which required a whole other unique approach. The keyboard and mouse drivers were extracted from Windows 1 in the same way.

The end result is a fully working copy of Windows 2, including things like Word and Excel, which was the original goal in the first place. There aren’t many people around doing stuff like this, and it’s great to see such very peculiar, unique itches being scratched. Even if this is only relevant for exactly one person, it’s still been worth it.

What an unprocessed photo looks like 30 Dec 2025, 1:05 pm

I knew digital cameras and phones had to do a lot of processing and other types of magic to output anything human eyes can work with, but I had no idea just how much. This is wild.

Apple’s terrible UI design is not the fault of just one fall guy 28 Dec 2025, 11:58 am

There’s been endless talk online about just how bad Apple’s graphical user interface design has become over the years, culminating in the introduction of Liquid Glass across all of the company’s operating systems this year. Despite all the gnawing of teeth and scathing think pieces before the final rollout, it seems the average Apple user simply doesn’t care as much about GUI design as Apple bloggers thought they did, as there hasn’t been any uproar or stories in local media about how you should hold off on updating your iPhone.

The examples of just how bad Apple’s GUI design has become keep on coming, though. This time it’s Howard Oakley showing once again how baffling the macOS UI is these days.

If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn’t have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to the interface changes brought in macOS Tahoe with Liquid Glass. After three months of strong feedback during beta-testing, I was disappointed when Tahoe was released on 15 September to see how little had been addressed. When 26.1 followed on 3 November it had only regressed, and 26.2 has done nothing. Here I summarise my opinions on where Tahoe’s overhaul has gone wrong.

↫ Howard Oakley at The Eclectic Light Company

Apple bloggers and podcasters are hell-bent on blaming Apple’s terrible GUI design over the past 10 years on one man. Their first target was Jony Ive, who was handed control over not just hardware design, but also software design in 2012. When he left Apple, GUI design at Apple would finally surely improve again, and the Apple bloggers and podcasters let out a sigh of relief. History would turn out different, though – under Ive’s successor, Alan Dye, Apple’s downward trajectory in this area would continue unabated, culminating in the Liquid Glass abomination. Now that Alan Dye has left Apple, history is repeating itself: the very same Apple bloggers and podcasters are repeating themselves – surely now that Alan Dye is gone, GUI design at Apple will finally surely improve again.

The possibility that GUI design at Apple does not hinge on the whims of just one person, but that instead the entire company has lost all sense of taste and craftmanship in this area does not cross their minds. Everyone around Jony Ive and Alan Dye, both below, alongside, and above them, had to sign off on Apple’s recent direction in GUI design, and the idea that the entire company would blindly follow whatever one person says, quality be damned, would have me far more worried as an Apple fan.

At this point, it’s clear that Apple’s inability to design and build quality user interfaces is not the fault of just one fall guy, but an institutional problem. Anyone expecting a turnaround just because Ive Dye is gone isn’t seeing the burning forest through the trees.

The HTML elements time forgot 28 Dec 2025, 11:22 am

We’re all familiar with things like marquee and blink, relics of HTML of the past, but there are far more weird and obscure HTML tags you may not be aware of. Luckily, Declan Chidlow at HTMLHell details a few of them so we can all scratch shake our heads in disbelief.

But there are far more obscure tags which are perhaps less visually dazzling but equally or even more interesting. If you’re younger, this might very well be your introduction to them. If you’re older, this still might be an introduction, but also possibly a trip down memory lane or a flashback to the horrors of the first browser war. It depends.

↫ Declan Chidlow at HTMLHell

I think my favourite is the dir tag, intended to be used to display lists of files and directories. We’re supposed to use list tags now to achieve the same result, but I do kind of like the idea of having a dedicated tag to indicate files, and perhaps have browsers render these lists in the same way the file manager of the platform it’s running on does. I don’t know if that was possible, but it seems like the logical continuation of a hypothetical dir tag.

Anyway, should we implement bgsound on OSNews?

Package managers keep using git as a database, it never works out 27 Dec 2025, 12:57 pm

If you’re building a package manager and git-as-index seems appealing, look at Cargo, Homebrew, CocoaPods, vcpkg, Go. They all had to build workarounds as they grew, causing pain for users and maintainers. The pull request workflow is nice. The version history is nice. You will hit the same walls they did.

↫ Andrew Nesbitt

It’s wild to read some of these stories. I can’t believe CocoaPods had 16000 directories contained in a single directory, which is absolutely bananas when you know how git actually works. Then there’s the issue that git is case-sensitive, as any proper file system should be, which causes major headaches on Windows and macOS, which are dumb and are case-insensitive. Even Windows’ path length limits, inherited from DOS, cause problems with git. There just so many problems with using git for a package managers’ database.

The basic gist is that git is not a database, and shouldn’t be used as such. It’s incredulous to me that seasoned developers would opt for “solutions” like this.

QNX releases new desktop-focused image: QNX 8.0 with Xfce on Wayland 27 Dec 2025, 10:12 am

Christmas is already behind us, but since this is an announcement from 11 December – that I missed – I’m calling this a very interesting and surprising Christmas present.

The team and I are beyond excited to share what we’ve been cooking up over the last little while: a full desktop environment running on QNX 8.0, with support for self-hosted compilation! This environment both makes it easier for newly-minted QNX developers to get started with building for QNX, but it also vastly simplifies the process of porting Linux applications and libraries to QNX 8.0.

↫ John Hanam at the QNX Developer Blog

What we have here is QNX 8.0 running the Xfce desktop environment on Wayland, a whole slew of build and development tools like clang, gcc, git, etc.), a ton of popular code editors and IDEs, a web browser (looks like GNOME Web?), access to all the ports on the QNX Open-Source Dashboard, and more. For now, it’s only available as a Qemu image to run on top of Ubuntu, but the plan is to also release an x86 image in the coming months so you can run this directly on real hardware.

This isn’t quite the same as the QNX of old with its unique Photon microGUI, but it’s been known for a while now that Photon hasn’t been actively developed in a long time and is basically abandoned. Running Xfce on Wayland is obviously a much more sensible solution, and one that’s quite future-proof, too. As a certified QNX desktop enthusiast of yore, I can’t wait for the x86 image to arrive so I can try this out properly.

There are downsides. This image, too, is encumbered by annoying non-commercial license requirements and sign-ups, and this also wouldn’t be the first time QNX starts an enthusiast effort, only to abandon it shortly after. Buyer beware, then, but I’m cautiously optimistic.

Phoenix: a modern X server written in Zig 25 Dec 2025, 2:52 pm

We’ve got more X11-related news this day, the day of Xmas.

Phoenix is a new X server, written from scratch in Zig (not a fork of Xorg server). This X server is designed to be a modern alternative to the Xorg server.

↫ Phoenix’ readme page

Phoenix will only support a modern subset of the X11 protocol, focusing on making sure modern applications from roughly the last 20 years or so work. It also takes quite a few pages out of the Wayland playbook by not having a server driver interface and by having a compositor included. On top of that, it will isolate applications from each other, and won’t have a single framebuffer for all displays, instead allowing different refresh rates for individual displays. The project also intends to develop new standards to support things like per-monitor DPI, among many other features.

That’s a lot of features and capabilities to promise for an X server, and much like Wayland, the way they aim to get there is by effectively gutting traditional X and leaving a ton of cruft behind. The use of Zig is also interesting, as it can catch some issues before they affect any users thanks to Zig’s runtime safety option. At least it’s not yet another thing written in Rust like every other project competing with an established project.

I think this look like an incredibly interesting project to keep an eye on, and I hope more people join the effort. Competition and fresh, new ideas are good, especially now that everything is gravitating towards Wayland – we need alternatives to promote the sharing of ideas.

Wayback 0.3 released 25 Dec 2025, 10:42 am

Wayback, the tool that will allow you to run a legacy X11 desktop environment on top of Wayland, released a new version just before the Christmas. Wayback 0.3 overhauls its custom command line option parser to allow for more X.org options to be supported, and its manual pages have been cleaned up. Other fixes merely include fixing some small typos and similar small changes. Wayback is now also part of Alpine Linux’ stable releases, and has been made available in Fedora 42 and 43.

Wayback remains alpha software and is still under major development – it’s not yet ready for primetime.

GateMate Personal Computer, inspired by IBM PC 25 Dec 2025, 10:27 am

Can you use a cheap FPGA board as a base for a new computer inspired by the original IBM PC? Well, yes, of course, so that’s what Yuri Zaporozhets has set out to do just that. Based on the GateMateA1-EVB, the project’s got some of the basics worked out already – video output, keyboard support, etc. – and work is underway on a DOS-like operating system. A ton of work is still ahead, of course, but it’s definitely an interesting project.

Elementary OS 8.1 released 22 Dec 2025, 7:09 pm

Elementary OS, the user-friendly Linux distribution with its own unique desktop environment and applications, just released elementary OS 8.1. Its minor version number belies just how big of a punch this update packs, so don’t be fooled here.

We released elementary OS 8 last November with a new Secure Session—powered by Wayland—that ensures applications respect your privacy and consent, a brand new Dock with productive multitasking and window management features, expanded access to cross-platform apps, a revamped updates experience, and new features and settings that empower our diverse community through Inclusive Design. Over the last year we’ve continued to build upon that work to deliver new features and fix issues based on your feedback, plus we’ve improved support for a range of devices including HiDPI and Multi-touch devices.

↫ Danielle Foré at the elementary OS blog

The biggest change from a lower-level perspective is that elementary OS 8.1 changes the default session to Wayland, leaving the X11 session as a fallback in case of issues. Since the release of elementary OS 8, a ton of progress has been made in improving the Wayland session, fixing remaining issues, and so on, and the team now feels it’s ready to serve as the default session. Related to this is a new security feature in the Wayland session where the rest of the screen gets dimmed when a password dialog pops up, and other windows can’t steal focus. The switch to Wayland also allowed the team to bring fractional scaling to elementary OS with 8.1.

Elementary OS is based on Ubuntu, and this new release brings an updated Hardware Enablement stack, which brings things like Linux 6.14 and Mesa 25. This is also the first release with support for ARM64 devices that can use UEFI, which includes quite a few popular ARM devices. Of course, the ARM64 version comes as a separate ISO.

Furthermore, there’s a ton of improvements to the dock – which was released with 8 as a brand-new replacement for the venerable Plank – including bringing back some features that were lost in the transition from Plank to the new dock. Animations are smoother, elementary OS’ application store has seen a slew of improvements from clearer licensing information, to a controller icon for games that support them, to a label identifying applications that offer in-app purchases, and more.

There’s a lot more here, like the accessibility improvements we talked about a few months ago, and tons more.

Amifuse: native Amiga filesystems on macOS and Linux with FUSE 22 Dec 2025, 2:47 pm

Mount Amiga filesystem images on macOS/Linux using native AmigaOS filesystem handlers via FUSE.

amifuse runs actual Amiga filesystem drivers (like PFS3) through m68k CPU emulation, allowing you to read Amiga hard disk images without relying on reverse-engineered implementations.

↫ Amifuse GitHub page

Absolutely wild.

UNIX v4 tape successfully recovered 22 Dec 2025, 2:21 pm

Almost two months ago, a tape containing UNIX v4 was found. It was sent off to the Computer History Museum where bitsavers.org would handle the further handling of the tape, and this process has now completed. You can download the contents of the tape from Archive.org – which is sadly down at the moment – while squoze.net has a readme with instructions on how to actually run the copy of UNIX v4 recovered from the tape.

FreeBSD made major gains in laptop support this year 21 Dec 2025, 10:29 pm

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to try FreeBSD on a laptop, take note – 2025 has brought transformative changes. The Foundation’s ambitious Laptop Support & Usability Project is systematically addressing the gaps that have held FreeBSD back on modern laptop hardware. 

The project started in 2024 Q4 and covers areas including Wi-Fi, graphics, audio, installer, and sleep states. 2025 has been its first full year, and with a financial commitment of over $750k to date there has been substantial progress.

↫ Alice Sowerby for the FreeBSD Foundation

I think that’s an understatement.

As part of this effort, FreeBSD introduced support for Wi-Fi 4 and 5 in 2025, with 6 being worked on, and sound support has been greatly improved as well, with new tools and better support for automatic sound redirection for HDA cards. Another major area of improvement is support for various forms of sleep and wake, with modern standby coming in FreeBSD 15.1, and possibly hibernate in 15.2. On top of all this, there’s the usual graphics drivers updates, as well as changes to the installer to make it a bit more friendly to desktop use cases.

The FreeBSD project is clearly taking desktop and especially laptop seriously lately, and they’re putting their money and developers where their mouth is. Add in the fact that FreeBSD already has pretty decent Wayland support, and it the platform will be able to continue to offer the latest KDE releases (and GNOME, if they figure out replacements for its systemd dependencies).

With progress like this, we’re definitely going to see more and more people making the move to FreeBSD for desktop and laptop use over the coming years.