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.

A lost IBM PC/AT model? Analyzing a newfound old BIOS 5 Nov 2025, 10:19 pm

Some people not only have a very particular set of skills, but also a very particular set of interests that happen to align with those skills perfectly. When several unidentified and mysterious IBM PC ROM chips from the 1980s were discovered on eBay, two particular chips’ dumped contents posed particularly troublesome to identify.

In 1985, the FCh model byte could only mean the 5170 (PC/AT), and the even/odd byte interleaving does point at a 16-bit bus. But there are three known versions of the PC/AT BIOS released during the 5170 family’s lifetime, corresponding to the three AT motherboard types. This one here is clearly not one of them: its date stamps and part numbers don’t match, and the actual contents are substantially different besides.

My first thought was that this may have come from one of those more shadowy members of the 5170 family: perhaps the AT/370, the 3270 AT/G(X), or the rack-mounted 7532 Industrial AT. But known examples of those carry the same firmware sets as the plain old 5170, so their BIOS extensions (if any) came in the shape of extra adapter ROMs. Whatever this thing was – some other 5170-type machine, a prototype, or even just a custom patch – it seemed I’d have to inquire within for any further clues.

↫ VileR at the int10h.org blog

I’ll be honest and state that most of the in-depth analysis of the code dumped from the ROM chips is far too complex for me to follow, but that doesn’t make the story it tells any less interesting. There’s no definitive, 100% conclusive answer at the end, but the available evidence collected by VileR does make a very strong case for a very specific, mysterious variant of the IBM PC being the likely source of the ROMs.

If you’re interested in some very deep IBM lore, here’s your serving.

The Microsoft SoftCard for the Apple II: getting two processors to share the same memory 5 Nov 2025, 8:46 pm

We talked about the Z80 SoftCard, Microsoft’s first hardware product, back in 2023, but thanks to Raymond Chen and Nicole Branagan, we’ve got some more insights.

The Microsoft Z-80 SoftCard was a plug-in expansion card for the Apple II that added the ability to run CP/M software. According to Wikipedia, it was Microsoft’s first hardware product and in 1980 was the single largest revenue source for the company.

↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing

And Chen links to an article by Branagan from 2020, which goes into even more detail.

So there I was, very happy with my Apple ][_plus. But then I saw someone on the internet post, and it seems that my Apple is an overpriced box with a toy microcontroller for a CPU, while real computers use an Intel 8080, 8085 or Zilog Z80 to run something called “CP/M”… but I’ve already spent so much money on the Apple, so can I turn it into a real computer?

↫ Nicole Branagan

I have a soft spot for this particular subgenre of hardware – add-in cards that allow you to run an entirely different architecture inside your computer – and soon, I’ll be diving into a particularly capable example here on OSNews.

bluetui and restterm: two beautiful TUI applications 5 Nov 2025, 8:39 pm

There’s something incredibly enticing and retrofuturistic about a well-designed TUI, or text-based user interface. There’s an endless list number of these, but two crossed my path these past few days, and I found them particularly appealing. First, we’ve got bluetui, an application for managing Bluetooth connections on Linux systems with bluez installed.

The second is resterm.

Resterm is a terminal-first client for working with HTTP, GraphQL, and gRPC services. No cloud sync, no signups, no heavy desktop app. Simple, yet feature rich, terminal client for .http/.rest files. It pairs a Vim-like-style editor with a workspace explorer, response diff, history, profiler and scripting so you can iterate on requests without leaving the keyboard.

↫ restterm GitHub page

I don’t use TUIs or the command line in general all that much, but these are two excellent examples of just how beautiful and user-friendly a good text-based user interface can really be. The command line is about a lot more than just archaic, cryptic incantations designed in the 1960s.

Sculpt OS 25.10 released 3 Nov 2025, 9:25 pm

In the light of this year’s roadmap focus on “rigidity, clarity, performance”, Sculpt OS 25.10 looks the same as the version 25.04 but might feel different as it includes countless under-the-hood improvements of the two preceding framework releases 25.05 and 25.08. User interaction on performance-starved platforms like the PinePhone has become visibly smoother thanks our recent CPU scheduling advances. The streamlined block-storage stack combined with various refinements of the package-installation mechanism make the on-target installation of 3rd-party components a bliss. Regarding supported hardware, we steadily follow the tireless work of the Linux kernel community. All PC driver components using Linux kernel code are now consistently based on kernel version 6.12.

↫ Sculpt OS 25.10 release announcement

There’s also an optional brand new configuration format, which optionally replaces Scultp’s use of XML for this purpose. Norman Feske, one of the co-founders of Genode Labs, published an article detailing how to test this new format, which also goes much deeper into how it works. For Sculpt OS’ 25.10 release, Alexander Böttcher has also released an experimental image with five different kernel to choose from. The image is for PC, and works as a live system so there’s no need to install it to explore Sculpt OS.

Speaking of Alexander Böttcher, he also published an article about improvements and changes to Sculpt OS’ lockscreen component. This component has existed for a very long time, and has been improved considerably over the years, and Böttcher’s article details how to install it, configure it, and use it.

Debian to add hard Rust dependency to APT 2 Nov 2025, 10:52 pm

It seems like a number of Debian ports are going to face difficult times over the coming months. Debian developer Julian Andres Klode has sent a message to the Debian mailing lists that APT will very soon start requiring Rust.

I plan to introduce hard Rust dependencies and Rust code into APT, no earlier than May 2026. This extends at first to the Rust compiler and standard library, and the Sequoia ecosystem.

In particular, our code to parse .deb, .ar, .tar, and the HTTP signature verification code would strongly benefit from memory safe languages and a stronger approach to unit testing.

↫ Julian Andres Klode

The problem for a lot of architectures that Debian supports, in one way or another, is that Rust and its toolchain simply aren’t available for them. As such, Julian Andres Klode states, rather directly, that these architectures have about six months to get themselves a full Rust toolchain, or sunset their Debian ports. The Debian PA-RISC (hppa) and Alpha ports, for instance, do not have a Rust toolchain port, and most likely won’t be getting one either, especially not within six months.

The reasoning for moving towards a hard Rust dependency for APT is the same as it is in every other similar case: Debian’s and APT’s developers want to be able to make use of modern tools and technologies, even if that means dead architectures get left behind. As much as I am a massive fan of retro-architectures like PA-RISC, I really don’t want otherwise modern Linux distributions to eschew modern tools and technologies just because they’re not available for an architecture that died in 2005. I own and use the last and most powerful PA-RISC workstation running HP-UX as a retro platform, so I definitely care – but I really don’t expect Debian or Fedora or whatever to waste any resources on supporting them if that means holding the distributions back for everyone else using it on actually modern platforms.

If there’s a large enough community of people around such architectures, they’ll keep the Linux train running. If not, well, that’s life.

Microsoft breaks Task Manager in Windows 11, hard 2 Nov 2025, 10:01 pm

Let’s take a look at how things are going at Microsoft, whose CEO claimed a few months ago that 30% of their code was generated by “AI”.

After installing Windows Updates released on or after October 28, 2025 (KB5067036), you might encounter an issue where closing Task Manager using the Close (X) button does not fully terminate the process. When you reopen Task Manager, the previous instance continues running in the background even though no window is visible. This results in multiple lingering instances of taskmgr.exe, consuming system resources and potentially degrading device performance. Additional instances appear as “Task Manager” in the Processes tab and as “Taskmgr.exe” in the Details tab. Although the impact is less if Task Manager is opened and closed a few times, many instances accumulated over time can cause noticeable slowdowns in other applications.

↫ The Windows Health Dashboard

Well okay then.

Configuring cwm on OpenBSD 2 Nov 2025, 9:51 pm

For those unfamiliar, cwm is the Calm Window Manager. It’s part of the OpenBSD base distribution as one of the native window managers, along with an old version of fvwm and the venerable twm. It’s pretty simple but surprisingly powerful, a floating window manager with some basic manual tiling. It’s keyboard-centric, has an application launcher and highly configurable menus. It uses groups rather than workspaces which provides a lot of flexibility.

My configuration isn’t particularly groundbreaking, but it’s comfy and suits me well. I can happily live in it indefinitely, though I do split my time between cwm and Xfce with occasional forays into other window managers or Wayland compositors. This has nothing to do with cwm limitations and everything to do with me being curious and craving novelty. It’s cwm that I return to, because it’s entirely unsurprising and very capable, and also because it’s part of OpenBSD’s base so I know I’m dealing with software that’s been refined and audited and refined again.

↫ Antony Fox-Bramwell

If you opt for a default installation of something like OpenBSD, without any additional desktop environments like Xfce, when you start X, you’ll be served with the default OpenBSD window manager: cwm, or the calm window manager. At first glance, it looks incredibly basic and, to most people, archaic and unusable, but what it lacks in sparkles and boondoggles it more than makes up for in flexibility and configurability. The problem, however, is that it’s not exactly intuitive to mold cwm into something that works for you.

Articles like this one, by Antony Fox-Bramwell, function as great springboards into the world of configuring cwm. If you do an internet search for similar articles, you’ll find tons of other examples that can help you become more capable at configuring cwm. Most of us are probably just fine accepting something like KDE or Xfce, but if those just don’t scratch your itch, diving into cwm could be just what you’re looking for.

V7 pwd, converted to modern POSIX systems 2 Nov 2025, 3:13 pm

This is a conversion of the original V7 pwd program for use on POSIX systems (tested primarily on Linux). This is mostly of historical interest — modern systems have a library routine or system call for getting the current directory, and don’t need this.

I’ve attempted to make the minimum set of logic/functionality changes needed to make the program work, preserving the core of the original logic. I’ve made slightly more aesthetic changes, to make reading easier for a post-standardization C speaker.

↫ Cliff L. Biffle

Over on Fedi, Cliff L. Biffle provides more details as to why he undertook this project.

AMD to enter ARM market with new “Sound Wave” APU 2 Nov 2025, 3:05 pm

AMD is expanding its processor portfolio beyond the x86 architecture with its first ARM-based APU, internally known as “Sound Wave.” The chip’s existence was uncovered through customs import records, confirming several details about its design and purpose. Built with a BGA-1074 package measuring 32 mm × 27 mm, the processor fits within standard mobile SoC dimensions, making it suitable for thin and light computing platforms. It employs a 0.8 mm pitch and FF5 interface, replacing the FF3 socket previously used in Valve’s Steam handheld devices, further hinting at a new generation of compact AMD-powered hardware.

↫ Hilbert Hagedoorn at The Guru of 3D

It only makes sense for AMD to enter the market for ARM SoCs, as it’s a whole section of the processor market they’re not tapping into. Even if they don’t manage to compete with the best ARM processors out there, they can still serve the mid and lower end just fine.

Removing obfuscation in Minecraft: Java Edition 29 Oct 2025, 11:00 pm

Gaming isn’t something we talk about very often here on OSNews, but I think this piece of news is actually a rare piece of good, welcome news from this industry. Mojang, the Microsoft-owned company behind Minecraft, has announced it’s going to stop obfuscating the code behind the Java edition of Minecraft. A refresher: the Java edition of Minecraft is the original version of the game, which exists alongside the Bedrock Edition, which is written in C++. Both variants are kept more or less in sync with each other.

The Java edition has historically been far more moddable, and comes with far fewer restrictions than the Bedrock Edition, which Microsoft maintains far tighter control over. Still, the modding scene around the Java Edition sprung up in spite of Mojang and Microsoft, not because of them, but over the years the modding scene has been embraced more and more by these two companies. The final step in this embrace comes today as Mojang will no longer obfuscate the code behind th Java Edition.

Minecraft: Java Edition has been obfuscated since its release. This obfuscation meant that people couldn’t see our source code. Instead, everything was scrambled – and those who wanted to mod Java Edition had to try and piece together what every class and function in the code did. 

But we encourage people to get creative both in Minecraft and with Minecraft – so in 2019 we tried to make this tedious process a little easier by releasing “obfuscation mappings”. These mappings were essentially a long list that allowed people to match the obfuscated terms to un-obfuscated terms. This alleviated the issue a little, as modders didn’t need to puzzle out what everything did, or what it should be called anymore. But why stop there?

↫ Minecraft website

This is excellent news for the game, the wider modding community, and players. Minecraft is still a massively popular game, and making modding easier is very welcome, as for a lot of people, mods are what make Minecraft actually interesting. It’s also rare to see a massive force in gaming making a positive step like this, so they deserve the few kudos.