MotifCentral: all things Motif/Xt/Xlib

Over the last few days and weeks or so, a few of the people I follow and interact with on Fedi have been talking about centralising information, tools, applications, and expertise from the Motif (and Xt, Xlib, and X11) ecosystem. There’s a ton of information, resources, and actively maintained applications out there, but it’s all spread out and sometimes difficult to find, and so Thomas Adam – one of the core developers of FVWM, among other things, as well as creator of CoW (FVWM for Wayland, more or less) – has created an effort to centralise all of this. Motif Central brings together information about Motif, Xt, Xlib and X11: how they fit together, how to program with them, and where to find the manuals, examples and historical material that explain them. Begin with the X programming stack, build your first Motif application, or explore the programming resources. The history pages describe the libraries’ origins, while the archive guide helps you navigate older documentation. ↫ MotifCentral There’s been a whole flurry of activity around Motif lately, including the updated and maintained fork we talked about a few weeks ago. The people loosely collaborating on MotifCentral also submitted patches to CDE to make sure it works on the new Motif fork, with the CDE developers setting up a build pipeline for easier testing. Making sure CDE, the classic Motif desktop environment, works well with the maintained Motif fork quite a few people seem to be rallying around is a worthwhile effort. We’re still quite far from a complete(-ish) modern Motif ecosystem, but it’s very heartwarming to see just how many people are actually still interested in it. My perhaps misguided hope is that we can somehow get to a modernised Motif/CDE desktop environment and applications, making it possible to more easily run a modern Motif environment on Linux and the BSDs. One may dream.

Posted on: 28 September 2026 | 1:17 pm

Windows 10 breaks far less often than Windows 11

Windows 11 received its September update on the 8th of this month, and within days Microsoft had acknowledged or investigated problems involving Remote Desktop, USB audio, Linux and WSL-based apps like Claude Cowork, and enterprise domain issues. Windows Latest also found File History failures, Explorer.exe crashes, and AMD GPU instability, with an emergency update following on September 14 that still did not fix everything. This got us curious, and we looked back across the nine monthly updates released from January through September 2026 and, rather unsurprisingly, Windows 10 update history isn’t infected with nearly as many bugs as that of Windows 11. ↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest Of course, Windows 10 also isn’t getting nearly as much attention from Microsoft, but that’s kind of the whole point, isn’t it? Whenever Microsoft touches something, especially over the last 5 years or so, it’s one cascade of failures after the other, eroding trust in Windows’ updates even more (if that’s even possible). In that light, why would you want to use Windows 11 and all the headaches that come with it, when Windows 10 is right there, still being supported, albeit without the latest bells and whistles that only seem to break Windows 11 anyway? If you really do need or want to use Windows, consider switching back to Windows 10 whenever the usual Windows reinstallation time draws near. You won’t lose much, but will gain quite a bit in the process. Of course, this won’t be a responsible or usable choice forever, but at this point in time, I definitely think it’s the optimal choice for quite a few people.

Posted on: 28 September 2026 | 12:54 pm

Amiga screens: a primer

One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan (myself included) must show up and try to explain the concept of screens. Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we’ll tell you, and one can drag them, we’ll say, and other Amiga users rally in agreement, while non-Amiga users probably still don’t get what’s so great about screens. Until now, when this text has been written, in the hope of converting unsuspecting normies into full-blown Amiga screen lovers. ↫ Carl Svensson A deeply technical look at not just how the Amiga managed to achieve this stunning functionality way back in the ’80s on machines with 7MHz and less RAM than a keyfob, but also how this functionality can be useful. I’ve always found the concept of screens on the Amiga quite interesting, and Svensson’s article does a great job at demystifying the whole concept. Of course, expect a lot of lovely Amiga OS screenshots.

Posted on: 25 September 2026 | 6:10 pm

Redox runs Qemu, gets multicore support for ARM

It’s time for an overview of another month of Redox OS progress, and over the month of August – they’re a bit late, don’t believe the publication date – they’ve implemented multicore support for ARM, and considerably improved the I/O performance for the NVMe driver, RedoxFS, and RAMFS by implementing a ring buffer communication API. There’s also initial support for NUMA-based memory management, QEMU is now working on Redox, and much more. Of course, there’s also the usual long list of improvements to the kernel, relibc, drivers, and more.

Posted on: 25 September 2026 | 5:44 pm

JagOS ‘Spot’ turns Atari Jaguar into the unreleased Atari Painter prototype computer

Can you run an operating system with a graphical user interface and applications on the Atari Jaguar? Well, you can. A long time running idea and work-in-progress, I’d like to finally announce the current version of JagOS ‘Spot’ for the Atari Jaguar, running from the RetroHQ GameDrive. I’m slow at releasing things and try not to announce in-progress stuff due to lack of free time but would like to push this along. Maybe it’ll motivate me to work on it more if the interest is there or just release it as-is if not. The idea is based on the unreleased Atari Jaguar Painter Computer prototype, that a merged Falcon with Jaguar chipset-based computer would have found its way into consumer hands after the Falcon030. ↫ Clint Thompson The screenshots and YouTube video are quite impressive, but as it’s not actually released, it’s difficult to really say anything more about this project for now. I hope there’s enough interest to get this project’s code out there so it can be further improved and expanded.

Posted on: 25 September 2026 | 5:38 pm

We’ve been here before: Qualcomm promises Linux support for Snapdragon X2

Qualcomm, yesterday, promising Linux support for the new Snapdragon X2 processors: Linux on Snapdragon X2 Series is moving from early bring-up toward a more complete upstream developer experience. Core support is landing, Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU work is progressing, and real laptops with Snapdragon X2 Series processors are already beginning to boot Linux. ↫ Qualcomm’s promises from 2026 Interesting, but I feel like I’ve heard these exact words before. Qualcomm, two years ago, promising Linux support for the then-new Snapdragon X processors: It’s been our priority not only to support Linux on our premium-tier SoCs, but to support it pronto. In fact, within one or two days of publicly announcing each generation of Snapdragon 8, we’ve posted the initial patchset for Linux kernel support. Snapdragon X Elite was no exception: we announced on October 23 of last year and posted the patchset the next day. That was the result of a lot of pre-announcement work to get everything up and running on Linux and Debian. ↫ Qualcomm’s empty promises from 2024 These promises were not at all kept. Two years later, Linux support for Snapdragon X laptops is still spotty, broken, and limited, confined to just a few bespoke Ubuntu builds, which don’t even offer full support either. It’s a complete mess, effectively unusable, and highlights once again that big technology companies are compulsive liars. I have little faith in these new promises, but who knows – maybe this time it’ll be different. Probably not, though.

Posted on: 25 September 2026 | 1:30 am

The state of scrollbars in Windows makes even longtime Microsoft engineers sad

Raymond Chen, longtime Microsoft employee and author of the very popular The Old New Thing blog, published an interesting post about the Win32 scrollbar. It turns out there’s actually quite a few interesting shortcuts and useful hidden features, like clicking inside a scrollbar while holding down shift will make the content jump to that point. Halfway through the article, though, Chen laments how nobody really uses proper Win32 scrollbars anymore. Sadly, almost nobody uses Win32 scroll bars any more. Everybody uses frameworks that provide their own custom scroll bars. ↫ Raymond Chen And as you might expect, none of these scrollbars work like the Win32 one, making even something as basic as the scrollbar a fragmented mess. He doesn’t just blame things like Electron, either, as Microsoft’s own WinUI framework, which is used for most “new” Windows UI developed by Microsoft for Windows 11, also uses custom scrollbars that do not work like the Win32 one does. Great, so by the time I learn about a shortcut for scroll bars (Shift+click), the ecosystem has fragmented so much that I can’t even rely on it working. ↫ Raymond Chen Modern computing is depressing.

Posted on: 23 September 2026 | 5:40 pm

Solaris 11.4 SRU95 released

The Solaris branch for paying customers has been updated to SRU95. Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU95 updates a broad set of platform, runtime, developer, networking, desktop, and open source components. Notable updates include Ansible Core to 2.21.1, Apache HTTP Server to 2.4.67, Apache Tomcat to 9.0.120, BIND to 9.20.23, Django to 5.2.15, Elixir to 1.20.1, Erlang to 28.5.0.2, Firefox to 140.10.0esr, Go to 1.25.11, ImageMagick to 7.1.2-27, MySQL 8.4 to 8.4.10, NSS to 3.125, OpenSSH to 10.4p1, Rust to 1.96.0, SQLite to 3.53.2, Thunderbird to 140.10.0esr, and Vim to 9.2.0513. Additional updates include CMake, CUPS, Cython, GnuTLS, libarchive, libexpat, pip, rsync, and a range of Python modules, X11 libraries, graphics libraries, printing components, and desktop utilities. ↫ Colin Kavanagh at the Oracle Solaris Blog One of the major changes is the deprecation and removal of NTLM authentication of local users; only NTLMv2 is supported now for security reasons. This release also brings GCC 16, with GCC 13 being removed in the next version. The detailed release notes go into some of the more low-level, esoteric changes in Solaris 11.4 SRU 95.

Posted on: 23 September 2026 | 4:55 pm

You know the GDPR is good based on who hates it

It is impossible to go anywhere in a technology space online without hitting a wave of commentary about how stupid GDPR is. It was written by bureaucrats who don’t understand the amazing potential of unrestricted technology. These US-based critiques almost always lean on the oldest trick in cyberlibertarianism: we don’t have time to regulate, we must simply adapt and ride the wave. Nobody has time for government. Of all GDPR’s consequences, none gets more attention than the cookie banner, which critics present as the inevitable result of government meddling. Blaming GDPR for the cookie banner is like blaming the health inspector for the roaches. The banner is deliberate vandalism, a dark pattern engineered to exhaust you before you can learn anything about the surveillance apparatus humming behind the “OK.” Ironically the banner designed to hide the machine has taught the public more about the machine than a thousand podcasts ever will. Even non-technical people stop at “your data is shared with 996 partners.” ↫ Mat Duggan There is so much misinformation about the cookie banner, it’s honestly quite hard to believe it’s not deliberately spread. You don’t need a cookie banner for functional cookies, so as long as you don’t share your users’ data with anyone else, you don’t need a cookie banner at all. On top of that, most cookie banners you encounter are actually not compliant with the GDPR at all, because they don’t present a single-click option to block your data from being shared with those 996 partners. What the cookie banner has done is inform millions – maybe even billions – of people the world over of just how insipid the online advertising and data harvesting industry really is. It put the issue on the map, and by now, everyone, no matter their level of computer literacy, is fully aware of what’s happening to their data every time they see one of these (non-compliant) banners. No else had the guts to do this – except for the European Union. The wider GPDR has set the baseline for online privacy protections, and while we have a long way to go before we’ve fully solved this issue, the EU at least gave us a good point to jump off from. Smoking and asbestos weren’t banned in a day, either.

Posted on: 21 September 2026 | 2:42 pm

Googlebook OS: Google launches its Android-powered laptop effort

A few months ago, Google announced it was going to put Android on laptops (and eventually, desktops), serving as eventual replacements for Chromebooks. Unlike those, though, these new Android laptops wouldn’t be low-quality, cheap, underpowered devices for school children to spill milk on, but devices actually competitive with Windows and macOS laptops. Today, the company finally allowed the press to use these new things. Google describes Googlebook as a “totally fresh approach to computing,” bringing together Android, ChromeOS, Gemini, and premium laptop hardware from major manufacturers. The idea is to create a laptop that feels more natural to use for Android phone users while retaining what makes a desktop OS useful, such as a full Chrome browser, desktop apps, a proper file manager, Linux support, and a full terminal environment. Google is also trying to solve some of the biggest problems Android users have had when moving between their phone and laptop, and make the two devices feel like part of the same ecosystem. ↫ Adamya Sharma at Android Authority I’ve been looking at some of the videos of people using and playing with these new Android laptops, and to be honest, I’m not impressed. I’m seeing quite a bit of jank, a complete lack of consistency, and apparently, a lack of Android applications optimised for desktop use. The close integration with your Android phone are nice, but of course, this also means another dollop of slimy lock-in, as I highly doubt Google will make it easy or even possible at all for, say, iPhones or other platforms to integrate quite as nicely as Android devices will. Worse yet, there’s the elephant in the room: for just how long will Google care about this new platform? These laptops start at $900 and go all the way up to $1300 (and will be considerably more expensive here in Europe), which is a lot to ask for something Google might get bored of and abandon in a few years’ time. Ten or more years ago, in a slightly more innocent time, I might’ve been excited about Google bringing Android to laptops and desktops, but in 2026, I just can’t be bothered to care. Also, and this doesn’t really matter, but “Googlebook OS”?

Posted on: 21 September 2026 | 2:20 pm

Let’s stop debating the GnuImp Manipulation Program

The GIMP will never magically become software beloved by artists—not without radically changing its culture, and making the artists the ones who call the shots. The GIMP will remain what it has always set out to be: a tinkerer’s toolbox, more concerned with the purity of its software politics than with garnering a loyal userbase of photographers and designers. But because everyone insisted to poise it as a viable Photoshop killer, Linux is left with an obvious hole in its software offering, a hole nobody managed to fill with their own challenger. ↫ Aria Salvatrice Excellent article, and spot-on conclusion.

Posted on: 21 September 2026 | 2:01 pm

“I don’t like passkeys”

Passkeys are a fantastic technology. Since they are bound to the site they are created for, they cannot be phished by a hacker’s fake login screen. If a site suffers a data breach, passkeys are asymmetric and cannot be recovered from the server-side details. This leads to passkeys being the perfect fit for a corporate environment, but a poor fit for personal security. To an individual, the greatest risks are instead permanent account lockout, automated account bans, and device loss. By using passkeys, you gain better security against man-in-the-middle attacks but face the higher probability scenario of losing access to your accounts. Phishing through the standard login flow is eliminated by passkeys, but it creates a false sense of security. An account’s security is still dictated by the weakest recovery method: SMS, email links, security questions, and so on. If these recovery methods aren’t enabled, then the risk of permanent lockout remains for the user. ↫ Ethan Hawksley I’ve always felt something was off about passkeys, and have never used them. They’ve become – or were always intended to be – tools for further lock-in by especially Google and Apple, tying their entire usage flow to their respective operating systems. They also don’t seem to work well if you often work on devices not your own, which is a major hassle. None of these shortcomings come into play when using a traditional password manager, even if they require more manual work. Just let me use a password manager with random password generation, instead of trying to force passkeys down my throat.

Posted on: 19 September 2026 | 7:07 am

Java 27 released

Speaking of unsexy programming, we’ve got a new Java release. Featuring thousands of performance, stability, security, and productivity improvements, Java 27 (Oracle JDK 27) provides a strong foundation for continued Java innovation. To help organizations prepare for more secure communications in a post-quantum world, Java 27 advances its post-quantum cryptography (PQC) capabilities with hybrid key exchange for TLS 1.3. ↫ Oracle press release The OpenJDK release page has more information.

Posted on: 18 September 2026 | 7:14 pm

Performance improvements in .NET 11

Look, nobody’s going to argue .NET is sexy, but the truth of the matter is that it’s quite popular in less visible circles, so any new release is going to have a big impact on a ton of people and product. In other words, performance improvements in .NET 11 are going to matter. In contrast, .NET 11 is actually one higher, one louder. The sections that follow are full of real improvements. A bounds check removed, an allocation that no longer happens, a lock that isn’t taken, a loop that runs in fewer cycles than it did a year ago, a comparison folded to a constant here, a redundant check hoisted out of a loop there, a couple of instructions fused into one, a syscall sidestepped, an array copy handed off to SIMD, and on and on. That’s how real performance work goes, accumulating gain after gain, each compounding on the last, until the whole thing is measurably, provably louder. And so, in this post, as I’ve done in past years with .NET 10, .NET 9, .NET 8, .NET 7, .NET 6, .NET 5, .NET Core 3.0, .NET Core 2.1, and .NET Core 2.0 before it, we’ll take an unhurried tour through hundreds of them. ↫ Stephen Toub at Microsoft’s Dev Blogs My eyes glaze over at all of this, but even here on OSNews, there’s going to be countless people working with .NET at their jobs.

Posted on: 18 September 2026 | 7:09 pm

GNOME 51 released

GNOME 51 has been released, with a whole slew of new features and improvements. Most notably, at least in my experience, will be the work done on GNOME’s graphics stack, which seems to stutter and jitter more than KDE’s on the same hardware – at least in my experience. In particular, GNOME’s compositor, Mutter, has improved frame scheduling for smoother animations, even under load. This hopefully addresses the stutters I generally experience when using GNOME. They’ve also done a lot of work on the Settings, Maps, Calendar, Web, and other applications. Of note to many will be the array of improvements to GNOME’s file manager, including better performance, although I doubt it will convince those of us who aren’t particular fans of Nautilus in general. They’ve also improved the remote desktop experience by, among other things, adding support for smart cards and improving support for Kerberos. GNOME 51 will make its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.

Posted on: 16 September 2026 | 5:38 pm

Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

Ubuntu has been replacing core utilities with Rust rewrites, and it’s now completed the process. cp, mv and rm were held back on their GNU versions in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS due to a crop of TOCTOU (time-of-check to time-of-use) issues that needed to be fixed in the uutils versions.  With those issues resolved upstream, Ubuntu 26.10 finishes the job. The ‘Stonking Stingray’ ships a full set of Rust core utilities, which encompasses common command-line tools like ls, cat, chmod and  du. ↫ Joey Sneddon at OMG! Ubuntu I’m definitely not qualified enough to make any useful remarks about this, but the idea of replacing such foundational, battle-tested utilities with brand new ones, even when written in a memory-safe language, does make feel a little hesitant. Still, at least this way Ubuntu users can work out any issues so that if and when other distributions – like the one I use, Fedora – follows suit.

Posted on: 16 September 2026 | 5:31 pm