Pinta 3.0 brings major GTK4 overhaul 13 Apr 2025, 12:52 am

Over 15 years ago, I wrote about the launch of a Paint.NET clone for Linux, called Pinta, written in GTK. That was merely version 0.1, and over time, it’s become somewhat of a staple for many Linux users. The project just released version 3, which is a major revision, moving the application over to GTK4 and Libadwaita.

Built on the robust GTK 4 toolkit and the sleek Libadwaita, Pinta 3.0 brings a redesigned user interface that’s faster, more responsive, and more efficient than ever. Linux users will also benefit from improved system utility integration. On top of all this, new effects and the return of add-ins—previously disabled due to technical constraints—promise to bring even more creative possibilities.

↫ Pinta 3.0 release announcement

Aside from the new user interface and return of add-ins, virtually every aspect of the application seems to have been touched in one way or another. We’ve got improved performance for both the UI and the application’s functionality, better gesture and touch support, redesigned and adaptive toolboxes, improved keyboard support, new effects, and much, much more. Like its original inspiration Paint.NET, Pinta sits between a basic image editor like Microsoft Paint and much more advanced tools like Photoshop and GIMP, and it seems this new release sticks to that position in the market.

You can download Pinta 3.0 for Linux, Windows, and macOS, and it will surely find its way to your distribution’s repository soon enough.

Elliptical Python programming 12 Apr 2025, 10:34 pm

One thing I love about Python is how it comes with its very own built-in zen. In moments of tribulations, when I am wrestling with crooked code and tangled thoughts, I often find solace in its timeless wisdom.

↫ Susam Pal

I can’t program and know nothing about Python, but this still made me laugh.

Windows Recall returns, and its companion feature does not keep data on-device 12 Apr 2025, 12:25 am

Remember Windows Recall, the Windows feature that would take a screenshot of your desktop every three seconds, stored them in a database, and then let you search through them at later dates? The feature has been hobbled by implementation problems, security issues, and privacy troubles, and has been released in preview and pulled since its original unveiling. Well, it’s back in testing now for users of the Release Preview Channel.

As you use your Copilot+ PC throughout the day working on documents or presentations, taking video calls, and context switching across activities, Recall will take regular snapshots and help you find things faster and easier. When you need to find or get back to something you’ve done previously, open Recall and authenticate with Windows Hello.

↫ Windows Insider blog

The “AI” magic (meaning, OCR and image recognition, but with sparkles) runs locally, on device, and supposedly, the collected screenshots and data extracted from them never leave your device – at least, for now. The tech industry has a long history of relegating its promises, so excuse me if I don’t have a ton of faith in this data remaining on a Windows PC for too long into the future.

Case in point, a related Windows Copilot feature: Copilot Vision. This is very similar to Windows Recall, but instead of taking automating screenshots every few seconds, you can invoke it manually so that Copilot will “read” the current contents of your desktop, applications, and so on, allowing you to ask questions, get help, and so on. The kicker, however, is that while the screenshots and resulting data from Recall supposedly remains on your machine, whatever Copilot Vision does is done on Microsoft’s servers. In other words, a feature very similar to Windows Recall is already sending your personal, private data to Microsoft.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t think Windows Recall will remain “on-device” for very long. The temptation to hoover that data up into the giant advertising machine is too great, and there’s no way in hell Microsoft will be able to resist it.

MacSSL: a port of Mbed-TLS for the classic Mac OS 7/8/9 11 Apr 2025, 9:35 pm

Yesterday we had SDL2 for the classic Mac OS, today we have modern SSL/TLS for the classic Mac OS.

This is a C89/C90 port of MbedTLS for Mac System 7/8/9. It works, and compiles under Metrowerks Codewarrior Pro 4.

This is a basic app that performs a GET request on whatever is in api.h, and prints the result out to the text box (with a lot of debug information, of course). The idea of this project was to build an ‘app’ of sorts for 640by480, my ‘instagram clone for vintage digital cameras’. The idea would be to login, post images, view images, and read comments. I would need HTTPS for that, so here we are: a port of MbedTLS for the classic mac.

↫ MacSSL GitHub page

It’s remarkable what tenacity can achieve.

Amiga OS 3.2 Update 3 released 11 Apr 2025, 12:17 am

I’ve long lost the ability to keep track of whatever’s happening in the Amiga community, and personally I tend to just focus on tracking MorphOS and AROS as best I can. The remnants of the real AmigaOS, and especially who owns, maintains, and develops which version, are mired in legal battles and ownership limbo, and since I can think of about a trillion things I’d rather do than keep track of the interpersonal drama by reading various Amiga forums, I honestly didn’t even realise there’s been a development in the Hyperion Entertainment situation.

Hyperion Entertainment is the Belgian company who has been developing both AmigaOS 4 and 3.1/3.2 for a while now, but the company’s largest shareholder, Ben Hermans BV, went bankrupt, causing its shares to be annulled as prescribed under Belgian law. This happened well over a decade ago, but only earlier this year, in January, was the situation resolved for Hyperion: a new director, Timothy De Groote, was appointed by the remaining shareholders, who also instructed Hyperion to continue development of Amiga OS.

In addition, a few days ago, Hyperion released Update 3 for AmigaOS 3.2, adding a bunch of fixes and improvements to AmigaOS 3.2.2. It brings various updates to ReAction classes, a new custom menu for TextEditor users can customise with macros, a new KickStart 3.2.3 ROM, and many more smaller updates and fixes. The update is free for existing users. AmigaOS 3.2 is available for classic Amigas.

SDL2 ported to Mac OS 9 10 Apr 2025, 11:53 pm

Well, this you certainly don’t see every day.

This is a “rough draft” of SDL2 for MacOS 9, using CodeWarrior Pro 6 and 7. Enough was done to get it building in CW, and the start of a “macosclassic” video driver was created. It DOES seem to basically work, but much still needs to be done. Event handling is just enough to handling Command-Q, there is no audio, etc etc etc.

↫ A cast of thousands

The hardest part was a video driver for the classic Mac OS, which had to be created mostly from scratch using the QNX driver as a “skeleton” because it happened to be the smallest one. It works on both m68k and PowerPC as well as on SheepShaver and Basilisk II, and there’s already a few screenshots of it up and running at the link, too. Amazing work, and it opens the door for a whole bunch of especially games to be made available on classic Mac OS.

Not updated in 7 years, IIS is still a default part of Windows, apparently 10 Apr 2025, 11:18 am

This month’s security updates for Windows 11 create a new empty folder on drive C. It is called “inetpub,” and it does not contain any extra folders or files. Its properties window shows 0 bytes in size and that it was created by the system itself. Neowin checked a bunch of Windows 11 PCs with the April 2025 security updates installed, and all of them had inetpub on drive C.

↫ Taras Buria at Neowin

So this folder, inetpub, is most likely coming from Microsoft’s Internet Information Services, the company’s web server. IIS is part of Windows, but inactive by default, and it seems some buggy update script somewhere forgot to remove the folder or created it by accident. Regardless, it seems you can remove it without any issue, so if you see it on your Windows’ root drive, just delete it any be on your merry way.

Still though, something about this seems odd, right? Internet Information Services as a core product hasn’t been updated since 2018 when version 10 came out, which doesn’t necessarily mean specific Windows updates might not have changed it since then, but it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. The Internet Information Services’ website also hasn’t been updated in ages, and is broken in places, further adding to the feeling IIS seems to be mostly abandoned, only kept going as part of Windows updates because it’s, well, part of Windows.

I’m not trying to insinuate there’s anything nefarious or dangerous going on with this silly folder glitch or anything; I was just surprised to see such an outdated, seemingly abandoned web server suite still being a default part of Windows today.

IBM unveils z17 mainframe, z/OS 3.2 10 Apr 2025, 10:55 am

IBM today announced the IBM z17, the next generation of the company’s iconic mainframe, fully engineered with AI capabilities across hardware, software, and systems operations. Powered by the new IBM Telum II processor, IBM z17 expands the system’s capabilities beyond transactional AI capabilities to enable new workloads.

↫ IBM z17 press release

Alongside this brand new behemoth of a computer, IBM also announced z/OS 3.2, the next version of its mainframe operating system, which brings with it even more “AI” buzzwords and features. z/OS 3.2 is slated for release later in 2025. It it is highly unlikely any one of us will ever get to interact with any of this hardware or software.

FreeDOS 1.4 released 9 Apr 2025, 10:15 pm

With FreeDOS being, well, DOS, you’d think there wasn’t much point in putting out major releases and making big changes, and you’d mostly be right. However, being a DOS clone doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement within the confines of the various parts and tools that make up DOS, and that’s exactly where FreeDOS focuses its attention. FreeDOS 1.4 comes about three years after 1.3.

This version includes an updated FreeCOM, Install program, and HTML Help system. This also includes improvements to many of the utilities including FDISK, JEMM, 7Zip, FORMAT, FASM, MORE, RUNTIME, and more!

↫ FreeDOS website

If you’re using FreeDOS, you’re most likely doing so for a highly specialised task, and racing to upgrade isn’t exactly high on your list of priorities. Still, it’s great to see FreeDOS moving forward and improving where it can.

What’s up with Linux support for Qualcomm X Elite chips? 9 Apr 2025, 9:46 pm

Remember when Qualcomm promised Linux would be a first-tier platform alongside Windows for its Snapdragon X Elite, almost a year ago now? Well, the Snapdragon X laptop have been out in the market for a while running Windows, but Linux support is still a complete crapshoot, despite the lofty promises by Qualcomm. Tuxedo, a European Linux OEM who promised to ship a Snapdragon X laptop running Linux, has posted an update on its progress, and it’s not looking good.

While Tuxedo did reach a major milestone last week by sending the laptop’s device tree to the LKML, that’s where the good news ends.

The next step is to support additional components of the ARM notebook within the device tree. This includes all USB functionalities, including USB4, external monitor connectivity via HDMI, and audio features, such as the headset jack. Additionally, driver testing is on the agenda. Unfortunately, a planned collaboration with Qualcomm, the manufacturer of the Snapdragon X Elite, did not materialize. However, we are in contact with the ARM specialists at Linaro and have sent test devices to them. We hope to receive valuable feedback from their developers and the community in the near future.

↫ Tuxedo’s website

This seems to indicate that Qualcomm isn’t as interested in Linux support after all, which may be because the Snapdragon X machines haven’t exactly taken over the laptop market as Microsoft and Qualcomm had hoped. The market for these things is probably not large enough for Qualcomm to justify investing in Linux support, especially when Windows on ARM is apparently not up to snuff yet either.

In case you are unaware of why device trees are such a big thing in ARM land, it’s because ARM devices do not have a nice ACPI table for operating systems to read system information from. Whereas x86 devices have their hardware components laid out in a nice ACPI table in UEFI, ARM devices do not, meaning that the Linux kernel needs to know specifically which device you’re using so it can load the correct device tree. On x86, this isn’t necessary, as the Linux kernel can just read the ACPI table, which works 99% of the time to get it to boot, even if specific components might not be supported (yet). On ARM, without a device tree, the Linux kernel doesn’t know what to do.

That’s one of the major reasons why it’s so hard for ARM to take off in the same way x86 once did. It’s just not designed to be infinitely intercompatible and interoperable as we’ve come to expect from the x86 world, and I don’t think anybody has any vested interest in changing that. I had hoped Microsoft might throw its weight around here, but it seems that’s not happening either.

The ARM desktop/laptop revolution seems mostly confined to Apple for now.

This month in Redox, March 2025 9 Apr 2025, 8:32 pm

Another month, another month of Redox improvements and bug fixes. This month saw a ton of work on process management as part of the NLnet grant, massive improvements to the USB stack, including a USB hub driver, as well as the usual kernel and driver improvements. On top of all this work, there’s the usual long list of bugfixes and smaller improvements.

The insanity of being a software engineer 7 Apr 2025, 10:06 pm

Software gets more complicated. All of this complexity is there for a reason. But what happened to specializing? When a house is being built, tons of people are involved: architects, civil engineers, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, interior designers, roofers, surveyors, pavers, you name it. You don’t expect a single person, or even a whole single company, to be able to do all of those.

↫ Vitor M. de Sousa Pereira

I’ve always found that software development gets a ton of special treatment and leeway in quality expectations, and this has allowed the kind of stuff the linked article is writing about to become the norm. Corporations can demand so much from developers and programmers to the point where expecting quality is wholly unreasonable, because there’s basically no consequences for delivering a shit product. Bugs, crashes, security issues, lack of documentation, horrid localisation – it’s all par for the course in software, yet we would not tolerate any of that in almost any other type of product.

While I’m sure some of this can be attributed to developers themselves, most of it seems to stem from incompetent managers imposing impossible deadlines downwards and setting unrealistic expectations upwards – you know, kick down, lick up – creating a perfect storm of incompetence. We all know it, we all experience it every day, and we all hate it – but we’ve just accepted it. As consumers, as developers, as regulatory bodies.

It’s too late to fix this now. Software development will forever exist as a sort of no man’s land of quality expectations, free from regulations, warranties, and consumer protections, and imposing them now after the fact is never going to be accepted by the industry and won’t ever make it through any lawmaking process of any country, and we all suffer from it, both as users of software and as makers of it.

Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU kernel deep dive 7 Apr 2025, 9:34 pm

Apple’s Darwin operating system is the Unix-like core underpinning macOS, iOS, and all of Apple’s modern OS platforms. At its heart lies the XNU kernel – an acronym humorously standing for “X is Not Unix.” XNU is a unique hybrid kernel that combines a Mach microkernel core with components of BSD Unix. This design inherits the rich legacy of Mach (originating from 1980s microkernel research) and the robust stability and POSIX compliance of BSD. The result is a kernel architecture that balances modularity and performance by blending microkernel message-passing techniques with a monolithic Unix kernel structure. We’ll go through a chronological exploration of Darwin and XNU’s evolution – from Mach and BSD origins to the modern kernel features in macOS on Apple Silicon and iOS on iPhones. We’ll follow this with a deep dive into the architectural milestones, analyze XNU’s internal design (Mach-BSD interaction, IPC, scheduling, memory management, virtualization), and examine how the kernel and key user-space components have adapted to new devices and requirements over time.

↫ Tanuj Ravi Rao

Despite its popularity and open source kernel, it’s quite rare to see detailed deep-dives into the underpinnings of macOS. It always surprised me that nobody took whatever Apple threw across the fence every macOS release and ran with it – much further than “run existing open source desktops but worse” we never got when it comes to Darwin distributions (although this might change) – so perhaps having more approachable articles like these out and about get people interested.

Getting the firmware of a VTech/LeapFrog LeapStart/Magibook 7 Apr 2025, 4:38 pm

This is a very small blog post about my first reverse engineering project, in which I don’t really reverse engineer anything yet, but I am just getting started!

A family member asked me to add additional book data to the LeapStart he bought for his son, this is the starting point here.

↫ leloubil’s blog

We’ve all seen toy, child-focused computers like these, and I always find them deeply fascinating. I’m not buying them for my own kids – they’ll get their start on a “real” computer I’ll set up for them to explore and break – but I see their value, and they’re probably a better choice than giving a kid a tablet or whatever (which my wife and I are opposed to for our kids). What fascinates me about them is, of course, what software, and more specifically, what operating system they run.

It turns out this one most likely runs on something called µC/OS-II, one of the many relatively obscure embedded operating systems you never hear about.

µC/OS is a full-featured embedded operating system originally developed by Micriµm. In addition to the two highly popular kernels, µC/OS features support for TCP/IP, USB-Device, USB-Host, and Modbus, as well as a robust File System.

↫ µC/OS GitHub page

The documentation provides a lot more detail about its capabilities, so if you’re interested in learning more, that’s your starting point.

Windows Hotpatch comes to client version of Windows 4 Apr 2025, 11:50 pm

Good news for Windows users, and for once there’s not a hint of sarcasm here: Microsoft has started rolling out Windows Hotpatch to the client versions of Windows. This feature, which comes from the server versions of Windows, allows the operating system to install patches to in-memory processes, removing the need for a number of restarts. Obviously, this is hugely beneficial for users, as they won’t have to deal with constant reboots whenever a new bunch of Windows updates are pushed.

There are some limitations and other things you should know. First, the way the system works is that every quarter, installations with Hotpatch enabled will receive a quarterly baseline update that requires a reboot, followed by two months of hotpatches which do not require a reboot. Hotpatches can only be security updates; new features and enhancements are rolled up into the quarterly baseline updates. In other words, while this will not completely eliminate reboots, it will cut the number of reboots per year down from twelve to just four, which is substantial, and very welcome in especially corporate environments.

The biggest limitation, however, is that Windows Hotpatch will only make it to one client version of Windows, Enterprise version 24H2, so users of the Home or Professional version are out of luck for now. On top of that, you’re going to need a Microsoft subscription, use Microsoft Intune, and an Intel/AMD-based system (Hotpatch will come to ARM later). I hope it’ll make its way to Windows 11 Home and Professional, too, because I’m fairly sure quite a few of you using Windows would love to set this up on your own machines.

How big is VMS? 4 Apr 2025, 11:30 pm

This question was asked during my Boot Camp presentation last fall in Boston, and over the past 35 years dozens of times people have asked, how big is VMS? That translates into “how many lines of code are in VMS”? I thought it was time to at least make a stab at pursuing some insight into the answer. I wrote some command procedures to count the number of source lines in .B32, .B64, .C, .MAR, .M64, and .S files. Not counted are blank lines and lines beginning with the standard comment characters and miscellaneous directives for the particular language.

↫ Clair Grant

As always with the ‘lines of code’ metric, there’s some real arbitrariness going on, and in this case that means things like excluding networking, which to me seems like a core part of an operating system, but alas, choices need to be made. The final tally for lines of code, as per the definition used in the article, in the most recent version of OpenVMS, version 9.2-3, is almost 1.9 million. Do with that information as you please.

What’s really fascinating, though, are the deltas between the versions investigated in this article: V6.2 (May 1995, port to Alpha), V7.2 (February 1999, kernel threads, 64-bit APIs, Galaxy, and more), V8.2 (February 2005, port to Itanium), V9.2-3 (december 2024, port to x86). Going from one version to the next, roughly 400000 lines of code were added each time – the article doesn’t theorise about the consistency of this number, and I suspect it’s mostly just a fun coincidence, but it does jump out.