25 years ago today, Google was founded.
On the same day, I wiped Windows 98 off my computer, believing that Debian Linux (which I had been using for a while but still kept Windows on another partition) could do everything I had been doing with Windows until then.
Since that day, many installations of Linux, *BSD, MacOS have graced my computers, but Windows has remained, on a few occasions, only an occasional (unwelcome) guest.
In the spirit of a typical support group phrase, I can joyfully say:
'Hello, I'm Stefano, and I haven't been using Windows as my primary operating system for 25 years.'
Guix maintainers Janneke Nieuwenhuizen @janneke and Ludovic Courtès @civodul have announced just today that their "seed" C compiler "Mes" is now in production in Guix OS. Mes can, after several boostraping stages eventually compile GCC which in turn compiles Linux, Guile, and Guix. The bootstrap program (as I understand it) is written in Guile Scheme, and compiles to a 357 byte binary. Now when you do guix pull you will see that the entirety of the core operating system (some 22,000 expressions) all depend on that single 357-byte bootstrap program. The idea is to eliminate the footprint of trusted binaries that build the software for the OS and compiler toolchain -- the famous "Trusting Trust" problem outlined by Ken Thompson which he presented while receiving his Turing Award. Thanks to their hard work, we now have an operating system for which every stage of the build can be verified by a human. https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/
Nix OS people do not need to feel left out, a new issue on the Nix OS GitHub page has announced that they will begin a similar project. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/227914
This is why I do not regret moving to Linux as my daily driver in the slightest. Windows 11 is annoying as hell, and even my Windows 10 work machine has to nag me about upgrading at least once a week. Meanwhile my Linux box has been running smoothly for years.
The enshittification of proprietary software is increasing while the ease-of-use of open-source software keeps getting better.
OpenBSD and FreeBSD are two operating systems that have unique features and differences. OpenBSD is a security-focused operating system that emphasizes cryptography, whereas FreeBSD is more geared towards performance and scalability. Both are free and open-source, but each has a distinct user base and target market.
Breaking IT news: #Microsoft just open-sourced MS-DOS 4.0. Versions 1.25 and 2.0 had already been open-source (MIT License) since 2018. If you’ve ever used DOS in the 1990s, you most likely were using v5.0 or v6.x. Those later versions likely won’t be released as open-source due to third-party restrictions.
#microsoft keeps pushing this #windows 11 22H2 update that fails to boot (freezes while booting), and after a couple of forced restarts it undoes the changes it made, restoring the 21H2 version. It's really annoying. It seems Microsoft lost some expertise in making #operatingsystems