OpenBSD 8.0 brings bigger virtual machines, graphics improvements, and another helping of AI mockery. The round version number doesn't signal a radical break with its predecessors. OpenBSD 8.0 is the 61st release of the project. Developer Bryan Steele posted a highlights rundown on Mastodon. Wireless improvements include updates to the qwx driver for Qualcomm Wi-Fi 6 hardware. Its VMM/VMD hypervisor now supports multiprocessor VMs with up to 64 virtual CPUs in each guest. The kernel virtual memory address space on x86-64 is now 512 GB, up from 4 GB, allowing for GPUs with large amounts of VRAM. On Arm64 machines, OpenBSD supports hibernation, and on both x86-64 and Arm64 it can use CPU AES instructions for faster encrypted swap. Component upgrades include OpenSSH 10.6 and LibreSSL 4.4.0, and the DRM graphics driver stack from Linux 6.18. The default C compiler is Clang/LLVM 22, including for the SPARC64 edition – but at the cost of dropping support for the Loongson architecture. The list of errata is short, with just four fixes – but then, version 8.0 is very new. Just days before this release, there was a high-profile OpenBSD issue: Calif's "Big Fish" research describes a decades-old shared-memory bug chained with a separate kernel flaw to gain local root access. Both were fixed in OpenBSD 7.9, through errata 026 and 018 respectively. Project leader Theo de Raadt forked OpenBSD from NetBSD 1.0 in 1995, and the first release of the new OS was OpenBSD 1.2 in July 1996 – so version 8.0 is as close as the project will get to a 30th anniversary release. According to Calif's proof-of-concept code on GitHub, the bug was in the original code that both OpenBSD and NetBSD inherited from the original BSD codebase – which is how come there's a 37-year-old bug in a 30-year-old project. A HackerNews comment says: "Interestingly, looks like this was accidentally fixed in NetBSD during a rewrite of that code in August of 1999." The project has not updated its infamous slogan. The homepage still proclaims: "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!" As we noted in May when OpenBSD 7.9 appeared, the project rejects code generated by LLMs, although on the basis of licensing concerns rather than its cousin NetBSD's explicit anti-AI stance. As we reported recently, this strict anti-AI stance seems to be serving NetBSD well. OpenBSD is also an anti-AI project, and for this release, the website goes out of its way to make that very clear. OpenBSD's mascot is a pufferfish, and in the banner artwork for the new release, "Puffy" has an extra eye – and the signpost in the image's background also has malformed text, a hallmark of early image-generation bots. The eyes are also constantly blinking – one at a time – to emphasize that this is a reference to Blinky the mutant fish from The Simpsons. In case you missed The Simpsons reference, the version 8.0 release theme song makes it even more explicit: it's titled "The Simps on AI." The lyrics and the vocals parody both Simpsons characters and AI users. Our favorite line sounds like Grampa Simpson, and says: Back in my day we didn't have artificial intelligence, we had real stupidity – and we liked it. We've seen negative reactions online, but then we often find that some people lack much of a sense of humor. For our part, we really enjoyed seeing the OpenBSD team having such fun. We reckon it will appeal to many Butlerian Jihadi types. It certainly did to The Reg FOSS desk. A little Wine with your pufferfish A couple of days before the 8.0 release came an unexpected announcement on the openbsd-ports mailing list: a proposed port of Wine for OpenBSD. This is a new version of the Wine 11 runtime that allows Windows binaries to launch and run on OpenBSD. This is a 64-bit version of Wine for OpenBSD on x86-64, and for now, this means it can only run 64-bit Windows code. (For the technical nitty-gritty: Wine needs to manipulate the CPU's GS register. Windows on x86-64 uses the GS segment base to locate the Thread Environment Block (TEB), as the late great Geoff Chappell explained. This is a very longstanding Windows data structure, going all the way back through Windows 95 to OS/2. The port was particularly tricky because OpenBSD doesn't allow programs to alter that, so the port is emulating instructions that use the %gs segment override. The snags are that this means 32-bit code doesn't work, and secondly, because this is unnecessary on Linux, the code is unlikely to be merged back into upstream Wine.) If you want to see it working, there are a few screenshot galleries on Reddit's openbsd_gaming group, showing a number of recent major titles running: Some samples from WIP wine port, more wine-on-OpenBSD screenshots, and even more wine-on-OpenBSD proof. The port comes hedged with caveats, notable among them that Wine does not do any kind of sandboxing, so using it potentially opens up OpenBSD to Windows malware. However, for some users, this could be a very useful addition. OpenBSD is the simplest and cleanest member of the BSD family, indeed, of the FOSS Unix family. Part of this is because entire subsystems are missing that the other BSDs provide. Bluetooth connections to Apple's wireless keyboards and pointing devices aren't supported. There's no logical volume management – which would massively help with OpenBSD's complex disk partitioning. There's no journaling filesystem either (although a port of the new Gefs is in progress). While small and clean, its priorities favor security and simplicity, though performance will depend on the hardware and workload. Importantly – since you probably will need to ask for help – the OpenBSD community does not have a reputation for friendliness. Saying that, it is quite a lot easier to get OpenBSD installed and running, complete with its 25-year-old version 2.2.5 of the Fvwm window manager, than either NetBSD or FreeBSD. If you're looking for an AI-free, and indeed systemd-free, path away from Linux, OpenBSD 8.0 is very definitely worth a try. ®

Surprisingly few organizations were promoting Linux distros at Open Source Summit Europe. The only dedicated stands we found belonged to two Chinese projects, with openEuler occupying the larger booth. For users accustomed to Western enterprise distros, openEuler may be a less familiar name, but it has an impressive history. It's the modern free community version of Huawei's EulerOS, a version of which achieved official official UNIX™ certification. openEuler is no longer a solely Huawei project, though. Since then, it's been opened up, and it is now run by the OpenAtom Foundation. OpenAtom was co-founded in 2020 by Huawei along with some other big Chinese names, such as Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent. Another of the co-founders was Inspur, which formerly developed its own distro, K/UX – a version of which also achieved official UNIX™ certification. Inspur K/UX won Unix certification in February 2016, and EulerOS seven months later. K/UX's Unix certification expired in 2019. A few months later, in May 2019, the US placed wider sanctions on Huawei. It is possible that the fresh restrictions on American sales prompted Huawei's interest in closer co-operation with other companies in the Chinese Linux space. As far as we can see, there were no further versions of K/UX after version 3. As additional motivation for cooperation, both EulerOS and K/UX were originally based on CentOS Linux, and of course, in December 2020, the CentOS Project announced it would shift its focus from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream. The openEuler community has taken the platform in new directions. It has built its own stack of tools for developing, deploying, and running LLMs, called Intelligence BooM. It has a tool for migrating CentOS Linux systems to openEuler, called x2openEuler. As you would expect, it supports Kubernetes, as well as Docker and Podman, but it also has its own container engine called iSula (named after a species of ant). Aware that it's less known outside Asia, at the Open Source Summit, OpenAtom was handing out copies of a special "Focus Guide" from Admin Magazine, which is also available as a free download. Some parts of this are also available online without registration, such as AI and the BooM Stack and Automating Migration to openEuler. openEuler has a dual-strand release cycle, akin to Ubuntu rather than the RHELatives, with LTS versions and more frequent "innovation releases." The current LTS is version 24.03, released in June 2024, while the latest version is 26.09. There is a plethora of versions and editions available on the downloads page: the latest release is for x86-64 and 64-bit Arm. The LTS version adds support for RISC-V and LoongArch, and there are minimal versions for 32-bit Arm as well. The older 22.03 LTS was also available for SW-64, meaning the SunWay RISC processors that Register sister site The Next Platform looked at in 2016. As LWN put it last year, this is a "non-upstream kernel port." There are five types of installation ISO available: Offline Standard, Offline Everything (a hefty 24.9 GB), Network Install (a still significant 1.5 GB), and two variants of the desktop "DevStation" version – a basic one at 3.3 GB and an "everything" edition at 25 GB. We gave the DevStation a very quick whirl in VirtualBox. It boots into its own installation program called Heolleo, which offers the choice of Simplified Chinese or English. Installation took a while, as it automatically fetches updates as it goes. We ended up with a GNOME desktop configured for Chinese, but we opened Settings, typed "language" into the Search box, and picked English. After a reboot, we could read most of the desktop. Program groups and some other elements are still in Chinese, but it's navigable with a bit of guesswork. It's GNOME 49, with the Dash to Panel and Arc Menu extensions preinstalled for a slightly more familiar layout. Opening a terminal, we were greeted with: Welcome to 6.18.48-0.0.0.15.oe2609.x86_64 It also offers the Deepin Desktop Environment, UKUI (as seen in Ubuntu Kylin), MATE, Xfce, and the Kiran Desktop Environment, which is a new one to us. In places, the English-language materials for openEuler mention Chinese CPU makers rather than western ones – which is understandable, in context. Examples include processors from Hygon, a Chinese licensee of AMD designs, as well as Phytium and Kunpeng, which explain the Arm support on offer. In the western world, the Red Hat user community responded to the end of CentOS Linux by building new free distros that stay as close as they can to their progenitor: the Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux projects, rebuilt from Red Hat source code. Then, when the IBM subsidiary restricted access to that source to its customers in 2023, the Rocky and AlmaLinux projects started to diverge. Rocky aims for the closest possible RHEL compatibility, and its most visible innovation is that it's built its own new build service. It also found a clever workaround to get Red Hat's kernel source code. AlmaLinux still targets RHEL compatibility, but differentiates itself by retaining older device support and older CPU architectures after Red Hat drops them. Chinese vendors have responded very differently. Those offering CentOS Linux-based OSes clubbed together, dropped their rival versions and their UNIX compatibility efforts, and instead are working on new tools and subsystems. Much like European interest in digital sovereignty, this is in part due to the Trump administration. Half a decade after it was cut off from its upstream sources, the openEuler platform is thriving and growing, even if few in the western world pay any attention at all. ®

Microsoft has been forced to admit that the Always On VPN glitch – which it said it had fixed in an update on October 13 – was not actually fixed after all. We've all been there. You fix that bug, or tweak the configuration setting, and you're pleased with yourself, but it turns out it didn't take, and you have to send the "er, about that fix" follow-up email of shame. The same has happened to Microsoft. After proudly declaring the problem resolved as part of its last security update, the company had to roll back its triumphant trumpeting to a sad little parp from a clown's horn in the message WI1482218: "This disclosure was mistakenly updated to Resolved status on October 13, 2026. We have returned its status to Mitigated. "We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion." The bug in question concerns the operating system's Always On VPN functionality, a useful bit of code that quietly opens a VPN connection in the background without tiresome prompts for authentication. It dates back to Windows 10, and Microsoft alerted administrators to problems after the September 2026 Windows security update inadvertently broke it. The issue affects Windows 11 versions from 24H2 through 26H2. The problem could occur when the VPN was set to try a different connection method if the initial connection failed (Microsoft gave the example of using automatic protocol selection with IKEv2 and SSTP). According to Microsoft: "Affected VPN connections might remain in a 'Connecting' state or repeatedly attempt to connect without succeeding. Subsequent connection attempts might also display the error: 'The specified port is already in use'." This is not ideal for administrators. The workaround Microsoft highlighted back on October 13 was to change from automatic protocol selection to a single protocol, which would at least get affected users up and running. The workaround remains the same. The bad news is that, because last week's fix did not work, affected administrators will need to apply the workaround for a bit longer. Microsoft claimed, "A resolution for this issue is planned to be included in an update to be released in the coming weeks." ®

In Brno in Czechia, Red Hat’s large local office has been helping the city’s Masaryk University to teach future technical writers. Whenever someone tries to teach, though, they learn as well. At the Open Source Summit in Prague, a senior member of Red Hat’s documentation team in Brno presented a talk called Diagrams & Dragons: Teaching Technical Writing to University Students the Open Source Way. Red Hat has a large site in Brno, which is the second-largest Czech city and is also the home of the respected Masaryk University. Red Hat’s Brno office has a substantial documentation team — this vulture was part of it for a while. For the last four years, Red Hat has been working with the university’s Faculty of Informatics to teach a course unit in technical writing. Jiří Herrman talked about what the course tutors had learned from the students. For FI MUNI, its course PV177 Technical Writing. Red Hat has a page with some of the materials. “RH has been looking into cultivating technical writers in Brno for a while,” he said, but the launch of the course was “delayed due to the 2020 worldwide global… thingy.” The company particularly wants to work on what he described as “that tricky part of technical writing where you actually have to interact with other humans.” Some of the things that struck this former tech-docs writer the most are covered on pages 7 and 9 from Herrman’s short slide deck [PDF], which discuss what didn’t work. Although the course was aimed at students with some technical knowledge, they found that setting classwork with shell-based tools didn’t work: some of the students had never used the command-line, some came with borrowed laptops without admin-level access, and some came with just phones rather than laptops. Some we found less surprising. Getting students to grade one anothers’ work, much as professional tech writers review one another’s contributions, didn’t work well – partly due to the speed required. In the end, the compromise was to give the students a course in grading each other’s work “without pissing each other off.” It didn’t shock us, but we suspect might leave some training vendors taken aback, that interacting with remote teachers who were presenting online didn’t work well – especially when there were multiple tutors, changing with each class. LLM use You may well have already foreseen the biggest “gotcha” for a course that ran for the first time in 2023. It is, naturally, use of LLM. The students were told that they were not allowed to use LLMs during the course, but naturally enough, they did so anyway. Among the problems that Herrman reported were that giving praise to good work that involved LLM use just encouraged more cheating. However, telling students off for it discouraged them, and that encourages cheating. So the team had to come up with some tactics to try to manage this, which involved teaching the students how to use LLMs instead. They did, however, find some things that did work well. Awarding points, even on a semi-arbitrary basis, with occasional secret prizes, as well dispensing feedback via internet-style memes. A final exercise was to role-play a scenario, “Dungeons & Dragons” style. The quest was “I want to be a tech writer, but how to get there?”. This involved navigating a cross-functional team, creating things like release notes, technical notes, and some real documentation for the process. And as the course materials are open source, the graduates ended up with a permanent FOSS record that they can show to prospective employers. There is a project Github, and you can see some of the student’s archived coursework for 2025 and 2026. The issues around LLM use in tech writing were the primary subject of a “Birds of a Feather” session that Herrman moderated earlier: Technical Writing in the Age of AI. He started by asking how many in the audience were using AI in their tech-writing efforts, getting what he called an “overwhelming majority” who were already on-board. What we found interesting is what people said they didn’t use it for. They find even the best models are poor at writing documentation themselves. They’re also poor at drawing diagrams, and at reading them for review purposes. They’re poor at reviewing docs (“AI is too obsequious and so reviews are overly positive,” and “it doesn’t give good feedback on user focus, or structure.”) However, most of the attendees found uses for it all the same. Examples included “Change management” and “Updating to new code” – in other words, identifying which parts of large products had changed and which therefore needed fresh documentation. Others said they used it for “Documenting decisions from meeting notes,” and in other ways, “Collecting information resources for writing,” and worryingly, to “Summarize notes (from conferences, meetings, etc.) and cluster by themes”. Another use was “Reverse engineering code to figure out intent,” or to “Find existing docs to prevent reinvention or duplication.” Tech writing is a demanding job, and pretty much permanently under-resourced. We can’t and don’t blame anyone for grabbing onto anything that might help. Even so, for us, what stood out from this session was the pretty much unanimous agreement among an audience of tech writers that LLMs were poor at doing the job that tech writers themselves did. Reviewing each others’ docs is a core part of the job: tech writers are used to this, and when they review the bots’ efforts, they find the machinese lacking. That fits our impressions, too. What we found alarming is that, although they find the bots poor at doing what the writers know best, even so, they trusted the bots to be competent in other functions, things the writers don’t look at so closely – for example, finding and selecting where docs need updating. The use for summarization is especially alarming: this is something that studies have demonstrated LLMs are bad at. They shorten, not summarize, and that’s no substitute. We find that worrying, but we regularly hear reports of companies pressing staff to use AI more. This is an all-too-human response: “it can’t do my job, but if I must use it, then this stuff isn’t my jurisdiction, and if it messes up, I can blame someone else.” We just worry at whose desk this buck will eventually stop. ®

Windows 11 26H2 is out, and Microsoft has enabled Windows settings backup by default, a move that could send administrators scrambling to opt out where they once had to opt in. The latest release hasn't made a lot of shockwaves in the community featurewise. Users with up-to-date versions of 25H2 will unlikely notice much difference – 26H2 has the same code base, delivered via an enablement package. It even has the same set of known issues, although all are now "mitigated" in one way or another. However, administrators will spot several important changes. The end-of-support clock is reset, and Microsoft has flipped some switches behind the scenes; notably, enabling Windows backup and restore (formerly Windows Backup for Organizations) by default. On by default The service, which was previously off by default, backs up a device's settings and a list of installed Microsoft Store apps. The idea is that when a user moves to a new device, a restore can happen during setup. Microsoft also listed an objective of the service as allowing "organizations to transition to a cloud-first approach for managing devices and user settings." The problem is that many organizations are prohibited from sending this data to the cloud. As a result, the default-on setting won't apply in privacy-sensitive regions such as those covered by the EU Digital Markets Act, or in sovereign and restricted environments. For many others running Windows 11 26H2, it'll now be enabled by default on eligible devices – Entra joined or Entra Hybrid joined. Unless an administrator has explicitly said no to the functionality, the act of installing the update will flip the switch, and the backups will begin. Administrators will rightly be wary of anything that switches from opt-in to opt-out, even something so apparently useful and innocuous as a backup. Why wouldn't you want your users to be able to leap to a new device with ease? That assumes their data is also in the cloud, of course, since this only backs up settings and a list of Windows apps. Backing up data is something else entirely. That is the real issue with the change. The release of Windows 11 26H2 isn't particularly exciting in itself, but flipping a long-standing opt-in to opt-out as part of it is likely to set more than a few nerves jangling. ®

A new loophole to avoid Microsoft's insistence that you need a Microsoft account to use the Home edition of Windows 11 has appeared, and it's so ludicrously simple we can only assume the good bug fairy has paid a visit to Redmond. The workaround is in the normal Windows 11 Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE) that users see when setting up the operating system. Get to the point where Windows prompts for a Microsoft account, then click the "Learn more" hyperlink beneath the text box and the Sign-in options link, and the OOBE skips to prompting for the user's name and eventually a password. Just like it used to do before Microsoft decided that you needed one of its accounts to use the software you thought you'd paid for. "Bob Pony" created a helpful post demonstrating the workaround. We checked it, and it worked exactly as demonstrated in the video. However, we can't imagine Microsoft leaving this in the setup program for long, considering the company's desire to drive users into its preferred online world. Indeed, some components installed with Windows won't work without a Microsoft account, but at least users can choose whether or not to use them. Microsoft has played whack-a-mole with workarounds users have found to avoid a Microsoft account in the Windows setup application over the years. In 2025, it snapped shut a popular loophole in the name of keeping users safe and ensuring Windows is stable, secure, and ready to deliver the experience users expect from Microsoft's operating system. It is worth emphasizing that the workaround is only for the Home Edition of Windows 11, so it will be useful when friends or family pick up a new PC and don't want to go through the Microsoft account rigmarole. Windows 11 Pro users, or administrators, obviously have other options and aren't forced down the Microsoft account route, which may hint at why this loophole exists in the first place. It's unclear when Microsoft will close this loophole, and we certainly aren't going to ask it. Until then, Home Edition users can avoid a Microsoft account without resorting to third-party scripts, tools, or instructions. Just use a simple click of the mouse to Learn more. ®

Ubuntu 24.04's likely final scheduled point release barely made it out the door before an installer bug sent its x86-64 desktop image back to the workshop. Meanwhile, October's interim release is approaching. 24.04.5 was released on September 10, but its x86-64 desktop installation image was withdrawn after a bug caused the installer to crash when users selected the extended installation option. Other images and official flavors are unaffected. For the time being, if you try to download the graphical desktop version, the "Noble Numbat" download page is serving the 24.04.4 ISO image instead. The other versions on that page – Server, WSL2 image, and the Netboot version – are not affected. The issue only affects fresh installations: if you already have 24.04 installed, a full system update will result in 24.04.5 in the usual way. Version 24.04.5 is very likely to be the last point release of the 2024 Ubuntu LTS. Ubuntu 26.04 is the latest LTS release, but 24.04 remains supported. As we reported when Resolute Raccoon launched in April, it uses Linux kernel 7.0, and that means that a new install of 24.04.5 comes with kernel 7.0 as well. This is part of Canonical's system of LTS Enablement stacks, also called Hardware Enablement or HWE, as we described back when 24.04.3 appeared in August 2025. The same applies if you upgrade an existing copy of 24.04. We upgraded one of our test laptops and it too got the new kernel version automatically. Kernel upgrades depend on which kernel track the installation follows. Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop defaults to HWE, while Server defaults to the original general-availability kernel; some desktops use an OEM kernel instead. HWE updates bring newer kernels and graphics support to an existing LTS release. A successful installation doesn't establish that every device or feature works correctly, or that later updates offer no benefit. As we wrote in January 2025, we have a couple of laptops with onboard Nvidia GPUs that need kernel 5.x to run the Nvidia binary drivers, so we downgraded them to Ubuntu 22.04's original 5.15 kernel. It still works and it's still getting bug fixes from Canonical. Alongside the newer kernel, the release includes a graphics stack based on Mesa 26.2. There's a detailed list of issues and fixes in the 24.04.5 release notes, as well as a list of security fixes in Ubuntu Security Notices. Here comes a stingray! (Ooh-wah, ooh-wah) In other Ubuntu update news, version 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" is getting close. At the start of the month, the company announced in-progress development snapshot 3, and the beta is scheduled for September 24. Both a standard x86-64 installation image and a build optimized for processors supporting x86-64-v3 are on the download page. Post-install, it should be possible to switch to the newer-CPU binaries. As the June development roadmap specified, 26.10 is now in feature freeze, but a big one sneaked in right under the wire: it should come with Linux kernel 7.3. Kernel 7.2 came out last month, with the kernel team's new faster AI-assisted development cycle. The following version is already at RC-2 stage and the final version 7.3 should be out right around the same time as Stonking. If necessary, the Stingray may be set free with a pre-release kernel and updated within days. Canonical did promise earlier this year that it was aiming to make Ubuntu interim releases exciting again, and this would certainly qualify. GNOME 51 is nearly a month into its beta cycle and should appear a couple of weeks before Stonking. This release should also finish the process of replacing all the Unix-style core utilities with Rust versions. There should also be a version of the Myna speech-to-text tool, as we mentioned back in June. If you want to see the new look, there's a public Google Drive folder with the new wallpapers available now. ®

Switzerland's Federal Chancellery is preparing to offer a FOSS workplace suite to some 3,000 employees – but the Swiss Armed Forces are pushing ahead faster still. European interest in digital sovereignty isn't limited to the European Union: the Swiss Federal Chancellery plans to offer selected government employees a FOSS alternative that will run alongside Microsoft 365. The chancellery is launching the program with an initial 3,000 staff, out of some 47,000 federal employees. The platform is expected to become available to about 3,000 selected employees from the end of 2027, with the first phase forecast to cost CHF 9 million (£8.2 million, $11.1 million). For comparison, Swiss Radio reported last year that the federal government had spent CHF 1.1 billion (£1 billion, $1.4 billion) on Microsoft licenses. The program follows the BOSS Proof of Concept feasibility study, which began last year and tested browser-based FOSS tools with 172 users. The English version of the report says: "Functions examined included document editing, email, calendar, contacts, tasks, file storage, audio and video conferencing, chat, and identity and access management." The study carefully spells out four limits to its scope: It would not replace Microsoft 365 It would not have 1:1 functionality It would not have full M365 compatibility It would not be permanent infrastructure It's important to make this stuff plain right at the start. Back in 2022, in a piece whose working title was You can't buy software, this vulture mentioned a member of one of his online communities who wanted to replace Microsoft software with free software – but demanded complete fidelity, including intact imports of all his Outlook files. This kind of exact and perfect match is basically impossible, and the four bullet points above strike us as a good effort at managing users' expectations. The Chancellery concluded that the browser-based suite was suitable in principle for key standard tasks, although it also identified technical and operational limitations. The next phase will cover less than 10 percent of federal employees and is expected to take about 15 months. The plan is to use the openDesk suite from the German state-owned enterprise ZenDIS. This is the same collaboration suite that we reported Mecklenburg-Vorpommern was adopting in July, following neighboring Schleswig-Holstein in 2025. The move is part of the Swiss government's Digital Switzerland Strategy 2026, announced in Bern at the end of 2025 – less than a month after its Federal Council's report on Swiss digital sovereignty. They also follow the 2024 introduction of the Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfilment of Governmental Tasks – or EMBAG for short. The government has a fresh interest in open source – indeed, the Chancellery maintains an online catalog of its own open source tools. Back in July, Heise reported in English that the Swiss Armed Forces were making similar moves. It cites a German-language report from Swiss publication Republik, Die Cyber-Spezialisten des Bundes kehren Microsoft den Rücken – The federal government's cyber specialists are turning their backs on Microsoft – which has more details. The military is moving faster: Republik says it aims to complete the migration by October 2026 – next month at the time of writing. Again, there is a local precedent – this time, from Austria. In September last year, representatives of the Austrian military presented a talk at the LibreOffice Conference in Budapest: Migration to LibreOffice in the Austrian Armed Forces (ÖBH). Last month, the ÖBH gave a long interview to the Document Foundation about how and why: part 1 and part 2. ®

Microsoft has pumped ads into the Windows Start menu and pushed users through setup screens promoting its services. Now it's bringing advertising to the Windows desktop with a Harry Potter promotion in its Bing Wallpaper app. Users of Microsoft’s Bing Wallpaper app took to Reddit and Microsoft’s own Learn site, where users can post questions about Microsoft products and services, to ask why their usual rotation of scenic desktop wallpapers was interrupted Monday by an ad for Harry Potter films. The wallpaper displays a minimalist vector image of the Hogwarts castle from the film adaptations of author J.K. Rowling’s seven-book fantasy series along with text reading “Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts 11-film collection” and an additional line noting that all eleven movies in the series are “available now.” “Why in the world is my Bing wallpaper today an advertisement for a film collection, not a beautiful landscape or nature photo,” a Microsoft Learn poster identifying himself as Reed Miller said. “Will there be more advertisements, and if so, must I uninstall Bing wallpaper now to prevent them, or is there a way to opt out?” Reddit users similarly expressed dissatisfaction about their usual rotation of photographs being hijacked to advertise a movie collection. “Usually it's animals, landscapes, or architecture,” one poster noted. “Today it's shit.” While both Miller and Reddit commenters complained in part about Rowling’s transition from author of kids’ books about a young boy who grows up with a hidden identity to an anti-transgender activist, one need not lean on the fact that Rowling’s intellectual property is the one being advertised to find dissatisfaction with the move. Plenty of people leaving ratings on the Bing Wallpaper app’s Microsoft Store page since Monday made no mention of Rowling or her politics in their one-star reviews, only noting that they were upset the app had turned into one that delivers desktop ads. “What's next? Immediately uninstalled. Fair warning to everyone else,” one reviewer said. Another pointed out that the settings for Bing Wallpaper now note AI is used to generate some wallpapers served by the app. Others complained that there had to be a better way to monetize the Bing Wallpaper app. This isn’t the first time such a seemingly innocuous app has drawn criticism. As we noted in late 2024, the Bing Wallpaper app was spotted snooping on and decrypting browser cookies. When asked, Microsoft didn’t technically deny it, only telling us at the time that it didn’t peruse and decrypt “all user Edge and Chrome cookies,” with Firefox not getting a mention. Beyond the Bing Wallpaper app, Microsoft has a lengthy history of privacy controversies involving user data – and inserting ads into Windows, including Microsoft Store promotions that landed in the Windows 11 Start menu in 2024. One could argue that the many iterations of cramming Copilot into every corner of Windows in a bid to increase user numbers are tantamount to advertising, too. We reached out to Microsoft to get more info on the latest addition to its in-your-face advertising portfolio, but didn’t immediately hear back. In the meantime, your best bet might be uninstalling the Bing Wallpaper app before it hijacks your wallpaper. ®

The Asahi Linux gang has announced support for Apple's M3 silicon, with a few ifs and buts for owners that want to try out the code on their hardware. According to the project, "Asahi Linux now officially supports Macs with an M3 series SoC!" There are, however, some substantial caveats. Want performant or power-efficient 3D acceleration from the GPU? You'll need to wait a bit. How about the HDMI port? "The lack of DCP support means that the HDMI port on equipped MacBooks is currently disabled." Sleep does not work either, although the project noted: "This will be addressed once full DCP support is wired up for M3." Even with those limitations, it is quite a feat of reverse engineering. According to the project, almost everything supported on the M1 and M2 series machines "just works." This includes the webcam, internal microphones, USB, hardware-accelerated video decoding including support for AV1, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. The lack of GPU support is nevertheless a significant limitation that will make anything other than a 2D desktop a painful experience. Work is underway, but the synopsis of a talk planned for the X.Org developer conference at the end of September points to hurdles caused by hardware differences from previous generations. Although support for M3-series machines has been merged into the installer, it remains gated behind Expert mode, meaning users must run the installer with EXPERT=1 enabled. The project aims to drop this requirement in time for the Fedora Linux 45 beta in a few weeks, barring any major regressions or other showstoppers. Apple debuted the M3 in 2023, and Asahi's support extends to the M3 Pro and M3 Max. The M3 Ultra, found in the Mac Studio, is not yet on the supported list. With luck, the work on M3, including its GPU, should stand the team in good stead when tackling Apple's subsequent chip generations. Apple announced the M6 last month. ®

Kumander Linux has been around for a few years now and version 3.0 is nearly ready, with some strong nostalgic appeal. We recently came across Kumander Linux and thought it was an interesting distro – although not technologically "interesting," which isn't always a good thing. Underneath, it's almost boring: Debian 13.6 with Xfce 4.20. These are safe, solid, sensible choices, combining a lightweight mainstream desktop with one of the most established Linux distros. What's not to like? What's fun about Kumander Linux is its looks. It makes a very convincing effort to look and work more or less like Windows 7. It doesn't go as far as the wholesale "borrowing" of commercial assets and trademarks seen in Wubuntu, AKA "Windows Linux," nor is it a strange, hacked-together combination of genuine Windows components like Classic 7. It uses a mixture of FOSS and freeware components. The office suite is LibreOffice 25.2, configured with a Microsoft-like ribbon UI. The image editor is GIMP 3.0.4, and it comes with native Linux versions of some familiar Windows tools, such as Google Chrome, PuTTY, Audacity, and VLC. Yes, Chrome isn't FOSS, but it's a much more widely used web browser than Firefox. The customizations go beyond appearances, with some of Xfce's stock tools replaced. For instance, Xfce's slightly feeble Task Manager has been replaced by a tool that was new to us, System Manager. There's also an easy point-and-click Software Center. Both were written by distro developer Roy Hoejgaard. The presence of non-FOSS tools such as Chrome means that a few additional repositories are configured. Flatpak and WINE are both preinstalled, but neither comes with any apps preloaded. One simple but effective touch is that the Start menu lists popular apps from Ardour and Blender to the Steam client, suffixed with Installer. These are not the applications themselves, but handy links for downloading and installing them. Kumander isn't the smallest distro – it's a 4.25 GB download, and a full install takes 11 GB of disk. Even so, providing installation links rather than preinstalling all those applications makes it substantially smaller than Zorin OS Pro, for instance. Xfce is pretty lightweight, and Kumander Linux 3 takes about 725 MB of RAM at idle. In places, we do feel that the customization has perhaps gone a little too far. For instance, when we opened a terminal window, we found that the default shell prompt said C:/home/lproven>. Familiar to a nervous Windows migrant, yes, but almost misleading – there are no drive letters here. It's harmless, though. The distro's About page explains a little of its history. The name is an indirect tribute to Commodore computers – it's "Commander," but spelled the Filipino way. We think this is the first distro we've seen from the Philippines. The changes to Xfce are modest: Kumander doesn't even use the docklike plugin for a Windows 7-style taskbar with pinned applications. Instead, it has its own Quicklaunch plugin. This is documented – unlike some other customized distros, it has a page with links to the repositories of all custom components, which is good to see. Even the Extended Security Updates scheme only has slightly over a year left. The international edition of Windows 10 LTSC is nearing the end too. Only the IoT edition has years left. If you're disenchanted with Windows 11 and modern flat user interfaces in general, you have our sympathies. If you miss the gradients, transparency, and overall look of Windows in the Noughties, but want Debian stability and Xfce simplicity, Kumander Linux 3 offers an appealing combination. The current build is Release Candidate 2, and it looks close to being ready. ®

It looks like the Racoon has bedded in and settled down, as Canonical releases the first point release of this year’s Ubuntu LTS version, offering an upgrade to users on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat). Ubuntu 26.04.1 is the first point release of April’s long-term support version, which will be supported until 2031. Assuming that it follows the pattern of previous Ubuntu LTS releases, 26.04.1 will be followed by four further point releases – usually, the final release comes a little while after the following LTS release. That means Ubuntu 26.04.5 should arrive some time after Ubuntu 28.04 - meaning in or around September 2028. It’s accompanied by most of the remixes releasing matching point releases: Kubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu Studio, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, and Ubuntu Cinnamon. Notably, two flavors are missing from this list. There are 10 official flavors but only eight point releases lists. There was no official 26.04 release of Ubuntu MATE. Maintainer Martin Wimpress has stepped down – he has a new project called Nøughty Linux he’s working on instead. There’s not much to see on the website yet, but if you’re curious, his talk at the 2025 Ubuntu Summit will give you a taste. Ubuntu Unity isn’t in that list, either. That remix missed the 25.10 release cycle because lead developer Rudra Saraswat – whom we first talked to in 2022, when he was 12 – is at university. The good news is that some developers did step up to help and there is an Ubuntu Unity 26.04 release. It replaces a bunch of subcomponents of the previous version, though, and that means it’s officially not an LTS release. Ubuntu Unity users should be aiming for the 26.10 release instead. This first point release has a few consequences we can expect. One is that for LTS users, it’s upgrade time, if you are planning on trying to stay current. Canonical does not start offering new version upgrades to LTS users until the first point release. Now that Raring-point-one is here, people running Ubuntu 24.04 “Noble Numbat” will start to see offers to upgrade to the new version. This applies to those running their Ubuntu servers as pets, rather than herding them like cattle. One of the things that really crumples the cardigans of hardcore Debianisti is that Canonical inserts messages into the output of the apt command. So the upgrade offers won’t be limited to graphical desktop users. Another consequence, albeit less concerned with any of the official flavors, is that System 76’s Pop!_OS 26.04 is expected soon. The company said on LinkedIn that they were aiming for an end-June release date. That didn’t happen. The team is certainly hard at work. Its in-house COSMIC desktop hit version 1.0 in December last year, and earlier this week, it released COSMIC version 1.7.0. That means that the next Pop!_OS will now use Ubuntu 26.04.1. The Reg FOSS desk is becoming quite fond of COSMIC and Pop!_OS, after a fairly shaky start. It feels quite a bit faster than Ubuntu itself, and on our newer testbed laptop – a 2018 Dell XPS13 – it’s not only very fast to start, but its ability to change the screen DPI on the fly is very handy. On older kit, it can make effective use of NVIDIA GPUs that the official binary driver can no longer use on modern kernels, although we have seen it freeze up quite a few times on those 10-15 year old machines. COSMIC is new and it’s developing faster than any other desktop in the Linux world. The team has ambitious plans for “Epoch 2” and beyond. At the rate they’re moving, perhaps Pop!_OS 26.04 will come with COSMIC 2. ®

Microsoft has dropped Windows 11 26H2 into the Windows Insider Release Preview Channel and released August's preview update. Windows 11 26H2 shares the same servicing branch as Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, and many of the tweaks and updates that users are looking forward to have already appeared in the monthly Windows updates. The latest, the August Preview Update, includes such modifications as the long-awaited movable taskbar, more Start Menu customization, and the ability to drop web and Microsoft Store suggestions from local results in Windows Search. The update will turn up via an enablement package – a relatively small piece of code that switches on functionality already downloaded, but currently dormant. "Think of it as a switch rather than a full operating system replacement," Microsoft wrote. It's considerably more compact than a multi-gigabyte full download and reinstall of an operating system. Resetting the support clock The shared codebase and shared updates – Windows 11 26H2 will share the same release note KB identifiers as 25H2 and 24H2 – might have some users wondering about the point. One answer is support. For example, support for the Home and Pro editions of Windows 11 24H2 ends on October 13, 2026. Windows 11 26H2 resets this clock, with 24 months of support for Home and Pro versions, and 36 months for Enterprise and Education editions. Enterprises will still need to validate the new release. The servicing branch is the same, and if something works with Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2, it should work with Windows 11 26H2. However, Microsoft still recommends "testing with devices running recent versions of Windows 11 to confirm compatibility with your apps, policies, and infrastructure." Some organizations will have already done this, while others will have waited until the Release Preview milestone was reached. Microsoft took careful aim at its foot when it skipped the Release Preview stage and released the infamous document-destroying Windows 10 October 2018 update. It has been considerably more cautious in the years since. The move to Release Preview was accompanied by the August Preview Update, which included a raft of improvements, but was also greeted with dismay by some users complaining of problems with cursors and black desktop backgrounds following the installation. As far as Microsoft is concerned, it is not currently aware of any issues with the update. ®

The controversial Omarchy distro is attracting both criticism and fans – and financial support, too. Omarchy is an opinionated respin of Arch Linux and a pet project of Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH. Although the first release was as recent as June last year, this week sees the release of Omarchy 4.0.1 – a security fix for the mid-August Omarchy 4 “Quattro”. Although it started out just over a year ago, Omarchy now has a sibling project Omakub, which is based on Ubuntu, and an organization behind it called Omacom. A week ago, DHH announced the launch of the Omacom Foundation with $8 million. Its founding patrons include figures behind Shopify, Stripe, Dell, Block, Cloudflare, Sesame, and 37signals - closely followed by people behind Dropbox and OpenClaw, taking the total to $10 million. The project, like the man behind it, is controversial. But that means attention, and an “opinionated distro” gets opinionated reviews. Some of the criticism is strong stuff: for instance, Merchants of Insecurity, whose top line is: “First, a PSA: Do NOT use Omarchy if you care about security of your machine even a little bit.” Author “One Happy Fellow” is not the first: last year, a member of Framework's community forums posted Omarchy is not a secure distribution and should be taken off the Linux installation options. Others like it or give it a guarded thumbs up while saying it’s not for them. There really is no such thing as bad publicity. As P. T. Barnum put it: "Say anything you like about me, but spell my name right." DHH is no stranger to controversy. We suspect he doesn’t mind at all. The Register reported in late 2025 that Framework, known for its repairable laptops, was sponsoring Omarchy and Hyprland, and in turn, multiple people criticized Framework for sponsoring such controversial projects. That piece linked to some of the criticism of DHH, but he has been attracting criticism since at least 2014. We tried it, and it does work. It has a unique UI based on the Hyprland tiling compositor and a panel and menus provided in the new release by Quickshell. This is heavily keyboard-driven, but ignores almost all existing keyboard shortcuts and UI conventions from other OSes. There are no title bars, let alone close buttons or anything like that. No middle-click or right-click app menus. The jaded take of the Reg FOSS desk, who is a big fan and advocate of keyboard-driven UIs, is that such things usually reflect ignorance of existing user interface standards. We found it a bit clunky. We had to install an additional tool, hypermon, in order to be able to make our testbed machine’s second display useful. You can’t use established pacman commands to update it – you must use the custom omarchy update script, and when trying that in a VM, we hit a known bug. On hardware, it worked fine. It’s Arch, extensively preconfigured. Lots of apps are preinstalled, and the selection is surprising and not typical of a FOSS product. The selection includes Discord and WhatsApp for communications, Docker, Obsidian for note-taking, Neovim as an editor, and OBS Studio for streaming. There are optional extras for using speech, automatic dictation via Voxtype, and other unusual features. There’s a terminal-based music player, cliamp. (We like the name of that one, and may keep it around.) There are, of course, options to add AI tools – one of the startup messages invites you to configure your preferred plastic pal who’s fun to be with LLM bot. It’s pretty big. A default install (not that there is any other kind) took 14 GB of disk space after the first update. It did install in a VM with a 16 GB virtual disk, but there wasn’t enough disk space to update the OS. It uses about 1.5 GB of memory at idle. It’s not lightweight, but then, Omarchy definitely comes with batteries included, as well as (to quote a friend’s old email signature) “bells and whistles, plus a couple of gongs. Don’t forget the horns, the custard pies and the water-powered whirling knives.” If you don’t know your way around existing environments or distros, want something fashionable and snazzy looking, and are willing and happy to jump in and learn, then this is an interesting new option. You may not agree with the politics and views behind it, but you must be able to either tolerate them – or ignore them. It works, it’s quite fast, it looks striking, and it does the job. If you just want something clean, fast, pretty, and with tiling by default, personally, we’d suggest Pop!_OS instead. ®

AROS is an all-FOSS re-implementation of AmigaOS, and after years of effort, it now supports Arm kit – both 32-bit and 64-bit Raspberry Pi hardware, especially the Pi 3. The AROS project's nightly builds page has some interesting new offerings. Notably, there's raspi-aarch64-system for 64-bit capable Raspberry Pi hardware, including the Pi 3 and Pi Zero, and raspi-armhf-system for older ARMv6 based devices. We first mentioned AROS 13 years ago, and last took a proper look in May 2025. Building a version of AROS that runs natively on Arm processors has been a long term goal, as the AROS Arm support page details. It has made good progress, though, and now the nightly images include a version which runs well on the Raspberry Pi 3. (Unfortunately, the Reg FOSS desk’s Pi 3 is currently running PiHole full-time, and Pi 4 support is slightly lagging, with no sound or networking.) There's no specific mention of what has changed on the project's Github repo, but we suspect that some judicious use of LLM has enabled this sudden burst of progress. Since May 2026, there have been 13 commits by Claude Code. Even so, it works. This is an existing, human-written OS which can now boot and run on a Raspberry Pi 3. The install images are small – only slightly over 100 MB in size – but if you want to give them a try, you should also copy the contents of the additional raspi-aarch64-contrib or raspi-armhf-contrib files, which contain an additional gigabyte of compressed files with apps, demos, accessories, and supplementary tools. Whether or not it has been made with LLM bot assistance, we think this is an impressive step forwards. AROS has been able to run on Arm CPUs for years, but until this, it ran hosted on top of another Arm OS – usually Linux. Now it can boot and run on bare metal. We feel this is a good step for several reasons. Although the native platform for AROS was for many years x86-32, on that platform, AROS is a small fish in a big pond: there's a vast array of off-the-shelf hardware for x86 PCs, and it’s impossible for a tiny experimental OS to support more than a fraction of it. We have tried and failed to get AROS running on bare metal more than once. For many years, the best way to try it was to run it under VMware thanks to a specialized distro called Icaros Desktop. The Raspberry Pi represents a much narrower platform: there are only a handful of models of Pi, and as a result, a very small number of GPUs and network interfaces that AROS needs to support. That makes it much easier to offer complete coverage. The Pi is also a fairly severely constrained platform: except for the most recent - and most expensive - models, most of the older and cheaper Pi kit only has either 512 MB or 1 GB of RAM. That isn’t enough to do full justice to Linux, Windows, or any BSD with a graphical desktop – but it’s plenty for AROS. This initial build boots to the Workbench desktop in about five seconds. And, of course, those lower-end Pis are still cheap, which is always welcome. For now, the Pi version of AROS is a prototype: it’s incomplete, may not be very stable, and lots of things don’t work yet. An important missing part is that it doesn’t have any 680x0 emulation yet, so it can’t run any classic Amiga apps. Even so, we suspect that quite a few old Amiga fans might enjoy playing with a brand-new £30 ($40) Amiga. If you just want to play your old games, there are much easier ways to do that on a PC. Last year, we also looked at Commodore OS 3 – and in there, we gave PiMiga a mention as well. Both products are free Linux distros bundled with emulators and tons of Amiga apps, games, and demos. Easier still, if you’re a Windows user, just buy a copy of Amiga Forever. Either way, knock yourself out. AROS is re-invigorating other bits of the Amiga world, as well. Later in 2025, we also reported on a new Amiga web browser, which runs on the A600 GS and A1200 NG computers. These are Arm-based machines which run Amiga software via emulation on an OS called AmiBench – which uses parts of AROS. TheA1200 is now officially an Amiga Alongside the A600 GS and A1200 NG Arm-based machines, last year we also mentioned THEA1200 from Retro Games Ltd. This is another Arm-based machine, based around a tweaked emulator, like RGL’s existing Sinclair reproduction The Spectrum. However, THEA1200 just recently moved one step closer to Amiga legitimacy. On its Facebook page, RGL announced that THEA1200 is officially an Amiga product: “The Amiga name has a new chapter. With the recent announcement from Mike Battilana and the Amiga Corporate [sic], we’re delighted to see the Amiga brand move forward with a clear and unified future. We’re proud to be part of that future with THEA1200, bringing the Amiga experience to a new generation while celebrating everything that made the original so special.” As we said last year, THEA1200 is an Arm computer running Linux, which runs a bundled emulator derived from Amiberry. The same is true of the AmigaKit machines we mentioned earlier, the A600 GS and A1200 NG: they too run an emulator based on Amiberry on top of Linux, and inside that, they run AmigaKit’s AmiBench OS. When RGL says it has come to an agreement with Mike Battilana and Amiga Corp, that means Cloanto. Cloanto is the company that sells AmigaForever, and it owns the Amiga trademarks, the Kickstart ROM, and the rights to the original 680x0 AmigaOS. Inside AmigaForever, along with various retro models for games compatibility, there's even a higher-spec VM running Cloanto’s updated version of classic AmigaOS, which it calls 3.X – it also has a page about the improvements 3.X contains. A deal with Cloanto means RGL can bundle the genuine original AmigaOS with TheA1200. This could give TheA1200 an edge over the AmigaKit models in terms of its compatibility with older games and original Amiga apps. (As one sign of the complexity of Amiga ownership, German developer Hyperion also has an AmigaOS license, for the purposes of developing a PowerPC version. The Register covered this back in 2004, and Hyperion used it to develop AmigaOS 4 – used in, among other things, the Amiga X1000 which The Reg covered in 2010. Controversially, Hyperion is using this license to flog updates to classic AmigaOS: in 2022, we reported on AmigaOS 3.2.2 and in 2025 on AmigaOS 3.2.3.) Christian Simpson – known on YouTube as Peri Fractic – recently revived Commodore International, and following its FPGA-powered Commodore 64 Ultimate computer, the company also launched a Sailfish-powered smart flip-phone, as The Register covered back in June. The Commodore brand is back, and it's in the news. However, the revived Commodore doesn't own the Amiga name, or IP, or code. Feel free to call us excessively cynical, but we suspect that this could be a motivation behind licensing some Amiga rights to another vendor in 2026. This exposure will increase the value of Cloanto's IP. Hypothetically, if Cloanto were to sell its rights to the revived Commodore, that could mean it could ask for more money. ®