Hacker News with Generative AI: Operating Systems

Tails warns about balenaEtcher, recommends Rufus (tails.net)
We replaced balenaEtcher with Rufus in our installation instructions for Windows to solve privacy concerns with balenaEtcher.

Security, Software, Operating Systems, Windows

11 points by top_sigrid 3 hours ago | 0 comments

What I Saw at the Evolution of Plan 9 (Geoff Collyer) [pdf] (adi.onl)

Operating Systems, Conferences, History

9 points by adriangrigore 20 hours ago | 4 comments

1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected (tuhs.org)
Hi everyone, First-time poster here. Near the end of last year, I did some forensic analysis on the DMR tapes (https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Dennis_Tapes) and had some fun playing around with them. Warren forwarded a few of my emails to this list at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, but it was never my intention for him to be my messenger, so I'm posting here myself now.

Unix, History, Software, Operating Systems, Archive

374 points by henry_flower 21 hours ago | 98 comments

Why FreeBSD is the right choice for embedded devices (klarasystems.com)
FreeBSD stands out as the ideal OS for embedded devices, offering true open-source freedom without GPL restrictions. With a permissive license, a robust community, and real-world adoption in high-performance systems, FreeBSD provides flexibility, reliability, and a streamlined development experience. Learn why more companies are choosing FreeBSD over Linux for their embedded solutions.

FreeBSD, Embedded Systems, Operating Systems, Open Source, Linux

14 points by klarainc 22 hours ago | 8 comments

Things you can do to clean up a fresh install of Windows 11 24H2 and Edge (arstechnica.com)
If you start using Windows 11 this year, you'll want to know how to clean it up.

Windows 11, Operating Systems, Software, Optimization, Cleaning

31 points by mastazi 22 hours ago | 17 comments

Rewriting essential Linux packages in Rust (lwn.net)
Most Linux systems depend on a suite of core utilities that the GNU Project started development on decades ago and are, of course, written in C. At FOSDEM 2025, Sylvestre Ledru made the case in his main stage talk that modern systems require safer, more maintainable tools.

Rust, Linux, Programming Languages, Operating Systems, Security

7 points by fofoz 2 days ago | 0 comments

Microsoft to remove the Location History feature in Windows (bleepingcomputer.com)
Microsoft announced the deprecation of the Location History feature from Windows, which let applications like the Cortana virtual assistant to fetch location history of the device.

Microsoft, Operating Systems, Privacy, Windows, Cortana

12 points by workfromspace 2 days ago | 2 comments

ArcaOS 5.1.1 released (modern OS/2) (arcanoae.com)
This document contains up-to-date issue resolution in the current ISO release of ArcaOS 5.1.

Operating Systems, New Releases, Software

19 points by jandeboevrie 3 days ago | 4 comments

GNU/Darwin (2000) (gnu-darwin.org)
It has been amusing to watch the office of the President and Georgetown University professors responding to the culture shock of multiband social media.

Operating Systems, History, Social Media

6 points by lizstar_ 3 days ago | 4 comments

Someone put an iPhone SE 3 inside a Nokia Lumia 1020 (reddit.com)
As we all know Hackintosh is macOS on a Windows PC. But how about iOS on a Windows Phone?

Mobile Phones, Operating Systems, Hackintosh, iOS, Windows Phone

17 points by microflash 4 days ago | 1 comments

How to add a directory to your PATH (jvns.ca)
I was talking to a friend about how to add a directory to your PATH today. It’s something that feels “obvious” to me since I’ve been using the terminal for a long time, but when I searched for instructions for how to do it, I actually couldn’t find something that explained all of the steps – a lot of them just said “add this to ~/.bashrc”, but what if you’re not using bash?

Linux, Terminal, Bash, Operating Systems, Programming

19 points by misonic 4 days ago | 17 comments

I helped fix sleep-wake hangs on Linux with AMD GPUs (gitlab.io)
I dual-boot my desktop between Windows and Linux. Over the past few years, Linux would often crash when I tried to sleep my computer with high RAM usage. Upon waking it would show a black screen with moving cursor, or enter a "vegetative" state with no image on-screen, only responding to magic SysRq or a hard reset. I traced this behavior to an amdgpu driver power/memory management bug, which took over a year to brainstorm and implement solutions for.

Linux, AMD GPUs, Debugging, Operating Systems, Hardware

756 points by fanf2 4 days ago | 208 comments

Why is there a screen that says "It is now safe to turn off your computer"? (2016) (microsoft.com)
I don’t know whose idea it was, but Windows 95 added a screen that appeared when you shut down Windows.

Windows 95, Operating Systems, User Interface, Technology, Nostalgia

93 points by susam 4 days ago | 93 comments

Low-Latency Transaction Scheduling via Userspace Interrupts [pdf] (cs.sfu.ca)

Operating Systems, Networking, Performance Optimization

3 points by jandrewrogers 5 days ago | 0 comments

Maintainer Opinions on Rust-for-Linux (lwn.net)
Miguel Ojeda gave a keynote at FOSDEM 2025 about the history of the Rust-for-Linux project, and the current attitude of people in the kernel community toward the experiment.

Rust, Linux Kernel, Open Source, Programming Languages, Operating Systems

3 points by flyaway123 5 days ago | 0 comments

The glibc 2.41 update has been causing problems for Linux gaming (gamingonlinux.com)
It seems a recent update to glibc with version 2.41 release at the end of January, has been causing all sorts of problems for Linux gamers that have pulled in the update (mostly on rolling-release distributions).

Linux Gaming, Software Updates, Open Source, Operating Systems

7 points by pjmlp 5 days ago | 0 comments

Kleene as a Container Management Platform for FreeBSD (gyptazy.com)
Kleene is a container management (jail manager) platform designed specifically for FreeBSD, bringing familiar concepts from Docker while fully embracing FreeBSDs native tools and philosophy.

Containerization, FreeBSD, Operating Systems, Tools

61 points by rodrigo975 5 days ago | 9 comments

Why I quit: kernel developer Con Kolivas (2007) (archive.org)
INTERVIEW | Linux is burdened with enterprise crap that makes it run poorly on desktop PCs, says kernel developer Con Kolivas who recently walked away from years of work on it.

Linux, Operating Systems, Software Development, Open Source, Interviews

53 points by nalinidash 6 days ago | 22 comments

Q2DOS – Quake 2 backported to MS-DOS (toastednet.org)
Quake II for MS-DOS

Gaming, Retro Computing, Operating Systems

118 points by jsheard 6 days ago | 79 comments

Haiku Activity and Contract Report, January 2025 (haiku-os.org)
This report covers hrev58487 through hrev58583.

Operating Systems, Reports, Software

21 points by todsacerdoti 6 days ago | 0 comments

Nearly half of Steam's users are still using Windows 10 (pcguide.com)
Microsoft has already announced that after October 14, 2025, they will no longer provide free software updates, technical assistance, or security fixes for Windows 10. This means that in just a few months, Windows 10 will join the list of unsupported operating systems alongside Windows 8.1 and Windows 7. However, a significant portion of users, especially gamers, are not willing to switch to Windows 11, at least not yet.

Windows 10, Gaming, Operating Systems, Microsoft, Steam

83 points by Sontho 6 days ago | 147 comments

The History of S.u.S.E (abortretry.fail)
In 1992, four college students, Roland Dyroff, Thomas Fehr, Hubert Mantel, and Burchard Steinbild in Fürth, Germany were dreaming of independence.

History, Operating Systems, Germany

241 points by ibobev 6 days ago | 128 comments

Linux kernel cgroups writeback high CPU troubleshooting (dasl.cc)
We’ve been upgrading the operating system from CentOS to Ubuntu on hosts across our fleet. Our CentOS hosts run an outdated Linux kernel version (3.10), whereas our Ubuntu hosts run a more modern kernel version (6.8). In August 2024, we began rolling out the Ubuntu upgrade across our Apache web servers. When we migrated larger portions of our fleet to Ubuntu, we began seeing elevated listen overflow errors.

Linux Kernel, Troubleshooting, Performance, Operating Systems, Server Management

178 points by mesto1 6 days ago | 27 comments

Passing the Torch on Asahi Linux (asahilinux.org)
With a heavy heart, we announce the resignation of Asahi Linux founder Hector Martin (marcan). His statement is on his blog.

Operating Systems, Linux, Open Source, Community

50 points by pabs3 7 days ago | 42 comments

Honeyguide/FreeBSD-pinephonepro: Porting FreeBSD to run on the PinePhone Pro (codeberg.org)
Porting FreeBSD to run on the PinePhone Pro. This repo tracks files added to or modified from the FreeBSD source. The intention is to merge these into upstream once ready.

Operating Systems, Mobile Devices, Open Source

6 points by rodrigo975 7 days ago | 0 comments

Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows (chrome.com)
The job of a web rendering engine is vast, and much of this work, such as styling, media, or layout, is driven by standards. These standards ensure that independent engines can be interoperable, which has allowed the web to flourish. But some finer details, such as how text is rendered at the pixel level, are often left to interpretation by the standards bodies, and typically end up relying on the operating systems that browsers run on.

Web Browsers, Software, Rendering, Operating Systems

173 points by barlog 7 days ago | 130 comments

Tumbleweed Adopts SELinux as Default (opensuse.org)
Tumbleweed has adopted SELinux as the default Linux Security Module (LSM) for new installations after a recent snapshot.

Security, Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems

24 points by val-gfr 7 days ago | 0 comments

Reassessing Wayland (dudemanguy.github.io)
So a bit under 3 years ago, I made my infamous Wayland rant post that is likely the most read post on this blog by miles.

Wayland, Linux, Operating Systems, Software

109 points by GalaxySnail 7 days ago | 59 comments

How to run Firecracker without KVM on cloud VMs (alexellis.io)
In this post I want to introduce a novel way to run virtual machines, namely microVMs on cloud VMs where KVM is not available.