The RAMpocalypse is hitting enthusiasts hard. We recently reported on the crisis seeping down to affect supplies of the decades-old DDR2 gen RAM. So it comes as no huge surprise that a well-known tech tinkerer has been inspired to look at the viability of Windows 11 on an even more ancient DDR1 platform. Step forward Omores, who demonstrates Microsoft’s newest OS running on a Core 2 Quad Q6600, using a DDR1 motherboard, supported by an ATI Radeon HD 4650 AGP graphics card. “The best part,” says our hacky hero. “It’s completely stable.”

Windows 11 on a DDR1 motherboard, with AGP support enabled from r/windows

DDR1 first became available to PC builders and DIYers at the turn of the century, replacing the aging SDR SDRAM. The DDR1 rollout began with data rates like DDR-200 and DDR-266, being the preferred choice over older platforms featuring PC100 or PC133 SDRAM. We don’t know the rated speed of the DDR1 sticks Omores used, as it isn’t shown, but DDR-400 was the best official non-overclocked standard (a couple of years later). It would make sense to use the best memory on a cherry-picked older system like this.

Other key components of this age-defying Windows 11 PC build include an ASRock ConRoe 865PE motherboard. This is regarded as something of a legendary board as it bridged generations and allowed folks to use the latest Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad chips from Intel while keeping their DDR1 RAM and AGP graphics cards. It isn’t only today that PC DIYers have cared deeply about component longevity.

The last significant component in this DDR1 system that we were told about was the ATI Radeon HD 4650 AGP graphics card. This seems to have required the most wrangling to make it work with Windows 11 / modern software. However, Omores reveals that “With some 'hacking' ... AGP 8X is fully functional and H.264 hardware decoding is active.” The key was finding, then crowbarring, ATI’s Windows 7 64-bit drivers from 2012 onto the system.

Once some details of the setup were confirmed in the video using tools like CPU-Z and GPU-Z, Omores showed the ‘fresh’ Windows 11 DDR1 system running modern browsers, with embedded video and hardware decoding. A handful of games and 3D benchmarks were also shown running without glitches. Last but not least, the system did indeed run Crysis.

In a later comment on the Reddit post, Omores elaborates on how to install the ATi driver on Windows 11 and shares a more detailed video link. “I like that Windows 11 is rock stable on these older systems with no UEFI whatsoever and only ACPI 1.1,” adds the adventurer in older PC tech. “A lesser-known fact is that Windows 11 actually officially supports BIOS systems via Windows 11 IoT, so it's kind of expected to run smoothly.”

Microsoft has extended its free consumer Windows 10 Extended Security Updates (ESU) program by a year, pushing the cutoff for critical security patches to October 14th, 2027. The change came without any actual announcement, appearing instead in an edit to Microsoft's Windows 10 ESU support page. Devices already enrolled roll over to the new date automatically, with no action required from users. The program was originally set to expire on October 12th, 2026, one year after Windows 10 reached end of support on October 14th, 2025. With the extension, however, users who can’t or won’t move to Windows 11 now have a second free year of patches.

Speaking to BleepingComputer, Microsoft said that the change reflects “our ongoing commitment to helping customers stay secure during the transition,” adding that the extra year gives users “more time and flexibility to find the best PC for their needs while keeping them protected.”

In terms of enrollment, nothing has changed: users can enroll for free by syncing their PC settings to a Microsoft account through Windows Backup, by redeeming 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, or with a one-time payment of $30. Users in Europe can enroll at no cost simply by signing in with a Microsoft account, a concession Microsoft made after pushback from consumer advocacy groups over its original requirements. A single ESU license covers up to 10 devices tied to the same account.

Microsoft's consumer program is limited to personal devices, however. Systems joined to an Active Directory domain or to Microsoft Entra, or managed through Mobile Device Management, are corporate-controlled and therefore not eligible. Personally owned machines that are only Entra-registered — e.g., a work account added to a personal device, rather than the device itself being organization-owned — still qualify.

Windows 11 has surged to roughly 73% of desktop share against Windows 10’s 26%, so it’s clear that the broader migration is working. Those users still on Windows 10 are increasingly the difficult edge cases, with around 400 million active PCs unable to officially upgrade to Windows 11 because their hardware fails its TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, or supported-processor requirements.

Users of those machines face a choice of remaining on unsupported Windows 10 or upgrading their hardware outright. But thanks to the AI-driven memory shortage, doing so has never been more expensive: DRAM contract prices have roughly doubled since early last year (and are expected to double again) as Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron divert wafer capacity toward high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators.

IDC expects PCs, tablets, and smartphone prices to rise 10% to 20% through the end of 2026, with memory now accounting for a far larger share of a system's bill of materials than it did two years ago.

For users unwilling to buy new hardware at current prices, some third-party options remain. The security firm 0patch has pledged to provide unofficial Windows 10 micropatches through 2030, and Linux migration efforts such as the End of 10 initiative continue to court holdouts whose machines can’t run Windows 11.

A Reddit user has demonstrated that SteamOS, Valve's Arch-based gaming operating system built around AMD silicon, can boot and run on an Intel Arc B580 discrete graphics card. Posting in the r/SteamOS subreddit as SaperPL, they documented the feat this week, pairing the Arc B580 with a Ryzen 5 5600 processor and getting Valve's full gaming-mode interface running on the card. The catch is that reaching that point took a Radeon card, a workaround for a broken installer, and a motherboard setting that nearly sank performance along the way.

The opening exists because recent SteamOS beta builds quietly widened hardware coverage. Valve's changelog for the beta cites improved compatibility with recent Intel and AMD platforms, language clearly aimed at the wave of Intel-powered handhelds rather than desktop Arc cards. However, because the underlying Linux graphics driver is shared, the same Mesa stack that targets Intel handheld chips also recognizes a desktop Arc GPU. SaperPL's system reported the card as Mesa Intel Arc B580 Graphics (BMG G21) on Mesa 26.1.2, running SteamOS 3.9.

Getting there was not exactly plug-and-play. According to the post, newer SteamOS images that supposedly already include Intel Arc support failed during setup. These images did not boot into the older live desktop-style installer with install, update, and recovery options. Instead, they started installing directly to the drive, then failed when the system tried to connect to the network and pull its first update. SaperPL says the same problem occurred even when testing with a Radeon RX 9060 XT, suggesting the issue was not limited to the Arc B580 itself.

The workaround was suitably PC-gaming messy. SaperPL installed an older “repair-main” SteamOS build using the Radeon card, pulled the required updates, and then swapped in the Intel Arc B580. After that, SteamOS booted on the Intel GPU and ran from the Main channel. The poster also noted that users without a spare Radeon card may be able to follow a Steam Community workaround to bypass the installer’s update failure directly, although that still leaves the process firmly in enthusiast territory.

The first performance results were mixed. SaperPL tested 14 games, including Cyberpunk 2077, Helldivers 2, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Toxic Commando, Hades, Rocket League, and others shown in the SteamOS library screenshot. The interface itself appeared to behave well, with the poster saying the Steam library and store navigation worked smoothly, even while downloads continued in the background. Gamescope also reportedly worked similarly to Radeon, apart from a VRR bug on FreeSync displays with HDR that caused occasional flickering.

Frame rates were another story. Indiana Jones and Toxic Commando were initially barely above 20 FPS at 1080p on the lowest settings, while Helldivers 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Spider-Man: Miles Morales fell far below comparable Windows benchmark videos. The poster’s monitoring suggested the CPU was not the main problem, with the GPU often sitting around 80% to 90% usage while the Ryzen 5 5600 hovered between roughly 30% and 50%.

The biggest culprit turned out to be a familiar one for Intel Arc users: Resizable BAR. SaperPL later updated the post to say that ReBAR had been disabled on the Asus B450 Strix motherboard after a CPU change. Once enabled, Cyberpunk 2077 and Spider-Man appeared to perform as expected, while Indiana Jones and Toxic Commando improved significantly, though still not fully matching Windows reference results.

That detail matters because Intel Arc GPUs are unusually sensitive to Resizable BAR. Without it, the CPU cannot efficiently access the GPU’s full memory space, which can lead to severe performance drops. In this case, it made the difference between “SteamOS on Arc is broken” and “SteamOS on Arc is early, but actually running.” Even on Windows, leaving ReBAR off will severely impact Arc performance.

Commenters also pointed to another likely limitation: kernel support. Intel’s Arc drivers on Linux have improved considerably, but the newest performance work often depends on recent kernel and Mesa versions. If SteamOS’ Main channel is still behind the very latest Linux graphics stack, Arc performance may remain below what the same card can do under Windows or faster-moving Linux distributions.

For now, this is more proof of concept than a consumer-ready feature. Valve has not turned SteamOS into a general desktop gaming OS with clean support for every GPU, and the install path shown here is still too awkward for normal users. But the result is interesting. SteamOS running on an Intel Arc B580 suggests Valve's hardware net is widening, whether intentionally for desktop GPUs or indirectly through work on Intel-powered handhelds.

That could matter for future SteamOS machines. AMD remains the obvious fit for Valve’s gaming hardware today, but Intel has been pushing harder on Linux graphics support, and low-profile Arc cards could become attractive for small living-room builds if the driver stack matures.

Copilot PCs have been around for a couple of years since Microsoft launched them in 2024, and while the company tried to push NPU-equipped laptops towards users to take advantage of these new features, it seems that it’s planning to reverse course. According to Windows Latest, an experimental Windows App SDK available on GitHub now lets you run Language Model APIs on supported GPUs, starting with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 30-series cards with at least 6GB of VRAM. However, it also requires a Windows Insider Experimental Channel and Developer Mode switched on. Hence, you need to go through some hoops to turn on local AI inferencing on Windows, even if you don’t have an NPU-equipped device.

You still won’t get all the features found in a Copilot+ PC even if you went through all the hoops to activate this feature, but it’s a sign of things to come for local AI on Windows PCs, in general. It’s still not clear why Microsoft is seemingly abandoning the Copilot+ PC advantage it has heavily marketed in recent years, though RAM pricing might play a role, but this is good news for the millions of users who were locked out of Copilot features simply because their processors don’t have a built-in NPU (neural processing unit). This also opens Windows’ AI features to desktop users, who typically don’t have processors that support NPUs.

What’s interesting is that NPUs aren’t necessarily more powerful than GPUs for AI processing — it’s just that they’re more efficient, making them crucial for laptops with limited battery life. And because not all laptops come with a discrete GPU (which are mostly found on gaming and high-end laptops), it also allowed Microsoft to include AI features on more affordable Windows 11 PCs. Another reason Microsoft could be looking to expand Copilot+ features to non-NPU-powered devices is that AI didn’t actually take off the way it had hoped. A research firm in 2024 said that people didn’t purchase AI PCs because of their features — instead, they bought them because they’re what’s available if they need to upgrade.

The situation is worsening in 2026, as the AI data center-driven shortage of memory and storage chips is pushing computer prices to unprecedented highs. This has resulted in a collapse in sales for PCs and their components, with entry-level laptops expected to disappear by 2028. People not buying new NPU-equipped PCs would limit the adoption of Copilot+ PCs and the AI features they offer. By expanding the availability of AI features to non-Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft will increase its user base and help differentiate Windows 11 from the competition, especially as Windows is slowly bleeding users to macOS and Linux.

AI-assisted coding (or vibe coding) has infiltrated Linux driver maintenance, with Linux developers now using LLMs to help maintain old drivers in the Linux kernel. Phoronix reports that GitHub Copilot was used to clean up code pertaining to vintage AMD R6000 Linux graphics drivers, helping keep the driver relevant for people still using these late 2000s-era GPUs.

Specifically, the R600 Gallium3D driver saw 59 commits by Gert Wollny, all aimed at cleaning up shader compiler code in the driver. The refactoring process was done with Copilot, with notes in each commit citing Copilot in auto mode being used to help build the code.

This method of driver maintenance will inevitably become a staple of Linux driver maintainers moving forward, as the world adopts AI over human programmers for writing the vast majority of code written today. The Linux community often only has a handful or a single person updating these older drivers, making AI a very incentivizing tool to compensate for a lack of manpower and help keep these older drivers alive. The R600 Linux driver is designed to run the AMD/ATI HD 2000 through HD 6000 series of graphics cards. The HD 2000 series debuted in 2007, and the HD 6000 debuted in 2010, making some of these graphics cards nearly 20 years old.

Rather than rejecting AI, Linus Torvalds has opted to embrace the adoption of AI and allow Linux developers to use AI, but only when appropriate. A new policy enforces proper tagging if Linux kernel developers use AI to assist in code creation. Critically, this system puts the blame for any buggy code on the person publishing kernel driver changes, requiring the person to test their work before publishing.

Despite the use of AI, Linux developers are, regardless, discussing branching off the R600 drivers into a legacy branch dubbed “Amber2”. This would free up the main Mesa codebase and prevent legacy drivers from accidentally breaking as new features are added to Mesa.

Apple introduced its next major macOS release, macOS 27 Golden Gate, at its WWDC event. The new operating system update, coming this fall, includes a series of new artificial intelligence gestures, as well as iterations to the "liquid glass" design introduced in last year's release, macOS 26 Tahoe.

Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said that the 27 releases were focused on more polished and intuitive operating systems, trust and safety (including for children), and updates to Apple Intelligence and Siri. Unlike previous years, Apple spent most of its time highlighting changes that affect the entirety of its platforms, meaning that many of the improvements on Mac are also available in some form on the iPhone or iPad, and vice versa, reflecting the continuing deep integration in Apple's ecosystem of products, including iPhone (iOS 27), iPad (iOS 27), and watchOS (watchOS 27).

macOS will include some specific upgrades, including ultrawide display support with higher resolutions, and an updated video podcast player, while many others, like updates to iCloud shared albums and changes to Maps, are across multiple platforms. In many ways, the focus on fixes is reminiscent of 2009's OS X Snow Leopard, which was famous for fixing problems rather than introducing tons of new features.

Liquid Glass

Apple is making changes to Liquid Glass across its platforms to make content more readable and decrease distractions. Glass will now better diffuse content behind it.

A new slider in settings will let you move from from ultra-clear to fully tinted, letting you customize how much it affects readability.

Specifically on the Mac, Apple is adding a uniform tool bar across the top of apps, which harkens back to more traditional Mac design. Expanded sidebars will move to the edge of windows, and sidebar icons will regain their colors. Additionally, every window will have tighter corner radii, even if they're not updated, for improved consistency across the OS. These were all complaints from Mac diehards over the last year.

In app icons across platforms, there will be additional layers of glass in icons to make them sharper and more defined.

Improvements

Apple said that it is bringing a massive amount of improvements under the hood of macOS and other platforms, with focus on CPU usage, memory usage, display rendering, and more. Apple claims apps can launch 30% faster on the iPhone and iPad, while new photos will show up in the library up to 70% faster. The advanced CPU scheduler on the iPhone is being optimized and brought all the way back to the iPhone 11, which will be the oldest iPhone supporting iOS 27.

Network transitions — especially between cellular and Wi-Fi — were also highlighted, so you don't have to toggle as often.

The company also highlighted a new content index across Spotlight, photos, mail and more, which will index your existing files immediately and continue to do so as new content comes in. Apple demonstrated a new ranking system for mail on Mac, showing more relevant results, even if it's years old.

AI and Siri

Federighi claimed that the mission is to turn AI into helpful and intuitive products, rather than AI for the sake of AI.

"Truly helpful AI must be centered around you and your needs," Federighi said, saying it needs to be designed for devices, apps, and with privacy in mind. Surprisingly, Federighi briefly mentioned that its foundation models are integrated with Gemini and will be used "on-device and in servers" with private cloud compute. Additionally, Apple has a more powerful on-device model.

Apple SVP for Siri engineering Mike Rockwell showed off a revamped Siri. The new Siri grows out of the dynamic island with "Hey Siri" or when you hold the buttons. It retains context between interactions.

A new voice experience includes a more conversational tone. Voice can now be customized for expressivity and pace, with sliders to adjust them in a new Siri app.

Rockwell asked about a Suki Waterhouse concert, and Siri told him when the concert will be. You can even inquire about tickets, which in this case were part of a lottery. Rockwell asked to be added to the lottery and to play her newest single in separate requests, as it remembered context.

He also demonstrated finding photos from a recent trip, asking Siri to pick out photos that include just specific people, and then share them with family members via text – without even having to go into the Photos app.

On iOS, you can swipe down, use the side button, or say "Hey Siri." On the Mac, Siri is integrated into Spotlight, or you can use Siri requests in system menus. One demonstration included using Siri on a Mac to help build a Maker Space at a child's school. When "How should I think about building a maker space in a shed” was typed into Spotlight, macOS realized it was a question specifically for the assistant. Siri was able to search through texts from the demonstrator's son, to address lingering electrical issues and find a fix.

Siri AI is also coming to iPadOS, where you can use the dedicated Siri App. You'll be able to see a conversational history synced with iCloud across devices, including Mac, Apple Watch, and iPhone. On visionOS, you can simply look at Siri and initiate your query.

Visual Intelligence will be integrated into the iPhone camera app. You can tap the shutter button for Siri AI to “see what you see” and provide contextual information, powered by Apple Foundation models. Pointing your iPhone at a plate of food can give you nutritional information, while showing the camera an image of a restaurant bill will let you split it among friends. You can also use visual intelligence to ask about items presented on your screen.

You'll also be able to write with Siri anywhere you type. Siri can generate drafts, including emails, and will provide suggestions and automatic proofreading, available systemwide, even in third-party apps.

Siri AI won't be available in the European Union and China initially, as Apple deals with international regulation and privacy laws. Siri AI will first be available in English.

Apple Intelligence in apps

Apple also demonstrated how Intelligence can be used within and across applications, including Safari, Passwords, Photos, and Home.

In Safari, Apple has introduced tab management features, which can organize tabs into topics. Another option lets you monitor a page and asks you to "Notify me" for changes on a page, like a product coming back in stock or a ticket becoming available. You can then close the tab, but Siri will notify you when the page has changed. Perhaps the most impressive change is one to Shortcuts. You can describe what you want a Shortcut to do in natural language, and it brings together the steps automatically. One example: “When I’m leaving home, message Pedro” brings together a shortcut using Maps and Messages, which should open up Shortcuts to a much wider variety of people who may have been put off by its complicated nature.

Other demos included custom Safari extensions to adapt web pages for you, a Password app that can automatically fix compromised passwords for you on "eligible" accounts. In messages, you can get one-tap suggestions, and the phone app can find flight information when calling an airline.

For Home, Apple Intelligence can understand how a number of unrelated notifications work together to create fewer notifications and provide images from multiple security cameras. It can even track package deliveries across multiple cameras. 4K resolution will work on supported cameras.

In the Image Playground, you can create high-quality images in any style, with the image generation model running on private cloud compute. You can use natural language to adjust existing images and use it across the device, such as on your lock screen. The Photos app may have the most controversial aspects, as you can extend photos to change photo borders without cropping. There's also an option to reframe the entire scene with a spatial camera, as if you were moving the lens in the original shot. This feature works on any image in your library, even if you've taken the photos on other cameras or phones.

These features will support all languages Apple Intelligence works with. Some features will have usage limits that will adjust based on iCloud+ subscriptions.

Developers will have access to improved models, including server models, through a new API that will support natural language and images.

Lastly, Apple highlighted updates to XCode, including agentic coding, choosing the model and agent of your choice (including the newly added Google Gemini). It can connect to Figma and GitHub for design, and a new Device Hub will let developers simulate devices, including touch screens, alongside real-world testing devices.

Trust and Safety

Apple also demonstrated new child safety tools, with new child accounts and parental controls. Child accounts will automatically block adult websites and implement app store age restrictions.

Children will be able to ask parents for permission to buy or download apps in messages, as well as browse new websites in Safari for children under 13. There will be similar permissions for contacting new people outside of your family.

A new safety communication warns about nude images and intervenes, but will also be expanded to gore or violent content. Parents will have Time Allowances across entertainment, games, and social media, with shared allowances across all three, or you can set them individually. A redesigned Screen Time will let parents see how devices are being used. Developer tools are being made more capable for third-party apps to take advantage of the new features.

Golden Gate will be the first version of macOS to exclusively support Apple Silicon Macs. Last year, Apple announced that Tahoe would be the final major release to support Intel-based systems. (Intel-based Macs will still receive three years of security updates.) This is the last macOS release to support Rosetta 2, the tool that lets Apple Silicon computers run Intel applications through an emulation layer (though parts may stick around to keep legacy games running). Without Intel processors to support, Apple is urging developers to make native applications for its own silicon.

Support and Release Dates

Developer betas for the 27-suite of OS releases are available today, with public betas starting in July. Final releases are expected in the fall.

macOS 27 Golden Gate will be supported on devices with Apple Silicon. Apple's website specifies:

• MacBook Neo
• MacBook Air (2020 and later with Apple Silicon)
• MacBook Pro (2020 and later with Apple Silicon)
• iMac (2021 and later with Apple Silicon)
• Mac mini (2020 and later with Apple Silicon)
• Mac Studio (2022 and later with Apple Silicon)
• Mac Pro with Apple Silicon (2023)

However, adjustments to Siri's voice and advanced dictation will require newer chips on the Mac, iPad and iPhone. On the Mac, that means "an M3 and later and at least 12GB of unified memory." Otherwise, you need an iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, iPhone Air, iPad models with M4 and later and at least 12GB of unified memory, or Apple Vision Pro with M5.

A “full-feature-parity version of Notepad” has been written in x86 assembly and it weighs in at just 2,749 bytes. Windows legend Dave W. Plummer is (inevitably) the coder behind this efficiency tour de force, and he’s made RetroPad available (code and exe) on his GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.

Plummer announced this latest release of RetroPad on Thursday, describing it as a feature-for-feature match of the version of Notepad that shipped with Windows XP. That’s impressive enough in 2.7KB, rather than an app of about 65KB. However, Plummer’s work rate is such that he’s since added optional line numbers and a dark mode. He also decided to add “all of the Notepad keyboard shortcuts” on Saturday which added a few bytes. It won’t be long until there’s an accompanying YouTube video for a deeper dive into RetroPad, but for now we have the GitHub notes.

A few hours ago Plummer also added the trpad.exe to GitHub, so folks who don’t want to run the code through MASM/Crinkler can just download and run this little utility. The version of trpad.exe available on GitHub wouldn’t run on my Windows 11 laptop, though.

Windows app bloat

Windows bloat has become so bad that even Microsoft noticed. Earlier this year, Microsoft promised to go back and get the basics right, things like File Explorer, the Taskbar, and other Windows staples were going to get some tuning and polish. This was a much-needed initiative, but was precipitated by a tone-deaf exec post about the operating system “evolving into an agentic OS.”

The puffing up of Notepad is a fascinating case study in Windows bloat. As mentioned previously, the Windows XP era Notepad was approximately 65KB, not much more than Windows 9X releases (~50KB). According to a web search notepad.exe would grow to around 190KB to 200KB for the Windows 7 to 10 eras.

Windows 11 is a bit different, though. The notepad.exe in my current Windows 11 install appears to weigh in at 352KB but according to the Windows Control Panel, the install size is 808KB. Looking even deeper at this, and it seems like the moderately sized .exe file is just a ‘stub’ or ‘bootstrapper’ app to point to a UWP/WinUI app that is about 5MB in size. That’s where Microsoft has stuffed all the recently added features like spell check, autosave, multiple tabs, and Copilot writing tools.

A short video has resurfaced in which Bill Gates promotes Windows 95 with DirectX as a gaming platform set to eclipse DOS. The video is part of footage from an internal Microsoft ‘Judgment Day’ developer/gaming event. So far, so ordinary, but the typically meek Gates appears dressed in a trench coat and holding a shotgun, standing inside a Doom-style environment littered with demon carcasses. You can watch the video by expanding the tweet below.

The Doom franchise began in 1993, well before Windows was widely used for games beyond the likes of Minesweeper and Solitaire desktop distractions. Throughout much of the 1990s, PC users would run games through DOS, with Windows seen as something to use for multitasking productivity tasks. With Windows 95, Microsoft wanted to change that; hence, this promotional video to developers, starring Gates himself.

Though there were (and are) DOS gaming devotees, Windows 95 was promoted as delivering improved multimedia, Plug and Play hardware support, and, with DirectX, even better gaming performance.

Gates begins his in-Doom spiel by saying that “these games are getting really realistic” before boasting that “Windows 95 is THE BEST game platform, whether it’s the best performance, the best setup, the best integration.” He then admitted that DOS can be hard work for end users, developers, and tech support. But the key improvement being dangled in front of developers was the new DirectX API.

During this brief presentation intro, Gates touted 75 new games coming for Windows 95 in the coming year. He reckoned with this push and collaboration between Microsoft and game developers, “we’ll be able to clean up this DOS mess, and get everything focused on Windows.”

This unusual video isn’t just Bill Gates standing and spouting about Windows 95 gaming, thankfully. Halfway through this clip, he is interrupted by an enemy grunt, and quickly turns to give it both barrels, “Don’t interrupt me.” But when delivering this punchline, Bill sounds more like Kermit the Frog than Arnie.

The video closes with Microsoft’s logo, some sinister laughing soundtrack, and the tagline “Who do you want to execute today?”

Key to the background collaboration between Microsoft and a host of game developers was the work of Gabe Newell. The future Valve co-founder initiated and led the Microsoft team responsible for porting id Software’s Doom to Windows 95, which would result in the release of Doom95 in 1996. Some sources say that Doom was installed on more computers worldwide than Windows 95 was at this time (late 1995).

Linux developers are looking into retiring the x32 ABI that was introduced into the Linux kernel in 2012. Phoronix reports that Sebastian Andrezj Siewior of Lintronix has proposed removing the x32 ABI from the Linux kernel due to its obsolescence and lack of serious adoption since its debut. If no objections are raised, the x32 ABI will likely be removed from the Linux kernel by 2027.

x32 ABI was introduced to Linux in an effort to optimize the memory consumption of 64-bit programs. The application binary interface was designed to allow 64-bit processors and applications to operate in semi “64-bit/32-bit” hybrid mode. With x32 ABI, software is allowed access to the full 64-bit register file and data path but is restricted to using 32-bit pointers. For the uninitiated, a pointer is a binary number that keeps track of data that is held in system memory.

This ability allows the OS to use more than 4GB of RAM while keeping pointer sizes at just 4 bytes instead of 8 bytes (for 64-bit). This size difference is x32 ABI’s main selling point, as cutting the pointer size in half improved the amount of data that can fit in a CPU’s multiple caches and improved performance.

Despite its potential, x32 ABI also had several disadvantages. Using x32 ABI adds additional complexity for developers to deal with and requires compilers to support the feature. Arguably, its biggest technical problem relates to the fact that individual processes running with x32 ABI cannot take advantage of more than 4GB of memory due to the pointer sizes being limited to 32 bits.

That said, the nail in the coffin for x32 ABI is its lack of mainstream adoption by software developers as a whole. This was likely helped by the fact that x32 ABI was ever only implemented on Linux and was not ported to Windows or Mac. Sebastian Andrezj Siewior highlighted further issues in his proposal, noting that the better performance x32 ABI realized was not great enough for certain workloads to move to it and use it exclusively.

An IBM ThinkPad user boasts that they can install “(almost) all versions of Windows from NT 4 to 10 22H2,” with driver support, without resorting to virtual machine (VM) technology. The ThinkPad T43 from 2005, used by Redditor MatiHalek, was already a firm favorite among retro tech enthusiasts and well known for being IBM’s final design prior to the Lenovo acquisition. The confirmation that it can run 26 years of Windows OSes certainly adds to the T43’s considerable charms.

I installed (almost) all versions of Windows from NT 4 to 10 22H2 on my ThinkPad T43 with drivers! from r/windows

So, what did Mati actually do? In the post embedded above, you can see they posted a gallery with 10 Windows screenshots, most of which show an iteration of the System > About control panel as evidence of the version of Windows installed and running. This gallery will take many readers on a journey down memory lane as the Windows UI evolves through the eras.

Mati says that they didn’t use VMs to install any of these Windows versions. They were all real software-to-metal installs on the single-core Pentium M CPU, though it wasn’t always an entirely straightforward process getting Windows to behave. We’d assume most difficulties would be due to support and drivers for graphics and storage interface hardware.

The Redditor didn’t install the 26 years of OSes sequentially in a strictly experimental fashion. “When I got this laptop, XP was installed, so I decided to dual-boot Vista with that XP. Then I did the upgrade path Vista-7-8-8.1-10RTM,” they explained. Subsequently, Windows 22H2 wrinkles forced them into doing a clean install for this pretty recent OS from Microsoft. However, modern OSes don’t appear to be Mati’s passion as “after that, I wiped the hard drive and multi-booted 98, NT 4, and 2000.” They end their post by indicating they will be keeping this 20th-century OS trio on the IBM ThinkPad T43, simply out of preference. It's probably the most responsive choice, given the hardware.

IBM ThinkPad T43 hardware

As we mentioned in the intro, the ThinkPad T43 was the final laptop from IBM’s stables, before Lenovo took the reins. Mati was correct to assert that it originally shipped with Windows XP, and it launched just a few months before Vista hit the scene.

Key components of the T43 were as follows:

• Intel Pentium M processor
• ATi Mobility Radeon X300 or X300SE graphics
• 14.1-inch screen in resolutions up to 1,400 x 1,050 pixels
• Support for up to 2GB of DDR2
• Storage config between 40GB and 100GB HDD
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, and modem connectivity options
• Ports included 2x USB 2.0 ports, a parallel port, VGA, S-Video, a PC Card slot, and a docking station port

Beyond the hardware tech specs, the IBM ThinkPad T43 earned a lot of praise due to its durable, perhaps legendary, build and keyboard quality. It isn’t light for a 14-incher in 2026 terms, of course, weighing in at approximately 2.3 kg (5.1 pounds).

Do any readers still cherish an IBM ThinkPad T43? If so, do you still run an older version of Windows like Mati does, or have you moved to an alternative OS like Linux?

AMD has been accused of 'bait-and-switch' tactics following changes to the licensing of Vivado on Linux. As reported by It's Foss, AMD has decided that Linux users of the Vivado chip design environment need to pay up or stick with an older version that will become unsupported soon.

For the uninitiated, Vivado is AMD's proprietary design suite used to program Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). These special chips can be rewired via software to mimic nearly any kind of computer hardware. This makes them invaluable for simulations and design testing. If you are designing, simulating, or testing custom circuits for AI, aerospace, or advanced electronics, Vivado is the gateway to making that hardware actually work.

The core of the outrage stems from a change in Vivado's upcoming 2026.1 update. Previously, the free "Standard" tier supported both Windows and Linux. Under the new tiered model, the free "Basic" tier is restricted entirely to Windows. If you want to use Vivado natively on Linux, you'll be forced to step up to the "Core" tier, which demands an eye-watering $1,200 to $1,800 annual subscription.

AMD's defense on its community forums has also not landed well. The company claimed that 70% of Vivado users are on Windows anyway, alienating the academic researchers, engineering students, and open-source hobbyists who heavily favor Linux-native environments and rely on free tools to learn the trade.

A forum representative for the company stated, "No one is stopping users (students, etc.) to continue using the current versions of Vivado (any Vivado version prior 2026.1)," and developing using the free Vivado ML Standard Edition, arguing that it was only if users decided to update that they'd need the license.

"I guess no one involved in this decision thought about the millions of hobbyists and amateurs like myself using Vivado for their hobby projects," one disgruntled user replied. Another noted that many users are already discussing moving to alternate platforms like Lattice and Altera due to these changes.

AMD's forum representative confirmed they were "collecting all the feedback received and passing on to the relevant team/marketing" at AMD, leaving the door ajar for a possible change to this policy down the line.

California lawmakers may be backing away from a controversial age-verification requirement bill that alarmed Linux and open-source developers earlier this year, after a new amendment bill proposed exempting most open-source operating systems from the state’s upcoming Digital Age Assurance Act. In practice, that would likely exempt most mainstream Linux distributions — including Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, and Mint — from compliance requirements scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2027.

Assembly Bill 1856 (AB 1856), currently moving through California’s legislature ahead of committee reviews in June, would amend the state’s earlier age-assurance law by excluding software distributed under licenses that allow users to “copy, redistribute, and modify the software.”

The proposed amendment specifically states: “Operating system provider” does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.

The amendment follows months of backlash after California passed the original Assembly Bill 1043 (AB 1043), formally known as the Digital Age Assurance Act, in late 2025. The law sought to shift online age verification away from individual websites and apps and down to the operating-system level instead.

Under the original law, operating systems would be required to request a user’s age or birth date during device setup, then expose an “age bracket signal” to apps and app stores. The law, which defined brackets such as “under 13,” “13–15,” “16–17,” and “18+,” immediately raised questions about how such requirements would apply to decentralized, open-source software ecosystems.

Unlike Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android, most Linux distributions are not centrally controlled commercial platforms. Many are community-run projects maintained by volunteers, often without user accounts, telemetry systems, or even formal corporate ownership structures. Critics argued the law’s wording was so broad that it could technically force open-source operating systems to become age-verification platforms.

Privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, criticized the legislation as invasive and warned it could create infrastructure for broader identity tracking online. Linux developers also questioned how California could realistically enforce such requirements on infinitely forkable open-source software projects.

The controversy became particularly heated after reports suggested platforms like SteamOS could still fall under the law due to their ties to proprietary application ecosystems. Valve’s Linux-based gaming platform ships with the proprietary Steam storefront and client, potentially placing it closer to Apple’s App Store or Google Play from a regulatory standpoint.

AB 1856 does not repeal the original Digital Age Assurance Act. Instead, it narrows the definition of who qualifies as an “operating system provider” under the law. Commercial platforms with proprietary app ecosystems could remain subject to California’s age-assurance requirements even if most open-source Linux distributions are ultimately exempted.

California Assembly Member Buffy Wicks introduced the amendment on February 11, 2026. However, the open-source exemption language appeared in later revisions that began drawing attention across Linux and privacy communities. The latest version is dated May 18, 2026, and as of May 19, 2026, the bill was read a second time and ordered to third reading.

Linus Torvalds declared the Linux kernel's private security mailing list "almost entirely unmanageable" on Sunday in his weekly post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), blaming a flood of duplicate vulnerability reports generated by researchers running the same AI tools against the same code. The complaint accompanied the release of Linux 7.1-rc4 and a pointer to newly merged documentation that formalizes how AI-assisted bug reports should be handled.

The problem, according to Torvalds, is the combination of volume and redundancy: multiple researchers are independently discovering identical bugs using automated tools and filing them separately on a private mailing list, where nobody can see what has already been submitted. Maintainers end up spending their time triaging duplicates and directing reporters to fixes that were merged weeks earlier.

"AI detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved," Torvalds wrote on LKML.

Torvalds pointed developers to the project's security bug documentation, which states that vulnerabilities found using AI tools should be treated as public disclosures and submitted directly to the relevant maintainers, not routed through the private security list. Reports must be concise, formatted in plain text, and include a verified reproducer.

In March, Willy Tarreau, the creator of HAProxy and a longtime Linux kernel stable maintainer, said in comments posted to LWN that the kernel security mailing list, which received roughly two to three reports per week two years ago, now receives five to 10 reports per day. Most are solid finds, but the duplication across researchers using similar tooling has overwhelmed the existing triage process.

Torvalds urged researchers to go further than filing raw findings. "If you actually want to add value, read the documentation, create a patch too, and add some real value on top of what the AI did," he wrote. "Don't be the drive-by 'send a random report with no real understanding' kind of person."

This Torvalds-endorsed approach is exactly what fellow maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has been doing with his “Clanker T1000” system, a Framework Desktop-powered bug-finding tool: discover the issue, write the fix, take responsibility for the patch, and submit it publicly.

The Linux kernel project formalized its broader stance on AI-assisted contributions last month, establishing a project-wide policy that permits AI-generated code provided developers follow strict disclosure rules.

Under that policy, AI agents cannot use the legally binding "Signed-off-by" tag, and contributors must use a new "Assisted-by" tag for transparency. Every line of AI-generated code, and any resulting bugs, remains the legal responsibility of the human who submits it.

Microsoft is finally looking into fixing automatic GPU driver downgrades on Windows 11 that have plagued users since the OS's launch in 2021. Windows Latest reports that Microsoft has finally acknowledged the issue and is preparing a partial fix that will be released by Q4 of 2026.

Specifically, Microsoft is looking to start applying this fix to Windows 11 PCs in April 2026. Only by Q4 will the update be applied to everyone.

The fix Microsoft is cooking up narrows down how many devices Windows Update can target with specific GPU driver updates. GPU drivers that are published to the Windows Update catalog using this system incorporate a two-part hardware ID (HWID) in conjunction with computer hardware IDs (CHIDs). The latter is an ID designation designed to identify a specific PC model or hardware configuration.

This two-pronged approach gives Windows Update better information on when to expose GPU drivers to Windows 11 machines. The outgoing system Microsoft is using only considers a four-part hardware ID as part of a ranking system. The worst part about this system is that it will not take into consideration the GPU driver model specifically, which is what allows Windows Update to downgrade GPU drivers in the first place. Whichever driver is ranked highest in the Windows Update catalog for systems with a specified hardware ID, Windows Update will push even if the driver itself is outdated.

However, there is a caveat with this system — only device display drivers that target new devices can get the update. Existing drivers in the Windows Update catalog may still get forcibly applied on older systems.

Windows Update has long had a problem where the service will automatically downgrade GPU drivers in the right circumstances. This is specifically problematic with OEM machines when the OEM has uploaded a GPU driver to the Windows Update catalog. One issue I've run into personally is the inability to clean install Intel Xe drivers on my Windows 11 laptop. Doing so automatically triggers Windows Update to install several older Intel graphics driver revisions.

Unfortunately, Microsoft's update won't fix the issue entirely, but it is at least a start. To clarify, this specific fix is different from the Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery feature Microsoft rolled out recently.

Microsoft has outlined a new feature of Windows called Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery (CIDR). This newly introduced capability lets Microsoft remotely roll back a bad driver to a previously known good version on affected PCs. Moreover, it can work without user action or OEM intervention. It sounds like a magic bullet for a long history of Windows Update woes, but we’ll have to see if it works when the rubber hits the road. CIDR will only work with drivers distributed via Windows Update.

Windows Update can cause plenty of problems when a bad driver gets through testing and gets pushed to users. Indeed, buggy drivers have caused many a lost hour, gray hair, wrinkle, high blood pressure, and so on, among Windows veterans. Microsoft also notes that a bad driver often means a user has to manually intervene and roll back to “a low-quality driver for an extended period.” So, the new CIDR is cautiously welcomed.

Microsoft spells out the CIDR process in its Tech Community blog, and there we learn that recovery starts by the Windows developer triggering "a recovery action directly from the Hardware Dev Center (HDC) Driver Shiproom." Once a problematic driver is flagged, the system recovers the previously known-good version of a driver via the Windows Update pipeline. “This is handled through coordinated updates to the PnP driver stack and the driver flighting and publishing services,” says Microsoft.

Importantly, Microsoft notes that “recovery is delivered through the existing Windows Update infrastructure — no new client agent or partner tooling is required.” That should help CIDR work well with what we’ve already got and for it to become an established standard. Likewise, partners don’t need to get involved in CIDR, Microsoft will manage it. However, Microsoft asks that these partners “continue monitoring their driver quality metrics in the Hardware Dev Center dashboard and to respond promptly to any shiproom feedback on rejected submissions.”

CIDR is rolling out now for validation and testing, and it is expected to automatically support the Hardware Dev Center publishing process from September onwards.

Last week, news of Microsoft working on a new "Low Latency Profile" for Windows 11 was leaked by Windows Central. When enabled, it would increase CPU clock speeds momentarily to improve app opening times. This was met with widespread backlash, with the community thrashing Microsoft for essentially putting on a Band-Aid instead of addressing underlying Windows performance issues. Since then, the company has stood firmly by the decision on social media, reminding users that it's simply catching up to industry practice.

Senior developer and VP Scott Hanselman replied to a lot of concerned users on X and compared other operating systems to Windows 11, highlighting that this boosting functionality isn't anything new. That's true; every modern OS, including the bastion of efficiency, Linux, and even smartphones, already have this implemented. He went on to claim that "this isn't cheating" and implies that such a solution works in tandem with optimizing apps and code in further replies.

The Low Latency Profile (LLP) is part of Microsoft's broader "Windows K2" efforts to make Windows 11 smoother, more stable, and more efficient after years of sluggishness. As such, LLP works by boosting CPU frequencies for a quick assist in things like flyout delays for the Start Menu. Your CPU usage and clocks will spike for a fraction of a second to ensure the OS feels fast and responsive during those moments.

For all this to work on a technical level, though, you do require pretty aggressive clock parking so the CPU's prepared to shift into gear the moment it's needed to speed up an OS interaction. This is also important for mobile devices with batteries, such as laptops or handhelds that might consume more power when their cores are being utilized at a minimum for longer, compared to just idling in C-state after a quick burst at max speeds.

People across social media continue to dunk on Scott's replies, asking why Microsoft needed to wait until Windows 11 was in an intolerable state to think of this solution. That's entirely fair, too, considering just how long users have been complaining about the general reliability of the OS. Even devs who formerly worked on Windows have called out Windows 11 for its underwhelming navigation performance.

There's also the argument that perhaps Microsoft needs to optimize the operating system on a much deeper level before applying superficial patches like this, given complaints about the amount of bloatware a stock copy of Windows 11 comes with. Microsoft has even resorted to making an Xbox Mode just so games can bypass the bloat and run better.

It seems like the company is slowly realizing that the AI push it's been hiding behind for a few years at this point just isn't working out the way it was expected. Just look at Xbox — even with a new CEO that literally comes from Microsoft's AI department, it's making community-first changes like never before.

A recent update to Dell's pre-installed SupportAssist Remediation software is causing persistent blue screen of death errors and reboot loops on multiple Dell laptop models, according to user reports on Dell's community forum (spotted by Neowin).

The update, version 5.5.16.0 of Dell SupportAssist Remediation and the accompanying OS Recovery Plugin, was released on April 30th. Affected users report their PCs crash and reboot roughly every 30 minutes, with the cycle continuing indefinitely until the software is removed.

SupportAssist Remediation is a background service that Dell bundles on its Windows PCs to automate system recovery and repair tasks. Dell hasn’t acknowledged the issue or released a fix, but the problem has been confirmed across at least two Dell product lines so far: the XPS 15 9530 and the Dell Pro Plus 14.

Multiple users have independently analyzed their Windows crash dump files using WinDbg, Microsoft's debugging tool, and arrived at the same conclusion: The crash dumps show a bugcheck code of 0xEF (CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED), with the faulting process identified as DellSupportAssistRemedationService.exe, part of the SupportAssist Remediation package installed at C:\Program Files\Dell\SARemediation\agent\.

Forum user Sygent, who owns an XPS 15 9530 running Windows 11 with BIOS version 1.29.0, posted a detailed dump analysis on Sunday, showing the failure pointing directly to the Dell process. A second user, MartinHBS2026, reported the same findings on a Dell Precision 3571 and confirmed the crashes stopped after removing all SupportAssist components. A third user, Waddo, confirmed identical crash dump results on a Dell Pro Plus 14 the following day.

Users in the Dell forum thread have identified two workarounds. The first and less disruptive option is to disable only the Dell SupportAssist Remediation service by running sc.exe config "Dell SupportAssist Remediation" start= disabled from an elevated command prompt, then restarting the PC, thereby preserving the rest of Dell's update and diagnostic tools.

The second option is to uninstall SupportAssist Remediation and the Dell SupportAssist OS Recovery Plugin for Dell Update entirely. Both approaches have stopped the crashes for users who have tried them.

This isn’t the first time that SupportAssist Remediation has caused similar crashes. A Dell forum thread from January last year described the same BSOD pattern on both Windows 10 and Windows 11 machines after a SupportAssist Remediation update, with WinDbg analysis again identifying the Dell software as the cause. That earlier thread went unresolved by Dell support.

Aside from causing blue screen crashouts, Dell’s SupportAssist suite has previously been found to contain significant vulnerabilities, allowing remote attackers to gain administrative privileges on Dell PCs.

AMD’s landmark K5 processor family will no longer be supported by Linux when kernel version 7.2 arrives. The Linux-watchers at Phoronix noticed the forced retirement of the venerable K5 in a recent patch designed to “remove support for TSC-less Pentium variants.” The lack of TSC (Time Stamp Counter) in the K5 apparently makes it a burden for developers to support in the kernel.

The K5 holds a special place in AMD history as the firm’s first independently designed x86 processor. However, it wasn’t a very popular processor as it arrived late, then offered lackluster performance in the competitive environment it joined.

AMD’s shiny homegrown 4.3M transistor chip featured a “RISC-based internal architecture that decoded x86 instructions into micro-instructions before executing them,” we noted in a 2008 retrospective. However, launch SKUs in 1996 were limited to clocks from 75 MHz to 133 MHz, and, due to being late, Intel’s Pentium line was already faster. AMD still managed to get an edge on the Cyrix 6x86, though.

As was de rigueur at the time, these AMD K5 chips were sold with a ‘performance rating’ (PR) figure, suggesting an integer performance comparison with an Intel Pentium with the indicated clock speed. For example, a second revision K5 with a 116 MHz clock was marketed as a K5 PR166. Enthusiasts don’t like this kind of obfuscation, even when it is clearly on the surface. We also note that this era marked the introduction of the heatsink and fan as a CPU-partnering necessity.

Intel i486, AMD Elan SoCs, and AMD Geode CPUs also put out to pasture

We reported a month ago that Linux devs had started to remove support for the 37-year-old Intel i486 CPU in patches destined for the Linux 7.1 kernel. That was probably a bigger deal than today’s AMD K5 news, as many more of these processors were sold.

Other lesser-known processor lines have also been retired from Linux support, but are still worth a mention for the sake of completeness. Specifically, the AMD Elan (i486‑class, TSC‑less) SoC for embedded systems which first launched in 1995, looks set to be retired in Linux 7.2. Similarly the AMD Geode x86 embedded processors (early 2000s Elan replacements) will be cut off from Linux support from Linux kernel 7.2.

With no end in sight for the RAMpocalypse, it is a little sad to see older hardware getting dropped from support. However, machines packing these retired processors can still be used in fun projects where a fully up-to-date security-hardened internet-connected patched OS isn’t essential.

Linux mascot Tux the penguin was first conceptualized on this day in 1996. In an email to a mailing list 30 years ago, Linus Torvalds informed the unwashed masses of his vision for a Linux logo prototype. It should be a contented, cute, and cuddly, slightly overweight penguin, he argued.

Dialing down the details, pivoting from a world map

Torvalds’ contextual sketching of Tux came in response to another developer who was talking about using a clipart concoction involving a map of the world to represent the open-source OS.

The Linux supremo was open to holding a logo competition, but instead of a complex encapsulation of the world as a logo, he proposed a penguin. Penguins embodied three positives, thought Torvalds, being universally considered cute, cuddly, and contented. The Linux founder wanted the penguin to be highly stylized, “not a lot of detail - just a black brush-type outline,” as per the logotype rule of thumb. He also basically dismissed any complex penguin + world map fabrication.

A contented, but definitely not randy, penguin

First impressions count with logos. With penguins, the designer would have to be careful in their artwork to prevent any unintentional conclusions regarding its contented state, reasoned Torvalds at some length.

“Now, with penguins, (cuddly such), 'contented' means it has either just gotten laid, or it's stuffed on herring,” explained the lead Linux dev to mailing list subscribers. “Take it from me, I'm an expert on penguins, those are really the only two options.”

To give this overfed and content impression, Torvalds explained that Tux should be “sitting down after having gorged itself, and having just burped,” and overweight without going into fat territory.

Happy 30th, but is it time to mature?

Though we reckon Torvalds was correct in pushing for a penguin expressed in a simple brushstroke, the Tux mascot is still pretty detailed/ornate compared to a typical tech company logo. In 2026, even the fox from Firefox is on the way out, being reduced all the way to a circular spot, if we are reading the official teaser video correctly.

Other companies have vastly simplified and minimized their logos, so it seems inevitable that Tux will become a shadow of his or her former self in due course. It is true that a simpler logo for Linux would be good for branding, and a reduced detail/color identity could be a boon for merchandise and makers, too.

A top Microsoft exec has admitted that Windows 11 still relies on a bunch of old code from the 1990s. It is refreshing for Microsoft Azure Chief Technical Officer Mark Russinovich to highlight this fact on social media, but it might not surprise as many folks as he thinks.

As Russinovich eloquently puts it, those of us invested in the computer scene in the 90s “were thinking flying cars and moon stations by the year 2026, not Win32.” The admission that such old software tech is still the "bedrock" of Windows today may be the CTO strategically sharing a cold, hard truth, providing a 'let's be real' moment as part of Microsoft’s latest charm offensive. Sharing a candid confession indicates that the corporation is actually aware of the issues in its OS.

Remember, the firm is currently in the midst of a major transformation, targeting enthusiast hot button areas like Windows performance, overhead, and reliability. This drastic pivot was cautiously welcomed in contrast to Microsoft being widely slammed for boasting about Windows “evolving into an agentic OS” last November. Currently, Microsoft seems to be flailing around, trying to stop folks straying to pastures greener like Mac and Linux.

However, Win32 isn’t inherently labeled as ‘bad’ by the Microsoft CTO. Though it is ancient, it has probably stuck around for good reason. “I think one of the reasons it’s got this staying power is just a fundamental layer inside of Windows that so many apps have built on,” notes Russinovich. “So many technologies and ecosystems have been built on top of it that it’s kind of a bedrock.”

The CTO explains that Win32 has persisted even when facing targeted existential threats from within Microsoft, particularly in the Windows 8 era. “There’s been various times in Microsoft’s history where we thought we’d reboot the Windows API surface, like WinRT, that actually didn’t play out the way a lot of people expected it to.”

In closing, Russinovich highlights that Win32 was also the bedrock for tools like Sysmon and ZoomIt, which he actually wrote back in 1996. These tools are now “more relevant than ever in 2026,” as parts of Windows 11 and PowerToys, respectively, reckons the CTO.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added a newly disclosed Linux vulnerability, dubbed “Copy Fail,” to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on May 1st, warning that the flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-31431, is already being used in active attacks and urging rapid patching across affected systems.

The vulnerability resides in the Linux kernel‘s “algif_aead” cryptographic interface and allows unprivileged local users to escalate privileges to root. In practice, this means an attacker with limited access to a system can gain full administrative control.

Security researchers at Theori disclosed the flaw publicly last week, releasing a working proof-of-concept exploit alongside their findings. According to the team, the exploit is “100% reliable” and functions without modification across multiple major Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Amazon Linux 2023, RHEL 10.1, and SUSE 16. That level of portability is unusual and lowers the barrier for attackers seeking to weaponize the bug.

At a technical level, the bug enables attackers to write controlled data into the kernel‘s page cache, a low-level memory structure, ultimately allowing privilege escalation. While the exploit requires local access, it still allows attackers to break out of standard user restrictions and gain full control of the system.

Compounding the risk, a discussion on the Openwall oss-security mailing list suggests that the vulnerability and the working exploit were publicly disclosed without prior coordination with Linux distribution maintainers. In typical responsible disclosure processes, vendors are given advance notice to prepare and distribute patches before technical details are made public.

In this case, however, maintainers indicated that no such heads-up was provided, leaving some distributions without fixes ready at the time of disclosure. One contributor noted that older long-term support kernel branches had yet to receive backported patches, forcing developers to rely on temporary mitigations, including disabling affected cryptographic modules.

The result is a compressed response window in which defenders must scramble to deploy updates while attackers can immediately leverage publicly available exploit code.

That dynamic is reflected in CISA‘s unusually swift inclusion of the flaw in its exploited vulnerabilities list, signaling that the issue poses a significant and immediate risk. CISA has given U.S. federal agencies two weeks to apply patches, in line with Binding Operational Directive 22-01, and has also urged all organizations to prioritize remediation.

Linux vendors have begun rolling out kernel updates to address the flaw. However, with exploit code already in the wild, users running older or unpatched systems may remain vulnerable until the fixes are applied.

Microsoft recently published a new support document for gaming on Windows, serving as a guide for what hardware people should choose in 2026. Just a day later, that post has already been deleted because it recommended 16GB of RAM as the "practical starting point," while suggesting users go for 32GB if they want to future-proof their system. That means 32GB is no longer overkill according to the Windows maker.

Despite the grim outlook of the market, if you follow recent hardware trends, the data actually backs up this argument. Last year, before the RAMpocalypse ushered in, we covered September 2025's Steam Survey that showed 16GB configs falling behind in popularity while 32 GB systems were gaining notoriety. The lines still haven't overlapped, though, and 16 GB remains more common than 32GB, especially with the current situation in mind.

RAM has gotten significantly more expensive in the past few months, thanks to the AI boom snatching production lines. Manufactures are trying to come up with solutions to alleviate the crisis, such as the HUDIMMs proposed by ASRock, Intel, and TeamGroup. Despite prices flatlining as of late, DDR5 in particular is still out of reach for most DIY builders.

The company does lay out its reasoning for this — it says that more RAM will help in running apps like Discord alongside your game, while AAA blockbuster titles also benefit from the extra breathing room. That's true in essence because, of course, having more RAM will always be nice; it'll allow the system to rely less on the page file, which is much slower, while keeping more things in memory.

GPUs with limited VRAM, such as those with only an 8GB pool, will also appreciate the higher system RAM capacity as assets spill over during intense workloads. If you're using an APU like the new Ryzen AI 400 series, a high-speed, high-capacity memory config is pretty much essential to squeezing out as much performance as possible from the integrated graphics.

All that being said, Microsoft is not "recommending" 32GB for gaming since most developers still outline 16GB as the actual baseline; it's just claiming that 32GB is the new norm we're working toward. Now, some titles actually do require 32GB of RAM, but many are edge-case scenarios tied to very high-fidelity presets (such as 4K Ultra in Stalker 2). Microsoft's own Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 lists 64GB as the ideal RAM config, so the Redmont giant is definitely an exception to the rule.

Alongside memory, the company also recommends a much more reasonable upgrade: an SSD. It outright shuts down using any hard drive for either gaming or running Windows in 2026, saying that "active games and the OS should live on an SSD for the best experience." Moreover, the guideline states that "HDDs are best reserved for bulk storage." That much has been universally true for about a decade.

The SSD advice goes hand in hand with the memory advice, since your CPU will swap to system storage once the RAM fills up, so it's good to have a fast drive. Also, with features like DirectStorage poised to become the standard going forward, SSDs truly are a zero-compromise component. Unfortunately, we're in the middle of a global shortage right now, so even though the 32GB RAM recommendation is technically valid, it still comes off as tone-deaf for a company that's reportedly spending $190 billion on AI this year, which is the reason the shortages and high pricing exist.

Microsoft continues to make some of the earliest chapters of its operating system history open-source and freely available. Earlier this week, it announced that Tim Paterson's DOS listings, containing source code of the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, various PC-DOS 1.00 pre-release kernels and utilities, and the Microsoft BASIC-86 Compiler runtime library, were available on GitHub. Microsoft VP Scott Hanselman tied the release to 86-DOS 1.00’s 45th anniversary. The exec confirmed that the code, transcribed from reams of old dot matrix printouts found in a garage, was perfect, "and recompiles byte for byte to the original binaries.”

If you head on over to the GitHub page to snag the code, you will see a photo of Tim Paterson standing in his garage with a pile of yellowed dot matrix printouts in the foreground. These pages contain the code for the software mentioned in the intro, and you can even see the original scans in PDF and PNG format via a link to the Internet Archive. These include the coder’s handwritten notes.

Probably more important to tinkerers, though, is the fact that the work of transcribing the printed code has been completed (for those three mentioned wares). Tips to compile and assemble the sources can also be found on Paterson’s GitHub.

From 86-DOS to MS-DOS

In case you aren’t familiar with the place of 86-DOS (or Tim Paterson) in Microsoft’s history, here's a short refresher. Microsoft took a shortcut and gained a foothold in the OS software market by purchasing 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products and inventor Tim Paterson for a figure in the region of $75,000.

In the GitHub repository, you can see 86-DOS’s transformation into the PC-DOS 1.00 kernel, alongside code for some well-known utilities (still in use today) such as CHKDSK. As the Microsoft blog asserts, this work “offers rare insight into how MS-DOS/PC-DOS came to be, and how operating system development was done at the time, not as it was later reconstructed.”

So, we have another old DOS release to tinker with. In April 2024, we reported on Microsoft releasing the code for MS-DOS 4.00 under the generous MIT License, allowing tinkerers free rein. It did the same with MS‑DOS 1.25 and 2.11 in 2018. Also in 2024, we coincidentally covered a video demo featuring 86-DOS version 0.1C being taken for a test drive (via the Internet Archive), and now version 1.00 of this OS has hit GitHub, straight from the files squirreled away in Tim Paterson's (the creator’s) garage.

We’re still waiting for any version of Windows to be open-sourced. You have to dig through leaks if you are curious enough to want to investigate the source code for Windows XP, for example.

Security engineer Andy Nguyen, known online as TheFlow, has publicly released ps5-linux on GitHub: a complete toolchain for booting Linux on PlayStation 5 Phat consoles running firmware versions 3.xx through 4.xx. The project, which Nguyen demonstrated running GTA V Enhanced Edition via a proof-of-concept in March, is now a documented, reproducible process that anyone with compatible hardware can follow.

The release includes a Linux payload that exploits a patched hypervisor vulnerability, a build script that produces a bootable Ubuntu 24.04 image, tools for M.2 SSD installation, and a fan and CPU/GPU boost control utility. Nguyen credits several contributors, including c0w, resulknad, flatz, and the fail0verflow and ps5-payload-dev teams.

Only PS5 Phat consoles on older firmware 3.00, 3.10, 3.20, 3.21, 4.00, 4.02, 4.03, 4.50, or 4.51 are supported, with Nguyen having said support for 1.xx and 2.xx may come later, but that it’s not a priority. Firmware 5.xx could eventually work, though Linux would run inside Sony's GameOS virtual machine with reduced performance and unknown limitations, while anything 6.xx or above is ruled out entirely. Users who want to downgrade or sideload a specific firmware version can do so using Sony's official reinstall process with the correct PUP file.

Installing the payload requires a separate jailbreak tool — the umtx2 exploit — for initial code execution. Users set up a fake DNS server and HTTPS host on a local PC, redirect the PS5's manual page lookup to trigger the exploit, then send the ps5-linux-loader payload over TCP. After the console enters rest mode and the LED goes solid orange, pressing the power button boots into Linux. If the LED turns white, it worked.

Once booted, the PS5 runs as an x86 Linux desktop with access to all eight Zen 2 CPU cores (16 threads) at up to 3.5 GHz and the RDNA 2 GPU at up to 2.23 GHz. A bundled control tool enables CPU and GPU boost clocks alongside an adjustable fan curve, and Nguyen warns users should always enable the fan profile when boosting, as the console's cooling was designed for Sony's own power management. You can see the hack running GTA V in the tweet above.

The system outputs video and audio over HDMI at 1080p, 1440p, or 4K at 60 Hz. All USB ports remain functional, so users can optionally install Linux onto an M.2 SSD inserted in the PS5's expansion slot, turning it into a dedicated Linux partition separate from the console's internal storage. The internal SSD is never modified, and the console can return to normal PS5 operation on a standard reboot.

It’s worth noting that ps5-linux is a soft mod, not a permanent installation, meaning that the exploit must be re-run each time you want to boot into Linux. Some monitors are also known to have compatibility issues with HDMI output at 1440p and 4K, and Nguyen in his FAQs directs users to try a 1080p fallback or join the project’s Discord for troubleshooting.

With discrete GPU prices remaining elevated and Valve’s Steam Machine delayed beyond its original early 2026 expected launch window, a used PS5 Phat on old firmware could easily serve as an affordable and surprisingly capable alternative for Linux gamers willing to work through the setup.

In a comprehensive post in the Ubuntu community hub on 27th April, Canonical VP of Engineering Jon Seager confirmed that AI is finally coming to Ubuntu, sketching out a plan that focuses on responsible adoption, local AI inference, among other tools, that lean into open-source tooling to align with company values.

Responding to complaints about the lack of a universal AI “kill switch,” Seager explained that the planned AI capabilities would be delivered as removable Snap packages layered on top of Ubuntu, allowing users to effectively disable them by uninstalling the associated snaps.

Since AI came to be as we now know it, numerous companies, organizations, and systems have incorporated the technology in their workflows or very architecture.

In the last few years, we’ve seen industry giants like Meta, Microsoft, X Corp, and Samsung, to name a few, weaving AI into the fabric of their ecosystems and corporate identities. Then there are countless organizations that have integrated the technology into their everyday operations. Through all these, Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical have remained silent, leaving their users wondering if and when AI would be coming to the platform.

Well, not anymore. Seager outlined in detail how the company plans to incorporate AI not just in Ubuntu but across the broader company. According to the post, and in typical Canonical fashion, the company will be focusing on responsible AI adoption, local inference infrastructure, context-aware operating system features, AI-assisted accessibility tools, and agentic automation workflows, while prioritizing open-weight models and open-source tooling as these align with its values.

Seager’s post covered six key areas: AI adoption within Canonical, responsible and cautious deployment, implicit versus explicit AI features, local AI inference infrastructure, a context-aware AI-assisted operating system, and performance and efficiency considerations.

AI adoption inside Canonical

Seager explained that Canonical has already begun encouraging internal experimentation with AI tools across engineering teams, though not through hard mandates or productivity quotas. Instead of forcing teams onto a single AI stack, the company wants different groups exploring different tools to better understand where they are genuinely useful.

“I will not be measuring people at Canonical by how much they use AI, but rather continue to measure them on how well they deliver,” Seager wrote, adding that AI itself will not replace engineers at the company, but engineers who effectively use AI tools could gain an advantage.

A cautious and responsible approach

A major part of the post focused on the risks surrounding AI adoption, particularly low-quality AI-generated code and overreliance on large language models. This is an extremely valid concern. We recently covered an incident where an AI coding agent deleted a company database.

Seager acknowledged growing concerns around “slop” contributions flooding open-source projects and stressed that Canonical does not want AI used carelessly. “We’ll need to help our colleagues and open source contributors develop good instincts by training them to be skeptical and not blindly trust what comes out of the machine,” he wrote. The company also signaled that transparency, auditing, and licensing concerns will heavily influence which AI technologies ultimately make their way into Ubuntu.

Implicit vs explicit AI features

Seager introduced a framework dividing Ubuntu’s future AI functionality into two categories: implicit and explicit AI features. Implicit AI refers to background enhancements to existing operating system functions, such as improved speech-to-text capabilities or AI-powered accessibility tools. Explicit AI features, on the other hand, would involve more direct AI-driven workflows and assistants. “Implicit AI features will improve what Ubuntu already does; explicit AI will be introduced as new features,” Seager explained.

Local inference and AI infrastructure

One of the strongest themes throughout the post was Canonical’s push toward local AI inference rather than cloud dependence. Seager highlighted the company’s “inference snaps,” which are designed to simplify the process of running optimized AI models locally on Ubuntu systems.

According to him, the goal is to make it significantly easier to deploy local AI models without requiring users to manually manage complex model configurations and dependencies. “The bottom line is that inference snaps provide simplified local access to inference with models that have been specifically optimized for your hardware,” he wrote.

Toward a context-aware operating system

Perhaps the most ambitious part of the roadmap involved turning Ubuntu into what Seager described as a more context-aware operating system capable of agentic workflows. He suggested that future AI systems inside Ubuntu could eventually help users troubleshoot system issues, automate administrative tasks, or even manage servers under tightly controlled permissions. “I love the idea that all the power and capability that Linux has acquired over the past few years could become more accessible to more people,” Seager wrote, while emphasizing that security guardrails and strict confinement controls would remain central to the approach.

Performance and efficiency

The final major point centered on the hardware realities of local AI processing. Seager acknowledged that smaller local models still struggle to match the capabilities of large cloud-hosted systems, but argued that advances in consumer AI hardware will gradually close the gap. Canonical believes its partnerships with chip manufacturers will help prepare Ubuntu for that transition. “We must consider both performance and efficiency in the conversation,” Seager wrote, pointing to the growing importance of AI accelerators and low-power local inference hardware.

Following strong reactions from the Ubuntu Community, Seager later published a clarification addressing concerns around privacy, user control, and forced AI integration.

He also stressed that the first AI-powered features planned for Ubuntu 26.10 would be strictly opt-in, and that local inference — not cloud processing — would remain the default unless users manually connect to external AI services themselves. Seager added that Canonical is not attempting to “force AI into every Desktop indiscriminately,” but instead wants to selectively introduce AI where it meaningfully improves functionality, such as accessibility, automation, and troubleshooting tools.

Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux kernel's stable branch maintainer, who is widely regarded as second only to Linus Torvalds in the project's hierarchy, posted a photo to Mastodon on Friday showing the hardware behind his AI-assisted bug-finding tool, dubbed a "clanker."

The setup, which Kroah-Hartman has dubbed "gkh_clanker_t1000," is a Framework Desktop powered by AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" processor, running a local large language model to hunt down kernel bugs without relying on any cloud infrastructure, as first reported by Phoronix.

Since April 7, close to two dozen patches assisted by the Clanker T1000 have been merged into the mainline Linux kernel, addressing bugs across a range of subsystems, including ALSA, HID, SMB, Nouveau, and IO_uring. Kroah-Hartman first began testing the tool against the kernel's ksmbd and SMB code earlier this month, choosing that subsystem because it was straightforward to set up and test locally using virtual machines.

The patches carry a Git tag reading "Assisted-by: gregkh_clanker_t1000," and Kroah-Hartman has been up-front about the need for human verification, writing in the patch submission that the patches "pass my very limited testing here," adding "please don't trust them at all and verify that I'm not just making this all up before accepting them."

The tool doesn’t write kernel code but instead acts as a fuzzer, bombarding code with unexpected inputs to expose crashes, memory errors, and other latent bugs. Kroah-Hartman then reviews what it finds, writes fixes, and takes full responsibility for the submitted patches.

The Framework Desktop is a 4.5-liter Mini-ITX system built around AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 395, which pairs 16 Zen 5 CPU cores with 40 RDNA 3.5 compute units and up to 128 GB of unified LPDDR5x memory accessible to both the CPU and GPU. That large shared memory pool makes it capable of running sizable language models locally, a task that would typically require either a high-end discrete GPU with substantial VRAM or a cloud API.

Kroah-Hartman has not disclosed any details about the software stack powering the Clanker T1000, and the emergence of the tool follows the Linux project’s formal adoption of an AI code policy earlier this month, which permits AI-assisted contributions provided developers use an "Assisted-by" disclosure tag and accept full personal liability for any code they submit.

Kroah-Hartman's workflow with the Clanker T1000 predates that policy but already conforms to it.

Microsoft announced in a blog post yesterday that it would allow users to pause updates in Windows 11 indefinitely. This would be the first time the company officially allowed indefinite update pausing for everyday users since the launch of Windows 10 in 2015. The change is in response to countless user complaints over the years about its “mandatory update” policy.

Updates are necessary for the seamless functionality of the Windows OS and for security. However, users have had limited control over when and how these updates happen. You could postpone updates, but never for more than 35 days. There have been reports of forced update restarts right in the middle of meetings or gaming sessions after the extension period expires.

The upcoming changes, currently being tested in the Windows Insider Program before a wider public release, seek to give users much more control in four key ways: Delaying updates on new devices, indefinite update pausing and scheduling, restoring normal shutdown and restart options, and clearer update information.

First, new device owners would no longer be forced to install updates immediately after taking their devices out of the box. They have the option to go straight to the desktop and hold off on updates until a more convenient time.

Secondly, and most likely the answer to most complaints, users can now schedule updates for specific days or pause them indefinitely, in increments of up to 35 days. The initial 35-day extension limit remains, but this time, upon expiration, you can extend for another 35 days, and you can keep doing this as many times as you like.

“With a new calendar experience, you can choose a specific day of the month you want to pause until, up to 35 days, enabling you to plan around expected travel, conferences, exams, or even just busy weeks,” explained Microsoft’s Aria Hanson in the blog post. “When 35 days just isn’t long enough, we are also enabling you to extend the pause end date as many times as you need.”

The next change is the ability to shut down or restart your PC normally, even when updates are pending. Previously, whenever updates were due, the usual power options would change to “Update and shut down” or “Update and restart,” often accompanied by the familiar yellow notification dot beside the Shut down icon. This meant you couldn't simply perform a quick restart or power off your system without first installing pending updates. This change fixes that, allowing you to shut down or restart on your own terms, without being held hostage by a pending update.

“With this change, the Power menu will always show the standard Restart and Shut down options, meaning you will always have a choice to just restart or shut down your device without having to install the pending update. At the same time, update‑specific choices like Update and restart and Update and shut down will still be available when applicable,” said Hanson.

As the final key change, Microsoft would provide more insights on available updates, ensuring you know exactly what's being updated.

“Often, driver updates would have similar, if not identical, titles. To help provide you with more insights, we have added the device class to the driver title – ensuring pending or installed driver updates clarify whether they apply to display, audio, battery, extension, HDC, or other applicable driver update classes,” explained Hanson.

In addition to these changes, Microsoft said it will try to unify updates so that users won't have to deal with multiple system updates in a month.

With these changes, Microsoft is simply giving you more control and making updates far less disruptive to your workflow. That said, Microsoft is clear that updates remain critical for security, performance, and system stability — so the intention isn't to skip them altogether, but to plan them around your schedule rather than be ambushed by them at the worst possible moment.

A computer tinkerer and hacker has posted a tool called WSL9x on Codeberg and taken to social media to boast that it might be “one of my greatest hacks of all time.” Hailey shared a summary of WSL9x on Mastodon, referring to it by its longer and more meaningful name, the Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux. Oftentimes, folks like to run old OSes inside their modern ones, but WSL9x turns that on its head, as it can run the most modern Linux kernels within some of the earliest versions of Windows. It works on systems sporting Windows 95 or newer, and even machines with 486 CPUs.

In her brief summary of WSL9x, Hailey highlights that the tool can “can run all your favorite Windows and Linux apps side-by-side with a modern Linux kernel running cooperatively with the Windows kernel in ring 0.” Moreover, it is even compatible with processors as far back as the 486, because no hardware virtualization is used. That contrasts with modern WSL in Microsoft's latest versions of Windows.

We can see from the more detailed Codeberg readme and repository that there are three main components to WSL9x. These are a patched Linux kernel, a VxD driver, and wsl.com. The tinkerer and coder explained that “wsl.com is just a client program, it exists to hold a DOS window open for the console driver in the kernel to push chars into. + It also handles shuttling keystrokes from DOS to the console driver on IRQ.”

With the tool built and run, following the guide at Codeberg, users will be able to run “a modern Linux kernel (6.19 at time of writing) cooperatively inside the Windows 9x kernel, enabling users to take advantage of the full suite of capabilities of both operating systems at the same time, including paging, memory protection, and pre-emptive scheduling,” writes Hailey. No reboots are required to fire this up and get your favorite Windows 9X and Linux apps running side-by-side, highlights the developer.

In an age of AI and vibe coding, readers may also be refreshed to hear that WSL9x was “proudly written without AI.” Hailey also reveals that WSL9x has been brewing for six years, ever since she finished her doslinux project.

Meanwhile, Linux is saying goodbye to the 486

Earlier this month, we reported on Linux kernel devs starting to remove support for the 37-year-old Intel 486 CPU. Linus Torvalds had previously telegraphed that there was 'zero real reason' to continue support for this ancient processor.

Developer Ingo Molnar will probably go down in history as the 486 on Linux gallowsman, though. Molnar authored a patch “that initially gets rid of the CONFIG_M486SX, CONFIG_M486, and CONFIG_MELAN Kconfig build option.” This patch is expected to be merged into Linux 7.1, so from that time, users won’t be able to build an i486 kernel image. Time to upgrade to a Pentium, perhaps.

The Linux kernel community is currently debating a significant proposal that could see countless legacy network drivers purged from the mainline source code to combat an unsustainable surge in AI-driven bug reports. This development follows a patch series submitted by OG developer Andrew Lunn to the netdev mailing list earlier this week.

Maintaining support for old hardware has always been a “thing” for Linux. However, thanks to AI-wielding “detectives,” the sheer number of reports is forcing a shift in the kernel’s long-standing philosophy. Developers must now choose between addressing countless low-quality or hallucinated reports on systems no one uses or focusing their limited time on modern, high-impact subsystems.

Andrew Lunn argued that while support for aging ISA and PCMCIA-era hardware was once a low-maintenance endeavor, it has recently become a disproportionate burden due to newbies using AI and fuzzers to uncover theoretical defects in code that likely have no remaining active users.

"These old drivers have not been much of a maintenance burden until recently,” writes Lunn. “Now there are more newbies are using AI and fuzzers to find issues, resulting in more work for Maintainers. Fixing these old drivers makes little sense if it is not clear they have users.”

Lunn notes that many of the Ethernet devices date to the late 1900s and feature ISA or PCMCIA interfaces (although there are a few that debuted between 2001 and 2002). If accepted, Lunn's proposal would remove specific drivers from 3Com, AMD, SMSC, Cirrus Logic, Fujitsu, Xircom, and 8390-based hardware families, eliminating approximately 27,646 lines of code from the kernel source tree.

More importantly, rather than nuking support all at once, Linux would handle the removal one patch at a time, meaning a user could restore any of these drivers if they still depend on them and are willing to step in as a maintainer. This approach would ensure that legacy systems are not permanently locked out, but no longer impose an ongoing maintenance burden by default.

YouTube tester NJ Tech has just shown that 4GB GPU users are not entirely left out of Valve's recent VRAM hack. Earlier this month, we covered a literal game-changing VRAM hack by Valve’s Natalie Vock for Linux gamers that lets you give priority to current gaming tasks. The hack fixes long-standing issues where gaming tasks are evicted from VRAM to make room for low-priority background tasks when VRAM is running low. The announcement focused on 8GB GPUs — understandably so, as most modern games are graphically demanding, requiring at least that much VRAM for high-visual-fidelity gaming.

However, this left 4GB GPU users wondering where they stood. At the time, it seemed like the options were: upgrade (for the love of God!), stick to older games (or lower graphics), or keep dealing with the visual glitches. Fortunately, YouTube gaming tech channel NJ tech demonstrated, through extensive testing with some recent gaming titles, that the options are not exhaustive — the VRAM hack does offer some improvement in 4GB GPU gaming, at least in terms of FPS in certain games at low graphics settings.

The test setup was a 4GB Radeon RX 6500 XT running CatchOS, paired with 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a Ryzen 5 5600X with a stock cooler. The channel tested various recent titles in low- to medium-graphic settings, obtaining mixed results.

Alan Wake II saw the most improvement, with average frame rates nearly tripling from 14 FPS to 41 FPS, while 1% lows significantly increased from 12 FPS to 28 FPS. Two other titles, Resident Evil: Requiem and Silent Hill, showed more modest improvements. Conversely, a bunch of other titles showed little to no improvement.

The results showed that the Valve VRAM hack may offer some benefits to 4GB GPUs in certain scenarios. Of course, we will need more testing to conclusively assess the benefits across a wide range of titles. However, it is safe to say that 4GB-GPU users are not entirely left out.

It's important to note that the hack does not reduce a game's VRAM usage; it just optimizes it, ensuring the game gets priority access to the space. If you run a title that requires at least 6 GB of VRAM on a 4 GB GPU, the patch ensures that the game doesn't have to compete with background system processes for the available 4 GB of memory. However, the remaining 2 GB will still spill into the system RAM.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down from the top job to serve as executive chairman of the company's board of directors. He will be replaced by current senior vice president of hardware engineering, John Ternus, the company announced in a press release.

Cook will serve as CEO until Ternus takes the top job on September 1. The company notes that as executive chairman, Cook will continue to engage with "policymakers around the world," likely leaving him in charge of relationships with the Trump administration, China, India, and other areas where Apple has manufacturing and political interests.

Cook, 65, originally joined Apple in 1998 from Compaq. He was handpicked by Steve Jobs to become CEO in 2011, and became known for turning Apple's supply chain operation into a well-oiled international machine. Apple's press release highlights that during Cook's Tenure, "Apple has grown from a market capitalization of approximately $350 billion to $4 trillion, representing a more than 1,000% increase, and yearly revenue has nearly quadrupled, from $108 billion in fiscal year 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal year 2025."

“It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple and to have been trusted to lead such an extraordinary company," Cook said in the release. "I love Apple with all of my being, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with a team of such ingenious, innovative, creative, and deeply caring people who have been unwavering in their dedication to enriching the lives of our customers and creating the best products and services in the world... I could not be more confident in his abilities and his character, and I look forward to working closely with [Ternus] on this transition and in my new role as executive chairman.”

Ternus has worked at Apple for over 25 years and has served as an increasingly visible hardware mind in Cupertino, most recently showcasing the iPhone Air and the MacBook Neo. He also oversaw the Mac's shift to Apple Silicon and away from Intel.

Ternus began at Apple in 2001 on the product design team and rose through the ranks, overseeing hardware engineering across multiple products, including the introduction of the iPad and AirPods. Before working at Apple, he worked as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

At 50 years old, Ternus is the same age that Cook was when he became chief executive, affording him stability and a long tenure. He will serve as Apple's eighth CEO.

Cook's legacy is likely to be one that was safe and extremely profitable. While showing off his supply chain mastery, he also introduced Apple to the services business, including Apple TV and Apple News, which has become a sector worth more than $100 billion in its own right. During Cook's leadership, the company debuted the Apple Watch, Apple Vision Pro, and Apple Silicon Macs. Cook also promised to reduce the company's carbon footprint, including a goal to become carbon neutral by 2030.

But under Cook, Apple also faltered with artificial intelligence, and the company hasn't been on the cutting edge of the latest technology. Apple is expected to release an update to its Siri voice assistant later this year, but it will have been several times delayed and will be based on Google's Gemini model.

When he becomes CEO, Ternus will join the company's board of directors. Arthur Levinson, the company's non-executive chairman for the last 15 years, will become lead independent director.

Johny Srouji, senior vice president of hardware technologies, will immediately become chief hardware officer, leading the department that Ternus oversaw and getting a significantly expanded role. Srouji, who previously served at Intel and IBM, joined Apple in 2008 to lead development on A4, Apple's first system-on-a-chip, for the iPhone 4. Last year, Bloomberg reported that Srouji was looking for a bigger role or would consider leaving. Srouji told staff he "didn't plan on leaving anytime soon."

Linux 7.1 is bringing what might be the biggest under-the-radar storage change in years: a new in-kernel NTFS driver that finally treats Microsoft's filesystem like a native citizen instead of a tolerated guest. After years of half-solutions, including slow FUSE drivers and under-maintained kernel code, Linux users will finally get fast, reliable, and fully integrated NTFS support out of the box.

The headline feature under discussion here is a ground-up rework of NTFS support built directly into the kernel. Unlike the long-standing NTFS-3G driver, which runs in userspace via the "Filesystem in Userspace" (FUSE) module, or the more recent but somewhat neglected NTFS3 driver, this new implementation is designed around modern Linux filesystem infrastructure from day one.

That includes support for native in-kernel read/write operations, iomap (the same high-performance I/O path used by filesystems like XFS), folio-based memory management, removal of legacy buffer_head code, and delayed allocation for improved write efficiency. In practical terms, this isn't just "NTFS, but working again"; instead, it's Linux NTFS support rebuilt to behave like a contemporary Linux filesystem internally. It's a big philosophical shift from previous approaches that mostly treated NTFS support as a compatibility layer.

Microsoft's filesystem has always been unavoidable for Linux users in mixed environments; whether it's dual-boot setups, external drives, or just moving data between machines, support has existed, but it's never felt first-class. Historically, your options were the NTFS-3G driver, the newer NTFS3 driver, or the ancient kernel NTFS that was only capable of reading NTFS volumes, not writing them. NTFS-3G is stable, but it's slow due to userspace overhead, and the newer NTFS3 driver is faster, but has been largely unmaintained since it was added way back in Linux 5.15 in 2021.

The new driver in Linux 7.1 is actually based on that ancient NTFS kernel driver, but it's been fully rewritten from the ground up by developer Namjae Jeon, the very same genius behind the Linux exFAT driver. The original work was done under the name NTFSPlus before being merged simply as "ntfs" to replace the old driver. Thus, Linus Torvalds referred to the new driver as "NTFS resurrection" when announcing the merge.

If the new NTFS delivers, it removes one of the longest-standing friction points between Linux and Windows ecosystems. On paper, performance should improve, especially compared to NTFS-3G. Running in kernel space alone eliminates a lot of overhead from context switching, which has always been the Achilles' heel of FUSE-based filesystems. Add in iomap and newer memory handling, and the new driver should be noticeably better at large sequential reads and writes, with lower CPU overhead during file operations and more consistent throughput under load.

Compared to NTFS3, things are less clear-cut. The new driver is architecturally cleaner and more future-proof, but it's also new code, which means early releases may not immediately outperform NTFS3 in every scenario. However, the developer says single-threaded writes are 3-5% faster, while multi-threaded writes are between 35% and 110% faster. Mounting a 4TB drive apparently goes four times faster, too, which is promising.

Of course, because it's new code, it comes with the usual risks. Edge cases, especially around less-commonly used NTFS features like advanced permissions, compression, or journaling quirks, may take time to fully stabilize. It's also worth noting that even with a perfect driver, NTFS itself isn't designed around Linux semantics, so while compatibility improves, it's not suddenly going to behave exactly like ext4 or XFS in every case. The new driver passes 326 xfstests, though, which is better than NTFS3's 273 passing results, so it's already more than reliable enough for most users.

Still, for years, NTFS on Linux has been in that awkward "good enough, but..." category. It worked, but it never felt clean. Linux 7.1 is the first time it looks like the kernel is taking NTFS seriously as something worth doing properly, rather than just supporting it out of necessity. If the new driver holds up and gets consistent maintenance, it could finally make NTFS a genuinely seamless bridge between Linux and Windows. If not, it risks becoming just another entry in the long history of "almost there" NTFS support on Linux.

Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer, who has worked on iconic projects like adding ZIP file support to Windows and the Windows NT Start Menu, revealed how the Task Manager actually reads CPU usage. Plummer built the original Task Manager, and made the tool so simple (in programming and engineering terms) to ensure that it does not use up your computer’s resources unnecessarily. However, there have also been some complaints that it sometimes felt that the numbers it showed were a bit off, so he explained why looking up CPU usage is quite complicated, how Task Manager gets the CPU utilization numbers, and why it might show results that are a bit different from what you see and feel on your PC.

“But measuring CPU usage sounds like it ought to be one of the easiest jobs in computing — I mean, either the CPU is busy, or it’s not, right? It’s silicon, not interpretative dance. Surely, you just ask Windows, ‘Hey, how busy are you?’ and it tells you 73%, and then we all go home early — except none of that is true,” Plummer said. “Because the first uncomfortable question is ‘Busy doing what, exactly?’ Busy on one core or all of them? Busy right now, or averaged the last second or two seconds, or however often your UI happens to wake up? Busy is user mode or kernel mode or interrupt time or deferred procedure calls or the idle loop or some weird accounting bucket that only exists because the scheduler needed somewhere to hand the bill? And once you start asking those questions, what looks like a simple speedometer starts looking more like forensic accounting.”

Dave says that Task Manager is timer-driven in that it refreshes every so often to give you an updated figure. This shows that the machine is showing an interpretation of what happened to your PC between each refresh, not a real-time view of your CPU’s actual usage. The easy answer to this would have been to divide the CPU usage by the time elapsed between refreshes, but Plummer says that this depends on the GUI timer firing precisely. He compared this to “trusting a metronome to stay perfectly steady while it’s riding the back of a pickup truck on a pothole-filled dirt road.”

Instead, he programmed the Task Manager to ask for the total time, i.e., the sum of the kernel time and the user time, of each process since it started. It then subtracts the last total it received during the last refresh from that particular process from that value to get its CPU consumption for that period. This number is then divided by how much total CPU time was accounted for and consumed by all processes in between refreshes. While it may sound complicated versus just dividing the total CPU usage by the time elapsed between refreshes, this solution is far more precise.

However, technological advances made this feel inaccurate. Since the accounting is just an average number, between refresh states, it does not take into account the actual work happening at a particular moment. “Modern CPU usage is more like how full the freeway was, rather than how many miles were actually traveled. A half-full freeway with Ferraris on it can move a lot more traffic than a jammed freeway full of old cement trucks,” Plummer explained. “Now, the old Task Manager was built in an era where the time used was a pretty decent proxy for what work got done. But on today’s processors with dynamic frequency scaling, turbo boost, thermal throttling, deep idle states, that connection has gotten a lot looser. So, when the numbers feel a little slippery, it’s not because the tool is broken so much as the hardware stops being simple enough for a single percentage to tell you the whole story.”

He also added a note on the screen saying, “If I were king… CPU usage should be a measure of the amount of work accomplished versus the theoretical maximum work that COULD have been accomplished.” But because he’s already retired from Microsoft, he probably has no say anymore in how Windows should work.

You can find several more interesting stories and explanations on how one of Windows’ most basic tools works on the Dave’s Garage video embedded above.

Installing this month's Windows Server security update has knocked some enterprise domain controllers into continuous reboot cycles, Microsoft confirmed in a release health dashboard entry.

The company says the April 2026 patch, KB5082063, triggers crashes in the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) on non-Global Catalog domain controllers used in Privileged Access Management (PAM) deployments, leaving Active Directory authentication and directory services unavailable on affected servers.

Microsoft's dashboard lists Windows Server 2016, 2019, 2022, 23H2, and 2025 as vulnerable to the fault, with the LSASS crash occurring during the startup sequence, which is what turns the failure into a loop: each automatic reboot re-enters the same faulty authentication codepath rather than recovering into a stable state.

The problem is only affecting managed enterprise environments that run PAM for Active Directory privilege delegation, and Microsoft said personal devices outside IT-managed domains aren’t exposed. The company hasn’t yet published a patch and has instead directed affected administrators to Microsoft Support for Business for mitigation guidance that can be applied if KB5082063 is already deployed.

KB5082063 now has three acknowledged bugs within a week of release, and Microsoft has warned separately that the same update prompts some Windows Server 2025 machines for a BitLocker recovery key after installation. The company is investigating reports that KB5082063 fails to install entirely on a subset of Windows Server 2025 systems.

April security updates have disrupted Windows Server domain controllers for three consecutive years. In March 2024, Microsoft shipped an emergency out-of-band fix after that month's Patch Tuesday caused DC crashes outright. The April 2024 patch cycle then broke NTLM auth across Windows Servers and forced unplanned DC restarts, which Microsoft corrected in a May 2024 rollout.

In June last year, the company released another correction for Active Directory authentication problems introduced by the April 2025 security update. This month's LSASS crash follows the same MO for the third year running: a general Patch release followed by post-deployment failure reports from enterprise admins, and a scramble for mitigation while the fix is prepared.

With KB5082063 still on the release channel and no patch date published, admins have three choices: delay the April update, isolate a test DC to validate patch behavior before wider rollout, or escalate through the Microsoft Support form Business to obtain the mitigation steps the company is providing case-by-case.

The open-source community's long-simmering identity crisis over artificial intelligence just got a much-needed dose of pragmatism. This week, the Linux kernel project finally established a formal, project-wide policy explicitly allowing AI-assisted code contributions provided that developers follow strict new disclosure rules. The new guidelines mandate that AI agents cannot use the legally binding "Signed-off-by" tag, requiring instead a new "Assisted-by" tag for transparency. Ultimately, the policy legally anchors every single line of AI-generated code and any resulting bugs or security flaws firmly onto the shoulders of the human submitting it.

The move comes after a chaotic few months in the open-source world, resolving a fierce debate that peaked in January when Intel's Dave Hansen and Oracle's Lorenzo Stoakes clashed over how aggressively the kernel should police AI tools. Linus Torvalds, in his trademark blunt fashion, ultimately shut the argument down, calling the debate over outright bans "pointless posturing."

Torvalds' stance, which forms the philosophical backbone of this new policy, is remarkably straightforward: AI is just another tool. Bad actors submitting garbage code aren't going to read the documentation anyway, so the kernel should focus on holding human developers accountable rather than trying to police the software they run on their local machines. It's a highly reasonable, pragmatic approach, especially when contrasted with the panic that has gripped other corners of the open-source ecosystem.

Until now, major projects have taken wildly different approaches to the AI question. Over the last two years, prominent Linux distributions like Gentoo, as well as venerable Unix distribution NetBSD, moved to outright ban AI-generated submissions. NetBSD maintainers famously described LLM outputs as legally "tainted" due to the murky copyright status of the models' training data.

The core of this panic revolves around the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO). As Red Hat pointed out in a thorough analysis late last year, the DCO requires humans to legally certify they have the right to submit their code. Because LLMs are trained on massive datasets of open-source code that often carries restrictive licenses like the GNU General Public License, developers using Copilot or ChatGPT can't genuinely guarantee the provenance of what they are submitting. Red Hat warned this could inadvertently violate open-source licenses and shatter the DCO framework entirely.

Legal headaches aside, project maintainers have also been fighting a losing battle against sheer volume. The open-source world is currently drowning in what the community has dubbed "AI slop." The creator of cURL had to close bug bounties after being flooded with hallucinated code, whiteboard tool tldraw began auto-closing external PRs in self-defense, and projects like Node.js and OCaml have seen massive, >10,000-line AI-generated patches spark existential debates among maintainers.

The cultural friction of undisclosed AI code has been even more volatile. Late last year, NVIDIA engineer and kernel maintainer Sasha Levin faced massive community backlash after it was revealed he submitted a patch to kernel 6.15 entirely written by an LLM without disclosing it, including the changelog. While the code was functional, it include a performance regression despite being reviewed and tested. The community pushed back hard against the idea of developers slapping their names on complex code they didn't actually write, and even Torvalds admitted the patch was not properly reviewed, partially because it was not labeled as AI-generated.

The Linux kernel isn't the only community dealing with the fallout of undisclosed AI assistance. Over in the gaming sphere, the legendary (and still quite-alive) Doom modding community was cleaved in two last year as Christoph "Graf Zahl" Oelckers, the longtime lead developer of the mega-popular GZDoom source port, was caught using undisclosed AI-generated patches. When community members called him out on the lack of transparency, Oelckers took a remarkably cavalier attitude, essentially telling his critics to "feel free to fork the project." The community called his bluff, resulting in the birth of the new UZDoom source port as the overwhelming majority of contributors to GZDoom fled to the new fork.

The GZDoom incident and the Sasha Levin backlash highlight exactly why the Linux kernel's new policy is so vital. Most of the developer community is less angry about the use of AI and more frustrated about the dishonesty surrounding it. By demanding an Assisted-by tag and enforcing strict human liability, the Linux kernel is attempting to strip the emotion out of the debate. Torvalds and the maintainers are acknowledging reality: developers are going to use AI tools to code faster, and trying to ban them is like trying to ban a specific brand of keyboard.

The bottom line is, if the code is good, then it's good. If it's hallucinatory AI slop that breaks the kernel, the human who clicked "submit" is the one who will have to answer to Linus Torvalds. In the open-source world, that's about as strong a deterrent as you can get.

Dave Plummer, the engineer behind many of Windows iconic features like ZIP file support, shared how he built the Task Manager to be so efficient. According to his YouTube video, the current Windows Task Manager is about 4MB, but the original version that he built was just 80K. Plummer’s main concern when he built the Windows utility was that hardware during that time was so limited, and that the tool that was used to recover the PC after everything had failed still needs to feel crisp and responsive, even if everything else had hung.

“Every line has a cost; every allocation can leave footprints. Every dependency is a roommate that eats your food and never pays rent,” said Plummer. “And so, when I ended up writing Task Manager, I didn’t approach it like a modern utility where you start with a framework, add nine layers of comfort, six layers of futureproofing, and then act surprised when the thing eats 800MBs and a motivational speech to display just a few numbers.”

One of Plummer’s favorite features on the Task Manager is how it handles startup. Unlike other apps that just check if another instance of the app is already running and activates it if there’s already one, this Windows tool goes one step further. It checks if the already existing instance, if there is one, is not frozen by sending it a private message and waiting for a reply. If it gets a positive response, then it’s a sign that the other Task Manager instance is fine and dandy, but if all it gets is silence, then it assumes that the other instance is also lost and would launch to help get you out of a rut.

Another thing that the engineer did was to load frequently used strings into globals once instead of fetching them over and over again, while rare functionalities, like ejecting a docked PC, are only loaded when needed. The process tree also saves resources by asking the kernel for the entire process table instead of querying programs one by one. This removes numerous API calls, and if its buffer is too small, it would resize the buffer and try again. Plummer also shared several tips and tricks that he used to ensure that Windows Task Manager did not take on more resources than necessary, allowing it to run smoothly on the limited computing power available at that time, even on systems that were already facing issues.

The processing and resource limitations of 90s computers forced Plummer to make the Windows Task Manager as lean as possible. “Task Manager came from a very different mindset. It came from a world where a page fault was something you felt, where low memory conditions had a weird smell, where if you made the wrong thing redraw too often, you could practically hear the guys in the offices moaning,” he said. “And while I absolutely do not want to go back to that old hardware, I do wish we had carried more of that taste. Not the suffering, the taste, the instinct to batch work, to cache the right things, to skip invisible work, to diff before repainting, to ask the kernel once instead of a hundred times, to load rare data rarely, to be suspicious of convenience when convenience sends a bill to the user.”

The Linux 7.0 kernel has merged support for three new keycodes intended for a coming wave of laptops with dedicated AI agent keys, Phoronix has reported, meaning that three new keys with dedicated AI functions, much like the Microsoft Copilot button on newer laptops, could be coming to a keyboard near you soon.

Arriving through the HID fixes pull request for 7.0, the additions recognize The additions arrived through the HID fixes pull request for 7.0 and recognize KEY_ACTION_ON_SELECTION (0x254), KEY_CONTEXTUAL_INSERT (0x255), and KEY_CONTEXTUAL_QUERY (0x256), all defined on the USB HID Application Launch usage page.

These are new, recently-approved entries to the usage page, defined specifically for in-context AI agent interactions and routed through the USB-IF specification process, potentially marking a step beyond how the existing Microsoft Copilot key works on shipping Copilot+ PCs. According to Phoronix, Google authored both the HID specification proposal and the kernel patch wiring the new codes into Linux input.

Just over two years ago, we established that the Copilot button doesn’t transmit a new scan code at all, and instead reports as Left Shift + Windows + F23, a 1980s IBM function key repurposed by firmware. The 0x254, 0x255, and 0x256 entries, however, replace that workaround with first-class HID values that operating systems can map directly.

Per the descriptions, Action on Selection is meant to fire an AI action against whatever the user currently has highlighted, whether text or an image, with example flows including explain, summarize, or search the selection. Contextual Insertion calls up an overlay that lets the user retrieve or generate content and drop it straight into the focused field, while Contextual Query finds suggestions tied to the selected element.

None of the three replicates the Copilot key's job of launching a standalone assistant app; they target inline, in-context interactions instead.

The fact that it’s Google that authored the HID specification and kernel patch is interesting, given that Microsoft drove the original Copilot key push in early 2024 and Intel co-defined the AI PC certification around the presence of that button.

Google, meanwhile, shipped a physical Quick Insert Key on the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus in October 2024, rolled the underlying function out to all Chromebooks in ChromeOS 130 a few weeks later under a Launcher + F shortcut, and has now taken the button class to USB-IF and landed the kernel implementation.

KEY_CONTEXTUAL_INSERT, as defined in the merged Linux header, describes a contextual overlay for retrieving or generating content into the focused field, which is functionally what Quick Insert already does on ChromeOS. The 0x254 to 0x256 entries sit on the HID Application Launch page, the same usage range that already covers dedicated keys for browser, calculator, mail, and media player launches.

The keycodes themselves seem to be agent-agnostic; nothing in the kernel definitions ties them to a particular vendor's assistant, which leaves OEMs free to wire them to Gemini, Copilot, or a local model, so you can expect to see them on upcoming laptops and PCs.

VRAM usage has become an increasingly unavoidable issue in games as they grow more graphically intensive over time. Pushing the visual fidelity requires more assets to be stored in VRAM, which makes it harder for cards with 8GB (or less) memory to run games smoothly. For Linux at least, Natalie Vock has just proposed a new solution that alleviates this issue, providing a notable performance boost for games by optimizing VRAM usage.

Vock is part of Valve's Linux graphics driver team; she's developed new kernel patches and two specific utilities to address the VRAM usage issue. These fixes basically talk to the OS and let it know that the game currently running in the foreground gets to call dibs on the VRAM. If the VRAM starts to fill up, any VRAM consumed by background tasks needs to spill over into system RAM before the game does.

Previously, whenever a game consumed too much VRAM, Linux would move its data (evict it) to system memory to prevent crashes. This is because, generally speaking, the Linux kernel doesn't have a clear idea of which program to prioritize; it might evict the game to allocate VRAM to a background browser window. When this happens, you'll experience inconsistent frame pacing and stutters in-game.

Vock tested Cyberpunk 2077 with an 8GB GPU and saw 1.37GB of memory spilling into the GTT, which stands for Graphics Translation Table and is responsible for telling the GPU to look for something in system RAM. The game was only consuming around 6GB of VRAM; despite having an 8GB pool, it could have maximized instead. Vock's fixes specifically target this via new patches proposed to the Linux kernel.

The main solution she developed is called dmemcg-booster (Device Memory Control Groups), which tells Linux what program needs to be "protected" at any given moment, meaning it can't be evicted from the VRAM and thrown into the GTT. If a background task requires VRAM, it will be the one forced to move to slower system memory to ensure the game keeps running without interruption.

This is more about optimizing VRAM usage than outright reducing it. If you had a 12 GB card, for instance, you'd never notice the drawbacks of just 8 GB of VRAM because there's enough buffer for poorly prioritized background programs. Now, even a GPU with less VRAM can run at its full potential. Case in point: with the fixes applied, Cyberpunk 2077 started using almost 7.4GB of VRAM, and GTT dropped to just 650MB.

The other component is called plasma-foreground-booster, and it can automatically tell KDE which window is in front so that it can prioritize VRAM usage for that window. These patches are currently being integrated into CatchyOS and are awaiting merge into the main Linux kernel. You can download and use these patches yourself inside any distro, but keep in mind they'll only work on AMD GPUs because Nvidia drivers have closed-source memory management.

Microsoft’s Clippy was put out to pasture a quarter century ago. This hapless, and some would say ‘irritating,’ productivity assistant would no longer be enabled by default in Office, starting April 11, 2001. Nowadays, it is easy to remember Clippy with some fondness through rose-tinted retro spectacles. But, in its era, Clippy’s repetitive catch-all catch phrases such as “It looks like you’re writing a letter” and “Would you like help with that?” would soon erode any tolerance you might have for cute character-based digital assistants.

Clippy (more properly called Clippit) was a digital assistant introduced with Microsoft Office 97. The plan was to bring a friendly agent to the screen to interface with Office help content, as explained by Wikipedia. Several characters were designed to offer this help, with Clippy (Clipit) as the default choice. Among the alternatives were caricatures of Albert Einstein, William Shakespeare, and Rocky the dog, as well as several animated inanimate objects (like the unpopular paperclip).

Some esteemed figures in the computer industry think that the introduction of Clippy might have been a "tragic misunderstanding" of research conducted at Stanford University on breaking barriers in human-machine interaction. Indeed, there must have been something seriously wrong with a ‘helpful’ project like this for it to attract so much ire and ridicule among users and tech commentators.

As per our headline, Clippy was officially retired on April 11, 25 years ago, when Microsoft announced it would be disabled in Office by default. In Office XP, it would still be there as a dormant and optional feature. However, with Microsoft Office 2007, there was no longer any way to summon help from Clippy or his friends.

Rose-tinted retro spectacles

Clippy’s infamy has been sealed with its place in Time magazine’s 50 worst inventions. However, the mists of time have taken the edge off the pain of working with such a useless assistant, as it is now often viewed as being part of an amusing, heart-warming era in computing.

Microsoft has played on this softening of public opinion, or even nostalgia, for Clippy in several marketing campaigns since the animated paperclip and his friends were discarded. Most recently, it resurrected Clippy as an Emoji in Microsoft 365 – after overwhelming popular demand.

Last year, as the wave of new AI assistants began to grate on the public nerves, we also observed some fondness for Clippy being rekindled in a project by software engineer Felix Rieseberg – a locally hosted, LLM-based, AI-enhanced Clippy, complete with Office 97-era-appropriate UI.

Despite the sting of Clippy's clear failure, Microsoft keeps coming back to digital assistants as the future of computing. We had Windows Cortana foisted upon us from 2014 to 2023.

Now we have Copilot everywhere, in every corner of our Windows 11 PCs and Microsoft apps. A recent count indicates that there are at least 80, and probably over 100 Copilot apps…

As optimists, we hope Copilot will be reined in, as far as Windows goes, thanks to Microsoft’s latest stated initiative to focus on OS performance, reliability, and RAM usage. This telegraphed change is also supposed to lead to fewer Copilot interactions.

Microsoft's promises of a better Windows are moving one small step closer to fruition, starting with the Windows Insider Program. In a blog post authored by Microsoft product manager Alec Oot, the company promised a simpler channel structure and more control over which features Insiders get to try.

The channel structure is being simplified down to two primary channels. The previous Beta Channel will go into the more simply named "Beta" branch, while what was previously the Dev Channel will go the "Experimental." These are where you go for first access to the newest features. Though Oot explains that in the Experimental channel, "what you see may change, get delayed, or not ship at all."

If you're in the existing Canary Channel, things will get slightly more complicated, with 29500-series builds going to Experimental (Future Platforms), while 28000-series builds will transition to Experimental (26H1). Future Platforms will be the earliest preview build you can get, and one Oot writes that it is "not aligned to a retail version of Windows."

Features and gradual rollouts

On the Beta channel, there's another big quality of life change for Insiders. Microsoft is stopping gradual feature rollouts. If Microsoft announces a feature and you download the update, you'll get it. This differs from the previous practice of gradual rollouts. While the company says the gradual rollouts are designed to assess how features perform before releasing widely, they acknowledge that it made the program "unpredictable," and it could mean that "you don't get the new features that motivated many of you to join the Insider program to begin with."

For the Experimental channel, there will be flags for new features, so Insiders can enable the ones they want to try and disable those they don't.

Windows Insider for Business will see the same changes as the consumer program, while the Windows Server version will continue unchanged. Release Preview will hang around as an advanced option for those who want to try production builds shortly prior to their general release.

Upgrading in place

Moving between Windows Insider channels or leaving the program has been historically different, with very few points to stop and get off the ride without needing to wipe your PC and clean install Windows.

Microsoft now says it is working on the ability to hop between versions without losing all of your software and settings.

"This will allow, in most cases, Insiders to move between Experimental, Beta, and Release Preview on the same Windows core version, or leave the program without a clean install," Oot writes. "An [in-place upgrade] takes a bit more time than your normal update but migrates your apps, settings, and data in-place."

The Experimental (Future Platforms) build will still require a clean install, as it doesn't line up with any retail production builds of Windows.

Oot writes that these changes are set to begin in "the coming weeks."

Last month, Microsoft promised a slew of features to improve Windows 11, including a more flexible taskbar, a less aggressive Windows Update, improvements with RAM issues, and a better File Explorer. To assess upcoming fixes, Microsoft will need its slew of Insiders. Hopefully, a streamlined program makes it easier for enthusiasts to join the program and leave feedback before changes come to everyone else.

France is accelerating its digital sovereignty plans. In an official press release this week, the country’s DINUM announced its “exit from Windows in favor of workstations running on the Linux operating system.” (machine translation).

The DINUM is an important section of the French state, headed by the Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs, so this will mark a key changeover in the machinations of government, eliminating U.S.-based commercial interests from workstation computers. We assume some French flavor of Linux will be adopted to satisfy the stated objective of migrating to sovereign solutions. Joining the DINUM in this mission for digital sovereignty are France’s Directorate General for Enterprises (DGE), the National Cybersecurity Agency of France (ANSSI), and the State Procurement Directorate (DAE).

Moving to Linux is described as one of three “concrete initial steps” that have recently been committed to, to reduce France’s extra-European digital dependencies. The plan is expected to be formalized in the fall. By then, stakeholders should know what “workstations, collaborative tools, antivirus software, artificial intelligence, databases, virtualization, and network equipment” will be needed to move ahead with this digital sovereignty initiative.

On the topic of applications, not just the underlying OS, France recently announced that it had moved 80,000 National Health Insurance Fund employees to open-source alternatives to platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Dropbox. These commercial platforms have been put into forced retirement by the new Tchap, Visio, and FranceTransfert services (and others), delivering a set of modern collaborative productivity tools dubbed La Suite.

Last month, the French government also “announced the migration of the health data platform to a trusted solution by the end of 2026,” says the source press release.

We know why – but why?

French Ministers are very keen on reducing reliance on technologies that depend on or are controlled by outside interests. “We must become less reliant on American tools and regain control of our digital destiny,” wrote David Amiel, a Minister of Public Action and Accounts, in a statement pinned to the above-linked PR. “We can no longer accept that our data, our infrastructure, and our strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, pricing, evolution, and risks we do not control.” It is interesting to see Amiel single out the U.S. for his statement about how the French state “must break free.”

Anne Le Hénanff, Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technology, echoed Amiel’s sentiments by asserting that “Digital sovereignty is not an option, it is a strategic necessity."

One wonders whether the growing cultural rift between the U.S. and its traditional European allies has added momentum to the digital sovereignty movement in France.
The implications for software and services businesses across the Atlantic don’t look great. As a leading member of the EU, France’s decisions and direction can exert a strong influence on others in the bloc. Moreover, if the move to Linux is seen as a success, it could also influence other government departments, and organizations that work closely with the government, and so on, all the way down to individual users.
Perhaps 2026 is set to be l’année de Linux?

Speaking from personal experience, using a Mac as a server or server-like contraption is quite an interesting proposition, as despite its Unix roots, the operating system isn't exactly designed for unattended, 24/7 usage and is difficult to set up and use as such — fighting words, but I stand by them. While most every user will reboot their Mac at least once in the space of a few weeks, if you happen to leave one running for precisely 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds, many parts will suddenly stop working as its TCP/IP networking stack dies.

Those are the findings of the folks at Photon, who did some serious sleuthing after encountering a mysterious issue in a fleet of Macs they use to monitor iMessage services. The problem revealed itself when some machines just up and stopped responding to network connections out of the blue, even though they answered ping requests with an "all good here, boss!"

Said machines kept their existing network connections going, making the situation even harder to diagnose, as the failure was unexplainable and otherwise invisible. Not left with much of an option, Photon's boffins had to reboot the machines to clear the issue, something any systems administrator hates as a "solution" to a mystery issue. After all, if it happened once, it'll happen again, and assuredly at the worst possible time.

After the team spotted another set of machines that was reaching the 49.7-day uptime, they set up some scripts to test their theory. Alas, they found that when the fateful moment arrived, the Mac they had continuously creating new connections just stopped doing so without so much as an error.

The team then turned its attention to the root cause, as it was clearly related to a networking-related timer. They found the culprit to be the "tcp_now" internal counter, a figure that was "destined to overflow." The job tcp_now does is to keep track of the current time since boot as far as the TCP stack is concerned, down to the millisecond. tcp_now is represented as a 32-bit unsigned integer, and those have a maximum value of 4,294,967,295 (2^32 - 1) before they wrap around to zero. Since it tracks milliseconds, tcp_now's maximum is 4,294,967 seconds, or 49.7 days.

As defined by standards, operating systems collect and remove closed TCP connections after a short while; 30 seconds in the case of macOS. The result of attempting to clean up these inactive connections when tcp_now is close to or at its limit (and gets stuck there thanks to a bug in Apple's XNU kernel) is that any connection's expiration status is calculated against that frozen number, resulting in a value that always overflows a 32-bit unsigned integer. When the periodic check comes to see whether a closed connection is meant to be deleted, the result is always "no," because the comparison math doesn't work.

The TCP stack then fills up with errantly held ephemeral ports and effectively grinds to a halt when no more are available. How quickly that happens depends on the amount of network activity, but in any server or professional environment that's bound to be a rapid event. This class of problems is hardly known, integer overflows have been the cause of Windows 98's famous 49.7-day crash and the upcoming Year 2038 problem.

According to Photon, the current mitigation is a reboot, although the team says it's working on an alternative solution. They also found this issue to be the source of some bugs discussed online in the Apple Community forums, too. The long-existing RFC 7323 specifies what should happen to the timestamp clock (tcp_now) when it reaches its limit, but Apple's kernel performs an incorrect implementation. It's safe to say this issue will likely be fixed quickly—and hopefully before 49.7 days after the report.

An artificial intelligence (AI) aficionado has put together a chart featuring all the Copilot things that Microsoft has released since AI became the next big thing. At the latest count, Ty Bannerman notes that there are 80 different, separately marketed Copilot products and tools. Charting these Copilot things wasn’t a trivial task; even Microsoft doesn’t appear to maintain a definitive list. When I first noticed this story, there were 78 Copilots in Bannerman’s charts, but now it has expanded to 80.

The AI strategy, design, and implementation expert says that the idea of charting the expanse of the Copilot universe came to him when someone asked what Microsoft Copilot is. He knew it meant at least 75 different things, in so many contexts, at the time. “Apps, features, platforms, a keyboard key, an entire category of laptops - and a tool for building more Copilots,” tallied Bannerman in his blog. “All named ‘Copilot’.” His chart contends this is "What happens when you name everything Copilot."

Last week, the AI aficionado charted the number of Copilots as 78. However, since yesterday, I note the number has increased to a nice round 80. Thanks to the power of the internet / social media, Bannerman had learned of the existence of Gaming Copilot and Microsoft Dragon Copilot. The latter of those isn’t designed for residents of Westeros, but an AI clinical assistant.

Copilot says there are ~95 to 120+ Copilots

So, we have a chart of 80 Copilots, and who knows what the final figure may be, and how many more Bannerman can uncover?

Since I’m typing on a laptop with a Copilot key, I prodded it and asked the thing itself. Who better to ask? The answer was that “the ecosystem is well north of 100,” if you include things like every app-embedded Copilot, enterprise, and Azure-adjacent tools, etc. I then asked it to add them all up, and it concluded there were “~95 to 120+ Copilots.”

Is that too many? Well, even on this PC, I was surprised to find two Copilot apps in my system tray a few weeks ago. One pops up the usual chatbot box, the other was actually Copilot 365, which, when clicked, asked me to sign in with my (non-existent) Microsoft 365 credentials before I could use it. It has been eliminated.

The corporation's promise of major improvements to Windows 11 performance, reliability, and fewer Copilot interactions can't come soon enough.

Perhaps it is time to send your 37-year-old Intel 486 system into retirement, as far as modern Linux goes, as OS kernel developers appear to have started to dismantle support for this legendary CPU. Phoronix reports that the change seems to have been confirmed in patches destined for the Linux 7.1 kernel. So, those still cherishing their 486 PCs and using them to run a modern version of Linux should probably now make sure they run one of the existing Linux LTS kernels to squeeze a few more years from the platform. Alternatively, they could upgrade to a Pentium or even one of the best CPUs available in 2026.

The patching out of 486 support isn’t really a surprise. Firstly, it is ancient, with the first examples released in 1989, and modern Linux distros continue to grow more resource-hungry. Secondly, Linux creator Linus Torvalds hinted not long ago that 486 support may get the axe. The Linux mogul said that there was “zero real reason” to continue support for the 486 CPU. In fact, he indicated that continuing support for it was detrimental to upstream Linux kernel development efforts.

Developer Ingo Molnar will probably go down in history as the gallowsman, though. Molnar has authored a patch “that initially gets rid of the CONFIG_M486SX, CONFIG_M486, and CONFIG_MELAN Kconfig build option,” says Phoronix. Which is basically signaling in code that the 486 is on borrowed time.

“In the x86 architecture we have various complicated hardware emulation facilities on x86-32 to support ancient 32-bit CPUs that very very few people are using with modern kernels,” commented Molnar in a note accompanying the patch. “This compatibility glue is sometimes even causing problems that people spend time to resolve, which time could be spent on other things.” Then he repeated some of Torvald’s remarks to remind readers of who signed the 486's death warrant.

Phronix notes that the patch should be merged in Linux 7.1, meaning users won’t be able to build an i486 kernel image. Then, barring an unexpected level of public uproar, the rest of the 486 support can be safely gutted.

We are sure that this isn’t the end of having fun or even being productive with old Intel 486 systems. For example, earlier this year, we covered the news of an open-source 486 motherboard being built from scratch and passing Linux, DOS, and Doom compatibility tests (and more).

Microsoft is force-updating devices running Windows 11 24H2 to the latest 25H2 update. With support for version 24H2 officially ending on October 13, 2026, the move seems to be a part of the company’s effort to keep all devices updated to the latest version of its operating system, at the same time make the entire update experience more streamlined.

According to Microsoft’s Windows 11 25H2 support page, the automatic rollout specifically targets systems running Home and Pro editions of Windows 11 version 24H2. However, devices that are managed by organizations or IT departments are excluded at the moment. Notably, the rollout will be handled by an “intelligent” update system that leverages machine learning to determine when a device is ready to receive the update.

Curiously, there seems to be a lack of transparency around how Microsoft’s machine learning system decides when a device is ready to receive the automatic update. The company has not shared any specifics about the criteria or any data points that are being used, which does raise some questions, especially for users who prefer greater control, especially at the system-level.

As this is a forced update, users will not have an option to completely opt out. There is, however, limited control over when the update is installed, as Microsoft will let users postpone for a specific period of time. For those who prefer taking matters into their own hands, the update can also be installed manually by heading to Settings > Windows Update and clicking on “Check for updates,” provided the device meets the eligibility requirements.

Since we are on the subject, Microsoft pushed an emergency update for Windows 11 earlier this week following a faulty preview update that failed to install on a large number of systems. The original update (KB5079391) was released in late March, which reportedly triggered widespread installation issues with error code 0x80073712, which typically indicates missing or corrupted files. Microsoft acknowledged the issue and has since pulled the broken update and replaced it with a new out-of-band patch (KB5086672). This updated release not only resolves the installation problems but also includes all the improvements and features originally intended for the March update.

A former president of Microsoft’s Windows Division has been reminiscing about the lean and efficient coding regime at Microsoft in the 1980s. Steven Sinofsky surprised some commenters, who were talking about modern software’s RAM and resource use, by recalling that from 1980 to 1990 “every Microsoft eng got a stop watch,” adding that “Extras were in the supply room.” Stopwatches were used for “everything,” Sinofsky went on to explain. “Scroll speed. Boot. Exit. Save. Compilation. Print.”

Core products of the ‘stopwatch era’ would be MS‑DOS, Windows, Word, Excel, and Office – as well as programming languages and tools. Windows work would involve versions one through three, but of course, this period predates Windows 95; the clue is in the name. Sinofsky indicates that the same resrouce efficieincy based ethic continued to at least the year 2000, though. “From 1980-2000 half of software engineering was managing resource (clock time, disk, and RAM) usage,” he said on social media.

Do people prefer ‘whizzy spinning’ things to raw speed?

However, the ex-president of Windows told of one retrograde action implemented in software purposefully. Despite his stopwatch indicating otherwise, user feedback the dev team received was that the compile speed under Windows for VC++ 1.0 was slower than prior releases. Implementing a “whizzy spinning line counter made of random numbers… slowed the compile speed down a few pct points but perception improved,” noted Sinofsky. Moreover, despite not liking reworking purely for perception, and actually slowing raw performance, he reluctantly kept the whizz in.

Interestingly, another well-known Microsoft / Windows veteran, Dave W. Plummer, responded to say that he was denied a free stopwatch in 1993. Actually, that is outside the freebie window, as told by Sinosfsky. Microsoft told Plummer that a stopwatch would be “too expensive,” he recalls. Humorously, Plummer says that “While I clearly resent it enough to bring it up 30+ years later, it went a long way toward setting the fiscal accountability I brought to the career.”

Microsoft’s new performance pledge

Sinofsky’s tale comes at an interesting point for Microsoft, particularly its Windows OS, which has been under heavy criticism for losing focus. Specifically, there’s a growing wave of resentment regarding the OS’s poor core performance, general resource hungriness, and devs throwing too much AI in the mix.

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft’s managers finally decided to face up to this reality and penned a surprisingly detailed blog post, promising that the situation would change over the course of this year. It has now pledged to implement performance, overhead, and reliability improvements across a swathe of core services like Explorer and Windows Update. It will also improve resource use and be more purposeful about where Copilot integrates.

Microsoft’s signaling regarding its newfound efficiency thrust is still fresh, so we can only wait and see if any or many of these improvements materialize. But we’d like to know if, as part of the plans, devs will be given free stopwatches.

A retro computing connoisseur has installed and booted Microsoft Windows 3.1X on a Ryzen 9 9900X and RTX 5060 Ti PC system. That’s a 1992 OS working on a bare-metal 2024 Zen5 CPU and 2025 Blackwell GPU. The full story contains a few nuances, but basically, a system and OS separated by over 30 years of huge advances kind of play nicely together.

In the video by Omores, above, you can see we start by inspecting a Spanish-language Windows 3.1X backup floppy disk set, which the TechTuber had access to. But there’s some important background to understand, before the first 3.5-inch installer disk starts ticking away in its drive.

A key part of this system, not yet mentioned, is its motherboard. This Asus motherboard’s ‘classic BIOS’ functionality doesn’t get in the way of users tinkering with old OSes like Windows 3.1X when the built-in Compatibility Support Module (CSM) is enabled. Moreover, we noticed Omores initially prepared the system using a Windows 95 boot floppy to create the bootable DOS FAT16 partition necessary for setup.

With that done, the retro enthusiast began the Win3.1X install from his USB-attached floppy. There was no problem using this drive, as it was recognized as Drive A: by the installer, and the 1992 media hadn’t suffered from any kind of deterioration, even hidden bit rot.

The first hurdle shows up after the transition from the DOS prompt to Windows 3.1X startup, as the GUI system crashes straight away. It is explained that this is because there is a clash between the OS’s Enhanced Mode and Omores’ modern hardware.

There is an easy workaround, though, as Win 3.1X could be run in Standard Mode. Intended for pre-i386 systems, Standard Mode is useful for this project due to its greater compatibility. A mode switch was all that was needed to get Win 3.1X up and running on this modern system.

Poking around the freshly booted Win 3.1X UI operating in a rather low resolution, Omores commented that the graphics were a bit “glitchy,” but there are supplementary patches and drivers that can improve it.

Adding the graphics driver VBESVGA from PluMGMK on GitHub made a big difference. The UI was scaled up to the display’s native 1920 x 1080 pixels properly. Moreover, the RTX 5060 Ti graphics card now worked without any irksome issues. The tinkerer had used this driver with previous projects, but sounds surprised by how well the driver has matured. It was previously “picky with Nvidia cards” and slightly glitchy, he comments. The driver has seen 44 releases, observes Omores, but it remains in beta.

With graphics fixed, the TechTuber’s attention switched to trying to get Enhanced Mode working for benefits such as virtual memory and improved multitasking. Omores’ chosen sound card also required Enhanced Mode.

So AHCIFIX.386 (from the same GitHub source as VBESVGA) was also installed. Installation was a simple file copy plus the adding of a line to System.ini. With that done, Omores fits his Ensoniq ES1370 audio PCI card. Though other cards he’s tried have Windows 3.1 drivers, this is the only one the TechTuber knows that works on modern hardware with original drivers and MIDI support. Please note that other brand cards using the same chip aren’t compatible, in the TechTuber’s experience.

If you are interested in following in these retro footsteps, the video description includes a link to a Windows 3.1 update script, which will help you go from floppies to a fully working Enhanced Mode system running on bare metal.

The release notes for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS show that Canonical has quietly raised the minimum RAM requirement for its popular Linux-based operating system by 50%. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (Resolute Raccoon), the newest long-term support (LTS) release, requires at least 6GB of precious RAM, alongside a minimum dual-core CPU with a clock speed of 2 GHz, and 25GB of free storage.

The last time that Canonical upped the minimum RAM requirements of its well-known Linux distro was in 2018. That was when Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) arrived, demanding 4GB. Ubuntu LTS RAM requirements had been as low as 1GB for the preceding four years, as established by Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) in 2014. In that context, the latest change in RAM requirements isn’t as big of a shock.

Ubuntu experts at OMG Ubuntu characterize the latest revision in RAM specs as “an honesty bump.” In other words, the core OS isn’t really more demanding on system resources this time around, but Canonical recognizes that with the latest Gnome desktop, modern web browsers, and typical multitasking workflows, users should look at a minimum of 6GB of RAM.

Key apps like Firefox, LibreOffice, Thunderbird, and the GIMP are all updated in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Moreover, the Gnome desktop has been upgraded from version 46 to 50, and there are a host of underlying changes.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS doesn’t make 6GB a hard requirement. The OS will still install on systems that don’t match the new spec. But obviously, users shouldn’t complain about Ubuntu’s poor performance on systems with lower memory quotas. OMG Ubuntu actually tested 26.04 (Beta) on a laptop with 2GB of RAM and noted it was functional but slow.

In the Linux world, there are plenty of alternatives

No one likes to see minimum system specs rise, especially during component shortages directly affecting potential upgrades. But progress must march on, and if this revision is indeed just for ‘honesty’ regarding usability with modern apps, then it is difficult to argue against the update.

If you are someone who would have installed Ubuntu LTS, and perhaps you were intending to do so on a machine constrained by a maximum of 4GB of RAM, remember that alternatives are readily available. Even within the ‘Ubuntu family,’ there is Lubuntu, a lightweight and efficient distillation of Ubuntu. This ‘essentials remix’ of Ubuntu is only up to 24.04 LTS right now but requires just 1GB of RAM, as well as a 1GHz CPU and a smidgen under 10GB of storage.

After rolling out an optional non-security update for Windows 11 last week, Microsoft was forced to pull it due to widespread installation issues. The cumulative update KB5079391 included several quality improvements; however, users reported that it failed to install, showing error code 0x80073712. To replace the faulty preview update, the company has now issued an out-of-band KB5086672 emergency update for affected Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2 systems.

According to Microsoft, the latest update (KB5086672) for Windows 11 “supersedes all previous updates and includes all protections and improvements from the March 2026 Windows security and non-security preview updates, as well as this installation fix.” It is available for devices running Windows 11, including those that have already installed KB5079473 or a later update. Users can also manually download the new update from the Microsoft Update Catalog.

Some key features of the optional KB5079391 update (which should now be available with the latest KB5086672 fix) include enhanced Narrator capabilities with improved image descriptions and Copilot integration. It also brings a refreshed design for account-related dialog boxes that align with Windows 11’s modern look and dark mode, as well as enhancements to File Explorer with reliable file unblocking and support for voice typing during file renaming. There are several display-related updates too, such as support for monitors with refresh rates going beyond 1000 Hz, improved auto-rotation and HDR reliability, and improved power efficiency for USB 4-connected monitors during sleep.

Microsoft has faced repeated criticism over problematic Windows 11 updates in the past, with the company promising to make changes and improve the OS. Earlier this year, the January security update KB5074109 caused widespread issues for gamers, particularly those using Nvidia GPUs. With reports of frame rate drops, visual artifacts, and instability, Nvidia itself advised users to uninstall the update as a temporary fix.

The same update also introduced a more serious issue for some users, with reports of systems failing to boot altogether. According to an AskWoody forum post, some devices encountered an “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME” error after installing the security update. The affected devices ended up with a message that said “Your device ran into a problem and needs a restart. You can restart.” Additionally, some PCs refused to shut down or hibernate, and another bug resulted in Cloud-based apps, like Outlook, OneDrive, and Dropbox, not working.

Microsoft's tenacity in imposing AI across its product stack has cornered Windows into a tough spot. Mac and Linux are catching up in terms of software compatibility, and Windows' longstanding flaws have begun to outweigh its universality. Even though the company has promised to fix the OS and has initiated a course correction, the mistakes just keep slipping through the cracks. The latest in the line of discrepancies is a new Windows update that, funnily enough, won't install for a lot of users.

Microsoft pushed the KB5079391 non-security update on March 26, 2026, featuring "production-quality" improvements, which means it's part of the efforts to make the OS more stable/reliable. It's ironic then that the update refuses to install, throwing up the 0x80073712 error code in a loop. This code means something is broken or missing in the update files, which is preventing Windows from piecing together the update.

The only fix to this is rerolling the update with fixed components, so Microsoft has pulled it from the release channel for now. If someone got the update installed anyway, no reports have shown it actually breaking anything — it's just the installation process itself that's broken. No harm, no foul; but it's still a waste of time and, more importantly, the optics of another broken Windows update are inopportune. "Rollout of this update is temporarily paused due to installation error 0x80073712," Microsoft's website now reads. "To prevent additional impact while the issue is investigated, Microsoft has temporarily limited the availability of this update. As a result, the update temporarily might not be offered through Windows Update."

KB5079391 is not just a minor update, either, as it brings a lot of new features like support for monitors beyond 1,000 Hz. There's a new About page in Settings, and a brand-new Narrator built around Copilot, among other refinements such as a better File Explorer experience. It's an optional update, and it was released in preview, so maybe some of the blame can be absolved, but there's still no workaround for installing it thus far.