FTR, also happens with Openbox on X11 and with labwc on Wayland, so this isn’t related to my custom X11 window manager.

Heh, that’s a cute story: https://www.osnews.com/story/145459/you-paid-me-a-long-time-linux-user-to-use-windows-11-exclusively-for-a-month-heres-how-it-went/

Windows NT 4 didn’t have a Device Manager. You know, this thing right here that got introduced with Windows 95:

Image

And that’s super awkward in NT4.

You know what doesn’t have a Device Manager, either? Linux. Why? 🤔 Isn’t this one of the most useful system tools? It gives you an overview of the devices in your system and tells you which driver is used for them. Linux could really use such a tool, I think? 🤔

(There are programs like “hardinfo” and I remember ancient KDE providing such a tool, but they’re all an afterthought. Hardly integrated into the overall system.)

@GabesArcade@gabesarcade.com The no-JS part is one thing, but you also have to disable the (nowadays common) forced-HTTP-to-HTTPS-redirect, because those old browsers can’t do modern crypto. And make sure that your webserver serves the correct page even if no Host header is sent by the client. And don’t even think about serving UTF-8 or even just putting utf-8 in the content type. 😅 And for the JPEG thumbnails I pass a special flag to ImageMagick so that IBM Web Explorer from OS/2 won’t trip. 🤣 And always use link rel="stylesheet" for CSS, because some browsers render inlined CSS as literal text. And … probably more that I forgot by now. 😂

@david@daiwei.me Not sure, actually. Let’s see. Those are the ones where I still have the original disks (or have bought them on eBay again):

• SuSE Linux 6.4 (it’s a massive 7 CD distro with a huge manual, best thing ever)
  
• OS/2 2.1
  
• OS/2 Warp 3 (red and blue spine because $reasons)
  
• OS/2 Warp 4
  
• PC DOS 7
  
• MS-DOS 6.22
  
• Windows 3.1
  
• Windows for Workgroups 3.11
  
• Windows 95 C
  
• Windows 98
  
• Windows NT 4 Workstation (still in the mail, though 😅)
  
• Windows 2000
  
• Windows XP Professional (last Windows I ever used on my private PCs)
  

(Plus a few “classic” office products as can be seen here: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/POSTING-en.html )

Okay, wow. Windows NT 4 wasn’t part of my timeline back then, so this is the first time I’m seeing it in action. And this thing came with IE 2, which I’ve also never seen before. (That’s interesting, because I remember using IE even on Win 3.x, but apparently that was already IE 3?)

It also makes me really happy to see my website work in these old browsers. Fullscreen images are “broken” because those are PNG or WebP, but the rest works just fine. 🥳

https://movq.de/v/56243a3e54

Java 1.3 on Windows 95 with Proton as the editor could be another option for next Advent of Code.

Win95 runs pretty smoothly on my old box (no surprise, that box came with Win95) and I like Java, so … why not …

Not sure about the speed, though. 🥴

Image

Installing software was (is?) such an incomprehensible mess on Windows … Why did you allow any program to install files anywhere in the system? Why was this considered normal and okay? With no chance of ever cleanly removing that stuff again?

And now we’re back to the trend of curl | bash these days … same thing.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh dear! :-(

Now, it’s cooler outside than inside. Time to open the windows and start the wind machines.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s right, way harder than centrally managed. They even didn’t reach concensus over the main folder: “Alle Programme, “Alle Programme (x86)”, “All Programs”, “All Programmes”, etc. Anyway.

For class 11 (or maybe already in 10, I don’t remember exactly) we could choose either between traditional maths class with a graphical calculator or “Mathe mit CAS”. There were two teachers in my entire school who were able to teach the latter. It was also fairly new at the time I believe. Certainly unheard of for a „allgemeinbildendes Gymnasium“, maybe the technical ones were already offering it for some time, not sure. It was clear to me that I would take the maths with CAS class.

Each kid had to buy their own Cassiopeia A-Something. I don’t know how much that thing was (definitely more expensive than a graphical calculator) and whether the school subsidized that in any form. But it was slow and underpowered as hell. We rarely used it in class nor for homework (most if not all had already a desktop at home). Typically, when we worked with the CAS, we sat down on the desktop computers. Our class took place in one of the two computer rooms. The desktops were placed on the three sides (left, right, back, facing the walls or windows) and the regular school desks were in the middle. Since there were more pupils than desktops, we always shared. Nowadays, we call it pair programming. ;-)

For the exams we had the “mandatory part” (Pflichtteil) without any tools. Once we finished that and handed the papers to our teacher, we were then allowed to boot up our Cassiopeias and work with them for the second part. Before the exam started, everyone had to show the teacher that they reset their small computer to factory settings. This second part was called „Wahlteil“. But you had to do it in order to pass. So, I never understood the choice of this term. Maybe it’s because the first part is the exact same for everyone (graphical calculator and CAS class), but the second part was definitely different for the two classes. Each suited to their tools.

After one or two exams, it became clear that the Cassiopeia was far from ideal. So, we took the second part at the desktop computers from then on. Our teacher unplugged the network cables himself to avoid cheating. Each computer had an “HDD Sheriff” running that reset the disk at startup. There was also an issue that the personal user accounts were affected by that. Sometimes all your data were lost. If you were lucky, they were still there. So, we saved our Maple project to local disk (if the computer didn’t crash in between, that was no problem) and at least eventually before leaving the classroom, we then also saved it on the server. For that, the teacher quickly plugged in the cable, we saved, and then the cable was unplugged again immediately. Oh, and everybody used their USB sticks, too.

All in all, this Cassiopeia A-* was quite a useless purchase. :-D I’m not sure if I still have it. At least I thought several times about giving it to the flea market. Don’t know if I did or not.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

But it’s Windows, it doesn’t have a place in my heart.

The older I get, the more I’m glorifying anything pre XP. 😅 But that’s only because everything today is so horrible.

Well, not anything pre XP. 3.0 or newer would be nice, because Windows 2.x was still pretty bare bones:

https://movq.de/v/00162b9df8/

(OS/2 was great, though, except for the lack of a good file manager.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ah, you mean the categorization. Yeah, that would never work in Windows, at least not without having a centralized package manager (so there’s one authoritative source of which program belongs into which category).

Oh wow, those Cassiopeias look pretty cool. Did you have one of those or one for each kid?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes, yes, yes and yes.

The start screen looks exactly like a website not a desktop application.

I mean, I find Motif also fairly ugly. Granted, it’s a hell lot more discoverable than anything today. The old Windows UIs probably had the best balances. But it’s Windows, it doesn’t have a place in my heart. So, I stick with good old KDE. ;-) That’s my nostalgia kicking in.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes, this screenshot. However, not the Dutch but rather the German version, no wonder it looks so crazy!!1!11

It’s been a hot minute or two since I last used KDE, so I don’t remember exactly. I just vaguely recall that I found myself thinking multiple times that the KDE application categories were better matching or there were more or something like that. Most of my classmates were on Windows and had one giant long list of all sort of stuff in there. You even had to scroll in the menu. Sure, they installed all kind of garbage, which didn’t exactly help. Where in KDE, they were actually grouped by Office, Internet, Graphics, Multimedia, Games, etc. In Windows, applications usually hid themselves in a sub folder named after the software vendor. At least in the later (?) days.

I only used Win 95, 98 and XP at home. For maths class with computer algebra system (Maple), we had a Cassiopeia with Win CE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_Cassiopeia At school, there was probably also Win 2000, but I don’t know anymore for sure.

Speaking of UIs, this is how Thunderbird looks now:

https://movq.de/v/a41105eebb/

So we continue to let every program make up its own UI style (and then we complain that “the Linux desktop” looks “messy” and “inconsistent”). I guess this uses GTK, but it doesn’t look like any other GTK program. Buttons, tabs, drop-downs, whatever, it’s all different. It even has its own subwindow system (i.e., popups that you can’t move).

I didn’t say this in the blog post, but I’m convinced that programmers these days absolutely positively hate everything that looks even remotely like Windows 95 or Motif – with a passion. I see that in my coworkers as well, they really can’t stand it. It’s an emotional thing.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Regarding https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html:

In my opinion, the KDE 3.5 menu was organized way better than the Windows Start menu. Granted, a typical KDE installation had much more applications to offer, too. So, there was more need to get it right. And it probably was also later in time.

Isn’t Notepad++ and Python cheating!? :-D

Crazy story on the clock’s seconds. I never heard of that before. Neat.

Yeah, UI these days is horrible. (That’s why my own TUIs suck, too!)

Don’t trust large context windows
Article URL: https://garrit.xyz/posts/2026-05-06-dont-trust-large-context-windows

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524620

Points: 9

# Comments: 2 ⌘ Read more

Show HN: I built 80 mini-games using Fable before it was shut down
Dear Hacker News,

I’m kindly asking for your participation in the open beta for my AI-managed mini-games website. Thank you in advance!

For a limited time window, I’m setting the all-free feature flag to true. I hope you have a lot of fun exploring the AI’s sense for games! Here and there, I tweaked it to help with visual consistency.

I would be deeply grateful if you opted into analytics.

$2,300 in API tokens…

Cheers!

Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.c … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Now I’m curious how movwin deals with that. ;-)

Focus handling? I hardly remember, lol. 😅 Did that 6 months ago and haven’t touched it since. Let’s see.

The core main loop gets keyboard/mouse events from curses. At this level, the main loop only knows about exactly one widget, so it passes the event to that widget (whatever that is, doesn’t matter – they all inherit from the Widget base class, it could be a Window, a WindowManager, or an Edit box directly).

The outermost widget is usually a WindowManager. It implements a few hotkeys of its own, like switching to another window. If none of those hotkeys match, it passes the event to the currently focused window.

Same story here: Window implements some hotkeys (like opening the menu bar). If none of those match, then … the magic happens.

Each Window acts as a focus manager. It can descend into its child widget hierarchy and collect all child widgets in a depth-first search. They are collected into a flat list. Each Window then has an attribute _focus_position, which is an index into that list. Pressing Tab or Shift+Tab increases or decreases that index and that allows you to select the next/previous focusable widget in the current window.

Eventually, Window passes the input event to the currently focused widget.

Usually on initialization, the application can ask a Window object to focus a certain widget. The file selection dialog does that, for example, because the “natural” focus order would be to focus the Edit box at the top of the window first – but that’s not what the user wants, the Table showing the list of files should be focused.

If no widget ever feels responsible for handling a certain input event, then there’s a global unhandled_input callback that the application can provide (same as in urwid).

I think that’s it.

Hm, that’s more complicated than I remembered, but apparently it works fine, because I completely forgot about this. 😅 All I did in the last few months was make new classes that inherit from Widget, like the new Table class or Edit or HexEdit or whatever, and if they want to get input events, then they must implement the methods input_key() or input_mouse().

Does this answer your question? 😅 (I admit that I didn’t exactly understand your scenario, so I just went ahead and rambled about my implementation. 😅)

Young teens risk mental health harm after one year of social media use
A study that tracked teenagers for a decade found a decline in their wellbeing from time online – but it also provides a critical window for intervention. ⌘ Read more

Young teens risk mental health harm after one year of social media use
A study that tracked teenagers for a decade found a decline in their wellbeing from time online – but it also provides a critical window for intervention. ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That is really cool! Maybe it would look nicer if the selected entry highlighted the whole row, not just the individual cells in that row without the column spacers. :-? But maybe I’m wrong. Everyone has their own taste.

And no, it’s not pointless at all. I find this really interesting. The videos and photos are perfect for me. Even if I had the source code, I would not use that toolkit, as I’m not a fan of movable windows in TUIs. I want all my own programs to be fullscreen all the time. 8-) Having said that, it’s still an absolutely brilliant source of inspriation that will come in handy one day. So, keep posting. :-)

Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs
Article URL: https://twitter.com/lemire/status/2062880075117113739

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48424605

Points: 6

# Comments: 3 ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Those are stunning 😎 I’d leave the windows dirty too — clearly the birds approve of the current state of affairs 🤣

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org those are sharp, and sooo nice! Are you sure the windows need cleaning?

I might have to clean windows tomorrow. https://lyse.isobeef.org/voegel-2026-06-05/

Coreutils for Windows
Article URL: https://github.com/microsoft/coreutils

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48372853

Points: 15

# Comments: 3 ⌘ Read more

Launch HN: Minicor (YC P26) – Windows desktop automations at scale
Hey we’re Faiz and Saheed and we built Minicor so AI companies who need to integrate to desktop systems with no API can quickly build scalable desktop RPAs. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD0GHZIJ1cw

We were working on non-RPA integrations when a customer promised to sign a deal in 2 days if we could unblock a sale of theirs that involved integrating with a clinic’s Windows based medical record system. We didn’t know it at … ⌘ Read more

Use Tiny11 to Rescue a Computer Running Windows 10
If you can’t—or don’t want to—upgrade to full Windows 11, consider this lightweight version of Microsoft’s operating system that works on a wide range of computers. ⌘ Read more

Finally, a Great Free Radio App for Windows
Tune into live broadcasts from your Windows desktop with Trdo, a free and open-source application. ⌘ Read more

Best Window Air Conditioners of 2026: Midea, Zafro, GE
These are the AC units we’ve trusted to cool our homes for months, if not years. ⌘ Read more

I’m not always on the same page as Rob Pike, but this hit close to home:

Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I’m being charitable).

Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.

I spent my time trying to make it better. Not just write code, but find better or at least different ways to do so. Simpler, cleaner, more general, more comprehensible.

What’s happening today is a complete repudiation of everything I was trying to achieve.

“Simpler, cleaner, more general, more comprehensible”, that’s what I’ve been trying to establish in our teams as well. Obviously not to the same degree, but you get the idea.

And it all goes out the window now. We’re doing the complete opposite – and with full force.

Earthset: Artemis II offers a breathtaking window on our world
During the few hours the Artemis II crew spent going round the Moon, they took some seriously impressive photos. In what could be argued was a generat… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de with the current regime, everything is, to put it politely, rather odd, and in disarray. They have yesterday’s window, otherwise the next one was on the 12 of April, or something like that. We knew it was going up for a few days, but we are used to that kind of thing, so it is not that super exciting any more. LOL.

Yeah, I saw it in person.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de pretty cool, thanks for sharing! We saw the rocket go up yesterday, but it didn’t occur to me to pull out the camera and take a shot until it was gone. I mean, the visible window is also quite short! 😅

お知らせ：JPCERT/CC Eyes「Windowsのイベントログ分析トレーニング用コンテンツの公開」 ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

I can’t remember if the hex viewer back then had these options. Don’t even recall what software that was. :-)

The one that I used during my Windows 95 days was “Hex Workshop”. It had similar features, just not as promimently displayed. It shows them down there in the statusline as “Value”:

Image

Newer versions can probably do more, haven’t checked. 😅 (Assuming this program still exists.)

Apart from selecting text to copy into the clipboard. But that probably has the potential for trouble and interference with button clicks, etc.

Yeah, that’s a big problem: Once you activate mouse mode in the terminal, the terminal loses the ability to select text. 😞 You’d either have to emulate that in the program itself (like Vim does) or give the user an easy way to turn mouse support on/off during runtime.

How did the startup times develop?

They’re pretty stable at around 230 ms on my old NUC. It’s just fast enough so that it doesn’t annoy me.

I’m inclined to remove all mouse support, except for moving windows. 🤔 I originally wanted this to emulate the behavior of DOS programs, but a) mouse support is a lot of code, b) using the mouse is cumbersome anyway and I would rarely do it.

TIL that #Processing 4 on Windows now has an installer!

I is not just a zipped folder anymore, I wonder if it will make it harder for people to use it on restricted school labs…

TIL that #Processing4 on Windows now has an installer!

https://processing.org/download

I is not just a zipped folder anymore, I wonder if it will make it harder for people to use it on restricted school labs…

#Processing #CreativeCoding

TIL that #Processing4 on Windows now has an installer!

https://processing.org/download

It is not just a zipped folder anymore, I wonder if it will make it harder for people to use it on restricted school labs…

#Processing #CreativeCoding

I love using #ThonnyIDE, and, on Linux, I can use !pip install, !jupyter lab, and !py5-live-coding mysketch.py on the interactive shell console, I wish this would work on Windows too :(

https://github.com/thonny/thonny/discussions/3736

Okay, I had heard of “River” before but I was not aware of this:

https://codeberg.org/river/river

River defers all window management policy to a separate window manager implementing the river-window-management-v1 protocol. This includes window position/size, pointer/keyboard bindings, focus management, window decorations, desktop shell graphics, and more.

This sounds promising and it follows the old X11 model. River does all the nasty Wayland work and I can make just the WM? 🤔🤯

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Aha! Well, happy hacking. A tiling window manager seems to be good fun. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s not super comfortable, that’s right.

But these mouse events come with a caveat anyway:

ncurses uses the XM terminfo entry to enable mouse events, but it looks like this entry does not enable motion events for most terminal emulators. Reporting motion events is supported by, say, XTerm, xiate, st, or urxvt, it just isn’t activated by XM. This makes all this dragging stuff useless.

For the moment, I edited the terminfo entry for my terminal to include motion events. That can’t be a proper solution. I’m not sure yet if I’m supposed to send the appropriate sequence manually …

And the terminfo entries for tmux or screen don’t include XM at all. tmux itself supports the mouse, but I’m not sure yet how to make it pass on the events to the programs running inside of it (maybe that’s just not supported).

To make things worse, on the Linux VT (outside of X11 or Wayland), the whole thing works differently: You have to use good old gpm to get mouse events (gpm has been around forever, I already used this on SuSE Linux). ncurses does support this, but this is a build flag and Arch Linux doesn’t set this flag. So, at the moment, I’m running a custom build of ncurses as a quick hack. 😅 And this doesn’t report motion events either! Just clicks. (I don’t know if gpm itself can report motion events, I never used the library directly.)

tl;dr: The whole thing will probably be “keyboard first” and then the mouse stuff is a gimmick on top. As much as I’d like to, this isn’t going to be like TUI applications on DOS. I’ll use “Windows” for popups or a multi-window view (with the “WindowManager” being a tiny little tiling WM).

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, I see. Unfortunately, there seems to be no box drawing character for a corner with a diagonal line. Indeed, this is probably the best you can do.

Is the single character enough to hit it comfortably with the mouse, though? Maybe one additional to the left and above could be something to think about. Not sure. Of course this complicates it a bit more. Personally, I like fullscreen windows, so I’m definitely the wrong guy to judge this or even comment on. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ah, the lower right corner is different on purpose: It’s where you can click and drag to resize the window. https://movq.de/v/cbfc575ca6/vid-1767977198.mp4 Not sure how to make this easier to recognize. 🤔 (It’s the only corner where you can drag, btw.)

@bender@twtxt.net Seriously, if I ever get a CRT monitor again, I want it to be an amber one and then hook it up to some 8086. 😅 Only problem is that this stuff is expensive as hell now …

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Very nice, it’s coming together!

Just in case you haven’t already noticed it, the right lower corner of the window in front was not updated when it received the focus. 8-) (In tt I also render focused text input fields with a doubly lined border, where unfocused ones have a single one.)

(The background and the window shadow are not amber and it wouldn’t have looked like that on a real monitor, unless you cranked up the brightness way too high.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think they are Windows users, going by the lack of attention to detail, and the fact they love DFS. Ha!

On my way to having windows and mouse support:

https://movq.de/v/95bbbbd3e8/basic-windows.mp4

It would be cool to have something like Turbo Vision eventually.

(I considered just using Turbo Vision, but it’s a C++ library and that’s not quite what I’m looking for. But it’s not yet completely off the table.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I haven’t spoken to a single person yet who was a fan of all this. Not even the more conservative family members.

Some people have detonated several really loud bombs yesterday. This wasn’t a “Böller”. It shook my walls, doors, windows. Family members in other parts of the country reported the same … Is this a new trend?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m toying with the idea of making a widget/window system on top of Python’s ncurses. I’ve never really been happy with the existing ones (like urwid, textual, pytermgui, …). I mean, they’re not horrible, it’s mostly the performance that’s bugging me – I don’t want to wait an entire second for a terminal program to start up.

Not sure if I’ll actually see it through, though. Unicode makes this kind of thing extremely hard. 🫤

@zotero@zotero I noticed that some combinations of XFCE appearance (light) themes and Zotero made the menu “disappear” (black on black) as the window title was dark. Changing the Zotero to a dark theme or changing the XFCE theme worked (but then, I liked the dark window title on a light theme best…). Should I try to open an issue about this, or is it a XFCE issue? I don’t want to burden the maintainers but it was a bit disturbing not to find the menus…

#FediAjuda #AjudaMastodon meu irmão precisa comprar um computador, ele precisa navegar e rodar alguns programas de desenho, tipo inkscape. Ele sabe um pouco de SketchUp, e não sei se consigo tirar ele do Windows :((

Estamos no Brasil, alguma sugestão/dica perto de 2mil reais parcelados? Da Suponho que tela de 15”, i3 e SSD seja o mínimo?

I just noticed this pattern:

uninformativ.de 201.218.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:27 +0100] "GET /projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 301 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
www.uninformativ.de 103.10.xxx.xxx  - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:28 +0100] "GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 400 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Let me add some spaces to make it more clear:

    uninformativ.de 201.218.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:27 +0100] "GET                       /projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 301 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
www.uninformativ.de 103.10.xxx.xxx  - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:28 +0100] "GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 400 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Some IP (from Brazil) requests some (non-existing, completely broken) URL from my webserver. But they use the hostname uninformativ.de, so they get redirected to www.uninformativ.de.

In the next step, just a second later, some other IP (from Nepal) issues an HTTP proxy request for the same URL.

Clearly, someone has no idea how HTTP redirects work. And clearly, they’re running their broken code on some kind of botnet all over the world.

Windows at work, always a fresh inconvenience:

C:\>python -m pip install ipython
Requirement already satisfied: ipython in c:\users\[...]

C:\>ipython
'ipython' is not recognized [...]

#ipython #windows #python

@prologic@twtxt.net Hm, same startup delay. (Go is not an option for me anyway.)

It’s hard to tell why all this is so slow. Maybe in this particular case it has something to do with fonts: strace shows the program loading the fontconfig configs several times, and that takes up a bulk of the startup time. 🤔 (Qt6 or Java don’t do that, but they’re still slow to start up – for other reasons, apparently.)

To be fair, it’s “just” the initial program startup (with warm I/O caches). Once it’s running, it’s fine. All toolkits I’ve tried are. But I don’t want to accept such delays, not in the year 2025. 😅 Imagine every terminal window needing half a second to appear on the screen … nah, man.

Be it Java with Swing or PyQt6, it takes ~300 ms until a basic window with a treeview and a listbox appears. That is a very noticeable delay.

Is it unrealistic to expect faster startup times these days? 🤔

Once the program is running, a new second window (in the same process) appears very quickly. So it’s all just the initialization stuff that takes so long. I could, of course, do what “fat” programs have done for ages: Pre-launch the process during boot, windowless. But I was hoping that this wasn’t needed. 😞 (And it’s a bad model anyway. When the main process crashes, all windows crash with it.)

Digital Forensics — Windows USB Artifacts [Insider Threat Case] ⌘ Read more

** Timber **

Image

Timber, I’m not gonna lie, I kinda hated you. At the same time I am surprised to find how gutted I am now … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, you have to manually move each card one by one. That’s annoying. Haha, I remember the old Windows Solitair animation. :-)

Design trends I think will take off in 2026
but tierlist

S - move from flat design to more detailed, 3D, more complex logos.

A - glass, not just liquid, Windows Vista, 7, 11,… accessibility concerns, but I like to see it.

B-/C+ - black and white icons, favicons. I did it before it was cool, but it’s getting overused.

E - gradientslop, barely started, already all blends together.

@zvava@twtxt.net Late happy birthday! :-)

Cool, your website indeed mostly works even in w3m and ELinks. Sending notifications in the about page is out of question, since it requires JS. Apart from that, this is very good, keep it up!

Not sure how I can get the deskop look and feel working in Firefox, but since I’m a tiling window manager user, I prefer linear webpages anyway. :-)

Magpie with nut photographed through a dirty window: https://lyse.isobeef.org/elster-2025-11-01/

HTB Academy: Windows Fundamentals ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Uh, that actually looks not that terrible. Somehow, I remember Swing GUIs being way uglier.

As for Visual Basic, I only had to use VBA once in my life. That was in the beginning of my career when I inherited a project from a leaving coworker. Fuck me, was that awful. Just alone the damn compiler error dialog box popping up in my face all the time while editing and the compiler already trying to parse the unfinished and hence of course uncompilable code. Boy, that left a lasting impression on me. I ported everything to Java very quickly. Luckily, the code base wasn’t all that large at that point in time. I had to add a bunch of new features after that, so I was very glad that I convinced my workmate/project manager to do that first. We didn’t even need a GUI, the button in Excel was transformed to a command line program that just generated the large file.

But I cannot comment on the VB GUI designer, I never used that. Your screenshot looks very similar to the Delphi one, though. Only towards the end of my Delphi days I found out about the possibility to make the widgets snap to window edges and corners (I don’t remember how that was called), so that resizing the windows was actually possible without messing up their entire contents.

Switching to Linux, Delphi wasn’t an option anymore. For some reason I couldn’t use Kylix. Maybe it was already dead by the time I changed OSes. Or I couldn’t get it to run. I just don’t remember. I just recall that the unavailability of Delphi was the reason it took me a while to actually settle on Linux. I then fully switched to Java. The GridBagLayout was my absolutely favorite Swing layout manager. I reckon I used it 98% of the time, because it was so powerful and made the windows resize properly, just as I had learned to do in Delphi shortly before.

Up until discovering Swing, I used Java’s AWT for a short amount of time. That was very limited I think and I hit the limits fairly quickly. Later at uni, we had one project making use of SWT. Didn’t convince me either. I could be wrong, but I think there was also a SWT GUI designer plugin for Eclipse. If there really was, that one wasn’t in the same street as Delphi’s (there must be a reason I forgot about it ;-)).

A mate just sent me Microsoft’s magnificent master piece diagram regarding the end of life of Windows 10: https://support.microsoft.com/de-de/windows/windows-10-support-wurde-am-14-oktober-2025-eingestellt-2ca8b313-1946-43d3-b55c-2b95b107f281

That’s what you get for training with zalgo. :-D Of course, this isn’t even proper German.

In case they fix it, here’s a screenshot of the enlarged frontal crash:

Image

We had some gray soup with the occasional fine rain with strong wind gusts. Despite the bad forecast we took the train to Geislingen/Steige and strolled up to the Helfenstein castle ruin. All the colorful leaves were so beautiful, it didn’t matter that the sun was behind thick layers of clouds.

We then continued to the Ödenturm (lit. boring tower). By then the wind had picked up by quite a bit, just as the weatherman predicted. We were very positively surprised that the Swabian Jura Association had opened up the tower. Between May and October, the tower is typically only manned on Sundays and holidays between 10 and 17 o’clock. But yesterday was Saturday and no holiday. The lovely lady up there told us that they’re currently experimenting with opening up on Saturday, too, because there are some highly motivated members responsible for the tower.

We were the very first visitors on that day. Last Sunday, when the weather lived up to the weekday’s name, they counted 128 people up in the tower. Very impressive.

The wind gusts were howling around the tower. Luckily, there are glass windows. So, it was quite pleasant up in the tower room. Chatting with the tower guard for a while, we got even luckier: the sun came out! That was really awesome. The photos don’t do justice. As always, it looked way more stunning in person.

Thanks to all the volunteers who make it possible to enjoy the view from the thirty odd meters up there. That certainly made our day!

After signing the guestbook we climbed down the staircase and returned to the station and headed back. The train even arrived on time. What a great little trip!

https://lyse.isobeef.org/wanderung-auf-die-burgruine-helfenstein-und-den-oedenturm-2025-10-25/

Beyond the Shell: Advanced Enumeration and Privilege Escalation for OSCP (Part 3)

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Part 3 reveals the high-value Windows PrivEsc methods that defeat rabbit holes. Master file transfer, service … ⌘ Read more

Everything in the realm of “smartphones” is such an incomprehensible clusterfuck. I want to throw this thing out the window.

And this fucking WhatsApp … jfc.

Debugging a Go runtime crash: the one-instruction window
Comments ⌘ Read more

The critical window of shadow libraries (2024)
Comments ⌘ Read more

Linux Sucks 2025 is coming.
“Linux Sucks: Windows 10 End of Life Edition” will be live streamed on October 14th, 2025. ⌘ Read more

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 9, 2025
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Kernel Rust features; systemd v258, part 2; Cauldron kernel hackers; BPF for GNU tools; 6.18 merge window, part 1; Lifetime-end pointer zapping; Robot Operating System.

• Briefs: OpenSSH 10.1; Firefox profiles; Python 3.14; U-Boot v2025.10; FSF presidency; Quotes; …

• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security upda … ⌘ Read more

Who needs git when you have 1M context windows?
Comments ⌘ Read more

windows gvim users, TitleBar may be styled now ⌘ Read more

Cars left with bullet holes, windows smashed after dramatic arrest in Sydney
A major police operation has taken place in Sydney’s south-west after tactical operations officers conducted a “high risk” arrest on a suburban street. ⌘ Read more

Publisher of famous Soviet newspaper Pravda falls to his death from a seventh-floor window ⌘ Read more

[$] 6.18 merge window, part 1
At the time of writing, there have been 9,099 commits in the 6.18 merge window,
8,475 non-merges and 624 merges. The
changes so far include core-kernel, graphics, and networking work, among others.
There are no big surprises, but several items that were discussed at this year’s
LFSMM+BPF Summit have now been merged. ⌘ Read more

(g+) Schon altes Eisen?: Ältere Hardware mit Linux Mint weiternutzen
Der von Microsoft erzwungene Umstieg auf Windows 11 sorgt dafür, dass an sich noch brauchbare Hardware nicht mehr nutzbar ist. Mit Linux Mint lassen sich entsprechende PCs aber bequem weiterverwenden. Eine Anleitung von Martin Loschwitz ( Linux Mint, Storage) ![](https://cpx.golem.de/cpx.php?class=17&aid=19923 … ⌘ Read more

All good things come to an end, I guess.

I have an Epson printer (AcuLaser C1100) and an Epson scanner (Perfection V10), both of which I bought about 20 years ago. The hardware still works perfectly fine.

Until recently, Epson still provided Linux drivers for them. That is pretty cool! I noticed today that they have relaunched their driver website – and now I can’t find any Linux drivers for that hardware anymore. Just doesn’t list it (it does list some drivers for Windows 7, for example).

I mean, okay, we’re talking about 20 years here. That is a very long time, much more than I expected. But if it still works, why not keep using it?

Some years ago, I started archiving these drivers locally, because I anticipated that they might vanish at some point. So I can still use my hardware for now (even if I had to reinstall my PC for some reason). It might get hacky at some point in the future, though.

This once more underlines the importance of FOSS drivers for your hardware. I sadly didn’t pay attention to that 20 years ago.

L.I.S.A.’s Universe Window Discoveries are Beyond Expectation ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Nice! And I didn’t look out the window at all. Was watching eels. 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m looking for an OS that runs better than Windows (🤮) and through which I can do basic stuff like read RSS feeds and browse geminispace; but which I can also learn from.

This probably means that I can no longer host my own website. I don’t want to deploy something like Anubis, because that ruins the whole thing: I want it to be accessible from ancient browsers, like OS/2 or Windows 3.11.

I’ll keep an eye on it for a while. Maybe try to block some IPs.

Sooner or later, I’ll take the website down and shift everything to Gopher.

Interactive demo of #shapely’s centroid for the triangle :)

import py5
from shapely import Polygon, Point

def setup():
    py5.size(400, 400)
    py5.stroke_join(py5.ROUND)
    
def draw():
    py5.background(200)
    pts = ((100, 100), (300, 100),
           (py5.mouse_x, py5.mouse_y))
    xs, ys = zip(*pts)
    cx = sum(xs) / len(xs)
    cy = sum(ys) / len(ys)
    tri = Polygon(pts)
    py5.no_fill()
    py5.stroke_weight(1)
    py5.stroke(0, 200, 0)
    py5.shape(Point(cx, cy).buffer(5))
    py5.stroke(0, 0, 200)
    py5.shape(tri.envelope.buffer(2))
    py5.shape(tri.envelope.centroid.buffer(5))
    py5.stroke_weight(3)
    py5.stroke(0)
    py5.shape(tri)
    py5.fill(0)
    py5.shape(tri.centroid.buffer(2))

py5.run_sketch(block=False)

#py5 #python #creativeCoding

Video

I have a #CreativeCoding course at Domestika, teaching the first steps of #Python and #py5. The feedback from students always makes me happy!

Check out this work by a student:

https://www.domestika.org/en/projects/1841169-programacion?ttag=a_b_a_villares

And other testimonials:

https://www.domestika.org/en/courses/4307-designing-with-python-programming-for-a-visual-context?ttag=a_b_a_villares

Image

Image

I have a #CreativeCoding course at Domestika, teaching the first steps of #Python and #py5. The feedback from students always makes me happy!

Check out this work by a student:

https://www.domestika.org/en/projects/1841169-programacion?ttag=a_b_a_villares

And other testimonials:

https://www.domestika.org/en/courses/4307-designing-with-python-programming-for-a-visual-context?ttag=a_b_a_villares

Image

Image

@prologic@twtxt.net They would know how to do that, but the issue was anything else, like switching workspaces or opening a terminal window or any window at all. 😅

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz If you’re willing to ignore that it’s proprietary software, then Windows used to be pretty good. Like, 25 years ago. After Windows 2000 (or maybe XP) it went downhill fast. Kind of makes me sad, actually. 😂

i’m helping someone get a reverse proxy going on windows and my god this operating system is dogshit

I wasn’t really aware until recently that programs can’t choose their own window’s position on Wayland. This is very weird to me, because this was not an issue on X11 to begin with: X11 programs can request a certain position and size, but the X11 WM ultimately decides if that request is being honored or not. And users can configure that.

But apparently, this whole thing is a heated debate in the Wayland world. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org “Advanced”, well, probably more “mature”. There aren’t a ton of crazy features and that icon thing is the largest code addition in the last 10 years. %)

Speaking of OS/2 … I just realized that Windows 3.x didn’t have icons, either. If I’m not mistaken, this only got added in Windows 95. In other words, OS/2 had this feature before Windows did, because at least OS/2 2.1 from 1993 had icons. Who would have thunk.

(Now I kind of want to know which system really introduced this feature.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, huh, maybe it was just my GNOME 2 themes back then that didn’t show the icon. 🤔

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right?

Oh, no. It’s still X11. All my recent Wayland comments resulted from me trying to switch, but I think it’s still too early. Being unable to use QEMU (because it can’t capture the mouse pointer) is a pretty big blocker for me. This is completely broken, it just happens to be unnoticeable with modern guest OSes, so it’s probably not a priority for devs.

(Not to mention that I would have to fork and substantially extend dwl in order to “replicate” my X11 WM. And then, after having done that, I’d have to follow upstream Wayland development, for which I don’t have the resources. Things would need to slow down before I can do that.)

all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1

Heh. I’ve been using tiling WMs for ~15 years now, so it’s actually kind of refreshing to see something different for a change. 😅

Probably close to the older Windowses.

That particular theme is a ripoff of OS/2 Warp 3:

Image

We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98

Oh god. Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of those, either. 🥴

@movq@www.uninformativ.de According to this screenshot, KDE still shows good old application icons:

Image

And GNOME used to have them, too:

Image

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right? The only thing on this screenshot to critique is all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1 At least the file browser. 8-)

This drives me nuts when my workmates share their screens. I really don’t get it how people can work like that. You can’t even read the whole line in the IDE or log viewer with all the expanded side bars. And then there’s 200 pixels on the left and another 300 pixels on the right where the desktop wallpaper shows. Gnaa! There’s the other extreme end when somebody shares their ultra wide screen and I just have a “regularish” 16:10 monitor and don’t see shit, because it’s resized way too tiny to fit my width. Good times. :-D

Sorry for going off on a tangent here. :-) Back to your WM: It has the right mix of being subtle and still similar to motif. Probably close to the older Windowses. My memory doesn’t serve me well, but I think they actually got it fairly good in my opinion. Your purple active window title looks killer. It just fits so well. This brown one (

Image

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org True, at least old versions of KDE had icons:

Image

GNOME, on the other hand, didn’t, at least to my old screenshots from 2007:

Image

I switched to Linux in 2007 and no window manager I used since then had icons, apparently. Crazy. An icon-less existence for 18 years. (But yeah, everything is keyboard-driven here as well and there are no buttons here, either.)

Anyway, my draft is making progress:

Image

I do like this look. 😊

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I haven’t used KDE or GNOME for ages, but I’m sure KDE at least used to show application icons in the title bars. They proabably still do. But then, one could argue that KDE is mimicking Windows. I never thought like that, I always found KDE way superior, because I was able to configure it like a madman.

In i3, I don’t have any application icons. I remember missing them at the beginning. But I don’t even have the classical minimize, maximize and close buttons in the title bar either. Just the title. Being mostly keyboard driven and a tiling window manager, these buttons are not super useful, anyway.

Here’s an example of X11/Xlib being old and archaic.

X11 knows the data type “cardinal”. For example, the window property _NET_WM_ICON (which holds image data for icons) is an array of “cardinal”. I am already not really familiar with that word and I’m assuming that it comes from mathematics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number

(It could also be a bird, but probably not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinalidae)

We would probably call this an “integer” today.

EWMH says that icons are arrays of cardinals and that they’re 32-bit numbers:

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest-single/#id-1.6.13

So it’s something like 0x11223344 with 0x11 being the alpha channel, 0x22 is red, and so on.

You would assume that, when you retrieve such an array from the X11 server, you’d get an array of uint32_t, right?

Nope.

Xlib is so old, they use char for 8-bit stuff, short int for 16-bit, and long int for 32-bit:

https://x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/libX11/libX11.html#Obtaining_and_Changing_Window_Properties

That is congruent with the general C data types, so it does make sense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_data_types

Now the funny thing is, on modern x86_64, the type long int is actually 64 bits wide.

The result is that every pixel in a Pixmap, for example, is twice as large in memory as it would need to be. Just because Xlib uses long int, because uint32_t didn’t exist, yet.

And this is something that I wouldn’t know how to fix without breaking clients.

I was drafting support for showing “application icons” in my window manager, i.e. the Firefox icon in the titlebar:

Image

Then I realized: Wait a minute, lots of applications don’t set an icon? And lots of other window managers don’t show these icons, either? Openbox, pekwm, Xfce, fvwm, no icons.

Looks like macOS doesn’t show them, either?!

Has this grown out of fashion? Is this purely a Windows / OS/2 thing?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I fully agree with you on https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-07-22/0/POSTING-en.html!

Although, in the first screenshot, the window title background is much darker in the new version than the old one!1!1 :-P Kidding aside, the contrast in the old one is still better.

Also, note the missing underlines for the Alt hotkeys now. I just think that the underline in the old one is too thick.