Operating Systems and Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 04, 2025

• Windows Central ☛ WINUX: The Linux Distro Giving Windows 11 Users a Familiar Experience Without Red Tape

  The clock keeps ticking and Microsoft's end of support date for Windows 10 is edging even closer. While Windows 11 surpassed Windows 10 as the most dominant desktop operating system, recent stats shared by Statcounter reveals that the former's market share dropped by 4% to to 49.08%, but perhaps more interestingly the latter's market share weirdly gained 2.65% market share, pushing it to 45.53% despite its imminent death.

  A public interest group petitioned Microsoft to reconsider its decision to pull the plug on Windows 10 in October 14, 2025 as it could lead to the single biggest jump in junked computers ever. However, the software giant has come up several options for users to continue using Windows 10, even after it cuts support for the operating system, ensuring that they continue receiving security updates.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • The Register UK ☛ IBM Cloud to end free human support, suggests customers use enhanced AI instead

    IBM Cloud will update the services it provides under its Basic Support tier, which will move to a self-service model in January 2026.

    The Basic Support tier is free to all IBM Cloud customers. Big Blue describes it as “Basic business protection that is included with your IBM Cloud Pay-As-You-Go or Subscription account.” The service is well-named as it includes the ability to raise cases with IBM’s support team 24x7, but doesn’t include a guaranteed initial response time or a dedicated account manager.

    In an email sent to customers, IBM advises the changes coming next year mean Basic Support users will lose the opportunity to “open or escalate technical support cases through the portal or APIs” but can “self-report service issues (e.g., hardware or backup failures) via the Cloud Console” and “open Billing and Account cases in the IBM Cloud Support Portal.”

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu Fridge ☛ The Fridge: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 907

    Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 907 for the week of August 24 – 30, 2025. The full version of this issue is available here.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers

    • Mozilla

      • LWN ☛ The tangled web of XSLT browser support

        While XML documents are suitable for consumption by computers, they are verbose and not particularly readable by humans. XSLT was developed as a language for transforming XML documents into other formats such as HTML, plain text, or other XML formats. When an XML document is served to a web browser with an XSL stylesheet, the browser can render the document into something more suitable for the user to read. For example, the US Congress web site serves legislation as XML with an XSL stylesheet, such as this bill from 2021.

        All of the major web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.) support client-side XSLT rendering, but they only support the 1.0 version that was finalized in November 1999. XSLT development has continued; the current 3.0 version of the standard was finalized in 2017, but the major browser vendors have shown little interest in keeping up with XSLT developments in this century.

        Chrome and Safari use libxslt, while Firefox uses the TransforMiiX XSLT processor. LWN covered some of the history of libxslt in June; that implementation has suffered from a lack of resources for quite some time, and the longtime maintainer, Nick Wellnhofer, announced he was stepping down in June. Iván Chavero has offered to take over the project, and was vouched for by Federico Mena Quintero. He will, however, need to get up to speed with XSLT and the code base for the project.

        It is worth noting that client-side rendering is not the only option for using XSLT to render XML as HTML for viewing in a web browser. There are a number of open-source projects, such as Apache Xalan and Saxon, that offer server-side processing for XSLT.

  • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • It's FOSS ☛ Meet Pogocache: The High-Performance, Multi-Protocol Redis Alternative

      Caching systems are critical in modern applications, speeding up data access and reducing database load. The space has known names like Redis, Memcached, Valkey, Dragonfly, and Garnet, who have established themselves with reliable performance and broad adoption across industries.

      And now, there's a new contender that aims to offer fast, flexible caching while supporting protocols that developers already use.