We’ve seen a bunch of efforts to develop free and open source smartphone operating systems over the past decade. But most have relied on at least some proprietary drivers and other software – even on ...

Developers talk a lot about “immutability.” Outside the technical world, it usually means something negative: unmoving, inflexible, and entrenched. However, in the technical field, these features ...

Would you believe that almost all of the technology you use today is here because of a misbehaving printer? Believe it. In the early 1980s, an MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory programmer named ...

Why it matters: Debian is not the oldest Linux operating system out there, being just a month "younger" than Slackware. But the project started by Ian Murdock certainly is the most successful, as it ...

The last time I spent much time thinking about the QNX operating system was when Lee spent a few weeks in 2011 figuring out how to root a BlackBerry PlayBook tablet running the QNX-based PlayBook OS, ...

If I asked you to name the operating systems people actually use, I would probably get three answers: Windows, macOS, and “Linux, probably.” That is a fair answer in 2026, but it is also a very narrow ...

Free operating systems based on the Linux operating system kernel invented and published by Linus Torvalds are now a serious alternative to Windows, not least due to the wide range of open source ...

Want Google out of your life? It's pretty easy to find alternative search, email, and photo storage providers, but it's much harder to come up with a mobile operating system that's free of Google. The ...

Using Ubuntu Linux to import and edit photos from a digital camera. By J. D. Biersdorfer Companies are starting to see the advantages of being able to do large amounts of computing with technology ...

When it comes to the operating systems you can actually use on your computer, there are really only three main ones that are ever brought up. You have Windows 11, macOS, and Linux (or, more accurately ...