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KDE Binds Itself Tightly to Systemd, Drops Support for Non-Systemd Systems

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The KDE desktop’s new login manager (PLM) in the upcoming Plasma 6.6 will mark the first time that KDE requires that the underlying OS uses systemd, if one wishes for the full KDE experience. This has especially the FreeBSD community upset , but will also affect Linux distros that do not use systemd. The focus of the KDE team is clear, as stated in the referenced Reddit thread , where a KDE developer replies that the goal is to rely on systemd for more tasks in the future. This means that PLM is just the first step. In the eyes of KDE it seems that OSes that do not use systemd are ‘niche’ and not worth supporting, with said niche Linux distros that would be cut out including everything from Gentoo to Alpine Linux and Slackware. Regardless of your stance on systemd’s merits or lack thereof, it would seem to be quite drastic for one of the major desktop environments across Linux and BSD to suddenly make this decision. It also raises the question of in how far this is related to the p...
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Print-in-Place Gripper Does It With a Single Motor

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[XYZAiden]’s concept for a flexible robotic gripper might be a few years old, but if anything it’s even more accessible now than when he first prototyped it. It uses only a single motor and requires no complex mechanical assembly, and nowadays 3D printing with flexible filament has only gotten easier and more reliable. The four-armed gripper you see here prints as a single piece, and is cable-driven with a single metal-geared servo powering the assembly. Each arm has a nylon string threaded through it so when the servo turns, it pulls each string which in turn makes each arm curl inward, closing the grip. Because of the way the gripper is made, releasing only requires relaxing the cables; an arm’s natural state is to fall open. The main downside is that the servo and cables are working at a mechanical disadvantage, so the grip won’t be particularly strong. But for lightweight, irregular objects, this could be a feature rather than a bug. The biggest advantage is that it’s extremel...
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A Higher-End Pico-Based Oscilloscope

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Hackers have been building their own basic oscilloscopes out of inexpensive MCUs and cheap LCD screens for some years now, but microcontrollers have recently become fast enough to actually make such ‘scopes useful. [NJJ], for example, used a pair of Raspberry Pi Picos to build Picotronix , an extensible combined oscilloscope and logic analyzer. This isn’t an open-source project, but it is quite well-documented, and the general design logic and workings of the device are freely available. The main board holds two Picos, one for data sampling and one to handle control, display, and external communication. The control unit is made out of stacked PCBs surrounded by a 3D-printed housing; the pinout diagrams printed on the back panel are a helpful touch. One interesting technique was to use a trimmed length of clear 3D printer filament as a light pipe for an indicator LED. Even the protocol used to communicate between the Picos is documented; the datagrams are rather reminiscent of Ether...
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Usagi’s New Computer is a Gas!

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[Dave] over at Usagi Electric has a mystery on his hands in the form of a computer. He picked up a Motorola 68000 based machine at a local swap meet.  A few boards, a backplane, and a power supply. The only information provided is the machines original purpose: gas station pump control. The computer in question is an embedded system. It uses a VME backplane, and all the cards are of the 3u variaety. The 68k and associated support chips are on one card.  Memory is on another.  A third card contains four serial ports. The software lives across three different EPROM chips. Time for a bit of reverse engineering! [Dave] quickly dumped the ROMs and looked for strings. Since the 68k is a big endian machine, some byte swapping was required to get things human readable. Once byte swapped, huge tables of human readable strings revealed themselves, including an OS version. The computer runs pSOS , an older 68k based real time operating system – exactly what one would expect a m...
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CPU Scheduler Divines The Will Of The Heavens

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Horoscopes are a great way to pass a boring lunchbreak, and an excellent excuse for ending a ill-considered relationship. They’re also a hilarious way to handle CPU scheduling under Linux, thanks to the work of [Lucas Zampieri]. The project is called scx_horoscope , and it’s a sched_Ext scheduler that makes its CPU scheduling choices based on what the heavens are doing in real time. Different tasks are handled based on different astronomical objects. For example, the Sun represents life force, and thus grants boons to key system processes. The Moon, an emotive influence, rules over interactive processes like shells and terminals. Mercury, as the god of communication, handles network and IO tasks, and so it goes from there. It’s not just a surface level thing, either—[Lucas] has implemented the influences of the elements of fire, air, earth, and water, and there are negative timeslice penalties on associated tasks when a given planet lands in retrograde. You can argue whether or not...
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Fixing Sony and Philips’ Doomed CD-i Console

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Although not intended to be a game console, the CD-i would see a a couple of games released for it that would cement its position in gaming history as the butt of countless jokes, some of which still make Nintendo upset to this day. That aside, it’s still a fascinating glimpse at the CD-based multimedia future envisioned in the early 90s, starting with its release in 1990. Recently [MattKC] decided to purchase another CD-i in a fit of nostalgic rage, and repair it to show the world what the future could have been like. Although Sony and Philips co-developed the device, Sony would go on to release the PlayStation a few years later, which made the CD-i’s life and expectations for it that much harder, leading to it slowly fading into history. The Magnavox one that [MattKC] got is one of the later models, based on the CD-i 450 that was introduced in 1994 as one of the more gaming-oriented models. As is typical with older devices that use optical media, it would not read discs. It also...
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Hackaday Links: February 1, 2026

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For many readers, more snow is the last thing they want to see right now…but what if it comes in the form of an online simulator in the style of an old DOS game? Created by [Potch], it works like one of those “falling sand” simulators, with sliders that let you control various elements of the wintry action. For more a immersive experience, open the window and let some cold air in while you play. If those old school graphics have you yearning for a simpler time, then you’ll love Places to Telnet , a page on the very slick CRT-themed telnet.org that lists servers you can connect to. The list is made up primarily of games, but there’s also systems you can call up to do things like show the weather or browse Wikipedia. They even take submissions, so if you know any interesting destinations that aren’t on the list, make sure to share with the class. Our ability to make and use tools is one of the things that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, and is an ability not often s...
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