The OSNews Fundraiser, to celebrate the fact I posted 20000 stories in 21 years, is still underway. The first major incentive was reached, and I, a long-time Linux user, published my experiences using Windows 11 for a month. It wasn’t a success. Keep donating if you want to find out what a Linux user thinks of the current state of macOS!

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The OSNews 2026 Fundraiser

➡️ Donate through Ko-Fi ➡️ Donate through SEPA transfer* ➡️ Buy merch from our store ➡️ Why a fundraiser?

€5000 incentive: Make me use Windows 11 for a month (the results were not great)
> €10000: Video tour of my office and my computers/devices collection <
€15000: Buy a Mac and use macOS for a month (and review it)
€20000: I get an OSNews tattoo

*Name: Thom Holwerda – IBAN: SE08 8000 0820 1684 4657 8414 – BIC: SWEDSESS

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Why support OSNews?

• We do not run any ads, so we don’t have to be friendly to advertisers (i.e. the technology companies we’re supposed to report on).
• We are not owned and controlled by a large media company dictating our tone and content. You’d be surprised how many other sites are.
• We do not use any “AI”; not during research, not during writing, not for images, nothing.
• We rely entirely on your support to keep going.

I want to make sure I can run OSNews for another two decades and another 20000 posts, and I need your help to do so. Since my wife, who has a tough, underpaid job in elderly care, is largely unable to work due to health reasons caused by that very same job, my income has become a lot more crucial for our kids, my wife, and myself. With OSNews readers being more skeptical of subscription-like things like our Patreon than most people, it’s exactly these one-time donations that make up the bulk of your support.

Thank you.

Raymond Chen explains what, exactly, the file winstart.bat in Windows 95 is used for.

In Windows 95, you could create a winstart.bat file in your Windows directory. During startup, the virtual machine manager initializes and creates the so-called “System virtual machine” (the “System VM”), which is the virtual machine that all Windows programs run in. But before running the user-mode kernel in that virtual machine, the virtual machine manager runs the winstart.bat batch file if it exists.

↫ Raymond Chen

Chen needs to use several diagrams to really explain what the batch file is used for, but as a very crude summary, it allows you to load TSRs that only apply to Windows programs, while not affecting any additional DOS command prompts you may load later after Windows is already running. While many think it’s a Windows 95 feature, it was already present in Windows 3.x.

A unique feature that I doubt many people made active use of.

Delphi is still very much a thing, and still very much in active development. The current stewards of Delphi, Embarcadero, released the Delphi 13 Community Edition today.

Delphi Community Edition is a full-featured, free edition of Delphi for building native applications with the Delphi language. It includes a professional IDE, visual designers, integrated compilers and debuggers, the VCL framework for Windows development, and the FireMonkey framework for creating native applications from a shared codebase across Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.

It is designed for students, hobbyists, freelancers, and small teams that meet the Community Edition license requirements.

↫ Marco Cantu at the Embarcadero blog

Delphi has been around since 1995, first released for Windows 3.1. It’s both a programming language, a variant of Object Pascal, and the accompanying IDE and related tooling and frameworks, originally developed by legendary company Borland. This latest version of course adds a number of new features to the programming language, and further improves the IDE as well, this time with a brand new 64bit version. The two frameworks for visual application development, VCL and FireMonkey, have also been updated and improved.

Sadly, it’s not open source, and the Community Edition is intended for mostly non-commercial, hobbyist use. If you want to actually earn any money using Delphi, you’re going to have to step up to Delphi 13 Florence, which isn’t free.