OSnews – 21 years and 20k posts later
Thom Holwerda reflects on 21 years of leading OSNews, marking over 20,000 posts and significant shifts in operating systems and internet culture. He highlights the growth of Linux, BSDs, and alternative systems like Haiku and Redox, while criticizing fleeting tech trends. OSNews has transitioned to a reader-funded, ad-free model, maintaining editorial independence and a minimalist web design.
- ▪Linux evolved from a niche curiosity into a popular and competitive desktop operating system, even surpassing Windows in some gaming scenarios.
- ▪Alternative operating systems like Haiku, Redox, and OS/2 have seen sustained development and increasing stability over the years.
- ▪OSNews transitioned to a fully reader-funded model, removing all advertising to maintain independence from corporate interests.
- ▪The website has retained a minimalist, fast design for over a decade and resists trend-driven redesigns.
- ▪Holwerda consistently avoided hyped technologies like cryptocurrency, NFTs, the metaverse, and AI, maintaining a skeptical and independent editorial stance.
Hacker News (Newest) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 5,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Osnews |
| Canonical URL | https://www.osnews.com/story/144962/21-years-and-20000-posts-later/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 16 May 2026 15:31:10 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-16T15:40:18.968Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-16T15:40:18.968Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 2wgMbakRfcFg |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Home > OS News > 21 years and 20000 posts later21 years and 20000 posts later Thom Holwerda 2026-05-16 OS News 3 CommentsAlmost exactly 21 years ago, in June 2005, at a mere 20 years old, I took over the managing editor role at OSNews from Eugenia. I had already published a few articles in the years prior, and had given Eugenia enough confidence to suggest me as her replacement. It was, and is, a great honour.In those 21 years and more than 20000 posts, I’ve seen a lot of beautiful things. Linux grew from a curiosity among nerds into a popular desktop operating system, and often a better choice for gaming than Windows. The BSDs flourish steadily, growing into even stronger and capable alternatives to desktop Linux than they already were.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Osnews.