Skip to contentThese days you can play plenty of Windows games on Linux PCs thanks to Valve’s proton software. And a growing number of games that were originally made for Windows have also been ported to run natively on Linux.All of which is to say that if you really want to run an older PC game like Half Life on an open source operating system, you have plenty of options for doing that. But it’s still pretty nifty to see that you can also now run Half Life on an open source operating system that’s not based on Linux.ReactOS is an open source operating system designed to run Windows software and drivers while offering a Windows-like desktop experience. It’s been in development for around 30 years, but progress has been rather slow in recent years… ReactOS is still considered alpha software, and it just recently gained the ability to play Half Life, a Windows PC game that’s almost as old as the ReactOS project itself.Oh, and it’s kind of buggy – apparently the game won’t run on systems with more than 2GB of RAM. If you do manage to load the game, it crashes on exit. And there are issues with the game menu buttons.Still, it’s kind of cool to see ReactOS taking one more baby step toward becoming a true open source Windows alternative… even if it’s more likely to be a Windows 98 alternative than Windows 11.ReactOS is an open source operating system designed to let you run Windows applications without installing Windows. Under development for nearly 3 decades, it’s still in Alpha. But now you can run Half-Life on it (a game from 1998). www.phoronix.com/news/ReactOS…[image or embed]— Liliputing (@liliputing.bsky.social) June 12, 2026 at 3:55 PMMicrosoft PowerToys 0.100 brings a new Shortcut Guide that pops up as a side pane, displaying system-wide and app-specific shortcuts, an Extension Gallery for discovering Command Palette add-ons, and more. devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/…[image or embed]— Liliputing (@liliputing.bsky.social) June 12, 2026 at 12:30 PMThe Rotary Mouse is a wireless mouse with an unusual scroll wheel that spins horizontally rather than vertically. Heading to Kickstarter soon. www.techpowerup.com/349915/new-a…[image or embed]— Liliputing (@liliputing.bsky.social) June 12, 2026 at 11:59 AMBeelink’s Me Pro is a NAS that’s currently available with Intel inside, and the company says AMD and Arm-powered models are on the way. Now it looks like customers in China will have another option thanks to a model with a Loongson 2K3000 chip. www.ithome.com/0/963/658.htm[image or embed]— Liliputing (@liliputing.bsky.social) June 12, 2026 at 3:13 PMKeep up on the latest headlines by following Liliputing on Bluesky or @[email protected] on Mastodon. You can also follow Liliputing on Threads and Facebook.