They are pushing hard on the developer experience because greenfield projects aren’t being built using Windows centric tooling anymore. If it’s server it’s Linux, and if it’s client it’s either electron or a web app. What will kill Windows is when there is no reason to buy Windows. MS recognizes this fact and has been pivoting to service offerings for that reason. They want users to make an MS account so they can herd people into their ecosystem.

DDG has had cost issues with some of the more complex queries. Exclusions (-) for example are very expensive, as Bing recently raised their prices. I think this is why search has gotten worse with DDG recently.

I firmly maintain that if Microsoft gave a shit about ARM, they would be defaulting every one of their compilers to produce fat x86/aarch64 binaries. The reality is, however, that they don’t care about the hardware so long as it is good enough.

Nobody will buy the hardware if they can’t commit to supporting the software. In a previous role, I was responsible for advising purchasing decisions for my company’s laptop fleet. The Surface X (Arm edition) looked cool, but we weren’t willing to take the risk, because at the time Microsoft had far worse transitional support than they do now. It’s gotten better, but no one in their right mind is going to make the kind of volume purchases that actually drive adoption until they demonstrate they are in it for the long haul. It’s a chicken and egg problem, and Microsoft doesn’t care what hardware you are using, so long as it is running Windows or using (expensive) Windows services.

They probably fear that the failed Windows mobile lineup tainted the brand name for the product’s target demographic.

OMG is it bad. We used a couple WD drives for a surveillance camera array and they didn’t last a year. Two drives failed 9 months apart. Ended up going on Blackblaze and picking what looked best for our XFS Raid 10 having learned that lesson the hard way.

This 1000%. Since basically High School I’ve been on Ubuntu for the machines I need to work, because at the end of the day it usually does. Some of the people I meet see that I use a Chromebook with the containers enabled and have similar reactions. “How can you use that it’s not even real Linux?”, as if it isn’t literally a Linux kernel. The Steam Deck is popular because you don’t need to know Linux to use it, and Ubuntu is popular because you don’t need to know a lot of Linux to use it.

I have a lot of love for OpenSuse. Back in my teenage years, I used it and Ubuntu a lot. zypper is the best package manager, and YaST made configuration easier since I didn’t know config files yet.

Japan too. The U.S. Congress threatened Japan with a trade war if they didn’t shutter their TRON project to create a domestic Unix. Nowadays it’s almost entirely Windows, and Japan has stagnated in terms of technology. They might have another chance at it with the world searching for an alternative to Taiwan for semiconductors and the potential legal status of AI training in Japan.

I don’t care whose indexes they use so long as the results are good. The problem isn’t the index, it’s how the contents get prioritized and presented. Kagi happens to do so well for me.

He offered to start a conversation about the blog post and give his perspective. The only thing I see here is the author refusing to stand on their post.

Having done my time as an Army medic, this is incorrect. It takes more force than that, but less than you might think. A good 25 kilos with some velocity behind it will easily sever a phalange. Up it to 50 or 80 kilos and you can claim an arm or shin. Mass is the real killer. I’ve seen a vehicle at comically slow speed absolutely yeet someone because it had several tons of momentum behind it.

Don’t give them ideas 😂

If Canonical and RedHat weren’t backing different horses (Snap vs Flatpak), I could see the app containerization system coming under systemD as well fairly soon. The Cosmic DE project uses functionality from systemD to overlay changes onto the system that are reversible, so that alpha versions of Cosmic can be tested without permanently changing the base system. Imagine apps shipping on whatever container runtime, and dynamically overlaying system-level changes as needed for things that tap into the host system via systemd-sysext.

A lot (and I mean a lot) of criticism can be leveled at systemD. One of the upsides of it becoming popular is the standardization of much of things from the developers’ perspective. It’s easier to target multiple distros when you can rely on systemD’s single implementation of the feature. Over the next decade, I forsee systemD eating more and more of the userspace, until you are only left with managing the differences between DEs and which display server they are using. We’re already headed towards immutable base systems with apps shipping with their own dependencies, which we reduce the differences between distros even further.

The KPIs are coming for their Ads Money too. I commented elsewhere about how Search is being bent to the will of Ads, and it’s Raghaven who’s being enabled by Sundar to do it. They’ve been hit with the problem that Ads isn’t growing as expected. Having worked with the new Google Ads dashboard, it’s no wonder why. It’s clunky, the mobile app is missing functionality, and the web app is broken on mobile. Throw on top the constant interruptions due to their AI flagging perfectly normal campaigns, and it’s enough to push people elsewhere. Sundar is the Ballmer of Google, and unless he’s deposed he will drive Google down the path the likes of IBM or Oracle.

Something I appreciate about Lemmy is that garbage links get downvoted into oblivion like they observe. Unlike the alien site where people don’t even open the link and just argue about the headline.

“hello system” is pretty nice to look at, and has some Mac-isms I find helpful. FreeBSD has a new release recently, so maybe Nomad or GhostBSD could be worth trying. You’ll find FreeBSD is a lot more “consistent” compared to Linux, but be prepared for random hardware to not work.

A company made me an offer last year when I was looking for startups, but they required me to move to Austin. Austin is a nice place, but it’s unfortunately surrounded by Texas. Fast forward to today and they are moving out of Texas because it’s too expensive and they are having trouble retaining talent. The incentives the city has been offering to foster their own Silicon Valley are stalling because it’s not much cheaper and the state legislature is a Barnum circus of inhumanity.

Honestly it isn’t. Support for anything front-end related is way more sparse compared to Linux.

I use Claude to write plenty of the code we use, but it comes with the huge caveat that you can’t blindly accept what it says. Ever hear newscasters talk about some hacker thing and wonder how they get it so wrong? Same thing with AI code sometimes. If you can code you can tell what it does wrong.