ARM has a high probability of blowing a tire.
They have a complex relationship with their licensees which may try to cause self-sabotage trying to pull more of the money home. See the various licensing fights.
If you don’t want or need x86, what does ARM have to offer-- in the long term-- over RISC-V, which is much less coupled to a single firm’s caprice? We can assume the gap in performance will continue to shrink ovrr time.
My objections:
Instead of writing the code now, you end up having to review and debug it, which is more work IMO.
Not to mention the Xbox Box, and the shipping cintainer full of 'em, the Xbox Box Box
I always figured BSD should lean into the daemon imagery with a full heavy-metal branding: a suite of wallpapers with decidedly less cuddly daemons, a succubus OS-tan character… make it the go-to Edgelord Desktop.
Then FreeBSD introduced that stupid sphere logo. No sense of branding. :P
Or that there’s a huge amount of legit demand for mature node chips and it makes sense to own the supply for it.
The 5000 microcontrollers you inyeract with each day, by and large, do not need 5nm processes.
We saw a few years ago how relatively cheap, commodity-grade, low-complexity chips suddenly become vital when you can’t get them and they have unfinished cars piling up at the assembly plant.
I suspect Intel has a broader product range than AMD to justify the headcount, but I’m not sure where the extra resources should go.
Their networking chipsets were gold-standard in the 100M and Gigabit era, but their 2.5G stuff is spotty to the point Realtek is considered legit.
They’ve pulled back from flash, SSDs and Optane.
There must be some other rich product lines that they do and AMD doesn’t
It can also throw things against the wall with no concern for fitness-to=purpose. See “None pizza, left beef”.
So thry’re saying they have plenty of licenses for the use case, but somehow people are still pirating?
Maybe their license management paradigm is just garbage. This could be the vendor, but also poor IT policy if the users can’t requisition what they need.
As usual, service problem.
So much licensing fuckery-- dealing with floating or reissuing licenses, users needing to move to different machines-- could be solved via affordable site licensing. But that might leave dollars on the table if users don’t overbuy.
Also on modern firebreathers.
I like runit better than systemd, the packages are current, and it has most of what I want in the main repos.
I also found the documentation excellent in thst it’s a cohesive list of real-world topics rather than a 500-km-deep wiki or forum archive.
I should try a modern Slackware one day. I loved it back before I had broadband and just ordered a burned CD for each new release, but I should try following -current and the Slackbuilds stuff.
AlsoHeatsinks.
I guess the assumption is more that for me, a fresh install is often about decluttering as much as anything-- the five Wayland compositors, three music players, and six pseudo-IDEs I tried and didn’t like don’t need to follow me to the next build.
In a conventional install, that just means “don’t check the checkbox in the installer next time”. In a Nix-style system, this is a conscious process of actively deciding to remove things from the stored configuration, no?
I suppose the closest I’ve gotten was recently migrating my setup from a desktop to a new laptop. Mostly copying over some config from my home directory, but even then, I wanted enough different stuff-- removing tools I don’t use on the laptop, adding things like battery monitoring and Wi-Fi control-- that it involved some reconfiguration.
I suspect the tooling isn’t quite there yet for desktop use cases.
If I were to try to replicate my current desktop in an immutable model, it would involve a lot of manual labour in scripting or checkpointing every time I installed or configured something, to save a few hours of labour in 2 years time when I get a new drive or do a full install.
The case is easier for defined workload servers and dev environments that are regularly spun up fresh.
We get, for some reason, a huge number of window replacement contractors coming door-to-door. Because I really want to be high-pressure sold $10k worth of low quality glass from the people who are running big enough marhins to put a full page colour ad in the local newspaper every day to go with their 6 hours a day of local TV spots.
I actually said to one “We’re a Linux household. Not interested in Windows” and slammed the door on them.
I now realize cocking a rifle would have made the effect even better.
I wonder now about the social norms of the “default” versions of things in replicators.
Would you go on one ship and “soft drink” is Pepsi and another Coke, like venues today? How is it negotiated?
Or do you spend your life building and refining a profile? How is that carried around?
No, this is a general practice-- I see it a lot with third-party vendors who want you to integrate with their services. They’ll expire the documentation portal password after 90 days, but the actual user facing service still accepts the same “password123” that’s been set since 2004.
I suspect the pattern is to protect the vendors from developer scrutiny: by the time you’ve jumped through enough hoops to read the docs and realize it’s trash, the execs have signed the contracts and the sunk costs are too high to bail out.
Also add another 6 months to actually get the credentials for the test environment.
They’ve got a guy at work whose job title is basically AI Evangelist. This is terrifying in that it’s a financial tech firm handling twelve figures a year of business-- the last place where people will put up with “plausible bullshit” in their products.
I grudgingly installed the Copilot plugin, but I’m not sure what it can do for me better than a snippet library.
I asked it to generate a test suite for a function, as a rudimentary exercise, so it was able to identify “yes, there are n return values, so write n test cases” and “You’re going to actually have to CALL the function under test”, but was unable to figure out how to build the object being fed in to trigger any of those cases; to do so would require grokking much of the code base. I didn’t need to burn half a barrel of oil for that.
I’d be hesitant to trust it with “summarize this obtuse spec document” when half the time said documents are self-contradictory or downright wrong. Again, plausible bullshit isn’t suitable.
Maybe the problem is that I’m too close to the specific problem. AI tooling might be better for open-ended or free-association “why not try glue on pizza” type discussions, but when you already know “send exactly 4-7-Q-unicorn emoji in this field or the transaction is converted from USD to KPW” having to coax the machine to come to that conclusion 100% of the time is harder than just doing it yourself.
I can see the marketing and sales people love it, maybe customer service too, click one button and take one coherent “here’s why it’s broken” sentence and turn it into 500 words of flowery says-nothing prose, but I demand better from my machine overlords.
Tell me when Stable Diffusion figures out that “Carrying battleaxe” doesn’t mean “katana randomly jutting out from forearms”, maybe at that point AI will be good enough for code.
There are some recent $1 notes where the same serial was issued twice.
https://www.mycurrencycollection.com/blog/1-2013-new-york-duplicate-serial-number-mistake
The “looks for other operating systems” is huge for any desktop use with dualboot, recovery media, and plenty of systems have utilities like Memtest86 through the boot menu.
Grub always seemed weirdly complex yet incomplete- the idea that you had to pre-enumerate every bootable OS made it worse than rEFInd to me.
Chromebooks maybe?
I always figured the browser part mostly falls out of doing the Electron-for-cross-platform thing.
Fujifilm successfully repositioned towards other chemistry. I know there’s that Eastman spinoff but why wasn’t it as successful?