I've observed that most "enthusiasts" are really just brand ambassadors. They've been captured by some proprietary software that doesn't run on Linux, and that's the problem of Linux. The day their set of products runs perfectly on Linux is the day Linux will be ready for them.
I think that if affinity chooses to make it work well on linux that would be a game changer for a lot of people. daVinci resolve works on linux for video so having a proper photo editor/illustrator tool that is not gimp would open up the option for most people to daily drive it. that's really the missing piece.
I mean, yes. That's how people work: They don't care about the OS for itself, the OS is a means to run the software they want to run, and it'll be ready when it runs that software.
(I'm typing this on my Linux desktop right now... but also have a separate Windows PC for running the games I want to run that don't work on Linux yet. When they work, I'll be thrilled to put Linux on that machine or its successor.)
Also, everyone seems to blame developers for anticheat shenanigans, but is invasive anticheat evem possible on linux without trivially being able to circumvent it? I don't think this is a brand issue here
Switched in, ooh i dunno, '98 or '99. Quality is about where it was then relatively speaking. Sure things have improved, mainly just systemd, and we got ACPI and later power management stuff for laptops.
Prior to that windows was better on laptops due to having the proprietary drivers or working ACPI. But it was pretty poor quality in terms of reliability, and the main problem of the included software being incredibly bare bones, combined with the experience of finding and installing software was so awful (especially if you've not got an unlimited credit card to pay for "big professional solutions").
Every time the year of the Linux desktop arrives, I'm baffled, since not much has changed on this end.
This is a strange statement for me, because I'd say that since '99 almost everything has changed. Maybe your definition of quality is a bit different than mine.
I tried to use Linux back in high school. I had a Pentium 4 computer which was pretty fast for its time. However, I had a dialip windows soft modem. You remember the driver situation. I had to boot to Windows to check my email.
Also, I was basically a child and had no idea what I was doing (I still don't but that's besides the point). Things have definitely gotten better.
> Every time the year of the Linux desktop arrives, I'm baffled, since not much has changed on this end.
It's Critic's Disease: When a band moves to a major label, they "suddenly" put out their critically acclaimed masterpiece, when before nobody would review a thing they did and mocked their fanatic fans.
"Now, they've matured."
Let them have it, though. People need to rationalize their past hostility to the right thing in some way in order to progress. If you want people to say that they were ever wrong, you'll die waiting. The situation became completely intolerable where they were insisting on staying no matter what because they weren't stuck-up nerds who care about stupid stuff that no one cares about. They were finally humiliated enough to move.
They'll end up moving to weird semi-commercial distributions that market specifically to them, too, and ridicule people who criticize those distributions for being stuck-up nerds who care about stupid stuff no one cares about. As long as it doesn't break Debian, I'm cool.
I'm sorry, but no. I ran Slackware 96, Red Hat 4.2, Mandrake 5.0, a bunch of Ubuntus from 12.04 onward, and Fedora now. It is absolutely, qualitatively different now than it was at the turn of the century.
In the Red Hat 4.2 days, it was something that I was able to use because I was a giant nerd, but I'd never ever ever have recommended it to a normal person. By Ubuntu 12.04, 15 years later, it was good enough that I'd recommend it to someone who didn't do any gaming and didn't need to use any of the desktop apps that were still then semi-common. In 2026, it's fine for just about anyone unless you are playing particular (albeit very popular) games.
Actually yes, that would be an ideal intervention of state into computing infrastructure.
It could even be revenue generating as, once developed, it could be sold out to the private sector, instead of essentially being taxed by foreign corporations for such basic digital infrastructure as hypervisors and key/value stores.
It could also act as a buffer and wage-stabiliser for people like us, who work in tech, by providing guaranteed employment when the private sector implements layoffs.
I don't know why anyone in our position wouldn't support that.
The UK also needs better distribution of data centers. Ireland is off the table for some services, like police etc. So all data ends up in London, and you need to distribute between AWS and Azure, but you don't get the regional distribution.
So, yea, build some data centers in Scotland and somewhere in the midlands, setup some good cloud services, starting with the basics - Compute, DB, and storage.
I mean, you can work for government, it's excellent (if underpaid) work. But they absolutely don't have the long term scale, focus, or investment to build something like Databricks/Foundry over several decades.
Which, they could - in fact, government (specifically meaning Civil Service) is the ideal environment in which to manage long-term scale, focus, and investment - it's just that private (in fact multinational) interests have weaponized politics against "government", which in practice means "good governance".
Billionaires have sabotaged pretty much every aspect of life by using their enormous wealth, power, and influence to hijack our public institutions. They're destroying our country and our way of life. We don't have to bend over passively to receive a shafting.
The insinuation is that they'll use their market position and political influence to extract funds for costly products and services that should be being spent on improving the NHS instead, happily driving the NHS towards a crisis so that they can privatise it. This is the project, and has always been the project of the billionaires. And even if all the current billionaires die and are replaced tomorrow, it will still be the project of the billionaires who replace them. The only solution is to eradicate billionaires.
Quite. One of my first gigs was at a large real-estate aggregator. The people were great but the highest levels of the company did
- A pet “adoption” site, in quotes because to my knowledge the pets weren’t real and it was a subscription service with no means of cancellation outside of a voicemail box
- A kind of Craigslist-esque site for selling home improvement services that was wildly vulnerable to XSS -
I discovered that during an unannounced client demo when my own manager had said “you guys try to break it”
- We were a PHP shop from the beginning. One day, engineering gets pulled into a meeting room and told that they’ve been developing 2.0 in an office downtown, with a separate team, in ColdFusion. They fired the lead engineer on the spot and most of us left or got fired shortly thereafter. They did offer to train us in CF, but the bad blood was too thick for my taste.
All that is to say, if I ever get wind of the owner or CEO being involved anywhere that I’m working, I’ll probably be walking.
Yeah, the details are scattered through the article, so you've got to pay close attention. It says that the LCA that the industry produced ignored the carbon intensivity of draining wetland, creating more farmland, and fertilizing it. When that's accounted for (last 2 paragraphs, the bit of hagiography on Searchinger), biofuels isn't a climate policy anymore. Using an LCA that ignores the carbon emissions you're creating, misleads people, whether done on purpose or not.
"These analyses have failed to count the carbon emissions that occur as farmers worldwide respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels. By using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land-use change, we found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years"
