Well, I'm still running critical services on Solaris 10 everyday and will be running them for the foreseeable future. Granted it's on an airtight network, but still, every time I see CDE, I'm brought back 15 years ago.
I wish we could migrate to something more modern, but vendor lock-in is strong in certain instances, let alone in the embedded space.
I understand being stuck on Solaris 10, but if you don't like CDE you could theoretically install something else; didn't it even officially ship with GNOME 2 out of the box?
(This is slightly funny to me, too, because I sometimes run CDE on my shiny new Linux boxes out of a combination of nostalgia and dislike for the endless change of new things. As you say, I can install the latest CDE release, fire it up, and return to 15 years ago, if not more. Windows 11? Never heard of it. GNOME? Well Sun brands it the "Java Desktop", but whatever. CDE is the same as last time I saw it, and it will be the next time I see it. It's clunky, but that's a small price to pay for a quiet corner of the world frozen in time.)
Here in Europe , a lot of former public utilities companies and the public sector in general has been really pushing niche OSS and OpenData projects in Europe.
It's not always useful (rarely actually) for the average Joe, but it's definitely cool to see them embracing OSS and OpenData.
That's why using immutable distros is awesome. Worst case scenario, you can boot the previous version.
I've been using Fedora Silverblue for a while and never got a borked upgrade. It's not without its own flaws, but if you can live with mostly flatpak apps, it's a pretty compelling package.
Agreed 100 percent. Software is the easy part. Getting HVAC, power and network up to the levels of cloud providers is difficult to get right and prohibitively expensive.
For instance, the cost for a pair of redundant symmetric gigabit fiber is in the thousands a month and may require tens of thousands of construction costs.
These quickly add up, and the upfront costs can quickly reach six figures.
Not to mention security compliance. If you can afford all of that, seems pretty likely you'll also have SOC2/etc needs. Being able to "ignore" the whole physical security aspect of that stuff is a huge benefit of the cloud.
There’s a huge middle ground between on-prem and GCP/AWS. You can rent space and connectivity from in very competent datacenter without any of these big fixed costs.
Can rent the space, but you still have to buy the hardware. Maybe there's money to be made running some low-availability cloud service offering newer hardware.
Have you checked the price for a system capable of using two redundant 10Gbps links lately? It’s cheap. You could put gear like this in your closet at home and not feel particularly silly about it, especially if you are willing to buy still-current used enterprise gear.
For that matter, have you checked the price, in qty 1, of a server that will absolutely destroy anything reasonable from a major cloud vendor in terms of IOPS to stick behind that switch or router? Even if you believe the numbers on the website of a major server vendor and forget to ask for a discount, it’s still quite reasonable in comparison to a major cloud.
Yeah, tends to be. But it's more efficient for multiple customers who don't need the hardware full-time to share it. Someone could set that up without all the expensive HA guarantees and other stuff a regular cloud provides. Maybe was too niche in the past, but now with the AI boom...
I remember seeing a quote for 500/500 metro E from Comcast several years ago. $12k to install, $1.2k/mo. And that only involved laying a few miles of fiber, no redundancy. Dedicated lines are no joke. If you're AWS or GCP, you can be your own ISP and mitigate this to some extent, but that's just the physical connection they save on.
You can always save by going on-prem, assuming you have no uptime requirements. But the moment you sign an SLA, those savings go out the window.
Honestly, if you're not playing video games or require Windows for certain apps and if you're a little tech savvy, why are you still using Windows?
It's not a rhetorical question, it's a real one. I'm really interested in what's keeping people on Windows nowadays, considering all the spying, nagging and overall hostile attitude Microsoft has against its users.
I'm a linux developer and I run Windows 11 Pro on my devices ( a mini PC desktop & a laptop).
My development is done with VS Code + Windows terminal into WSL2, linux VMs and remote instances.
I use Windows for the great hardware support : power management, printers, scanners, webcams, usb microphone, usb wifi adapters, yubikeys. HyperV is great for VM management. MS Edge has great performance and cross-device sync. One-Drive has excellent OCR & search indexing. I use it to search & manage legal documents for various partnerships. MS Co-pilot is excellent for engineering & legal research. MS Designer (image gen) has been great for generating logos & designs. I've learned more about Powershell https://github.com/tonymet/powershell-scripts
I've spent time to remove all of the recommendations, news, online content, ads and bloatware features from Windows 11. I turn on "max performance" and everything is very snappy.
It's been the best OS experience I've had since Windows 2k.
Every tool requires time investment. I also don't like Windows 11's online /entertainment content. Many industries are going in that direction e.g. automotive.
Having things "just work" can be really appealing. I once had an issue where my Linux distro of choice was having a tough time with my monitor orientation. I got quite a few linux gurus involved and none could figure it out. I'm sure it eventually would have worked, but that's not an experience I'm particularly fond of.
And then software that does exist will often have bugs for Linux that are overlooked due to how small the market is.
Inertia. I don't have a lot of mental energy to think about operating systems. Which distribution should I use? Will my hardware be supported? I ponder these things for 2 or 3 minutes. Then I defer the question for another year.
The UNIX layout is also my favorite layout by a mile.
The backspace and control keys position is so much more natural, I don't understand why it didn't become the default layout.
> There’s a better place to put it, right on a large, easy-to-press key that you rarely use: Caps Lock. A few keyboards throughout the years have gotten this right, like Apple’s Standard Keyboard for the Macintosh II and SE:
Revising caps lock makes perfect sense since it's obsolete.
The backspace key has been at the location it is (far right of number row) for well over 100 years. Indeed its placement preceeds the existence of the Return key, as prior to the IBM Electric (1935) and similar, typewriters had a manual carriage return bar. That's a century of keyboards and muscle memory that you're trying to undo.
As a touch typist, any keyboard that moved the backspace key would be awful. Still better than the ergonomic nightmare that is the ISO european keyboard.
I've been remapping caps lock to backspace for more than a decade now, I have backspace mapped to (forward) delete. This was due to the only repetitive stress injury a keyboard has ever given me, which was strain in the outside of my right wrist from the frequency with which I would go after the backspace key.
Also, aesthetically, I like the fact that backspace is to the left and delete to the right, the directions in which the command acts. But mainly, I'm not an especially accurate typist, and I change my mind a lot, a home row backspace is a godsend.
This remap leads to some pretty comical results when I find myself using a board which doesn't have them, the first time I make a mistake it STAYS ANd I get something like that, a run of capital letters and then lowercase as I instinctively hit caps lock again to try and delete them.
I wonder what it means for SuSE Enterprise Linux in the long run.
Are they going to migrate SLE to be bug-for-bug RHEL compatible but keep their own tools on top? What about OpenSUSE?
I'm an avid SLE/OpenSUSE user and it was chosen specifically because it's not an RHEL clone.
SuSE uses btrfs for the root filesystem, and although this can be quite dangerous if it fills up, it does allow much greater flexibility in rolling back the OS to a working state.
It would be interesting if this capability returned to OpenELA. It could be done with rhel7 (and clones).
There are likely some users who consider this a must-have.
I can guarantee you that SuSE will only ever support btrfs with their own kernel. There are a ton of fixes backported in theirs. At which point you are running SLES anyway.
Bitwarden can import them too.