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Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

I won't move to Linux, because ultimately I've realized I want people who keep developer perfectionism in check.

For a semi-recent example, a lone Debian developer decided that Which should longer be used, and a huge fight ensued ( https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/874049/bf89a969ed3dde87/ )

In a large corporation, their boss would swing by and tell them customers need that tool, and it can't be removed willy-nilly.

And I won't move to Mac, because of the missing link in Apple's product lineup. I'd move over in a heartbeat, if they had a midrange tower, beefier than an Mini, less expensive than a Pro, and sans monitor (iMac)

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> In a large corporation, their boss would swing by and tell them customers need that tool, and it can't be removed willy-nilly.

Vastly more arbitrary and intrusive changes routinely occur in large corporations, where community complaints are often ignored rather than addressed by quickly reverting the offending change.

Such as? I'm predicting most examples would be things where it's only some small subset of the community, who would be much better served with a competing product.

For anyone interested, I have written the 'which' for Windows (cmd.exe) some time ago: https://metacpan.org/release/DOLMEN/Win32-App-which-1.030/so...

Yes there was some drama about removing which, but they (very quickly) decided to keep Which around. The same exact thing can happen in large organizations. The difference is, in Debian everything is out in the open so we see the massive email chain. In a large org that would all be behind the scenes.

>And I won't move to Mac, because of the missing link in Apple's product lineup. I'd move over in a heartbeat, if they had a midrange tower, beefier than an Mini, less expensive than a Pro, and sans monitor (iMac)

There's been some rumours of such a model, although not too frequently, although it's unknown to what price point it'd set.

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/03/01/fan-favorite-power-mac-...

I imagine they will release a Mac Mini (Pro) at some point with the same M1 Pro/Max internals at the new MacBook Pro, except inside a desktop computer. There's no doubt that it'd be beefier, but it might lack some of the Mac Pro features such as internal expandability (although it's still a question mark as to how internal expandability will work when the Mac Pro becomes an ARM machine).

It looks like the bigger iMacs will get optional bigger CPUs. I haven't heard about the Mini, but it has space and thermals to spare after ditching x86 space heaters, so an M1 Pro or M1 Max would still fit neatly.

As for the MacPro, my guess is Apple will keep the chip count to one, but add more performance cores while moving some accelerators outside the CPU package. Video encoders/decoders aren't as bandwidth-hungry as GPUs.

> In a large corporation, their boss would swing by and tell them customers need that tool, and it can't be removed willy-nilly.

Didn't the bosses at Microsoft recently[1] nerf an already-implemented free/community .Net feature (edit: Hot Reload) so it could be a Visual Studio exclusive? Yes, they reversed course after a getting blowback, but I don't think your assumption about bosses championing for (all) customers is correct.

1. https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/22/22740701/microsoft-dotne...

2. https://www.thurrott.com/dev/258605/microsoft-backs-down-fro...

The answer lies in your post itself. Free/community != customers. Customers by definition spend money on something.

I am too eagerly awaiting an M1 Max based Mini with 64 gigs of RAM. Or an iMac Pro with one. I find the 16GB limit a bit constraining for a computer that should be useful for at least half a decade.

I also totally didn't notice the Debian thing, but I have moved a couple scripts I use to have `command` instead of which for detecting whether a given executable is available or not (those scripts need to run unmodified on Linux and macOS) and `command` is the POSIX way to do it.

I'd strongly suggest flagging avoidable non-POSIX approaches whenever possible. POSIX still is the standard and, if you play nice, you'll be able to run a script everywhere, from MINIX to AIX to zOS's POSIX environment (an EBCDIC Unix!). So far, shellcheck has been ruthlessly teaching me to write better shell scripts.

The entire contents of Merriam-Webster fail to adequately explain how little I care whether or not I can run my scripts on MINIX or AIX.

"The script you wrote last week for Debian no longer runs on Debian, but if you follow this guide, you can run it on an PDP-11!"

Yay..

If you wrote it for POSIX, you can be sure it’ll run today and continue to run unmodified for the next 50 years.

Software needs to be durable.

I doubt that bosses of large corporations keep the customer's needs as their priority. As far as my experience goes, people in power are just as human in either structure, and they can, and do make decisions that some don't agree with.

Also, there are Linux distros that are maintained by large corporations, like Oracle Linux. Not every distro is governed the same way.

There are enlightened companies out there:

“How much time would a $4,000, top-of-the market machine like the M1 shave off from each build? How much total time over 2 years? How much “value” does this time mean per engineer?

With the M1, the answer is a no-brainier. The $4,000 per engineer spent will bring back so much more productivity versus top-of-the-market Intel ones, including the 2021 one.“

https://9to5mac.com/2021/11/08/heres-why-twitter-uber-and-mo...

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