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Comment by bilegeek | Hacker News Reader

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bilegeek·

Note also: it just got an experimental Windows driver!

[1]https://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows/pull...

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> disables preemption systemwide

I guess that means not usable day-to-day. One infinite loop in any app and the whole OS will freeze forever. I didn't even know any modern OS could operate only with cooperative multitasking. Windows 3.1 in 1992 and PowerPC Mac OS until 2002 were the last mainstream OS's to use it...

I believe he’s referring to GPU preemption. I don’t think it’s even possible to disable cpu preemption on windows. On nix you can.

For decades no one used "nix" to mean Unix and Unix-like OSes (they used "*nix" and occasionally "Lunix") then a package manager named Nix became important and now people confusingly start using "nix" to mean Unix and Unix-like.

Interesting info. It seemed like a reasonable common one to me over the past decade on the web.

I can’t really blame you, it’s a perfectly reasonable concatenation imo. Pretty sure I’ve at least rarely seen it over the years as well.

That said, he is correct that now “nix” is going to likely be popularly associated (especially with tech types that love excessive things) with the Nix language, package manager, and NixOS, which has really been gaining steam. Especially these past few years.

It was what I first thought of as well, given I use them.

...And of course after the edit window is over, it occurs to me I got my wires crossed. "Concatenation" is adding two strings/words.

What I meant was "contraction".

What’s the performance like on this?

Imagine still using Windows in 2023

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