dandotway

I saw "Red Hat" on the login screen of a retail cash register a few years ago. If Ubuntu is ready and able to be installed on old workstations with Win 10 that are otherwise about to lose security updates, that could be millions of dollars cheaper than replacing 10,000+ Dells just to get Win 11. And there are still enterprises around that financially reward bean counters that successfully cut costs to increase profitability. So does this create an opening for enterprise Linux?

At the Windows-centric companies I've worked for it was mostly just running Outlook that was the thing we all absolutely had to do every day, with only occasional use of Word.

So many businesses now have replaced Windows native business apps with either web based ones or (less and less) Java apps. Both work on Linux.

Question: How good is Thunderbird nowadays as an alternative to Outlook, from a business decision maker perspective? (Or is there better than Thunderbird for businesses deeply entrenched in Outlook?)

The SPARK example I found uses singly-linked lists and says doubly-linked lists and graphs with cycles are not supported:

https://blog.adacore.com/pointer-based-data-structures-in-sp...

Yes, I could and should have been more explicit when I spoke of 'linked lists' without further qualification. While talking about these languages designed to eliminate all ambiguity I would do well to be unambiguous. :-)

Yes, SPARK has a Rust-like borrow checker that doesn't allow implementing arbitrary pointer graphs. You have to use 'unsafe Rust' to implement linked list containers which, once implemented, other parts of the codebase can then consume in 'safe Rust'. Seems to be the same deal with SPARK ('safe Ada') vs vanilla Ada ('unsafe Ada').

Great question. C/C++ is definitely trending upward in 'safe software' systems even though it isn't ready and industry as a whole isn't (as far as I know) using Frama-C. Are Tesla/Google/Apple hiring Ada engineers to build the car autopilots that control whether we live or die? Nope, seems to all be C++, God help us all.

Responding to each point you raised:

'Frama-C so verbose': ??? Ada is the most verbose programming language, ever, even before you had the extremely verbose Spark contracts. Could you show me an example of Frama-C with annotations being more verbose than Ada/Spark?

'Spark has added checks on memory ownership': A Rust-like pointer ownership tester has its advantages and limitations.

Advantages: if you have team of 20 engineers working on a 20 million line web browser and no single engineer understands how the whole code base works, a pointer borrow-checker prevents an important class of errors.

Disadvantages: Rust tutorials point out that you have to resort to 'unsafe Rust' to implement even an intro-to-computer-science linked list. You have to use unsafe Rust to implement your fancy heap manipulation algorithms. Unsafe vs safe Rust is a bit like Ada vs. Spark ("safe Ada").

'I'd be quite happy to find more people diving into Frama-C': Frama-C is trending upward and Ada is in decline, ever since the Ariane 5 explosion on 4 June 1996. The US DOD consequently shut down its Ada office and eliminated the Ada requirement, and C/C++ subsets increasingly dominated.

Ada's formal verification capabilities have fallen behind Frama-C for ANSI/ISO C.

Frama-C allows formal verification of essentially arbitrary heap manipulation algorithms. You can implement linked lists and graphs in traditional C with Frama-C annotations in the comments, then prove your code never dereferences NULL, never has an integer overflow, etc.

One single commercial Ada vendor offers Spark, a formally verifiable subset of Ada. Spark does not allow arbitrary dynamically allocated data structures like Frama-C does.

https://frama-c.com/

Secure boot is necessary but not in itself sufficient for ransomware prevention. The worst ransomware hijacks the boot process. It can encrypt the entire hard drive. But even with uncompromised secure boot, a ransomware program can still encrypt valuable filesystem directories, just not the entire OS install.

This is also the experience with Ubuntu on Windows WSL:

  $ ps aux
  USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
  root         1  3.5  0.0   8944   332 ?        Ssl  11:38   0:00 /init
  root         7  0.0  0.0   8944   228 tty1     Ss   11:38   0:00 /init
  dando        8  1.7  0.0  16804  3396 tty1     S    11:38   0:00 -bash
  dando       32  0.0  0.0  17392  1916 tty1     R    11:38   0:00 ps aux

A strange irony that the most purist Unix-like Linux is to be found in the belly of the Windows beast, for the equivalent of those hundreds of processes doing who knows what on a typical native Linux install are instead all in Windows Task Manager.

Well, you can't exactly relocate a campus with 5,000-10,000 employees to another state 'on a whim', but yeah, your point still stands that it's a lot easier than moving a factory that builds physical things.

I recall IBM and other tech companies being called out for occasionally deliberately moving campuses to other states because this creates an excuse to sever certain employees who can't otherwise be lawfully fired.

> macos for my work machine

When has Apple ever supported a computer for 10+ years like Windows routinely does? I have a 2012 iPad I can only use as a Kindle and PDF reader because the ancient Safari version on it doesn't support modern Javascript features like the "let" keyword that websites now use, and this is exactly what Apple wants: if I can't install Firefox on my iPad and if Apple won't update Safari, my only choice is to buy a new device. But I never again bought a new iPad, I learned my lesson.

My old iPad can still run the original Flappy Bird. New $1000+ iPad Pros can't do this, because Apple deliberately breaks old apps on new devices, to encourage developers to charge customers for an updated app that continues to work on new devices, which Apple gets its mandatory 30% cut of.

Apple also ties Xcode releases to the most recent macOS releases. Apple doesn't want you being able to run the newest Xcode on a 10 year old Mac so that you can keep your old iOS game you wrote in college still working, oh no, you have to buy a new Mac for that, and keep paying your $99/year membership dues.

Microsoft lets you run Visual Studio on very old computers, unlike Apple with Xcode.

High-profile ransomware attacks have made the news this year and so MS decided Win 11 should only be on computers that can secure the boot process so that ransomware can't encrypt your hard drive until you send bitcoins to Ukraine.

For CPU and disk, sure, but GPU is the next frontier, and WSL on Win 11 allows the GPU to be used will full hardware accelerated OpenGL. Microsoft's own documentation even suggests installing Chrome for Linux inside WSL:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-a...

I actually tried KDE Plasma on 20.04 LTS just a few days ago, and it has HiDPI bugs. When moving the mouse pointer over the desktop the pointer is drawn too small rather than 200% scale. I actually like the KDE taskbar better than Gnome's default. (I ended up installing the Gnome dash-to-dock extension to get a KDE-like taskbar.) I've tried Gnome, KDE, Xfce, and old-school window managers (mostly FVWM2) and Gnome has the fewest overall issues (particularly for HiDPI) but it still has a large number of bugs, especially when installing user themes, which I learned to just avoid for the sake of my sanity. (I actually tried KDE because I wanted to avoid installing dash-to-dock on Gnome, because of how often I've seen extension bugs on Gnome.)

Wayland still isn't 100% there for nVidia yet. "Well don't use nVidia then!" Well, for many machine learning workflows and other use cases non-nVidia isn't 100% there yet. But yeah, Linux users should avoid nVidia to the maximum extent possible.

Your Firefox tip sounds good, thank you.

I've been eyeing a Dell XPS Developer Edition for a long time but other HNers told me it suffers noticeable coil whine. Have you noticed any coil whine on the XPS?

There was also a story 5 days ago that putting an XPS in a bag voids its warranty unless it is completely powered off. Dell says you can't just close the lid to put the laptop in a sleep state before throwing it in your backpack:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952

(Of course, this could just be a CYA cover-your-ass clause that Dell's lawyers said to throw in to reduce lawsuit losses from lithium battery fires that affect all laptop makers including Apple. If the sales losses from this CYA clause's bad publicity are less than the reduction in lawsuit losses then I guess it's a win for Dell's balance sheet. I haven't seen any evidence that Dells are more prone to fires than any other brand.)

EDIT: I was just reading the linked XPS thread and it sounds like the overheating issue is due to a change in how sleep states were traditionally handled (S1/S3 etc.). This affects all Windows laptops, not just the XPS. A Linux XPS can actually avoid the issue if Linux sleep states are configured correctly, according to posters in the discussion.

Main reason I gave up on desktop Linux after 20 years is that Gnome is being forced on us and software is no longer playing as nice on traditional X11 window managers. I use HiDPI 4K screens and if you use a traditional window manager like FVWM which doesn't do all the modern desktop bus systemd stuff then you are outta luck.

  echo 'Xft.dpi: 192' | xrdb -merge

Is the first step to getting hidpi to work. But some 'modern' apps ignore this, but might respond to

  export GDK_SCALE=2

But then there are apps which respond to both of these settings and give you 400% scaling, or give you 400% scaling for some UI elements, 200% for other UI elements.... I just installed Windows, set my desktop to 200% scaling and I was all done and could finally start doing work again that actually makes money, and I even have more spare time for HN now that I don't have to constantly study the Arch Wiki to fix the next broken Linux thing.

Windows is actually better for online privacy because a Windows browser is so much more mainstream. If you are broadcasting your "Linux" OS in your browser User-Agent string to every website you visit you are not terribly anonymous online because you are broadcasting you are among the elite 1% of computer users. Yes, you can install a browser extension to say your User-Agent is Windows, but have you?

WSL2 is paradoxically the best and worst thing to happen to desktop Linux.

It is the best thing because it makes Linux so easy to install and get started with on Windows PCs which dominate the market.

It is the worst thing because desktop Linux users are no longer forced to dogfood and fix laptop hardware issues, and so these issues will continue to go unfixed, and native desktop Linux installs will thus continue to suffer.

Case in point: I've used desktop Linux for more than 20 years and I recently moved to using WSL on Windows because I love having all my hardware devices like my photo printer "just work" on Windows and I love getting great laptop battery life.

It looks like the Thinkpad X1 Carbon is the only killer laptop you can buy with Linux preinstalled that has a 4K UHD screen option, but Lenovo makes the buying experience extremely frustrating. Lenovo overprices Thinkpads most of the year and then occasionally does killer sales. And Lenovo has lately been suffering 4 month shipping delays on many Thinkpad configurations. I'm sick of wasting time waiting for the sales and then trying to buy before the reseller bots buy up the deals. So I bought a non-Thinkpad Win 10 laptop instead and I run WSL on it for my Linux needs.

Careful there - Microsoft and Canonical are increasingly cultivating a very close relationship that includes lucrative data sharing. There was a scary story on HN seven months ago, 'I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure':

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114194

Canonical knows everything an Ubuntu install at your IP address installs with "apt get" unless you change your repos to a mirror that you know for a fact doesn't share its logs with Canonical. And Canonical is pushing the Snap Store that it alone owns and controls, and which it can Big Brother monitor what every single IP addr installs.

So Canonical doesn't need closed source spyware to make money spying on you.

For the most part though, Canonical seems it will only use its spy data to market products developers are actually potentially interested in. If you download a bunch of container tools Canonical may wish to market to you that a certain service they make money from might work for your needs. And all things considered it actually might.

I do use Ubuntu btw, mostly in WSL though. I will go back to native Ubuntu though once all the art and music tools I need run as well on native Ubuntu as they do on Windows, and once Ubuntu is as hassle free on laptops as Windows is. I recently bricked a native Ubuntu install because I forgot to turn off secure boot, which somehow broke the proprietary nVidia drivers I need.

EDIT: Canonical seems to have closed down its Ubuntu One cloud storage product... I thought Canonical was still trying to offer an alternative to AWS/IBM/Google/Azure but it seems they are just focusing on their OS now. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

> Unfortunately Central Washington is part of a state that is known for erratic, wild, and unpredictable whims when it comes to any company whose name isn't "Boeing"

Microsoft, Amazon, Nintendo, etc., have a strong WA presence and what has WA done to them that is 'unpredictable'? WA has no state income tax and is very billionaire and business friendly. You are perhaps thinking of Seattle politics, but Seattle!=WA. WA votes very blue during elections but it's for the pro-wealthy billionaire-friendly blues. WA doesn't elect the AOC squad type blues.

That list is missing Deborah, one of the 'Judges' of ancient Israel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah

And if the list is limited to 'Queens' then I guess that means it rules out Joan of Arc:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc

It seems female warriors and rulers aren't absent from history; rather, they are absent from the knowledge of historians.

You were probably downvoted because of Poe's Law[1]. Mods didn't detect your satirism when you spoke of a golden age of domestic terror. Circa 1970 was also a golden age of domestic terror in other countries too, notably the IRA bombings of English interests. ;-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

EDIT: I hope my own satirical post doesn't put me on some 3-letter agency watchlist. You can't be too careful nowadays.

It's slowly starting to trend because of three realizations backend developers are having: (1.) Although scalability is hard, distributed apps are really hard, particularly distributed debugging and logging. (2.) Monolithic servers are now powerful enough to host an entire billion dollar internet business with millions of simultaneous users.[*] (3.) Cloud providers make their huge profits in part by carefully engineering their billing to maximize how much they dark-pattern surprise-bill their clients the moment they have unexpected growth.

[*] In early 2010s, WhatsApp could handle 2M connections on a single 1U with Erlang; MigratoryData could handle 10-12M connections with Java on Linux. Epyc servers are even more powerful now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem

Class B shareholders can do anything they want that hurts class A shareholders, so long as class A shareholders can't successfully sue. 67.8% of Fortune 500 companies incorporate in the state of Delaware[1], largely because Delaware has a Court of Chancery that handles corporate cases and is renowned for making shareholder lawsuits unsuccessful.

[1] https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/incorporating-in-delaware...

2010: Move to cloud hosting to save yourself from scalability hassles.

2020: Move from cloud hosting to save yourself from surprise billing hassles.

For Merkel's generation in East Germany, nudism was a popular form of youthful rebellion (and Europeans are generally less puritanical about nudity than Americans). When some old black and white pictures of a group of young nude German women turned up with one of the women bearing a striking resemblance to a younger Merkel, Merkel's response has always been, "No comment."

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/angela-merkel-n...

The article said it's not activated by default for western buyers, but that Xiaomi has the ability to remotely enable it. On that note, there is no setting on either Apple or Google phones that lets you tell the phone, "Under no circumstances remotely install or disable software on my device unless I give explicit consent. I paid for this phone with my own money and I own it and control it."

Google and Apple are the real owners of Google and Apple phones. They can install and uninstall whatever they want, whenever they want.

You are absolutely correct there is no "solid theory" for FTL. Rather, there is "solid theory" FTL truly is impossible in the universe as we know it, because it would allow effects to happen before the events that caused them. It would allow messages to be sent back in time. The speed of light is much more than the speed of light: it is the speed of causality itself. If the sun were to suddenly disappear, the earth would continue to orbit the disappeared sun for the roughly 8 minutes that lightspeed (or causality-speed) requires for covering the earth-sun distance. Anytime any event happens anywhere in the universe, you can imagine an invisible sphere exploding outward from that event in all directions at lightspeed (causality-speed). The event cannot cause an effect anywhere in the universe until this expanding sphere hits that part of the universe. So picture one of these spheres expanding outward from you at the moment you were born. At age 80 your birth-sphere now has a radius of 80 light-years. There is a 160 light-year diameter ball in the Milky Way all the effects of your birth are limited to. It will be millions of years before anything you ever could have done could have any effect whatsoever in the Andromeda galaxy. There is a "glass half full" optimistic view of this limitation: intergalactic Thanos/Hitler types cannot exist in the universe as we know it. We are well quarantined from the evil in other galaxies (if any exists), and other galaxies are well-quarantined from our evil here (where it definitely exists).

My 2012 iPad is stuck on iOS 9 and can't load many websites anymore, such as Reddit, because its Safari version is too old to support the "let" keyword, etc. This is one of two reasons Apple only allows Safari on iPhones. Besides this forced obsolescence, the other reason is that Apple can auction to the highest bidder who is the default search engine on Safari; Googe pays billions to be the default search.

But those improvements aren't worth buying a new phone for most of us, as the existing camera and speed is just fine for messaging, reddit, twitter, all the most common smartphone stuff. Also, the newest phones still cripple mobile WebGL game development so that gamedevs can't bypass the App Store 30% commission.

It's just like how buying a shiny new car is pointless for most of us: old cars get us from home to the grocery store and back just as fast, they have airbags and crash safety testing, etc. Older cars are also less likely to have broken software updates than newer "smart cars", too. In rural areas farmers pay premium prices for 40+ year old tractors because they don't have the anti-right-to-repair electronic doodads that ensure only dealers can service the thing.

We hit peak cell phone back around 2015. Indeed, the older phones have a nice privacy feature the new ones don't: they are too old for Apple and Google to bother quietly rolling out their 'think of the children' spyware on, which, once installed, will be used to determine who photographed police brutality at protests, who photographed a senator with a young intern, who photographed Chinese PLA soldiers hauling those with 'low social credit scores' to Re-education Through Labor camps.

Unless you crack the phone's screen and the battery is shot, there's no point in buying a new one. I'll buy another used one on Amazon, eBay, or Craigslist when I must.

I use a 2014 mobile phone. It has a good camera with Optical Image Stabilization, just like brand new $1000+ phones. It has a high density retina display that displays razer sharp text, just like new phones. It can load all the web pages people read and all the most popular apps, just like new phones.

+1 As a society we want to do all we can to accommodate the handicapped so they can work, and many deaf persons are extremely effective lip-readers able to handle retail customer interactions. If Richard's lip-reading isn't up to the job, a non customer facing role would be better for Richard, either that or have Richard do email and message chat customer interactions that are compatible with his deafness.