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Linux May Be the Best Way to Avoid the AI Nightmare
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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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"The Year Of Linux on Desktops". Been hearing this for decades, but it might actually be happening. What I'm feeling now is the same thing I felt when Mozilla originally split Firefox out, and made the first real competition to corporate browsers as a free product. People don't want all this bullshit, and want to retain control over the machines they are working on. Seems a lot more people are interested in FOSS environments now just to avoid all the other BS they hate getting shoveled at them.
Been hearing this for decades.
And it won’t ever be true until you can pick up a PC running Linux in a big box store. I could see the Steam Deck (and Valve’s rumoured upcoming console) to make a dent in the PC gaming space, but it won’t make a difference to the purchasing decisions of your your aunt who uses her pc to check her emails.
Should corporate buyers ever get tired of MS’ shenanigans they might switch over to Ubuntu, but I’m not holding my breath for that.
At work, we have a strict ban on purchasing any laboratory equipment that requires Windows. After about a year, several of our suppliers have been pressured to offer Linux support, precisely because we don’t have time for windows shenanigans on a $100k piece of advanced benchtop hardware. We just got our first oscilloscope with Red Hat preinstalled.
Also, regular people aren’t buying PCs as much as they used to. The PC is now a workplace and enthusiast device. Everyone else uses mobile.
The oldest version of Win I used was 95 about 2 years ago on chromatography machine (I think hplc or gas).
It is to my knowledge still in use in the school because the software don't run on newer machines. The teacher told me that he don't know what will he do when it dies. It isn't really an issue on Linux.
It might be worth trying it in Wine. It has great support for older software especially.
Within the past year I have compiled new software for Windows 98.
In a lab environment, it’s important to strictly control software versions and understand thoroughly what gets updated. We also want the ability to use the same version of software indefinitely if it meets our needs.
I think that there are more issues like archaic connectors and stuff like that. You can't find new hardware with 30yo standard io.
O&G still uses a lot of old versions as well. I remember back in the Win 7 days when I had to set up a 95 virtual machine and register a bunch of DLLs by hand plus set up a fake A: drive because even the 95 version of the software was garbage. A friend of mine did something similar but he got it working on the Win 7 machine somehow. I never understood how, but he left a script behind at the company he worked for because it needed to be reinstalled every time someone did something stupid and he didn't want to do it by hand.
We ship a $50k instrument product running Windows, and everyone hates it.
As the only EE on staff, I got to spend a portion of covid soldering TPM chips to motherboards. Fun times.
Wow, that sounds painful. Not so much because it’s technically difficult, but ridiculous that you have to do that.
Yeah, they were tssop, so not hard. It was only necessary because the parts shortage crunch had the vendor shipping them without the chips installed.
I find it unbelievable that anyone ever accepted lab equipment with a Windows requirement. I mean, I know it is true, but what the fuck? Glad your work is doing this.
I was not around at that time. Some of the systems I support are very long lived. At the time, having windows running on some of your equipment wasn’t seen as a liability. I guess you have to get bitten a few times before you understand that you need control of that system including the software.
This is so cool. Really great to hear. I wish more companies and other institutions would do this. They have to realize that using Microsoft software won't benefit them in the long term, and actually start pressuring hardware vendors into pre-installing Linux.
Part of that job is supporting fielded hardware and ground systems, think like automated test or verification systems. I think we’ve learned our lesson that we can’t afford to have unserviceable software.
At least with Linux and generally with an open source baseline, there is the option of throwing engineers at your problem because you have access to the code, and you can strip down the system to the bare minimum of what you need, and in doing so, really understand it. We don’t want to get into a situation where our hands are tied and we can’t fix it because the problem lies in the proprietary software while the vendor has long since abandoned any hope of support… grumble…
That kinda reminds me of my job, except that we build the unserviceable hardware and install Windows, as well as our proprietary software. Then we charge our customers shitloads of money for technical support. We're a government contractor btw
It's actually a pretty nice company (from an employee standpoint), we use a lot of Linux internally, as well as other FOSS software. But porting our products to Linux is hopeless, we have decades of C++ code that either relies on Windows APIs directly, or on our custom libraries that rely on Windows-specific stuff.
Shit, the iPad pro is pretty damn close to a laptop these days with the keyboard and track pad (just lacking the OS). I had a conversation the other day where someone mentioned how OSX and Windows are locking down their OS's to the point where it wouldn't be farfetched to guess that many consumer devices will eventually use essentially a mobile device OS.
I had a conversation with a friend about iPads lately related to the „just lacking the OS“. The newer iPads with M-chips have all the computing power an average user could need but it’s crippled by the mobile-ish OS, so all the computing power is for nothing basically. An iPad running MacOS (with some adjustments for the Touchscreen) would be awesome. But we concluded it won’t happen anytime soon, because then basically no one would buy MacBooks anymore
The only regular people I can think of are gamers and my mom but I would like the idea of PC's returning to techie and specialized use cases
I'd argue the year of the Linux desktop passed years ago and now it's just a saturation game. Most serious SW development is now on Linux laptops/desktops, Android owns the mobile space and versions are starting to make huge inroads in the laptop space. You can buy gaming systems running it trivially now.
Conversely, casual users of windows are dying off, fewer non technical people are using desktops for anything at all. Only institutional users are buying Windows keys and they're some of the easiest to get on Linux because of the cost savings, particularly if you run Linux server infrastructure, a fight we already won over a decade ago.
I'd love a source for this. To my knowledge, most people that build to Linux hosts still use OSX.
a good indication is Microsoft making WSL at all
Source: I'm a super pro serious developer and I use Linux. QED if you don't also use Linux, you're not serious.
Thanks to the Steamdeck Linux users on Steam now outnumber Mac users. Still a tiny percentage of total Steam users but if developers increase support we will hopefully see that number take off.
Also helps that Valve isn’t porting source to Apple silicon.
All the larger PC manufacturers do offer Ubuntu at least. There was a time when Best Buy was selling them from Dell and Lenovo, but I'm sure the staff couldn't sufficiently explain the "why", and it was also at a time when more technology illiterate folks were the purchasers. That's not the case anymore, but I guess we will see how/if it shifts at all.
I loathe to be the BestBuy employee who sells a Linux box to a customer who only cares about the price difference.
Lenovo ships some models with Mint FWIW.
Framework laptops also ship without Windows if you wish. Certainly nice to save the money for not purchasing an OS license I won't use.
I don't understand people who choose the Windows option, like wtf, make an install USB yourself and activate it using a $2 key from ebay or just crack it using massgrave.dev. Linux is still the best option tho.
Your average Joe Schmoe probably has no idea that different operating systems on a given device are even a thing, they just see them as MacBox™, WindowsBox™, etc, they don't see it as the blank hardware canvas we do. While I'll agree it's trivially easy to install Windows in the way you suggested, that'll completely fly over the average user's head.
But I don't think that these are the people buying a Framework Laptop
Duh, my bad man. Not my day for reading comprehension.
That said, should in the unlikely event Joe Schmoe buy a Framework, my above point could still be relevant.
Most aunts I know primarily use an iPad or phone to manage email.
For me the hang up is still hardware compatibility and fuss factor. I still haven't seen a windows app that will check all hardware and software and give a pain scale rating on what switching would involve. I have an Asus wifi 6 card, a stream deck, a Logitech trackball with Logitech customization software, a Logitech Webcam, a dygma keyboard running bazecor software. I'm sure there are some hidden headaches awaiting the transition. Once I finally get all that worked out, I will probably want to upgrade my surface and my ThinkPad as well and imagine even more headaches with these.
You can just use a liveboot Linux image on a USB key drive and find out whether there are any issues.
Here's Debian's liveboot images (which they apparently call "live install"):
https://www.debian.org/CD/live/
I imagine that most distros probably have a liveboot image, though I haven't gone looking.
USB drives are maybe slower than your internal SSD drive, but for rescue work or just seeing whether your hardware works, should be fine.
I would expect everything that you listed there to work. The only thing I haven't heard of on there is that dygma keyboard, and looking at their website, if this is the keyboard in question:
https://dygma.com/pages/dygma-raise-2#section-faq
I mean, I dunno if Logitech puts out trackball software for Linux, but if what you want is macro software or configurable acceleration curves or something, there's open-source stuff not tied to that particular piece of hardware. And the Steam Deck is running Linux itself.
There's gonna be a familiarization cost associated with changing an OS. Like, your workflow is gonna change, and there are gonna be things that you know how to do now that you aren't gonna know how to do in a new environment. But I think that that's likely going to be the larger impact, rather than "can I use hardware?"
EDIT: Oh, it sounds like the reason that they call it "live install" rather than "liveboot" is because you can use the same image to both just use Linux directly, and can run the installer off the image too.
Decades ago it was a funny joke. Now it's the most popular handheld OS on the planet by a huge margin. Linux is damn EVERYWHERE except the desktop now, and it's only a matter of time.
This is why (as per usual) Stallman was right: the "GNU/" part matters. Linux is already all over the desktop (or at least, the laptop) in schools, in the form of Chromebooks. That means the entire next generation is going to grow up using Linux.
The only trouble is, it's locked-down Google/Linux that they're using, not GNU/Linux. All the freedom and user empowerment has been neatly excised from it such that it only facilitates consumption, not creativity.
And within that frame, I'd be very surprised if it ever breaks out into the mainstream. Google brought android to the world as a vessel to make money. You very rarely hear about GNU in the wider world, outside of tech circles, being promoted to the masses as a viable alternative specifically because no one stands to profit from it, and they can't have that.
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I've been hearing this about people hearing about people hearing that about Linux for decades.
We can dream 😔
Seems like we’ll get financially viable fusion power plants before that happens.