The only "Linux Desktop" ready desktops and laptops to find at local shopping mall for normies are Android and ChromeOS devices, likewise in out-of-the-box experience for hardware support for peripherals.
"Normies" from the 80s do not represent the dissemination of personal computing we experienced in the last 10-15 years. So far we have one or two generations whose experience with personal computing is limited to downloading apps from app stores and ,at best, check webpages. That is very far from what people used DOS for.
I'm saying that there's a far larger portion of the population using computers, and they all benefit extensively from R&D going into UX design that allow people to use computers without having to "learn".
What kind of dissociation from reality leads anyone to believe your regular joe will even have the motivation to waste their time sitting in front a computer, open a terminal, and type commands? Some software engineers don't even want to touch a computer when they clock out, and you expect others to push themselves to "learn" something the have no interest in?
tl;dr: LiMux didn't just fail due to politics (although politics did play a large role and I will forever dislike Dieter Reiter for a multitude of reasons, LiMux being among them), it was set up for failure from the beginning, mostly budget related.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The issue was propaganda. There are even rumors that Dieter Reiter told someone that he regretted moving away from LiMux after he had to pay so much money for IT.
Depends on how one judges the state of equipment - I remember my private laptop having 4x the RAM than the city's computer... or my school's MuSiN computers running on win2k (!) until at the very least 2012. If that isn't a budget problem, I really really don't know what else could be one.
> There are even rumors that Dieter Reiter told someone that he regretted moving away from LiMux
Reiter regretting something, now that might be a first for him
Anyway nice to see (or rather: read) you again!
and musin is not the city of munich, that's federated governments for you
> Anyway nice to see (or rather: read) you again!
Dito, i hope you are fine :)
They are out to lock you in to ensure sustained cashflow, not solve your problem in the most impartial and cost efficient way for you.
Then like a year later they doubled down on MS products (right after a new IT head came in). The IT people I spoke to had no idea why this happened but no one seemed to think going back to MS was a good idea.
Discussed more here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41717607
It seems like Hypernews was only turned off in 2021, much much later than planned, but they did do it.
The experiment SW is a lot like the buildings and labs in every physics department I've been to: everyone is on a separate 3-5 year grant cycle and as such is contractually obliged not to push for newer infrastructure. People stick to the same software/lab until it is discontinued/condemned.
Scientific Linux is discontinued, though. A few experiments went to CentOS and (when that was moved to CentOS Stream) to AlmaLinux. But practically speaking the OS the experiments are using is a RHEL-like base with almost everything important overwritten via LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PATH, etc. and pointing to a fuse-mounted file system called cvmfs
https://github.com/cvmfs/cvmfs
For better or worse this allows O(weekly) releases that change what would normally be core components of the OS.
It's kind of weird how all the interesting stuff at CERN is linux and open source, and then all the IT infrastructure is outdated MS services and Windows.
I was one of the few Linux heads at the time on my group, and took part on the Scientific Linux rollout experiment.
On my group, most papers were either authored on FrameMaker or Word with a LaTeX like template.
The reason is the same as on the last agencies I have worked for since then, IT doesn't want to support Linux hardware, just like OEMs don't want to sell Linux computers (yes there are a few exceptions like System76 and TUXEDO), and most folks that really need it, get by with UNIX on macOS, or running guest VMs on Windows.
The large majority of CERN researchers aren't using Linux directly, and writing code for LHC experiments, hence why.
Within my experiment (which has a few thousand collaborators) every paper is written in LaTeX and has to build in a linux environment to be submitted for publication. All the central software work is done in one of three ways:
- ssh to a cluster running linux, develop there
- work in a linux VM on your machine (usually docker, lima, or other container management products)
- with a linux laptop or desktop
Of course the engineers and hardware developers are often using a whole Windows-dependent stack of FPGA design software, LabView, etc.
A big part of being a CIO or CTO is having and maintaining relationships with key suppliers. This is especially true with SaaS/IaaS, where your business is valued based on whatever bullshit churn metrics the company cooked up. Your $2M deal may have way bigger impact on a Sales VP bonus than you think. You have to be a different kind of asshole to maintain control of these guys than in the old software world.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=duaYLW7LQvg
Yt-dlp while it's hot. Microsoft sure sends DMCA takedowns after this one.
> González Waite said that all of the large proprietary software companies ""are big bullies"". He has been called into the US embassy and been threatened because Mexico was using technology that was not from the US; those threats were dialed back when he explained that the government also used software and services from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Various companies use the US government to bully other countries, but they also use license audits as a reaction to projects that move to open-source software. Every time a successful switch happened, ""six months later there was an audit""; having the right legal team helps defend against those tactics, he said.
It matches also what I heard from someone working for the Dutch government. He said that whenever they needed a new software system, that Microsoft would send multiple consultants for "free" which all could "help" the transition to a new service from Microsoft.