Was that in 2000? My own vague memory was that Linux started picking up some steam in the early 2000’s and then branched out to a new audience shortly after Firefox and Ubuntu hit the scene around 2004, and actually saw some adoption when Windows XP’s poor security and Windows Vista’s poor hardware support started breaking things.

So depending on the year, you could both be right.

Which is is such a high dollar count that this simply cannot be USD

So I haven’t used Windows on my own machines in about 20 years, but back when I built my own PCs that seemed about right. So I looked up the price history, didn’t realize that Microsoft reduced the license prices around Windows 8.

I remember 20 years ago, Windows XP Home was $199 and Professional was $299 for a new license on a new computer. Vista and 7 were similarly priced.

Since Windows 8, though, I just don’t understand their pricing or licensing terms.

Honestly, this is an easy way to share files with non-technical people in the outside world, too. Just open up a port for that very specific purpose, send the link to your friend, watch the one file get downloaded, and then close the port and turn off the http server.

It’s technically not very secure, so it’s a bad idea to leave that unattended, but you can always encrypt a zip file to send it and let that file level encryption kinda make up for lack of network level encryption. And as a one-off thing, you should close up your firewall/port forwarding when you’re done.

Yeah, if OP has command line access through rsync then the server is already configured to allow remote access over NFS or SMB or SSH or FTP or whatever. Setting up a mounted folder through whatever file browser (including the default Windows Explorer in Windows or Finder in MacOS) over the same protocol should be trivial, and not require any additional server side configuration.

Yeah, I mean I do still use rsync for the stuff that would take a long time, but for one-off file movement I just use a mounted network drive in the normal file browser, including on Windows and MacOS machines.

(the preview fetch is not e2ee afaik)

Technically, it is, but end to end encryption only covers the data between the ends, and not what one of the ends chooses to do with it. If one end of the conversation chooses to log the conversation in an insecure way, the conversation itself might technically be encrypted, but the contents of the conversation can be learned by another. Or if one end simply chooses to forward a message to a new party not part of the original conversation.

The link previews are happening outside of the conversation, and that action can be seen by people like the owner of the website, your ISP, and maybe WhatsApp itself (if configured in that way, not sure if it does).

So end to end isn’t a panacea. You have to understand how it fits into the broader context of security and threat models.

So I used THIS GUIDE to try to make a persistant USB stick.

Yeah you’re gonna want to use an external SSD instead. USB thumb drives can vary considerably in speed, and bottlenecking yourself there is gonna be a miserable experience.

Yes, software that is in a package manager is similarly easy on a Mac. There’s an app store, which can be used to install the dependencies for homebrew (which is a good package manager for most of the stuff that Linux package managers maintain, including building stuff from source). Going outside of a package manager is relatively easy (but needs to be enabled, as the defaults basically discourage users from installing software not verified by Apple), but that method of software installation still beats running .exe/.msi installers downloaded from the internet, beats running random shell scripts, probably beats downloading docker containers and flatpaks, and is not that far removed from installing from the AUR or something like pip/conda: you still need to know what you’re doing, and you have to trust the source/maintainer. None of that is unique to any operating system, except those that simply don’t allow you to install software not reviewed/approved by the manufacturer (Apple mobile devices, Android devices by default).

High DPI screen support in Linux is still troublesome, especially between multiple screens with different DPI/resolution, especially between GTK and Qt programs.

And I haven’t played around with Asahi yet, but it’ll be hard to top the built-in power/suspend/hibernate/resume behavior and its effect on battery life (especially in being able to just count on it to work if you suspend for days, where it seamlessly switches to hibernate and starts back up very quickly). But on my old Intel MacBook, the battery life difference between MacOS and and Linux is probably two to one. Some of it is Apple’s fault for refusing to document certain firmware/hardware features, but the experience is the experience.

I gave up on Homebrew because it was difficult to install.

It just includes as a dependency the Mac command line developer tools, which can be installed pretty easily from what I remember.

And what I like is that it’s a normal Unix style shell, with almost all the utilities you’d expect.

you have to drag the icon in to install things.

I mean that’s about 100 times better than Windows’ default of running an installer that isn’t easily reversible.

For my personal devices:

• Microsoft products from MS DOS 6.x or so through Windows Vista
• Ubuntu 6.06 through maybe 9.04 or so
• Arch Linux from 2009 through 2015
• MacOS from 2011 through current
• Arch Linux from 2022 through current

I’ve worked with work systems that used RedHat and Ubuntu back in the late 2000’s, plus decades of work computers with Windows. But I’m no longer in a technical career field so I haven’t kept on top of the latest and greatest.

When they say modules, does that mean mainboards?

They mean each part. Here’s their store for individual parts.

This announcement includes a new display, so anyone with the old display can swap out their old one for the new one. People can swap out batteries. Keyboards. Touchpads. It’s a modular design so that each module can be swapped out if broken, or if there’s been an upgrade the user wants.

Those small USB drives are too slow anyway, often limited to USB 2.0 interfaces or slow flash modules. I’ve switched over to an SSD specifically because of how slow booting and installation is from a standard 10-year-old USB stick.

every distro I’ve tried has a strong sense that if you’re using the GUI you don’t need or deserve admin controls

It’s more that GUI programs can’t be trusted with root privileges. They’re not designed for that, and can break things in unpredictable ways.

Good writeup.

The use of ephemeral third party accounts to “vouch” for the maintainer seems like one of those things that isn’t easy to catch in the moment (when an account is new, it’s hard to distinguish between a new account that will be used going forward versus an alt account created for just one purpose), but leaves a paper trail for an audit at any given time.

I would think that Western state sponsored hackers would be a little more careful about leaving that trail of crumbs that becomes obvious in an after-the-fact investigation. So that would seem to weigh against Western governments being behind this.

Also, the last bit about all three names seeming like three different systems of Romanization of three different dialects of Chinese is curious. If it is a mistake (and I don’t know enough about Chinese to know whether having three different dialects in the same name is completely implausible), that would seem to suggest that the sponsors behind the attack aren’t that familiar with Chinese names (which weighs against the Chinese government being behind it).

Interesting stuff, lots of unanswered questions still.

Apple, too. The 2012 MacBook Pro had a high DPI display, and everything scales normally even when dragging windows over to non-HiDPI external monitors.

That’s not even getting into the mobile OSes, which have to deal with nonstandard display sizes and resolutions all the time, across multiple settings for accessibility.

I agree.

I especially love that it addresses the biggest pitfall of the typical “fancy new format does things better than the one we’re already using” transition, in that it’s specifically engineered to make migration easier, by allowing a lossless conversion from the dominant format.

What does “maximize shareholder value” mean if not profits? You can dress it up how you like but that’s the way businesses treat it.

It doesn’t mean short term profits over long term profits, or dividends/buybacks over reinvestment, or anything like that.

The Delaware courts have repeatedly confirmed that majority shareholders, officers, and directors are allowed to do things like pay their employees bonuses, give corporate money to charity, demand less than the market-clearing, profit-maximizing prices, etc., even over minority shareholder objections that the corporation isn’t properly maximizing shareholder value.

eBay v. Newmark doesn’t change that. That was a fight about shareholder rights to buy or sell shares (or majority shareholder powers to prevent minority shareholders from acquiring or selling shares without the majority shareholders’ approval), which directly affects the value of the shares themselves (without getting into the question of the corporation’s obligation to grow that shareholder value in business operations). It’s one step removed from what we’re talking about, about the directors’ power to control shares, rather than the directors’ power to control the company.

That’s not a requirement of publicly traded companies. Any corporation has the same obligation to put shareholder interests first, whether it’s closely held (like Valve) or publicly traded but still under the founder’s control (like Facebook) or publicly traded with no one owner that exercises significant control (like IBM). The court case that established that corporations have a duty to shareholders above everyone else (Dodge v. Ford Motor Company) involved a closely held corporation (not public) and also confirmed that the corporation’s management can exercise its own judgment and discretion in prioritizing long term over short term gains, or vice versa.

My ping to the server is usually less than 10ms on wifi, and sometimes less than 5ms on a wired connection, so I’ve found that most games work fine. After all, that’s lower latency than some displays.