The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[nah]

Bean counters. Cloud means captive subscription.

Believe it or not, ms have been trying to move to thin client subscription models since the early 2000s, but kept encountering the same problem every time: nobody had the bandwidth. Most people still don't.

You WILL live in the city. You WILL have a high-bandwidth subscription. You WILL use the correct OS. You WILL be happy.

 

[Kosher Dill]

I disagree that businesses will reject Windows as a cloud service because I have never met a VP that doesn't suck Microsoft dick morning noon and night. Cloud services are fantastic to these retards because it's easy to provision

The thing to understand is that for big businesses, cloud is not an IT product, it is a financial product. By offloading all the hardware to a third party, you change the accounting treatment of "having a bunch of computers" from a mix of capital and operational expenditures, to 100% operational expenditures (more or less). If this lines up with how a business's accountants want to juggle the books, they'll switch to cloud, regardless of suitability for purpose.
But when it comes to moving desktop Windows to the cloud, I'm not sure that gets you the same accounting benefit. Every single desktop user using Cloud Windows still needs some sort of hardware of their own, which is subject to the usual depreciation and so on.

 

[Betonhaus]

Anyways KDE neon does look interesting. I might transition my desktop to it. I'll have to put windows in a virtual machine to be able to access some things without rebooting, but as long as I have an Xbox to play my Store games and can get my steam games to run on Linux, I could probably make the switch with it being pretty seamless.

Question, is it possible to point steam Linux at a drive with a downloaded steam library for windows and have the compatible games work, or would they all need to be redownloaded?

 

[Nitro!]

But when it comes to moving desktop Windows to the cloud, I'm not sure that gets you the same accounting benefit. Every single desktop user using Cloud Windows still needs some sort of hardware of their own, which is subject to the usual depreciation and so on.

Won't depreciation be less of a factor with thin clients? Businesses will still be issuing company laptops but that hardware will stretch longer with lower system requirements. I can see it being marketed as a cost-saver that way.

Businesses aren’t the issue, the EU, and businesses in the EU, are. There’s no way they’re allowing all their computers to be remotely operated from the USA. Neither would countries like Russia or China. Windows-as-cloud could potentially be sold in the USA, but the rest of the world will want no part of it because of the security and privacy implications. The EU are subservient lapdogs to the yanks but even they would never tolerate it.

That's a fair point - the EU would have to have its own datacenters. I think that MS would choose to have regional DCs established anyway to minimize bandwidth cost. China is an interesting case since their internet is firewalled. Russia? I think you could probably get away with just using EU servers but I don't know if the audience is there.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Won't depreciation be less of a factor with thin clients? Businesses will still be issuing company laptops but that hardware will stretch longer with lower system requirements.

I imagine there would be some potential savings, but not an obvious accounting slam-dunk on the same order as "Take every CapEx dollar we spend on running a datacenter and transform it into an OpEx dollar for paying our AWS bill".
My personal impression is that most business hardware doesn't make it to the end of what a home user would consider its "useful lifetime" anyway, either because it gets lost, broken, or official replacement parts become too hard to source. I don't have any figures on that though.

 

[Betonhaus]

More or less have KDE Neon set up, and aside from the fact I still have several months left in my Microsoft 365 subscription realistically I can probably make the plunge to linux pretty easily - especially as i got a copy of windows spun up in virtualbox temporarily.

 

[Dirty Harry]

Linux Mint 21.2 released today. No groundbreaking things except that if you are installing it, tap to click is now enabled by default.

KDE Neon - Kubuntu comes with more themes out of the box but KDE neon always has the latest KDE version in it. I've only played with them on a virtualbox, I personally just don't like how KDE feels. Used to be a big Kubuntu fan when it was using KDE 3 (Which is now called Trinity and available on Q4OS).

 

[Lone Wandering Courier]

Question, is it possible to point steam Linux at a drive with a downloaded steam library for windows and have the compatible games work, or would they all need to be redownloaded?

Steam on linux doesn't play nicely with NTFS partitions and that's especially true when playing windows games via Proton. If you backup the files and then reformat the drive to something native to linux then you can reuse those game files.

 

[Betonhaus]

Steam on linux doesn't play nicely with NTFS partitions and that's especially true when playing windows games via Proton. If you backup the files and then reformat the drive to something native to linux then you can reuse those game files.

Ah, that would explain the issues I was having.

 

[Never Scored]

the only thing wrong with most chromebooks is that many only have 4gb of RAM

When you tell people on KF the hardware and Chrome OS have been improving by leaps and bounds and it's going to fit a lot of people's use cases, they get really mad and start seething and I really don't understand why. People are more committed to operating systems than their spouse and it's fucking weird. I'm not saying I'm going to use it or you have to use it. I'm saying it's growing into an actual functional operating system and a lot of other people are going to use it.

Windows nowadays is principally for business and gaming - business won't touch it because of the security implications,

Most businesses WANT to go to the cloud.

Boomers want to be able to go to Florida for three months in the winter and be able to function like they're at the office.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Most businesses WANT to go to the cloud.

That's starting to reverse, now. The unanticipated costs of cloud are starting to bite hard. It's only the fact that cloud falls under operating expenses, rather than capital expenses, that has kept the meme running for so long.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

The problem is the people running the business. Way too many are simply obsessed with costs and convenience to the point of engaging in kafkaesque schemes that make no sense to anyone who isn't high on managerialism and the Cult of Human Resources where they start thinking forcing everyone to do all company related comunications on MS Teams text chat is somehow a improvement of just having people ask each other IRL in the office, or that having important files kept only on OneDrive is somehow safer than a local server.

 

[The Ugly One]

Surprised there isn't more chatter about IBM trying to take RHEL closed-source in this thread. It's absolutely blowing up my LI feed. This is a much bigger deal than whatever Arch spergs are into these days. TL; DR - IBM bought Red Hat, then effectively killed the CentOS project. CentOS quickly respawned under a new name, Rocky Linux, and now IBM is trying to claim they can take RHEL closed source (technically "open source," but putting a TOS on the source that violates the GPL) because it's not fair that they have to share all their code.

Been hearing the "now is the time to switch to linux because Windows XXX is being discontinued" argument for 20 years. People aren't going to switch to the sperg OS anytime soon in masses. That said, I like linux and do run it fulltime on several laptops except the desktop I am using and do some work on. Mint on the 2 newer one's and Antix on the real old one.

The argument is also very weird because your favorite version of Linux will also get continued. I'm pretty sure Steam Linux requires a much more recent operating system than Steam Windows does.

Businesses aren’t the issue, the EU, and businesses in the EU, are. There’s no way they’re allowing all their computers to be remotely operated from the USA. Neither would countries like Russia or China. Windows-as-cloud could potentially be sold in the USA, but the rest of the world will want no part of it because of the security and privacy implications. The EU are subservient lapdogs to the yanks but even they would never tolerate it.

Lots of big businesses in America do classified or ITAR-controlled work for the federal government, and they largely refuse to use cloud services for this work, even those that are FEDRAMP certified.

Right, because everyone is rushing to buy a $999 monitor stand for some reason.

Locked-down appliances are popular.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Looks like AlmaLinux is going to drop the lost cause of 1:1 binary compatibility with upstream RHEL.

I did mention this earlier. May be the start of a trend? Who knows, it would be best to break off from big brother as I had stated before.

Oracle is trying to be "friendly" with the audience, claiming they will honor "open and transparent" solutions in response to IBM/RHEL.

EDIT: if you saw multiple notifications about posts in this thread, my bad, connection fucked up.

 

[std::string]

Surprised there isn't more chatter about IBM trying to take RHEL closed-source in this thread. It's absolutely blowing up my LI feed. This is a much bigger deal than whatever Arch spergs are into these days. TL; DR - IBM bought Red Hat, then effectively killed the CentOS project. CentOS quickly respawned under a new name, Rocky Linux, and now IBM is trying to claim they can take RHEL closed source (technically "open source," but putting a TOS on the source that violates the GPL) because it's not fair that they have to share all their code.

Well, it was discussed earlier and I'm not aware of any recent updates except for Oracle's slapfight against IBM. Oracle trying to rebrand themselves as champions of open source is pretty funny.

 

[DavidS877]

Well, it was discussed earlier and I'm not aware of any recent updates except for Oracle's slapfight against IBM. Oracle trying to rebrand themselves as champions of open source is pretty funny.

And in a couple years, Oracle will realize they can monetize it more and do exactly the same thing as IBM and close it off.

 

[Hall of Cost Payer]

And in a couple years, Oracle will realize they can monetize it more and do exactly the same thing as IBM and close it off.

A tale as old as DB2

 

[AnOminous]

Lots of big businesses in America do classified or ITAR-controlled work for the federal government, and they largely refuse to use cloud services for this work, even those that are FEDRAMP certified.

It should be literally illegal for anything finance or natsec-related to use cloud ("clown") services. Probably private medical info stuff too.

 

[Car Won't Crank]

It should be literally illegal for anything finance or natsec-related to use cloud ("clown") services. Probably private medical info stuff too.

The medical area, notably in academia and research sciences, is really hanky panky laisee faire about cloud use. In fact, many institutions use some sort of cloud solution either as primary or as part of the their backup scheme. All they look for is if the solution is HIPAA compliant and if it is, they can be guaranteed the IRB will approve it. Who audits those HIPAA compliant advertised services? Don't know it's a black box for them.

 

[The Ghost of Kviv]

The medical area, notably in academia and research sciences, is really hanky panky laisee faire about cloud use. In fact, many institutions use some sort of cloud solution either as primary or as part of the their backup scheme. All they look for is if the solution is HIPAA compliant and if it is, they can be guaranteed the IRB will approve it. Who audits those HIPAA compliant advertised services? Don't know it's a black box for them.

HIPAA in practice really isn't about protecting patient data, it's about moving liability to big money with big lawyers. Academia usually falls into one of two groups: the truly intellectual and motivated who are woefully underfunded and overworked, and the rest who are just there because they don't know what else to do after their bachleor's. On a long enough timescale, anyone can get a Ph. D. these days.

Besides IBM's corporate influence was the biggest concern in the aquisition, and the fears expressed are what's happening to a T. The optimist in me hopes that this will usher a shift away from corporate-sponsored distros and back to the likes of Debian and Gentoo.