Will it really obey the GPL ?
Or will this be another case of VMware ripping off open source. There is already one case rumbling to court in Germany:
VMware has created its very own Linux distribution, dubbed 'Project Photon', as part of an effort to create a stack for what it's calling “Cloud-Native applications”. The rest of us would probably call them “microservices”, the technique of spawning instances of an application to handle a small user population – maybe even an …
Or will this be another case of VMware ripping off open source. There is already one case rumbling to court in Germany:
Anyone in VMware land know how to use a search engine?
Any trademark lawyers short of a couple of thousand dollars?
Anyways, I'm pleased to hear VMware's stuff 'only' needs 300MB.
A decade or more ago, QNX did a demo of OS, networking, and their Photon microGUI.
All running on a generic x86 off a 1.44MB floppy. Yes 1point44MB not 144 MB.
Any guesses as to how big the "attack surface(s)" might be if it was done right?
Don'tcha love progress.
http://www.qnx.co.uk/developers/docs/6.4.1/neutrino/sys_arch/photon.html (and doubtless elsewhere)
http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html (simple writeup)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VlI6IBEJ0 Corresponding demo video (only 3 minutes)
(Caution: turn the sound right down)
This approach is held to be a better way to scale than conventional tiered application models, with Google's two-billion-containers-a-week regime and Netflix's use of a containerised content delivery network often cited as validation for that assertion.
Personally whenever things like that are cited as evidence my gut reaction is that if that's the best you can come up with then their is no precedent at all. Things like NoSQL in particular come to mind there but let's get one thing straight: if you are in the position to be making decisions on things like this you are likely a much smaller shop. You are not Google, you are not Facebook, you are not Microsoft, and you are not Netflix.
These are massive companies with particular requirements. There may be at most fifty such institutions worldwide. What they need to do is on an entirely different scale to your much more humble requirements. Yes, they may use x, y and z but they have IT staff in the thousands and budgets in the billions: they have the resources available to keep the plates spinning on their sticks. You probably don't and unless they become available the comparison is not an appropriate one.
Comment Recently, The Register's Liam Proven wrote tongue in cheek about the most annoying desktop Linux distros. He inspired me to do another take.
Proven pointed out that Distrowatch currently lists 270 – count 'em – Linux distros. Of course, no one can look at all of those. But, having covered the Linux desktop since the big interface debate was between Bash and zsh rather than GNOME vs KDE, and being the editor-in-chief of a now-departed publication called Linux Desktop, I think I've used more of them than anyone else who also has a life beyond the PC. In short, I love the Linux desktop.
Analyst firms S&P Global Market Intelligence and Gartner have both offered negative evaluations of Broadcom's takeover of VMware.
S&P surveyed VMware customers and found 44 percent feel neutral about the deal, and 40 percent expressed negative sentiments.
But when the analyst crunched the numbers for current customers of both VMware and Broadcom, 56 percent expressed negative sentiments. More than a quarter rated their response to the deal as "extremely negative".
Apple is extending support for its Rosetta 2 x86-64-to-Arm binary translator to Linux VMs running under the forthcoming macOS 13, codenamed Ventura.
The next version of macOS was announced at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference on Monday, and the new release has a number of changes that will be significant to Linux users. The company has disclosed the system requirements for the beta OS, which you can read on the preview page.
One level of Linux relevance is that macOS 13 still supports Intel-based Macs, but only recent ones, made in 2017 and later. So owners of older machines – including the author – will soon be cut off. Some will run Windows on them via Bootcamp, but others will, of course, turn to Linux.
Linux Lite has been around since 2012 and version 6, codenamed "Fluorite", is one of the first Ubuntu-based distros to offer a version built on Ubuntu 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish", released just last month.
This is unapologetically a distro aimed at Windows users. For instance, unlike some distros, there are no difficult questions of what desktop you want – you get Xfce 4.16, with a trendy flat theme, but a somewhat retro default layout that reminds us of Windows XP. The Start button and window buttons have text labels, for instance. We liked that: it's simple, efficient, and welcome, but Zorin OS 16 manages a more modern Windows look.
Linux Lite also isn't bashful about including non-open-source freeware: the default web browser is Google Chrome. The very long and rather rambling release announcement says this is because Ubuntu distributes Firefox as a Snap package and that the developers wanted to shield users from too many package managers. That's fair enough.
Review The Reg FOSS desk took the latest update to openSUSE's stable distro for a spin around the block and returned pleasantly impressed.
As we reported earlier this week, SUSE said it was preparing version 15 SP4 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution at the company's annual conference, and a day later, openSUSE Leap version 15.4 followed.
The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE project is comparable to that of Red Hat and Fedora. SUSE, with its range of enterprise Linux tools, is the commercial backer, among other sponsors.
Broadcom's stated strategy is very simple: focus on 600 customers who will struggle to change suppliers, reap vastly lower sales and marketing costs by focusing on that small pool, and trim R&D by not thinking about the needs of other customers – who can be let go if necessary without much harm to the bottom line.
The Register offers that summary based on Broadcom's own words, as uttered at a November 2021 Investor Day.
The Broadcom event kicked off with an overview from president Tom Krause, who illustrated the outfit's go-to-market plan with the following diagram.
The Linux Mint XApps suite of cross-desktop accessories has a new member – the Timeshift backup tool.
The Linux Mint blog post for June revealed that Mint team lead Clement Lefevbre recently took over maintenance of the Timeshift backup tool used in Linux Mint.
Timeshift is akin to Windows System Restore in that it automatically keeps backups of system files. It's not Mint-specific and was originally developed by Tony George. That name might sound familiar as we recently mentioned his company TeeJeeTech as the creator of the original Unity-based remix, UMix.
VMware customers have seen companies acquired by Broadcom Software emerge with lower profiles, slower innovation, and higher prices - a combination that makes them nervous about the virtualization giant’s future.
The Register offers that assessment after spending the day at a VMware user group conference in Melbourne, Australia, where we interviewed over a dozen VMware customers to ascertain their reaction to Broadcom’s surprise acquisition of the virtualisation giant. The customers all requested that The Register not use their names, or those of their employers, as none were authorized to speak to the media.
One of those customers was a sysadmin at a sporting organisation that has decided to drop Symantec products because product evolution has slowed under Broadcom’s ownership. The sysadmin has also heard, from multiple sources including Broadcom partners, that the company uses price hikes to discourage customers it does not want.
In a sign of how display handling is evolving, the GNOME desktop's 3D-compositing Mutter window manager is gaining support for variable refresh rate (VRR, also known as Adaptive Sync) displays.
Mutter is an important chunk of code. As the project page says, it's "a Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library."
It's the basis of GNOME Shell, which is implemented [PDF] as a Mutter plug-in, but other desktops use it as well.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that all operating systems suck. Some just suck less than others.
It is also a comment under pretty much every Reg article on Linux that there are too many to choose from and that it's impossible to know which one to try. So we thought we'd simplify things for you by listing how and in which ways the different options suck.
This would be an impossibly long list if we looked at all of them since Distrowatch currently lists 270. So we need to thin the herd a bit.
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