Hints about SUSE's 'Adaptable Linux Platform' emerge The Reg has collated information that points at the direction of the Adaptable Linux Platform – SUSE's future replacement for its conventional distros. One element is relatively straightforward, but may be unexpected – possibly requiring version 3 of the x86-64 spec. Since a discussion in 2020, there are now four defined …
'telnet.netkit localhost 25' still works and I could read the email with 'cat ~/Maildir/new/*'. Sending to a remote system would probably require SMTP AUTH and I have never tried to do that by typing SMTP commands directly into telnet. Change 'user' to your user name and this will probably work:
HELO localhost
MAIL FROM:<sender@localhost>
RCPT TO:<user@localhost>
DATA
From: "Sender Name" <sender@localhost>
To: "User Name" <user@localhost>
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2022 10:50:00 -0000
Subject: Telnet Email
Hello me
.
QUIT
At the risk of putting words in someone else's mouth, I reckon what the chap above refers to is the many layers of indirection, containerisation, virtualization, and whatever elseisation between the user and the hardware (not to forget the many complex layers in the hardware itself).
It hardly matters if your user agent is Thunderbird or telnetnetcat.
"as is suggested by the strong sales of Chromebooks in recent years"
I'm not sure this isuggests anything. AFAIK ChromeOS is basically a browser with whatever minimum support (Gentoo, last I heard) is neededt. That it happens to be Linux is purely convenience. If they could run Chrome on bare metal that would be good enough.
As to the rest of the ideas multiplying like fleas on a dog's back they seem to be variously ways to run as many individual services on one server as possible (in some cases bizarrely passing them of as serverless) or somebody's solution in search of a problem. They're all trying to become the Next Big Thing. As running S/W on other people's computers has become a huge market there's scope for monetizing the NBT if you can score it and there, I think, we can see the reason for it all.
I doubt the money-grubbing is going to improve things for those of us who just want a decent desk/laptop system.
I think the Reg's point is, that strong sales help ensure the *durability* of the solution and Charles Darwin then takes over.
But yes, just as RNA life (probably) gave way to DNA life, which presently evolved multicellular forms, which presently evolved brains and the ability to spout platitudes, so too has machine code given way to the text command line, the GUI, distributed networked systems, virtualization, AI and all the rest. Every level of IT evolution carries its own specialists and afficionados - long may that continue.
My point was that, by the prevailing standards of 3rd decade 21st century, ChromeOS *is* very nearly Chrome on bare metal.
The OS doesn't have the ability to install additional packages. It has Android and Debian containers (on some host platforms) and can run those limited, sandboxed apps.
And yet, it's the best-selling desktop/laptop Linux platform there has ever been, by a factor of 10.
The reason we hear so much fuss about CentOS Linux being discontinued is that it had about 10× as many users as RHEL. From the most plausible figures I've seen, Ubuntu has, very very roughly, roughly 10× more users than both of those put together.
(The difference is, RH worked out how to monetise this well; Canonical hasn't. I suspect that this is because that wasn't an original goal. Canonical's goal was "cause Windows not to be the № 1 OS any more. ChromeOS and macOS have accomplished that.)
When Canonical occasionally released numbers for downloads, or updates fetched -- a good indicator for how many of those downloads were actually successfully installed -- it had a few million a year.
If Ubuntu is a few million a year, and RH relatives are maybe ⅓ of that, and Debian and relatives is ⅓ of RH, and Arch and relatives is ⅓ of Debian, and so on -- and it's really hard to get reliable numbers, but this stuff is plausible... then we're only talking about 5 million or so new Linux installations per year.
Many of those will be on VMs, in which case they aren't real hardware installs. The kind of people who try Linux distros often have several, some on old machines that are rarely used, many more in VMs or dual-boots that are seldom used. *I* certainly do.
So it is plausible to round those numbers down quite a bit.
ChromeBooks sell 30-40 million a year.
Which means that, even with sales dropping post pandemic home-worker/student sales boost, ChromeOS is running on an order of magnitude more boxes than all the other Linuxes (and BSDs) put together.
Which implies that end-users want something that is easy, robust, gets the primary task done (which is not just "browse the web" -- it also covers things like "connect to wifi", "connect to mobile networks", "play music", "view documents" etc.
The stuff that desktop Linux partisans complain about -- desktops, packaging formats, init systems, that LibreOffice isn't MS Office compatible enough, all that -- just doesn't enter into the equation.
Most of the stuff that people who care about Linux distros get all adversarial about doesn't matter, so long as the OS provides the basic core functionality with the minimum of fuss.
Fix that, and it sells strongly and ordinary computer users like it. Computers to run it perfectly well are cheaper than Windows ones, and it remains fast and responsive even on such low-end kit. It has no end-user accessible way to install software, which combined with Linux' inherent resistance to Windows malware, means no need for performance-sapping antivirus. It has no open ports or services, and no way to add them, which means no need for a firewall.
Having a Linux kernel there may be convenient to those instances providing additional Android or Debian addons. But from the PoV of the basic architecture is it any more than a shim that could be replaced by something else such as FreeDOS if it suited Google? Although much is said about Microsoft wanting to take Windows users into their cloud a Windows PC is still very much more obviously a Windows box than a Chromebook is a Linux box.
SUSE afaik is a extremely commercial operating system, used by full time staff on the server industries. The other brand-names mentioned are a mix of open source and popular operating systems, used by the general public.
This article describes the four types of Intel x86-64 CPU, according to the years of design. Other operating systems have yet to do this level of discrimination, reserving such to the raw code of the Linux kernel, if ever.
It is unclear how and why this type of categories into four different subtypes of CPU will be needed. The article explains that "containers" are not that popular for non server use. Wny is this development from SUSE significant then?
> SUSE afaik is a extremely commercial operating system, used by full time staff on the server industries.
Respectfully, that would be for "not very far" values of AFAIK.
/(Open)?SUSE/ makes for a rock solid, outstanding desktop operating system (as well as an equally outstanding server system).
a distro designed for desktop usage will never be good enough for server usage, and vice versa. it seems suse is going to be server-friendly so it's a signal to the desktop users to migrate to a distro better for desktop use - there are plenty, like zorin, kubuntu etc.
what i don't understand is the "adaptable" thing... at the first glance, i thought they are making the distro more modular... for example, instead of low-level libraries they group them into modules and allow users to (1) setup, (2) configure, (3) patch and (4) upgrade them at ease. there may also be different "recipes" for system configuration, for example, json files (just 1 .json file for each recipe, please) which configures the modules which can be shared between users and easily applied to their systems. a plus for this is, there will be a lot less distro which differs only in a very minor way - a new distro is just a json file away.
if they want to go the containerized way, please do it more deeply - how about, in addition to each application running in a container, there are "data containers" which, like docker volumes, that share data between containers? for example, application a and application b want to share a .png, and the system creates a new data container just for sharing between a and b (which is invisible to application c)... i have always long for this functionality, but maybe someone have already done it - i just think if someone could make this work in a straightforward way, it would be a big plus to security of a desktop-oriented distro. my mac always ask me if i allow some app to access the "Downloads", "Documents" etc. folders but it is useless as all apps accessing my "Documents" can access everything in it.
> a distro designed for desktop usage will never be good enough for server usage, and vice versa.
As someone who has been using the subject distro very productively both on desktop and on servers for nearly twenty years I beg to disagree.
Tip for pros: when building a server / container go for the JEOS image. On workstations, the full KDE desktop will do you well; either grab the Net image for a network install or the full ISO depending on your connectivity needs.
For mass installations, look into AutoYAST.
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