Posts by botfap 49 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2022
Im still on a 12 Mini for the work line and a 12 Pro for personal, purely for the camera. I still see no compelling reason to upgrade. Maybe its because I just use a £10 per month pre pay sim with 40GB data and unlimited texts / calls, including EU roaming and buy the handsets at retail. I dont do mobile contracts
Those of you that felt the need to upgrade to the latest 13/14/15s, what were the driving factors in your upgrade decision? I just dont see any
Long term Mint Cinnamon user here. Ive used it exclusively on my laptop, gaming desktop and workstation for the last 5-6 years because its been rock solid stable and the UI has been uncluttered, straightforward and consistent. Its also the standard desktop within my company. However its dependency on Gnome apps is getting worse rather than better, the UI is becoming messy and inconsistent, default themes are a mess and we have had quite a lot of stability issues with v20 onwards. A lot of the default apps now use Gnomes libadwaita for themeing instead of standard GTK themes and look out of place and have different behaviour. Desktop stability has also been a problem since 20.3 with crashes on unlock desktop and coming out of sleep, sound and video stuttering issues across a wide range of dektop and laptop hardware and desktop responsiveness is a bit more sluggish than it used to be. They have also basically said point blank that they have no interest in supporting wayland so Cinnamon is looking like a dead end moving forward. Add to that the refusal to even consider an ARM64 spin even though ARM desktop hardware is now becoming more common
Its not horrific and not bad enough yet to be planning a change, its too much effort right now for a whole fleet of PC's. I do however have this nagging doubt going forward about what they are currently doing and focusing on. Its a shame they dropped their KDE spin because thats probably what I will be looking at next. Gnome 4x is almost universally hated by our devs and users and most of them consider a default install unusable without at least dash2dock or dash2panel extensions. Sadly those extensions have a habit of breaking, even with minor, distro packaged updated
>What guarantees do the Cloud providers give for data recoverability and integrity.
None whatsoever. Ive been through this with clients who have lost data and servers from cloud providers (Azure & AWS) and VPS providers (Vultr, IONOS, HeartInternet and others). Even when you replicate data to multiple zones a stray deletion command in one zone replicates to the others before you can finish your brew and investigate. The contracts are always water tight on the providers side, there is no comeback or compensation when it happens
As an earlier poster remarked: There is no cloud, its a mental abstraction, only other peoples servers. If you are not doing your own, locally stored backups and replicas then you are asking for a disaster. The cloud isnt some magic place where data is secure. Its just a marketing abstraction to make you believe thats the case. Its also fucking expensive compared to running your own, even on a small scale, unless you are in a location where appropriate bandwidth isnt available. In which case you probably chose the wrong location to base your data intensive business
I would second this if you want or need some ARM hardware for testing your software on. What they offer is exceptional for free and Im not quite sure how they are affording to do it. Ive played with the free Oracle instances and performance was fine, pretty good even. Disk IO was heavily limited (think SATA2 HD) but CPU and mem performance was surprisingly good
Just be careful with the egress limits, they can quickly start turning into billable megabytes if you use them regularly
You are quite right. The Ampere CPU's dont respond to over provisioning cores quite as well as the x84_64 stuff though, due to lack of SMT I presume. For mixed, low priority workloads on Epyc we will provision 300% of the cores, on Ampere 180% seems to be the sweet spot for us
Docker security is not amazing and while it has improved over the years there are still many fundamental gaping holes in its architecture. You would be a fool to use docker alone it a multi tenant architecture without additionally separating each tenant with VMs
Take this little beauty from 2014 for example. Closed but not fixed due to lack of upstream support: https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/6324
And its proposed solution from 2016, which is still open for the same reasons: https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/24716
Its very hard to get the docker guys / gals / traps to accept a security related submission, Ive tried many times
I was just thinking that. Lawyers work for people and organisations under the instructions they are given, not the other way round. Whatever way you want to look at this, its a monumental foot shooting from the peeps at the Rust Foundation who organised this. They either didnt bother to brief legal or they didnt bother to check what came back before publishing. Its either incompetence at a monumental scale or they got what they asked for, in which case its greed and arrogance at a monumental scale
This is just avoidance and deflection. Your response has nothing to do with the point that I made and is further self delusion to justify censoring opinions that differ to your own
Deal with the point I actually made:
>you should tolerate all speech, but by doing so, you are promoting hate speech
This is a completely false dichotomy and its present in the thought process of extremists on both the left and right. In no way, shape or form is tolerance the same as promoting, its not even in the same ball park. You are being very dishonest here. Either intentionally or because you dont have the self awareness to see your own contradictions
>you should tolerate all speech, but by doing so, you are promoting hate speech
This is a completely false dichotomy and its present in the thought process of extremists on both the left and right. In no way, shape or form is tolerance the same as promoting, its not even in the same ball park. You are being very dishonest here. Either intentionally or because you dont have the self awareness to see your own contradictions
This is why censorship is so dangerous, especially around "hate speech" which has no clear definition. Ask 10 different people what qualifies as "hate speech" and you get 10 different answers. Thats why we created our cultures around free speech with a very specific exception of incitement to violence. Anytime you go further than that its for censoring opinions that differ from your own, regardless of the lies you tell yourself to justify it
They probably earn more than that now. Ive been out of the Blue Chip world (mostly) since 2006. Before I decided I hated working with "Blue Chip" companies, I was doing SAP integration contracting in the late 90s through to the mid 2000s I was getting £1200-1500 / day depending on the client (big pharma paid the best) and I would get mileage, hotels and expenses on top of that. I was only mid level and there were better skilled people earning upto £2500 / day. The rates were so disconnected from knowledge and expertise that it almost felt like theft at the time. It wasnt even particularly complicated compared to the embedded development world Im in now. The hardest parts of dealing with any SAP deployment are the politics first, then dealing with the fact that the sales team sold something that didnt or only partially existed
TSMC's 7nm nodes (N7/N6) are not EUV, they are the last of TSMC's planned nodes built on the DUV process. TSMC didnt use EUV in production until the N5 nodes. Originally N6 was supposed to be on an EUV process but TSMC couldnt make it work in time and stuck to DUV for those nodes. There is a 7nm class TSMC node built on EUV called N7+ but that came after N5 was released
SMIC / DongFang's N7 process is also DUV and is based heavily on TSMC's DUV tech. It was basically stolen from TSMC. DongFang also managed to get most of the info needed to reproduce TSMC's EUV process and most of the info needed to reproduce ASML litho tech but they are still a couple of years out from making that a high volume production process
You never miss an opportunity to spout this kind of, unrelated to the post, political nonsense do you? Its bordering on deranged and Im a Labour voter nationally and a Lib Dem voter regionally. Almost all politicians in the west are terrible, shortsighted, incompetent, corrupt buffoons. Its not restricted to one party
Completely agree. However we have gone too far in the opposite direction. Critical infrastructure like this SHOULD be invested in by the state for the good of our own economies. Our own governments in the west have watched this bottleneck approach for at least 10 years and done nothing to make the ecosystem more healthy and robust. Consequently we now have a defacto monopoly on advanced chip production in the west and the skyrocking wafer prices that go along with such monopolies
This is no longer true. Chinese company DongFang is making their own lithography equipment now (even if it probably is with IP stolen form ASML). While its still a few years behind ASML they are catching up quite fast. So much so that a few months ago SMIC started volume production of a new 7nm node based on DongFang equipment that is functionally the equivalent of TSMC's 7nm process. Not quite as refined yet but they will get there because they are putting the investment in. They have 5nm EUV nodes planned for Q4 2023 and 3nm nodes planned for late 2025. Thats probably optimistic timing but they will get there eventually
We have been lazy in the west about this stuff, relying on a single company instead of creating a robust ecosystem. We assumed we were so far ahead that nobody else would ever catch up. The tortoise and the hare race with China has played out tens of times over the last 2 decades and the tortoise has always eventually come out on top because they actually invest and do, rather than embargo and sabre rattle
Im in the same boat, old eyes that need decent contrast. Modern themes are all too uniformly dark or light for me, I want something in between
I agree, the Mint default, medium grey on dark grey is hideous. The new themes (from 20.2) give me eyestrain on the light themes and take me too much effort to pick out individual elements on the dark themes. Same is true in Gnome 3 and KDE 5, though KDE is a bit better in that regard
I always end up using the mint-legacy-themes and papirus icons as they are a nice blend of dark and light and my eyes can pick out the elements immediately so I end up with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFcHtWMOxJA
Just tested CubeIDE on 21.1 and it works fine here. I installed CubeIDE on Mint 20 and its still fine after upgrading. A cheat way of setting up the 32 bit multiarch and libs on Mint or Ubuntu is to just install "apt install steam", that will setup multiarch for i386 and install all the base libs
Just upgraded my laptop to Mint 21.1 this morning. Ill give it a couple of weeks before I do the workstation upgrade just to be on the safe side. No problems and everything went smoothly, but my god, the new default theme and colour scheme is ugly. Its like the old Redhat 7/8 theme from 2000-2002. I dont know why Mint have switched away from the distinctive green themes to something so bland, generic and blue
Everything works well though. The desktop is a little more responsive on the cinnamon version and the new animations are much more subtle. Was only a 30 second job to install the mint legacy themes and papirus icons and its backing to looking good too
Olive 0.1.2 branch is an excellent, simple(ish) video editor with some great community created effects and very good performance. I use it frequently to create training videos and its rock solid stable. Its an ideal first time video editor for new users with a simple interface and a suprising amount of features. Only problem is there are no binary packages for it and you have to compile from source which most users are not going to do. The new olive 0.2.x branch is still a bit of a mess. Its getting there very slowly and hopefully will be ready for production use soon but its very buggy for me with frequent crashes and incomplete features
I ended up creating my own fork of 0.1.2 with a few fixes and baked in community themes which I will keep using till the 0.2.x branch reaches stability
IceWM still gets a lot of use in the embedded space, especially when you are dealing with display hardware that only supports 2D acceleration. We used it for our ARM and X86 devices till 2021 before we switched our stack over to wayland
You can have have a minimal desktop and terminal in < 40 MB RAM
Im with you here, I dont understand the hate. I was gifted a Samsung Z Fold 4 in August by our Samsung rep. While its not for me as a daily driver I was reasonably impressed after using one for a week. If you view it as a small tablet that doubles as a phone it works remarkably well and the extra screen real estate makes a big difference when browsing and using office apps. And it came with a decent case and stylus. Not sure what they cost and while I personally wouldnt shell out for one, I know plenty of people that would
Its just a bit chunky compared to my iPhone 13 mini, I actually want smaller not bigger when it comes to phones, Id love to be able to get away with a dumb phone. My daughter however loves it and she was so thankful for passing it on to her she actually took me out for lunch and I didnt have to pay! Its a natural upgrade to her Samsung Galaxy Note 20
Just go to Settings -> Windows Activation and there will be a link to "Switch to Windows 10 Home". It will open up the Microsoft App Store where you can buy the Windows 10 Home Upgrade license. This used to cost £49 but its now free
I presume its the same for Windows 11 in S mode but having never used or had to support Windows 11 I have no idea really
Its free now but when Windows S first hit the OEM channel in 2017 it was different. S was initially considered a separate, cheaper release of 10 and if you wanted to "upgrade" from S to Home or Pro then you had to buy an appropriate upgrade license. An upgrade to Home from S was £49/$49/€49 and an upgrade to Pro was £119/$119/€119. It stayed this way until mid 2020 when Microsoft had a change of heart and folded the S edition into a mode of Windows Home. This was mainly because most OEMs were getting pissy about having to support Windows S which didnt behave in the ways their support teams were used to. OEMs didnt want S, they just wanted Windows
In simple core terms we span from 16-80 cores per node. We have 39 "servers" in total with 8 of them being hot standby (one for each type of deployed hardware). Our oldest hardware is dual socket, Haswell era Xeons (E5-2675 v3 iirc), 2 x 16 cores. We have a couple of slightly newer gen, single socket, 20 core Xeon 6138Ps. Our latest and greatest are single socket EPYC 7713P's, 64 core, very good value and performance. We also have some prior gen 32 core EPYC's which were our first introduction into AMD servers. Our primary build farm is made up from 12 x Threadripper 3990X 64 core, self built boxes. Not server CPU's of course but they provide better performance and lower cost than the equivalent EPYC's thanks to them being commodity hardware and having higher clock speeds (though its a product line that seems to have been cancelled now). Our ARM build servers are Solidrun LX2 Honeycomb boxes, 2 x separate 16 core servers in a single 1U chassis. We are currently evaluating a Gigabyte Ampere Altra Q80-30 80 core ARM server which is a huge step up in ARM performance but Im not convinced about value yet
As you can see, its a very mixed non enterprise topology hardware wise and we are far from enterprise level budget wise! We try to reuse wherever possible. Our infrastructure is split into 5 main regions; internal admin, build farm (X86+ARM), client build services, CI testing and storage. Each of these have different performance characteristic requirements
-For example our entire internal admin systems (sales, support, finance and admin) and its 9 VM's can run comfortably on a single EPYC 7713P 64 core box. We spread them over 2 with automatic fail over but they can all run on a single box should there be a hardware failure
-Our internal build systems need as many cores as possible at as high speed as possible but dont use a lot of RAM comparatively speaking so Threadripper 3990X's fit the bill perfectly here. On the ARM side the LX2 was the only commercially available option at the time
-Client build services are a mixture of 64 and 32 core EPYC's split over 2 generations. CPU performance isnt as critical as our internal build systems (I pay my own staff, not clients!) and the RAM requirements are much higher than you can pack into 3XXX Threadripper. We basically over provision the CPU cores because most of these jobs are submitted for overnight building, ready for the next day
-CI is a hodgepodge of repurposed, old build servers from Intel and AMD of various core sizes. Performance isnt critical here and in a push we can steal some cycles from the build farm
-Storage is done on the old Haswell era Xeons
I have no issue with VMWare from a technical point of view. Its definitely the most noob friendly ecosystem and its solid and reliable in the most. Its the constant redefining of the product into multiple, chargeable SKU's and the corresponding invoices that I had to pay that pissed me off. If Im the IT director at a bank then Im playing it safe and I would go VMWare, its off the shelf with an abundance of certified bods but has a price tag to match it. I dont care about the price in that situation. As a small to medium sized dev house I need better value, much better value. I also need stability, I dont have the resources to constantly throw at the upgrade cycle
I never looked at oVirt, it didnt come up on our radar at the time, Im not sure it was in any usable state then. [Java rant redacted]. We did briefly look at Proxmox but ruled it out quickly due to it being a bit of a mess at the time and a lack of support on ARM hardware. We were already in the process of deploying some test ARM kit and wanted to make sure that if we deployed production ARM64 servers in the future then we didnt need to change our infrastructure to deal with it. Proxmox is basically KVM (with LXC in later editions) anyway so there were no real advantages there, only negatives. Proxmox still doesnt have ARM support and we now deploy ARM64 based servers both internally and for clients
We also looked at pure open source XEN server, which was a little ahead of the feature set of KVM at the time. But with KVM being accepted into the Linux kernel as an official component, the writing was on the wall as to which open source virt layer was going to get the lions share of quality developer time in the future so I bet on KVM and it seems to have been the correct play so far
We initially went to Citrix Xen Server as I had previous good experience with it in small, single server setups and we were already using Citrix VDI for our Windows sales, finance and admin desktops. We used a hybrid of the commercial version on internal business systems and systems hosting customer data and the free, open source edition for dev servers and the build farm. It wasnt terrible but we had some reliability and compatibility problems with the commercial edition. Things like hot migrate only working between servers with identical CPU's, missing support for some 10Gb ethernet adaptors and quite a few "undocumented behaviours" as Citrix liked to call them. We ended up having to write a lot of glue code and modify a lot of Citrix core system behaviour (which technically invalidated our support contract) to pull everything together. It was just about usable but required a lot of maintenance and fire fighting and Citrix support made VMware look amazing. When V7 arrived in 2016 it broke a lot of our glue code and fixes and Citrix changed the VDI licensing making it much more expensive. Given how much support we were doing internally and how little we were getting from them, I decided to hold off on migration and start an internal project to look at a full migration to open source, even on the admin, sales and finance Windows desktops
So 6 months and lots of brainstorming, testing, training and recruiting later we had a plan to move to KVM on Ubuntu LTS. Ubuntu LTS VDI desktops to match the developer ecosystem and deploy the 3 Windows finance apps that we couldn't find quality alternatives for as RemoteApps using Windows Terminal Server. We employed a new bod who was a KVM specialist and trained up two of our best support peeps to be his cover. Smart move as he moved back to Arizona after 5 months, unable to cope with the UK winter! The actual migration was pretty smooth and trouble free and the whole thing was done over a weekend
We ended up with KVM/libvirt using virt-manager as a GUI which is simple but capable for our purposes. We ended up writing a web based monitoring and alert system and a chunk of glue code to get things to behave exactly as we wanted it. There are now open source web based monitoring and management tools for KVM but ours fits us perfectly so we will stick with it until we really have to change it. More recently we moved away from Ubuntu on the Desktop to Linux Mint, for both developer and admin systems, due to continually increasing problems in the way Ubuntu packages it default desktop but that was a pretty straightforward migration
Very, very happy with what we have now, its rock solid stable, easy to maintain, does exactly what we need it too, is very flexible and reduced our 3rd party software licensing costs from about £245K per year down to about £19K! It was a bit of a rigmarole to get here but if we had to deploy it all again from scratch in a disaster recovery situation then we can do it in under 24 hours including restoring backups
...VMWare's recent moves all seem to have been to antagonise customers, not help them. Maybe the Broadcom acquisition will be a good thing for VMWare customers? Only joking
P2V is a very niche market nowadays and almost exclusively used to virtualise legacy systems that companies have lost the staff and experience they need to reconstruct such legacy services. Its no good for VDI and virt dev workstations because the resulting image isnt compatible with the corporate base images so huge amounts of storage are wasted. If you really need P2V then you can still use the 3rd party KVM and XEN P2V tools to generate images and import them into VCentre. Its not optimal but VMWare's own P2V never was either. It almost always required some cleanup on complex systems.
VMWare has always been a prickly, customer hostile, company to deal with (with the exception of the first few years before the first corporate sell off to EMC in 2004). We were VMWare customers for the better part of 15 years, starting with GSX Server in 2001 and moving to ESX shortly afterwards. Every release, a core feature seemed to vanish only to be replaced with an additionally charged optional extra. The final straw for us was blocking the 3rd party Veeam backup software from working on the entry level edition because VMWare wanted a slice of their income and to sell their own backup options
Its also way too expensive now. In order to get modest functionality you need the VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus subscription. The essentials subscription is only of use for a single physical server setup, 2 or 3 maybe at a push, there is no hot migration or other basic functionality included. For a small dev and support outfit like ours with about 30 physical servers you are looking at about £120K per year (30 x £4200 ish) just to lease the virtualisation layer. Its just not good value for money, especially when the support is so poor. Thats 2 decent infrastructure guys or gals who could do a great job of migrating you to opensource and free KVM based solutions, configured exactly as your company needs it. So thats what we did and despite a couple of hurdles in the early days, the end result is much more efficient and easier to manage than VMWare's offerings. We also have infrastructure people with spare time to help the devs in big deployments. Invest in your own company peeps, not other peoples
That was a dishonest, manipulative answer. He didnt say it was difficult, he said it was impossible, you shouldn't pretend otherwise. Its not that its difficult, its literally impossible. Biology precludes it. Just look at the Scandinavian countries. Their policies and social structures have gone the furthest to minimise these differences and yet the outcome has been the exact opposite of what people like you said it would be. Instead of shrinking the difference in choice between genders, it has actually widened the differences in the choices they make. Woman make more feminine choices and men make more masculine choices in Sweden than in any western country
https://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girls-3848156-Feb2018/
Infact the Scandinavian experiment has failed so badly that they have actually made it illegal to do scientific studies that show the truth in Sweden. That politically correct policies cause more societal damage than they could ever hope to match with improvements. Its a disastrously failed policy and outlook on the world that sadly many people believe is true, thanks to the media, big tech and western governments constantly pushing this narrative
https://www.opindia.com/2021/11/sweden-lund-university-researcher-faces-prosecution-for-study-post-rapes-committed-by-immigrants/
Geekbench 5 for Linux is very, very simplified benchmark but it does show you some differences between the mitigations being enabled and disabled and it allows you to perform the same benchmarks across Windows, macOS and Linux. The results on their own are meaningless but when used as a comparative it gives a reasonable, if incomplete indication of performance differences
Phoronix Test Suite is a much more comprehensive benchmark for Linux (and Windows, macOS, Solaris, FreeBSD). While its not perfect, indeed some of the tests are meaningless drivel. It does however contain a lot of real world scenarios and provides a lot more data about individual aspects of performance on many specific workloads. Its well worth a look if you want to understand what aspects of performance change under the mitigations
You just created shit loads of extra work for yourself. Maybe that was the plan? You will now have to do the same kernel customisation 10-30 times every year, every time a security update is published
Im sure it would have been much easier to boot with "mitigations=off" which would apply now and to all future debian kernel updates
The problem with the tinfoil hat brigade is that the last decade has proved them to be correct about an alarming number of topics. Infact, if we spent more time listening, as opposed to making smarmy comments, we could have avoided many of the large scale fuck ups we are dealing with today. We were warned in advance and we chose to ignore, either through arrogance or general stupidity, myself included
The trend away from smartphones to dumb phones has already started, we have already hit peak smartphone market penetration. In the field of OpSec, smartphones are already a quaint throwback to 2016. In the field of embedded systems development, many developers (about 40-50% in my company) simply refuse to carry one, either personal or company supplied. Business cards are back in vogue at embedded conferences
While I personally still use one (carefully) because the convenience factor is just to high for me, I wont demand that my staff use them. They have good reason to be concerned
You are correct that there are no official ISO images for Kubuntu, Lubuntu or the other desktop respins of Ubuntu but that is mainly because ARM platforms dont have a standard way of booting, rendering ISO's as non workable for most ARM platforms. The core system and packages do however have support for both armhf and aarch64 so if you want Kubuntu on ARM, including the latest KDE Plasma, you can install in pretty easily if there is an Ubuntu Server image for your hardware (which almost all ARM systems have)
Simply flash your Ubuntu server image, add the backports repo and: apt install kubuntu-desktop. I would start with an Armbian spin of Ubuntu Server. Its generally better quality and higher performing than most ARM OEM releases
KDE works very well on most Rockchip and AMLogic SoC's. Ive run KDE 5.25 with hardware GPU acceleration on on cheap £30 RK TV boxes and it runs fine
Ubuntu 22.04(.1) Desktop is a mess sadly, its an under performing mass of bloatware that uses 2-3 times the RAM it should do and a similar amount in wasted disk space
Ive been a long term Ubuntu desktop user for a decade (since 12.10) and a dabbler with Ubuntu since 5.04. Prior to that I was a SuSe Desktop user and before that I ran Slackware. The reason I switched my primary systems to Ubuntu in the first place was performance. SuSe had far better management tools with YAST (and still does) but Ubuntu offered a slimmed down, better performing, more constant desktop experience than any of the other distros. Its underlying core was well thought out and laid out (and still is mostly) and its default desktop and GUI app choices were well optimised, best of breed, well integrated app selections. With the release of 16.04 (actually in 2015 but I only use LTS releases on our workstations), Canonical changed its internal development direction. It wanted to reduce the cost of development internally so it started to rely more what was being developed by others and spend less developing and optimising internally
The first major external sign of this was the replacement of upstart with systemd, a backwards step that made system configuration and troubleshooting more complicated than the traditional methods with no appreciable increase in functionality. SystemD also doubled the RAM use for a barebones, stripped down install used as app hosts in VMs. Suddenly our minimal VMs would no longer run with 16-32MB of allocated RAM. You needed 64MB ram just to run an SSH server. Bah humbug but not enough of an issue to change my entire toolstack for 80-90 employees
Then we had Gnome 3. Another big increase in RAM and storage requirements came with it and a corresponding performance decrease caused frustration. For the first time we had to add 3D accelerated gaming GPU's to developer workstations whose primary function was to write code for embedded systems in a text editor and use a terminal for serial console and ssh access. Are you fucking kidding me? Again, mumble, grumble, sweary words but easier to throw money at RAM, SSD's, GPU's and new workstations than to put the time and R&D into retooling my entire companies software platform
Next came snap packages to replace traditional deb packages. What an absolute clusterfuck. Seriously what kind of idiot thinks its a good idea to ship half an operating system with each software package? This level of abstraction for the sake of stupid "developers" unwilling or unable to learn simple package management tools is ridiculous beyond belief, not to mention the mess it makes by mounting every app at is own loopback device. The wasted storage and RAM went up again as each snap app packaged and ran its own versions of already installed system libraries. The apps didnt integrate properly into the desktops because they ran separate versions of toolkits and themes. Add to that the doubling in average startup times for apps. Only a few to start with and nothing system critical. Even though they were shipping with some snap packages it was a simple enough job to disable snap and use the equivalent and standard deb packages from the repos. Then apps stopped appearing in the standard repos at all, only being available as snap packages. Current versions of Chromium and Firefox could no longer be installed from the standard repos. Canonical told the world a load of bullshit; it was too difficult to build Chromium for multiple releases and therefore snap was the way forward. We (a tiny development house compared to Canonical) were building and maintaining multiple versions of Chromium for multiple architectures including arch's with custom GPU and VPU code required (Pi4/RK3399/RK3288/AML905/AML922/etc) so we knew this was horseshit firsthand
This was the critical point for us and when we decided to switch away from Ubuntu desktop. Ubuntu Server (sans snaps) is still a great, if imperfect, end product, even the 22.04 release. We still use Ubuntu's core (NOT Ubuntu Core) for the base of some of our embedded systems and for our servers without snap but the Desktop has reached Microsoft's levels of bloatware and multi toolkit stupidity sadly
I also have a small web design agency (well 50% of it) that is mainly a windows house (with a couple of macs) and to be fair Windows hardware requirements have grown at pretty much the same rate as Ubuntu Desktop. My whine is that there is no real reason for it other than lazy development and the overuse of abstraction layers
BTRFS was NOT originally developed at Oracle. It was originally developed by Chris Mason, who was an Oracle employee at the time but it wasnt originally worked on inside Oracle, it was a completely independent project for Chris
Also OpenZFS (as opposed to Oracles propriety ZFS) does NOT pose serious licensing issues (licensed under the CDDL), the issues are pretty minor and the practicalities were solved long ago, ask Canonical. This has the effect of blocking the distribution of binary modules within a prebuilt kernel but there are no restrictions on shipping an OpenZFS kernel module as a separate binary package or as source package for a DKMS module build.
Ive been using a free G Suite legacy account for a small business with less than 20 employees for 10+ years and this coaxed me into taking another look at Office 365 which Id ignored for the last 5 years due to it being a slow, unresponsive mess when I last looked at it. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was much improved and the browser apps are streets ahead of Googles offerings in terms of functionality and usability. Its still isnt quite as responsive as Google Apps, especially when it comes to Outlook vs Gmail in the browser but its good enough. It offers more and better features and at the basic end its almost half the cost. I just wish they had some decent migration tools, it ended up being a manual weekend slog with a lot of G Documents needing manual conversion and tweaking. Even our preferred Linux email clients (Evolution & Geary) work great with it and it integrates into our local Nextcloud instance quite well
What on earth are you talking about? There are no supply chain issues with AMD or Intel Desktop CPU's any more and there hasnt been for months. The top end 16 core 5950X is currently selling for £260 less than its RRP (£489 when I picked one up from Scan 6 weeks ago and still the same price today). The reason TR Pro 59XX is not available till next month is because Lenovo demanded a period of exclusivity in exchange for developing their TR Pro workstation line
>I just can't see choking down what AMD now wants for a decent developer box with those useless gaming-focused crippled chips
Again, WTF? In what way is the 5950X a "useless gaming-focused crippled chip"? AMD has only a single product that is purely gaming focused, the 5800X3D and the 12 and 16 core 5900/5950X make excellent content creation and developer workstations on the cheap. They even support ECC UDIMMS. A 5950X is faster than a 24 core non Pro Threadripper 3960X for almost all software development and build tasks thanks to its 25% faster per thread performance. It even matches the 32 core non Pro 3970X in most build tasks. The number of situations where a software build can utilise 64 concurrent threads is almost zero, there are too many dependencies in most build chains
We build embedded linux systems, custom OS's for 3rd party embedded and IoT systems, that vary in size and complexity from ARM set top boxes (buildroot/yocto) to VR walls (custom debian where we have to build all packages from source to integrate our customisation and own software). From a day to day developer perspective I have a choice of my 64 core non Pro TR 3990X or my 5950X. The 5950X is preferred most of the time because its silent and the day to day and single thread performance is better. The only time the 3990X comes into play is when we do automated build testing. That means iterating through tens of different build configs for 4 different base systems across 4 cpu architectures (x86-64, armhf, arm64, risc-v) totalling 350-450 builds in total. At that point those 64 cores, 2x memory capacity and ~60% better memory bandwidth start to make sense when you are running 16 VM's in parallel. Thats a ~28 hour job on the 5950X dropping to ~17 hours on the 64 core Threadripper
Either way its a weekend job and dependent on disk IO as much as CPU performance. If you really have a build chain at the very top of the complexity and size ladder then you are probably going to get a bigger performance improvement from upgrading you build storage to an Optane P5800X or even an older 905P than adding more cores
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