I have a mac I use for some specific tasks. I’ll agree the Apple is, ehh, Apple.

But mounting network fileshares is dead simple. My SMB share pops right up, authentication works fine, the user interface for it is fine. If I wanted to use it remotely, I’d just export it over my tailnet.

’sshfs’ is good for short stints of brief use, but ultimately it breaks on a protocol level as soon as your socket dies, on any OS.

This will be so much fun for people with legacy systems

Apparently AMD couldn’t make the signal integrity work out with socketed RAM. (source: LTT video with Framework CEO)

IMHO: Up until now, using soldered RAM was lazy and cheap bullshit. But I do think we are at the limit of what’s reasonable to do over socketed RAM. In high performance datacenter applications, socketed RAM is on it’s way out (see: MI300A, Grace-{Hopper,Blackwell},Xeon Max), with onboard memory gaining ground. I think we’ll see the same trend on consumer stuff as well. Requirements on memory bandwidth and latency are going up with recent trends like powerful integrated graphics and AI-slop, and socketed RAM simply won’t work.

It’s sad, but in a few generations I think only the lower end consumer CPUs will be possible to use with socketed RAM. I’m betting the high performance consumer CPUs will require not only soldered, but on-board RAM.

Finally, some Grace Hopper to make everyone happy: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gYqF6-h9Cvg

Ok, while most of these don’t have companies behind them with huge revenues, most work on these projects is done by paid developers, with money coming from sponsorships, grants, donations and support deals. (Or in the case of Linux - device drivers are a prerequisite for anyone buying your product).

Developers getting paid to work on open source is a good thing. These projects may have begun their life as small hobby projects - they aren’t anymore. (And that’s probably good)

For you? No. For most people? Nope, not even close.

However, it mitigates certain threat vectors both on Windows and Linux, especially when paired with a TPM and disk encryption. Basically, you can no longer (terms and conditions apply) physically unscrew the storage and inject malware and then pop it back in. Nor can you just read data off the drive.

The threat vector is basically ”our employees keep leaving their laptops unattended in public”.

(Does LUKS with a password mitigate most of this? Yes. But normal people can’t be trusted with passwords and need the TPM to do it for them. And that basically requires SecureBoot to do properly.)

I’ll bite. It’s getting better, but still a long way to go.

• No commercially viable remote desktop or thin client solutions. I’m not talking about just VNC, take a look at for example ThinLinc to see what I’m looking for - a complete solution. (Also, it took like ten rough years before basic unencrypted single user VNC was available at all.) Free multimillion dollar business idea right here folks!
• Related to the above point - software rendered wayland is painful. To experience this yourselves, install any distro in VirtualBox or VMWare or whatever and compare the usability between a Xorg DE (with compositing turned off) and the same Wayland DE. Just look at the click-to-photon latency and weep. I’ve seen X11 perform better with VNC over WAN.
• ”We don’t need network transparency, VNC will save us”. See points above.
• ”Every frame is perfect” went just as well as can be expected, there is a reason VSYNC is an option in games and professional graphics applications. Thanks Valve.
• I’m assuming wlroots still won’t work on Nvidia, and that the Gnome/KDE implementations are still a hodgepodge, and that Nvidia will still ask me to install the supported Xorg drivers. If I’m wrong, it only took a decade or so to get a desktop working on hardware from the dominant GPU vendor. (Tangentially related - historically the only vendor with product lines specifically for serving GPU-accelerated desktops to thin clients)
• After over a decade of struggles, we can finally (mostly) share out screens in Zoom. Or so I’m told.

But what do I know, I’ve only deployed and managed desktop linux for a few thousand people. People were screaming about these design flaws back in 2008 when this all started. The criticisms above were known and dismissed as FUD, and here we are. A few architectural changes back then, and we could have done this migration a decade faster. Just imagine, screen sharing during the pandemic!

As an example, see Arcan, a small research project with an impressively large subset of features from both X11 and Wayland (including working screen sharing, network transparency and a functioning security model). I wouldn’t use it in production, but if it was more than one guy in a basement working on it, it would probably be very usable fairly fast, compared to the decade and half that RedHat and friends have poured into Wayland thus far. Using a good architecture from the start would have done wonders. And Wayland isn’t even close to a good architecture. It’s just what we have to work with now.

Hopefully Xorg can die at some point, a decade or so from now. I’m just glad I don’t work with desktops anymore, the swap to Wayland will be painful for a lot of organisations.

#define yeet throw
#define let const auto
#define mut &
#define skibidi exit(1)

The future is now!

Well, a few issues:

• For hosting or training large models you want high bandwidth between GPUs. PCIe is too slow, NVLink has literally a magnitude more bandwidth. See what Nvidia is doing with NVLink and AMD is doing with InfinityFabric. Only available if you pay the premium, and if you need the bandwidth, you are most likely happy to pay.
• Same thing as above, but with memory bandwidth. The HBM-chips in a H200 will run in circles around the GDDR-garbage they hand out to the poor people with filthy consumer cards. By the way, your inference and training is most likely bottlenecked by memory bandwidth, not available compute.
• Commercially supported cooling of gaming GPUs in rack servers? Lol. Good luck getting any reputable hardware vendor to sell you that, and definitely not at the power densities you want in a data center.
• TFLOP16 isn’t enough. Look at 4 and 8 bit tensor numbers, that’s where the expensive silicon is used.
• Nvidias licensing agreements basically prohibit gaming cards in servers. No one will sell it to you at any scale.

For fun, home use, research or small time hacking? Sure, buy all the gaming cards you can. If you actually need support and have a commercial use case? Pony up. Either way, benchmark your workload, don’t look at marketing numbers.

Is it a scam? Of course, but you can’t avoid it.

If you can have NAND-gates, a clock and some wires, you can build anything.

Go visit https://nandgame.com/ to try it out yourself!

How else would you be webscale?

Most arch users are casuals that finally figured out how to read a manual. Then you have the 1% of arch users who are writing the manual…

It’s the Gentoo and BSD users we should fear and respect, walking quietly with a big stick of competence.

Used to? It’s standard practice like everywhere.

Let’s stop perfect getting in the way of better.

For the threat models and data harvesting the general consumer (i.e. our moms) will face, MacOS does a far better job than Windows and iOS far better than Android (and no, your mom isn’t actually using a pixel with Graphene. Maybe she could, but she isn’t. Not really.)

If Apple can’t satisfy your threat model and privacy posturing, fine. But don’t assume everyone’s requirements are the same as yours, that’s how we scare people away.

Jokes aside, vim as PID 1 is just a bad idea.

Emacs on the other hand: https://github.com/emacs-os/el-init

Rough start? It’s been over a decade and it’s still rough.

That javascript hole was probably caused by a bicycle.

My NAS will stay on bare metal forever. Any complications there is something I really don’t want. Passthrough of drives/PCIe-devices works fine for most things, but I won’t use it for ZFS.

As for services, I really hate using Docker images with a burning passion. I’m not trusting anyone else to make sure the container images are secure - I want the security updates directly from my distribution’s repositories, and I want them fully automated, and I want that inside any containers. Having Nixos build and launch containers with systemd-nspawn solves some of it. The actual docker daemon isn’t getting anywhere near my systems, but I do have one or two OCI images running. Will probably migrate to small VMs per-service once I get new hardware up and running.

Additionally, I never found a source of container images I feel like I can trust long term. When I grab a package from Debian or RHEL, I know that package will keep working without any major changes to functionality or config until I upgrade to the next major. A container? How long will it get updates? How frequently? Will the config format or environment variables or mount points change? Will a threat actor assume control of the image? (Oh look, all the distros actually enforce GPG signatures in their repos!)

So, what keeps me on bare metal? Keeping my ZFS pools safe. And then just keeping away from the OCI ecosystem in general, the grass is far greener inside the normal package repositories.

For anyone working on or around stages:

Most sane production companies standardise on over-under. Even if you find some other method superior (nothing is), you’ll get thrown out headfirst if you don’t follow the standard. Having a tech fuck around with a non-compliant cable during a changeover is far too risky.

Should be noted that there are special cases. For example, thicccc cables (i.e. 24ch analog multi) that have their own dedicated cases often go down in an 8 instead - easier to pull out and you can use a smaller case. Thank god for digital audio.

(Also, when using over-under correctly, you can throw the cable and it will land straight without any internal stresses winding it up like a spring)

I’ll extend your RHEL corpo parents with the other children in the family. The majority of their revenue comes from completely legal oxycodone sales, any (alleged) trafficking is just a side hustle.

Rocky: The rich corpo parent’s least favorite child. Chill dude. Gives hugs to his parents victims. Still intends to take over the family business and run an oxycodone-empire - but ethically.

Alma: The other reasonable estranged child. Wants to take over the family business, but considers high quality ”herbal remedies” the only pain medication anyone would ever need.

Oracle: Wants to pivot the family business into more potent opioids and possibly world domination. While it’s obvious he has access to ”stuff”, you suspect he has ties to multiple cartels and possibly the yakuza. For some reason has direct numbers to several heads-of-state in his phone.

I’ve seen ZFS in production use on pools with hundreds of TBs, clustered together into clusters of many PBs. The people running that don’t even think about BTRFS, and certainly won’t actively consider it for anything.

• BTRFS once had data corruption bugs. ZFS also had that, but only in very specific edge cases. That case was taken very seriously, but basically, ZFS has a reputation for not fucking up your bits even close to BTRFS
• ZFS was built and tested for use on large pools from the beginning, by Sun engineers from back when Sun was fucking amazing and not a pile of Oracle managed garbage. BTRFS still doesn’t have stable RAID5/6.
• ZFS send/recv is amazing for remote replication of large filesystems.
• DRAID is kind o the only sane thing to do with todays disk sizes, speeds and pool sizes.

But those are ancillary reasons. I’ll quote the big reason from the archwiki:

The RAID 5 and RAID 6 modes of Btrfs are fatally flawed, and should not be used for "anything but testing with throw-away data”.

For economic reasons, you need erasure coding for bigger pools, either classic RAID5/6 or DRAID. BTRFS will either melt your data in RAID5/6 or not support DRAID at all.