Still, most people interact with AI via a messenger-like app, not a terminal-like one.

Exactly.

Who could imagine Apple would eventually inherit Sun’s crown as the king of the RISC unix workstation?

No one, given how A/UX went down.

It was a mix of not buying Be, having a reverse acquisition with NeXT, Jobs taking over the reigns yet again, Sun doing a bunch of bad decisions.

Nowadays, following the spirit of old Apple, they only care the UNIX underpinnings as good enough, and that's about it.

Still, they managed to bring Unix to the masses. On a RISC platform even.

And their Unix is just fine.

UNIX had already won the server room by them with RISC.

Lets not pretend outside IIS with ASP, later ASP.NET, Active Directory, Sharepoint, SQL Server, SMB, there were any other deployment scenarios left for Windows.

I have to confess I've never seen a modern .NET stack deployment on anything other than Linux.

If you want faster, anything running on a Cerebras machine will do.

Never tried it for much coding though.

Outside of their (hard to buy) GLM 4.7 coding plans, it's also extremely expensive.

Interesting to note that, At 1.2 TiB/s memory bandwidth, it has twice as much bandwidth as an M5 Max chip from Apple. In the unlikely event Apple decides to make an M5 Ultra, it'll have the same memory bandwidth.

Of course, all the other metrics are well below this monster.

I have zero idea of what I'd do with it except programming in Python and doing my e-mail and browsing, but I would still love to have one under my desk.

It's a monster at 19-bit and smaller floating point computation, and at moving memory around to feed the ALUs.

Apart from that it would be like using an old-school Cray to run single-threaded, non-SIMD applications. It'd be a waste of money and electricity.

> it would be like using an old-school Cray

I'd totally do that as well. Don't judge me. ;-)

I really love Fedora and GNOME. It looks nice, it's reliable, and stays out of the way. That's all I ask from an OS.

Nobody passionately hates Chromebooks.

I really dislike the “expiration” date, and at one point they were very short (5 years) and poorly documented so it was a nasty surprise if you got an older model on sale.

I recently helped liberate 70 Chromebooks that were going to recycling. Now students get a Linux laptop for free.

I'm absolutely sure there are people who do. Chromebooks just have a practically nonexistant market share compared to Windows, and a lot of those users being kids being issued school laptops probably doesn't translate to a lot of visible complaining about Chromebook-specific problems.

What? I passionately hate Chromebooks, firstly because they were conceived as a power grab by Google to get people to do everything through online Google services instead of locally, and secondly in a more personal way when I actually had to use one, in a remote hostel with ropey internet.

You hate Google. I don't like them, but they are OK computers that lack some important keys. Lacking a Meta key makes using Gnome less convenient.

You are not forced to use Gmail or Google Docs. You are mostly forced to use a browser, unless you jailbreak it.

I do

I respect you. It's very hard to be passionate about something as bland as a Chromebook. It's like being passionate about tofu, or toothpaste, or baby shampoo.

Me too

I recently helped liberate about 70 EOL'ed Chromebooks. Now students in a college near me will get free laptops they can actually use for college work, running the latest and greatest Linux distros.

SusyQ USB-C Cable + USB-A to USB-C Cable + Coreboot?

Recently liberated a Chromebook that powerwashed my hours of manual provisioning again due to remote login control failure FWICS

Can't believe how much faster the same machine is with a modern Linux distro.

(ChromiumOS was originally Gnome and Chrome on a Gentoo derivative by Linux workstation users, but now has a "Turn on Linux" button greyed out for all the kids.)

Mrchromebox > Supported Devices: https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/supported-devices.html

It's possible to install a list of apps with a script on Win, Mac, and Linux computers.

Try to `adb install com.google.android.calculator`.

Which should be the security priority? App download counts or automated provisioning?

Oh well that's a different matter. Nobody hates acceptable cheap hardware.

Oh I thought it was a very dodgy process. Can you give some pointers? I will also ask an LLM?

Here you go

https://mrchromebox.tech/

This was it. It involved dismantling the machine, removing a screw, and some other maneuvers.

Depends on the Chromebook. Some use a screw as a write protect jumper, some do not.

Agreed. This was, so far, my worst experience with liberation of locked down machines. It’s fun that it scaled to that many units.

Their hardware, however, was always top-notch. It's really a shame they divested from it almost completely. I'm getting a Logitech ergo keyboard because Microsoft no longer makes them.

> It's been awful compared to any competitor it's ever had.

TBH, Windows 3.1 was reasonably nice compared to macOS 7, and much faster than OS/2 or Solaris 2.1 on the same hardware.

Faster than OS/2, sure. Now try to download a file in the background while doing work in the foreground. You would be lucky if your Windows 3.1 communications application could complete it without multiple retries.

The two operating systems were trying to solve different problems, and had different system requirements because of that. Windows 3.1 was fine for running multiple interactive applications since neither application would be doing real work in the background. When Windows 95 entered the picture, that changed and its system requirements weren't all that different from OS/2.

And that is just one example. Windows 3.1 didn't provide much in the way of memory protection. (From my recollections, it could detect a memory access violation. At that point it would blue screen.) One of OS/2's most noteworthy features was memory protection. All of a sudden you could use your computer for an entire day without losing work from crashing. Yeah, OS/2 would happily terminate an application (rather than the OS) when there was a memory access violation. On the other hand, it made it much easier for developers to detect and address such bugs.

On that last point: I have fond memories of bringing OS/2 boot disks to my high school programming classes after the upgrade to Windows 95 (and, when they started refusing to let me boot OS/2, they let me use the NT server). There was a world of difference between programming under OS/2 or NT verses Windows 95. No one bothered to try programming under Windows 3.1!

> No one bothered to try programming under Windows 3.1!

VB and Windows 3.11 paid for my first home. I wouldn’t enjoy programming in C in Windows though, and, IIRC, it was a while before Microsoft’s C tooling got a Windows version.

I should have said: no one in my programming class bothered to program under Windows 3.1. Clearly there were people out there writing software for Windows 3.1, and I have heard that VisualBASIC was a nice development platform for Windows 3.1.

I'm not sure what the C situation was like for Windows 3.1. I did have Borland C++ and fiddled around with the Windows IDE a bit, but never recalled making any progress.

Didn't MS also do OS/2 early on? Didn't they bill IBM by line of code?

I can't say much about Solaris, I used it - much later - on sparc and amd64.

I can say that I was writing 16 bit windows apps in '95, including drivers and VxDs, and Win 3.1 was a piece of garbage inside and out.

3.1 was still nice compared to its main competitor, which was MacOS 7. Only the richest kids would be running things like Solaris, SCO, and other preemptive multitasking systems because memory demands were high and memory was very expensive.

Also, Windows 3 would run on 286 computers (as would OS/2), which made the barrier of entry very low. I started running it on a 286 with a Hercules adapter.

> 1. There are plenty of computers sold with Linux installed.

Compared to what?

Compared to a hypothetical world without computers with Linux preinstalled, presumably.

“Plenty” doesn’t really seem like a relative term here, but a statement that there are enough options on the market if someone wants to buy a machine with Linux preinstalled.