• be microsoft, a whole bunch of greedy user-hostile fucks
• make spyware
• tell users that spyware is really cool and useful
• make them pay for the spyware
• use the spyware to get their data
• sell their data
• profit

Yea, this is because society system is lagging behind and we have not done the right changes fast enough to prevent suffering due to technological advancements, in my opinion

The oldest version of Win I used was 95 about 2 years ago on chromatography machine (I think hplc or gas).

It is to my knowledge still in use in the school because the software don’t run on newer machines. The teacher told me that he don’t know what will he do when it dies. It isn’t really an issue on Linux.

We ship a $50k instrument product running Windows, and everyone hates it.

As the only EE on staff, I got to spend a portion of covid soldering TPM chips to motherboards. Fun times.

I find it unbelievable that anyone ever accepted lab equipment with a Windows requirement. I mean, I know it is true, but what the fuck? Glad your work is doing this.

several of our suppliers have been pressured to offer Linux support

We just got our first oscilloscope with Red Hat preinstalled.

This is so cool. Really great to hear. I wish more companies and other institutions would do this. They have to realize that using Microsoft software won’t benefit them in the long term, and actually start pressuring hardware vendors into pre-installing Linux.

The only regular people I can think of are gamers and my mom but I would like the idea of PC’s returning to techie and specialized use cases

Most serious SW development is now on Linux laptops/desktops,

I’d love a source for this. To my knowledge, most people that build to Linux hosts still use OSX.

I loathe to be the BestBuy employee who sells a Linux box to a customer who only cares about the price difference.

Also helps that Valve isn’t porting source to Apple silicon.

Framework laptops also ship without Windows if you wish. Certainly nice to save the money for not purchasing an OS license I won’t use.

I still haven’t seen a windows app that will check all hardware and software and give a pain scale rating on what switching would involve.

You can just use a liveboot Linux image on a USB key drive and find out whether there are any issues.

Here’s Debian’s liveboot images (which they apparently call “live install”):

https://www.debian.org/CD/live/

I imagine that most distros probably have a liveboot image, though I haven’t gone looking.

USB drives are maybe slower than your internal SSD drive, but for rescue work or just seeing whether your hardware works, should be fine.

I would expect everything that you listed there to work. The only thing I haven’t heard of on there is that dygma keyboard, and looking at their website, if this is the keyboard in question:

https://dygma.com/pages/dygma-raise-2#section-faq

Is the software compatible with macOS and Linux?

Yes, our configurator software is compatible with macOS, Linux and even Windows.

I mean, I dunno if Logitech puts out trackball software for Linux, but if what you want is macro software or configurable acceleration curves or something, there’s open-source stuff not tied to that particular piece of hardware. And the Steam Deck is running Linux itself.

There’s gonna be a familiarization cost associated with changing an OS. Like, your workflow is gonna change, and there are gonna be things that you know how to do now that you aren’t gonna know how to do in a new environment. But I think that that’s likely going to be the larger impact, rather than “can I use hardware?”

EDIT: Oh, it sounds like the reason that they call it “live install” rather than “liveboot” is because you can use the same image to both just use Linux directly, and can run the installer off the image too.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

user empowerment

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.

The Intel MacBook waking up from hibernation is about 30 seconds to get to the login prompt, 30 seconds for the login prompt to actually work, then 10-15 seconds after entering the password to get to a usable desktop environment with the wifi generally connecting within that window.

Hmm. Yeah, okay, I can see about a minute-and-a-half being obnoxious.

So, the login prompt can probably be dealt with by just having some way to treat the login process specially and paging it in sooner. Like, I can’t believe that it uses all that much memory. If it isn’t an isolated process, make it one.

But that’s with only 8 gigs of ram on this MacBook, the more ram the longer it takes. The 32 gigs of ram in my actual work laptop (ThinkPad P1 11th gen i9) takes about a minute to wake from hibernation, and like 2 minutes for it to fully get situated.

I’m using a 32 gig laptop. But most of that doesn’t get used other than as disk cache, and I believe that normally, Linux isn’t gonna restore the disk cache; it’ll just drop the cache contents. Right now, I’m using 2.3G for actual application usage.

considers

I figure that maybe the desktop shell or whatever Apple calls it these days – going back to classic MacOS, the Finder – probably is more-heavyweight than what I’m using, but I figure that they could maybe do something like temporarily twiddle I/O priority on processes during the de-hibernation process. Like, okay, anything other than the foreground process gets an I/O priority penalty for a period of time. Like, maybe your music player or something is choppy for a few seconds, but whatever you’re directly interacting with should be active more-quickly.

If this is SSD, that seems kinda long, still. Like, it shouldn’t take 2 minutes to move 32GB to SSD.

It looks like I get about 3GBps reading from SSD:

$ dd bs=100M iflag=direct if='setup_act_of_war_direct_action_1.06.3_(24183)-1.bin' of=/dev/null
40+1 records in
40+1 records out
4294098942 bytes (4.3 GB, 4.0 GiB) copied, 1.28615 s, 3.3 GB/s
$

And that’s doing I/O going through the filesystem layer; I dunno if Macs use a swap file or swap partition these days, but if they have a dedicated partition, they might pull a bit more). So if you figure that in terms of raw I/O performance, it shouldn’t take more than about 10 seconds to fully restore memory contents on a 32GB laptop with comparable SSD performance, even if the OS has to fully-restore the entire contents of the memory. There’s some hardware state restoration that has to happen prior to starting to pull stuff back into memory, but for the memory restoration, that’s the floor. If it’s more than that, then presumably it’s possible to optimize by reprioritizing reads.

So, I guess that there are maybe a couple areas for potential improvement:

1. If the thing is locked and requires a password or something, you know that the user is gonna have to use the login process before anything else. Get that paged back in as soon as possible. Ditto for the graphics layer, Quartz or whatever Apple has these days. Strip that login process down; maybe separate it from whatever is showing blingy stuff on the login screen. Can have the OS treat it specially so that it’s first in line to come up.

2. The next goal is to get the stuff that the user needs to be immediately interacting with back into memory. My guess is that that’s probably the launcher and/or task switcher and the foreground process. Might have a limited amount that can be done to strip the launcher/task switcher down. Have all processes other than those few favored processes get a temporary I/O priority penalty.

3. One wants to keep the I/O system saturated until the system is to a fully-restored state, so that we don’t have to have the latency of waiting for a process to request something to bring it back into memory. So have some process that gets started, runs with I/O priority below all other processes, and just does bulk reads of valid pages from the pagefile (or wherever MacOS stores the hibernation state). Once that thing has completed, the system should be fully-warmed back to pre-hibernation state. That eliminates idle gaps when maybe there’s no reads happening. Maybe restore the disk cache state after that, if that doesn’t happen now, if the reason the system is sluggish is because it’s having to re-warm the cache bit by bit. On my Linux box, it looks like post-restoration, the disk cache is empty, so it’s probably just dropping the disk cache contents (which probably speeds up hibernation, but is gonna mean that the post-hibernation system is gonna have to figure out what it’s sensible to cache).

EDIT: Also, relevant Steve Jobs quote that comes to mind:

https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html

Larry Kenyon was the engineer working on the disk driver and file system. Steve came into his cubicle and started to exhort him. “The Macintosh boots too slowly. You’ve got to make it faster!”

Larry started to explain about some of the places where he thought that he could improve things, but Steve wasn’t interested. He continued, “You know, I’ve been thinking about it. How many people are going to be using the Macintosh? A million? No, more than that. In a few years, I bet five million people will be booting up their Macintoshes at least once a day.”

“Well, let’s say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that’s probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you’ve saved a dozen lives. That’s really worth it, don’t you think?”

We were pretty motivated to make the software go as fast as we could anyway, so I’m not sure if this pitch had much effect, but we thought it was pretty humorous, and we did manage to shave more than ten seconds off the boot time over the next couple of months.

Yeah, that’s why I mentioned in my comment that enterprise/professional versions will almost certainly allow it to be completely disabled via GPO, as this would be a death sentence for Windows. Businesses and governments across the world would immediately begin planning to off board to something else otherwise.

Hmm. Do you allow people to VPN in from non-company-controlled laptops? Because I figure that anyone doing work at home is going to be maybe unwittingly having local copies made of data that they’re working with.

“Oopsie, we didn’t mean to leave the libraries in like that, and then for that update to switch ON the collection of all data after people stopped paying attention to it, and then after a lot of data has been collected for that still additional update to cause all that data to be sent back to our home servers…”

And perhaps it would not even be a lie - one malicious actor, working inside the company, might be able to sneak it in without the higher-ups knowing about it. Or arguably worst of all, not even realize themselves that they did it, until after-the-fact.

When working with something dangerous - e.g. explosives, or heavy like a car - it behooves us to treat it with special care. The fact that this data collection option now exists already warrants greater care in using Microsoft products in terms of security. Except, just how much do people care?

I could also see another alternative moving forward: the DoS simply freezes their Windows versions at the last version that did not include the data collection capability, and then never updates again. As the first years and then decades roll by, and they are using the equivalent of Windows 7, then XP, then 95, then 3.1, they simply lose out on having “computers”. Possibly here I’ve gone too far into the doom-and-gloom, b/c while it’s possible it’s not terribly plausible, though it illustrates how Microsoft is not committed to the safety of a national government, but rather instead solely their own profits - and short-term ones at that.