By “hub”, do you mean switch? I haven’t seen a hub in a very long time. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 1Gbps one.

Basic unmanaged switches often don’t have any sort of protection, and on some fancier managed switches it’s disabled by default (no idea why)

There’s a good explanation about that here: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

The issue is that a lot of sites used the user-agent to determine if the browser supported particular features (e.g. show a fancy version of a site if the user is using Netscape, otherwise show a basic version for Mosaic, lynx, etc). New browsers had to pretend to be the old good browsers to get the good versions of sites

This is why getting rid of the user agent is a good thing. Sniffing the UA is a mess.

Do they use the BSD userland instead? Interesting…

I think Alpine uses Busybox, but it’s feasible for a Linux distro to use BSD coreutils. Not sure if any do that, though.

User agents were commonly used for the wrong reasons - fingerprinting, sites that block particular browsers rather than using proper feature detection, etc. so I’m glad to see them slowly going away.

Interesting… I didn’t realise Skylake isn’t supported. I agree with your comment. I thought people were talking about much older equipment.

TPM 2 has been around since 2015ish and I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows starts relying on it more heavily. A lot of businesses have already required employees to use computers with TPM 2.0 for a long time, and enterprise use is a big focus for Microsoft.

not counting systems that use the Linux kernel but aren’t considered a traditional GNU+Linux desktop.

Does that mean you don’t count Alpine towards Linux market share? It mostly doesn’t use any GNU stuff.

You can also compile the kernel with LLVM instead of gcc, use musl instead of glibc, and use BSD coreutils instead of GNU coreutils.

User agent strings are frozen these days, at least in Chrome. They still have the browser major version and OS name at least, but Windows will always report Windows 10, Android will always report Android 10, MacOS will always report 10.15.7, and Linux is just “Linux x86_64”: https://www.chromium.org/updates/ua-reduction/

User agent strings are essentially deprecated and nobody should be using them any more. They’ve been replaced by User-Agent Client Hints, where the site can request the data it needs, and some high-entropy things (ie fields that vary a lot between users) can prompt the user for permission to share them first.

The thing is that most Windows users don’t care and will continue to use it. People like you and I know about the benefits of Linux, but sometimes we overestimate how much regular users care about the OS they’re using.

Forced restart for software updates

If anything, they’re moving in the opposite direction. Windows Server 2025 is going to support hotpatching, which means that system updates can be applied without needing to reboot. Not sure if the technology will come to consumer Windows though.

Require new CPUs and motherboards / hardware, ignoring the market for old computers.

How long do you expect legacy hardware to be supported for?

every day we get closer and closer to ctOS in Watch Dogs becoming a reality

I legitimately can’t tell if this is satire or not. I think you’re confusing the USA with a European country that actually has data privacy and consumer protection laws.

fags

This is what we called cigarettes in Australia.

Debian gives you a choice though. If you want stability, install the stable release. If you want newer packages, install the testing release. Just be sure to get security updates from unstable (sid) if you do that.

“stable” in this context means that stuff doesn’t change often. It doesn’t mean “stable” as in reliable / never crashes, although Debian is good at that too.

I think you’re looking for Debian. If you want newer packages, run testing instead of stable.

it’s not “stable”

“stable” in this case means that it doesn’t change often. Debian stable is called that because no major version changes are performed during the entire cycle of a release.

It doesn’t mean “stable” as in “never crashes”, although Debian is good at that too.

Arch is definitely not “stable” using that definition!

The tweet at the top has the rest of them attached as a screenshot which does make it a bit confusing.

Lake Superior’s tweet (the “innermost” one) came first. Tom quote-retweeted it. Lake superior replied to Tom’s tweet. Ron took a screenshot of the whole exchange and posted it as his own tweet.

Yeah, for sure. Same reason a bunch of subscription stuff goes up in price after a year or two.

Your version is better than OP

I’ve seen many a terrible containerized monolithic app.

I’ve seen plenty of self-hosters complain when an app needs multiple containers, to the point where people make unofficial containers containing everything. I used to get downvoted a LOT on Reddit when I commented saying that separating individual systems/daemons into separate containers is the best practice with Docker.

Docker is still useful even for apps that compile to a single executable, as the app may still depend on a particular environment setup, particular libraries being available, etc.