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German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

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Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#241
post #91
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, aware of those... But... I wouldn't really use most of the countries on your list to set an example for the rest of the world, if you know what I mean...

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're tedious and predictable—people always say the same things, and it usually turns nasty.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#242
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't call a president that by all means takes from the poor, and gives it to the rich, to himself, and to children as corrupt? How about many, many senators who are doing the exact same thing? How about a prime minister that does the same? There is just as much corruption in the developed world as there is in ex-Soviet countries.

I feel like taking from the poor and giving to cronies is a thing that also happened under communism (and a good chunk of contemporary 'socialist' states, and to a less horrifying extent, gas and water socialisms like Western Europe). This is a generally predictable outcome of state-led socialism, as predicted long before actual implementation of state socialism, by early socialists like Benjamin Tucker and others li…

I guess my point was that OP was implying capitalism has no or considerably less corruption, when in reality, this is not true.

I'm not sure an ideology necessarily creates corruption. I'm not advocating for communism or capitalism or anything else, but when the UK PM is okay to start a multibillion dollar novelty project (London's Garden Bridge) and give that contract to his buddies, or the US president can literally charge the US taxpayer over $100 million to golf at his own golf course in less than four years, you cannot claim to be the better person. Capitalism sucks. Communism sucks. Instead of bashing one and praising the other despite both of them being immensely flawed, isn't the solution.

Also why my original comment is flagged is beyond me.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. The Kernel ABI is stable. Userspace is somewhat of a mess, ABI-wise. But most source code is available, so in most cases, you just need to recompile software to have it run, since APIs are more stable than ABIs. Now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder if, given proprietary (no source) software A, you couldn't recompile every open-source dependency of A from their sources around A's release time, and get…

I will take Windows's "sometimes there's very little you can do about it" against Linux's "compile it and all its dependencies (probably versions of those dependencies from the same time period, and possibly even their dependencies) from source" any day.

Part of my point was: if these dependencies are still maintained, chances are their API remained stable, so you only have to compile it with the new headers in most cases. Sometimes, you indeed have to compile obscure dependencies.

This is a consequence of a userspace where most software is open source, and where distributions systematically recompile every package. As a side-effect, it is also generally more portable across architectures.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm pretty sure there are some lesser known solutions out there. I've just learned about `guix deploy` for instance, which could make such a thing doable, and might be even easier to maintain in the long run. No pretty GUIs for now, though, and it configuring a setup seems to require at least a good understanding of guix/scheme. Give it a bit more adoption, though, with more examples, snippets and tools, and th…

This is an example of a tool that solves only a slice of the problem and requires a wizard to operate it. Plus, it doesn't seem well suited to changing configuration on already deployed machines. If corporate comes and tells you all users must have their machines configured to automatically lock the screen after 5 minutes idle and enable some password requirements this tool would struggle.

I'm not really sure why the tool would struggle, it seems like it was made for that use-case: running the command will ssh into each of the listed existing machines, perform some basic sanity checks, upload the new configuration (and packages in case of a system update), and finally atomically update the symlink, thus applying the new policy.

I'll grant you that it seems to require a wizard to operate, or at least write a tutorial and investigate that use-case, but so does most software: I would be clueless in a AD environment, and it would take me a few hours to catch up on some basic concepts.

Now, it hasn't been designed with your specific example in mind (it could have been), so some wizard would most likely need to expose these knobs (lockscreen timeout, password policy)as easily accessible config items.

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#245
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read your parent as making fun of the often-used argument against the plethora of Linux distributions. It's true that entering the Linux world is a bit like entering a shoe shop: why can't they just make two versions, home and professional? ;)

we also need summer and winter variants, and outdoor and indoor. i'd like the summer outdoor casual all natural materials pair please.

I should have specified that they only come in one size at that other shop :)

Re: German city wants to ditch Microsoft for Linux

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will take Windows's "sometimes there's very little you can do about it" against Linux's "compile it and all its dependencies (probably versions of those dependencies from the same time period, and possibly even their dependencies) from source" any day.

You don't want to do that. The first situation is not fixable, the second one is.

How very Linux Community of you to tell me what I want to do.
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