For big products with many years of history behind them, yeah, that's true. For v. 1.0 or skunkworks projects, it's still mostly true but occasionally, some crazy-ass stuff can happen. (Cue the "what has seen cannot be unseen" meme pic.)
The "somehow" is Microsoft, who defines what the hardware architecture of what a x86-64 desktop/laptop/server is and builds the compatibility test suite (Windows HLK) to verify conformance. Open source operating systems rely on Microsoft's standardization.
Microsoft's standardization got AMD and Intel to write upstream Linux GPU drivers? Microsoft got Intel to maintain upstream xHCI Linux drivers? Microsoft got people to maintain upstream Linux drivers for touchpads, display controllers, keyboards, etc?
I doubt this. Microsoft played a role in standardizing UEFI/ACPI/PCI which allows for a standardized boot process and runtime discovery, letting you have one system image which can discover everything it needs during and after boot. In the non-server ARM world, we need devicetree and u-boot boot scripts in lieu of those standards. But this does not explain why we need vendor kernels.
> You can't have a custom kernel if you can't rebuild the device tree.
What is this supposed to mean? There is no device tree to rebuild on x86 platforms yet you can have a custom kernel on x86 platforms. You sometimes need to use kernel forks there too to work with really weird hardware without upstream drivers, there's nothing different about Linux's driver model on x86. It's just that in the x86 world, for the vast, vast majority of situations, pre-built distro kernels built from upstream kernel releases has all the necessary drivers.
It's legacy of IBM PC compatible standard, that has multiple vendors building computers, peripherals that work with each other. Microsoft tried their EEE approach with ACPI that made suspend flaky in linux in early years.
This does not explain why the drivers for all the hardware is upstreamed almost immediately in the x86 world but remains locked away in vendor trees for years or forever in the ARM world. Vendor kernels don't exist due to the lack of standardized boot and runtime discovery.
Why would you expect an engineer to be able to comment on legal affairs? Presumably it was cleared with Microsoft's legal department or whatever GitHub's divisional equivalent is.
That's precisely what the term 'engineer' signifies. (I know it gets used incorrectly for software developers.) Workers in general need to decide whether something is legal independently of their company, because the company lawyers have the interest of the company in mind, which might conflict with the workers interest to not do illegal things.
Big Tech is known for clearing illegal things by their legal departments all the time.
The 50th anniversary of Bill Gates' "An Open Letter To Software Hobbyists" was a couple of months ago and the letter was literally about developers deserving to be compensated for the hard work put their code. Now that much of the FOSS community is starting to say the same, it's time for them to finally admit that Bill Gates turned out to right in the end.
In short it says: I can't make you pay me, but I'm calling you a thief, so you should pay me anyway, or else I'll call you a thief again. Other people get paid, so I should be paid too because I like money.
I’ve only ever used Outlook when forced to by an employer and I find it a dreadful application to use. I would guess that most people prefer something else. I would imagine that most people tend to stick with the default email app on their computer (no idea what that is on Windows as I’ve managed to avoid having to use Windows for 7 years now).
The default mail app on Windows is now called Outlook for Windows, no relation to the Outlook in Office (sorry, Microsoft 365 Copilot), and it's a significantly worse barely functional webview. It also replaced the entire Calendar app, which was decent.
They've really shifted how Outlook works... as well as how the backend is more tuned to the way M365 mail works far more than how it used to work with Exchange, or independently. It's been a slow downslide imo since around 2007 or so.
I know the why, but it's really worse as an experience for most people than the older integrations... but the use of horizontally scalable backends makes for a saner platform at the expense of better UX.
It's a device with a fixed, known-good set of hardware for developers to target, which is all that any of the major consoles is. Your question applies just as much to the Steam Deck and upcoming Steam Machine.
The fine article plainly says that these are for corporate use and that the service it is meant to connect to isn't even available to regular consumers. And this is hardly a new concept: even a casual search shows that Windows thin clients have existed since the '90s and that the previous models are still currently being sold by various OEMs.
Yes, exactly, this is the same old "how do we prevent lowly employees from going on facebook and solitaire" technology many other companies have tried 1000 times before.
Always runs stuck on 3 problems:
1) this attitude makes these machines a reverse status symbol. I mean if you work at a company and work on one of these it essentially means you're low status. It's just shy of a slave collar. So everyone fights to the death not to have one of these.
(this was imho also a problem of Google Stadia. It worked ... but an xbox was better. It worked, but a PC was better. It worked ... but a PS5 was better. Not because they were actually better, but because they were fundamentally superior status symbols. Stadia meant you were cheap/poor)
2) for any even remotely creative work you need access to so much of the internet, and a web browser. Which then defeats the purpose because of course facebook (or rather the 10.000 ad-supported sites) have an extreme incentive to make themselves available. So solitaire (whatever the modern version) is available.
3) management has their little favorite solution and configuration. IT has their little favorite adaptations. Security has ... and so on. So fixing even the tiniest of incompatibilities is a 5 year project that requires 5 departments getting involved, that nobody wants to do.
Microsoft has always resisted doing this, with citrix picking up the slack, but looks like they'll give it another shot.
One would expect people on Hacker News to know that a single business division doesn't have direct access to the funds of other business divisions of the same corporation.
reply