Are we giving strategic advice to Microsoft now?

Anyway: consumer OSes are historically cheap, and cannot be easily converted into subscriptions. So the market is low-margin, and shrinking (due to both phones and clouds). I suspect it is already unprofitable for Microsoft. So they need to exit; while exiting, ideally, sell people something else.

Which is what we observe.

The article advises them to “have a boring year” to “stop the slide” to stay dominant in a market they should have left years ago.

Tailscale somehow found use for self-hosters, despite being wildly unergonomic for an all-Linux, non-corporate, network. Yggdrasil lacks marketing effort, but is otherwise a great option.

I actually use Yggdrasil in lieu of Tailscale because I love the idea of a decentralized routing system.

I never understand why people enjoy having a centralized control plane.

easier to implement and understand

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but assuming you're not: Tailscale makes security easier because networks are private by default. To achieve a similar effect with Yggdrasil you'd have to use a firewall to whitelist the Yggdrasil IPs of all your devices. So it's more work to set up.

You have to use a firewall anyway. If you use Tailscale, you have two firewalls, which is not strictly easier.

Huh? I thought one of the appeals of Tailscale is that security is done at the network level; plus that your network is private, so you don't get randos knocking at your ports.

What does “at the network level” mean?..

Anyway; Tailscale is not your only network. If you’re on a laptop, you need to be able to log onto rando wifi networks. If you’re at home, you need to be mindful of your smart fridge going rogue. You need to run a firewall. Tailscale adds a separate, Tailscale-specific, firewall with centralized management. Now you have two firewalls.

Ah, I see what you mean now. Yes, that's true; you'd still need a firewall for LAN.

> What does “at the network level” mean?..

I meant the normal non-Tailscale firewall (e.g. iptables).

I suspect Linux has better hardware support than Haiku, which is not exactly easy to run on laptop hardware (w/ wifi, sleep, &c)

I suspect it was a freak occurence, but I actually had incredible luck running Haiku on an old laptop back in the day. It was incredibly fast, and just about all the amenities you'd expect worked with no or minimal intervention.

In the last year sometime I ran the Haiku live image off USB on my only laptop (2011 X201t), it worked fairly well.

Me too. The laptop was so old that I couldn't play a 360p mpg video without pauses on Windows 2K or XFCE, but it ran smoothly with BeOS5 (the Intel-based abandonware version)

Even running from an HDD?

I recently tried the latest version (Beta 5?) on a 2005-ish PC with an even older HDD and it ran surprisingly fast off that. The only thing where it was somewhat slow was web browsing.

Yeah. I installed it to HDD and it worked great. You'd think the thing had an SSD ot was so snappy. No issues with compat on the drive or anything.

> I suspect Linux has better hardware support than Haiku, which is not exactly easy to run on laptop hardware (w/ wifi, sleep, &c)

So true. I had an old Dell Latitude D620, 3GB/500GB, 1.66ghz Intel Core Duo Processor and it was sound that tripped me up. Haiku was lightning fast on this machine.

I think that eventually I might've gotten sound to work but... this was many years ago and the laptop was mostly for testing light-weight distros on modest hardware.

Yeah, a good opportunity to contribute upstream.

Also opposite in terms of feature-richness.

Yep

You can block your own internet, if you feel that way.

I think the most you can say is that they recognized that many male propertied white protestant Americans are American. Maybe some more qualifiers are necessary.

So are the other browsers on iOS.

It's not just the WebKit bit, basically the entire app implementation is actually shipped as a "Private Framework" which lives outside the .app bundle. e.g. on macOS % otool -L /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Safari.framework/Versions/A/Safari (compatibility version 528.0.0, current version 623.1.14) /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1356.0.0)

There's a bunch of other private frameworks (SafariCore.framework, SafariFoundation.framework, SafariPlatformSupport.framework, SafariShared.framework, SafariSharedUI.framework, SafariSwift.framework) as well. I haven't checked but I assume it's similar on iOS.

Not in the EU...

While alternative browsers are legally usable on iOS, nobody has really published one yet.

Maintaining a browser is expensive and with the way Apple implemented their obligations, it's not worth it for existing browser companies to ship their own engines (and have twice or more the maintenance).

Yes in the EU. Apple made the alternative browser requirements impossible to meet, and somehow got away with it.

Yes also in the EU.

I use Linux on the desktop since 1997, and there was no point where Windows was even slightly more attractive.

I don't know what "prime time" means here.

edit: apart from, you know. Applications and drivers for random hardware.

With prime time I mean being comfortable enough to install it for a non-technical user. Even during Ubuntu's Unity days it didn't feel like I could install it on a computer for my parents or siblings for them to use as a daily driver.

My parents did fine with Linux. My mom still does; it's certainly less maintenance effort from me than Windows would require.

It was fine for non-technical users since at least early GNOME 2, if you're ready to help them set up and maintain. Semi-technical users (Windows power users, gamers, &c — people who like to install and configure things, but fear the deep dark abyss of the terminal) were and remain more problematic.

Unity days were the nadir of linux desktop ux — it was when Gnome 2 was gone, and 3 not yet there. Still better than contemporaneous Windows 8, though.

I can bet there’s no OS that are easy to install for a non-technical user. And that start from booting the installation media. Give someone a OS with their software already installed and they will use whatever OS that is.

People are always task-oriented, not tool oriented unless they’re nerds.

I had Kubuntu installed on my grandfather's computer for a year. I ended up replacing it for Windows because my aunt likes to install stuff on it. But my grandfather was happy with it. He only needed a working web browser and a program to use the TV tunner.

At this point, it isn't clear why federation is in there at all. The "forums, bit twitter" concept does produce nice places, but federation seems like a net negative for that.

Federation is good if you want to stay within a community but also have a chance to interact with others.

I.e. you mostly care about technology foo but occasion delve into epic poetry, and it's nice to interact with both footech.social and epicpoems.read. Also, being able to consume personal publishing (blogs!) from within the same app is quite nice.

Why not several identities, and aggregation in the client? You seem to need to be in the community to fully interact with it on Mastodon, anyway.

The steelman for federation is that email survived the rise of the big platforms despite no-one owning email, so making other applications follow the email model means they too could be free from central ownership.

So did forums, even with no federation.

You'd have to have a lot of trust that the one instance wouldn't get enshittified and end up as another X / Truth Social / BlueSky.

Different instances can also have different rules, different moderation and different federation.

Edit: and exist in different legal jurisdictions, and also be harder to ban or regulate.

Having many instances is not the same as federation.

Isn't one a subset of the other? A system with federation must have multiple instances, but a system with multiple instances doesn't need to federate (in the sense of information passing between independently managed instances.)

Yes. My original question was whether federation is necessary for the kind of communities Mastodon serves, not whether the web must have multiple websites.

The one with the smaller cemetery.