I don’t think Apple is an exception. I think they have also over hired but they are also scaling, albeit slower than they used to. The scaling elsewhere is not happening, especially meta where they are trying to extract money from every corner they can find out of desperation, and so the books need to become lighter.
For Apple, hiring more than they need can be soaked into the books because their sales and profits keep increasing, though the rate of growth has slowed. However, if it’s an expense that can be avoided, then it’s an expense that should be avoided.
This looks like it might be the best solution, no snap, maintained by an actual system integrator and laptop maker, and I also like the new Rust-based desktop environment. I wonder how well it runs on Framework laptops or MacBooks as well.
Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Linux Lite, Pop OS, and several less famous distros are all based on Ubuntu. New versions of all of them will follow this new LTS release in time.
Mint forked GNOME 3 to make something more Windows-like.
Zorin customised upstream GNOME with a lot of extensions.
Pop removed it and replaced it with their own homegrown desktop, written in Rust. It's actually pretty good and works well.
Ubuntu LTS is still the choice for many production environments and education and learning. As someone with Ubuntu from 2010 CDs, I find it refreshing that modern Ubuntu distros work OOB on most computers these days with excellent driver support.
Is this even true? I mean, Windows is the main focus for all hardware vendors, and everybody who has owned a PC knows that malfunctions are unavoidable. If that is the case for Windows, then Linux cant be better.
20 years ago your Linux installation might not include wifi drivers, bluetooth support, decent GPU drivers, fat32/ntfs drivers, or the widely used video/audio codecs of the era. And you had to be careful when shopping for things like wifi cards, as only certain chipsets could be made to work.
Much of which was kinda fair enough, because if you're a volunteer making an open source OS because of a strong belief on the open source ideal, you don't want to distribute closed-source driver blobs or patent-encumbered codecs. But it meant mean the initial installation process was not always easy. One of the things that contributed to the success of Ubuntu was a particularly easy initial setup process.
Today, things are a lot better - you'll still get unsupported hardware from time to time, but it'll be much less severe. If your laptop has a non-USB integrated camera you might have to download and install a kernel module. Your corporate laptop's built in fingerprint scanner might not work, but who cares?
When I was shopping Lenovo.com for my ThinkPad in 2018, there was a table with ThinkPads certified for Ubuntu Linux in one column, and certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in another column.
I chose the T580 as a RHEL-certified notebook, and it was fantastic. Lenovo.com let me configure each individual component exactly according to my needs and tastes, and it was custom-assembled and shipped from Shenzhen.
It did arrive with Windows 10 pre-installed (this was the least hassle and most popular OS option). I initially installed CentOS, but quickly realized that Fedora would be the sweet spot, and so it was a Fedora system for most of its lifetime. Near the end, I did revert to Windows 10, which also worked flawlessly.
The ThinkPad T580 literally never malfunctioned. It was still 100% working when I turned it in for recycling in 2025.
I've also run Ubuntu on my "daily driver" desktop system, which ran from 2006-2022. Yes, that's 16 years' worth of Ubuntu installs and upgrades. It was mostly a KDE Plasma (Kubuntu) system. I enjoyed every bit of that.
In 1999, I was avidly using OpenBSD on really old hardware (such as HP Apollo 425t workstations.) OpenBSD simply couldn't deal with the special graphics subsystem on those machines. I tried and tried to get something working, but there were obstacles, not only with the hardware and drivers, but also the monitor connection needed a particular type of cabling and a proprietary monitor, too.
However, OpenBSD did great for networking, security, Squid cache, proxies, all kinds of things. And even in 1999, though it was early, I ran Linux on a 386DX-40, because Linux supported the "ftape" floppy tape driver at that time, and I had some kind of QIC tape backup from Eagle that wouldn't be recognized by OpenBSD or NetBSD.
Meanwhile, in that same year, my "daily driver" desktop machine was a 486 with VLB, dual-booting Windows 98 and OpenBSD. The Windows 98 was set up with a Cygwin system and X11 server, so that I could run X11 clients on the OpenBSD machines, or the Linux machine, or whatever else was on the LAN.
So for third party apps this seems like if you do e2e then along with this bug fix your texts are safe. E2E apps could be independently verified by a third party let’s say.
But what about iMessage. The source code will never be available for neither the servers nor the app.
>They are great heavily supported Linux machines though.
Since the release of Touch Bar based Macs (which contain apple silicon) this has not been the case. The Macs that are well supported by linux and work very well were abandoned long time ago.
The T2 chip is Apple silicon, and marked the beginning of really locking down the OS running on a Mac (as opposed to iOS, which was always locked down that way, and Intel Macs which of course could run anything).
It was the first mass market SoC hardware test of their new Mac chip design and it seems it was also to prep macOS for the M line. The level of control Apple gave it makes repair and refurbishing very difficult without Apple’s authorization.
That is an interesting point. I did mean the M series, M1 and later, when I said Apple Silicon, and that's usually how I interpret the phrase. The Wikipedia article by the same name seems to interpret it much more broadly, also including mobile stuff like the A series.
Not sure why this is so down voted.
I have a touch bar era Intel Mac, I regularly check the state of Linux on it and they are still somewhat poorly supported.
Some drivers are out of tree, audio and sleep doesn't necessarily work, etc...
What if someone (Google) used Google suite to send 10k emails to fire people. Wouldn’t that be considered normal for the server for a day let alone a week. Yes I know I could have come up with a better example.
The example was given to say you could be a gsuite customer and have 10k emails a week be very normal. Something that wouldn’t trigger any alarms unless set. The alarms would probably be set on a curve. Something unusual would be far off the curve.
A year ago everyone was so hyped on LLMs even on HN. A year later I see frustration and disappointment on HN. It’s very interesting because this is the case with every new technology and the ‘next thing’
I think America in general is moving to a service based economy where you don’t own anything anymore. Everything from cars (lease) to homes (rentals) to electronics to insurance etc comes at a monthly cost. This kind of model works when the central government is trusted (or at least perceived to be trusted) to keep the wheel churning. I think the current government took some of the power back from big tech and people didn’t like it. Very interesting because the whole argument was private companies having too much power. Now the argument is government having too much power.
Humans are also, possibly apart from dogs, the only beings that think humans are incredible. If we take any other entity in the universe, then chances are they think pretty lowly of humans and their cherished intelligence, if at all.
I don’t think Apple is an exception. I think they have also over hired but they are also scaling, albeit slower than they used to. The scaling elsewhere is not happening, especially meta where they are trying to extract money from every corner they can find out of desperation, and so the books need to become lighter.
For Apple, hiring more than they need can be soaked into the books because their sales and profits keep increasing, though the rate of growth has slowed. However, if it’s an expense that can be avoided, then it’s an expense that should be avoided.
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