Any move away from the abusive big tech that exists in USA is a good move in my book. Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads, and per ads viewed, you then earn credit to be able to use your program/game. It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
I'm not familiar with patent legalese, but from my layman skimming of the patent application, I think you're right.
Instead, the patent would cover running object detection/classification ML models — optionally on remote servers — on screen and audio output and user input of specific applications (particularly videogames), without requiring cooperation from the application, to target ads based on what's happening in the application and to decide when to interrupt the application with an ad.
To hazard a guess: Microsoft or part of Microsoft is planning to include pervasive targeted advertising in the next Xbox console OS, including during gameplay of any game.
I’m experience windows 11 which is my first windows experience since maybe NT 2 or 4.
I can tell it’s still windows but I’m shocked how many things I have to turn off to stop live data from the internet appearing in my GUI. Also my profile settings, saved passwords, and other data seems to reset unexpectedly cause some or all settings to disappear. Finding stored passwords is also surprisingly difficult or impossible depending on I don’t know what.
Adding such overt spying to this mess of an OS achieves a new low in user experience.
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
It's easy: The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal. Hardware vendors shipping PC's with Windows 11, corporations who went all in to Microsoft's tooling shove Microsoft Teams down your throat because "the company uses it", and the list goes on.
Well of course I wouldn't expect corporations to know what ethics or human decency is even if it stared them straight into the eyes, but I would expect governments to establish laws and regulations such that the psychopaths wouldn't be able to abuse people to no end.
I am sorry, but that can't be the only reason. At my job we are free to choose. Some have MacOS, almost everyone else has Windows, I am the only one using linux. But the joke is that Windows users are heavy users of WSL and RStudio. We are not forced, or even suggested to use Teams, Office or whatever tooling Microsoft has, and in fact meetings were I am invited had to be done in Zoom instead of Teams only because of me.
I believe that it is more a familiarity issue, and seeing Linux/Mac as an obscure tool only usable by gurus.
> The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal
That behaviour in itself is believed to be morally wrong, and dystopian. That still doesn't answer the question why people just accept this. How can "we" deem ourself more moral than the Nazis, and literally do this.
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
There is a couple more wild things here:
1) That there is an agenda, demand and total legal abetment from the top of the power/monetary hierarchy for such corporate policies
2) That there is a horde of individual employees working to those ends without any shadow of doubt, often even vice signaling their intent to be the first to attain the figurative A-bomb or full-blown BB telescreen.
A lot of that has to do with the fact that the people who decide to use it fall into two camps:
1. People who do not have to use it themselves (political decides, bosses, ..), but get lobbied to the max
2. People who have to administer it and know nothing else and endure the lasting pain over the perceived infinite hurdle of changing the system
I gladly can use Linux at work, so I have had a stable, reliable and unchanging system since the past 6 years, but others have to go through major pains for each version of enshittification of their OS update. In my case the OS just got better slowly and incrementally.
3) That half of HN works at these companies and loves to whitewash their conscience by commenting "look at how awful they are" on any company that's interpreted as 1% worse. You have MS devs who comment on Amazon who comment on Meta who comment on Palantir comment on Flock comment on NSO Group, as this is roughly the "perceived hierarchy".
If you're in US big tech you're working directly for the regime and fully complicit, end of.
That is true. We see that with Trump, where he tries to force the EU to open markets to the US corporations who will just steal data from EU citizens.
Why can't the EU learn more from Canada? Canada realised that with Trump there is no way to make a deal. So cut things down where possible, diversify - the EU still has to learn this lesson. In particular Germany is totally US-addicted - no idea why, other than, of course, the obvious answer ("we need to export into the USA", aka selfish greed from Germany here).
My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.
Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose. Decline -> Your subscription will be terminated, no further monies will be debut from your account, are you sure?
I'm more interested in the cases where you buy your phone, for example, and after purchase you are asked to agree with terms and conditions. Money is paid already. If you do not agree, you cannot use the device. Worse still, if 2 days after thre is mandatory update that forces you to agree to new version. If you don't like them, you should be compensated for it, as it is hidden information from you as a buyer.
> My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.
> Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose
“Where the contract provides that the digital content or digital service is to be supplied or made accessible to the consumer over a period of time, the trader may modify the digital content or digital service beyond what is necessary to maintain the digital content or digital service in conformity in accordance with Articles 7 and 8, if the following conditions are met:
[…]
2. The consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract if the modification negatively impacts the consumer's access to or use of the digital content or digital service, unless such negative impact is only minor. In that case, the consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract free of charge within 30 days of the receipt of the information or of the time when the digital content or digital service has been modified by the trader, whichever is later.”
Does that need new law? The problem we have in the UK is that Trading Standards has been starved of funding for the last 16 years so they can't do their job. If they had funding I'm pretty sure they have the power to tackle this.
> Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads,
You got the important details of the Microsoft parent wrong (the patent doesn’t use camera and microphone monitoring), but more importantly the existence of a patent is not the same as intent to deploy a technique.
Every few years news outlets will generate controversy about a patent they’ve discovered, implying that the company is going to force the evil thing on everyone. If you’ve worked at a tech company with a patent incentive you realize most of these patents are just resume padding junk or people gaming patent incentive systems. I was at a company that had a modest bonus for submitting ideas that could be patented and you wouldn’t believe the junk that people were trying to push through without any intent to ever use it.
As further proof, the patent you’re thinking of where cameras monitor the user is actually from 2009 and was patented by Sony. US8246454B2
>As further proof, the patent you’re thinking of where cameras monitor the user is actually from 2009 and was patented by Sony. US8246454B2
I'm not OP, but I'm really not sure how you came to that assumption. A cursory Google search for "Microsoft monitor patent" brought up a bunch of articles that actually linked to filings like what OP talked about from this year.
Well I'd like to think Charlie Brooker, like many of us, could clearly say where humanity was heading. Some of the episodes that were considered far fetched 15 years ago are probably considered plausible at best and likely at worst now.
Seems like many films and books have been taken as inspiration for making "hypothetical futures" true.
E.g. Her - take AI as your girlfriend... was creepy then, still is now.
Sometimes good people are able to think like villains and predict their next moves, sometimes villains themselves declare their intentions via proxies.
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
It's a long chain, but ultimately it comes down to incompetence... When I was younger (decades ago), I assumed that the incompetence lies on the side of the executives who were overriding knowledgeable technical folk.
I do not believe that anymore.
I have seen the following play out in 5 companies in the last 5 years:
1. The people making the purchasing decisions are told by the technical head what to buy. They get told "Buy Microsoft".
2. The technical head deciding what to buy will not buy something the technical division don't know how to support. He gets told "Buy Microsoft".
3. The technical division are not actually technical, they have just learned where to click when they want to do something. Learning concepts and/or where to click on a different system is beyond the mental acuity of the average professional Microsoft Mouse-Click-Systems-Engineer (MCSE).
4. Unwilling to explain that they are actually incompetent and non-technical, they blame the users when making their recommendation: "The Users Only Know How To Use Microsoft".
5. The users, OTOH, are wondering WTF is going on; collectively, they have no problem switching OSes because they use so many - Android, iOS, MacOS, that infotainment system in their bargin-basement car...
Over the years, I've been told many times by the IT departments "Users only know how to use Microsoft". I've been told exactly that even when when users were happily switching between Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Symbian OS, Blackberry OS, iOS and Android with no problems.
When I got told this, I always asked "Do you know how to do you daily functions on Linux", to which I'll always get some sort of "We tried running Exchange on it, and it didn't work", or "We tried running MSWord on it, and it didn't work", or (in one hilarious case) "We tried running Windows on it, and it didn't work" (No, I don't know what they actually fucking tried!).
It's incompetence on the part of the IT department.
I don't like this idea, but I do like to get my facts right. If it is the patent linked elsewhere on this page, then
- I can't find the bit where they monitor you via camera and microphone. (I think the "track your eyes to make sure you don't look away during ads" is already patented for mobile, but has never been deployed as far as I know.)
- "block" your game/program to show ads - I think "pause" would be a better word here, perhaps. That's how ad breaks/popups work, for example on youtube and on many mobile apps, even on the radio in some sense. Scummy? On mobile apps, probably. New? no.
- The part being patented here is some kind of machine learning system to decide the optimal time(s) to show ads.
- Patent doesn't mean it's going to happen.
Apart from "we inserted some ML into the ad pipeline" there's really nothing new that I can see here.
But it's still bad as fuck, deplorable, despicable and many others adjectives. And it doesn't change GP point, even if the patent sucks at being a patent.
What's truly wild imo is how the vast majority of consumers keep choosing absolute crap when better alternatives exist. Microsoft, Google, Twitter... oh my
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
Cory Doctorow wrote a book exactly about this business practices, "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It."
"Once the platform is fundamentally focused on the shareholders, and the users and vendors are locked in, the platform no longer has any incentive to maintain quality. Enshittified platforms that act as intermediaries can act as both a monopoly on services and a monopsony on customers, as high switching costs prevent either from leaving even when alternatives technically exist."
We live in a world that has an immense amount of wealth, so it's possible to build a pretty bad business and still make money so long you're providing a minimal amount of value and/or have some sort of lobbying/regulatory capture/juicy government contracts obtained via wining and dining key members of government that enables you to leech off taxpayer money.
This is why I really like Apple, despite their faults, they've shown that "being marginally less bad than Microsoft" is a good enough strategy to build a trillion-dollar business.
I make dystopian adds for my game- and one of them is a company called MacroSoft, which has a product that makes you sing add jingles to measure "engagement" performance before opening a program on its operating System (called BARs). Its really insane, how my dystopian crap regularly gets overtaken by reality.
Microsoft has done a lot of super shady things, and they are domiciled in a hyper-corrupt, lawless threat to humanity (one that elects quite possibly the stupidest human alive -- a rapist abomination halfwit clown -- to the highest office), however people do make far too much of the patent thing.
A lot of firms reward groups and employees that get granted patents. It doesn't actually matter if you're spitballing the most absurd nonsense that no one ever asked for and is nowhere on the product map, someone writes the application and gives it a shot. A patent being granted doesn't mean that a single person ever envisions doing this or asked for it implemented, and honestly the idea that they "invented" this is just how farcical the patent system is.
In this case the patent is held by Microsoft's "Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC", which is their "patent extortion" racket. So they literally wrote this hoping to catch someone doing something found in a single claim so that they can use the legal system to rob from people.
> just because they take a patent on something doesn't mean they will actually use it.
That's true, of course, but the fact that there are people in the company thinking like that to begin with, enough to think it's worth patenting such anti-human stuff, is plenty enough for me to never want anything to do with them.
It's not so surprising. When cultures slide into decadence, they seldomly do so abruptly. It often occurs thin slice by thin slice. Once you accept one seemingly thin moral concession, it is easier to accept the next because you've shortened the distance. Not only that, but with each moral concession, you become more willing to accept still greater concessions as you become increasingly detached from reality. And we shouldn't forget the role of cognitive dissonance. The notion that the consensus about what is normal can be wrong is very uncomfortable for many.
wow, getting us hooked into a usage IV drip, basically. that is horrifying. I can't imagine anyone staying on Windows in this day and age except purely to do work in MS-dominant environments. the jump to Linux is EASY nowadays. even my elderly parents have no problems using a windowsesque Linux desktop for their basic needs.
Looking at the 13 which rank higher than Microsoft - how many would you describe as treating their users/customers well?
Theory:
Treating your customers well is part of one strategy for corporate growth and profit. There are other strategies, which also can work very well - and don't require all the hassles and expense and non-evil of treating your customers well. Naturally, Capitalist propaganda stresses that first strategy, and doesn't talk so much about the others.
I’m looking with so much admiration what France has been building in this space, especially the latest gendarmerie transition into open source OS from windows.
The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost, despite the fact that is the most popular language in Europe.
Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this. If all the countries in Europe just keep pushing their nationalist ideology instead of truly believing into a united and solid Europe Union, we won’t go any where.
> The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost
Interestingly, a French-speaking Canadian who has spent some time in France told me that his right to use the French language is better protected in Canada than it is in France. He thinks that this is a consequence of the reciprocality implied by having more than one official language: French speakers in Canada get the same rights as English speakers, so people are happy to grant rights in return for getting them, whereas in France everyone gets screwed and you end up with a situation in which a French person wanting to do a PhD on French history at a French university has to write their grant application in English.
> Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this.
Isnt this just baked into the idea? The French are building an OS for internal use for their own interests.
If we then try to extend that or the Dutch OS to other countries we have the original problem of dependence.
I guess we could do with more weird third-path stuff with the Linux world, even if the reason for said weird stuff existing is the French having (le) NIH syndrome.
It's also great when an actual commercial organization with requirements gets into the Linux game, as they don't really yield to 'we could make that printer work but it would be against everything we stand for' style arguments that have cemented problems in Linux userland for decades.
‘United and solid EU’ doesn’t have to involve forcing everyone to use a someone’s native language. Ideally we’d have a common language that’s neutral and used for international communication only. In fact, we already have a working solution; Esperanto has existed for well over 100 years at this point, and continues to be a healthy, living language. People just don’t seem to care that much. It always seems to be either practicality or national heritage, never both at the same time. Yet the common ground has been there all along.
Frenchman here. French companies and organization, in my experience actually really like the English language (at OVH for example, most official docs are in English), but I do think it makes sense for a government funded by people who speak mostly French (ie the French taxpayers) to do stuff in French, the language most of its citizens will be most familiar with.
Putting stuff in English will tend to exclude the less educated, or people who struggle to learn foreign languages.
Awesome! I believe NixOS is perfect for systems you just want to work and track reproducibly, like appliances (which a lot of server software is supposed to be). I’m glad people smarter than me are actually able to realize its advantages =)
I've been thinking for years now that most distros could be replaced by a system config for NixOS or Guix System. I wonder if we'll ever see things go in that direction.
I recently got my feet wet with Nix for the purpose of agent sandboxing, and it's a really great concept!
The issue I have run into is that for running llama.cpp, which is a very actively developed bleeding-edge software, it seems like experimenting with different versions/configs/patches etc. was fighting with the Nix philosophy of immutable software, so I ended up just managing it outside of nix.
But this could be user-error, I've only spent a couple of weeks with it.
one can use direnv, nix-direnv and flake.nix to get an immutable and reproducible build toolchain protected from nix garbage collection, while keeping the llama.cpp branches and/or compiled binaries mutable on the local filesystem.
https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv
llama.cpp has a flake in-repo that I often use for trying out different branches and patches. I also have yet to have an issue just replacing the src and build number attribute in the nixpkgs build (in one cases I wanted to add an additional CMake flag but that was also easy).
IMHO this is way easier than without Nix in many cases as figuring out the upstream build process and getting it running can often be quite the chore. With Nix it is all set up for you.
> The issue I have run into is that for running llama.cpp, which is a very actively developed bleeding-edge software, it seems like experimenting with different versions/configs/patches etc. was fighting with the Nix philosophy of immutable software
May be. I'd guess it probably does it in a high-friction way compared to what you expect.
e.g. in a typical linux distro, you can just replace the (globally installed) version of the package and use that.
With Nix, you've got a declaration of how to build a package, including its dependencies; and each of those dependencies is also a declaration of how to build that package, and so on. -- And so, "just change this version" results in rebuilding the full chain of dependencies.
If you want multiple readily-available versions of llama.cpp each with different configs/patches, then using Nix would make this easier I'd think. But for "I just wanna try this, then try that", it's going to add overhead.
When I just want to make something work and there isn't a nix package that can instantly give me what I want with `nix-shell -p $PACKAGE` then I use containers. That's what I've done when playing around with llama.
> Strengthening the digital autonomy of the Netherlands.
Apparently the US becoming an authoritarian state means people don't want to do business with us. We're giving away our best advantage, our reputation for freedom and openness, for absolutely nothing in return.
A note to the developers in the project, if anyone is reading: your repositories are in violation of the new Codeberg policy that forbids AI-generated code [1].
That might still be in violation but I would imagine it's low on Codeberg's radar since they're not making primary contributions there (& if I were DAWO I'd also be interested in limiting direct community agentic contrib).
clearly shows the need for federated forges, where you get to decide on your own rules but you still benefit from interacting with a broader set of collaborators.
We can insist everyone self-hosts everything, but is it worth it? Do you have your own email? It's quite normal for a government agency to contract a third party to supply e.g. furniture, instead of chopping its own wood.
I've seen so much commentary on the apparent strictness & extreme nature of Codeberg's approach & no actual examples of it.
They have a strict policy (which many have rightly pointed out is impossible to fully enforce), & their "enforcement" has mostly relied on good faith contributions to date. They're also accounting for the fact the ToS change came without advance notice for many of their users who were already making active use of agents, hence there remains many AI repos (I have yet to hear of any removals).
To me that seems like the best approach one can hope for - a lax policy is a slippery slope (presuming dissuading AI contrib is your goal), & wouldn't satisfy their legal concerns (hosting code of questionable copyright status), & strict enforcement isn't viable in any case (especially at their scale), so this seems to me to be the best compromise.
I don't think they're banning all AI generated code, just projects that are primarily AI-generated. They'll probably also object to PRs that are entirely AI generated. Or at least they will when they become a problem.
Banning AI generated content works just fine, and arguing otherwise is nothing short of FOMO.
As a random example, AI generated content is banned from the /r/ProgrammingLanguages subreddit and any regular visitor that _isn't_ suffering from AI psychosis/FOMO will tell you it's for the better. In general it's not that difficult to moderate for it either as AI built projects consistently contain the same patterns _over and over_ such that 98% is easily detected.
> I predict that Codeberg will soon realize that they have no choice but to loosen and allow AI generated code.
I predict that eventually people will read the linked blog post and realize Codeberg already allows AI generated code. But this requires reading and nuance of course, which is hard to come by sometimes, so I guess we'll continue see misinformed comments like this until eventually the web is only autonomous agents.
Fair note, but I'd avoid the cheap shot "more open". You'll just bring up the old flame wars about whether the MIT-style or GNU-style licenses are more open.
The same applies here, is it really "more open" to allow corporations to profit by removing the openness of your work?
Did you actually read through that post you linked? You realize not every project that was ever touched by a LLM is being thrown off? Read the "Some early, but informal guidelines" particularly, as you've seemingly missed that.
They're targeting slop and essentially spam, not everything that could possibly have been built by LLMs.
> If you see yourself on this list, you don't need to move right away, but
there might be other places that better fit your needs:
- Projects written and maintained with heavy use of LLMs
All of the commits I browsed here seem to be LLM-assisted, so these projects are in this category. The policy being fuzzy is in itself a problem - "likely to be tolerated" is not a great policy to have your entire government depend on.
Personally, the refusal on "Projects heavily tied to the LLM ecosystem, e.g. LLM-written tools to ease LLM usage" is enough reason, as that's a good chunk of what I've been working on.
Codeberg are going to have issues in the future when all code is AI generated (except for artisanal code of course, written for the love of the craft but not to achieve anything of merit).
Policies are enacted for current reality, not fantasy futures. If your magical fantasy becomes reality (it won't), they can just... change their policy. Of course, you aren't thinking about practical effects of policies on platforms, only on how it's an insult to your LLM-bro way of life.
The highest problem is the office suite. If you think Libreoffice/Collabora can replace Microsoft 365 without friction the project could be a success. Honestly I do not think so as of today.
I agree, but I'm curious if anyone has thoughts on why. Like, why is good collaboration in an open-source office software so unrealistic when way more complicated-seeming state synchronization happens in open source and indie games all the time?
LibreOffice Sheets doesn’t compete with Excel 2024, it competes more with Excel 2003. Granted, this is fine for a lot of (most?) people but it’s still not a “replacement” in my mind.
I ended up just building a Nix Flake to properly run Excel. At least then the operating system itself isn’t MS.
Where would you say the gaps are? As someone who has been in an environment of excel power users for several years, the quality of that program has declined YoY due to all the excess bloat that MS stuffs into that thing. The plugin/macro ecosystem is one aspect that comes to my mind.
I kicked Excel to the kerb in 2005 or something like that and have been a happy Apple Numbers and Wolfram Mathematica (and SPSS, PSPP, and R, and Python) user ever since.
I hate to agree. It's not just a battle against a deeply entrenched Microsoft tools suite, but also the ease of use and convenience of Google's tools, and how easily they enable collaborative work. Word and Excel have accumulated so much cruft that they are if anything an easier target to surpass.
But that's not all. Avoiding US based proprietary tools, in general, is going to be a challenge. The EU needs some kind of fund to create the next generation of productivity tools for this platform. Not just equivalent replacements. Requirements change and new tools need to be different.
The challenge is engaging with external orgs. They will send you office docs and it creates friction when they cannot be reliably edited and returned. Even just opening them can be unreliable.
People can apparently imagine and accept future Recursive Super Intelligence and Datacenters in Space but can't imagine or accept a future where a free/libre Office Suite with support and funding from a motivated sovereign state can get close to Microsoft's offering
Do we even need to have a suite of tools for users to create spreadsheets, paste images into them, save them as a PDF, download to their local machine, sync to sharepoint, change permissions to include everyone in the entire universe to be able to see the file, email the link to another human in the company who opens it, uses a PDF editor to copy paste it back into excel, barely scratch the surface of tools within Excel to sum a column, reply back in a password protected word doc saying looks good to me.
I would much prefer to be using something like NixOS and not be depending on Microsoft etc but I can't imagine what the stack will look like if we don't revolutionise the work. Sensitivity labels, DLP, etc. are relics of people treating information on computers as if they are physical documents, and I can't see how I will have been paying for BP/E3/E5 licenses for users and then suddenly start to argue we don't need those features anymore after spending so long insisting users need to use them.
That's correct. The challenge is going to be creating a forward looking environment that doesn't just create 80% replacements. I'm deep into a mobile software project that needs to be ready for on device tool calling. Retrofitting that to existing monolithic apps is going to fall short of realizing the potential. Apps are going to change in big ways. Driving in the rearview mirror won't get you there.
I think a whole nixified country would revolutionize the work. Just gotta take the off the shackles of proprietary software and let human nature do its thing.
- Nix needs weird tricks to make its packaging scheme work
- The main repo is uncurated and hosted on Github
- The functional nature of packages means a low level update can either trigger a huge wave of updates or you end up with out of date deps. Usually both happen at the same time
1. The rigidness of it all, which after a while is the main point ofc. Takes getting used to, but awesomeness for servers
2. The highly specialized filesystem layout requires some tinkering when trying to “just get things to work” that is not already packaged/wrapped for nixos
3. The language is… special. An acquired taste perhaps.
Give it a go, I don't know anyone who has converted back (n=3). Agents/LLMs make things much easier these days.
If you have a single machine and only use stuff from the official nixpkgs, there are no more struggles than any other linux distro, this is a very happy path (imo).
Going outside of that you will, practically, need to convert to using flakes. The conversion is easy, but its another learning curve and there are conflicting docs. Agents make short work of this.
Packaging things yourself can get quite hairy. For simple projects in a single well supported language its easy and just a couple lines of code. For a rust+wasm+solidjs+vite+julia+more monorepo, it was a couple of weeks on a steep learning curve. Agents are pretty okay at packaging in general, I've been able to oneshot a number of difficult-for-me packaging problems, other times it can be an unmitigated mess.
For remote deploys, secrets management, and other devops-like tasks, things get harder, but most people don't need/want this and if you make it this far the remaining learning curve is totally worth it.
They also have "Mijn Bureau" which I tried out and wrote about here [0] which is the MS Office alternative.
I take it this is the layer below that, an operating system?
But it all looks quite fragmented still from what I can see, especially now that it's also split across GitHub and CodeBerg as well as being split across different organizations, and trying to collaborate with other efforts by other European countries while still remaining distinct.
I hope someone is security scanning all those NixOS provider modules.
I wonder if Claude could go from NixOS spec to actual config without the Nixos provider. The provider becomes a natural language description and some links to the docs/source code and then a verifier is all you need.
With the hypothetical providerless NixOS you'd get new config settings the moment the source code changes, without resorting to extraConfig escape hatches.
Over 400 comments and it’s all flamewars and almost zero discussion of NixOS.
I think NixOS would be a great solution for this sort of environment. With something like impermanence enabled to make the systems immutable, you could push all configuration from a central server and ensure that there is no drift. You could even use read-only nix stores served over nfs. This would all be easier if your hardware is limited to a few select configurations, of course.
I am curious about your confidence for NFS for the nix store.
My thoughts, ignoring my technical disagreements, would be that you'd want to setup clients to have a specific set of software per their government role. A nix store could expose more software than you planned on supporting (e.g. forgotten software or licensed software).
You could use multiple shares and limit each configuration to the software required. In this case you would share common configs through modules on the build server. The build server would output updated configs to the proper share paths.
A monolithic configuration may be adequate if each machine role only exposes the software that’s needed in its config. Other software that’s in the store could be hidden in some way, like overlay paths, perhaps. There may be other methods too. There’s a similar discussion here although this is about restricting paths via bubblewrap: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/restricting-nix-store-in-a-mou...
Most licensed software wouldn’t be an issue as long as the user doesn’t have license access, I’m assuming the license server would grant or deny access based on the user/user role. Depends on the software I guess.
I wonder if it’s possible to run a bubblewrapped (or similarly restricted) Wayland client and restrict access to store paths that way?
Man going from a Windows environment all the way to NixOS is quite the change isn't it? Probably good if NixOS can get more attention and easier to use. I see a lot of hype for it, and then people seem to give up as it can get pretty gnarly with some of the configuration. I'm a fan of something like Fedora Silverblue with the immutable OS setup.
Yes, and they should also rewrite all available packages for Nix in Rust, along with the Linux kernel.
No, that's still not enough complexity! They need at least a thousand agents using trillions of tokens around the clock to get us the Nix and Rust slop we need.
> Sextant: a graphical interface for NixOS management as an alternative to Intune, by Bram Buijs [1]
Now that's a fairly interesting project and a way to actually bring technology like NixOS to the administrators in the way they expect. From my experience (sample size one, yes) there are more systems administrators that use web interfaces for management than DevOps IaC folks. This would be a good bridging solution if it is a successful project.
It looks like they are using Claude to develop it, though..
> Things that cost somebody hours, written down so they cost the next person minutes. Each one is here because it actually happened, not because it might.
> Same commit, different answer, decided by the runner's store rather than by the code.
That sentence seems to lack an important word. Microsoft is a company so I don't assume they built an alternative for it. Microsoft 365 is what used to be called Office 365 and governments love their Office suite so that would make sense and I could see the number accidentally getting dropped but NixOS is probably an OS so I guess this is about Microsoft Windows but then it just means they're replacing one OS with another and Windows-compatibility (nor Office suite compatibility for that matter) is hardly a novel idea.
The site doesn't seem to have much information about this headline at a glance. Does anyone have a link to the missing context?
The German Defense sector did something with Nextcloud, Collabora Online, Open-Xchange, Element/Matrix and Univention Nubus I believe. With things like Euro-Office and Nextcloud really stepping things up. Even Proton getting an office suite, I don't think the M365 platform is the big hurdle it once was. Especially because Microsoft lost the private market. 25 years ago you'd get employees who knew how to use Microsoft Office, today they all grew up with Macs, Chromebooks and similar.
What is the alternative though? If you piss off Trump you risk getting all your digital infrastructure shut down over night. It doesn't even have to be you who pisses him off. Obviously using Anthropic AI service has it's own issues within the EU trade zone, but it's been what... 3 months? Since they were ordered to shut off EU access to their most powerful models because they ran afoul of the US government.
My opinion is that Microsoft’s software business practically goes to zero in an era when anybody can vibecode changes to open-source projects to fit their exact needs. All that will be left of MSFT is Azure.
My follow up opinion is that Satya agrees with me, and that is why he has so much anxiety around AI.
What took so long? Now start building a Arm computers native to Europe the Dutch have a long history in electronics ie.. Phillips which collapsed mainly from self inflicted wounds similar to some of the old-line American companies IBM, Xerox, Motorola, and Kodak...
I see about a dozen of these stories every year. Often some German municipality or some other bureaucratic enclave. Slashdot, back in its heyday, was filled with these stories.
What I'd love to see is a 5 year follow up to one of these stories. What worked, what didn't, how many people are still using the linux OS, etc. Because I feel like windows is as entrenched as always in the government space, whereas in the corporate world most people I know have migrated to macs long ago.
Guix has reproducibility. Instead of Nonguix, which bundles tons of propietary software, they can just add the Fearware repo, which just has the tainted non-free vanilla Linux kernel with closed blobs and firmware, just enough to function your machine well (especially with 3D support for Radeon cards and wireless devices) and nothing more.
The first, second and fourth items can be provided for NixOS.
As for the third item - that's not answering my question, it's a homunculus answer: What could the Netherlands have regulated that requires making changes to NixOS? Which NixOS maintainers themselves could not oblige?
I used to wonder this same question and weighed guix and nix quite a bit before moving to the nix camp.
Guix on paper really sounds ideal, it feels like a more compelling design, more first principles, it's all scheme, really exciting ideas under the hood. But design intent is not a substitute for the actual user experience. IRL it's too much hassle: weak package coverage, weak ecosystem, a steep learning curve, most stuff will require work because it was designed around systemd.
Now NixOS on the other hand already has an abundance of packages and real adoption. Most setups can probably migrate to nix today with a backup of /home and a competent LLM agent, and things "will just work". I did this recently!
Add to that the NixOS ecosystem where things are fairly simple to setup declaratively and "it just works": disko for partitions, sops-nix for secrets, restic for cloud backups, microvm for light vm's, NixOS anywhere or deploy-rs for deployments (colmena or nixops4 for interconnected nodes even). You can do complex things, and your rig or network could explode and it won't matter cause you can rebuild and deploy to a new/repaired machine in minutes. Your backups could explode and all you'd lose is state.
All that is easy to have in Nix today - I know cause I literally just switched and did most of it with like 0 experience. I migrated my fairly complex setup 1 to 1 and gained a ton of useful stuff in Nix, whereas with Guix it wasn't even possible (I would have to trim or package / translate tons of stuff), nor would it have been easy, and all the cool stuff I gained with nix is either difficult or non-existent on guix, let alone mature.
Guix users can just add the Fearware Guix channel which is just the nonfree firmware and blobbed vanilla Linux kernel, no propietary software it's added, just the necessary firmware to run your hardware (3D Radeon support, Nouveau+reclocking, some audio chipsets, and most of non-ant9k WiFi cards).
That's it.
I’m really curious to see what the answer for MDM and Group Policy is on Linux. The SSO part is mostly
figured out, but the reason places use Windows is often manageability.
Is there anyone doing MDM or policy enforcement on Linux other than Google Workspace + chromebooks?
It's Nix so you just push the new generation to the device. It's probably the easiest possible way to do device management. It's also generally like two lines of extra config to wrap a block into a container if you want to hide some of the underlying OS tools completely, which I've never tried with a full desktop environment but I'd assume should basically just work if you pass a couple things like GPU?
The hard part is finding enough people working for the public sector salary who know those two extra lines and where to put them, and then making sure they are not getting bored or disillusioned enough.
I’m not talking about software install/updates, that is easy and straightforward on every major enterprise distro. I’m talking about Group Policy specifically, that is, the ability to enforce many settings across the whole OS/DE.
Minimum password lengths, maximum screen saver delay, screen saver password requirement, disk crypto enforcement, a million other little things. All of them can be done by customizing linux sure but organizations won’t want to maintain a separate distro for each business unit that needs different policies.
This thread seems hopelessly tone deaf to non-technical people's experience with something like NixOS. I can manage it just fine myself given my background, but I see a very low, if non-existent chance that a standard office worker is going to be happy moving from Windows to NixOS. I mean, good for them for trying, I just think HN is full of Nix purists who tend to gloss over all the warts that has kept this ecosystem from growing much over the last few decades.
Who is giving a standard office worker admin rights on their Windows machine in 2026?
From a user perspective, KDE Plasma or GNOME are simple environments to work in. Most stuff is on the web these days anyway; even a locked down kiosk setup would probably be adequate for many users.
No average office worker will be fiddling with Nix configs or installing Windows software. That’s for IT.
First off - decoupling from Trump-USA is a must. Canadians noticed
this; european countries are still slow. The Netherlands is faster;
the biggest slow-ass behemoth is Germany - no clue why. Germany is
a big reason why the EU fails, but also the expansionistic agenda
and what not (why do only poor countries want to join the EU;
UK left, Switzerland and Norway are not going to join, so there
are indeed INTERNAL problems, but let's go back to the dependency
on the USA).
So while more alternatives here are the logical answer, as well
as eliminate the greedy US corpoations, I am not sure NixOS as
it is right now is ideal. On paper, NixOS should solve EVERYTHING.
For instance, if a build status works for one user, the environment
guarantee should mean it works for EVERYONE ELSE. Same with other
problems and hardware, so in theory, NixOS should be perfect.
In practice, though, I found working with NixOS annoying, for many
reasons. A static system that has issues, is not good. A static
system that restricts me in problem solving, is not good. Plus,
Nix is ugly to no ends - I have no idea why the NixOS team thought
a new programming language is required. Why do I need to define
static elements in Nix? Why not make that more free form? I already
describe my whole system via yaml files, which in turn ruby uses
to generate everything I need. Then there are smaller issues, like
why do I need to use systemd on NixOS, why can I not used versioned
AppDirs with a name scheme similar to GoboLinux (hashed program
directories on NixOS are, of course, also versioned app-dirs, but
I hate reading 7897389nughuewz789gewh2t93h923-hghwugeiw73, that
simply tells me nothing. Why not have /Programs/Python/3.15.0/ ?
It can't be simpler than that.)
Anyway - good for the Netherlands to push here, Denmark, Sweden,
Finland will also push, even France, though slower. Now please
everyone, help us convince the german government to stop being
such a tool for Trump. Merz is a failure anyway, but the problems
go far deeper than merely Trump, and with the AfD going to seize
power, idiocy will again dominate in Germany. That's very bad.
Germany is soooooooo slow here. Microsoft even managed to kill
LiMux years ago. They have placed their economic hitmen in Germany,
so the whole EU does not work anyway because Germany will keep on
dragging every other country down. It is thus very understandable
why real innovation comes from the smaller countries in the EU, as
they are quicker to innovate. Unfortunately the big german behemoth
will roll over them and again cripple many required things in the
EU.
Europeans are absolutely delusional, but I hope they're serious about dropping Microsoft this time. European governments have been pretending to do this for about 20 years at this point, though.
Microsoft isn't what it used to be. Maybe soon it will be called Microsoft/OpenAI, then OpenAI/Microsoft, then just OpenAI.
It's a bad sign that they chose NixOS instead of something boring like Debian, though (and it seems France, too.) Makes me suspect that this is being driven by a single strong personality who will eventually lose interest or even rugpull support, leaving the project in disarray and a poster child for criticizing doing anything but buying Microsoft as European flakiness. On the other hand, I'm happy that it will involve money being put into NixOS.
Well what I wrote was not on the homepage of nixos.com, or obvious after a few clicks. Claude summarised it very nicely. I now know I don't need NixOS.
Perhaps the real meatheads are the ones who spam threads with anti-ai memes, rather than looking at the utility of what the ai provided?
That's the nice part, as an admin you are familiar with the complexity and use it for good. As a user, you never have to see it. (And you can even have some freedom for installing apps using flatpack/snap if needed.)
How would you role out the same config to thousands of Arch systems? Sure Valve does it, but I still think that is a "bolted on top" solution. Bootc could be another option though, but Nix solves reproducibility more elegantly, imho. Nix went back and asked "how can this be done better", where many modern solutions took what was already there.
The problem with Arch is that configuration is by hand so you have to do it every time. With Nix you configure it once and then you can deploy it anywhere. Also it's pretty much impossible to break since the system is immutable and you can boot to a different revision any time.
I can imagine. Those are often the sort of projects that struggle to put a one line description of what they are on their homepage. I inferred it was an OS, inferred it was Unix adjacent...but no answer on the rest. It could have been BSD or open Solaris based for all I could tell.
Windows also is unnecessary complicated for a singular install but works kinda well for a network and central administration by someone who likes to read the docs (or whatever you read for windows)
It's a mechanism to legally force web browser vendors to install government issues root certificates (which they already did btw). And EU pinky-promises that not a single independent EU member won't use them to do MITM attacks on their political opposition and journalists. Like Orban 2.0 or Fico won't use Hungarian or Slovak root cert for nefarious purposes, no-no-no. It's only to protect the children, see, and definitely not to help murder journalists investigating drug smuggling cover-up. :)
I want to ask an honest question, why more businesses don't rely on Apple products knowing the simplicity of just buying an iMac and adding some apps to it?
I talk about small businesses mostly, starting with ten or twenty computers, zero config, bonjour discovery, download apps from the app store, for me it looks like a total winner
Microsoft or Linux don't offer such an easy path to productivity, so why is it? What is lacking? What needs to be done in order for that scenario to work? What roadblock have you hit when trying to implement it?
We all use apple products, iMacs, Macbooks, and if we start a business for sure we as CEOs or managers will use one on our desktops, so why? Genuinely interested in answers...
The context here is removing reliance on US. EU countries are trying to decouple from US (or at least diversify if not possible to decouple) in various critical sectors where they have become dependent. Over reliance on US software is one of them. They are basically doing what China did many decades ago. Have home grown alternatives to US apps/services so as to not be in deep waters if US decides to sanction them. It is all about independence.
> why more businesses don't rely on Apple products knowing the simplicity of just buying an iMac and adding some apps to it?
Apple is a US company first and foremost and US has become unreliable. It has nothing to do with simplicity or productivity if reliability is in question. What use is a Mac if it can be subject to US sanctions resulting in App Store being shutdown for you or your entire Country and apps/services stop working overnight?
Excellent point and I understand that, but then they should start working on building their own computers, and OS, and ecosystem, just like Huawei is doing for the past decade. It will take time, long years ahead but they should start now
I definitely like that future, but it should be built now
And yet Apple is doing well in the far East Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, and Vietnam. They are competitive in some of the toughest markets to sell electronic devices into.
Doing well in Australia and New Zealand too. Aside from Taco the only big headwind is memory.
Microsoft and Linux /do/ offer the same path to productivity. Buy 10-20 computers, zero config, native discovery services, download apps.
What businesses need is management services and business applications. Those exist for Apple as well, but two significant headwinds: 1) inertia of essentially every major business on earth using MS Active Directory means there are enormous support and ecosystem benefits, and 2) cost.
In my experience, the corporate world that uses mac has moved to Okta and other providers, not MS Active Directory. They may still use MS AD in some areas, but you can now federate to have that as an island - say you have some legacy accounting software that needs to run in AD environment.
IME, Okta is almost as popular as MS AD now, I think they have 30% market share compared to 40% for AD, with IBM and others taking up the rest.
My experience is that small companies in particular fields do/did use Macs. Staying on Mac is difficult though since any customer can expect you to do what they do or support what they do if they are Windows oriented and will only start with a conversation about compatibility if they haven't chosen the most popular choice.
The way enterprise software is licensed, and how those licenses are perpetuated means that, in the absence of a national security imperative, 99% of customers just go along to get along.
Other people already answered the non US reason. However I fell for this. I got myself an expensive iPad because I assumed it's actually like all the apple users are saying.
However, a lot of apps are unstable. Support is horrible to non existent for some. No refunds even when the app doesn't work at all directly after install. Most professional apps have a buy price AND a subscription price at this point. Most actually working apps are not apple exclusive these days.
It's definitely not as green over there as some apple people make it out to be.
I hear you, I am not an Apple pundit, just a developer always looking for the path to optimization and thought Apple was it, it is not, and to be honest they don't make it easy either. I've been in the waiting list to become an Apple developer for a month now and the road has been tortuous as a Venezuelan developer. But if Huawei offered a simpler path to developing on their ecosystem I'd give it a try in an instant. I am loyal to no one except to those who make my life easier
You mean paying twice to five times the price for something that is not configurable and on which you can run only a small subset of software, all very expensive?
Any move away from the abusive big tech that exists in USA is a good move in my book. Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads, and per ads viewed, you then earn credit to be able to use your program/game. It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
The patent does not include monitoring using a camera or microphone. https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
I'm not familiar with patent legalese, but from my layman skimming of the patent application, I think you're right.
Instead, the patent would cover running object detection/classification ML models — optionally on remote servers — on screen and audio output and user input of specific applications (particularly videogames), without requiring cooperation from the application, to target ads based on what's happening in the application and to decide when to interrupt the application with an ad.
To hazard a guess: Microsoft or part of Microsoft is planning to include pervasive targeted advertising in the next Xbox console OS, including during gameplay of any game.
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I’m experience windows 11 which is my first windows experience since maybe NT 2 or 4.
I can tell it’s still windows but I’m shocked how many things I have to turn off to stop live data from the internet appearing in my GUI. Also my profile settings, saved passwords, and other data seems to reset unexpectedly cause some or all settings to disappear. Finding stored passwords is also surprisingly difficult or impossible depending on I don’t know what.
Adding such overt spying to this mess of an OS achieves a new low in user experience.
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I love the absolute fever dream that is looking at the pictures of patents. The out of context fig 9 is amazing
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Yes you're right, that's my bad. I interpreted the "audiovisual" wrong. They are actually just monitoring the screen and system audio.
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> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
It's easy: The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal. Hardware vendors shipping PC's with Windows 11, corporations who went all in to Microsoft's tooling shove Microsoft Teams down your throat because "the company uses it", and the list goes on.
I refuse to use 'teams', it's a pile of garbage and spyware to boot.
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Yeah, although, the word “just” is doing a lot of work here.
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Well of course I wouldn't expect corporations to know what ethics or human decency is even if it stared them straight into the eyes, but I would expect governments to establish laws and regulations such that the psychopaths wouldn't be able to abuse people to no end.
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I am sorry, but that can't be the only reason. At my job we are free to choose. Some have MacOS, almost everyone else has Windows, I am the only one using linux. But the joke is that Windows users are heavy users of WSL and RStudio. We are not forced, or even suggested to use Teams, Office or whatever tooling Microsoft has, and in fact meetings were I am invited had to be done in Zoom instead of Teams only because of me.
I believe that it is more a familiarity issue, and seeing Linux/Mac as an obscure tool only usable by gurus.
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I hope you're aware AI vendors are running the exact same playbook these days. Don't want AI? Fuck you here's some AI on your toothbrush
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But why? Why do so many companies choose garbage?
> The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal
That behaviour in itself is believed to be morally wrong, and dystopian. That still doesn't answer the question why people just accept this. How can "we" deem ourself more moral than the Nazis, and literally do this.
[dead]
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
There is a couple more wild things here:
1) That there is an agenda, demand and total legal abetment from the top of the power/monetary hierarchy for such corporate policies
2) That there is a horde of individual employees working to those ends without any shadow of doubt, often even vice signaling their intent to be the first to attain the figurative A-bomb or full-blown BB telescreen.
A lot of that has to do with the fact that the people who decide to use it fall into two camps:
1. People who do not have to use it themselves (political decides, bosses, ..), but get lobbied to the max
2. People who have to administer it and know nothing else and endure the lasting pain over the perceived infinite hurdle of changing the system
I gladly can use Linux at work, so I have had a stable, reliable and unchanging system since the past 6 years, but others have to go through major pains for each version of enshittification of their OS update. In my case the OS just got better slowly and incrementally.
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3) That half of HN works at these companies and loves to whitewash their conscience by commenting "look at how awful they are" on any company that's interpreted as 1% worse. You have MS devs who comment on Amazon who comment on Meta who comment on Palantir comment on Flock comment on NSO Group, as this is roughly the "perceived hierarchy".
If you're in US big tech you're working directly for the regime and fully complicit, end of.
That is true. We see that with Trump, where he tries to force the EU to open markets to the US corporations who will just steal data from EU citizens.
Why can't the EU learn more from Canada? Canada realised that with Trump there is no way to make a deal. So cut things down where possible, diversify - the EU still has to learn this lesson. In particular Germany is totally US-addicted - no idea why, other than, of course, the obvious answer ("we need to export into the USA", aka selfish greed from Germany here).
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My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.
Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose. Decline -> Your subscription will be terminated, no further monies will be debut from your account, are you sure?
I'm more interested in the cases where you buy your phone, for example, and after purchase you are asked to agree with terms and conditions. Money is paid already. If you do not agree, you cannot use the device. Worse still, if 2 days after thre is mandatory update that forces you to agree to new version. If you don't like them, you should be compensated for it, as it is hidden information from you as a buyer.
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> My pet peeve is changes in 'user agreements' for paid services that add increasing amounts of adverts and tracking, but if you decline, you can't use the service, but the service continues to charge you. For the service they're no longer supplying.
> Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...:
“Where the contract provides that the digital content or digital service is to be supplied or made accessible to the consumer over a period of time, the trader may modify the digital content or digital service beyond what is necessary to maintain the digital content or digital service in conformity in accordance with Articles 7 and 8, if the following conditions are met:
[…]
2. The consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract if the modification negatively impacts the consumer's access to or use of the digital content or digital service, unless such negative impact is only minor. In that case, the consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract free of charge within 30 days of the receipt of the information or of the time when the digital content or digital service has been modified by the trader, whichever is later.”
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Does that need new law? The problem we have in the UK is that Trading Standards has been starved of funding for the last 16 years so they can't do their job. If they had funding I'm pretty sure they have the power to tackle this.
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This is why it would be so nice to have an EU that actually made law, instead of just handing over the right to oversee things to the commission.
Imagine if we actually had real regulations, instead of these negotiated things. Then we could just sue and normal courts could handle it.
I expect this is already covered by existing regulations but the only enforcement avenue is a lawsuit. They know you won't sue them for $20.
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> Microsoft just recently made a new patent where they will monitor you via camera and microphone to block your program/game to show you ads,
You got the important details of the Microsoft parent wrong (the patent doesn’t use camera and microphone monitoring), but more importantly the existence of a patent is not the same as intent to deploy a technique.
Every few years news outlets will generate controversy about a patent they’ve discovered, implying that the company is going to force the evil thing on everyone. If you’ve worked at a tech company with a patent incentive you realize most of these patents are just resume padding junk or people gaming patent incentive systems. I was at a company that had a modest bonus for submitting ideas that could be patented and you wouldn’t believe the junk that people were trying to push through without any intent to ever use it.
As further proof, the patent you’re thinking of where cameras monitor the user is actually from 2009 and was patented by Sony. US8246454B2
>As further proof, the patent you’re thinking of where cameras monitor the user is actually from 2009 and was patented by Sony. US8246454B2
I'm not OP, but I'm really not sure how you came to that assumption. A cursory Google search for "Microsoft monitor patent" brought up a bunch of articles that actually linked to filings like what OP talked about from this year.
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/26/6f/30/238c9d7...
https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/microsoft-patents-s...
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Black Mirror has unwittingly been offering a lot of nice, horrible ideas.
Well I'd like to think Charlie Brooker, like many of us, could clearly say where humanity was heading. Some of the episodes that were considered far fetched 15 years ago are probably considered plausible at best and likely at worst now.
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Too many people seem to have taken it as a todo list instead of a warning...
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Seems like many films and books have been taken as inspiration for making "hypothetical futures" true. E.g. Her - take AI as your girlfriend... was creepy then, still is now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
Sometimes good people are able to think like villains and predict their next moves, sometimes villains themselves declare their intentions via proxies.
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
It's a long chain, but ultimately it comes down to incompetence... When I was younger (decades ago), I assumed that the incompetence lies on the side of the executives who were overriding knowledgeable technical folk.
I do not believe that anymore.
I have seen the following play out in 5 companies in the last 5 years:
1. The people making the purchasing decisions are told by the technical head what to buy. They get told "Buy Microsoft".
2. The technical head deciding what to buy will not buy something the technical division don't know how to support. He gets told "Buy Microsoft".
3. The technical division are not actually technical, they have just learned where to click when they want to do something. Learning concepts and/or where to click on a different system is beyond the mental acuity of the average professional Microsoft Mouse-Click-Systems-Engineer (MCSE).
4. Unwilling to explain that they are actually incompetent and non-technical, they blame the users when making their recommendation: "The Users Only Know How To Use Microsoft".
5. The users, OTOH, are wondering WTF is going on; collectively, they have no problem switching OSes because they use so many - Android, iOS, MacOS, that infotainment system in their bargin-basement car...
Over the years, I've been told many times by the IT departments "Users only know how to use Microsoft". I've been told exactly that even when when users were happily switching between Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Symbian OS, Blackberry OS, iOS and Android with no problems.
When I got told this, I always asked "Do you know how to do you daily functions on Linux", to which I'll always get some sort of "We tried running Exchange on it, and it didn't work", or "We tried running MSWord on it, and it didn't work", or (in one hilarious case) "We tried running Windows on it, and it didn't work" (No, I don't know what they actually fucking tried!).
It's incompetence on the part of the IT department.
Error! Please drink a verification can.
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/microsoft-patents-s...
Patent: https://patents.justia.com/patent/20260260258
The mic/camera aspect doesn’t appear on that patent, it seems to be from an abandoned Sony patent filing from 2006 https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070261077A1/en?oq=US20...
"Drink verification can to continue"
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I don't like this idea, but I do like to get my facts right. If it is the patent linked elsewhere on this page, then
Apart from "we inserted some ML into the ad pipeline" there's really nothing new that I can see here.
Normally one practical solution would be to cover the front-facing camera on a phone.
Of course with face identification for unlocking, there is now a power incentive to not do so…
But it's still bad as fuck, deplorable, despicable and many others adjectives. And it doesn't change GP point, even if the patent sucks at being a patent.
What's truly wild imo is how the vast majority of consumers keep choosing absolute crap when better alternatives exist. Microsoft, Google, Twitter... oh my
I feel compelled to mention Oracle at this point. Isnt their entire business model suing their customers?
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
It's just a patent.
It's just a delousing room
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You can patent a black mirror episode?
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
Cory Doctorow wrote a book exactly about this business practices, "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It."
"Once the platform is fundamentally focused on the shareholders, and the users and vendors are locked in, the platform no longer has any incentive to maintain quality. Enshittified platforms that act as intermediaries can act as both a monopoly on services and a monopsony on customers, as high switching costs prevent either from leaving even when alternatives technically exist."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshitification
Black Mirror episode 2, IIRC.
Its not a good move. What about the opportunity cost. Is this really the best use of their time and money? Seems stupid and ideologically driven.
They can hold them criminally liable for surveillance and put the executives in jail if they are so concerned about some patents.
We live in a world that has an immense amount of wealth, so it's possible to build a pretty bad business and still make money so long you're providing a minimal amount of value and/or have some sort of lobbying/regulatory capture/juicy government contracts obtained via wining and dining key members of government that enables you to leech off taxpayer money.
This is why I really like Apple, despite their faults, they've shown that "being marginally less bad than Microsoft" is a good enough strategy to build a trillion-dollar business.
I make dystopian adds for my game- and one of them is a company called MacroSoft, which has a product that makes you sing add jingles to measure "engagement" performance before opening a program on its operating System (called BARs). Its really insane, how my dystopian crap regularly gets overtaken by reality.
Greed has no end.
> Microsoft just recently made a new patent
Microsoft has done a lot of super shady things, and they are domiciled in a hyper-corrupt, lawless threat to humanity (one that elects quite possibly the stupidest human alive -- a rapist abomination halfwit clown -- to the highest office), however people do make far too much of the patent thing.
A lot of firms reward groups and employees that get granted patents. It doesn't actually matter if you're spitballing the most absurd nonsense that no one ever asked for and is nowhere on the product map, someone writes the application and gives it a shot. A patent being granted doesn't mean that a single person ever envisions doing this or asked for it implemented, and honestly the idea that they "invented" this is just how farcical the patent system is.
In this case the patent is held by Microsoft's "Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC", which is their "patent extortion" racket. So they literally wrote this hoping to catch someone doing something found in a single claim so that they can use the legal system to rob from people.
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This makes me happy. The more enshittification the sooner the first pillar of Big Tech will fall down.
Meta and Google will follow soon after.
P.S.: just because they take a patent on something doesn't mean they will actually use it.
> just because they take a patent on something doesn't mean they will actually use it.
That's true, of course, but the fact that there are people in the company thinking like that to begin with, enough to think it's worth patenting such anti-human stuff, is plenty enough for me to never want anything to do with them.
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It's not so surprising. When cultures slide into decadence, they seldomly do so abruptly. It often occurs thin slice by thin slice. Once you accept one seemingly thin moral concession, it is easier to accept the next because you've shortened the distance. Not only that, but with each moral concession, you become more willing to accept still greater concessions as you become increasingly detached from reality. And we shouldn't forget the role of cognitive dissonance. The notion that the consensus about what is normal can be wrong is very uncomfortable for many.
wow, getting us hooked into a usage IV drip, basically. that is horrifying. I can't imagine anyone staying on Windows in this day and age except purely to do work in MS-dominant environments. the jump to Linux is EASY nowadays. even my elderly parents have no problems using a windowsesque Linux desktop for their basic needs.
In addition to being the plot of a Black Mirror Episode¹, Sony also owns a similar patent².
I wasn’t aware of the Microsoft patent but was able to find it³. It was published less than a month ago.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
² https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/
³ https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
> It is absolutely wild to me how a corporation can be so toxic and abusive to its users and still be in business.
Here's a (bit dated) list of the US companies which rake in the most bucks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...
Looking at the 13 which rank higher than Microsoft - how many would you describe as treating their users/customers well?
Theory:
Treating your customers well is part of one strategy for corporate growth and profit. There are other strategies, which also can work very well - and don't require all the hassles and expense and non-evil of treating your customers well. Naturally, Capitalist propaganda stresses that first strategy, and doesn't talk so much about the others.
> Looking at the 13 which rank higher than Microsoft - how many would you describe as treating their users/customers well?
Almost all of them.
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France government has announced NixOS based systems some months ago:
- https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix a hardened/secured os
- https://github.com/cloud-gouv/bureautix-example an example to use securix to build an office deployment (with some packages https://github.com/cloud-gouv/bureautix-example/blob/main/co... )
I’m looking with so much admiration what France has been building in this space, especially the latest gendarmerie transition into open source OS from windows.
The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost, despite the fact that is the most popular language in Europe.
Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this. If all the countries in Europe just keep pushing their nationalist ideology instead of truly believing into a united and solid Europe Union, we won’t go any where.
Hi (Sécurix developer), we wrote our documentation in English and in French: https://cloud-gouv.github.io/securix.
Maintaining both languages is hard but we will do our best.
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> The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost
Interestingly, a French-speaking Canadian who has spent some time in France told me that his right to use the French language is better protected in Canada than it is in France. He thinks that this is a consequence of the reciprocality implied by having more than one official language: French speakers in Canada get the same rights as English speakers, so people are happy to grant rights in return for getting them, whereas in France everyone gets screwed and you end up with a situation in which a French person wanting to do a PhD on French history at a French university has to write their grant application in English.
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> the latest gendarmerie transition into open source OS from windows
That was 18 years ago: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
> Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this.
Isnt this just baked into the idea? The French are building an OS for internal use for their own interests.
If we then try to extend that or the Dutch OS to other countries we have the original problem of dependence.
I guess we could do with more weird third-path stuff with the Linux world, even if the reason for said weird stuff existing is the French having (le) NIH syndrome.
It's also great when an actual commercial organization with requirements gets into the Linux game, as they don't really yield to 'we could make that printer work but it would be against everything we stand for' style arguments that have cemented problems in Linux userland for decades.
‘United and solid EU’ doesn’t have to involve forcing everyone to use a someone’s native language. Ideally we’d have a common language that’s neutral and used for international communication only. In fact, we already have a working solution; Esperanto has existed for well over 100 years at this point, and continues to be a healthy, living language. People just don’t seem to care that much. It always seems to be either practicality or national heritage, never both at the same time. Yet the common ground has been there all along.
Frenchman here. French companies and organization, in my experience actually really like the English language (at OVH for example, most official docs are in English), but I do think it makes sense for a government funded by people who speak mostly French (ie the French taxpayers) to do stuff in French, the language most of its citizens will be most familiar with.
Putting stuff in English will tend to exclude the less educated, or people who struggle to learn foreign languages.
EDIT: and actually, from looking at the README of https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix
> Ce README est en français mais le reste du code, les issuers et les PR sont en anglais.
The README is in French but the rest of the code, the issues (they wrote issuers, but that is a typo I suspect) and the PRs are in English.
So. :P
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The Dutch have ditched even github. They are thinking ahead.
https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS
I particularly enjoy the Asterix-adjacent naming scheme.
I’m glad multiple European agencies are giving this a whack - hopefully we’ll end up with a synthesis of the best aspects.
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Does it? The EU isn't a single country like the US - it's a partnership of 27 separate countries.
If one country in the UN adopted some new OS, we wouldn't expect every other country (incl the US) to adopt it too.
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> it says a lot about the EU that every government tries to reinvent the same operating system
Yeah what could possibly go wrong
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Awesome! I believe NixOS is perfect for systems you just want to work and track reproducibly, like appliances (which a lot of server software is supposed to be). I’m glad people smarter than me are actually able to realize its advantages =)
In the same space, also check out openDesk initiated by the German Government (https://www.opendesk.eu/en) and La Suite by the French one (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/).
AFAIK, there has been some collaboration with the German government on La Suite, not sure about the others.
It’s also the easiest if you want to make your own “distro”.
A “distro” is ultimately just a prebuilt configuration.nix file. NixOS itself even has tools to provide ISOs and QEMU images based on the build.
I've been thinking for years now that most distros could be replaced by a system config for NixOS or Guix System. I wonder if we'll ever see things go in that direction.
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I recently got my feet wet with Nix for the purpose of agent sandboxing, and it's a really great concept!
The issue I have run into is that for running llama.cpp, which is a very actively developed bleeding-edge software, it seems like experimenting with different versions/configs/patches etc. was fighting with the Nix philosophy of immutable software, so I ended up just managing it outside of nix.
But this could be user-error, I've only spent a couple of weeks with it.
one can use direnv, nix-direnv and flake.nix to get an immutable and reproducible build toolchain protected from nix garbage collection, while keeping the llama.cpp branches and/or compiled binaries mutable on the local filesystem. https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv
for agentic execution sandboxing, preventing 'rm -rf /home' nix or nix-direnv doesn't help, podman could be used next to nix. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/what-is-sandboxing-and-what-do...
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llama.cpp has a flake in-repo that I often use for trying out different branches and patches. I also have yet to have an issue just replacing the src and build number attribute in the nixpkgs build (in one cases I wanted to add an additional CMake flag but that was also easy).
IMHO this is way easier than without Nix in many cases as figuring out the upstream build process and getting it running can often be quite the chore. With Nix it is all set up for you.
> The issue I have run into is that for running llama.cpp, which is a very actively developed bleeding-edge software, it seems like experimenting with different versions/configs/patches etc. was fighting with the Nix philosophy of immutable software
May be. I'd guess it probably does it in a high-friction way compared to what you expect.
e.g. in a typical linux distro, you can just replace the (globally installed) version of the package and use that.
With Nix, you've got a declaration of how to build a package, including its dependencies; and each of those dependencies is also a declaration of how to build that package, and so on. -- And so, "just change this version" results in rebuilding the full chain of dependencies.
If you want multiple readily-available versions of llama.cpp each with different configs/patches, then using Nix would make this easier I'd think. But for "I just wanna try this, then try that", it's going to add overhead.
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When I just want to make something work and there isn't a nix package that can instantly give me what I want with `nix-shell -p $PACKAGE` then I use containers. That's what I've done when playing around with llama.
I would not be so confident the people making these decisions are smarter than you.
Is this just the old 'Government is stupid' or 'EU is too bureaucratic' trope, or did you have a particular point?
This realy would be a great way to foster collaboration within the EU. To create an own independant Ecosystem outside of the microsoft world.
Isn't it counterproductive for every European country with a bit of extra money to develop its own open source software stack?
Don't the stakeholders perceive this as a problem, too?
Or is it inevitable, given how differently these bureaucracies are structured?
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> Digital autonomy
> Strengthening the digital autonomy of the Netherlands.
Apparently the US becoming an authoritarian state means people don't want to do business with us. We're giving away our best advantage, our reputation for freedom and openness, for absolutely nothing in return.
A note to the developers in the project, if anyone is reading: your repositories are in violation of the new Codeberg policy that forbids AI-generated code [1].
[1] https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
It's self-hosted on https://code.overheid.nl/ & they mirror a subset of it on Codeberg.
That might still be in violation but I would imagine it's low on Codeberg's radar since they're not making primary contributions there (& if I were DAWO I'd also be interested in limiting direct community agentic contrib).
They have "migrated to codeberg" which is written in the repo itself.
However Codeberg actual "fuzzy" policy is less strict than "no LLM used ever".
And Codeberg also blocks real people from accessing it, for who knows what reason. I just get "Access denied." with no more info.
But they do let me visit blog.codeberg.org
They block some user-agents, maybe that's it?
From [1]
> We must regularly implement temporary security measures to ensure the availability of Codeberg's resources and prevent abuse.
> The 403 you have received is expected based on the UA.
From [2]
> What is the version of your chromium? AFAICT <=137 gets 403 Forbidden: [...] while >= 138 works ok: [...]
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/3084
[2] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/3078
Had that issue with HTTP accessed repo, switching to SSH solved it for me.
It’d make the most sense for the Dutch government (or DAWO) to have their own Forgejo instance if the goal is data sovereignty.
edit: looks like this was originally the case and then they moved?
They use both. https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK?q=dawo&sort=alphabetically as the official source, and https://codeberg.org/DAWO for the community parts.
clearly shows the need for federated forges, where you get to decide on your own rules but you still benefit from interacting with a broader set of collaborators.
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We can insist everyone self-hosts everything, but is it worth it? Do you have your own email? It's quite normal for a government agency to contract a third party to supply e.g. furniture, instead of chopping its own wood.
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Their instance is self hosted right, so this doesn't apply I think.
Codeberg does not forbid AI-generated code. It forbids AI-generated projects. You would know this if you read the policy.
The specific language is:
> projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
And "mostly" here seems egregiously undefined to me
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...
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Is it on Codeberg? I looked self-hosted to me.
https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS says:
> DAWO Core has moved from https://code.overheid.nl to Codeberg to facilitate community collaboration.
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Codeberg is trying to solve the right problem with the wrong solution. But hey, it's democratic!
I like Codeberg's solution (hard written policy, light good-faith based enforcement), what would you suggest as a better solution?
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I predict that Codeberg will soon realize that they have no choice but to loosen and allow AI generated code.
There is no point in being on the extreme end around banning all code generated by AI.
Regardless, there is AI generated code in many repositories on Codeberg anyway.
I've seen so much commentary on the apparent strictness & extreme nature of Codeberg's approach & no actual examples of it.
They have a strict policy (which many have rightly pointed out is impossible to fully enforce), & their "enforcement" has mostly relied on good faith contributions to date. They're also accounting for the fact the ToS change came without advance notice for many of their users who were already making active use of agents, hence there remains many AI repos (I have yet to hear of any removals).
To me that seems like the best approach one can hope for - a lax policy is a slippery slope (presuming dissuading AI contrib is your goal), & wouldn't satisfy their legal concerns (hosting code of questionable copyright status), & strict enforcement isn't viable in any case (especially at their scale), so this seems to me to be the best compromise.
I don't think they're banning all AI generated code, just projects that are primarily AI-generated. They'll probably also object to PRs that are entirely AI generated. Or at least they will when they become a problem.
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AI generated code is allowed on Codeberg, but not if it's mostly ai generated
It may be more a measure against explosive growth than being anti-AI in principle.
This is less about the code and more about load. It's community funded so allowing agents to willy nilly push and pull will be very expensive.
Banning AI generated content works just fine, and arguing otherwise is nothing short of FOMO.
As a random example, AI generated content is banned from the /r/ProgrammingLanguages subreddit and any regular visitor that _isn't_ suffering from AI psychosis/FOMO will tell you it's for the better. In general it's not that difficult to moderate for it either as AI built projects consistently contain the same patterns _over and over_ such that 98% is easily detected.
People who act out of ideology very very rarely change their opinions.
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> I predict that Codeberg will soon realize that they have no choice but to loosen and allow AI generated code.
I predict that eventually people will read the linked blog post and realize Codeberg already allows AI generated code. But this requires reading and nuance of course, which is hard to come by sometimes, so I guess we'll continue see misinformed comments like this until eventually the web is only autonomous agents.
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Did you read the actual policy? It isn't extreme in the slightest.
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Fair note, but I'd avoid the cheap shot "more open". You'll just bring up the old flame wars about whether the MIT-style or GNU-style licenses are more open.
The same applies here, is it really "more open" to allow corporations to profit by removing the openness of your work?
Point taken, trimmed that. I do take issue with their position but not the place to start a new discussion.
Did you actually read through that post you linked? You realize not every project that was ever touched by a LLM is being thrown off? Read the "Some early, but informal guidelines" particularly, as you've seemingly missed that.
They're targeting slop and essentially spam, not everything that could possibly have been built by LLMs.
Quoting from the post:
All of the commits I browsed here seem to be LLM-assisted, so these projects are in this category. The policy being fuzzy is in itself a problem - "likely to be tolerated" is not a great policy to have your entire government depend on.
Personally, the refusal on "Projects heavily tied to the LLM ecosystem, e.g. LLM-written tools to ease LLM usage" is enough reason, as that's a good chunk of what I've been working on.
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Not OP, but I stand corrected. Thought it was 100% no generated code. Now I know better, thanks! Looks like codeberg aren't as mad as I thought.
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hahaha
Codeberg are going to have issues in the future when all code is AI generated (except for artisanal code of course, written for the love of the craft but not to achieve anything of merit).
>but not to achieve anything of merit
Educating oneself to provide better quality of work still requires writing code by hand, and by extend is an achievement of merit.
Assuming writing code by hand is slower (which I agree with), why can't it still have merit compared to code written via llm harness?
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Policies are enacted for current reality, not fantasy futures. If your magical fantasy becomes reality (it won't), they can just... change their policy. Of course, you aren't thinking about practical effects of policies on platforms, only on how it's an insult to your LLM-bro way of life.
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The highest problem is the office suite. If you think Libreoffice/Collabora can replace Microsoft 365 without friction the project could be a success. Honestly I do not think so as of today.
I agree, but I'm curious if anyone has thoughts on why. Like, why is good collaboration in an open-source office software so unrealistic when way more complicated-seeming state synchronization happens in open source and indie games all the time?
Yeah, especially Excel.
LibreOffice Sheets doesn’t compete with Excel 2024, it competes more with Excel 2003. Granted, this is fine for a lot of (most?) people but it’s still not a “replacement” in my mind.
I ended up just building a Nix Flake to properly run Excel. At least then the operating system itself isn’t MS.
Where would you say the gaps are? As someone who has been in an environment of excel power users for several years, the quality of that program has declined YoY due to all the excess bloat that MS stuffs into that thing. The plugin/macro ecosystem is one aspect that comes to my mind.
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I kicked Excel to the kerb in 2005 or something like that and have been a happy Apple Numbers and Wolfram Mathematica (and SPSS, PSPP, and R, and Python) user ever since.
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We really need investments from large public institutions in LibreOffice Sheets.
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What version of Excel does your Nix Flake package out of interest? Is it current?
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I hate to agree. It's not just a battle against a deeply entrenched Microsoft tools suite, but also the ease of use and convenience of Google's tools, and how easily they enable collaborative work. Word and Excel have accumulated so much cruft that they are if anything an easier target to surpass.
But that's not all. Avoiding US based proprietary tools, in general, is going to be a challenge. The EU needs some kind of fund to create the next generation of productivity tools for this platform. Not just equivalent replacements. Requirements change and new tools need to be different.
Completely agree. Before that I would have add the Adobe Suite as well for a lot of people but it's less a problem now fortunately.
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ is the French government's office suite. I think this can work as long as the devs are responsive to users' needs.
They don't need to reimplement all of MS Office, just the parts they need to serve their constituency.
The challenge is engaging with external orgs. They will send you office docs and it creates friction when they cannot be reliably edited and returned. Even just opening them can be unreliable.
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People can apparently imagine and accept future Recursive Super Intelligence and Datacenters in Space but can't imagine or accept a future where a free/libre Office Suite with support and funding from a motivated sovereign state can get close to Microsoft's offering
Do we even need to have a suite of tools for users to create spreadsheets, paste images into them, save them as a PDF, download to their local machine, sync to sharepoint, change permissions to include everyone in the entire universe to be able to see the file, email the link to another human in the company who opens it, uses a PDF editor to copy paste it back into excel, barely scratch the surface of tools within Excel to sum a column, reply back in a password protected word doc saying looks good to me.
I would much prefer to be using something like NixOS and not be depending on Microsoft etc but I can't imagine what the stack will look like if we don't revolutionise the work. Sensitivity labels, DLP, etc. are relics of people treating information on computers as if they are physical documents, and I can't see how I will have been paying for BP/E3/E5 licenses for users and then suddenly start to argue we don't need those features anymore after spending so long insisting users need to use them.
That's correct. The challenge is going to be creating a forward looking environment that doesn't just create 80% replacements. I'm deep into a mobile software project that needs to be ready for on device tool calling. Retrofitting that to existing monolithic apps is going to fall short of realizing the potential. Apps are going to change in big ways. Driving in the rearview mirror won't get you there.
I think a whole nixified country would revolutionize the work. Just gotta take the off the shackles of proprietary software and let human nature do its thing.
I’ve been using NixOS exclusively the last few years. Its been a blessing and a curse!
My framework laptop, my NAS, my Home-assistant, etc
It’s how I’ve always envisioned “systems management”, but the struggle has been real.
Enter LLM’s - the barriers are kind of gone!
It’s actually making so much sense I don’t know where to start.
Just try it out, using a little bit of LLM support and you can reach a solid-state like setup for servers and workstations.
What are the struggles? I have been considering giving it a go.
This video sums it up pretty nicely imo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mqVnyOTeN8
TLDW:
- Nix needs weird tricks to make its packaging scheme work
- The main repo is uncurated and hosted on Github
- The functional nature of packages means a low level update can either trigger a huge wave of updates or you end up with out of date deps. Usually both happen at the same time
What it used to be:
1. The rigidness of it all, which after a while is the main point ofc. Takes getting used to, but awesomeness for servers
2. The highly specialized filesystem layout requires some tinkering when trying to “just get things to work” that is not already packaged/wrapped for nixos
3. The language is… special. An acquired taste perhaps.
4. Flakes, home-manager, experimental flags galore.
LLM’s makes short work of it all, and having a devenv.sh setup of all your projects is :chefs-kiss:
My machines are essentially solid-state devices, and it all just becomes extremely predictable and stable.
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Give it a go, I don't know anyone who has converted back (n=3). Agents/LLMs make things much easier these days.
If you have a single machine and only use stuff from the official nixpkgs, there are no more struggles than any other linux distro, this is a very happy path (imo).
Going outside of that you will, practically, need to convert to using flakes. The conversion is easy, but its another learning curve and there are conflicting docs. Agents make short work of this.
Packaging things yourself can get quite hairy. For simple projects in a single well supported language its easy and just a couple lines of code. For a rust+wasm+solidjs+vite+julia+more monorepo, it was a couple of weeks on a steep learning curve. Agents are pretty okay at packaging in general, I've been able to oneshot a number of difficult-for-me packaging problems, other times it can be an unmitigated mess.
For remote deploys, secrets management, and other devops-like tasks, things get harder, but most people don't need/want this and if you make it this far the remaining learning curve is totally worth it.
For a second I was worried that the actual code behind this was dead in the water ("3 months ago") but it's just one more click away:
https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS
The actual code repository: https://codeberg.org/DAWO/DAWO-Core
https://dawo.community/ is definitely the most 'Dutch Government'-looking Linux community website I've ever seen.
Workplace is such a confusing overloaded term.
They also have "Mijn Bureau" which I tried out and wrote about here [0] which is the MS Office alternative.
I take it this is the layer below that, an operating system?
But it all looks quite fragmented still from what I can see, especially now that it's also split across GitHub and CodeBerg as well as being split across different organizations, and trying to collaborate with other efforts by other European countries while still remaining distinct.
[0] https://techstackups.com/articles/is-it-feasible-to-self-hos...
[1] https://github.com/MinBZK/mijn-bureau-infra
[2] https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO/src/branch/main/compone...
I hope someone is security scanning all those NixOS provider modules.
I wonder if Claude could go from NixOS spec to actual config without the Nixos provider. The provider becomes a natural language description and some links to the docs/source code and then a verifier is all you need.
How is that better than the nixos provider? The trouble is the links to the source code right?
With the hypothetical providerless NixOS you'd get new config settings the moment the source code changes, without resorting to extraConfig escape hatches.
Digital Sovereignty
YouTube: What's Left? with Jovan and Freddie - AI Apocalypse Isn't Happening. This is Worse — Cory Doctorow
https://youtu.be/IXd9HwIE5bo?t=3087&is=cOQ7nxzZovbypQIe
Over 400 comments and it’s all flamewars and almost zero discussion of NixOS.
I think NixOS would be a great solution for this sort of environment. With something like impermanence enabled to make the systems immutable, you could push all configuration from a central server and ensure that there is no drift. You could even use read-only nix stores served over nfs. This would all be easier if your hardware is limited to a few select configurations, of course.
I am curious about your confidence for NFS for the nix store.
My thoughts, ignoring my technical disagreements, would be that you'd want to setup clients to have a specific set of software per their government role. A nix store could expose more software than you planned on supporting (e.g. forgotten software or licensed software).
You could use multiple shares and limit each configuration to the software required. In this case you would share common configs through modules on the build server. The build server would output updated configs to the proper share paths.
A monolithic configuration may be adequate if each machine role only exposes the software that’s needed in its config. Other software that’s in the store could be hidden in some way, like overlay paths, perhaps. There may be other methods too. There’s a similar discussion here although this is about restricting paths via bubblewrap: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/restricting-nix-store-in-a-mou...
Most licensed software wouldn’t be an issue as long as the user doesn’t have license access, I’m assuming the license server would grant or deny access based on the user/user role. Depends on the software I guess.
I wonder if it’s possible to run a bubblewrapped (or similarly restricted) Wayland client and restrict access to store paths that way?
Man going from a Windows environment all the way to NixOS is quite the change isn't it? Probably good if NixOS can get more attention and easier to use. I see a lot of hype for it, and then people seem to give up as it can get pretty gnarly with some of the configuration. I'm a fan of something like Fedora Silverblue with the immutable OS setup.
Nixpkgs should reduce package count. Waiting 2 days for unbound CVE patch merge is unbearable.
They could improve that speed if they had more hardware to do the needed rebuilds.
I hope you are paying them something.
You don't have to wait? You just have to compile matter yourself
Ask your favorite LLM to write an overlay for whichever package you need patches applied for before they hit Nixpkgs.
Use nixos-unstable-small branch or backport the change and build yourself.
There needs to be another repository with less stringent standards, nixpkgs should be for core libs and system applications
That’s where flakes come in.
Flakehub is one attempt at solving the discovery problem. For example: https://flakehub.com/flake/nix-community/disko?view=usage.
> What DAWO stands for
> DAWO brings public values and technology together. The community pursues five primary goals.
But fails to state what the letters in D.A.W.O. stand for
"Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid", ie ~government digitally autonomous workplace.
See https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO
digitally autonomous workspace (for the) overheid
So, could this push more software to publish to the official Nixpkgs?
Would be nice if they also push conversion of Nix to Rust, to finish what Lix [1] and Snix[2] started.
[1] https://lix.systems/
[2] https://snix.dev/
Yes, and they should also rewrite all available packages for Nix in Rust, along with the Linux kernel.
No, that's still not enough complexity! They need at least a thousand agents using trillions of tokens around the clock to get us the Nix and Rust slop we need.
please, no. We have enough Rust being shoved down our throats.
> Sextant: a graphical interface for NixOS management as an alternative to Intune, by Bram Buijs [1]
Now that's a fairly interesting project and a way to actually bring technology like NixOS to the administrators in the way they expect. From my experience (sample size one, yes) there are more systems administrators that use web interfaces for management than DevOps IaC folks. This would be a good bridging solution if it is a successful project.
[1] - https://members.dawo.community/en/blog/blog-1/dawo-nixos-wor...
FINALLY. I have been seeing other projects based on eg Fedora and I just think: why. Declarative, open source, and reproducible is the future.
It looks like they are using Claude to develop it, though..
> Things that cost somebody hours, written down so they cost the next person minutes. Each one is here because it actually happened, not because it might.
> Same commit, different answer, decided by the runner's store rather than by the code.
https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS/src/branch/main/d...
> 10 dead inputs were pruned (audit); these 15 are load-bearing and next up for the mirror pass.
https://codeberg.org/DAWO/DAWO-Core/src/commit/4db976f05c508...
> alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS
That sentence seems to lack an important word. Microsoft is a company so I don't assume they built an alternative for it. Microsoft 365 is what used to be called Office 365 and governments love their Office suite so that would make sense and I could see the number accidentally getting dropped but NixOS is probably an OS so I guess this is about Microsoft Windows but then it just means they're replacing one OS with another and Windows-compatibility (nor Office suite compatibility for that matter) is hardly a novel idea.
The site doesn't seem to have much information about this headline at a glance. Does anyone have a link to the missing context?
It looks like they're not quite set on that. There is a very empty part of the repo here: https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO/src/branch/main/compone...
The German Defense sector did something with Nextcloud, Collabora Online, Open-Xchange, Element/Matrix and Univention Nubus I believe. With things like Euro-Office and Nextcloud really stepping things up. Even Proton getting an office suite, I don't think the M365 platform is the big hurdle it once was. Especially because Microsoft lost the private market. 25 years ago you'd get employees who knew how to use Microsoft Office, today they all grew up with Macs, Chromebooks and similar.
What is the alternative though? If you piss off Trump you risk getting all your digital infrastructure shut down over night. It doesn't even have to be you who pisses him off. Obviously using Anthropic AI service has it's own issues within the EU trade zone, but it's been what... 3 months? Since they were ordered to shut off EU access to their most powerful models because they ran afoul of the US government.
I didn't know you could assign '#' to an alias, so here we go:
Good move for me, breaking free from licensing and saying no to being tied to a single tech giant.
As long as it has a built-in "VBScript like" lang, they'll be fine.
Are they going with Copilot for Dutchies or Kaaskoppen.NET?
I always enjoy stories about governments adopting open source and moving away from US big tech.
My opinion is that Microsoft’s software business practically goes to zero in an era when anybody can vibecode changes to open-source projects to fit their exact needs. All that will be left of MSFT is Azure.
My follow up opinion is that Satya agrees with me, and that is why he has so much anxiety around AI.
The link doesn't work for me.
What took so long? Now start building a Arm computers native to Europe the Dutch have a long history in electronics ie.. Phillips which collapsed mainly from self inflicted wounds similar to some of the old-line American companies IBM, Xerox, Motorola, and Kodak...
M$ is like SAP. They think of all kind of moats to lock you in.
Site doesn't work for me.
www.dawo.community took too long to respond.
Are you in the US? Hehe
No, Sweden.
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I see about a dozen of these stories every year. Often some German municipality or some other bureaucratic enclave. Slashdot, back in its heyday, was filled with these stories.
What I'd love to see is a 5 year follow up to one of these stories. What worked, what didn't, how many people are still using the linux OS, etc. Because I feel like windows is as entrenched as always in the government space, whereas in the corporate world most people I know have migrated to macs long ago.
as a nixos maintainer I can only say «well, it could've been so much worse»
Sorry, but this from the website is kind of hilarious:
"What DAWO stands for
DAWO brings public values and technology together. The community pursues five primary goals."
Guix has reproducibility. Instead of Nonguix, which bundles tons of propietary software, they can just add the Fearware repo, which just has the tainted non-free vanilla Linux kernel with closed blobs and firmware, just enough to function your machine well (especially with 3D support for Radeon cards and wireless devices) and nothing more.
Do you have a link to this ‘Fearware’ channel? I’ve only heard of nonguix.
https://codeberg.org/pastor/fearware
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What is it that they need/add above NixOS defaults?
They likely offer at least some of:
* typical deployments
* training/consulting
* compliance with Ditch regulations
* shared infrastructure for custom builds, and CVEs
The first, second and fourth items can be provided for NixOS.
As for the third item - that's not answering my question, it's a homunculus answer: What could the Netherlands have regulated that requires making changes to NixOS? Which NixOS maintainers themselves could not oblige?
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These are nice little initiatives that don’t seem to last anywhere I see them. But good luck to the Dutch, maybe they are different.
Proactively making a move before getting Microshafted is smart play.
This is great, would love to understand why Nix over Lix or Guix.
I used to wonder this same question and weighed guix and nix quite a bit before moving to the nix camp.
Guix on paper really sounds ideal, it feels like a more compelling design, more first principles, it's all scheme, really exciting ideas under the hood. But design intent is not a substitute for the actual user experience. IRL it's too much hassle: weak package coverage, weak ecosystem, a steep learning curve, most stuff will require work because it was designed around systemd.
Now NixOS on the other hand already has an abundance of packages and real adoption. Most setups can probably migrate to nix today with a backup of /home and a competent LLM agent, and things "will just work". I did this recently!
Add to that the NixOS ecosystem where things are fairly simple to setup declaratively and "it just works": disko for partitions, sops-nix for secrets, restic for cloud backups, microvm for light vm's, NixOS anywhere or deploy-rs for deployments (colmena or nixops4 for interconnected nodes even). You can do complex things, and your rig or network could explode and it won't matter cause you can rebuild and deploy to a new/repaired machine in minutes. Your backups could explode and all you'd lose is state.
All that is easy to have in Nix today - I know cause I literally just switched and did most of it with like 0 experience. I migrated my fairly complex setup 1 to 1 and gained a ton of useful stuff in Nix, whereas with Guix it wasn't even possible (I would have to trim or package / translate tons of stuff), nor would it have been easy, and all the cool stuff I gained with nix is either difficult or non-existent on guix, let alone mature.
1. You can run NixOS with Lix (I do)
2. Because Guix is less mature and more, ehm, opinionated, than *ix + nixpkgs
Guix users can just add the Fearware Guix channel which is just the nonfree firmware and blobbed vanilla Linux kernel, no propietary software it's added, just the necessary firmware to run your hardware (3D Radeon support, Nouveau+reclocking, some audio chipsets, and most of non-ant9k WiFi cards). That's it.
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… and every government department starts writing up a letter asking for an exemption.
Which is always granted.
Unless its mandatory, it's just theater.
Thanks Trump, Europe was never this united before.
Not by your choosing, but still.
alternative TO Microsoft
why not just use linux/?
NixOS is Linux.
I want to know the answer too. A battle tested OS for decades, with a thriving ecosystem and millions of users, what is NixOS bringing to the table?
I am in favor of more options, always
Declarative reproducible configuration is probably the main draw.
I’m really curious to see what the answer for MDM and Group Policy is on Linux. The SSO part is mostly figured out, but the reason places use Windows is often manageability.
Is there anyone doing MDM or policy enforcement on Linux other than Google Workspace + chromebooks?
It's Nix so you just push the new generation to the device. It's probably the easiest possible way to do device management. It's also generally like two lines of extra config to wrap a block into a container if you want to hide some of the underlying OS tools completely, which I've never tried with a full desktop environment but I'd assume should basically just work if you pass a couple things like GPU?
The hard part is finding enough people working for the public sector salary who know those two extra lines and where to put them, and then making sure they are not getting bored or disillusioned enough.
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I’m not talking about software install/updates, that is easy and straightforward on every major enterprise distro. I’m talking about Group Policy specifically, that is, the ability to enforce many settings across the whole OS/DE.
Minimum password lengths, maximum screen saver delay, screen saver password requirement, disk crypto enforcement, a million other little things. All of them can be done by customizing linux sure but organizations won’t want to maintain a separate distro for each business unit that needs different policies.
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Osquery https://codeberg.org/DAWO/DAWO-Core/issues/92 via https://sextantfleet.org/ looks to be what they are using (run by main contributor)… all “policy” is via NixOS… how tenable that will be we will see, but the landing page is heavy on compliance with audits
FleetDM (https://github.com/fleetdm/fleet) is also mentioned.
This thread seems hopelessly tone deaf to non-technical people's experience with something like NixOS. I can manage it just fine myself given my background, but I see a very low, if non-existent chance that a standard office worker is going to be happy moving from Windows to NixOS. I mean, good for them for trying, I just think HN is full of Nix purists who tend to gloss over all the warts that has kept this ecosystem from growing much over the last few decades.
Who is giving a standard office worker admin rights on their Windows machine in 2026?
From a user perspective, KDE Plasma or GNOME are simple environments to work in. Most stuff is on the web these days anyway; even a locked down kiosk setup would probably be adequate for many users.
No average office worker will be fiddling with Nix configs or installing Windows software. That’s for IT.
> Not one single product, but separate building blocks that work together. Every part can be inspected and replaced.
I know it's been said before, but why tf does Claude insist on writing in Reverse Polish notation?
With AI now, I am suprised we are not seeing many new os systems built. Have fable build a secure OS..... hm...
First off - decoupling from Trump-USA is a must. Canadians noticed this; european countries are still slow. The Netherlands is faster; the biggest slow-ass behemoth is Germany - no clue why. Germany is a big reason why the EU fails, but also the expansionistic agenda and what not (why do only poor countries want to join the EU; UK left, Switzerland and Norway are not going to join, so there are indeed INTERNAL problems, but let's go back to the dependency on the USA).
So while more alternatives here are the logical answer, as well as eliminate the greedy US corpoations, I am not sure NixOS as it is right now is ideal. On paper, NixOS should solve EVERYTHING. For instance, if a build status works for one user, the environment guarantee should mean it works for EVERYONE ELSE. Same with other problems and hardware, so in theory, NixOS should be perfect.
In practice, though, I found working with NixOS annoying, for many reasons. A static system that has issues, is not good. A static system that restricts me in problem solving, is not good. Plus, Nix is ugly to no ends - I have no idea why the NixOS team thought a new programming language is required. Why do I need to define static elements in Nix? Why not make that more free form? I already describe my whole system via yaml files, which in turn ruby uses to generate everything I need. Then there are smaller issues, like why do I need to use systemd on NixOS, why can I not used versioned AppDirs with a name scheme similar to GoboLinux (hashed program directories on NixOS are, of course, also versioned app-dirs, but I hate reading 7897389nughuewz789gewh2t93h923-hghwugeiw73, that simply tells me nothing. Why not have /Programs/Python/3.15.0/ ? It can't be simpler than that.)
Anyway - good for the Netherlands to push here, Denmark, Sweden, Finland will also push, even France, though slower. Now please everyone, help us convince the german government to stop being such a tool for Trump. Merz is a failure anyway, but the problems go far deeper than merely Trump, and with the AfD going to seize power, idiocy will again dominate in Germany. That's very bad. Germany is soooooooo slow here. Microsoft even managed to kill LiMux years ago. They have placed their economic hitmen in Germany, so the whole EU does not work anyway because Germany will keep on dragging every other country down. It is thus very understandable why real innovation comes from the smaller countries in the EU, as they are quicker to innovate. Unfortunately the big german behemoth will roll over them and again cripple many required things in the EU.
You can't even build your own website to go to discuss this.
Europeans are absolutely delusional, but I hope they're serious about dropping Microsoft this time. European governments have been pretending to do this for about 20 years at this point, though.
Microsoft isn't what it used to be. Maybe soon it will be called Microsoft/OpenAI, then OpenAI/Microsoft, then just OpenAI.
It's a bad sign that they chose NixOS instead of something boring like Debian, though (and it seems France, too.) Makes me suspect that this is being driven by a single strong personality who will eventually lose interest or even rugpull support, leaving the project in disarray and a poster child for criticizing doing anything but buying Microsoft as European flakiness. On the other hand, I'm happy that it will involve money being put into NixOS.
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https://meatproxy.me/
Well what I wrote was not on the homepage of nixos.com, or obvious after a few clicks. Claude summarised it very nicely. I now know I don't need NixOS.
Perhaps the real meatheads are the ones who spam threads with anti-ai memes, rather than looking at the utility of what the ai provided?
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NixOS is also unnecessarily complicated and it's easy for someone that doesn't want to read 1000 pages of documentation to brick your system.
Probably has its uses, tried it twice myself and both times were a lot of struggling.
For me even Arch was easier to configure than Nix.
The history of the Netherlands is all about making things unnecessarily complicated.
When lesser nations rally around the flag and elect dictators we have meetings and consultations.
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That's the nice part, as an admin you are familiar with the complexity and use it for good. As a user, you never have to see it. (And you can even have some freedom for installing apps using flatpack/snap if needed.)
How would you role out the same config to thousands of Arch systems? Sure Valve does it, but I still think that is a "bolted on top" solution. Bootc could be another option though, but Nix solves reproducibility more elegantly, imho. Nix went back and asked "how can this be done better", where many modern solutions took what was already there.
Each nixos rebuild creates a snapshot. While I also eventually moved off of nixos, I've yet to get a system that was as stable as it.
The problem with Arch is that configuration is by hand so you have to do it every time. With Nix you configure it once and then you can deploy it anywhere. Also it's pretty much impossible to break since the system is immutable and you can boot to a different revision any time.
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So far I have broken every Linux distro I used except NixOS.
And if I were to break it, i could just reboot into the previous system snapshot.
And I haven't read 1000 pages of docs - from my experience id doubt it even has that many docs.
I would image in corporate / government deployment, declarative configuration is more efficient.
When you have that many users, you don't really configure individual system, you deploy up some per-configured module or setup.
Repeatable builds also make troubleshooting lots easier - and you can hand those task to front-tier helpdesk staffs.
I can imagine. Those are often the sort of projects that struggle to put a one line description of what they are on their homepage. I inferred it was an OS, inferred it was Unix adjacent...but no answer on the rest. It could have been BSD or open Solaris based for all I could tell.
Windows also is unnecessary complicated for a singular install but works kinda well for a network and central administration by someone who likes to read the docs (or whatever you read for windows)
Sounds like a good replacement
Yeah I also wonder about going for NixOS for this. For servers maybe, but for user focussed desktops? The support requirements will be complicated.
Arch is easier to start of with, NixOS is easier to maintain, especially at scale
Hopefully the config is a little more descriptive than their README.md
It looks like a lot of nothing. All the READMEs are empty. What is being contributed here?
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The same Dutch who voted on the eAIDS... ahem, sorry, eIDAS and ADDW car spyware? I'm not particularly excited about our new benevolent OS.
eIDAS is federated login between countries in EU. What is wrong with that?
It's a mechanism to legally force web browser vendors to install government issues root certificates (which they already did btw). And EU pinky-promises that not a single independent EU member won't use them to do MITM attacks on their political opposition and journalists. Like Orban 2.0 or Fico won't use Hungarian or Slovak root cert for nefarious purposes, no-no-no. It's only to protect the children, see, and definitely not to help murder journalists investigating drug smuggling cover-up. :)
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As usual, it's federated*1 login*2 between countries*4*5 in EU*6*7*8
eidas is an EU thing and is like 15 years old, what is this even about
eIDAS 2.0 is 2 years old. An intentional dark pattern to confuse people.
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I want to ask an honest question, why more businesses don't rely on Apple products knowing the simplicity of just buying an iMac and adding some apps to it?
I talk about small businesses mostly, starting with ten or twenty computers, zero config, bonjour discovery, download apps from the app store, for me it looks like a total winner
Microsoft or Linux don't offer such an easy path to productivity, so why is it? What is lacking? What needs to be done in order for that scenario to work? What roadblock have you hit when trying to implement it?
We all use apple products, iMacs, Macbooks, and if we start a business for sure we as CEOs or managers will use one on our desktops, so why? Genuinely interested in answers...
The context here is removing reliance on US. EU countries are trying to decouple from US (or at least diversify if not possible to decouple) in various critical sectors where they have become dependent. Over reliance on US software is one of them. They are basically doing what China did many decades ago. Have home grown alternatives to US apps/services so as to not be in deep waters if US decides to sanction them. It is all about independence.
> why more businesses don't rely on Apple products knowing the simplicity of just buying an iMac and adding some apps to it?
Apple is a US company first and foremost and US has become unreliable. It has nothing to do with simplicity or productivity if reliability is in question. What use is a Mac if it can be subject to US sanctions resulting in App Store being shutdown for you or your entire Country and apps/services stop working overnight?
Excellent point and I understand that, but then they should start working on building their own computers, and OS, and ecosystem, just like Huawei is doing for the past decade. It will take time, long years ahead but they should start now
I definitely like that future, but it should be built now
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And yet Apple is doing well in the far East Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, and Vietnam. They are competitive in some of the toughest markets to sell electronic devices into.
Doing well in Australia and New Zealand too. Aside from Taco the only big headwind is memory.
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Microsoft and Linux /do/ offer the same path to productivity. Buy 10-20 computers, zero config, native discovery services, download apps.
What businesses need is management services and business applications. Those exist for Apple as well, but two significant headwinds: 1) inertia of essentially every major business on earth using MS Active Directory means there are enormous support and ecosystem benefits, and 2) cost.
In my experience, the corporate world that uses mac has moved to Okta and other providers, not MS Active Directory. They may still use MS AD in some areas, but you can now federate to have that as an island - say you have some legacy accounting software that needs to run in AD environment.
IME, Okta is almost as popular as MS AD now, I think they have 30% market share compared to 40% for AD, with IBM and others taking up the rest.
My experience is that small companies in particular fields do/did use Macs. Staying on Mac is difficult though since any customer can expect you to do what they do or support what they do if they are Windows oriented and will only start with a conversation about compatibility if they haven't chosen the most popular choice.
The way enterprise software is licensed, and how those licenses are perpetuated means that, in the absence of a national security imperative, 99% of customers just go along to get along.
Other people already answered the non US reason. However I fell for this. I got myself an expensive iPad because I assumed it's actually like all the apple users are saying.
However, a lot of apps are unstable. Support is horrible to non existent for some. No refunds even when the app doesn't work at all directly after install. Most professional apps have a buy price AND a subscription price at this point. Most actually working apps are not apple exclusive these days.
It's definitely not as green over there as some apple people make it out to be.
I hear you, I am not an Apple pundit, just a developer always looking for the path to optimization and thought Apple was it, it is not, and to be honest they don't make it easy either. I've been in the waiting list to become an Apple developer for a month now and the road has been tortuous as a Venezuelan developer. But if Huawei offered a simpler path to developing on their ecosystem I'd give it a try in an instant. I am loyal to no one except to those who make my life easier
What tablet is better in the world today software and hardware wise?
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I'm going to guess because they are expensive. Do Apple to on-site support like Dell, HP, et cetera?
You mean paying twice to five times the price for something that is not configurable and on which you can run only a small subset of software, all very expensive?
2x-5x the price is not a like-for-like comparison then. TCO is lower for Macs in the enterprise over the lifespan of the device.
https://www.jamf.com/blog/debate-over-ibm-confirms-that-macs...
Cost