Anyway, the whole trend to change from x86 to Arm on laptops is bad news for compatibility. It might be that the era where you can download an iso and expect Linux to run on a random laptop is over, and Linux users will have to stick to only a couple of devices with well known support. Did Valve release a laptop yet?
x86 Most random Linuix ISOs will boot on anything. I've seen software compiled before the hardware had finished being designed boot just fine. (in the latest case lstopo was very confused, but everything still worked!)
ARM, I go looking for a build for my chip/device in particular.
x86 I just buy hardware and it works, ARM I check for OS builds before buying, and wonder if the builds will continue to get updates.....
Why? Just to get ARM? Buy a brand that actually works with the kernel and distros to get their hardware working with linux. Get your money to the people that actually help the software ecosystem.
When you spent premium, put your money where it makes a difference.
At my bigco, we have all but given up on it and moved everyone to EC2 or Macs for non-Windows workloads.
It seems the issue on Apple hardware is the fight to get Linux booting on bare metal with full support (what Apple supplied for Windows with Bootcamp when moving to Intel), which is the fight Asahi Linux is waging. Is WSL aiding in getting Linux booting from bare metal on proprietary hardware?
People downvoting me because Microsoft are just silly. It is literally undeniable that Microsoft has done more to provide Linux support in the windows ecosystem than Apple has with MacOS. The closest thing Apple has done to “support” Linux is add a hypervisor without a GUI that they’ll tolerate you using but don’t really support. Try opening up a case with Apple about a Linux issue running a hypervisor.framework Linux vm and let me know how it goes…
Microsoft will absolutely support issues you run into with WSl.
They must have made major improvements since the last time I used it then, because filesystem issues was the #1 reason I moved away from WSL
Thankfully AI nowadays does an amazing job in issue diagnostic and resolution, and even patches the kernel to make stuff work, so this is the viable solution.
And then you install multiple Electron apps.
The developers on WSL (the Python project, Django) tend to have a simplified environment. For example they don't run Celery (I never investigated why) and run all the background jobs synchronously or they don't run those jobs at all.
The ones on Macs (the Ruby project, Rails) have the full environment but I remember that they skipped some integration tests because they always failed on their Macs (Capybara and Chromedriver, I don't remember the details.) I was the one running the full test suite. By the way: all the CI services I used in the last 10 years are particularly bad at running those kind of tests. Maybe it's the amount of memory or the timing of the operations and those CI VMs (or containers?) don't play well with the assumptions of the test frameworks. Any language, any framework.
No way I am spending any money on this future brick.
Thanks god reverse engineering with AI is a thing now, so the path forward looks nicer. But still...
Anyways, the Surface Pro X is such a nice HW. Too bad the company who built it is so bad.
Because us nerds like to say “the software is awful,” but really, the bones of Windows are not awful at all. It generally works well, it just takes a lot of work to get all of the BS out of your way.
If you’re looking for open source friendly, just buy a Framework 13 Pro and be done with it.
By the way, the other news from Computex is Dell and HP’s Macbook Neo competition, and they really look legit. So, Apple is waking up the PC industry a bit, showing them that they are endangered. Hopefully Microsoft gets the memo.
And how Linux fix the software problem?
I swear, people just live in their echochambers these days. Win 11 pro + WSL2 is literally the best, do it all OS you can get these days.
Most peoples experience is with Windows home, which ironically is about as intrusive as Mac OS. When you get Windows Pro, you can disable all the annoying AI/Advertising shit that comes with Windows, and at that point, you get a system that is cleaner than Mac OS.
Then you install WSL2, which is a full linux environment down to being able to run graphical apps, use gpus natively, and even talk to usb ports.
Ive been on Win11 Pro for 4 years. The only major things that are installed under windows for me are VPN Software, Steam (with games), Ollama, and Browser. Everything else, I run under WSL2.
What Stockholm Syndrome is this? Why should you have to do this in the first place?
Professional softwares, WSL2 and awesome native apps (Dopus, AHK2...)
I always try Linux but the fragmented nature just is not for me for desktop usage.
I run Linux in a VM and Docker on it, and WSL2. No problems with anything.
I don't see any ads. I turn a number of "intrusive" features off, but nothing is hacked; these are just settings you can switch off.
(I am running Pro, though.)