Btw Linux UI is not by any measure stable. It is the furthest thing from stable.

I think it is practically impossible to fix Linux desktop without reinventing it under a single entity like AOSP or BSDs.

HN is a quite economically libertarian place and it is full of "ashamed billionaires" and founders who yearn for creating companies that will fuck their customers over. There are many engineers who also think the same and think themselves as business-aware.

Rule of law and strong consumer protection is fundamentally against to contemporary startup mindset that prioritizes monopolization over everything else and rent seeking behavior.

HN, YC, startup environment or academia is a Unix bubble. They all feed into each other. Especially because Linux is gratis which helped all of those to deploy projects/products/papers cheaply. Unix systems traditionally lack much of the upper layers, so it is the responsibility of the company, persons, developers to deal with the OS minutea. You need sysadmins, devops, SREs. Those are common roles again in this Unix bubble. The dependency chains here are usually flatter since it keeps mid-term costs lower.

Other organizations like governments and bigger orgs like banks prioritize having somebody else liable (i.e. they can blame) and they prefer to not hire technical competence in their orgs but rely on other companies. This is where Microsoft gets a lot of clients. You buy a bunch of server licenses. Your Microsoft support person installs them and installs IIS via GUI. And then you just upload your code every now and then. The OS updates, IIS server etc are all the responsibility of Microsoft and the middlemen companies. Minimal competence from the orginal org is required. There are multiple middlemen businesses who all give zero fucks about anything but whatever the immediate downstream from them. This is more usual in already publicly traded huge businesses. Moreover the investors actually mandate certain things that only this kind of layers of irresponsibility can deliver :) So you see this kind of switch happening towards IPOs.

Azure is the cloud labeling and forcing the first paradigm over the second paradigm for Microsoft products. It got lots of support because shareholders liked it. I don't think the original NT design and Microsoft's business model was bad, it actually worked very well. However, shareholders gonna shareholder. So they pushed hard for Microsoft and their clients to move to the "cloud". Microsoft executives saw the huge profit and share value potential of pushing Azure the brand too. It was the AI of 2010s afterall.

The former isn't a problem, it is actually desirable to have good granularity for projects. The latter is a huge liability and the actual supply chain risk.

For example, Tokio project maintains another popular library called Prost for Protobufs. I don't think having those as two separate libraries with their own set of dependencies is a problem. As long as Tokio developers' expertise and testing culture go into Prost, it is not a big deal to have multiple packages. Similarly different components of the Tokio itself can be different crates, as long as they are built and tested together, them being separate dependencies is GOOD.

Now to use Prost with a gRPC server, I need a different project: tonic which comes from a different vendor: Hyperium. This is an increased supply chain risk that we need to vet. They use Prost. They also use the "h2" crate. Now, I need to vet the code quality and the testing cultute of multiple different organizations.

I have a firm belief that the actual People >>> code, tooling, companies and even licensing. If a project doesn't have (or retain) visionary and experienced developers who can instill good culture, it will ship shit code. So vetting organizations >> vetting indiviual libraries.

I was thinking like this for a while but, now, I think this expectation is majorly false for a senior individual contributor. Especially when someone who can push out a detailed series of blogposts and has tried step-wise escalation.

Communication is a two-way street. Unlike the individual contributors, the management is responsible for listening and responding to risk assesments by the senior members and also ensuring that the technical competence and experienced people are retained in a tech company. If a leader doesn't want to keep an open ear, they do not belong there. If there is a huge attrition of highly senior people from non-finalized projects, you do not belong leadership either. Both cases are mentioned in the article.

Unfortunately our socioeconomic and political culture in the West has increasingly removed responsibilities and liabilities from the leadership of the companies. This causes people with lackluster technical, communication and risk assesment mentality being promoted into leadership positions.

So outside of a couple completely privately owned companies or exceptionally well organized NGOs, it will be increasingly difficult to find good leaders.

This is how German system works actually. So, it DID HAPPEN. The German government has only some control over the budget but the actual media companies control the content themselves. Every resident has to pay a monthly contribution. This is a contribution to an independent account / budget for media only. It is not a tax that goes into a common pot that politics can decide to take out.

There are national outlets like ZDF, Tagesschau, Deutschlandradio and regional ones like Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Bayerischer Rundfunk. Each design and present their own programmes.

See more details on: https://www.rundfunkbeitrag.de/welcome/english

I took the https://emailspooftest.com/ and while the "spoof" mail gets delivered to mailbox.org's Inbox, my Thunderbird client is all red and it warns me about DKIM and SPF fails.

Stop Killing Games movement actually got a foothold.

EU as every healthy democracy has also non-elected experts (just like judiciary side) in its organs who can create law proposals. That's how we got USB-C and GDPR.