The latter, and it is good from an organisational perspective, but its never a nice experience, and for many, this will be their first real experience with a Linux.

Right now Linux is “That nerd OS”, if this goes badly, for millions it could change to “That OS they forced on us at work, where I can’t XYZ”

Edit: on the GPL front, GPL doesn’t require that you publish your code to everyone, just to the recipients of your binaries. And you only have to give it upon request. So they definitely could keep it somewhat under wraps if they wanted to. If they are smart, they’ll follow the Munich model and stick to upstreaming any changes they make.

Its not that I’m against it or don’t think it can work, I just dont think its going to help drive adoption of desktop Linux. And I think there is a very real risk that it could negatively impact Linux mind share if the experience is particularly bad.

The Munich OS proves its possible. But I’m really curious about how the end users actually felt about it. Maybe I’m wrong and they love it, but I’m very skeptical.

Fwiw, I suspect the “Linux” that ends up being deployed will likely be a glorified thinclient/browser, and nothing like desktop Linux as most of us know and love.

Maybe. I suspect most of the government apps will be webapps, and not particularly relevant to the rest of us.

Maybe Firefox will get some funding :D

Of course not, but if the first exposure someone has to Linux is a bad experience, thats not going to be good for mind share. Thats the double edge sword i am referring to.

Just like windows, except that the misdirected hate when the SOE environment gets in the way will be aimed at “Linux” instead of “Microsoft”.

Apparently they are back on the Linux train as of 2020, so thats good news.

No one wants to choose a bad OS environment, it will become one due to security or other non-negotiable requirements.

They aren’t going to just toss Ubuntu on a box and call it done. Itll be locked down, limited, and horrible to use. And users who dont know any better will blame “Linux”.

A government SOE Linux just isnt going to be a good ambassador for general desktop usage.

Yup, exactly, which is kinda my point. The OS given to users is gonna be heavily restricted, so no one is going to use it and then run home to install it on a home PC. Government OSs are just not good ambassadors.

Thats the problem though, there are near infinite ways for someone along the way to completely fuck it up, and very few ways to get it right. And security concerns are almost always going to make the distro worse for the users.

And even if it was left to IT professionals, they are just as capable of making it a mess on their own.

Yeah, that’s the one. Gnome 2 in 2017 would have felt pretty dated. And the political reasons can’t have helped either.

Double edged sword. Forced adoption of a shitty distro, or a really locked down/limited system might not be a step forward at all.

From memory, Germany did this many years ago, and ended up rolling it back?

I’m really happy to hear that, I still have and occasionally use my steam controller, I quite liked it.

Completed stray with it and a steamlink.

It doesn’t help that its not well named, realtime makes it sound fast.

One of the few things I remembered from my degree was the realtime programming course, because we got to program a model train set in Ada, on a 286(?), running on floppies. This was in ~2015, so ancient hardware even then, and it was slow, but it was “realtime”.

Interestingly, my compsci degree never covered O notation, so that I’ve had to pick up along the way :/

When I last looked into it, many years ago, RT definitely did negatively impact average latency. It was slower, but consistent. Has that actually changed?

At low numbers, it doesnt matter. If you exqgerate the numbers the effect is more clear.

Eg. if the latency was 100ms, it would feel your movments are behind by 100ms, which would be unplayable.

But if you had a typical latency of 10ms, with rare spikes to 1s, the spikes would be considered lag, and annoying, but most of the time its good and playable.

Realtime doesn’t necessarily mean low latency, it means consistent latency.

So if the latency from and input takes 1s, that is realtime, as long as its always 1s.

Typically for gaming you want the lowest latency possible, and at least historically, that meant not realtime.

Edit: Some examples with made up numbers:

Airbag: you want an airbag to go off EVERY time, and if that means it takes 10ms, thats usually OK. RT guarantees that your airbag will go off 10ms after a crash every time.

Games: you want your inputs handled ASAP, ideally <5ms, but if one or two happen after 100ms, you’ll likely not notice. If you enable RT, maybe all your inputs get handled after 10ms consistently, which ends up feeling sluggish.

Unless you know you need RT, you probably dont actually want it.

Isnt that exactly what minikube is? Kubernetes in docker.

I’ve used docker-in-docker images, but its usually not fun.

Looks like Test Driven Development + AI.

Hopefully the AI doesn’t get lazy and churn out huge if/else chains to pass the tests :D

Still a bit open ended. Web browser finger printing is probably going to be quite specific, unless you have a browser that avoids fingerprinting.

There is a trust issue, you need to trust the userland packagers to not build in any additional tracking, but its pretty unlikely that they’ll do that given its a tiny project.

Privacy is also multifaceted, and its never going to be as simple as “use this distro”. The techniques for online tracking are changing and evolving all the time.

This is a bit of a “how long is a piece of string” question, security is multifaceted.

From what I understand, it uses your phones kernel, so if its out of date or vulnerable, that might be a problem, and you may not be able to fix that.

Conversely, its running inside android, so the android hardening might make it more secure.

What are you specifically concerned about? Firewall? Zero days? Antimalware?