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Imagine what can happen if the French and other governments would start pouring all the money into developing that further in the open, rather than just giving it all to Microsoft instead?

Most of the cost (to the government) for Windows is "support" (in a very general sense) and that cost isn't disappearing with Linux.

Especially since it is easier to find badly underpaid (and not particularly competent) Windows sysadmins than it is to find badly underpaid Linux admins.


Ok but the license fees are, what, 50 quid? times say, 3k or 30k people? A 150k or 1.5m injection into the linux ecosystem to develop those would pay for a _lot_ of developers and a _lot_ of developer time.

From what I heard about NGI-zero, another government sponsorship project (1), the problem so far is primarily finding the projects that need sponsorship.

(1) https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/


That doesn't seem correct. Almost all of the projects installed on a standard Linux distro need funding. I just stopped applying to NLnet after getting nothing but rejections.

doesn’t really feel like that much tbh

I don't think that cost is what is mostly driving the move from Windows nowadays.

Are you implying that need for support would go away?

If anything the demand would be artificially high at the start of a mass migration, and then presumably level out to something similar to what we see today with Windows.

This is basically RHEL's entire business model.


Not a thing any longer, for the most part. People know how to open a browser on any operating system these days. Go to the menu, run it. Get bored and click the X on the top bar. Source: nearby kids. A few times I've said... "this is Cinnamon, or KDE, or... Windows."

"Ok, whatever," (old man) is the response I get.

And, you don't have to move 100% of their workflow in a single day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730137


> Imagine what can happen if the French and other governments would start pouring all the money into developing that further in the open

You'd get a clusterfuck of a consensus spec, then they'd all get pissed off and develop their own incompatible versions anyway?

Have you seen international projects without strong, centralized leadership?


I have worked on things like PSD2, a well oiled government-led machine that just works. There are some dysfunctional things, then there are things working perfectly fine.

You need to update your notes its not 90s.


Credit where credit is due, I think the strong centralization of the EU administration has made for better pan-European requirements and software.

Sometimes the perfectness of the product is less important than the fact that there was one opinionated decider.


They'll start pulling Linux in a direction that suites them, which will potentially be at odds with the preferences of open source software enthusiasts.

They might have an effect in the development of an office suite, possibly of a desktop environment or one specialized Linux distribution. Nobody will be forced to use those specific ones if they don't like them. There are plenty of options in the Linux world.

Why haven’t they done it yet? I just think they’re incentivized enough for it.

Because until literally a year ago, the country that hosted Microsoft was one of France's most trusted allies.

It takes time to find a suitable replacement to a global monopoly.


It looks like the president - which was a businessman - will make a huge damage to American IT businesses. And IT stocks dominate the S&P 500, comprising roughly 1/3 of the index's total market capitalization... Good luck America!

One eu country or another has been talking about this for at least a decade. Nothing will happen this time either, or we'll get another of those things like the weird owncloud knock off that is totally developed by the EU

On the other hand in 2018 Europe managed to sort out LNG etc pretty quick.

I'm kind of surprised it hasn't been louder and faster after the tariffs came in, but we've already had investigation after investigation into monopoly practices, the EU is working on domestic payment processing. So the political will is there. I assume they're just quietly getting on with sorting it out.


Exactly. They know there's nothing to win by being vocal about it. But it's obvious that there has been a general shift within all of EU.

Is slightly disagree. Trump brought in the tariffs based on trade imbalances. Bringing services into the conversation would highlight that there isn't a trade imbalance. But then I'm not trying to guess what trump might do with any given input.

Not really. I mean Trump has amped the rhetoric, but there have been no new laws passed.

The privacy threats were always there.


Law is irrelevant under the power of the gun; it was the threat to invade Greenland and the threat to leave NATO which have triggered this.

(people keep saying things like "only Congress has the power to declare war"; that may be technically true, but a war declaration is a piece of paper, and practically the authorization of force is at the personal disposition of the President)


Not everything makes US news but the decision by Microsoft to shut down ICC accounts after a Trump EO on sanctions really spooked a lot of EU governments.

There were general and abstract privacy threats. The current US administration however has managed to alienate the EU population as well as EU politicians.

Trump has basically ended the alliance between the western world and the US and everybody has started to built around that fact. Just one example is that the EU has finalized multiple huge trade contracts, some were in the making for decades.

I don't think the next US administration - if the US remains a democracy - will be able to fix that. The US lately has been very vocal that they don't want to be the center of the western world anymore and the western world got the message.

Reorganizing the post-WWII world order will take some time, of course, but I feel like the world is proceeding quite fast.


Gotta love anti America Reddit tier fear mongering

You know about Europe from Reddit subs. I know about Europe because that's where I live. We are not the same.

Sorry I thought it was the president of the US that imposed tariffs, threatened to invade Canada and Greenland, wanted to remove all Gazans from Gaza, etc, etc. not some random Reddit poster. My mistake.

> yet

Best time to start doing it was yesterday. Second best time to start doing it now. They are at "now" step.


If governments, especially France, get involved in software development the likely outcome is that people will soon regret the days of Microsoft...

The so called free market really did a bang up job didn't it? The proprietary buggy mess of Windows and the walled garden of MacOS which given its *nix underpinnings could have been really fantastically awesome but instead is a proprietary buggy mess.

Built in functionality that may offer something similar:

https://linuxhandbook.com/cdpath/


Because it's been trained on decades of StackOverflow and forum posts. And because while some command line tools go in and out of fashion, quite a lot are very stable, so their use will show up all the time in the training material.

Since it's all statistics under the LLM hood, both of those cause proven CLI tools to have strong signals as being the right answer.


If you asked an AI about joinery, it'd tell you to use a measuring tape, a pencil, a saw, a level, and a hammer a lot.

I wonder why?

Maybe because that's where the basic tools live.


A question because I'm not using speech-to-text, but find it intriguing (especially since it's now possible to do locally and for free).

How have your computing habits changed as a result of having this? When do you typically use this instead of typing on the keyboard?


I use it all the time with coding agents, especially if I'm running multiple terminals. It's way faster to talk than type. The only problem is that it looks awkward if there are others around.


Interesting. I can think and type faster, but not talk. I am not much of a talker.


Same, whenever I try to dictate something I always umm and ahhh and go back a bunch of times, and it's faster to just type. I guess it's just a matter of practice, and I'm fine when I'm talking to other people, it's only dictation I'm having trouble with.


Part of my job is to give feedback to people using Word Comments. Using STT, it's been a breeze. The time saving really is great. Thing is, I only do this when working at home with no one around. So really only when WFH.


There are already APIs being developed that assume a browser has an LLM either inside it or otherwise available, see for instance https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Summarizer_...

So they pretty much have to ship one, to stay relevant. And they are privacy-focused, so I'm happy they are not just using ChatGPT or whatever under the hood to implement support.


Attention is all you need, as the transformative paper (pun definitely intended) put it.

Unfortunately, you're only getting attention in 3 second chunks.


Telling people to use nano would of course have been next to impossible. Much easier to rewrite a DOS-era editor in Rust, naturally.


This way gets coolness points, HN headlines, makes the programmers who wrote it happy, and probably is a contribution to making a couple of autistic people feel included.

Rust + EDITOR.COM is kind of like remaking/remastering an old video game.


micro would have been an even better choice, the UX is impressively close to something like Sublime Text for a TUI, and very comfortable for those not used to modal editors.


This is the first time I've heard of micro. More info here: https://micro-editor.github.io/


I like micro and use it occasionally. I like this even more. I booted up the editor and instantly thought “it would be nice if there was a clickable buffer list right about…” and then realized my mouse was hovering over it. My next instant thought was that micro should have implemented this feature a long time ago


It doesn’t have a menu for windows devs, and is supposed to be small and light. Two strikes against.


does nano support mouse usage? It doesn't seem to work for me (but maybe it just needs to be enabled somewhere)

I guess they thought that inheriting 25 years of C code was more trouble than designing a new editor from scratch. But you'd have to ask the devs why they decided to go down that route


> does nano support mouse usage?

Yes, but you have to put `set mouse` into your nanorc.


> rewrite

This is not a rewrite. Maybe it’s slightly inspired by the old thing, especially with having GUI-style clickable menus (something not seen often in terminal editors), but it’s much more modern.


It does seem "modern" in the sense that it is incredibly limited in functionality (EDIT.COM from DOS is much more full-featured) and deviates from well-established UI conventions.

CUA-style menubars aren't that uncommon in textmode editors. Midnight Commander's editor has traditional menubars with much more extensive functionality, as does jedsoft.org's Jed editor. Both of these also support mouse input on the TTY console via GPM, not just within a graphical terminal.


I still see it as rewrite even if you only use the original as inspiration. But that's just semantics


If they hadn’t called it “edit” you wouldn’t have thought of it as a rewrite.


It's no semantics. It's just a lie


The developer actually explained, on Hacker News just over a month ago, some of the engineering choices that ruled out nano.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034961


nano's great but the shortcuts are a bit oddball, from the perspective of a Windows guy.


That's also where etcd came from. It really felt, to me, like the precursor to Kubernetes.


Help me understand what this means to e.g. GrapheneOS, please. Will it be able to exist and just have to wait longer for updates or will it be in real jeopardy?


Potentially longer gaps between major updates, since they can no longer follow upstream closely.

However, Google might have planned to slowly make Android proprietary, which means death to 3rd party forks.


Most of those forks twiddle a lot of low-level knobs, and if Google does not want to support those then the forks will have a hard time anyway.

The big problem is that aaaaaalll these forks are still just a tiny tiny tiny drop in the bug mobile phone OS bucket.

If the forks want to be sustainable they need to cater to the market a bit. (Of course that's much harder said than done, but we see - for example with Nothing Tech - that there are new successful upstarts from time to time.)



https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114230629374651118

> not much will change overall. It's a major step in the wrong direction but without a large direct impact on us


A GameBoy emulator written in PHP would certainly piqued my interest, but more like a morbid curiosity than anything else. :)


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