Foreign countries using Google, Microsoft, or Apple, would be suicidal not to change platforms. Right now, the U.S. has incredible leverage: it can turn off their government servers, delete their data, and is certainly spying on them right now.
The only reasonable move is some kind of self-hosted setup, at least for a large chunk of critical infrastructure, with some cloud options for backups, maybe, who knows, if the country is too small or centralized.
Considering the Dutch have ASML, this seems an unwise move for the US. But then, the Dogey Confederates are working towards the destruction of the USA. 😒
How much asml machine in the us rn ? That s not how stuff work
Tell us, how does “stuff work”? What up and running alternatives do the US have to ASML machines for latest generation high performance silicon? No matter where.
This might just be the best thing that happens in tech (for me) all year.
I daily drive debian just because boring and reliable. However, fancy package managers like flatpak and appimages and nix have made debian much more vibrant - it’s easy to install new versions of things now.
That said, nix package manager on debian is just freakin amazing. Being able to just
nix-shell -p <obscure cli tool>andexitwhen I’m done with it is magnificent.That’s the gateway drug anyway. The nix based home-manager is pretty cool.
While I’ve been tempted to jump in with NixOS my experience with nix packages and home-manager has felt kind of bleeding edge or experimental. Loads of things that don’t work as intended on debian.
A sophisticated well funded user base like a federal government has really good implications for the stability of the project in the future. I’m really stoked about this.
Personally id say try it in a VM*. Home-manager and nix packages (and even flakes at this point) havent felt like experimental features for a good 5 years for me on NixOS
NixOS is great, but it definitely breaks things. It’s the way it works, though, not whether the software is bleeding edge. Nix lets a package specify its own dependencies, even if those dependencies conflict with those of another package. It does this by breaking the traditional POSIX file system structure that many programs assume they can depend on. It puts all sorts of things where they “don’t belong”, and then uses a small army of environment variables, scripts, and symlinks to stitch it back together so that no individual package realizes what happened. If you only use software from the package manager, this is often (but not always) seemless, but if you download stuff from the web, none of the system libraries it traditionally expects are there. Likewise, if you’re using Nix alongside something like Debian’s apt, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the two package managers doing things in two different ways causes some issues that are hard to interpret to the uninformed.
Microsoft office is still their best product but many words apps such as only office are becoming comparable. Microsoft Access and excels cross compatibility with other office apps is unmatched
They don’t even need to be comparable. Majority of people just need the basics or what Office 2013 had to offer. Now Office does too much and no copilot… if anything it’s getting worse now.
Yup. I haven’t bought any new Office keys since like 2020, and I never will. Keep the CoPilot away from my thoughts, geesh. I feel like a schizo when I use them.
So ironic after bending over time and time again for the US. Think ASML, think Nexperia. Fuck Rutte and Jette - mini Rutte wannabe.
US has been building soft power like this for decades, and Trump is pissing it all away.
If this process to get rid of dependency on US gets well underway, there’s no turning that ship. US won’t recover the position it had in fifty years or more.
US won’t recover the position it had in fifty years or more.
This is not a bad thing. Over dependency on any one nation or even a bloc of nations is a bad thing.
I can’t help but think the dependency on the US that has been created played some role in what’s happening now.
Honestly, I can see that. America has been top dog for so long, it doesn’t value what it has.
Not even that. I’m thinking too much money, power and influence all consolidated in one place.
The US has the most billionaires at 989 and I’m guessing of the remaining ~2400 billionaires in the world, a not insignificant amount have substantial interests in the US.
It’s good the rest of the world is watching it happen. I hope they’re taking notes because it’s not stopping in America.
Nope. The US isn’t teaching people to fish, its forcing them to learn How to to feed themselves. In the past they handed them the fish so they could control them. That power is lost now.
Microsoft: “No, not like that!”
And nothing of value was lost
in fact, things got better
Neet, if NixOS get used more and more then the skills I acquired making my config will become marketable.
So we did this because we didn’t like what the court said about not us but Israel and its war crimes? This is the hill the admin is going to die (and drag us with them) on?
Windows is basically a zombie OS at this point, shambling along and eating brains.
Windows as a home user desktop is definitely coasting on momentum, though it is also the OS deployed on most new PCs which keeps it going.
I think the only thing really keeping Microsoft relevant is Active Directory (and Azure by extension) because a lot of organizations are dependent on AD internally, and there still aren’t really any good alternatives that check all the same boxes. You could probably cobble together a working solution for ~90% of it with open source software, but it would be clunky, fragmented and feature-poor compared to an on-prem AD system. It would require a lot more administrative overhead to configure and maintain it, and user management would be a mess.
I’m starting to see non-AD companies cropping up. If you have to support Mac and Mac is absolute trash on AD, you need to run software to manage the macs which can already manage windows. With all the remote work, even RMM software is on the rise.
EntraID also seems corporate established. For a modern with system, with zero trust etc, you use EntraID instead of AD now.
Of course, legacy AD systems, if they exist, are also lock-in.
Sounds like there’s a startup opportunity here.
Sure, but they’ll have to catch up on almost 30 years of feature development (and feature creep). Active Directory is entrenched, by virtue of being the only game in town for decades.
Not that they’re necessarily irreplaceable, but… a half-competent Windows Server admin can go from cold iron to running HyperV with a local domain (AD forest) with a SAN supporting 200 endpoints (assuming the hardware is already in place) pre-configured with end-user applications and all relevant network & security settings (via group policy), with a print server supporting local network printers, and be ready to enroll new users, in less than a day.
I’ve seen it done, I’ve helped get it done. And all of that can be done with point-and-click GUIs, and not a dozen different ones, just like 3 (one for server/HyperV deployment, one for HyperV config post-install, and then basically everything else can be done through Active Directory).
When you’re a sysadmin for a large organization, that kind of operation at scale is non-negotiable. When I say that AD really has no competition, that’s what I mean. You could accomplish all of the same things on Linux, but it would take you a week of punching through terminal commands just to get the server and the domain up and running, and once you were done the user management still wouldn’t be as flexible or feature-complete as it is on AD (especially if you need things like auditing, or physical access token integration like badges for authentication, or remote desktop support, or video conferencing that is linked to corporate email accounts).
All of that said, if you happen to know of a group that’s actually working on a competitor for on-prem AD (not Azure AD/EntraID, the cloud system is very different and not really comparable) I would be very interested. It’s a problem that’s been on my mind for awhile now, and I’d love to get paid to actually work on it.
You should check out JumpCloud. It frankly feels a lot like you’re living in a cloud-first, Microsoft-free future. It’s a dream to use and scales, manages Windows, Mac and Linux as equal citizens. We don’t even maintain on-premises servers (including domain controllers) anymore, we just use IP addressing from the firewall and patch, control, manage all our computers from one pane of glass.
living in a cloud-first, Microsoft-free future
Oh really, whose cloud? Oracle?
We don’t even maintain on-premises servers
Ah, you’re dependent on someone else’s computers, someone else’s network architecture.
That sounds awful.
Nope nope nope, need on-prem only data, on-prem user account control, on-prem domain, absolute positive control of all outbound network connections with as few of those as possible, and no dependence on someone else’s monthly compute fees.
Local always, remote only when absolutely unavoidable, and then stripped to the bare minimum. I’ll run my own NTP server so that only it has to reach outside for time updates, and every other local device can get time from it.
NO. CLOUD.
It’s fine to have these feelings, it just depends on your comfort level. For my home / personal life, I agree very much. For business, not so much (but, depends on your business).
For business you should be able to fully control the VM, back it up and restore it somewhere else.
If you can’t do that ypu are chained.
I heard OVH is at it. Maybe among others.
Phones when?
I’ve got a Jolla Phone this summer. Sailfish OS. Probably not something you can sell to the mainstream but it is a perfectly daily driveable phone for some target groups, and I belong to them.
The main issue to date is that security related stuff on phones is basically exclusively dependent on US American companies (Google, Apple), this is pretty much madness if we want to protect Europe against hostile actions by the US. So maybe things are starting to move.
We never should have let that horse into the hospital.
All middle powers need to align and collaborate on this. There is limited programming talent and gaps and especially security (ai) gaps need to be filled. EU, UK, Canada, Aus, NZ, SK, Japan should actively pool resources.
This great news! Away with USA!
Next up, convince everyone to drop Meta, including WhatsApp and IG!
