Looks great! I really like how KISS was PS4 interface.
Since you asked about the performance. Its really slow on Linux, tried with Firefox an Chromium. I think its because of the GPU heavy background, it can be made as a video and would run faster.
A suggestion: also when I click on Twitter "game", I should be able to click on the whole bar below to open the link.
The title of the blog doesn't do justice to the content. Its not the ad-blockers but predatory ads that harmed the open web more. People still post content and often the monetary benefit is taken up by the hosting platform.
Consider this: If I go to an electronics store and they try to sell me a new soundbar I won't mind. But if I want to buy noodles and they still want to sell me a TV I checked out I definitely would freak out.
Some of the key milestones for desktop Linux which I can remember:
* Office and PIM apps moved to web, no longer its a requirement.
* You can game on Linux out of the box, same performance or even better.
* Installation and hardware compatibility - it has improved a lot! Even Nvidia and Broadcom chips run easily with no tweaking of config editors.
* Old hardware still runs at same performance (mostly). If I need to upgrade its because I am doing something more like watching 4K movies, running LLMs locally or running MS teams! Not because my file browser or basic text editor is suddenly slow.
There are two major hurdles I see:
* Enterprise IT still prefers Windows or Mac because of MDM (managed devices).
* Niche tools like photo/video editing, CAD software are still Windows only (with Mac ports for some).
The bug reports linked on softwaremill and scala GitHub's are precise and surprisingly small fixes! It does show Scala's power in expressiveness.
Scala is a great language and I really prefer its typesafe and easy way to write powerful programs: https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/comlihaoyiScalaExecutablePseudo... Its a great Python replacement, especially if your project is not tied to ML libraries where Python is defacto, like JS on web.
Open nature of PC allowed for truly free/open source software to exist which can be functional without big corporate lockdown. I can fully assemble it with parts I can buy individually and as long as they are compatible (which is mentioned on the box, no hidden knowledge here) I can expect it to work within the mentioned warranty.
My PC based computers can be booted and fully functional with Debain, Fedora and (put your favorite Linux, BSD distro here mine is openSUSE Tumbleweed). There is no parallel ecosystem which yet, which rivals PC in terms of open specs and fully tinkerable hardware and software.
Macbooks are locked down with Apple and forget about your own hardware.
Android seemed like a competitor, but closed nature of its development and lack commodity hardware around ARM based phones means that FOSS layer exists only in user bases apps. We have custom ROMs which require bootable blobs from vendors and its non-reliable and breaks often.
It's common for people to assume that if IBM didn't use a simple, open architecture with off-the-shelf components for the original PC, then we'd never have had the PC ecosystem as we know it.
But this view neglects the fact that an organic ecosystem of interoperable open hardware converging to de facto standards and running a common OS already existed prior to IBM designing their PC. By 1980, there were already many independent vendors implementing their own variation on the 8080/S-100 design pioneered by MITS, all running CP/M from Digital Research.
When IBM released the PC, the CP/M world was still going strong. The fact that it was an easily cloneable architecture based on the 16-bit 8086 caused a lot of disruption, and led to the market dynamics that were already present in the 8080-S100-CP/M world pivoting over to x86-ISA-DOS.
If IBM had kept their PC proprietary, it might have led to a bit more fragmentation in the short-term market for business microcomputing, but at the same time, the CP/M world would have continued on without that disruption, and something else would have ultimately catalyzed the move to a common 16-bit architecture. DR was already working on CP/M-86 at the time IBM was developing the PC, after all.
Eventually, the same forces that led to the collapse of vertically integrated, proprietary platforms and the dominance of open-standards system builders would have asserted themselves, and IBM itself would still have been subdued by them. Modern computing would likely be in a similar position with or without IBM. The PC was a major ripple, but didn't really change the current.
You are right. We are lucky. A company like Digital could have made the PDP-11 into 'the PC' and lock it down from the beginning. IBM could have done the same if they had not been so incompetent. In such a case you would have Intel, IBM and Microsoft being a single organization that would have become to powerful.
We still had plenty of issue with Intel and Microsoft being able to play out their monopoly.
So I think it could have been a lot worse, but it could also have been a lot better.
I know of course, I'm love DEC history. But of course DEC Professional wasn't full compatible and cost far to much to be a Personal Computer. They closed down the bus also. It was more designed as Professional work station. And of course the famously released it with Rainbow and Decmade II. DEC had already lost by then.
Heathkit H11 was an opportunity but of course never followed up with.
> If they were not swimming in a pool of money this wouldn't happen.
Interestingly enough, Apple helped to develop a version of Linux running on the Mach microkernel, and handed out thousands of MkLinux CDs at WWDC and MacWorld Boston in 1996. Macs have been running Linux in various ways ever since.
Windows has also been running on intel Macs since Boot Camp in 2007. It remains to be seen whether ARM Windows will ever run natively on Apple Silicon however.
What do you suppose they would do? Seems to me that once the hardware is out there someone determined enough can find a way, no? I don’t see how this would affect their bottom line negatively either… hell, if they officially supported Linux I’m sure their hardware sales would do even better!
lol I remember years ago, people complained so much about "Wintel." And while I'm currently in the Linux+AMD camp, Intel and Windows are still far more open than any ARM+Android/iOS/anything world
Microsoft has been a decent enough steward of the x86 PC standard and the qualification test suite that defines it. If they are smart (which isn't necessarily guaranteed) and with enough pressure from industry and anti-competitiveness regulators to not close it off, they would probably be an adequate steward of a ARM PC standard as well.
The market is already full of ARM development boards that are pretty powerful. Just need to scale these up and put some real power on them.
Put something with the power of an M series or a Graviton on these and you have the start of a great ARM PC market.
There's nothing inherently not-open about ARM, or at least it's no less open by nature than x86. The fact that most ARM devices are locked down is a secondary effect from most of them being phones.
RISC-V would be more open than either of these but it still lags on performance. I have a RISC-V board but it's kind of slow. Not terrible but wouldn't make a good PC for anything but basic uses.
> There's nothing inherently not-open about ARM, or at least it's no less open by nature than x86. The fact that most ARM devices are locked down is a secondary effect from most of them being phones.
I'd argue lack of something like ACPI to discover the device tree and memory map is why this impression exists. Besides the ARM CPUs not being socketed.
UEFI doesn't help with hardware discovery. ACPI does. Commonly with non-PC systems the hardware addresses are hard-coded and they need to be known by the OS somehow. Device trees are that and there are nonofficial ways of exposing them as a UEFI driver but it is nowhere as official as ACPI on PC systems.
Because OEM rather sell laptops with vertical integration, which are going to become the PC of the future, as the build your own desktop market keeps shrinking.
ironically, you should be thanking Apple that the IBM PC exists
The Apple II was an open system and IBM clearly took a lot of inspiration from the Apple II line. Look at the 5150 motherboard in the picture in the article and compare it to the motherboard from an Apple II+
Apple II was an open system in a sense. Apple published the schematics and ROM source code. But it didn't have well defined interfaces that developers respected. A lot of published software, including some of the most popular apps, made use of variables and entry points in "unofficial" ways. This made it impossible for Apple or anybody else to even know how it was being used, much less to write a compatible ROM or OS that was not an exact copy of the original.
And if an updated system were to break any published app, Apple would be blamed. There were apps, albeit only a few, that would not run on an Apple IIe, and I think, a few more that wouldn't run on a IIc.
There were some notable violations of published entry points in MS-DOS software, most notably the page locations of display memory, leading to the famous "640k barrier." But they weren't enough to dissuade developers from treating the PC as an "open enough" platform.
I doubt that developers felt a particular sense of morality about the DOS interface, that they didn't feel about Apple II, but only that the interface was good enough to use as-is.
The real important thing here, was the openly published interface, and mutual agreement among devs to respect that interface. I mean "open enough" and "mostly respect" of course.
And when people made Apple II clones, most of them (like the Franklin Ace series) got sued out of existence by Apple. Eventually true clean-room ROMs were created like for the Laser 128, but that was fairly late in the life-span of the Apple II.
I believe they were both "accidentally open" for similar reasons. Neither company produced the most important chips and components in the device itself. That meant that you could assemble a greater understanding of the device than even the manufacturer had and there was good incentive for putting this effort in the early days of computing.
Intentionally open. As noted above, Apple published schematics and ROM source code. IBM published system board schematics as well as the BIOS source code.
All computers which could be bought by individuals at that time were 'open systems', they usually came with a full set of hardware schematics and programming documentation, and sometimes even ROM listings. The Apple II was nothing special in that regard.
Bengaluru/Bangalore has hotspots (PIN codes are postal address codes) where there are lots of startups, mostly in ecommerce, ad-tech, online education etc. and they have incentive to upsell you a lot.
I guess its referring to someone wannabe influencer buying Twitter(X) premium and posting based on half baked info on customers.
Mostly sarcasm, so take with a grain of salt. I can't tell about accuracy, but explaining the cultural context here.
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