4 ms·

Sounds kind of horrible. PCs have a level of compatibility that is basically unheard of anywhere in tech. Through whatever historical accident, the IBM PC is.

Sounds kind of horrible. PCs have a level of compatibility that is basically unheard of anywhere in tech. Through whatever historical accident, the IBM PC is... pretty amazing. Things are standardized. Stuff just works. We can choose our OS. We don't have a ton of fragmentation. Distros aren't niche community things developed for specific hardware. If you can make a single OS image that runs on any device of any manufacturer, the way that one Linux distro runs on almost any PC with any combination of parts, great. But removing layers of abstraction seems like it could easily lead to incompatibility. I'd much rather have proprietary blobs everywhere than incompatibility.

panick21_ 4y ago
There is something to be said for comparability, but as the speaker points out. That great if you want to install #CrazyLinuxDistro on some old machine and have fun. However if you want to run a whole cloud or have significant amount of server hardware, you might now want to have 5 other core with random OSs doing random things, eating errors and so on and so on. Same goes if you want to make secure devices like IPhone, Chromebooks and so on. I would like my standard linux laptop to be like that too. Also we could have both. If AMD/Intel documented these low level systems then the needed patches could flow into the linux kernel. You could likely boot LinuxBoot and still put UEFI on top if you really want to. And if the system was that open you can still define layers of abstraction on top for situation where you want that compatibility. At the moment compatibility is forced on us with a really thicc layer of abstractions that do some useful things, but also do many not so useful things.
- eternityforest 4y ago
  In theory it should work, but I'm still suspicious. In general, thicc compatibility layers seem to work in practice, and everything else never really seems to reach IBM PC levels of compatibility, fragmentation seems to happen fast if there's no consensus driving everything to follow some One True Standard. We'd probably wind up with 5 UEFI alikes, 3 distros that don't use any of them, and there would probably be subtle compatibility issues. Eventually the consensus would evolve to some new standard, the way systemd has, and then everyone would complain about that being too heavy and how they don't want a monoculture. Or, worse, we could wind up in the same place ARM is, for a decade. There's no technical reason for it, but there also doesn't seem to be a very strong pressure to standardize. Consumers aren't exactly going to unionize and engineers love to fragment, so to me a standard with that level of popularity is something special and should only be messed with if you have a real clear plan to preserve compatibility.

panick21_ 4y ago

There is something to be said for comparability, but as the speaker points out. That great if you want to install #CrazyLinuxDistro on some old machine and have fun. However if you want to run a whole cloud or have significant amount of server hardware, you might now want to have 5 other core with random OSs doing random things, eating errors and so on and so on. Same goes if you want to make secure devices like IPhone, Chromebooks and so on. I would like my standard linux laptop to be like that too. Also we could have both. If AMD/Intel documented these low level systems then the needed patches could flow into the linux kernel. You could likely boot LinuxBoot and still put UEFI on top if you really want to. And if the system was that open you can still define layers of abstraction on top for situation where you want that compatibility. At the moment compatibility is forced on us with a really thicc layer of abstractions that do some useful things, but also do many not so useful things.

eternityforest 4y ago
In theory it should work, but I'm still suspicious. In general, thicc compatibility layers seem to work in practice, and everything else never really seems to reach IBM PC levels of compatibility, fragmentation seems to happen fast if there's no consensus driving everything to follow some One True Standard. We'd probably wind up with 5 UEFI alikes, 3 distros that don't use any of them, and there would probably be subtle compatibility issues. Eventually the consensus would evolve to some new standard, the way systemd has, and then everyone would complain about that being too heavy and how they don't want a monoculture. Or, worse, we could wind up in the same place ARM is, for a decade. There's no technical reason for it, but there also doesn't seem to be a very strong pressure to standardize. Consumers aren't exactly going to unionize and engineers love to fragment, so to me a standard with that level of popularity is something special and should only be messed with if you have a real clear plan to preserve compatibility.