There is also a release of VirtualBox that uses KVM.

Some do. But introducing new language to a team is non-trivial. And maintaining a project in more than one language has its own challenges. Rewrites of course are risky and expensive. So, Rust tends to get introduced very incrementally, for smaller projects, or for green field dev. Look at all the drama in the Linux kernel.

Rust is already dramatically more popular and widespread than ADA ever was ( outside the US military ). Devs that use Rust say they love it. I do not believe that is the rule for ADA.

Rust is also very well suited to extending existing C and C++ code bases. I do not know enough about ADA to compare but it is my sense that it is not as strong there.

There is no ADA in the Linux or Windows kernels.

Have an upvote. I use Edge on Linux every day for Outlook and Teams. I do not really use Office online to create my own docs but, if there is an attachment in an email, I use Office in the browser to view it. It all works well enough that I hardly think about it.

It used to be that Edge was the only browser that worked well for Teams. Ironically, with the latest update to Edge, my webcam stopped working. I loaded Teams in Firefox and it worked fine. There are other reports online of the same problem and Microsoft posted that they are working on a fix. So, Microsoft managed to break Teams compatibility in their own browser and it seems that Teams now works fine in Firefox. At least, it did for me.

I will not use a system with snap and has nothing to do with being proprietary.

One of the reasons that I could not use Ubuntu is that I cannot control using snap or not. They even use it to install apps that you install via apt.

The fact that the only time I did use a system with snap left me with the impression that it is an absolute performance pig certainly does not help.

I do not think it is about the royalties in most cases. I mean, RISC-V royalties may be the reason you choose it over ARM for a custom chips ( say in the bajillion SSDs you are going to ship ). Perhaps you were going to choose a different ISA for a microcontroller and the lack of license fee makes RISC-V attractive.

For chip maker, it is the freedom that matters as that is what “convenience” means to them. And it means less risk. Look at the Qualcomm / ARM lawsuits right now. That would not happen if Qualcomm had chosen ARM.

And if you are a chip maker licensing core designs, do you want your ISA to force you into a monopoly? ARM is more mature today but the role that ARM the company plays is being filled by multiple RISC-V suppliers ( HiFive, Milk-V, etc ). More players means more completion means more choice and probably better prices. ARM’s core business is licensing chip designs and they are about to have a lot of competition from RISC-C.

And in the end, competition from and within the RISC-V space will drive down prices for consumers. That is what consumers are going to care about. The lower prices will not really be because of lower license fees ( though that will help of course ). And it all comes with a large and open software ecosystem. So the “convenience” will be there too.

Why is ARM better suited for the consumer market?

I am torn on this chip. One way of looking at it is negative as they are adding custom instructions that are not part of the RISC-V standard. Part of me hates the fragmentation.

On the other hand, the alternative is that they release another MIPS chip ( MIPS ISA, not RISC-V ). That obviously fragments the CPU space even more and does nothing to drive the RISC-V space forward.

If I take a step back, this is exactly the freedom that RISC-V represents. Not only did it make sense for MIPS to adopt RISC-V over their own ISA but this is the kind of thing that would not be possible if they went with ARM.

What makes RISC-V better than ARM is the freedom, not the lack of licensing fees. I think this is an example of how RISC-V wins in the end.

Equivalent instructions will make it into the RISC-V spec ( official extensions ) and future MIPS chips will no doubt use the standard at some point.

In the end, this just creates more demand for and more support for RISC-V on Linux and Open Source RISC-V toolchains ( such as compilers ).

Anything that moves RISC-V forward is positive.

Now they just need to let you run Distrobox in it.

This is for Azure. They care about it more than Windows these days.

These days, you also have the options of Flatpaks and Distrobox. Do not nearly as big a problem as previously. No need to build from source.

I mean, for most things, why even rely on EPEL when you can install something like Arch in Distrobox. A super stable base with totally up to date apps is a great combination.

I know pretty much everyone knows this but distros like Alma and Rocky give you a pretty much identical experience to RHEL for free.

And RHEL itself is free for individuals.

The biggest difference between Fedora and RHEL is that the packages in Fedora change far more frequently, are much more up to date, and are supported for a far shorter period of time.

Even more than Busybox, Alpine use MUSL. So, not very GNU at all.

Much more stable but much, much older packages at some point. Can you tolerate that?

It is a lot easier these days as Distrobox and Flatpak offer great escape hatches to get newer software when you really need it.

Some of us fiddle with the base OS more than we should. In many ways, I think using something that changes less often is a great idea.

One great thing about RHEL is the documentation. First Red Hat themselves make great stuff. Then there are mountains of third-party materials. Finally, since it changes slowly, whatever issues you are facing have probably been seen before by others and what you find about it on the Internet will still apply.

If you do try Haiku, use Falkon as the web browser. You will have a much better experience than the other Haiku browser options.

If you are a low-end Linux enthusiast, I would also recommend the Trinity desktop. Just as MATE is a continuation of GNOME 2, Trinity is a modern version of KDE 3. I was quite surprised how light and functional it is.

If you want to give it a shot in a VM, the Q4OS distro includes it as a default DE option. If you really want to be impressed what can be done with little RAM, try the 32 bit version of Q4OS.

What do you think of Thunar? I know it is part of XFCE but I think it would fit in well on MATE.

MATE is a bit heavier than XFCE.

I don’t love the default XFCE look but the default in distros like EndeavourOS or CachyOS are awesome. It is like a totally different DE.

I am not sure how I feel about it but there seems to be some resistance in the GTK world. Desktops like Cinnamon,MATE, and XFCE have said they are going to stick with GTK3. Mint has proposed a common suite of GTK3 apps called Xapps that would maintain GTK3 versions of some of the applications that GNOME has pulled to GTK4.

https://linuxmint-developer-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/xapps.html

One of the best things about the GTK world was that you had a choice of DEs but got the same universe of “native” applications with any of them. Sadly, it seems that there may now be GNOME and “other GTK” DE universes. On the plus side, there will be a haven for those that want off the GNOME train without as much “left behind” feel as MATE users have had.