While that’s definitely true, I think it’s maybe more fair to say that their actual strength has always been to take a personal computing technology that’s just about “ready-for-prime-time” and make it as accessible and fashionable as possible. Almost all of their failed products have been errors in judging how close a tech is to being ready for mass adoption.

Wait, are you parodying Madonna or meta-parodying Weird Al?

But then we have the same complaint against Electron, namely large deployment sizes and no shared memory, no?

this part is important: > A pure Rust desktop app stack

I think the parent is imagining a desktop with servo available as a standard lib, in which case you're left with the same complaints as Tauri, not electron; that the system version of Servo might be out of date.

Yeah, multiple Tauri apps could theoretically share a Servo library.

Though I’d also be interested to see how slim it could be with static linking.

Presumably a lot of code could be compiled out with dead code analysis? Or compile flags could remove old compatibility cruft and unneeded features?

Doing a mindless chore in the background to satisfy a meaningless metric sounds like the perfect task to give to an AI agent…

Definitely worse. This sort of thing still happening in 2025 is completely bonkers to me. Recently a financial institution sent me an email asking me to "re-validate my ownership" of a linked account by uploading a bank statement. The link was to a completely unrelated and unknown domain (not even a shortener). The message itself didn't address me by name but simply said "Dear Customer". It also didn't including any legitimate info like partial account numbers. And when I logged into my account, there was no notice or message mentioning any re-validation requirement. I was convinced it was a low/medium-effort phishing attempt and submitted it to their support channel so others could be warned. It turns out it was actually their legitimate email. I told the CS rep that they're basically training their customers to fall for the next real phishing attack. Won't do any good, I'm sure.

Well, one man's junk is another man's treasure.

In any case, none of the requirements you listed seem that exotic. There are computer cases with hot-swap ready drive cages, and status lights (or even LCDs) are easy to find. The software is probably already on github. The toughest ask is probably for it to be "little", but that's not something everybody cares about. So I don't find the GP's claim to be that much of a stretch.

Doesn’t that name make it confusing for your users? A tribute maybe shouldn’t be identical?

So far folks have been getting it but i see the point. I guess we'll see if a renaming makes sense later

> in short, the ARM systems boot Windows and only Windows.

I’ve not tried it myself, but a quick google seems to indicate people are running Linux on existing ARM64 laptops and there’s active development to try to achieve full support. For example, Ubuntu is installable on a number of off the shelf laptops, including one of Microsoft’s own Surface devices [0].

[0] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdrag...

I was wrong about booting only Windows, but this is because Microsoft still allows Ubuntu images to be signed with their master key. These machines are locked down to run only those systems Microsoft explicitly permits.

I abhor the general trend of governments outsourcing everything to private companies, but in this case, a technologically advanced country’s central government couldn’t even muster up the most basic of IT practices, and as you said, accountability will likely not rest with the people actually responsible for this debacle. Even a nefarious cloud services CEO couldn’t dream up a better sales case for the wholesale outsourcing of such infrastructure in the future.

I'm with you. It's really sad that this provides such a textbook case of why not to own your own infrastructure.

Practically speaking, I think a lot of what is offered by Microsoft, Google, and the other big companies that are selling into this space is vastly overpriced and way too full of lock-in, taking this stuff in-house without sufficient knowhow and maturity is even more foolish.

It's like not hiring professional truck drivers, but instead of at least people who can basically drive a truck, hiring someone who doesn't even know how to drive a car.

If this is true, every government should subsidize competitors in their own country to drive down costs.

Aside from data sovereignty concerns, I think the best rebuttal to that would be to point out that every major provider contractually disclaims liability for maintaining backups.

Now, sure, there is AWS Backup and Microsoft 365 Backup. Nevertheless, those are backups in the same logical environment.

If you’re a central government, you still need to be maintaining an independent and basically functional backup that you control.

I own a small business of three people and we still run Veeam for 365 and keep backups in multiple clouds, multiple regions, and on disparate hardware.

One co-effects of the outsourcing strategy is to underfund internal tech teams.. which then makes them less effective in both competing against and managing outsourced capabilities.

Shit (meaning “how true”), shit is veritably the aladeen of words. It can basically mean anything depending on usage, context, attitude, or tone of voice.