Article author here.

Yes, people complained, and I wrote about it:

https://www.theregister.com/20...

Torvalds made a counter-offer, a very reasonable one. AFAICS it did not happen.

Article author here.

> PowerPC and MIPS, which must have even less users.

Not at all.

PowerPC is a cost-cut single-chip variant of POWER, which is still in active development and on sale.

PowerPC was the basis of the Gamecube, Wii, Wii U, Sony PS3, and Xbox 360. They sold in the hundreds of millions of units. And a decade of PowerMacs, of course.

Itanium sold in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Not hundreds. It was a vast scale flop.

Because there are so many millions of PowerPC units, not only is it trivial and cheap to get units for testing and development, but there are also lots of emulators, so you can test code in an emulator on x86 or Arm or whatever.

Whereas AFAIK there are no complete working IA64 emulators out there.

> much of the lower level user space components expect systemd

That makes out that it's a done thing. It isn't.

Alpine, Void, Devuan, Gentoo, Slackware, AntiX & MX Linux don't use systemd. Chimaera Linux is developing a whole new init system and user-management daemon system based around the FreeBSD tools.

It's not some global requirement. Even many of the tools that currently "require" systemd actually just require some of its functionality, e.g. Canonical's Snap packaging system. If another init provides the functions, it could support snap fine. Source: I spoke to the lead developer of Snap in person.

I often hear this, and it makes me wonder:

It's still out there. It's in Illumos and so on.

Why doesn't anyone port it to Linux? Go for a date with me

Article author here.

Thanks!

Hi. I wrote the article.

This is a *proposal*. It's not a plan or an announcement. They are thinking about it and this blog post and white paper are for discussion and to gauge reaction.

Hi. Article author here.

That's wrong.

It was originally Acorn RISC Machine.

Then Apple and VLSI invested and it became Advanced RISC Machine.

Then just ARM, then Arm, now arm.

Hi. Article author here.

So far, Windows NT ran on, in order:

1. Intel i860 RISC -- its original *native* platform
2. x86-32
3. Alpha/32
4. MIPS
5. PowerPC
6. SPARC - unreleased
7. Alpha/64 - unreleased
8. IA64
9. x86-64
10. Arm

And a Thinkpad, which the same guy who wrote this article -- me -- reviewed on the Reg too:

https://www.theregister.com/20...

Just FWIW... I wrote this article, and I do test this stuff. Yes it still works fine. :-)

> 120 years after

World War 1 started 109 years ago. Just saying.

> Some of the MAGA crowd have it wrong

"Some of"?!

Yeah, no. I call BS.

P.S. I wrote the article at the top of this story. :-)

Huh. Another one of my stories makes the /. front page. Wooo etc. :-)