Unifi gear does need a controller, but they have an ISP line (edgerouter, etc) that does not require a controller. It's the same hardware platform, but different software. Being able to login to one app and control all of your hardware is convenient and the unifi controller can run on linux, freebsd, windows or macOS in addition to a physical one. You can just spin up a VM for it if you want. The hardware device they sell can be powered over POE from the switch.

What CPU is in your desktop? I'm curious what that comparison is.

There are several factors in determining this. What is the OS used for? Why can't one upgrade more frequently?

If it's an embedded product, or an appliance, LTS releases make a lot of sense and really should support at least 4-5 years for many types of products to be viable. This is certainly true for IoT uses.

For servers, it's another story because we're in the era of spinning up new ec2 instances or using docker/kubernetees. If you do it right, it shouldn't be such a big deal to migrate to a newer OS beyond testing. Even so, ~3 years of support or more is ideal.

Desktop users can migrate more often for personal use, but in business environments you start getting into things like VPN and other security software. It's hard to control that and new versions are often not supported right away. If we're talking linux, the community has a break it and punt mentality on everything. It's hard to support many versions of software on linux. The latest pulseaudio hack or systemd damage and you're SOL. Next week they break dns resolving. So there's the enemy of the community mindset and security fighting each other.

When you start talking about mature operating systems, I think the sweet spot is around 4 years. Older than that and it's extremely difficult to support. For instance, there is no updated SSL library that is stable for 4 years. Look at the recent issue with FreeBSD patching 11.4. This isn't the project's fault, it's the pay to play mentality of that project. They don't want people hanging out on older releases very long so they dictate when everyone should update their OS.

For smaller projects, LTS isn't even a possibility because it cuts into the time to develop the software.

They don't have a house full of them, but you'd be surprised how many people have an echo or philips hue bulb.

Apple also hasn't released specs for getting it working natively instead of macOS with Linux. Running a VM isn't good enough. The most important point of all this is that when apple makes this m1 mac end of life, it will still have an OS that gets OS updates (Linux, *BSD, whatever)

First gen apple hardware gets killed fast.

It's also not just about Linux.

My work laptop has 32GB right now and I'm a software engineer. If you use docker, plus 8 copies of chromium (vscode, teams or slack, etc), plus 2 browsers, plus your IDE, you need at least 16GB. That's the low end. I'm using 24GB on my iMac right now. I have 64GB in my desktop PC.

There are workloads where you don't need more, but I honestly need 24GB for some tasks. If apple offered 24 or 32GB models, I'd be happy.

Also consider that the intel mac mini can support 64GB but the new one can only do 16. That's a big cut.

Then you get into the yesteryear sized SSDs. 1TB should be standard at this point. They're cheap now.

Most people don't even check for certs at all. That's why google is trying to force it to begin with. It's still a net win for security on the web.

How would you afford a Tesla?

I don't understand the free hosting is impossible thing. Let's encrypt exists. TLS certs are free.

News flash.. gnome is built on top of a LOT of libraries.

True, but the same crappy service remains. They kept something!

Regardless of what streaming device you pick, there is some vendor lock in and features not available.

FireTV sucks with google integrations. There are hacks, but it sucks. Chromecast doesn't play nice with apple stuff. Roku pulls this stuff.

Apple TV is buggy and has to get rebooted a lot with third party streaming apps, apple steams content back after you bought it, etc. On the upside, an apple TV can use peacock, hbo max, and if you use the youtube app, you can get to any paid content from google play in terms of video, but the UI is horrible. There's also an amazon prime video app.

So even though apple sucks in many ways now, it's oddly one of the few platforms you can run apple, google, amazon, vudu, emby, and various other streaming products on without roadblocks. I'm sure they're screw that up eventually.

Don't use the word monopoly and i think a lot of people would agree with you.

Mail and Calendar do support integrations with Google apps though. So you can use a google calendar and GMAIL for instance and it will integrate with macOS. You just can't go the other direction easily.

Similarly, Chrome or Firefox are available on all these platforms and can do page sharing and bookmark sync across devices.

You're right. In fairness, they did add apps to some tv brands to stream on smart tvs. My samsung got the update awhile back. It sucks compared to an apple TV. They also let you stream apple music on the amazon echo now. You can also use apple music on android.

I wish you could stream video from the web. As far as I know, they don't have a service for that yet. There is a beta site for music though.

I get more frustrated by the services limiting streaming to certain browsers or operating systems. If I'm paying for a streaming service, I should be able to use it on any of my devices. Who cares if it's firefox on windows vs linux or bsd? It's still firefox.