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Comment Re:It's okay, they'll shut it down soon. (Score 1) 50

You should all know by now that as soon as your company commits to this, Google will shut it down: https://killedbygoogle.com/

It's a widespread but inaccurate belief that Google kills everything. If you look closer, there's a distinct pattern to what they kill and what they keep, and it's mostly based on adoption. If a Google service -- free or paid -- has 100M+ monthly active users, it won't be killed. That number is a guideline, not a hard requirement. If it appears that a service is on track to attain that sort of "Google-scale" user base, and it has some monetization mechanism (usually a place to put ads), then it will survive.

Paid services are a little different. Google is much more reluctant to kill any service that people are paying money for. That's not to say they won't do it, but they're less likely to, and if they do they'll bend over backwards trying to make it right. Stadia is a good example. Stadia didn't get enough adoption to be worth Google's time/effort, so they killed it... but they refunded every penny of what the users had spent on hardware, monthly subscription fees, game purchase fees, etc. I still have (and use) the rather nice Stadia controllers I got for free. I'd rather have kept the service, but I definitely don't feel like I was ripped off.

Comment Re:Do they really need to make a buck here? (Score 1) 50

No, they don't have a free upgrade path for individual (or family) users. The key thing was the custom domain, which is only available with a paid account. When it was available, it wasn't that uncommon for a tech-savvy family to have their own custom domain backed by G-Suite. Now, there's no free option for this anymore.

There's no free option for new signups. Lots of us who set this up still have the legacy free G-Suite accounts. I'm not sure what triggers the "you might be using this for a business" check. My family is still using mine and Google isn't telling me we're a business.

The biggest problem with it, frankly, is that Workspace accounts have lots of restrictions that regular gmail accounts don't have. There's lots and lots of stuff that just doesn't work, and the list is growing year by year. This isn't specific to the legacy accounts, though, it's all Workspace accounts, because Workspace is intended for business use. I've had to migrate various things to a personal gmail account, even though I'd really rather keep it all on my primary account (which is a legacy G-Suite/free Workspace account).

The "upgrade path" thegarbz mentioned is mostly that you can convert your legacy G-Suite account to a regular Gmail account, porting all of your data, Google Play Store purchases, etc., over to it. That won't have a custom domain, but if you want to keep your custom email address you can use one of many services (probably not free, but quite cheap) to forward.

Comment Re:Where's the surprise? (Score 1) 106

I am in favor of Microsoft releasing Linux distributions, donating code for Linux distributions and for the Linux kernel, supporting Linux on their cloud infrastructure, et cetera. I am not in favor of anything which involves Redhat even peripherally as long as they (IBM, really) continue to mount an attack on the GPL by continuously violating the clause about additional restrictions not being allowed, hiding behind the corrupt US court system, and exploiting the fact that approximately no one can afford to sue IBM.

To return to my point, I remain unsurprised.

Comment Re: Poettering (Score 1) 106

I just want a way to write a scheduled task with one line instead of an entire config file.

cron daemons still exist. Some of them are fairly fancy. I am running the default one for debian (as in, I installed "cron") and even that conveniently creates cron.{daily,hourly,monthly,weekly,yearly} where I can just dump scripts instead of editing crontab, if one will suit anyway. And then there's also at.

Another thing I would like is to be able to just put startup scripts in one directory and have them run instead of doing all kinds of configuration

That's /etc/boot.d

Comment Re:Surprise? Everybody's been saying it. (Score 1) 106

Windows 8 was the single biggest change in all of Microsoft UI history, and even then they didn't actually change any of the most important parts. All windowing operations are still based on IBM CUA and... work like dogshit.

Every single Windows version has the same problem, some things just won't multitask. If you try to drag an Edge window while the browser is opening a tab, you can't. That's because the application is responsible for that. On Unix systems this isn't a thing because the Window Manager is responsible.

What's especially frustrating about this is that Windows actually has some cool UI features like detecting when you're connecting to some displays you've connected to before, and arranging them logically the way you had them arranged before. But then the process fails as Windows forgets which windows were maximized, or the application doesn't restore to the same size window it had before because of some weird interaction. So Windows has this awesome feature... which doesn't actually work. I still have to rearrange my windows every time because they do actually do it, but they do it incorrectly.

But with that said Windows has never, ever, EVER changed the basic way Window management has functioned since Windows 3.0. It is still basically the same, the only significant difference is where minimized windows go.

Comment I actually noticed this positively (Score 2) 63

I did a google search, then I wanted to do another related search, google figured out accurately what I wanted on the second one based on the first, and offered as a suggestion exactly the search I had in mind. Could they do this without AI? Maybe, they were doing it before, but rarely did it actually give the suggestion I wanted. I might not have thought anything of it but there were interface appearance changes at the same time.

Comment Re:As for why... (Score 1) 106

The Novell Netware model adapted to the VM era is what makes sense, where the tools don't require logging in to the server at all in order to administer the environment.

What? You absolutely had to authenticate to administer a Netware server, unless you did it from the console in the early days. That is logging in. If you don't think so, then neither is passwordless rsh, or ssh with a key and no password.

Comment Re:Surprise? Everybody's been saying it. (Score 1) 106

because they won't give up that terrible UI they've invested so much in

Most of the basic behavior of the UI used in Windows was inherited from IBM CUA, and is also shared by all of the commonest DEs for Linux. They also all have an analogue of the start menu. It's unclear what you're talking about here.

Comment Re:Strange crossovers (Score 1) 106

Legacy macOS 10 was never meant as a server OS

Back when the OS MacOS is now based on was created, there was no distinction between workstation and server OSes. Therefore MacOS X not being intended as a server OS is a downgrade from the prior product... like many of the changes Apple made, especially the UI ones.

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