2006: fed up with IBM, everyone starts buying 64-bit x86 servers to load VMware on, cluster up, and migrate application loads from IBM mainframes to virtualized environments

2026: fed up with Broadcom, everyone starts buying IBM Z-series mainframes to migrate application loads from VMware to IBM mainframe environments.

We've been doing the "tick-tock" thing from distributed to centralized and back since the 1960s. This is not new.

For workstation stuff? QEMU/KVM is just fine. What you get with VMware is their "enterprise-y" features that aren't necessarily easy or available with QEMU, such as high availability, failover, backups, shared storage, software defined networking, templating, PCI / USB passthrough, etc.

However, there's already a good solution that leverages QEMU/KVM as the engine, giving you all that stuff as well as a nice web console for configuring it all, and an API you can use for automation: Proxmox VE - basically Debian with QEMU/KVM and a lot of tweaks and such to make it work properly on install.

I use this as my base OS on my desktop, so I can virtualize Windows and pass through a GPU, sound device, and specific USB keyboard / mouse and PCI-attached SSD. The OS boots from a VM disk which I snapshot regularly in order to be able to roll back Microsoft's compulsory dipshittery if they break stuff. I also have a second cheap GPU from Ebay (a Quadro M4000) so I can have KDE Plasma running on a third display and have a Linux desktop as well as Windows on the same box, both running at bare metal speeds.

I just wish RAM wasn't so bloody expensive so I could throw another 32GB in there, and it would be perfect.

Also, Proxmox VE has a complete API, as well as many 3rd party integrations for being able to do infrastructure-as-code work with it, using Terraform or Pulumi.

I've used it quite nicely to make ephemeral VM test environments for CI/CD and remote contractors that our company doesn't deem rate a laptop or AWS access.

Have you not seen the vibe-coded mess that apps are these days?

So, xAI Grok then?

And I'm sure that "working group" won't come to the conclusion that this testing and certification process will need to be done by an "independent" contractor, where one of the President's dipshit kids just happens to sit on the board as of a few weeks ago.

This isn't a huge opportunity for corruption at all, especially against a handful of companies that have overwhelming amounts of investment.

Nope, not a grift at all!

Anyone else getting a chuckle out of the HDMI Consortium, the current ruling kings of proprietary technology and implementations now that the MPEG LA tripped over their own genitals and made themselves redundant, rejecting open source implementations as "proprietary technology"?

Fuck HDMI. I still don't know why people are using that shitty port when DisplayPort is royalty-free, has better specs, is supported by everyone, and can be used over other cables that don't have all the licensing attachment (USB-C for example).

Except for where that Bavarian party of "National Socialists" implemented fascism at scale, you might have a point.

Tell me you shouldn't make assumptions without telling me you shouldn't make assumptions.

Where did I ever say that I traded stocks?

Where did I ever say it wasn't a one-liner shitpost meant for a laugh?

Adjust your sensitivity knob. Yeesh.

Can we extend this to people that think a YouTube video is the proper place to give a tutorial on how to do something with a CLI?

Give me a text document I can read in 2 minutes, and copy and paste stuff out of. I'm not interested in your 10 minute screed asking me to like and subscribe while pitching advertised drek at me, without the most obvious help when I'm looking for your "content."

Because price collusion is illegal under several jurisdictions.

It could be freakin great though, if they adopted a bit of the Amazon logistics soup recipe. They have shitloads of pickup locations scattered about already.

It would be sweet if I could buy from eBay and go pick it up at a local GameStop for free / reduced price instead of paying to wait 3 weeks for the slowest media mail on the planet because the buyer wanted to use the shipping money as extra profit.

Riding their own status as a meme stock, I'm guessing.

It's kinda sad how many people don't know about the backports repo, and still bitch about old software versions.

Exactly. And at the same time as avoiding whatever the hell Canonical thinks we need, AI-wise, you also can completely ignore the fucking Snap bullshit.

Win / win.