Depends entirely on the type of business.

Engineering companies building electronics or mechanical devices must use specific, industry standard software for interoperability with other shops.

Media businesses need to provide proofs and intermediate products in specific formats, and will receive subcontracted work in those same interchange formats.

I do government controls contracting as a side business, all of their software specs are in Word documents with macros and other special features of Word, their interlock and safety stuff is in Excel with VBA scripts and what have you.

It is never as easy as just deciding that you dont need certain software products, the larger ecosystem makes a lot of those decisions for you.

The Danish government can do this only because they are the originating entity for the documents, and they are the root of the tree for work rather than a leaf node.

The additional sad fact is that open-source not working that way anymore works to almost nobody's benefit. That projects have gotten unnecessarily complicated and baroque make enshittification inevitable and vendor lock-in just as large a problem as it is in the closed source world.

The answer is no, and stop trying to teach kids how to program until you can effectively teach them English and math. Thank you.

Mastodon is less a public square, more a series of self organizing echo chambers. I've read the stuff posted to Mastodon instances, I'm sort of happier they keep themselves isolated.

Kind of how Tumblr used to keep the degenerates grouped together and away from all the normal people, then they had to let them all spill out and taint the rest of the web.

Are Lovecraft's most iconic tales considered obscure now? If so I am a little sad for the loss of culture.

Ridiculous take. Once you've driven stick for a couple months the timing and extra work becomes second-nature, and you are much more in-tune with what is going on with the vehicle. You can get feedback through the clutch pedal and the stick to tell if the engine is running rough, if it is struggling to climb a hill, what have you.

When I had to drive an automatic after my manual car, I had to get re-accustomed to not using my clutch foot and would accidentally tap the brake a couple times at awkward points where I felt like I needed to shift because it was such an automatic response to driving.

I drove a manual for years, highway and in-city, including all around Long Island which has hellacious traffic. I miss the manual transmission terribly. Modern automatics are not the slushboxes of yesteryear, but it is still MUCH more fun to drive stick. I'm planning on replacing my truck next year and was looking for one with a manual transmission and it appears that those are pretty much all gone. I guess nobody can have fun because of lazy bastards who can't be bothered to learn how to drive correctly.

Less than 30% of my roughly 500 titles library shows as supported under Linux, few of which are modern AAA titles. There are probably quite a few indie games supported mainly because they use Unity and it makes it cheap and easy, but there are almost no devs specifically targeting Linux.

Based on the number of people I interact with who don't care about politics in the slightest, I'm going to say that this is wildly inaccurate unless someone is terminally online or never turns off cable news. If you live in a hyper-political bubble, then of course, you see nothing but politics around every corner, everyone else is just living their lives.

Even in places where you would think events should be overtaking everyone's life, you see people living normally. You can look at videos coming out of Ukraine and Russia, two nations in an active shooting war with each other, and see people still going about their days shopping, partying, going to school and work, etc.

In objective terms, there has probably never been a better time to be alive. There are social problems right now, just as there have been social problems throughout all of human history, which will continue to be true for as long as mankind lasts.

Indeed. This is especially the case for anyone doing embedded development or hard realtime systems. When you have 800usec to meaningfully respond to an interrupt and set your outputs up correctly, you often drop into assembly so you can count the timing.

This is exactly the reason, yes. It is easy to create a platform independent program assuming it never has to integrate in any meaningful way with the mechanisms the platform is providing. As soon as you need that, it takes actual work which most modern code houses aren't willing to do.

Kind of an odd take. The reason that DOOM runs on everything from supercomputers to toasters is because they intentionally structured the code in a portable manner, separating things like the game mechanics, BSP traversal, sound and rendering parts out into discrete modules so that it made porting it between platforms easier. As a kid when the game came out I played it on DOS and OS/2, but Carmack wrote and tested the game originally on a NeXTStation. It was very highly optimized even though it was also cross platform. The real difference is that it was bring written by skilled professionals rather than a bunch of rented warm bodies who have been to "code bootcamp" where all they know is how to glue prewritten modules and libraries together.

I'm not sure our outlook is actually very significantly divergent. Maybe I didn't elaborate it well in my comment, but I am not a fan of Windows, and while I haven't had the issues you've been having with activation I regularly have other infuriating failures occur as a regular course of events.

I also view computers as just tools. I also have a lot of fun playing with computers and stuff, but my day job (or my paying job, if you prefer) requires the use of software that must comply with certain standards and compatibility, and unfortunately there isn't much in the FOSS world that can substitute for the commercial tools.

Writing a scalable and robust electrical CAD system is a super boring and very difficult programming task, since FOSS is mostly driven by people wanting to donate their time by scratching their own intellectual itch, there isn't a lot of motivation for a FOSS alternative to pop up. There are some initiatives, but nothing like the coordination that a commercial concern puts to that sort of work.

And this is only one specific need, there are hundreds of other problem spaces that are similarly unserved because the work is hard and not particularly rewarding to do. You see it all the time in Linux (mostly I am a FreeBSD user myself) that working solutions go abandoned or unmaintained because someone decides it is no longer the cool thing to work on and so the "community" moves on. Think of something like the X to Wayland transition. There is, in principle, nothing wrong with X. It is a good, mature design that has worked for literal decades. Wayland throws it all out for the sake of screen tearing and whining about a messy codebase.

Sir. The world is filled with still-standing, still safe structures built entirely of wood which are centuries old. How long do you expect modern concrete and steel construction to last?

Modern structures made of wood are garbage for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is poor construction practices geared toward churning out rectangular boxes as fast as possible using unskilled laborers. Just in the region of the US where I live there are literally hundreds of barns in fields that are 150 year old or more that are still being actively used because they were constructed using pegged mortise-and-tenon techniques out of weather-resistant species of wood.

There are temples in China and Japan that are closer to 1000 years old which are entirely wood and use no metallic fasteners.

This is actually why I visit Slashdot less and less frequently. There is so little technical content now because the TDS noise drowns out all of the signal, it just isn't worth the time.