If you are in an enterprise setting and you currently evaluate ArcGIS vs QGIS, pick QGIS and thank me later. ArcGIS Enterprise is a piece of software that feels straight out of the 90s and has no native linux binary (can be started with wine). It is expensive as hell and resource hungry.
I think it is all well and good, but the most affordable option is probably still to buy a used MacBook with 16/32 or 64 GB (depending on the budget) unified memory and install Asahi Linux for tinkering.
Graphics cards with decent amount of memory are still massively overpriced (even used), big, noisy and draw a lot of energy.
I think it could be worthwhile to fork Alpine and maintain a glibc variant. That way we would keep nearly all of Alpine’s advantages while avoiding the drawbacks of musl.
Bare-metal servers sound super cheap when you look at the price tag, and yeah, you get a lot of raw power for the money. But once you’re in an enterprise setup, the real cost isn’t the hardware at all, it’s the people needed to keep everything running.
If you go this route, you’ve got to build out your own stack for security, global delivery, databases, storage, orchestration, networking ... the whole deal. That means juggling a bunch of different tools, patching stuff, fixing breakage at 3 a.m., and scaling it all when things grow. Pretty soon you need way more engineers, and the “cheap” servers don’t feel so cheap anymore.
Used ThinkPads from eBay, especially the smaller models from the X-Series, can make surprisingly cost effective "MiniPCs".
If you need multiple devices, as mentioned in the article, you can even stack the laptops and build a small tower of "MiniPCs" all with different purposes.
Another advantage is that they already come with a built-in screen and keyboard allowing for quick debugging, without needing to connect external peripherals.
By the way, that happens quite frequently. I regularly ask them about new AWS technologies or recent changes, and most of the time they are not aware. They usually say they will call back later after doing some research.
Your personal experience is valuable but does not generalize in this case. I have 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 (failover) set up for ever never experienced an outage.
ArcGIS Online has a bunch of limitations that makes it insufficient for many enterprises. I hope this will change in the future and their SaaS offering will have feature parity at some point.
GIS is truly impressive from a user's perspective: intuitive, powerful, and full possibilities. However, from a sysadmin's point of view, hosting an ArcGIS Enterprise setup - the market leader in this space - can quickly turn into a complex and frustrating experience.
While I don't disagree with your comment, I would say that a that a large language model, and a Docker build with a complex Dockerfile, where not every version is exactly pinned down, are quite similar. You might have updates from the base image, you might have updates from one of the thousands of dependencies. And each day you rebuild the image, you will get a different checksum. Similar to how you get different answers from the LLM. And just like you can get wrong answers from the LLM, you can also get Docker builds that start to behave differently over time.
So this is how it often is in practice. Then there is the possibility to pin down every version, and also some large language models support temperature 0. This is more in the realm of determinism.
This seems like an excellent future use case for a fully automated process by a large language model that translates a non-trivial C codebase to Safe Rust in under an hour with high accuracy. However, as the author noted, even after some attempts with Cursor at the end of development, the tool wasn't able to accelerate the translation effectively (in mid-2025). So while the potential is promising, it appears we're still some way off.
I'm not saying that it can't run in Linux, I'm saying there is no native binary for Linux.
They have bash scripts that starts the windows executables in wine.
You can see that when you read the scripts or in htop.