I can't speak for Firefox, but Google Chrome (and presumably anything Chromium-based) has working hardware-accelerated video on AMD and Intel GPUs.
It does admittedly take some effort to set up; I assume Google is hesitant to enable it by default because of issues with Nvidia GPUs. But when configured, it works and has for years.
> I work at Red Hat. Mostly on AArch64 support in several projects.
So an ARM developer, working for a major Linux distro vendor and trying to dogfood their work, used the closest thing to an ARM workstation that Linux can run on.
What other alternatives would you suggest? The various Apple Silicon or Snapdragon laptops that have their own well-documented problems running Linux? A smartphone running as a desktop?
There aren't very many ARM-based options that are even feasible for use as a developer desktop, even if the software did work correctly.
> We used to do that too from the late 1930's to the late 1970's, which is why we were the dominant industrial power in the world at that time as well.
I think there's another world event that happened in that time span that might better explain America's world-wide industrial dominance.
If one of my direct reports came to me and said they were interested in working on, say... AI observability (replace with whatever interests you), and that was something I had any influence over (even if only indirectly), I'd be finding whatever way I could to connect my report with that kind of work.
It's all well and good to say that you're in control of your own career advancement, but that's not in conflict with working with your manager on supporting your career development. Even if they don't have anything to teach you, they will necessarily have some influence of your scope/area of work, so it only makes sense to work them on aligning your work with your interests.
Fractal still sells a Serenity workstation[1], but it's essentially an off-the-shelf AMD Ryzen-based system, installed into a Fractal Design Define 7 Mini case, with a Noctua tower air cooler and case fans replacing the stock cooling. They have a variety of photos showing their customized fan setup in various configurations.[2]
It's a reasonably well-built system, but $3,500 USD is hard to justify for a basic system with an 8-core CPU, 32 GB of RAM, and no discrete GPU, especially given that it's using parts that you can just purchase and assemble yourself.
I know that prices of some components have increased significantly, but not by THAT much.
I have used Terraform, Puppet, Helm, and Ansible (although that's not strictly declarative), and all of them ran into problems in real-world use cases that needed common imperative language features to solve.
Not only does grafting this functionality onto a language after-the-fact inevitably result in a usability nightmare, it also gets in the way of enabling developer self-service for these tools.
When a developer used to the features and functionality of full-featured language sees something ridiculous like Terraform's `count` parameter being overloaded as a conditional (because Terraform's HCL wasn't designed with conditional logic support, even though every tool in this class has always needed it), they go JoePesciWhatTheFuckIsThisPieceOfShit.mp4 at it, and just kick it over to Ops (or whoever gets saddled with grunt work) to deal with.
I'm seeing the team I'm working with going down that same road with Helm right now. It's just layers of templating YAML, and in addition to looking completely ugly and having no real support for introspection (so in order to see what the Helm chart actually does, you essentially have to compile it first), it has such a steep learning curve that no one other than the person that come up with this approach wants to even touch it, even though enabling developer self-service was an explicit goal of our Kubernetes efforts. It's absolutely maddening.
> Sure, but lts often doesn't work for other use cases like gaming. For example the experience on lts with this year's AMD gpus will be extremely poor if it works at all.
I'm using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with a Radeon RX 9070 XT (currently the most recent and highest-end discrete GPU that AMD makes), and it works fine, both functionally and in terms of performance.
> I run Arch and my 9070 xt experience was poor for several months after release. I can't imagine modern gaming on an lts release.
Maybe instead of imagining it, you should just try it?
> Have you ever had to maintain a software project with many dependencies? If you have, then surely you have had the experience where picking up the project after a long period of inactivity makes updating dependencies much harder. Whereas an actively maintained or developed project, where dependencies are updated regularly, is much easier. You know what is changing and what is probably responsible if something breaks, etc. And it's much easier to revert.
Have you ever had situations where Foo has an urgent security or reliability update that you can't apply, because Bar only works with an earlier version of Foo, and updating or replacing Bar involves a significant amount of work because of breaking changes?
I won't deny that there's value in having the latest versions of software applications, especially for things like GPU drivers or compatibility layers like Proton where updates frequently have major performance or compatibility improvements.
But there's also value in having a stable base of software that you can depend on to be there when you wake up in the morning, and that has a dependable update schedule that you can plan around.
> You are probably using some annoying pedantic definition of unstable. Most people mean it to mean “does stuff crash or break”.
English has a specific word for that: reliable.
Pedantry aside, having a complex system filled with hundreds (thousands?) of software packages whose versions are constantly changing, and whose updates may have breaking changes and/or regressions, is a quick way of ending up with software that crashes or breaks through no fault of the user (save for the decision to use a rolling release distro).
Debian -- probably not, but Ubuntu has numerous variants whose primary purpose is providing a different desktop experience, and a SteamOS-like variant would fit in perfectly with that.
> the kernel might still be good but the userland is just awful in every way imaginable
The Windows kernel is also falling behind. Linux is considerably faster for a wide variety of workloads, so much so that if you're CPU limited at all, moving from Windows to Linux can net you an improvement similar to moving up a CPU generation.
There's nothing about 4K videos that needs an SSD, an OLED display, or any particular video codec, and "large-scale internet infrastructure" is just a different way of saying "lots of high-bandwidth links". Hardware graphics acceleration was also around long before any form of 4K video, and a video decoding accerator is such an obvious solution that dedicated accelerators were used for early full-motion video before CPUs could reasonably decode them.
Your anecdote regarding P2P file sharing is ridiculous, and you've almost certainly misunderstood what the author was saying (or the author themselves was an idiot). That there wasn't sufficient bandwidth or computing power to stream 4K video at consumer price points during the heyday of mp3 file sharing, didn't mean that no one knew how to do it. It would be as ridiculous as me today saying that 16K stereoscopic streaming video can't happen. Just because it's infeasible today, doesn't mean that it's impossible.
Regarding ChatGPT, setting aside the fact that the transformer model that ChatGPT is built on was under active research 10 years ago, sure, breakthroughs happen. That doesn't mean that you can linearly extrapolate future breakthroughs. That would be like claiming that if we developer faster and more powerful rockets, then we will eventually be able to travel faster than light.
Dial-up modems can transfer a 4K HDR video file, or any other arbitrary data.
It obviously wouldn't have the bandwidth to do so in a way that would make a real-time stream feasible, but it doesn't involve any leap of logic to conclude that a higher bandwidth link means being able to transfer more data within a given period of time, which would eventually enable use cases that weren't feasible before.
In contrast, you could throw an essentially unlimited amount of hardware at LLMs, and that still wouldn't mean that they would be able to achieve AGI, because there's no clear mechanism for how they would do so.
> Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well.
The gaming industry is thoroughly multi-platform, and many games that are limited to Windows on general-purpose PCs aren't so because the require DirectX, since they've also been developed for Playstation where DirectX isn't a thing.
Support for Mac can be somewhat challenging, partly because the platform (including the hardware) is so different from other general-purpose PCs, and partly because Apple doesn't particularly care about backwards compatibility, and will happily break applications if it suits their interest.
However, a developer that doesn't support Linux does so because they don't want to for whatever reason, not because the technical bar is too high. With the work that has gone into Wine, Proton, and other Windows compatibility libraries these days, there's a good chance that a Windows game will "just work" unless the developer does something to actively inhibit it.
I have seen no credible explanation on how current or proposed technology can possibly achieve AGI.
If you want to hand-wave that away by stating that any company with technology capable of achieving AGI would guard it as the most valuable trade secret in history, then fine. Even if we assume that AGI-capable technology exists in secret somewhere, I've seen no credible explanation from any organization on how they plan to control an AGI and reliably convince it to produce useful work (rather than the AGI just turning into a real-life SHODAN). An uncontrollable AGI would be, at best, functionally useless.
AGI is --- and for the foreseeable future, will continue to be --- science fiction.
It does admittedly take some effort to set up; I assume Google is hesitant to enable it by default because of issues with Nvidia GPUs. But when configured, it works and has for years.