>their version of windows seems to require an ipv4 adddess on an interface
Could be DirectAccess. Microsoft's earlier built-in VPN solution before Always On VPN. DirectAccess works only with IPv4 inbound so you can't use IPv6 only stack. Under the hood it uses a combination of v4-v6 transition and translation protocols, but it still requires the Windows client machines to have IPv4 addresses.
If you can run PowerShell commands on the laptop and if "Get-DnsClientNrptPolicy" returns some DirectAccessDnsServers then it's DA laptop.
Two years ago switched permanently from Win11 to Mint. It was ok, but craved something more bleeding edge. After two dozen distro hops landed on Cachy. Might try Gentoo at some point.
Presumably because it locks your bootloader or something, such that you are unable to wipe your PC once you're finally done pulling your hair out and ready to admit defeat? ;-)
There’s a sense of order and tidiness in running Nix on multiple machines with diverse uses and hardware, all based on single configuration, that’s difficult to let go off once you’ve tried it.
It’s basically an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.
Yeah, I noticed that this is a beast you do not want to disturb. But what I did not anticipate, is that the beast was also prone to disturbance by evolving dependencies.
Maybe it is a glimpse into what appeasing an unreasonable diety was like, back in the earlier times. We don't dare leave Dagon, but he is making our crops fail and we must figure out a way.
For any nix-curious person out there check out Julia Evans posts [0]
But also note that she eventually moved out of it
> (note from 18 months later in August 2024: I’ve mostly switched back to Homebrew, nix was interesting but overall I think it’s not worth the complexity for me)
>It's the government IT project equivalent of ordering a renovation, discovering the contractor has made your house less functional, and then learning they charged you for a mansion.
Or rather, it's you and your neighbours deciding to fix your house because it's an eyesore, but then you build a huge unpractical mansion for yourself on their expense.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it will survive it. It will survive a complete nuclear winter. It's too useful to die, and will be one the first things to be fixed after global annihilation.
But Internet is not hosting companies or cloud providers. Internet does not care if they don't build their systems resilient enough and let the SPOFs creep up. Internet does it's thing and the packets keep flowing. Maybe BGP and DNS could use some additional armoring but there are ways around both of them in case of actual emergency.
> genetic ai agent container orchestration; only the best results survive so they have to fight for their virtual lives
AI Agent Orchestration Battle Bots. Old school VMs are the brute tanks just slowly ramming everybody off the field. A swarm of erratically behaving lightweight K8s Pods madly slicing and dicing everything coming on their way. Winner takes control of the host capacity.
"You should set your hostname to be your FQDN, uppercased."
Never had an issue with this.
"name: initialize Kerberos ticket"
What's the use case for this Ansible task. Never had a need to manually generate tickets.
edit: didn't read it through; this is part of their automation pipeline
--
We manage 1000+ Windows Servers with Ansible and it's been as simple as Linux SSH. Multiple SOCKS5 proxies to different AD forests, WinRM double hop works great when become:true, GPO works just fine on Linux, initial setup is very simple with realmd. Biggest manual task is setting up the service accounts for Ansible.
That's the realm side which should be upper case. The comment reference was for hostname themselves which I've always just done as lower case and have never seen a reason to make it upper case. The krb5.conf has a [domain_realm] section which can map a DNS name/suffix to the actual realm
Dedicated GPU are dead for general computing. The whole market converged on APU because they are simply more efficient.
There is plenty of competition there: Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, MediaTek and of course Intel and AMD, and things are moving fast. The best phone APUs nowadays are more powerful than my not so old MacBook Air M1.
General computing has not required a dedicated GPU for nearly 20 years, I would argue that the continued perseverance of Windows hinges on a handful of productivity software and, for ordinary people, crucially, games. So judging a market so completely, based on "general" computing is too shallow.
> The best phone APUs nowadays are more powerful than my not so old MacBook Air M1.
Which is, itself, an APU.
The question is, is it better than a 2020 era dGPU and CPU combo (at any thermal/power envelope).
The answer is complicated unfortunately, but a 3090 (a 5 year old card) has 4x the memory bandwidth of an M4 Pro and also about 4x the FP32 performance.
So on the high end, descrete graphics cards are still going to be king for gaming. (I know that a 3090 isn't common, but 5080s are more powerful than 3090s).
PC gaming is a niche which is incredibly small. Ordinary people don’t use games on their PC provided they have one in the first place. Most PCs nowadays are laptops and they are mostly bought by companies sometimes by people and mostly to do work.
If you look at the respective market size, gaming is mostly done on smartphones and dedicated consoles and they all use APUs.
Do you have any links with regards to these market segments? I know that nowadays many people are mobile-only, but I struggle to estimate percentages. I guess it's going to be very different in developed vs developing economies, based on personal observations, but again I would like to see stats. I was able to find things like personal computer sales figures but nothing was said e.g. about desktops vs laptops and whether the laptop is for work or personal use and in the latter case, general vs gaming focused use.
I think the challenge is that uses for a PC, or even if you restrict it to "PC gaming" is such a wide net it's hard to make anything but the most vague/general readings from that audience. When the monthly steam hardware survey results come out there's always a crowd of enthusiasts putting their spin on what should or shouldn't be there, when that includes people playing simple low requirement games all the way through to reality simulators. For non-gaming uses, I think the most significant step was Vista, where they moved over to GPU acceleration for drawing windows (but with a software 'basic' fallback), video decode acceleration and to a lesser extent encode for any device with a camera, although I'd say mobile devices likely exercise encode capability more than desktops do generally.
I kinda feel that most games on smartphones are so fundamentally different to like the sweaty PC-gamer type games that they really should be considered a different market.
Take a look at the statistics for Minecraft and Fortnite, both games I would consider typical PC games, both massively successful. Mobile is always between 45% and 50%. PC has between 25% and 30% roughly on par with console.
PC gaming is mostly an Asian thing nowadays entirely propped up by esports. The market sure is big enough for GPU still making sense as a product (my incredibly small comment is admittedly a bit too extreme) but probably not for someone to go try to dislodge the current duopoly unless they have a product "for free" as an offshoot of something else.
I'd say PC gaming is huge, but the subset that cares for teasing out both fps and maximum details like it's 1999, that's tiny, an expensive niche hobby like classic cars (not quite as expensive tough). For almost the entire PC gaming market, GPU performance just isn't a pressing issue anymore. Some games might get a little prettier when you pick the more expensive option when choosing a new system, but that's it, not much of a driving factor in buying motivation.
> The prominence of mobile among younger players probably won't be a huge surprise to anyone reading this – 93% of Gen Alpha prefer playing on mobile, according to IGN's segmentation study. But preference for mobile is actually growing for Millennials, too, with 32% calling it their preferred device.
> ...
> Daily concurrent user numbers have grown in Roblox from 3.8 million in June 2022 to more than 25 million in June 2025. Over the same period, Fortnite has grown from 1.2 million to 1.77 million concurrents – with occasional blips, like when 15.3 million players logged on for the Marvel Galactus event.
These are still percentages. I asked for absolute values. If 100 million people played on PC in 2005, and now 100 million plays on PC, but 2 billion on mobile, then percentages changes, but you still have the same amount of people playing PC. Btw, “playing” is a very convoluted expression, because almost everybody played snake on their phone even 20 years ago. This is why the only indicator which matters is absolute values.
There are a whole raft of other GPU companies out there (Broadcom, MediaTek, PowerVR, Samsung, Qualcomm, ...), but none of them interested in the classic PC gaming space.
And I'm not sure that space has been economical for a long time. Integrated GPUs have more-or-less reached a point where they can handle PC games (albeit not at the latest-and-greatest resolutions/frame-rates/ray-tracing/etc), and the market for multi-thousand-dollar dedicated GPUs just isn't very big
The Steam Hardware/Software Survey [0] answers this.
Look up the MSRPs of the most common GPUs. Very very few are over $1,000. If you want to interpret "multithousand" to be >= $2,000, then the answer becomes VERY small (less than 0.5%), as the highest MSRP gaming GPUs are the RTX 5090 and RTX 3090 Ti, both which technically have an MSRP of $1,999, that typically only applies to the "Founders Edition" releases done by NVIDIA. 3rd party AIBs (MSI, Gigabyte, Zotac, etc) typically charge a bit more.
Steam hardware survey suggests <15% of gaming PCs are running a high-end GPU. I'm defining "high-end" as "outperforms a top tier integrated GPU", which makes it 3070/4070/5070 or above on the NVidia side of things.
That's a rough upper bound of 20 million on the whole market, and NVidia + AMD already have it buttoned up - a newcomer can expect to attract a tiny fraction thereof
But I think more importantly, you can see this in NVidia's focus. Most of their profits are not in the gaming space anymore.
PowerShell is the first thing I install on my Linux workstation/jump host because of those built-in Import/Export/Convertto goodies. Import-Excel module works on Linux too. Too bad the Invoke-WebRequest uses basic parsing only, it used to parse the actual DOM with JS and all, but I guess that was a security issue.
