For the most part what kind of company you are is what kind of product you’re selling or making money off of.

So you could contend that Tesla is a battery company or a car company feasibly. Nobody ahead of the AI bubble would have mentioned Tesla and artificial intelligence in the same category.

Besides, if it’s what he makes money selling Tesla is a tax credit company.

I think it’s grossly undersold personally. What valve has managed is getting the single target platform open source could never agree on.

It’s a small miracle, and it bleeds over into stuff like device driver support in a way I don’t think most people who didn’t deal with Linux in the 2.x era immediately appreciate.

If Linux on the desktop has a surge, they did a lot of the legwork.

From a macro economic perspective, (and im not advocating for a conspiracy, just aggregate business interest) they’re dropping energy usage so they can pay less on their electricity bills.

So actually a double fu. get less so they can pay less rent, to provide lesser service.

Because rent seeking is the only tech bubble left.

I didn’t mean to imply they’d roll in buggy packages, by virtue of release; just that Fedora’s function is typically regression testing for the money making product.

The testing is for the much more marketable enterprise window.

Generally Fedora’s purpose is to make sure nothing gets into redhat (RHEL) Linux. So if there are breaking changes to things, you’ll be getting them.

Historically if people had wanted to learn I’d push them towards Ubuntu because its Debian based, meaning familiar enough to most of what runs the modern internet that I could eventually (I’m not a Linux admin) fix.

These days if you just want to use it I’d pick Linux mint, just since they seem to be orienting towards that way. Arch or SUSE based something if you want to learn more about how the packages you install work together. But the choice in distro honestly feels more like an installer and package manager choice than anything. a distro is just a choice of which thousand things to hide in a trenchcoat.

I just ideologically don’t like IBM and would rather hand in my bug reports to the volunteer ecosystem.

Even if you’re right, those organizations still have to be dragged kicking and screaming to do the right thing.

It’s not a quick solution, but the answer is more education about the space, so that there are more voices.

Hey I’m you at almost 40! I was always dev adjacent, but never learned to do much more than basic scripting for work.

I started with a couple books: Chassels intro to emacs lisp and Python the hard way.

Python was helpful for a couple things, but the ecosystem is kind of a disaster. I found just the general emacs config helps quite a bit get your feet wet with lisp likes.

Other people have mentioned Go is a great start point because its simplified, and I’ve definitely found it a lot more helpful than the java and C compliers I tried to learn on in my teens.

The only other thing I’d throw out is Lua, it’s super verbose in a way thats pretty easy to understand. it’s also relatively easy to find programs like wezterm that are configured through lua and offer instant reaponses when you change something and see changes.

Just like any new language it takes time, and some hard work to internalize what youre learning, but I don’t think there’s a too old.

You don’t have to be the best programmer ever to do useful things.

I ended up on a first gen dell developer xps and didn’t win the Intel nic lottery. Dell’s Ubuntu repo bricked my laptop a dozen times til I moved to arch, which actually had the decency to include the broadcom driver.

The hardware is alright, but the total lack of effort in maintaining has been from the jump.

+1 here for the arch recommendation as an ex ms sys op. Browsing their repos was outstanding for retooling, most of the config problems you hit are a great way into the ecosystem.

It’s crazy how far this extends. I have fewer problems on my 5k atom series laptop GPU/CPU after fooling with a few of the settings than with an nvidia 2k card.

No issues with either full Intel or amd stacks a decade old.

Not always. Believe it or not it used to be kinda like it is now, here.

With the technical barriers to entry pre AOL the people online were outcasts, nerds, and science departments at universities. The ad driven model is the attempt to lower barriers of entry make profit of that and not the other way around. Lots of the Internet ran on generosity and donations.

It’s been shittier every day after there was an agreement on how to monetize though. The people at the start didn’t ever have the guarantee it would get adopted, so for all the idealism we deal with their compromises.