To be honest, it took me way too long to figure the Arch etc crowd are hobbyists who enjoy having something which always 'needs maintenance' over the weekend. (And maybe they don't want to admit they are hobbyists because what they are doing seems Very Important.)

Sorta like 'car guys' who recommend some old thing you can wrench on.

For what it is worth, while I'm sure it is right on target for some, I think that's incorrect model of a mean arch user. Updates are once a month thing for me (and the maintenance for that rarely exceeds 10m if that). I barely do any distro level tinkering, after all, I need to spare some time to improve my emacs config ;).

Basically, my model of a mean arch user would be closer to a DIYer -- likes to follow clear manual instructions, likes sturdy and non-ephemeral things, likes to know what the sausage is made of, but prefers if maintenance costs are minimized (since they will be bearing those costs and are responsible for the thing), so makes choices according to that.

Hey, your response improves my opinion of 'car guys'. Because the analogy is thin and they are looking directly at what is coming out of the 'sausage machine'. And if the result is good, they could sell the machine for profits! (Unlike computer nerds.)

I'm sticking with "hobbyists/dabblers" here, because almost nobody runs Arch in real production scenarios. Its just a fun high-touch thing people can enjoy fucking around with. Nothing wrong with that.

(That is why someone could trivially trojan hundreds of packages and it's NBD. Because "Nobody Cares." Wipe it and start over, funguy.)

Certainly not a Musk fan, but IMO the real point of hyperloop was more that it's on a route that could be constructed within our lifetimes. (Unlike CAHSR, check their website.) Of course, California knows this because that's where they built Interstate 5.

It's just another tool in the belt. Someone will say that's cheaper than rewriting in safe rust or whatever. (Apple must have a bunch of 1980s code written to 1980s standards. But that is their moneymaker.)

Bumbershoot is a great blog if you are a 1980s home computer/console enjoyer, but were never quite sure how it all worked. He is trying to figure this out himself, so he goes step-by-step through getting his games working on a particular system.

So there are a lot of ASM 'deep dives' like this entry (which probably won't get too much traction.) My one complaint is he has a lot of content, but the blog is hard to navigate.

A big feature for Microsoft is you have to pay them lots of money to still run supported Windows 10. Are you paying Intuit too? Probably not.

I say again this is really a filter against "high support" customers because most of them are not technical and running derelict setups.

That's not a technical reason.

Calls to tech support are by accounting defintion. So that makes it easy to draw the line somewhere, and cut off groups of negative-value customers. Its 2026 and times are tough baby.

> Its 2026 and times are tough baby

Tough even for firms that have regulatory capture in a ~$48 billion market?

You know it as well as I, no gotcha here buddy.

It's getting tough for shitters with some old ass legacy PC who depend on online services. Hopefully they were smart enough to understand they were living on borrowed time.

edit, also there are government subsided smartphones if you need one.

> old ass legacy PC

A bunch of the unsupported PCs aren't even that old.

I bought a Ryzen 5 1600X in 2017, which is noticeably higher performance than the basic tier of processors supported by windows 11, but it's not on the supported list, and you have to bypass the installer to get windows 11 running.

Ok, lets start planning its 10th birthday party.

My PCs are modern. I (used to) run TurboTax in a VM. I've got three VMs with different older versions of Windows, that contain about 20 years of Tax data. It's more secure to keep my tax data in VMs that I don't use for anything else. I do have a Windows 11 partition on my PC, but I haven't booted it in over a year, and I have no need to.

I don't think I'll ever need to make a Windows 11 VM.

Cool, a super technical dude like you can just spin a secure Win11 VM to run TurboTax then. You probably have a bash script or something. What are you complaining about.

I mean, sure; you can come up with some kind of justification to call just about anything "a technical reason".

But there's no genuinely technical reason—one you don't have to twist yourself into pretzels over—that fairly ordinary software, working fine on Win11, would not work on Win10.

Easy question because you need to evaluate every dependency for Win10 compatibility, Win10 bugs that MS fixed in Win11, running unsupported Win10 CI somehow, QA testing team for Windows 10 (programmers won't do this)... and on and on.

All for an dead operating system. I guess this works in your basement mind where people work for free or something.

Some of those layoffs were certainly people supporting dead versions of Windows, and high-touch low-sophistication users with old broken-down computers. At some point, they/you were getting dropped as a customer and, checking the news, now is the time to do that.

(But most of these people were probably working on some Intuit Whatsit that you and I have never heard of. Every profitable software company has a bunch of products which failed to launch.)

Disclaimer that years ago, I was impressed at how slick the TurboTax website was.

So I'm surprised they even still have a desktop version (...presumably not just some electron wrapper). And given how it works, I'd guess most of your data isn't staying local for much of this.

Their website is pretty garbage IMO. Every single click is a spinner image for 1 second while the layout adjusts and fetches data. I’m not certain if this is a react or vue or whatever FE JavaScript thing but it’s extremely prevalent across the web and pretty much completely defeats the purpose of having a SPA design.

TT was/is old-style "slick", like at the time it put my bank to shame in terms of UI. It probably wasn't using a 'popular framework' and if it was, it wasn't a naive implementation. It also was/is optimized for desktop, while many financial corps now only care about mobile. So as of last April, it was still good enough for me.

Was it fast? No. Just fast enough. That's why I doubt the desktop app is really any different. They must have a bunch of API endpoints, and the 'slowness' is all on the backend.

Sure, but the Air Force bills all this kinda stuff to Recruiting (having worked in an adjacent area. I support a voluntary military.)

Cocaine and Heroin (and LSD...) were widely available 20-30-40-50 years ago. Maybe this is a "It's the economy, stupid" thing?

Pretty much. Most Americans live awful miserable lives regardless of being addicted to drugs or not

They did a serious technical evaluation of MS WinNT. They also obviously knew about Linux. Sources: same as yours.

To the point Apple had their own Linux distro for a little while, MkLinux.

Checked this on wikipedia, and MkLinux came out after they bought Next. ("The mach kernel company"). But obviously everyone in this space knew about Linux.

Yes, before they decided what "Mac OS the Copland replacement" would actually look like.

This was during the fight for survival phase.

Yup.