Foreign countries using Google, Microsoft, or Apple, would be suicidal not to change platforms. Right now, the U.S. has incredible leverage: it can turn off their government servers, delete their data, and is certainly spying on them right now.
The only reasonable move is some kind of self-hosted setup, at least for a large chunk of critical infrastructure, with some cloud options for backups, maybe, who knows, if the country is too small or centralized.
Yay Broadcom or something.
Didn't vote for it but would have love it
Considering the Dutch have ASML, this seems an unwise move for the US. But then, the Dogey Confederates are working towards the destruction of the USA. 😒
How much asml machine in the us rn ? That s not how stuff work
The US massively depends on ASML machines. It does not matter if they are in the US or not.
This might just be the best thing that happens in tech (for me) all year.
I daily drive debian just because boring and reliable. However, fancy package managers like flatpak and appimages and nix have made debian much more vibrant - it's easy to install new versions of things now.
That said, nix package manager on debian is just freakin amazing. Being able to just nix-shell -p <obscure cli tool> and exit when I'm done with it is magnificent.
That's the gateway drug anyway. The nix based home-manager is pretty cool.
While I've been tempted to jump in with NixOS my experience with nix packages and home-manager has felt kind of bleeding edge or experimental. Loads of things that don't work as intended on debian.
A sophisticated well funded user base like a federal government has really good implications for the stability of the project in the future. I'm really stoked about this.
NixOS is great, but it definitely breaks things. It's the way it works, though, not whether the software is bleeding edge. Nix lets a package specify its own dependencies, even if those dependencies conflict with those of another package. It does this by breaking the traditional POSIX file system structure that many programs assume they can depend on. It puts all sorts of things where they "don't belong", and then uses a small army of environment variables, scripts, and symlinks to stitch it back together so that no individual package realizes what happened. If you only use software from the package manager, this is often (but not always) seemless, but if you download stuff from the web, none of the system libraries it traditionally expects are there. Likewise, if you're using Nix alongside something like Debian's apt, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the two package managers doing things in two different ways causes some issues that are hard to interpret to the uninformed.
US has been building soft power like this for decades, and Trump is pissing it all away.
If this process to get rid of dependency on US gets well underway, there's no turning that ship. US won't recover the position it had in fifty years or more.
US won't recover the position it had in fifty years or more.
This is not a bad thing. Over dependency on any one nation or even a bloc of nations is a bad thing.
I can’t help but think the dependency on the US that has been created played some role in what’s happening now.
Well of course. The whole point of US trade policy was to maintain global dominance. You don't think that politicians were sending money to other countries purely out of the goodness of their own heart, do you? ... Of course some of them have good intentions some of the time, but let's not pretend no other reasons came into consideration.
Honestly, I can see that. America has been top dog for so long, it doesn't value what it has.
Not even that. I’m thinking too much money, power and influence all consolidated in one place.
The US has the most billionaires at 989 and I’m guessing of the remaining ~2400 billionaires in the world, a not insignificant amount have substantial interests in the US.
It’s good the rest of the world is watching it happen. I hope they’re taking notes because it’s not stopping in America.
Nope. The US isn't teaching people to fish, its forcing them to learn How to to feed themselves. In the past they handed them the fish so they could control them. That power is lost now.
And nothing of value was lost
in fact, things got better
Windows is basically a zombie OS at this point, shambling along and eating brains.
Windows as a home user desktop is definitely coasting on momentum, though it is also the OS deployed on most new PCs which keeps it going.
I think the only thing really keeping Microsoft relevant is Active Directory (and Azure by extension) because a lot of organizations are dependent on AD internally, and there still aren't really any good alternatives that check all the same boxes. You could probably cobble together a working solution for ~90% of it with open source software, but it would be clunky, fragmented and feature-poor compared to an on-prem AD system. It would require a lot more administrative overhead to configure and maintain it, and user management would be a mess.
Neet, if NixOS get used more and more then the skills I acquired making my config will become marketable.
US: Let's sanction everyone everywhere all at once!
Also US: Why don't people want to be dependent on US systems? 😭
Couldn't undermine the country more if they tried, which makes one wonder.
Yep. Trump's actions are no different than what any bad actor would do if they wanted to destroy the USA without invading it.
And I'm accepting that he does it because he's likely a Russian asset, but why the fuck are the rest of them playing along? You can't tell me they're all being bought.
Destroying what (appearance of) democracy they had as well
Microsoft: "No, not like that!"
All middle powers need to align and collaborate on this. There is limited programming talent and gaps and especially security (ai) gaps need to be filled. EU, UK, Canada, Aus, NZ, SK, Japan should actively pool resources.
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