this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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This is so cool. Really great to hear. I wish more companies and other institutions would do this. They have to realize that using Microsoft software won't benefit them in the long term, and actually start pressuring hardware vendors into pre-installing Linux.
Part of that job is supporting fielded hardware and ground systems, think like automated test or verification systems. I think we’ve learned our lesson that we can’t afford to have unserviceable software.
At least with Linux and generally with an open source baseline, there is the option of throwing engineers at your problem because you have access to the code, and you can strip down the system to the bare minimum of what you need, and in doing so, really understand it. We don’t want to get into a situation where our hands are tied and we can’t fix it because the problem lies in the proprietary software while the vendor has long since abandoned any hope of support… grumble…
That kinda reminds me of my job, except that we build the unserviceable hardware and install Windows, as well as our proprietary software. Then we charge our customers shitloads of money for technical support. We're a government contractor btw
It's actually a pretty nice company (from an employee standpoint), we use a lot of Linux internally, as well as other FOSS software. But porting our products to Linux is hopeless, we have decades of C++ code that either relies on Windows APIs directly, or on our custom libraries that rely on Windows-specific stuff.