Yeah, Elon's whole shtick is make things scale up that everyone else thinks can't scale up. Sometimes it works (batteries), sometimes it works spectacularly well (Falcon 9), sometimes it fizzles out because it turns out everyone else was right (tunnel boring, solar tiles).

Jokes aside, I don't really see the appeal of a demake of helix; it only really makes sense to me as "vim but far more concepts integrated as first-class features rather than addons"; take that away and you have vi with less muscle memory. So, kakuone with the serial numbers filed off.

Or use UKI and throw the current kernel to /efi/boot/bootx64.efi; there's plenty of solutions to sane bootloader/kernel management if you're willing to invest 15 minutes into the topic and not act like it's scary and complicated (it really is the opposite).

Grub2 is scary and complicated. Remove grub from the equation, and all the scary goes away.

Grub is really impressive in how it consistently spent the last 30 years focused on improving everything except the UX of the one workflow 99.99% of its involuntary users need it for (boot linux as reliably as possible, and make it easy to debug when it does not).

grub is just a operating system. it is quite good when shit hits the fan

~90% of the failure modes grub can fix don't exist without grub. I can't remember any time when its needless complexity was actually a net benefit compared to literally any of its alternatives (and between gummiboot/syslinux/efilinux/isolinux/systemd-boot/efistub I've used a lot of them).

i like grub, but i also remember pre-0.98 grub

i love HN but also starting to think it's time for us oldies to have our own one: cost of entry, having a distant memory of booting linux from a floppy

My first linux system was a linux-on-a-floppy router that I ran on a spare 386 with two cards to provide NAT for my house, back in the days when internet providers tried to ban people for doing that.

i have the memory of bios being so shit that i had to boot grub from a floppy to boot from a cd

i never got it to work

Lol these are the most refined Linux flagship hardware manufacturers in the world. No clone.

If your definition of refinement is "looks like a Macbook", sure. Personally, if I wanted a laptop that looks like a Macbook, I'd buy a Macbook.

No my definition is most Linux compatible, custom firmware and support. They make the only modern qubes certified machine which is a hardware compatibility nightmare. Look is afterthought

> The point was usually not usability. It was identity.

And we're not even getting usability out of it! Each of those bland react-angles is subtly inconsistent with the OS, with each other, and very often, itself. And in 6 months everything will move around again, for no reason other than to keep the responsible managers employed, without improving UX. And a11y is crying in a corner somewhere, forgotten.

Don't be silly, this is the JS ecosystem. Why use your brain for a minute and come up with a 50 byte helper function, if you can instead import a library with 3912726 dependencies and let the compiler spend 90 seconds on every build to tree shake 3912723 out again and give you a highly optimized bundle that's only 3 megabytes small?

Scammers have no problem waiting 24 hours, so this doesn't protect incompetent people at all.

To be blunt: I don't care. Don't make their incompetence my problem.

> But putting my design hat on here: couldn't this be the whole approach?

No, because protecting users is just an excuse. The overreach is the goal.

Having worked in big tech, my money would be on Hanlon's Razor here -- "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence"

It isn't adequately explained by incompetence. This is out of the playbook of boiling the frog. Nothing about this is new or unexpected. We have plenty of history about how these things go down. First they make installing device owner chosen software ridiculously laberous. Then they will remove the option altogether.

That includes school-issued Macs, so I don't see how that's an argument against Chromebooks.