I had the privilege of having lunch with an entomologist once, and yes.

Also, some of them keep advanced databases for looking up cool bugs in case they can’t remember them later.

Yeah. Thankfully, Windows server cleaned up that stupidity starting around 2006 and finished in around 2018.

Which all sounds fine until we meditate on the history that basically all other server operating systems have had efficient remote administration solutions since before 1995 (reasonable solutions existed before SSH, even).

Windows was over 20 years late to adopt non-grapgical low latency (aka sane) options for remote administration.

I think it’s a big part of the reason Windows doesn’t appear much on this chart.

That’s certainly a big part of it. When one needs to buy a metric crap load of CPUs, one tends to shop outside the popular defaults.

Another big reason, historically, is that Supercomputers didn’t typically have any kind of non-command-line way to interact with them, and Windows needed it.

Until PowerShell and Windows 8, there were still substantial configuration options in Windows that were 100% managed by graphical packages. They could be changed by direct file edits and registry editing, but it added a lot of risk. All of the “did I make a mistake” tools were graphical and so unavailable from command line.

So any version of Windows stripped down enough to run on any super-computer cluster was going to be missing a lot of features, until around 2006.

Since Linux and Unix started as command line operating systems, both already had plenty fully featured options for Supercomputing.

RIP legend. O7

May his prompt always read “READY” wherever his legacy may GOTO or RETSUB.

Neat! I’ll check it out. Thanks!

Where did you find that azure runs on linux?

I dont know of anywhere that Microsoft confirms, officially, that Azure, itself, is largely running on Linux. They share stats about what workloads other are running on it, but not, to my knowledge, about what it is compared of.

I suppose that would be an oversimplification, anyway.

But that Azure itself is running mostly on Linux is an open secret among folks who spend time chatting with engineers who have worked into he Azure cloud.

When I have chatted with them, Azure cloud engineers have displayed huge amouts of Linux experience while they sometimes needed to “phone a friend” to answer Windows server edition questions.

But, surely Windows is the wrong OS?

Oh yes! To be clear - trying to put any version of Windows on a super-computer is every bit as insane as you might imagine. By what I heard in the rumor mill, it went every bit as badly as anyone might have guessed.

But I like to root for an underdog, and it was neat to hear about Microsoft engineers trying to take the Windows kernel somewhere it had no rational excuse to run, perhaps by sheer force of will and hard work.

I wonder if the numbers are still this good if you consider more supercomputers.

Great question. My guess is not terribly different.

“Top 500 Supercomputers” is arguably a self-referential term. I’ve seen the term “super-computer” defined whether it was among the 500 fastest computer in the world, on the day it went live.

As new super-computers come online, workloads from older ones tend to migrate to the new ones.

So there usually aren’t a huge number of currently operating supercomputers outside of the top 500.

When a super-computer falls toward the bottom of the top 500, there’s a good chance it is getting turned off soon.

That said, I’m referring here only to the super-computers that spend a lot of time advertising their existence.

I suspect there’s a decent number out there today that prefer not to be listed. But I have no reason to think those don’t also run Linux.

but it did not stick.

Yeah. It was bad. The job of a Supercomputer is to be really fast and really parallel. Windows for Supercomputing was… not.

I honestly thought it might make it, considering the engineering talent that Microsoft had.

But I think time proves that Unix and Linux just had an insurmountable head start. Windows, to the best of my knowledge, never came close to closing the gap.

Thank you for your service to the public.

Same here. I think we’re Puppy Linux or XUbuntu maybe? I’m trying to pick a distro that’s different, while also killing conversations among enthusiasts… Because all of my coffee enthusiast conversations inevitably die when I I mention tea.

Where would I even start.

There’s a lot of good information provided video game reviewers. I tend to start there, when looking for something new.

In particular, I’ve learned about entire genres such as “cozy games” and “couch co-op”, that way. Then, once I know what the genre I’m in the mood for is called I can search for “best cozy games of 2020”, to find ideas of what I might like to try.

In order to not worry about whether each game will run, I feel that the SteamDeck is the current nicest all around game console available, followed by the Nintendo Switch.

The first thing I do to, if I need to get the size down, is swap out Gnome for one of the X11 Windows managers, usually XFCE.

I usually do this by starting from the minimal install and building up, as schizo already suggested.

That said, I guess I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Linux Mint is an easy way to get Debian’s core with the XFCE window manager.

Looks like Mint starts at 3GB - 8GB, depending on options chosen?

Disclaimer: It’s honestly been awhile since I really paid attention to my own Linux install size, as long as it’s below 40GB.

the live disk won’t find my Wifi

Oof.

I’m case it helps: I have solved that problem for myself using a $9.00 USB Wifi dongle.

For whatever reason (other contributors facing the same issue?), I have found that every cheapo USB Wifi dongle I have tried has worked perfectly with the minimal Linux images.

I realize I might have just gotten really lucky a bunch of times, but it could be worth a try.

They are solvable problems, and many have already been solved already in some countries.

This is a great point!

But losing 75% of population, I can see some nuclear war breaking out

Seems pretty likely (eventually). I take hope that I’ll be in the direct blast radius, and not a mutilated horribly scarred survivor.

I choose not to think about this one much because it’s well outside my circle of influence.

The current trend sucks, obviously.

But historically, we used to be so much worse to each-other.

There’s reasons (data and practicality) to have faith that things will continue to improve.

But it won’t be enough, for many of us, in many of our lifetimes, so let’s all stay angry and active.

Lol.

“But honey, I left you a README file…”

Providing competition against media monopolies is illegal.

If they can’t sell you your memories, they think no one should have them. They will let your memories burn and be lost before they let you own or share them.

They’ll keep this up and they will continue to work to make intellectual property never enter the public domain.

I’m too chicken to be a pirate, myself. But I’m aware that pirates and librarians are the only ones with any intent to preserve works of art for the public.

“It’s only a banana. How much can it cost? Ten dollars?”