wrt (5): Is it not good for the user base at large or is it not good for users who choose to live as nomads on a boat?
I feel like we have to be realistic about the problems we’re solving here—-is the goal to optimize for 95% of users or 100%? If 100%, I have to ask if the tradeoffs for the last 5% of users are worth the squeeze to the 95%? SaaS really is the right solution for many people; not all but many.
> SaaS really is the right solution for many people; not all but many.
SaaS is a great solution for people selling software to have locked in revenue and customers who can’t leave.
For actual customers there used to be a time you could but some software, install it and then just run it for years. No forced recurring payments, no forced updates that break your workflows, no unnecessary look&feel changes every year, etc.
Spend any amount of time talking to customers and you may find that many of them, maybe even most, don't want the responsibility of maintaining infrastructure. They want "insert money, get more software." The few that run their own infrastructure often come back to SaaS after realizing they made a monkey's paw wish. Many aren't ready for, or interested in, that level of involvement and responsibility. It's a burden, and the economies of scale available to software make marginal scaling more efficient when done by the provider. Not always, but it's often a perfect fit.
But only a bad salesman dictates what the customer needs— talk to your customers.
While that might be a neat write-off mental model for the convenient few, from the perspective of most of the world, many modern software developers is live in affluent situations where processing power, memory, screen size, and connectivity are basically guaranteed. Anywhere else (much of the world) has issues with the systems they design.
This is not a 5% thing, it's a >50% potential users thing. Viewed that way, it makes commercial sense to consider them. However, SaaS was usually an exploitative now-or-never growth model seeking unrealistic returns in a short period based on false economics, so give-a-damn was already managed out of corporate scope.
The off the grid experience and journey discussed highlights how little hardware and connectivity we really need. Writing that off on the proviso it's economically 'smart' to ignore users misses the intellectual point.
I’m not advocating for anything but for distros to stop recommending swap partitions. I advocate for right-sizing your hardware to predicable workloads and not using swap at all. On your pet servers or desktops where the workload is experimental or wildly unpredictable, swap files make more sense over partitions.
"I advocate for right-sizing your hardware to predicable workloads and not using swap at all."
You do realize in the current semiconductor-short code-bloat-heavy economy we're in right now that your advocation would be prohibitively expensive for many people, yes?
At least, the gaming community would basically need to be grabbing $5K systems just because of garbage AI companies and crappy inefficient 'AI' upscaling algorithms with garbage engines that insist on doing intensive rendering optimization and upscaling on low-res models when simply rendering the regular model is faster (I'm looking square at you, UE5.) You know, that kind of thing. Plus the open world streaming, yea that's about already equal to a massive swapfile just for world data.
I think your advocation is very short on vision given current realities.
The thread is quoted to show that they have been functionally equivalent for several decades and yet distros continue to push outdated recommendations.
> yet distros continue to push outdated recommendations
Is it possible perhaps that this advice doesn't apply equally to all situations? Is it the best for people on ZFS? Is it the best for distributions that have their own kernels builds?
I'm not saying it's a bad default, or that people should avoid it, just that it's likely not "the absolute best no questions asked" regardless of the situation, that was what I was trying to point out with my previous comment.
I feel like we have to be realistic about the problems we’re solving here—-is the goal to optimize for 95% of users or 100%? If 100%, I have to ask if the tradeoffs for the last 5% of users are worth the squeeze to the 95%? SaaS really is the right solution for many people; not all but many.