palordrolap

(FWIW the downvote wasn’t me)

That sounds like you’re suggesting that Microsoft wouldn’t care what was installed locally to be able to net-boot / run the rest of Windows.

I think it’s all but certain that they’d want user’s computers to to boot into something they made, or at the very least, slapped their branding all over, even if that was only a wrapper for their web browser.

I can definitely see them going down the line of saying that their online apps aren’t guaranteed to work under any other system, going so far as to throw in a few deliberate stumbling hazards for anything that isn’t theirs. (Until anti-trust, etc.)

And thus, dual booting will still be something that people do. Even if - as you clarified - they’re not going to cripple that as well.

The only way to prevent dual booting would require a UEFI/BIOS that pulls the OS straight over a network, bypassing local storage entirely.

Even if that didn’t already rule it out, the size that OSes are these days makes it even less likely. At least not unless Microsoft (or whoever) are planning to ditch absolutely everyone who doesn’t have gigabit internet. (It would be kind of funny for an OS to go back to being 1990s-sized to mitigate that though. And funnier still when someone inevitably captures it onto a hard disk anyway.)

A more likely vector would be to deliberately break third party bootloaders every time Windows boots. And that would last until the next anti-trust / monopoly lawsuit and they’d roll it back to the current behaviour of only breaking third party bootloaders on installation.

And even if somehow that didn’t get rolled back, just wait until hardware vendors introduce this thing called a “switch” that can be added just before the power connector on an SSD. Can’t boot from a drive that has no power. BIOS defaults to the next SATA channel. And now you’re booting into Linux.

Doing the same for a mobo-mounted NVMe drive is harder but not impossible.

Mint definitely keeps a couple of previous kernels around, so that might be a Debian and Ubuntu thing too.

That said, there’s always going to be a critical point of failure that a power loss could cause things to break, no matter your OS or distro.

Writing the bootloader or updating a partition table for example.

I’m not sure there’s a way to answer that without being unnecessarily mean.

You’ll forgive me if I ever-so-briefly misread your boilerplate link as “And then I woke up.”

thatsthejoke.gif

Cygwin on Win7 back in the day was pretty close tbh.

I don’t know about that. Non-binary files have been put into bin directories for decades at this point. (Feel free to marvel at the analogy.)

Delete the contents and it’s not just binaries going to the bit-bucket.

The joke here is more “Tony Lazuto said to execute these files.”

Hasn’t Office worked under Wine since forever?

(And if not, what are the show stoppers?)

wait until you learn about .tar.lz

Kind of redundant. Both .zip and .rar store an index of files within the archive and are a bit ‘inside-out’ when it comes what we get from tar.gz.

That is, ZIP is pretty close to what you’d get if you first gzipped all your files and then put them into a .tar.

RAR does a little more (if I remember correctly), such as generating a dictionary of common redundancies between files and then uses that knowledge to compress the files individually, but better. Something akin to a .tar file is still the result though.

Bzip2 compression is often surprisingly good with text files, especially log files. It seems to “see” redundancies there - and logs often have a lot of it - far better than gzip and sometimes even lzma.

Anyway, if I saw a bunch of tar.bz2 files, that’s what I’d expect to find in them.