Safari is a monopoly on iOS and iPadOS, that's a problem if you want to make a bleeding-edge PWA app, in that it's probably not going to work very well on iPad and iPhone and there is no web alternative on those platforms.

Firefox is entirely optional, not a monopoly anywhere.

The problem for me isn't making bad web browsers, it's enforcing those bad browsers as the only option on a computer platform.

I haven't used Solaris since the last time I used it for work over 10 years ago. Agree ZFS and Zones are both exceptional, I would still use Solaris now where it made sense.

I don't think anybody suggests Oracle couldn't make faster SPARC processors, it's just that development of SPARC ended almost 10 years ago. At the time SPARC was abandoned, it was very competitive.

In single-threaded performance? That’s not how I remember it: Sun was pushing parallel throughput over everything else, with designs like the T-Series & Rock.

Perhaps not single thread, but Rock was a dead end a while before Oracle pulled the plug, and Sun/Oracle's core market of course was always servers not workstations. We used Niagara machines at my work around the T2 era, a long time ago, but they were very competitive if you could saturate the cores and had the RAM to back it up.

Sure, my work got a few of the Niagaras too and they were tremendous build machines for Solaris software.

But if you’re judging an ISA by performance scalability, you generally want to look at single-threaded performance.

Sparc stopped being competitive in the early 2000’s.

I was really surprised by the s390x performance, but I also don't really understand why there are build time listed by architecture, not the actual processors.

What's fast on Z platforms is typically IO rather than raw CPU - the platform can push a lot of parallell data. This is typically the bottleneck when compiling.

The cores are in my experience moderately fast at most. Note that there are a lot of licencing options and I think some are speed-capped - but I don't think that applies to IFL - a standard CPU licence-restricted to only run linux.

I thought I read somewhere that Z CPUs run at 5GHz ??

Probably because that's just the infrastructure they have.

i686 builds even faster

Neither were mainframes though, Watson and Deep Blue were both POWER systems.

I tried ReactOS a little while ago, in some ways it's closer than it feels to being acceptable as a daily driver, in others it's quite far away.

I like the idea of there being more alternatives Operating Systems that aren't just a Linux distro. Operating Systems like Haiku and ReactOS I think are great for being a direction that isn't Linux. It's not that Linux is bad, but it's a slow moving change-resistant juggernaut that isn't going to be a place where innovation will thrive.

It's free, it has support for loads of languages, and it's kind of fashionable.

Personally I'm kind of lukewarm on VS Code, it's fine, but CLion, Visual Studio Proper, and RustRover are better for me.

I see why people use it though, it's not a bad editor at all.

For Java, I'm all over IntelliJ.

Small company, < 50 people, industrial automation.

Machine not locked down at all, I could install OS/2 and nobody would care.

That's why it's a research OS, a lot of people (or at least some) think that the current range of mainstream OS are not very well designed, and we can do better.

I'm not saying Plan 9 is the alternative, but it is kind of amazing how un-networked modern Operating Systems are, and we just rely on disparate apps and protocols to make it feel like the OS is integrated into networks, but they only semi-are.

Agree, this is absurd, I have plenty of websites I use that are productive or mindful or otherwise tick the boxes this company wants ticked, but the idea that I can't view them on my phone just immediately rules it out.

No app store means I can't do any 2FA not approved by the supplier of my phone... I mean come on.