There is an irony that Wine is the most stable linux ABI for GUI applications in 2026.

I managed a lab of them. I _hated them_. They were unreliable, slow, and just absolutely miserable because they created endless complaints.

We were rolling out labs of Windows machines. Except for the lack of terminal, they were better on every single axis for the common university lab use cases - mostly netscape/mosaic and applications..

I also managed NeXT slabs and cubes; they were vastly better than the sun boxes because we had installed HDDs in the cubes and extra memory. The only problem with them was the absolutely terrible, shit behavior when users accidentally browsed the AFS root...

The only positive thing I can say about those Sun boxes is that _one_ behavior was better than NeXT. With NeXT, students would pull the power on them after wating four or five minutes of the beachball due to AFS I/O.

It's really probably more about wafer and chip allocation.

In 2000 I worked for a company that was building a mobile telephony and data product. The partner company asked us to help them implement the lawful intercept function, as is required by law, which we did, however they were asking for 5+% LI traffic when the common practice was 2-ish%. Our hardware was exceptional, we could trivially have done 100% at line rate with zero impact. The engineers all stepped aside, and finally: "Fuck those guys. They get their 2%."

It's one of the better ethical moments I've had in my career of working for _mostly_ very ethical companies (so obviously not any social media or crypto).

this principle applies to a lot of things. signaling for example. optical links. oldschool optical links (OC48 timeframe) did not feature scramblers and so a malicious packet could on occasion cause them to de-train and go out of sync since it's extended loss of light.

long since fixed but a common problem.