VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO

(dfarq.homeip.net)

57 points | by giuliomagnifico 5 days ago

4 comments

  • Taniwha 2 minutes ago
    It's worth noting that before the dotcom bubble the rule of thumb was that a startup had to have 5 quarters of profit before going public - the whole dot-com thing of going public on vibes before making any profit was part of why it was a bubble, and also why investors were playing in a whole new sandpit and possibly out of their depth
  • 0xbadcafebee 4 hours ago
    > Today, it’s a little unusual for something you buy not to work with Linux

    Err... no, it's definitely not unusual. I specifically spent a month looking for a laptop with Linux support just so I didn't have to go through the hell of unsupported hardware, and it's still not fully supported.

    • roryrjb 43 minutes ago
      If I install Ubuntu 25.10, I can't get camera effects (blurred background and so on) to work in Meet because hardware compositing (or something, I'm not entirely clear on the details[0][1]) doesn't work properly on the open Nvidia driver on Wayland. Wait I thought this was all supposed to be the future?

      0. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/644 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1due6ni/hardware...

      • p_l 13 minutes ago
        It's a recurring bug in chrome
    • notadev 34 minutes ago
      Been running Fedora on Dell XPS 13 for a couple years with zero problems.
      • zpr515 17 minutes ago
        Same. And then I upgraded to the new Dell 14 Pro Premium, where webcam does not work (as for any IPU7 laptop for that matter). The rest is fine though, but still annoying.
    • gkhartman 3 hours ago
      If you don't mind me asking, what did you end up buying, and what was lacking support? I'd expect full support from one of the "Linux first" suppliers like System76.
      • pcdoyle 3 hours ago
        I just got a ThinkPad E14 Gen 6 and the only thing I had to fix/install manually was the driver for the fingerprint reader (fprintd). Everything else just worked, including my docking station and ultra wide monitor.
      • cabirum 39 minutes ago
        MIPI camera on my 3 year old Thinkpad still does not work
    • whatever1 3 hours ago
      Not even high resolution screens work properly yet.

      Wayland has done some progress, but still half of my applications look like sh when I use fractional scaling.

      Linux is great if all you need is a terminal. Once you need a peripheral, then good luck, literally.

      • ghqqwwee 3 hours ago
        There’s no OS that doesn’t have problems with wireless headsets in Teams. Bluetooth and sound stacks is a badly/barely working combination everywhere. Hibernation is usually the test that fails the sound stacks everywhere.
        • dahcryn 1 hour ago
          literally 0 issues on my macbook

          It has different issues, but wireless headsets nor hibernation are among them

      • ThePowerOfFuet 2 hours ago
        >Wayland has done some progress, but still half of my applications look like sh when I use fractional scaling.

        Do they look like shell, or like shit? You can use grownup words here.

  • mikestorrent 3 hours ago
    Ahh, I'd totally forgotten they evolved into Sourceforge. A pity that they didn't pivot to Git hosting more quickly or they would have had a pretty good path to serious ROI for the enterprise.
    • zeruch 2 hours ago
      They didn't evolve into SF; SF was a project inside of VA that eventually became the flagship of what remained after the hardware and related services were excised. When they started (1998/99), Git wasn't a viable option (the first version of it wasn't released until 2005, by which point SF had ballooned to an enormous scale at the time, with it's own product inertia, and it would be a few more years before Git would become a major VCS itself, which is when Github started, and by then VA/SF was in decline and had changed hands several times.

      (disclosure: I was on the "Ignition team" for SF)

  • wmf 3 hours ago
    A fun tangent to this is ESR's "Surprised By Wealth" where he accidentally became paper rich off VA Linux stock but never made any real money due to the crash. https://lwn.net/1999/1216/a/esr-rich.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37708492
    • cheema33 2 hours ago
      I am not going to shed a tear for ESR. He turned out to be a massive turd.
      • wmf 2 hours ago
        ESR was always somewhat controversial. People trolled him at the time for what they saw as faux humility and virtue signaling.