We heard the feedback that we should pick a lane between CI and AI agents. We're refocusing on CI.
We're making Dagger faster, simpler to adopt.
We're also building a complete CI stack that is native to Dagger. The end-to-end integration allows us to do very magical things that traditional CI products cannot match.
We're looking for beta testers! Email me at solomon@dagger.io
Dagger has been a godsend in helping me cope with the unending misery that is GitHub Actions. A big thanks to you and the whole team at Dagger for making this possible.
Thank you for the kind words! I'd love to show you a demo of the new features we're working on, and get your thoughts. Want to DM me on the Dagger discord server? Or email me at solomon@dagger.io
Exactly. The LLM primitives will remain - we were careful to never compromise the modular, lego-like design of the system. But now we have clarity on the primary use case.
Thanks for giving us another chance! Come say hi on our discord, if you ever want to ask questions or discuss your use case. We have a friendly group of CI nerds who love to help.
Yes, I am the co-founder of Docker and also of Dagger. The other two co-founders of Dagger, Sam Alba and Andrea Luzzardi, were early employees of Docker.
The companies themselves are not related beyond that.
The strength of analogy is one of the more powerful tools humans have. You take findings/experience from a totally different field and use it to escape the local maxima that other field is caught in.
It's a relatively common theme in sciences that someone comes out of nowhere and solves a long standing problem in a field because they don't have the specialized set of biases that keeps everyone else trapped.
IMHO, it's MUCH more common in sciences though, that someone that is expert-level in one field comes into another and thinks they CAN solve a long standing problem in that field quite easily, and then repeatedly falls into all the pitfalls / traps that others in that field learned long ago to avoid (aka Dunning-Kruger). You know, "chemistry is just applied physics", "biology is applied chemistry", etc.. Sure, it's true in one sense, but... No one calculates the wave function of an elephant, for example.
One of the benefits of generalism / learning multiple fields (IMHO, again) is that you realizes that special abilities / skills don't necessarily translate well from one field to another. For example, learning to play the violin is very different from, say, playing billiards, yet becoming good at either one involves learning subtle manipulations of basically similarly-shaped pieces of wood. By involvement in multiple fields, you learn to be careful NOT to bring your "everything is a nail" mentality with you from one field to the next.
Aww, this stuff reminds me of my uni days. ML theory is interesting on its own. Too bad no one bothers learning it :) If you end up in industry, don't expect to ever use this. I still haven't.
Keep up the good work, looking forward to the next post
I switched my parents onto Linux a couple months ago, after my mom kept getting confused between edge and chrome - not being to uninstall edge was the last straw, but the massive amount of adware slowing down her capable-but-old laptop was a close second.
So far so good! Some smaller hiccups, like chrome won’t use dolphin, but I installed rustdesk so I can help them through whatever.
Over Christmas the in-laws were asking about Linux because of windows issues, which was surprising since they’re technologically literate but in a layman sense. I didn’t try to switch them over since the parent experiment is still ongoing but a couple more months of seamless use and I’ll consider it a success.
All this to say I’m very glad for Microsoft leadership!
My non-technical friend installed linux on her 10yo old laptop by herself after a windows update slowed down her device and rendered it unusable. She said she said she read about it somewhere and that the Ubuntu installation was pretty intuitive.
I was both amazed and proud. She's daily driving Linux now
(to be fair, it's just tv shows and web apps like chatgpt or docs, but still, Linux is now a good-enough alternative, at least anegdotally)
My late grandfather (passed in 2022 at the age of 104) showed us all how it could be done. In 2014! During one of my infrequent visits to his house; he was complaining about the state of the latest Windows installation on his new laptop, and saw me driving Debian+KDE and asked about switching.
I told him that Ubuntu was probably the best fit for someone changing/doing one's own install. And that was pretty much the extent of the conversation, we went on to talk more about raising beef on land without petrochemical fertilizers, and how he missed the flavor from his youth, circa 1930's vs what he could get in the store today.
A few years later, the next time I was in his living room, his somewhat older - the same - laptop was on his kitchen table with OpenOffice spreadsheets and something he was working on, running the latest Kubuntu flavor. I asked who he had asked to install it; he has a number of technically proficient descendants who live much closer and who visit far more frequently than I did, so I presumed one of my cousins had helped.
He acted a little gruff, told me he had switched to Ubuntu+gnome by reading and following the instructions, and had then decided he tried out the K Desktop and preferred it enough to just make the switch without reinstalling.
Had a bit of fun hearing him explain how he "hadn't been fond of some of the Ubuntu decisions with window managers but liked having both environments installed as somethings were better in K, and other things were better from Gnome."
In thinking about how ready he was, in his 90's, to fully read and follow instructions reminds me that he was from a generation whose automobile user manual came with instructions for adjusting the piston timing as well as how to bleed and adjust brake pressure.
Why does everyone act like switching to Linux from Windows is just too hard for "Kathy and Wayne"? The fact of the matter seems to be we have lost either the _ability_, or the _willingness_, to read-and-follow-directions in the general population. The end result of either is the same.
I've coached a few normies through a Linux installation and there are always 3 things that confuse them and it never improves.
1. Understanding they have to back up their current hard drive somehow. What even is a back up? How do they do it? What do they need to back up? How does it get restored? I tell them to put their important files on a flash drive, but it's not obvious.
2. How to boot into the flash drive with the Linux image on it, and what that even means. The instructions for this are usually sparse because every laptop enters BIOS with a different key and has a different way of choosing the boot device from there.
3. The disk configuration in the installer. They have no idea what to do here. There is usually not a simple default with friendly text to click through. It's impossible to write coherent instructions for this if the user doesn't understand what a drive even is, conceptually.
#3 is surprising, I don't remember the last time I saw a distro installer without a "just wipe the disk and set up the recommended partitions" option, and most machines usually just have 1 drive.
There's some funky things like drivers etc but on the whole switching to Linux is probably even easier for Kathy and Wayne (sorry, Alice and Bob) because the updates won't randomly break like MS's do
My Dad, who's well into his 60s, managed to install linux himself on his computer. His kept the windows partition in a dual boot setup just in case, but spends just about all the time in Linux, he loves it.
It matters what the tongue and voice box are doing in the surrounding sounds. The next letter (t) is voiced, and the prior sound is a vowel, so in practice many English speakers will continue to “voice” the c sound between e and d, the “g” is just a voiced “c”, which makes them homonyms in most speakers.
(This post brought to you by YouTube, who keep putting Dr Geoff Lindsey in my recommendation queue, and now I’ve become a part time linguistics enthusiast. Other interesting facts: “chr” and “tr” are also almost entirely homonyms in most speakers. Try saying “trooper” and “chrooper” and see what I mean. In fact my 4 year old, who is recently learning to write, drew a picture of a truck and wrote “chruck” on the paper.)
AFAICT the only thing that should be keeping people from Linux nowadays is gaming (especially VR) and systemd doing dumb shit device naming so that changing the physical location of an unrelated GPU renames your NIC and breaks your internet.
Yeah, i use online LightRoom for checking images in the darkroom actually, but for serious use, the old desktop app is still king. There are alternatives, like the excellent Capture One, but none available on Linux. I could live without Photoshop, but not Lightroom or similar.
Not really equivalent to Lightroom, and not remotely a replacement, but there's Corel AfterShot Pro [1]
(source: about 15 years ago, I was one of the (1?) proud Linux users of Bibble 5, its predecessor)
ALVR has been working really well for me on my Quest 3.
there are a lot of other things stopping people from migrating besides gaming though. sure, there are alternatives for professional audio/photo/video editing/producing, but they all mean losing some functionality if you migrate.
This is an ignorant response. It is 2026. The OS shouldn't be storing network configuration by nondeterministic device name when I ask the OS's default network management tool to join a wifi network.
Sometime around 2012, Windows XP started having issues on my parent's PC, so I installed Xubuntu on it (my preferred distro at the time). I told them that "it works like Windows", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer + scanner they had worked great! I went back home 2 states away, and expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it never happened. (The closest was Mom wondering why solitare (the gnome-games version) was different, then guided her on how to change the game type to klondike.)
If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that normies don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. Normies care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs. The interface is paramount for non-technical users.
A family friend recently called me for advice on her old decrepit laptop. I told her about my work "laptop": a Surface Pro tablet with Linux. I just sold one to her (I work in e-waste recycling), partially on the security and privacy advantages of Linux. Lets see how that works out.
My elderly parents asked me to install Linux on their laptops this Christmas after finally getting sick of the adware on Windows. If Microsoft can make them switch, anyone can.
Cool. I used to install it on all my family and friends computer when I was a teenager but as I grew older and had less and less time, being the constant tech support guy for everyone I introduced to Linux got very hard so I stopped recommended/installing it. Which distro did you choose for your parents?
After my mom's Chromebook died I switched her to Ubuntu + Firefox on a Thinkpad x201 and it's been her daily driver for years. I keep asking to buy her a newer laptop with a bigger screen (800p is pretty painful these days) but she won't let me.
Her router is running Linux. I can tell because of the speed of the WLAN alone.
Her STB runs Linux, specifically Android TV (Nvidia Shield TV). Thanks for adding the fantastic ads in the newest Android TV, Google! /s
Her vacuum cleaner runs Linux, I know because I slapped Valetudo on it.
Her NAS runs Linux (DSM), Synology.
Her printer runs Linux (Brother).
Her Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant runs Linux (DietPi).
Her tablet runs macOS variant, iPadOS.
Her smartphone runs macOS variant, iOS.
Her smartwatch will run macOS variant, watchOS.
OK, fair enough. Her laptop! Her laptop still runs Win... wait a sec, she hasn't had a laptop for more than a decade. She's been using that super expensive hardware keyboard for iPad. My mum never even used Windows 10 or 11. Her laptop came with Windows Vista back in the days, it was terribly sluggish.
I don't know which year it is, but it isn't the year of the Windows OS.
And yes, I am super happy with Microsoft using thumb screws like these. Squeeze them tight. The more computers will slip through your fingers, grand moff Nadella.
They're pulling out all the stops. If you told me that whoever was in charge of the consumer versions of Windows was trying to drive it into the ground, I'd believe you.
At this point probably there's no room for another Playstation-style video game console. My friend who plays only console-style video games, the sort of person who owned Wii-U and an Xbox One as well as that generation of Playstation, bought a gaming PC last year. He will undoubtedly buy a Switch 2 at some point, to play a Zelda or something, but why would you buy another Xbox?
So I think Xbox becomes a brand for video games with Windows and then gradually it loses relevance until one day the question is "Why isn't Minecraft on Steam like a proper video game?"
According to leaks with an excellent track recordWe are getting at least 1 more console, and possibly 2. The first (most likely) is a classic Xbox, the second is a handheld. After that, who knows?
All I know is that I own both an Xbox Series X and a PS5. I use the PS5 more. I also own a PC, and it sees more than 1,000 times the usage of either. I bought the PS5 for exclusives, and Sony began changing that. However there are still alot of older PS4/PS5 titles that are fun to play, and some games are just better with a controller and a TV.
That being said, I'm likely not going to purchase any other consoles.
The desire for controller + TV obviously also affected my console-gaming friend. So, the gaming PC is hooked up to a wireless controller and to his gaming display + audio setup, which was historically a ceiling mounted projector and surround speakers (he moved since I last spent hours playing games with him)
The PC means there's a wireless keyboard and some sort of pointing device, but they're just for launching games & basic admin.
Edited to add: Also WTF for refreshing the Xbox. Who is the audience for this product? What is your lead title? Another Halo? But there's going to be an excellent Halo for the PS5 and for PCs, right? A GTA? But people want the newer GTA which won't fit. Maybe I just don't understand the vision here.
I've been using Linux since the 90s, however I was never super awesome with it. I can do the basic stuff, and with a bit of documentation/guidance, a bit more. I was able to install Arch Linux at least 3X, for example. I also managed to build a kernel like twice...although I didn't do a great job of configuration.
I think my crowning achievement came early on when I managed to follow Linux From Scratch all the way through.
I say all of this to say that I am finally off Windows for good. It has become my daily driver. I've no obstacles. Not in gaming, software dev, personal work, media consumption (beyond streaming services degrading streams for a non-supported OS), or anything else. I've found open source apps to be quite a bit better than their closed source equivalents.
Things have really shifted in the past 5-10 years, and I dig it. KDE + CachyOS is great! Although I hear Bazzite is better for new users (I have some decent experience using Arch so I prefer Cachy)
I don't foresee ever moving back to Windows. The AI and constant push to Microsoft Edge, Second OOB experience, and other nonsense (including Diablo 2: resurrected, a [now] Microsoft owned product that still gets a few updates, hard locking my system), I decided to take my ball and go home...to Linux. A few people I know who aren't even remotely computer literate at all have done the same, and they've been surprised at how much better everything is, particularly on somewhat older hardware.
I suspect that Microsoft doesn't even care anymore.
Windows is not at the core of their strategy anymore. With Azure, they are as much of a Linux company as they are a Windows company now, and most of their software runs in a browser now. Windows is just a gateway to their services.
If it was easy for them to have their users run Linux instead of Windows and sell Office 365 subscriptions, they would prefer that instead of having to maintain a full OS.
Backups. Copying photos. Sharing files. As a Mac User, you're probably well served with backups integration in Finder, as well as iCloud, AirDrop, iMessage, and friends without realising it.
Eh? I don't have an iPhone, but my mum does and she uses it fine without a Mac. Everything just syncs to iCloud, if there is some benefit to connecting it to a Mac then I'm genuinely unaware of it.
Even if it was still a thing (and it really isn’t, imo), libimobiledevice does a decent job already, and given a little funding it shouldn’t be super hard to close the gaps and build a nice UI on top of it. But that’s not happening because very few people care about it at all.
Now, AirDrop support is a completely different beast. But it requires hardware support (promiscuous mode, iirc) that many common chipsets simply lack.
The only integrations that matter to me are Messages and notifications for phone calls, neither of which are even available on Windows AFAIK, and could just as usefully be implemented as a Web app as a native Windows app if Apple chose to do so.
Oh, and USB tethering, but in my recent experience that's harder to get working on Windows 11 than on Linux (had to find the correct driver manually on catalog.update.microsoft.com as neither Windows Update nor any of the Apple Windows apps installed it, only to have some update or other remove it without my knowledge or consent a few weeks later).
Your response and the parent sounds like the comments on DropBox thread. It is detached from reality of consumers and fails to contribute direction that can actually move the needle.
I read your comment. This doesn't expand on how dated your claim is whatsoever. Acting pissy and mysterious about your claim doesn't help either.
You literally claimed these are exclusive to Windows if not a Mac. Not only do very close to zero Mac users do this on their Mac -- do you understand we can copy and share photos and files right on the iPhone? -- on Windows the dominate way people do this is a web browser. You know, exactly the same web browser that works on basically any computer.
As a longtime iPhone user with Macs and Windows, I was legitimately confused by your weird claim of a dependency on Windows. The more comments you've made, the more certain I am that you actually have no idea what you're talking about.
It is pretty clear that you have no idea about the level of seamless integration between iPhone and Windows via iTunes, from Music to Photos and file sharing.
I have no idea how being able to share something right on the iPhone or via browser on Windows has to do with this.
every discussion like this has at least one of these comments. The year of the Linux Desktop must be nearly here. They've been predicting it for years already!
As the old saying goes, it happens slowly and then all at once. The things tethering people to Windows have largely disappeared for many/most people.
One of my sons has a desktop that is quite powerful and overwhelmingly adequate for what he does. As Windows 10 hit the end of support we were considering how to move forward as Windows 11 refuses to work on his device. We realized there is absolutely nothing keeping him on Windows, and perhaps we just replace his PC with a Mac Mini. But in the meantime he's rolling with Ubuntu and has lost absolutely nothing and gained plenty.
For me, after 35 years of Windows, 2025 was the year of the Linux desktop. Finally. Linux has become a lot better, and my skills with Linux have too. And Microsoft screwed me over a few times too many. I had bought a "lifetime license" for Outlook, which cost me over $100 a couple of years ago. So then I wanted to upgrade the CPU on the machine running the VM where I had Outlook running, and suddenly that "lifetime license" ended due to the CPU being different. That was really the last straw for me. I moved to Linux Mint and Firebird for email, and it's been great. Now all of my VMs are running Linux, all the locally hosted services I had running have Linux binaries. The switch was a lot easier than I anticipated.
If Microsoft is alienating people like me, using Windows for 35 years, they can alienate anyone.
The forced buying of new hardware just to run Windows 11 is going to be the last straw for a lot of people. And Apple is really no better, their existing x86 machines have the same problem. We could no longer update a MBP, and other software stopped working due to the inability to update (and sorry, no we're not going to use hacky solutions to force it to update).
Yeah, except there has been a steady increase in Linux (~5% "confirmed") and a steady decline of Windows. I bet a large percentage of those "unknown" are also linux machines.
URLCheck flags that host as adware/malware for some reason. Anyway, I assume you mean 5 percentage points? 5% increase probably wouldn't keep pace with desktop users growth.
Sorry but that makes no sense, there is nothing in "Microsoft's kingdom" here, Wine -as you certainly know- is independent. The most Microsoft can do is change the API in backwards incompatible ways - but that'd affect Windows too, so there is little incentive to do that (and attempts such as Metro/UWP/etc to change the core ways of working with Windows didn't prove popular with most gamedevs).
And even if Microsoft does that, it isn't any different than the 2394923th time a library breaks its API on Linux - Linux as an operating system isn't some monolithic project, it is a combination of hundreds of separate projects that for the most part work together like -sometimes misshapen- bricks on a wall. Wine/Proton is just another of those bricks (and history has shown that it tends to be among the more stable ones).
a) The vast, overwhelming majority of regular gamers who could potentially be convinced to try gaming on Linux truly do not give a shit about whatever line you're trying to draw here.
b) Driving widespread adoption of gaming on Linux is a chicken and egg problem---without a significant market of Linux gamers, developers and publishers have no reason to publish native versions of their games on Linux, and without games to play, nobody is going to install Linux on their gaming system. Proton directly solves the latter problem, and may indirectly solve the former when Linux sees widespread adoption by gamers.
The translation layer doesn’t really matter though, does it? If a user installs a game and it runs the same, the user doesn’t care about the translation layer inbetween. If installing and running a game on Linux is the same as running it on windows, there’s no reason to prefer one over the other for gaming.
It certainly does, because it allows game studios to keep ignoring GNU/Linux, even when they happen to have Android/Linux games written with the NDK, it is a Valve's problem.
Not the parent or grandparent poster and not a gamer.
The echo in my mind from the statement was along the following lines:
I can do everything at work remotely from my Linux laptop as they use Microsoft365/Sharepoint/Teams/Outlook and all. I can just log in via Chromium and noone knows any different with one exception: the finance portal. I have to be on an employer owned Windows PC to do that one thing as it is the last 'native program' needed.
Moral: enterprise-ish stuff is happening via the Web browser.
Steam et al financing WINE/Proton and generally hammering all the sharp edges out of the compatibility layer for running Windows software on Linux.
Moral: Complex Windows native software can be run under Linux.
So, at some point in the future, does Microsoft just phase out Windows? Replace it with a really well engineered Linux with compatibility environment for legacy software?
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish/Exterminate? They already begun the Embrace phase: WSL.
The smartest Extend phase they could do would probably be a "Windows" GUI on top of Linux kernel, possibly with some customized locked-down systemd, to replace the aging X and the mess Wayland created. If it gets to be at least as functional as Win11 is, it will instantly wipe out the other two alternatives - Exterminate.
Check how many Linux contributors are on Microsoft's paycheck, including systemd author and some Rust people also related to Rust on Linux kernel efforts.
Microsoft already has their own distro.
And they don't need to bother with anything else, Valve with Proton, makes Windows, Visual Studio and DirectX the way to go for the large majority of game studios.
WSL on Windows, alongside Virtualization framework on macOS, are the Year of Desktop Linux, regarding the latops I can actually buy on a random shopping mall computer store.
Games work just fine through Proton already, except when they require kernel level anticheat. I'm fairly certain OP is just one of the purists who think it's not done "proper" until it's a Linux native port, which I wholeheartedly disagree with.
1. Nobody said anything about Windows games being Linux games. We were talking about Linux gaming, which is gaming on Linux. Which - yeah - emulators also contribute to
2. Above being said, translation is not emulation and has much less overhead
So many pointless semantics to dismiss something genuinely good and useful
The blog says that in regard to finding bash with env. My reading is that it does not make the same claim regarding finding go with env. bash is commonly found at /bin/bash (or a symlink there exists) as it is widely used in scripts and being available at that path is a well known requirement for compatibility. Go does not so much have a conical path and I have personally installed it at a variety of paths over the years (with the majority working with env). While I agree with the author of the blog that using env to find bash may or may not improve compatibility, I also agree with the parent comment that using env to find go probably does improve compatibility.
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