Suse has been trying pretty hard with Harvester. KVM-based, VMs-as-k8s-pods which leverages all existing k8s tooling, as well as the same multi-cluster federation as RKE2.

Seems pretty great from afar, though it’s very much under active development.

I know people in that predicament and they’re, charitably, helpless little babies when you tell them to read two paragraphs of documentation on how to run one command in a Linux CLI.

Fundamentally nothing out there really caters to the needs of resellers. Your average resale company couldn’t automate a backup job to save itself from bankruptcy if it doesn’t come with a neat GUI, a 24/7 support contract, and preferably a Microsoft or oracle logo somewhere in the corner to inspire confidence.

Like I jest but there are Microsoft outfits and FOSS outfits and there is essentially zero professional overlap even though they both sell IT products/solutions. The disconnect is a mile wide. Which translates to wildly different business models where the FOSS people have been running shit in containers for 15 years while the Microsoft slaves are still licensing their monolithic solutions by the CPU Core and doing weird-ass shit like buy 4-core xeons because it’s more economical with these archaic licensing models.

So sure Proxmox/Suse are certainly very happy with their sales number right now but anecdotally I’m not seeing the migration frenzy that one would expect under such intense price gouging. Broadcom correctly identified that it will take years for these super corporate structures to steer away from “the way we’ve always done things” and in the meantime that’s untold millions in additional short-term profits.

The main difference in difficulty between the modes is the parry window. If your problem is the parry window, switch to normal mode.

I find in normal mode the game is not very hard for main quests, but extremely punitive with the many optional bosses. So if you still want a challenge, they’re right there.

This can be hard to implement and avoidable through “creative accounting” (e.g. living off daddy money with no declared income) so as a hybrid/additional solution fines should turn into penalties over repeat offences.

Some countries use points licensing where your driver’s license will simply be taken away if you have too many recent infractions on record.

Companies should also be prevented from doing certain kinds of business if they repeatedly break the law. We have legal frameworks for this, we are just refusing to apply them due to politics and corruption.

That’s a broad topic where I would avoid making generalizations. It’s a matter of tradeoffs.

The key indicators I’d look at are, in no particular order:

• Cost. Does cloud hosting provide economies of scale that dramatically reduce operational costs?
• Risk. If your cloud provider hikes prices or turns out to be based in a hostile fascist dictatorship, can you easily switch to another offering?
• Liability. For better and more often for worse, companies love delegating business because it relieves them of liability if someone cocks it up. It’s a harsh reality that some SMEs have IT infrastructure that looks fine and inexpensive until they find out the hard way that their “IT person” doesn’t know what a firewall is.
• Accounting. Companies strongly prefer OpEx to CapEx due to the way modern accounting incentives, and cloud hosting is tailored to that.
• Practicality. If you want your email to sync to your phone abroad, you’ll need a cloud (though it could be a private cloud, but then I’d recommend a VPN which is more secure but less practical).
• Security. Does the NSA looking at all your files matter? For governments I would hope it does buuuuut…

Either way it goes, be mindful of blind spots. Companies often don’t (IMO) properly assess the risk of locking themselves into walled gardens due to short-termism. But at the same time IT gremlins such as myself tend to underestimate the costs we represent, not just as salaried employees but as people who might cock something up or leave behind us an undocumented mess that will costs hundreds of thousands to rebuild a few years from now.