Expat/kennismigrant here - it's same "ends up late and over budget" for literally every country (and private businesses).
What Dutch government/politicians seems to be "ahead" compared to other countries - is combination of narrow or short sightedness and (over)correction trough rules, laws and regulations.
Like giving subsidies and tax breaks for electrical cars, rooftop solar panels and mandating household switch from gas (LPG and such) to electric heating and cooking. And ignoring industry professionals for decades saying the distribution network won't scale.
More of the same with stuff like 30% tax rule for expats, which was originally introduced as cost saving measures because actually doing bookkeeping for expatriate expenses was costing government more money. But then more recently expat tax breaks have been reduced and phased out "because cost saving". Meanwhile employers have trouble finding highly skilled workers. And we're limiting numbers of foreign students in universities (by forcing them to do it in Dutch instead of English).
Some Bulgarians cheated/defrauded Dutch tax returns or such - and "solution" was ML/AI reviewing things - but it turned out to be broken/biased and (ab)used for other things - leading to the whole toeslag scandal and government resigning.
Same for nitrogen vs lack of housing... And many more.
> ignoring industry professionals for decades saying the distribution network won't scale.
Who says that? The British National Grid says the opposite. Or is it specifically the Dutch network that would not handle the changing requirements? If so what makes it special?
The Dutch electric grid is owned and operated by a few companies that are heavily regulated by the ACM (Authority for Consumer and Markets). Those companies have been wanting to invest in upgrading the grid for many years, but the ACM refused them permission as they considered it unnecessary investments that would drive up the costs for consumers.
Now we’re fucked because the government has been stimulating electric cars, heat pumps, etc. to meet climate goals, which increases the load on the electric grid which is now unable to keep up with demand. Something everyone saw coming except for the ACM.
Are your heat pumps replacing gas? Because if not then replacing resistive heating with a heat pump results in less load on the grid not more. My heat pump outputs 7 kW for an input of less than 3 kW.
ADHD brain just recalled that similar concept was used for traffic jams being sent along FM radio signal.
Not talking about stuff that would automatically change the FM station to the one with traffic announcements.
Our ~2012 Škoda Octavia had typical Volkswagen Audi Group navigation built in. It would receive data about traffic jams in the background, and incorporate it into route/navigation decisions.
Not sure if switch from FM to DAB carried that over too. Kind of doubtful since mobile phones took over navigation even before Android/iOS Auto stuff showed up.
I recently learned that captions on BBC are teletext based (page 888) so I turned them on and got surprised that it's still working that way - especially considering I'm watching it basically via IPTV (using Dutch KPNs Android SmartTV app).
The 888 in the top right corner back in the day: https://youtu.be/rAk94cq23HQ?si=JLJMSqbUjKUsFcdQ just amazing that teletext was understood and ubiquitous to such an extent that just putting three numbers was important and clear enough to share in these very sparse idents.
If you're thinking about Linux/Gentoo - but don't want to spend a lot of time for maintaining/updating and most importantly not need time to fix stuff that broke because you didn't update it in months...
I would suggest Calculate Linux.
It's 100% Gentoo, with additional customization (e.g. profiles presetting not just sane defaults, but also things you usually want on desktop [e.g. samba, network printers ...]), there are pre built binaries for all profiles and basically all the software (but you can still override some and get it compiled with or without specific features) ...
And perhaps most importantly - there's extra tooling/automation around the Gentoo/portage updates and such.
With vanilla Gentoo - beyond regular PITA to update packages due to various package/use-flags conflicts (which would make me do it even less often). I was also regularly (every few years) having to reinstall Gentoo because my glibc/bintools/python/etc were so far behind that during system update something would break and fixing it was basically reinstalling Gentoo from stage3 tarball.
It's been ~10 years that I've "switched" to Calculate Linux - and it's "cl-update" was automatically solving even those things that would've left me with world update broken system.
And for the things that aren't in official portage nor one of 100s of other repositories - you basically just drop an ebuild file (that LLM can do for you ) into your own local repo.
There's already tooling for using say .deb or golang packages - but still having them installed as proper Gentoo/portage ones.
oh thats nice.
maybe if i ever feeling rebuilding i'll look into it again.
but truly, I've been using this install since 33... and am on 44 atm. never have i has such a slick trouble free experience. I've had one nvidia related issue once... I also had to rebuild a mirror once because i wanted to update more than i wanted ZFS, and they were updating the kernel faster than the zfs package was updating. not a big deal. I've moved on happily.
And at the same time, at least for last few years - you can also get the same (same but different) experience/convenience of having binaries available.
The Gentoo profiles mentioned in another comment is what still allows the system to have packages compiled with a consistent subset of things.
I don't see how that particular line of thinking applies when:
1) They continue to have a free version for Windows
2) They continue to have a version for Linux
I just can't see that cost of having a free Linux version (on top having a paid Linux version) is big?
I literally explained the thinking that the free builds on Linux aren't worth it. If you've ever shipped production software, you'd know this. Just because there's a free build available for Windows doesn't mean it costs the company $0 to release the free build. It's a lot of extra time and QA for each variant of a release. There might be many differences between the Windows and Linux builds, such as the Linux builds require proprietary 3rd party code with royalties, and they chose not to eat that cost.
There's no bait and switch. It's just people expecting things for free, as always, when this was never an open source project.
> It's a lot of extra time and QA for each variant of a release.
In Vivado, it's the same release for the free and expensive builds on both Linux and Windows. It's just a question of the installed license file/license limits.
> such as the Linux builds require proprietary 3rd party code with royalties, and they chose not to eat that cost.
This ignores that their revenue comes from selling chips. The software enables that. No software, no chip sales. This can only have a negative impact on their sales.
Think academic and small companies who don't pay for support opening corner case issues all the time publicly. They want none of the complex support unless you pay (reasonable imo).
And for those who forget RHEL for instance has to pay salaries to back port fixes and such and the same logic applies here.
Xilinx is/was an FPGA company until AMD bought them. Their primary revenue stream is selling chips. This is the equivalent of going back to the days of paid C/C++ compilers (anybody else remember that?).
Again that reasoning falls apart because they offer free Windows version. So basically those academic/small companies are incentivised to switch to Windows (or use Wine/Proton) to use this software?
And that's aside the fact that if support cases are the actual issue - they could (and probably already do that) just not allow free users to open/submit bug/support cases.
What Dutch government/politicians seems to be "ahead" compared to other countries - is combination of narrow or short sightedness and (over)correction trough rules, laws and regulations.
Like giving subsidies and tax breaks for electrical cars, rooftop solar panels and mandating household switch from gas (LPG and such) to electric heating and cooking. And ignoring industry professionals for decades saying the distribution network won't scale.
More of the same with stuff like 30% tax rule for expats, which was originally introduced as cost saving measures because actually doing bookkeeping for expatriate expenses was costing government more money. But then more recently expat tax breaks have been reduced and phased out "because cost saving". Meanwhile employers have trouble finding highly skilled workers. And we're limiting numbers of foreign students in universities (by forcing them to do it in Dutch instead of English).
Some Bulgarians cheated/defrauded Dutch tax returns or such - and "solution" was ML/AI reviewing things - but it turned out to be broken/biased and (ab)used for other things - leading to the whole toeslag scandal and government resigning.
Same for nitrogen vs lack of housing... And many more.
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