The article is from the guardian ( a reputable UK newspaper) reporting on an article by 'Which?' a UK consumer magazine with some very specific standards. The Which? Press release has citations.

This is the second order effect that doesn't seem to have been at the centre of the conversation. It's all very well if you are an established company who took out an office lease at the beginning of the 2020s, you have a bunch of boomer managers who basically need daycare, and the HIPPO at the top is also a boomer acting all entitled about having people come back to the office.

It's something else. When you're starting a new business and seeking investment capital, do you think your investors are going to want to spend their money on office accommodation and ability staff like receptionists, cleaners etc, if they think they can get equal or better results without it?

I don't know how 'irreversible' it might be in this particular situation, but I've had to fall back to one of my alt accounts on another instance. I'm not sure how sensible it is to stay on a smaller instance where the admins think it's clever to deploy a pre-release server version to production without notice, testing, or a rollback strategy

It didn't used to be this way, but modern power adaptors are required to implement standby power:

In the past, standby power was largely a non-issue for users, electricity providers, manufacturers, and government regulators. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, awareness of the issue grew and it became an important consideration for all parties. Up to the middle of the decade, standby power was often several watts or even tens of watts per appliance. By 2010, regulations were in place in most developed countries restricting standby power of devices sold to one watt (and half that from 2013).

Connect. I have jerboa and sync installed but the regex filters in connect are are a killer feature and I'm quite happy with the app

Its belly baking in the hot sun

This needs to be the top comment in my view.

Pretty much any new laptop running any operating system will be able to adequately do word processing but they will all feel different and they will be a range of price points. This is why involving your wife who will be the user for this device is critical. One of the key advantages with Apple is that you can try out every current model in person at an Apple store. I don't know how easy it is for you to get to one, but if you have the option I would definitely recommend sending your wife to do that.

I've been where this article describes, so has the author. Excellent article.

We keep hearing about 'productivity' in this context. Let's explore that - back in the days when people were 5 days/week in the office, supervisors and managers concentrated on attendance and punctuality. They still could but now they are focusing on being in the office. In both cases these are proxy measures- they don't directly measure output. What is this 'productivity' here? Because the actual verifiable data tells the opposite story

SystemD replaced a variety of Linux init systems across different distros almost 10 years ago now but it is still resented by a significant and vocal section of the Linux community.

Devuan is a fork of the Debian Linux distribution that uses sysvinit, runit or OpenRC instead of systemd.

Realistically, at this point, non-SystemD distros are of niche interest. Devuan is one of the distros available in that niche

Article:

fortune.com

Most bosses regret how they mandated workers return to the office. They blamed it on not having enough data

Jane Thier 5–6 minutes

Why aren’t workers particularly appreciating—much less adhering to—return-to-office mandates? Probably because adults don’t like being ordered around.

“People do want structure, and people like boundaries,” former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell last year. “But they don’t like to be told what to do, so I think the secret is to not make them feel like their autonomy is being denied or that their ideas aren’t important, while still giving some structure.”

If only managers had taken the hint. Four in five (80%) of bosses told workplace software firm Envoy that had they had a better grasp on their workplace data, they would have taken a starkly different approach to their return-to-office plans. The problem, they said: They didn’t have access to data that would help them make their decision. In a white paper report, Envoy surveyed 1,156 U.S.-based executives and workplace managers whose employees operate on some form of hybrid schedule.

Over half (54%) of managers told Envoy they’ve had to forgo making a critical decision about the workplace because they lacked the requisite data to support it. Without that data, nearly a quarter of them admit to making decisions based on “gut instinct,” which naturally leads to resentment and disappointment. Fifty-seven percent of bosses said if they had better access to data, they could better measure the success of their in-office policies.

One such example is Amazon, whose RTO plan was admittedly prompted by the feelings of senior leadership, not hard data. “It’s time to disagree and commit. We’re here, we’re back—it’s working,” Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, reportedly said of in-person work. “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”

It’s difficult to ascertain just how effective in-person days are compared to at-home days, especially when actual productivity could vary based on any number of factors not necessarily related to location. It’s even harder for companies who operate on an ad hoc basis, letting individual teams decide for themselves when to come in. Though experts speak highly of this kind of “organized hybrid,” it can be difficult to assess its effectiveness at a company level. “With so much variability, it’s difficult to know how to improve efficiency in order to save critical budget,” Brooks Gooding, a workplace experience program manager at a software firm called Braze, said in the report.

Braze operates on a hybrid plan with little consistency in attendance rates, which, as Envoy wrote, can make it “impossible for workplace managers to know how many people are on-site on any given day, and how to best allocate space and resources across the organization.” The RTO mismatch

Envoy’s data lays bare a fundamental mismatch that’s endured since the earliest days of the pandemic: Most bosses would rather have their workers where they can see them. Most workers demand a bit more latitude than that.

Granted, there are solid arguments for both time spent in the office and time spent on the couch. On one hand, remote work is proven to be between 10% and 20% less productive and can weaken morale and bonding, especially among younger workers and new workforce entrants. But people still overwhelmingly prefer at least a few days per week at home, arguing that physical office presence is more trouble than it’s worth and is rarely necessary to complete a task.

Ideally, a mix of both options—at the workers’ discretion—should fix the problem. Workers are flocking to jobs with flexibility, which has quickly become a must-have for most white-collar industries rather than a nice-to-have.

But many bosses are getting impatient, and many are using the approaching Labor Day holiday as an occasion to officially put “work from anywhere” policies to bed, whether workers like it or not. Alongside the usual suspects (like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs), those even include formerly quite lenient companies, like Meta, Google, and Salesforce.

Despite the fact that remote workers make more money and have fewer expenses, lower stress levels, and more time for family and errands, the office isn’t likely to disappear. In fact, workers can even be excited by the prospect—if they think it’s their idea. Data from Unispace found that a third of workers felt “happy, motivated, and excited” about an office return, but felt none of those things when the return was mandated.

As Atlassian’s Annie Dean put it, productivity, innovation, and creativity are “how-to-work problems, not where-to-work problems,” which will be solved only by an overhaul of how we understand work.

“This is a watershed moment of innovation of how work gets done,” Dean told Fortune, “but we’re still talking about the f–king watercooler.”

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