Sure there would be; raise funds: tax, pay profits: reduce tax / tax breaks. The real differentiator is in the ability to choose who your shareholders are with less scrutiny.
Only as many as are needed to physically rack the hardware and do hand-on maintenance. The people actually using the servers shouldn’t be located on-site.
A giant datacenter of AI scale will have a dozen or so contractors for physical plant on-site pretty much every single day as long as the thing is in operation. More if a refresh project is ongoing, which after a few years will be more less all the time.
They certainly are not high density employers, but these huge hyperscale facilities typically employ 150-300 people directly, and probably at least that many on average in contracting roles. They are massive facilities.
> Are these highly qualified people or do you just need to install some parts?
They're not software engineers or data scientists if that's what you mean by "highly qualified".
Datacenters techs do the physical parts of the job we once called "system administrator". That definitely requires skill and attention to detail, not just the ability to "install some parts".
When the tech industry transitioned from on site systems to datacenters and big compute / big data, "system administrator" got split into "site reliability engineer" and "datacenter technician" as they scaled independently, with datacenter tech being focused on manufacturing and physical troubleshooting.
They have always been the "blue collar" workers of tech, both in terms of pay and prestige. Like tech support, the job is considered more of a stepping stone into the operations (not R&D) side of big data companies.
That all said, the qualifications of applicants for a job depend a lot on the labor market, in particular, the desperation of applicants. During the dotcom bust, a lot of CS grads (including me) were applying for technician jobs.
> Great if everything that one wants from their GNU/Linux experience is a command line and TUI.
Regular GUI apps work fine on ChromeOS. There's a flag to enable the GPU in the VM and with it, 3D accelerated GUI apps also mostly work. It's not optimized for gaming if that's what you are referring to though.
I still think that if they'd released an electric Ford Maverick sized pickup instead of the monstrosity that is the Lightning, they would have done much better, but everyone had to run after the story Elon was spinning with the Cybertruck, and unsurprisingly, they are similarly unsuccessful.
Integration, testing, and support are all expensive. Right or wrong, that's a reason why if a laptop "just works" (like a Mac, Windows Thinkpad, or a Chromebook), it probably has proprietary binaries.
Also, if you aren't paying for the OS (via the hardware it's coupled with), you can't expect the OS to have the benefits of tight hardware integration.
Even Framework laptops use proprietary boot firmware, and they've been pretty clear that they only provide support for Ubuntu and Fedora, not the alphabet soup of other Linux desktop distros.
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