This feels like a very bad joke.

You could buy one of those embedded CPU/RAM motherboard, 3d print a tablet like case for it + design a screen for that case, install linux with a GUI supporting touchscreen and you created a much better product for the fraction of the cost.

How do they even find customers to buy this thing?

Oracle Linux is 100% the cause of this change.

Imagine supporting 2 other distros to make your own enterprise linux that is your only source of money through optional subscriptions to it.

Then some other big unethical corporation (much like your own parent company) comes in, use the GPL license to clone it and slap an “Oracle db certified” sticker on it. Finally, they decide to use the same subscription model as you except they get insane margins since you did 99% of the work for them.

But looking at what Rocky Linux is saying publicly. It’s not impossible that Red Hat won’t levy their right to remove access to the sources to non-commercial forks of RHEL.

Even if you own an instance, the tools are non-existent.

Some basics things that should be present but aren’t:

• A user directory for search and deletion
• Possibility to block communities for your whole instance
• Basic statistics. Both on the community and instance level
• Possibility to mute a user without banning them
• Allow creating a community but only after admin approval (right now it’s free for all or admin only)
• Easy access to server logs without having to dig directly inside the hosting server
• Importing block/allow lists for federations using a file or url
• Adding an administrator from the server admin UI

The API is also lacking in a way that some of those things are not possible without deploying your own API talking directly with the postgress database.

For example, if you wanted to see upvote/downvotes for each individual users, the data to calcultate it is in the database but the Lemmy API doesn’t provide that functionality.

While Lemmy is great as a platform, the management side of is glueing everything together just enough to not let it implode.