Regrets aplenty after some of the things I’ve drank, but none of them are about Debian.

I like my Kubernetes setup at work. It runs Nextcloud, Mattermost, GitLab, company website, several embedded firmware OTA update sites, a few internal apps. Nextcloud was pretty easy to install on it with Helm, just a single command line and a yaml file to specify domain, settings, etc. I had some teething issues in my early setup where the database would get wiped inexplicably, but it’s been running smooth for years now. (Yes, I know, bad juju running databases on Kubernetes…I’m used to it and it mostly works)

A little slower by today’s standards, but if your needs are light, it’ll do the job. Keep in mind it only has a gigglebyte of RAM, so its capacity for running things may be limited, especially as docker applications go (since they bring a copy of each dependency). You won’t be able to run something as large as GitLab or Nextcloud, but a smattering of small apps should be within its capabilities

The thing with using the “latest” tag is you might get lucky and nothing bad happens (the apps are pretty stable, fault tolerant, and/or backward compatible), but you also might get unlucky and a container update does break something (think a 1.x going to 2.x one day). Without pinning the container to a specific version, you might have an outage suddenly due to that container becoming incompatible with one of your other applications. I’ve seen this happen a number of times. One example is a frontend (UI) container that updates to no longer be compatible with older versions of the backend and crashes as a result.

If all your apps are pretty much standalone and you trust them to update properly every time a new version of the container is downloaded, then you may never run into the problems that make people say “never use latest”. But just keep an eye out for something like that to happen at some point. You’ll save yourself some time if you have records of what versions are running when everything’s working, and take regular backups of all their data.

I’m not so sure. I seem to be able to find my way around a GitLab project in much fewer moves than a GitHub project. But maybe I’m biased because I use it all the time at work. I know they change the sidebar a lot, though.

The problem child for me right now is a game built in node.js that I’m trying to host/fix. It’s lagging at random with very little reason, crashing in new and interesting ways every day, and resisting almost all attempts at instrumentation & debugging. To the point most things in DevTools just lock it up full stop. And it’s not compatible with most APMs because most of the traffic occurs over websockets. (I had Datadog working, but all it was saying was most of the CPU time is being spent on garbage collection at the time things go wonky–couldn’t get it narrowed down, and I’ve tried many different GC settings that ultimately didn’t help)

I haven’t had any major problems with Nextcloud lately, despite the fragile way in which I’ve installed it at work (Nextcloud and MariaDB both in Kubernetes). It occasionally gets stuck in maintenance mode after an update, because I’m not giving it enough time to run the update and it restarts the container and I haven’t given enough thought to what it’d take to increase that time. That’s about it. Early on I did have a little trouble maintaining it because of some problems with the storage, or the database container deciding to start over and wipe the volume, but nothing my backups couldn’t handle.

I have a hell of a time getting the email to stay working, but that’s not necessarily a Nextcloud problem, that’s a Microsoft being weird about email problem (according to them it is time to let go of ancient apps that cannot handle oauth2–Nextcloud emailer doesn’t support this, same with several other applications we’re running, so we have to do some weird email proxy stuff)

I am not surprised to hear some of the stories in this thread, though. Nextcloud’s doing a lot of stuff. Lots of failure points.

I was able to get a car loan a few years after the bankruptcy. It was dumb, I hadn’t fully figured out my money situation yet. Bankruptcy didn’t fix that spending habit. But that was the tipping point. When my minimum expenses between the car, student loans, and living expenses exactly equaled my salary, I started trying to beat my way out of the mess. The car I currently own, I paid for up front. By the time I bought a house, the bankruptcy had disappeared off my report. Now the plan is pay off the mortgage and never have a credit score again.

I got talked into bankruptcy (by a bankruptcy lawyer, surprise surprise). It cleared $12k of credit cards and bank fees but not the then-$50k of student loans and the spending habits that were the real problem. Now I learned my lesson. No credit cards. Save up and pay. Have an emergency fund that can cover your expenses for months and months in the event you lose your job, or your most expensive unplanned repair. That’s the real life saver.

I’m gonna keep my Christmas tree up all year and just halfassedly redecorate it for each holiday.

Me still trying to figure out how to get it to auto start / auto login on boot on my fresh new Raspberry Pi 5 without locking up at a flashing cursor screen: 😩

Good luck getting all the developers to rewrite their apps. The only reason you had any apps was because it was based on Android so it was little to no effort to port. Going plain ol’ embedded Linux is basically the death knell of your developer story. Source: been there, had no third party apps, switched to Android

16 on the machine I use the most at work. (MacBook Air M1)

Actually, 128 gigglebytes on my home PC, though. I upgraded so I could play pretty Minecraft.

ITT: some people are mad the web became the application platform of choice, in part due to handy dandy cross platform app tools like Electron and accessible languages like JavaScript.

There is no perfect answer. Qt isn’t using the platform’s native capabilities to the fullest extent either. Qt requires a “wrapper” too–all those libraries your app depends on, to name a few (unless you got a commercial license and are compiling statically, you rich devil).

Let’s celebrate the onslaught of apps that work with Linux instead of trying to scare off developers any more than Linux already did. Make love not war. <3

In my experience, Electron and other “web wrapper” apps run just fine and I have enough CPU and RAM to run a dozen of them alongside my 50 browser tabs. Slack, Discord, VSCode, Teams, IRCCloud, it all works fine. Hardware is cheap compared to my time.

All good points. I fully agree, and I deserve it for living on the edge of technology like this. (The cavemen probably burned a few eyebrows off before figuring out not to touch the fire)

Worth noting, I didn’t mean to use snap, it was that “apt install chromium-browser” transparently installed it as a snap and I wasn’t paying attention at the time.

In general I don’t really care one way or another between apt, snap, or just plain downloading the source and doing a good old fashioned build from source like the old days. I just didn’t know to expect this certain installation method to lock out a certain browser feature I needed at the time. Now I know, so I won’t use snap for that (or maybe ever, I’m debating whether I just uninstall it). I wonder what fell out of my brain to make room for that, though. :D

I am pretty sure the no display sleep thing is down to whether I had a VirtualBox machine as the active window when I left it, so my “fix” is just to make sure I click some other window before I leave the desk. I have had fine experiences running VMs in Windows, nothing to report. I even do crazy stuff like pass through USB devices to the guest machine and all (that seems to work regardless of what host OS I run it on).

I do run into things on Windows and Mac sometimes, to be completely fair. Just fewer and further between. Maybe that’s just because there’s fewer things I can do on them, though. (Can’t build embedded Linux or Android images on them)

It’s worth a whole post of its own. Shame I had to drown it out with the other crap.

I wasn’t trying to use snap, but the apt package did a sneaky and installed the snap for me, as I found out when I hit the about and realized my Chromium was a snap package. They decided to move it to a transition package a few years back and I missed the memo.

Fair point that 20.04 is ancient. However, I have tried 22.04 and some stuff I tried to build with Yocto Project could no longer build, so I left my main machine at 20.04. Or was it the AOSP build that failed? I forget by now. Urgh. So much crap I’ll have to test when switching. :(

To keep this post short and sweet, I laser focused on the one issue that most recently grinded my gears. I can get rid of snap, but then, what’s going to happen next? That’s all I’m saying, really. There’s no perfect story, even my Mac drives me bonkers at times (yes thank you I know I removed the drive without ejecting). But yeah, should really try something different than Ubuntu at some point, or start fixing some of the stuff that bugs me instead of banging my head on the wall about it. I used to fix stuff. Even contributed some code to a few open source projects over the years. I’m just always trying to deal with something else at the time I run into these things and don’t have the patience to engineer my way out of it in the heat of the moment. I’m a whiny baby and I’d rather it just be fixed for me.

I whine about something something Ubuntu. I should probably switch to something else. But I decided to spend my time typing words instead.

I’ve been itching to jump onto KDE Plasma. I work with Qt/QML a lot, which means I’d be right at home to tinker around with things. Actually recently developed an embedded Linux demo unit which used a small part of KDE Framework 6. Good stuff.