TCB13

TCB13 , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to piracy in best usenet group

If “feds decide to do something about piracy” I’m sure as shit your cheapo VPN isn’t going to protect you against them. People bought into all the marketing from VPN providers, that’s what’s really going on.

TCB13 , 5 months ago to selfhosted in I really wish Proxmox had an official Terraform provider

It’s a bit hard to search info about it with the name. But it’s a fantastic project

Searching for LXD usually returns more useful information… Incus is just a fork as you know.

TCB13 , 5 months ago to linux in Immutable Distros: What you should know - An introduction into image based systems (Part 1)

Great post, lots of detailed information for new users. Now I’m gonna tell everyone what you conveniently omitted about what’s driving immutable distros and what your “future” section should’ve looked like.

Immutable distros solve the same problem that was solved years ago with a twist: they’re are all about making thing that were easy into complex, “locked down”, “inflexible”, bullshit to justify jobs and payed tech stacks and a soon to be released property orchestration and/or repository solution.

We had Ansible, containers, ZFS and BTRFS that provided all the required immutability needed already but someone decided that is is time to transform proven development techniques in the hopes of eventually selling some orchestration and/or other proprietary repository / platform in the likes of Docker / Kubernetes. Docker isn’t totally proprietary and there’s Podman but it doesn’t really matter because in the end people/companies will pick the proprietary / closed option just because “it’s easier to use” or some other specific thing that will be good on the short term and very bad on the long term.

“Oh but there are truly open-source immutable distros” … true, but again this hype is much like Docker and it will invariably and inevitably lead people down a path that will then require some proprietary solution or dependency somewhere (DockerHub) that is only required because the “new” technology itself alone doesn’t deliver as others did in the past.

People now popularizing immutable distributions clearly haven’t had any experience with it before the current hype. Immutable systems aren’t a new thing we’ve been using them since the raise of MIPS devices (mostly routers and IOTs) and we’ve have been moving to ARM and mutable solutions because they’re objectively better, easier to manage and more reliable.

The RedHat/CentOS fiasco was another great example of these ecosystems and once again all those people who got burned instead of moving to a true open-source distribution such as Debian decided to pick Ubuntu - it’s just a matter of time until Canonical decides to do some move.

Nowadays, without Internet and the ecosystems people can’t even do shit anymore and the current state of things when it comes to embedded development is a great example of this. In the past people were able to program AVR / PIC / Arduino boards offline and today everyone depends on the PlatformIO + VSCode ecosystem to code and deploy to the devices. VSCode is “open-source” until you realize that 1) the language plugins that you require can only compiled and run in official builds of VSCode and 2) Microsoft took over a lot of the popular 3rd party language plugins, repackage them with a different license… making it so if you try to create a fork of VSCode you can’t have any support for any programming language because it won’t be an official VSCode build. MS be like :).

All those things that make development very easy and lowered the bar for newcomers have the dark side of being designed to reconfigure and envelope the way development gets done so someone can profit from it. That is sad and above all set dangerous precedents and creates generations of engineers and developers that don’t have truly open tools like we did.

This is all about commoditizing development - it’s a negative feedback loop that never ends. Yes, I say commoditizing development because if you look at it those techs only make it easier for the entry level developer and companies instead of hiring developers for their knowledge and ability to develop they’re just hiring “cheap monkeys” that are able to configure those technologies and cloud platforms to deliver something. At the end of the they the business of those cloud companies is transforming developer knowledge into products/services that companies can buy with a click.

TCB13 , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to piracy in best usenet group

I won’t pay for piracy and that includes a pointless piece of shit VPN that won’t protect you anyways if things get serious.

TCB13 , 5 months ago to linux in I'm working on a distro recommendation flowchart/ list for newcomers and need your input please! (Post is not only this picture btw and is mainly text)

Here’s a revised flowchart for you:

• You need professional software like MS Word, Autodesk, Adobe, NI Circuit Design for collaboration with others > Stick with windows;
• Any other case > Install Debian + GNOME + Software as Flatpaks. You’ll get a rock solid system with the latest software;

Done.

TCB13 , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to piracy in best usenet group

Paying for piracy is pointless and stupid. Piracy means free and solid access to content and paying for it means the complete subversion of that. 👎 👎

For that I would be better by just paying for some stupid streaming service and having something more convenient / not having to deal with anything.

Long live torrents.

TCB13 , 5 months ago to selfhosted in I really wish Proxmox had an official Terraform provider

Very new? The thing has been around since 2018. Anyways I know for a fact that a few cloud providers and some enterprise types are using it to power their infrastructure.

TCB13 , 5 months ago to selfhosted in I really wish Proxmox had an official Terraform provider

XCP-ng has an official terraform provider, whilst ESXi and Proxmox don’t. The unfortunate part is that there isn’t even a provider for KVM, which really sucks.

Use LXD/Incus instead, there’s a provider for it.

TCB13 , 5 months ago to selfhosted in I really wish Proxmox had an official Terraform provider

Well Proxmox doesn’t have it… however LXD/Incus has one. Maybe you should try it as a replacement for Proxmox? I mean it’s new, new generation software, can be installed in a clean Debian 12 setup from the repositories and does both containers and VMs.

TCB13 , 5 months ago to linux in Is there a downside to Flatpak?

but I suspect something will come along to address these issues and snatch the market away from Flatpak.

I believe it could only be fixed by a team from GNOME or KDE, they’re the one in a position to develop something like Flatpak but deeply integrated with the system instead of trying to get around it.

For what’s worth Apple did a very good job when it came to the isolation and containerization of desktop applications, but again only possible because they control both sides.

Apple enforces a LOT of isolaton, they call it sandboxed apps and it is all based on capabilities, you may enjoy reading this. Applications get their isolated space at ~/Library/Containers and are not allowed to just write to any file system path they want.

A sandboxed app may even think it is writing into a system folder for preference storage for example - but the system rewrites the path so that it ends up in the Container folder instead. For example under macOS apps typically write their data to ~/Library/Application Support. A sandboxed app cannot do that - and the data is instead written beneath the ~/Library/Containers/app-id path for that app.

And here’s how good Apple is, any application, including 3rd party tools running inside Terminal will be restricted:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/1d4655fa-f956-47fe-8797-130741a2e6bb.png

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/54effa3d-9f3b-48fc-a1a1-457d6d6b484b.png

I bet most people weren’t expecting that a simple ls would trigger the sandbox restrictions applied to the Terminal application. The best part is that instead of doing what Flatpak does (just blocking things and leaving the user unable to to anything) the system will prompt you for a decision.

I believe this was the best way to go about things but it would require to get a DE team to make it in a cohesive and deeply integrated with the system. Canonical could do it… but we all know how Canonical is.

TCB13 , 5 months ago to selfhosted in What's Your Preferred Server Monitoring Method?

systemd can be used to run whatever notification scheme you would like to use whenever some service fails. Here’s an example of how to do it: baeldung.com/…/systemd-service-fail-notification

TCB13 , 5 months ago to selfhosted in What's Your Preferred Server Monitoring Method?

I used it as well until I found out I could just do it with systemd. baeldung.com/…/systemd-service-fail-notification

TCB13 , 5 months ago to selfhosted in What's Your Preferred Server Monitoring Method?

So damn accurate ahhaha

TCB13 , 5 months ago to linux in Is there a downside to Flatpak?

Yes, I love it and don’t get me wrong but there are many downsides and they all result from poor planning and/or bad decisions around how flatpak was built. Here are a few:

• Poor integration with the system: sometimes works against you and completely bypasses your system instead of integrating with it / using its features better. To me it seems more like the higher levels are missing pieces to facilitate communication between applications (be it protocols, code or documentation) and sometimes it is as simple as configuration;
• Overhead, you’ll obviously end up with a bunch of copies of the same libraries and whatnot for different applications;
• No reasonable way to use it / install applications offline. This can become a serious pain point if you’re required to work in air gapped systems or you simply want to level of conservation for the future - it doesn’t seem reasonable at all to have to depend on some repository system that might gone at some point. Note that they don’t provide effective ways to mirror the entire repository / host it locally nor to download some kind of installable package for what you’re looking for;
• A community that is usually more interested in beating around the bush than actually fixing what’s wrong. Eg. a password manager (KeePassXC) and a browser (Firefox/Ungoogled) both installed via flatpak can’t communicate with each other because developers seem to be more interested in pointing fingers on GitHub than fixing the issue.

Flatpak acts as a restrictive sandbox experience that is mostly about “let’s block things and we don’t care about anything else”. I don’t think it’s reasonable to have situations like applications that aren’t picking the system theme / font without the user doing a bunch of links or installing more copies of whatever you already have. Flatpak in general was a good ideia, but the system integration execution is a shame.

TCB13 , 5 months ago to piracy in Italy’s new Piracy Shield has just gone into operation and is already harming human rights there

You may face criminal charges if you’re from another EU country. Or if your business is very large the Italian government gets really interested they may be able to ask other govts for help.