vampatori

vampatori , 11 months ago to linux in Anyone else starting to favor Flatpak over native packages?

Containerised everything is the future of computing and I think we’ll look back on how we do things currently with horror!

But yes, I am slowly starting to use more contained desktop applications. Server-wise, everything I deploy is now in containers.

vampatori , 11 months ago to linux in Comparing Ubuntu vs macOS for enterprise developers | Ubuntu Blog

I chose Ubuntu for my desktop/laptop because I chose Ubuntu for our servers. While we now have the servers setup such that we hardly touch them directly, I’ve found it to be incredibly valuable to be using the same technologies, tools, and processes daily on desktop as I need on our servers.

It boggles my mind how many organisations I’ve worked for that almost exclusively develop for Linux deployment use Windows as their primary desktop environment. It causes nothing but trouble. We’ve got Windows if we need it, I’m a big proponent of the best tool for the job - and what the company paying wants! - but Linux is our primary desktop environment.

vampatori , 11 months ago to linux in Auto "cd" in Bash with silent output

Ahh! I didn’t see that! Thanks.

vampatori , 11 months ago to technology in Twitter traffic is 'tanking' as Meta's Threads hits 100 million users

“Out of the frying pan, into the fire”

vampatori , 11 months ago to linux in Good printers?

We’ve got some Brother laser printers at work and they’ve been great. We get third-party toner from a local company for peanuts too, as well as sending them the old cartridges to reuse/recycle. If I ever need a printer at home, this is the route I’ll go!

EDIT: Also, checkout company closing auctions (there’s a few around again!) and you can pick-up some decent office stuff including printers for cheap!

vampatori , 11 months ago to linux in Auto "cd" in Bash with silent output

I did not know about the shopt command! Very interesting, thank you.

However, while your description refers to a GitHub Gist, there doesn’t seem to be a link to it.

vampatori , 11 months ago to linux in On Corporations and Linux

I think the most interesting thing out of the Red Hat/CentOS/downstream thing was that Red Hat used the absolute classic argument against FOSS - “they’re getting value out of this without contributing back”. The argument that Red Hat themselves spent so long fighting against and building their company around proving that argument wrong.

I think it shows a shift in mind-set, perhaps born from the IBM purchase, perhaps as they start to feel the squeeze, and that they no longer fully believe in FOSS.

But it’s early days, only time will tell - certainly there seems to be a fair few shifts going on at the moment though!

vampatori , 11 months ago to linux in On Corporations and Linux

I think all the flexibility and distributed nature of open source is simultaneously it’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. It allows us to do so much, to tailor it to our specific needs, to remix and share, and to grow communities around common goals. But at the same time, those communities so rarely come together to agree on standards, we reinvent the wheel over and over, and so we can flounder vs big corporations with more clearly defined leadership. Flexibility and options seems to lead to an inability to compromise.

But also I think open source and standards have become a battleground for Big Tech, with different mega-corps looking to capitalise on their ideas and hinder those of their competitors. Microsoft trying to push TypeScript into the ECMCA Script standard, Google trying to force AMP down our throats, Apple saying fuck-off to web standards/applications, the whole Snaps/Flatpak/Appimage thing, WebAssembley not having access to the DOM, etc.

I think one of the great things that open source does is that it effectively puts the code in people’s hands and it’s up to them to get value out of that however they can. But so often now it’s these mega-corps that can garner the most value out of them - they can best market their offers, collect the most data to drive the software, bring to bare the most compute power, buy up and kill any threats to their business, and ultimately tip the balance very firmly in their favour.

Open source software needs contributors, without them it’s nothing - sure you can fork the codebase, but can you fork the team?

Most people do the work because they love it - it’s not even because they particularly want to use the software they create, it’s the act of creating it that is fun and engaging for them. But I wonder if perhaps we’re starting to cross a threshold where more restrictive licenses could start to gain more popularity - to bring back some semblance of balance between the relationship of community contributors and mega-corps.

vampatori , 11 months ago to linux in Is there any reason NOT to use openSUSE Tumbleweed as a desktop OS?

I used it for about a year and it was good - I had some issues with some bits of my laptop hardware working out of the box, and I sometimes got into an error when doing an update due to mirror synchronization. If you use see an error similar to this, just give it a while before updating again:

<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">Downloaded data exceeded the expected filesize
</span>

In the end I moved away to match my server environment. Initially to Fedora (CentOS server) but then to Ubuntu (I was mid upgrading from C7 to C8 when Red Hat cut the C8 SLA and discontinued it, so I jumped ship). Both Fedora and Ubuntu are really solid and support absolutely every feature of all my hardware out of the box - I’ve come to really appreciate their stability now.

vampatori , 11 months ago to selfhosted in Defeated by NGINX

Glad you sorted it though! It’s a nightmare when you get such an opaque error and there’s so many moving parts that could be responsible!

vampatori , 11 months ago to selfhosted in Defeated by NGINX

Assume nothing! Test every little assumption and you’ll find the problem. Some things to get you started:

• Does the “app” domain resolve to the app container’s IP from within the nginx container?
• Can you proxy_pass to the host:port directly rather than using an upstream definition? If not, what about IP:port?
• Is the http(s) connection to the server (demo.example.com) actually going to your nginx instance? Shut it down and see if it changes.
• If it works locally on 80, can you get it to work on the VPS on 80?
• Are you using the exact same docker-compose.yaml file for this as locally? If not, what’s different?
• Are you building the image? If so, are you incrementing the version number of the build so it gets updated?
• Is there a firewall running on the host OS? If so, is it somehow interfering? Disable it and see.

While not a direct solution to your problem, I no longer manually configure my reverse proxies at all now and use auto-configuring ones instead. The nginx-proxy image is great, along with it’s ACME companion image for automatic SSL cert generation with certbot - you’ll be up and running in under 30 mins. I used that for a long time and it was great.

I’ve since moved to using Traefik as it’s more flexible and offers more features, but it’s a bit more involved to configure (simple, but the additional flexibility means everything requires more config).

That way you just bring up your container and the reverse proxy pulls meta-data from it (e.g. host to map/certbot email) and off it goes.

vampatori , 11 months ago to gaming in Warhammer’s upcoming fantasy RTS is simple, sleek, and thrilling

I think after Dawn of War III, caution is the key! But yes, this is certainly one to watch!

vampatori , 11 months ago to gaming in whats a game that you got significantly far into, only to realize you were doing something wrong or missing a key feature/ability altogether?

In the original XCOM my brother and I didn’t realise you needed to collect and research everything. We thought it was like a horde-survival game, however it could infact be completed. Learning this years after starting to play was one of my best gaming experiences - I came back to my parents for the weekend just to blow my brother’s mind!

vampatori , 11 months ago to linux in RHEL, Reddit, firing employees in the IT sector: Corporate mentality flexes its muscles

It does feel like there’s been a shift, especially in organisations that use the work of others for their own benefit (e.g. open source, community produced content, etc). It seems like there’s been a real move to have their cake and eat it.

Oracle has just made an aggressive move with regards to Java licensing too, they’re now charging as much as $15/month/employee to use their Java runtime on the desktop/server. Their FAQ even points you to OpenJDK if you don’t want to pay, which is strange - it makes me think the relationship between Oracle and the OpenJDK will be ending sometime in the not-so-distant future. There are several Java projects I’ve done where that would just become non-viable as it was a project for a single department in a large company.

Software developers are one of the most altruistic groups of people - it’s amazing just how much time and effort they put into things that they get no financial return on, only the love of actually doing it. And people that dedicate their time and effort to online communities, education, and so on are equally amazing.

But I think it’s time to stop being so naive and realise that many large corporate entities are abusing this relationship for their own gain.

vampatori , 11 months ago to books in What are you reading this week? [July 3-July 9, 2023]

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Somewhat randomly I read The Remains of the Day a little while back and loved it, even though it’s entirely unlike the stories I usually read.

I’m really enjoying Klara and the Sun too - in-particular I’m enjoying how the story has these quite sharp shifts in where you think the story is going, but they’re just dropped casually, almost as a throw-away line, and you’re left thinking about the huge implications of so few words.

I also just love Ishiguro’s writing style and creativity - it’s like he’s painting a picture with black on white, and that picture is great - but the white space forms a picture too, and with that he adds so much more.

With each story he’s setting out to take you on a specific emotional journey, but he’s not holding your hand and showing you so much as guiding you with as little effort as possible such that when you get there, you feel like you got there on your own, and so it hits so much harder as a result - even though he very carefully led you. It’s hard to describe! But it’s amazing, I’d be surprised if I’ve not read everything of his soon!