theroff

Meanwhile I've been arguing with council about getting bike racks at a new-ish shopping centre (a few years old) that is legally required to have one.

(Technically they do have a bike rack, but it's on B2 of the carpark hidden behind a car wash and completely unsigned)

Bash scripts will only get you so far and I can wholly recommend Ansible for automation.

Basically the main advantage of Ansible is that its builtin tasks are "idempotent" which means you can re-run them and end up with the same result. Of course it is possible to do the same with bash scripts, but you may require more checks in place.

The other advantage of Ansible is that there are hundreds of modules for configuring a lot of different things on your system(s) and most are clear and easy to understand.

You could use HAProxy on the client side to load balance apps in multiple locations, but it really depends on the application.

I like to manage my software with Ansible but Docker stack files might make it simple enough for you.

Yeah, sorry it was a long time ago (like 10+ years) but I checked and it would've been the --overwrite arg.

The manpage for the older ntfsclone command has it:

Clone NTFS on /dev/hda1 to /dev/hdc1: ntfsclone --overwrite /dev/hdc1 /dev/hda1

Moral of the story was to RTFM 😂

ntfsclone /dev/sdc /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb was a blank filesystem and /dev/sdc was my Windows filesystem.

ntfsclone man page

It ran for less than a second and didn't take me long to figure out what happened. That's the story of how I stopped using Windows.

Yeah, too frequent and too buggy. It got annoying having to do upgrades every six months and have to deal with all the new bugs that came with it.

Basically give me Debian-style biannual releases or Arch-style rolling releases.

There's also dotnet (.NET Core) available on most distros which is an open source subset of .NET by Microsoft

See https://fiodar.substack.com/p/differences-between-mono-and-net-core

I use Debian at home on my homeserver and a mix of Debian and Arch for my workstations. Most of my stuff is managed with Ansible to make rebuilding easier and most workloads in podman containers.

Personally I don't overthink the distro thing. I recently started using Arch and quite like it. I've noticed packages that are available in Debian but not Arch and vice-versa. Debian Stable is nice because it's just, well, stable.

Fedora has an annoying release cadence IMO. I have experienced desktop bugs in the early GA releases before which put me off. If I wanted instability I would sooner go with Arch (and I am yet to have many issues with Arch yet).

If I were to go with a BSD for a home server it would probably be OpenBSD or FreeBSD. OpenBSD has vmm and a bunch of tooling around it, and FreeBSD has bhyve and jails. I haven't taken the plunge because Linux works and it's what I know.

These days I hear about people using proxmox on their homeserver with LXC containers and/or VMs.

Trying to talk to a human at the big tech companies is nigh impossible these days. It's actually quite concerning how unaccountable they have become. If a billionaire can't do it, what chance do us commoners have?

Last edited 2014-01-12 12:30:18 UTC

Thanks, I wasn't sure what the situation with Darwin was. Android is definitely more free than iOS, but the spirit of AOSP is dead and many of the old AOSP apps have been discontinued. For example Google no longer maintains a calendar app and so LineageOS maintains its own fork. Google's proprietary suite is front and centre of a lot of the Android distros except for LineageOS and co.

We really didn't say the same thing