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

“If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream.”

Dude actually said that out loud. Wild. Teach me how to give that little of a fuck.

How do these things not have unbrickable A/B firmware partitions by now? Even I have that on a $2 microcontroller. Self-test doesn’t pass after an update? Instant automatic rollback to the previous working partition.

I wonder what the aim is. Trying to get relevant again? I haven’t used Winamp in many many years. I’m a Spotify / YouTube kind of guy now. I drank the koolaid. It’s a little late and things like VLC have a pretty solid offering now, without all gotchas that this will have (such as you apparently can’t call it Winamp and will have to sign away a sacrificial child to actually get the code)

The internet is not ready for me

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.

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’m surprised they kept at it for as long as they did.

https://everynoise.com

Every music genre you can think of, and then some. I finally found out what the stuff I like is called.

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

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.

I hear Mint is pretty good

I’ve been meaning to switch to something else for this and other reasons, it’s just that everything I google on the bing is written for an Ubuntu system ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it’s hard to wade against the current