Nah @exu is right: non-IT focused companies do not have the skills or desire to reliably set up and maintain these systems. There is no benefit to them creating their own server stack based on a community distro to save a few bucks.

Smaller companies will hire MSPs to get them setup and maintain what they need. And medium to large size companies would want an enterprise solution (IE: RHEL) they can reliably integrate into their operations.

This is for a few high value reasons. Taking Red Hat as an example:

1. Standardization (IE: they can hire people with RedHat certificates and they will be a few steps ahead in ramping up to internal systems)
2. Vendor support (IE: if something critical isn’t working they can get quick support from a Red Hat technician and get it resolved quickly)
3. Reliability (IE: all software is backed and tested by Red Hat and if anything breaks from a package update its on Red Hat to fix)

When lots of money is on the line companies want as many safety/contingency plans as they can get which is why RedHat makes sense.

The only companies that will roll their own solution are either very small with knowledgeable IT people (smaller startups), or MASSIVE companies that will create very custom solutions and then train their own IT operations divisions (talking like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon levels).

Not to say what Red Hat did is justified or good, because hampering the FOSS ecosystem is destructive overall, but just putting this into context.

I’ve been checking for the Flatpak daily 😭

This is where you can track the issue

Another shitty thing about Plexamp is there is no easy way to download your entire library in a converted format and auto download any new additions.

The developer said that “this is not the intended use of Plexamp”, but the reasoning is flawed IMO

The only thing keeping me on Plex is iOS downloads supported natively.

The second Swiftfin gets that I will be switching fully to Jellyfin

Unless Plex adds something new and exciting that pushes them beyond FOSS offerings

For anyone looking for a chair that doesn’t want to spend >$1000 or get a gaming chair, I recommend looking for an office furniture reseller in your area.

There are a lot of shops that buy used furniture from companies either going out of business or moving.

I was able to get a new Steelcase for like half the price, still had its tags and packaging. Granted this was during covid where a lot of businesses were dumping their in-office supplies, but still worth a look.

Restic and borg are the best I’ve tried for remote, encrypted backups.

I personally use Restic for my remote backups and rsync for my local.

Restic beats out borg for me because there are a lot more compatible storage options.

YES this.

Back when I was on Windows 10, I meticulously deleted all pre-installed crap (candy crush, Netflix, etc.), and turned off all tracking, ads, etc.

About a month later they pushed a major update and all those pre-installed apps were back, with more. All the settings I turned off were reverted.

I won’t ever go back. The only games I really can’t play are all online (League, etc.), and TBH good riddance. Wasn’t adding value to my life anyway.

I was on Pop for a while, if I was still using an Nvidia card I would still be on Pop. Their built in support/installer is just so convenient and seamless for the most part.

Nvidia is just such a pain on Linux. Like if it works then great, but I have had just so many minor problems in the past.

My Nvidia card is essentially just a backup now in my server in case I need video output for a terminal.

Used: yes

Contributed: no

I know I know, I am sorry. Just started using it a few months ago (through Organic Maps on iOS), and honestly have started using it more than Google/Apple Maps. This is a good reminder for me so get off my ass and start contributing.

Yeah I saw a post about it a long time ago on Reddit for users with lots of devices

Basically it is just setting up one or two “central devices” that know all the client devices, but not linking the client devices individually.

IE: One server is connected to your phone, laptop, tablet, desktop, etc. But the phone is not directly connected to your laptop or desktop or tablet.

To be fair I don’t actually know if this is the best approach anymore or if just connecting all of them in a mesh is better 🤷

Here is a forum post describing it.

Plex, PiHole, Photoprism, Home Assistant, Syncthing in a hub and spoke config, Caddy for reverse proxy, custom containers for: yt-dlp, restic, and rsync.

From a user perspective, Distrobox is a tool that lets you “spin up any distro inside your terminal”.

You can basically create a mini Linux environment of any distro that you can access through the terminal. You can set it to share your home folder, our create a new home folder just for that mini environment.

Behind the scenes Distrobox is creating and managing containers through Podman or Docker. You could technically achieve the same thing by manually setting up Podman containers, Distrobox just makes it very easy to create and maintain those containers with the correct permissions. It also has useful tools where you could install an app in a Distrobox container, but then add that app to your host OS app list.

This makes it especially useful for immutable OSs. Instead of adding packages to your base OS, which should be kept as minimal as possible, you can just install them in a Distrobox, so your host’s root filesystem is unaffected.

I daily drive Fedora Silverblue on my laptop and distrobox has been great.

I have layered only two packages: USB Guard and Distrobox. I run syncthing in a rootless podman container, and the rest goes through Distrobox.

I was even able to setup ProtonVPN in distrobox and it functions as if it was directly installed on the host (just need to map your home folder and some permissions).

I hope that immutable becomes either the standard or at least all major distros start offering it as an alternative. Makes everything foolproof and makes me much more willing to try new packages and tools because I can always just roll back.

The only thing that would really make it perfect is if files in /etc/ where also handled in a similar manner. IE: Can make changes to configuration files, and easily roll back to defaults at any time.