KDE Connect is amazing. Also works without KDE.

https://lemmy.world/post/9437528

This is hilarious. Thank you Lemmy!!

I'd be more than happy if this was used. Do whatever you want with it as long as you abide by the CC BY-SA-4.0 license. This means you can share freely and modify as long as you keep the authorship information and share with same license.

I think it's a short term vs long term debate. In the short term snaps are nice. They might help you get that software you want right now. In the long term though, it will only take away some of your rights and make you into a product.

There are also some interesting things to say about wording. Specifically consumer vs user. Software is not consumed, it's used and depending on the specific software, the user might be abused by the people producing and controlling the software.

Spiders are no insects technically. But whatever...

Professional sysadmin here who has been trying to create ansible roles and playbooks to re-create all his VMs.

I have spent a lot of time "packaging" custom web applications (and other stuff) for ubuntu systems and building complex configurations for a system of interacting hosts. Once I had finished writing a role to deploy or update one of those applications, I often found it very hard to use them for maintenance. The biggest problem being that I couldn't remember how to invoke the roles or playbooks to get my desired outcome and what state my systems were in. Another problem with ansible for my usecase is it's slowness. Installing a rather complex package might take minutes on one host.

All in all, I found that I had been doing things the wrong way. Off course, it's nice having all the procedures documented somehow, but if you don't remember what state your machines are in and what tags and roles to apply, it wont be of practical help in your day to day work. My workload is maintaing a bunch of VMs with mostly different sets of packages and config installed, so ansible doesn't play out it strengths of being able to execute things on multiple machines in parallel.

I'm now switching over to a model where I only use ansible to manage installation and configuration tying machines together and where I use debian packaging for, well, packaging. Although it's pretty tough to get into, once you have taken the first hurdles, things fall into place easily. You can do so many things with debian packaging, including installation of custom systemd service units, depend on other packages, distribute customized config files, install custom management scripts. There is even a way to ask questions during installation in an interactive and non interactive way (debconf). Since you target your package for a specific OS and version, you can rely on files being in their usual places (FHS), which makes configuration easy. The nice thing about this model is that I can now use the tools I've been using since ages, to install, update, uninstall, inspect and configure things. On top of that, I could easily distribute our weird to install software to third parties now instead of relying on a broken and long installation procedure.

Sometimes we should just stop reinventing the wheel and just try to understand what previous generations have built (.deb, sql, unix, etc). Sure, the old ways are bad in many ways but they often get the work done.

This being said, I'm happy for people to work on things like nix, guix, ansible etc. They are just not the right tool for my set of skills and problems.

This and on top of being inexact, it's not understandable and un-transparent. These are two of the top reasons to push for free software. Even if the engine executing and teaching models are free, the model itself can't really be considered free because of its lack of transparency.

1000 might by your user's user-id

I think because they want to have files from different packages separate and easily addable and removable using symlinks.

Also some things in the FHS make no sense for modern computers where storage is cheap and system storage is rarely shared amongst systems. The same applies for single-users/desktop machines. But it's the only standard we have so, why not keep it for now.

I would have loved to see the parts that are not under the US-American influence. What are Asian, African or South Americans using?

Flatpaks won't get their libs updated all at once by just updating a library. This can be very bad in cases like bugs in openssl. Instead of just updating one library and all other software benefiting from the fix, with flatpaks, you need to deal with updating everything manually and waiting for the vendor to actually create an update package.

I'm not 100% sure about this. Flatpak has some mechanisms that would allow to manage dependencies in a common fashion.

A floss project's success is not necessarily marked by its market share but often by the absolute benefit it gives to its users. A project with one happy user and developer can be a success.

I spent a few hours making it myself. Of course based on the standard document.

I often wonder as well. Then I think: is this not just the human condition. In any case I seem to score pretty high on those online questionnaires.

Remeber, the more boxes you have, the more advanced you are as an admin! Once you do his job for money, the challenge is the exact opposite. The less parts you have, the better. The more vanilla they are, the better.

Yes, it is. FHS stands for Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

Done!

That doesn't look good :(

Don't worry, the hype will die sooner than later, just like with cryptocurrencies. What will remain are the power and resource hungry statistical models doing nice work in some specific domains, some long faces and some people having made a bunch of money from it. But yeah, the term also makes me angry, that's why I started referring to them as statistical models.

Am I the only one seeing a parallel between the spectrum planned <-> "free"-market economy and classical algorithm <-> statistical model/ML? It seems that some people prefer to have some magic invisible handle their problems instead of doing the tough work. I'm not saying that there is not space for both but we seem to be leaning on the magic side a bit too much lately.

Thanks for the input. Things are complicated: https://askubuntu.com/a/135679 . Apparently it originally meant "user" but then slowly was used for system stuff. So people invented backcronyms.

Afaik guix is very similar to nixos in that respect. The store where applications are installed is called /gnu there.

Mailbox.org is decent as well

I guess the reason it's not in FHS is that FHS is concerned about system wide things whereas /home is the opposite. It's the user's realm.

There is XDG for /home/$user though.

Many FHS things don't make much sense for single-user (human user) systems on modern hardware. /usr/local does though. It's for you (as admin) to install software that doesn't come with the os.

Added to new version. Thanks for the suggestion.

Thanks! Unfortunately I've used closed source whimsical.com for this and don't have a paid subscription. They only offer low-res for those accounts since recently :(

The legend is a bit broken. Will fix it maybe.

As for the rest, yes, the FHS can be confusing. It's from a time where mostly professional admins would deal with it and requirements were pretty different from today's end-user systems. If you want to understand more, I urge you to read the spec. It's highly readable! https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs.html

Thanks a lot for having taken time to respond so thoroughly. I must say I haven't thought about things from this angle.

The part about the book and the mediocre comedian definitely rings a bell. Getting stuck in stupid local extrema (like in optimization) more often than necessary is definitely a thing with me.

Same here

/mnt is explicitly meant to be used as temporary mountpoint for admins. That's not a good place.

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

The better you understand it the less it seems bad.

You're welcome!

It's debated whether software like fail2ban actually helps or if it just makes attacks visible that would anyways fail if you have up to date software. Oftentimes, defensive software adds attack-surface because it adds more software that can be targeted by attackers.

Fail2ban might help with protecting against exploiting of bad passwords though.

Not true about xmpp in general. There are modern clients out there.

Added a black background version.

Makes sense. I imagine the push model of Ansible had a lot to do with the speed issues? I can imagine how a solid .deb would be much more performant.

It's part of the problem, but the other part is that you have to re-do the package building all the time. Alternatively you fiddle with tags and only run part of your roles (which is a hassle anyways because ansible does not really have good abstractions that help encapsulation).

What about using standard shell or bash? I know they are not easy to use correctly, but at least they won't break every few years.

I'm not into those since they just shift the complexity. People should learn how to package things and just do it. Ok, documentation on making dpkgs is pretty tough to understand and confusing.

But yeah, I guess with docker it's complete anarchy ( the bad kind of)