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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: May 1st, 2025

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  • When I learned Git I think there were not decent tools, so I got used to the command line.

    I occasionally use gitk for reviewing my commits- it’s nicer to see the files modified and be able to jump back and forth, although I get I could use git log -p instead.

    I’m an Emacs user, but I don’t use magit (!)

    I like some of the graphical tools- some colleagues use Fork and I like it… but as I’ve already learned the CLI, I don’t see the point for me.

    I could use learning some jj because it automates some of the most tedious parts of my workflow, but I’m getting too old.


  • Yup, came here to mention PaperWM. I used xmonad in the past, but I executed it on top of Mate to have an “easy” desktop environment.

    Nowadays Gnome extensions providing tiling is the equivalent “easy” method. Gnome is not for everyone, but it works out of the box- then you add the fancy tiling window management on top.

    For people who have bounced off systems that require much more set up, I think they are a good option.




  • Nextcloud is in EPEL 10. You’ll get updates along with the rest of the OS.

    I have been using EPEL 9 Nextcloud for a good while and it’s been a smooth experience.

    If you want specifically Docker, I would not choose an EL10 distro, really. I have been test driving AlmaLinux 10 and it’s pretty nice, but I would look elsewhere.


  • IMHO, it really depends on the specific services you want to run. I guess you are most familiar with Docker and everything that you want to run has a first-class-citizen Docker container for it. It also depends on whether the services you want to run are suitable for Internet exposure or not (and how comfortable you are with the convenience tradeoff).

    LXC is very different. Although you can run Docker nested within LXC, you gotta be careful because IIRC, there are setups that used to not work so well (maybe it works better now, but Docker nested within LXC on a ZFS file system used to be a problem).

    I like that Proxmox + LXC + ZFS means that it’s all ZFS file systems, which gives you a ton of flexibility; if you have VMs and volumes, you need to assign sizes to them, resize if needed, etc.; with ZFS file systems you can set quotas, but changing them is much less fuss. But that would likely require much more effort for you. This is what I use, but I think it’s not for everyone.



  • I switched to Emacs over two years ago because I was getting too comfortable in VS Code. If VS Code didn’t have the “dodgy” stuff, I would recommend it to everyone without reservation.

    Emacs has been a pleasant surprise. The latest versions have introduced Eglot (LSP), EditorConfig and a few other odds and ends that make it very close to being usable with very little configuration. My latest suggestion for getting started is JUST two lines of config, and I think you can scale easily.

    I just wish Emacs had started from the outset with more common keybindings- it makes it hard to recommend because you need to make a significant investment. I think it’s worthwhile, but still…

    However, due to how it’s evolving lately, I suspect it might become even easier to get started with time. If they rolled in to base Emacs automatic LSP installation, that would be huge, for instance.


  • I assume you basically want protection against disasters, but not high uptime.

    (E.g. you likely can live with a week of unavailability if after a week you can recover the data.)

    The key is about proper backups. For example, my Nextcloud server is running in a datacenter. Every night I replicate the data to a computer running at home. Every week I run a backup to a USB drive that I keep in a third location. Every month I run a backup to a USB drive on the computer I mentioned at home.

    So I could lose two locations and still have my data.

    There is much written about backup strategies, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-2-1_backup_rule … Just start with your configuration, think what can go wrong and what would happen, and add redundancy until you are OK with the risks.


  • What volume of data you are discussing? How many physical nodes? Can you give a complete usage example of what you want to achieve?

    In general, there’s a steep change in making things distributed properly, and distributed systems are often designed for big and complex situations, so they “can afford” being big and complex too.




  • I dunno, I still have a soft spot for Proxmox. I want ZFS, so it’s about the only game in town with support.

    (TrueNAS Scale looks good, but it would increase too much my Hetzner costs, because of their requirement of having a dedicated root pool. And I don’t want an LTS distro that supports root-on-ZFS “oficially”. That narrows the field quite a bit.)

    (For work and for my workstations, I’m very pleased with Incus on top of Debian… but that’s because I don’t need ZFS on those.)




  • I discovered Open Food Facts very recently. I was supersurprised because the mobile app is very neat, and I didn’t expect there would be so many products (edit: in Spain). I’ve sent two contributions so far.

    Also, you can download their database. If I had some time, I’d try to run some queries on it. (I’m on a low sodium diet and sometimes you find the most unexpected products with little salt, but it’s time consuming.)

    edit: also, I forgot, the app is on F-Droid, another nice touch.





  • I like to live on the edge of time and therefore have the feeling that debian based distros (although being very stable) are too “old” for my liking.

    Nowadays, with Flatpaks, so many software providing binaries, etc. this does not matter so much. If you want, you can even use something like Distrobox to have containers for tools using whatever bleeding edge distro you want, but still have a solid stable underpinning.

    Debian also has more stuff than you would expect in backports. The main sticking point is yes, you’ll be stuck in Debian 12’s KDE until 13 comes out. But that might be sufficient for you?

    (You could also use Debian Testing, which is basically a rolling release. But I’d consider stable first.)