• 3 Posts
  • 69 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle



  • Arch Linux. Everyone said it was hard to use, unstable, etc. but my experience with it has been the exact opposite.

    Yes, the install process is needlessly complicated (although it got a lot simpler now that we have archinstall), but the OS itself is rock solid and rarely has any issues that require more than a reboot or a package reinstall to solve. The AUR is a godsend too if you don’t want or don’t know how to compile stuff from source.


  • The first time I heard about programming being obsolete was when I was taught UML in university. That was over almost 15 years ago and it didn’t happen, if anything programmers now also had to know UML, which isn’t all that bad but it definitely didn’t replace anything, it’s just useful for designing and documenting projects.

    I also heard from colleagues that in the 80s and 90s people said that SQL was supposed to be used by users directly, making (some) programming obsolete.

    Now AI bullshit claims to be making programming obsolete. I won’t hold my breath.







  • I think this one beats them all.

    My home server keeps a few services up, including an instance of Jitsi Meet. The server runs nixos and the nixos package for jitsi is incomplete to say the least and doesn’t even support authentication, so I use the docker-compose version and I have a script that runs periodically to keep it updated. So far so good, right? Well, no.

    Because the server is at home, I have a dynamic external IP address, so I have to use a DDNS provider, but jitsi doesn’t expect this and uses a stun server at startup to determine the public IP of the server once, so if my connection goes down or is restarted and the IP changes, jitsi needs to be restarted or it won’t work anymore.

    The solution?

    • My router runs OpenWrt, so I am able to run a script that checks for external IP changes. When a change is detected, it uses SSH to connect to my server to restart jitsi
    • Because I don’t want the router to just be able to run any command, I created a jitsi-restart user that has no shell
    • When the router tries to log in with its pubkey, sshd creates a file called restartasap in the jitsi folder and closes the connection
    • On the server, there’s a systemd unit running a script as the jitsi user that periodically checks for that file, and if it exists it deletes it and restarts jitsi

    I’ve been running this setup since mid 2020 and I expect this to continue until IPv6 becomes the norm.










  • Windows becoming completely hostile towards power users.

    I used to LOVE Windows, I even made fun of friends who were using Linux, which I only used on servers because I thought the desktop experience was sub par (and at the time it was, we’re talking 10-15 years ago). Then Windows 8 came and I stayed on 7 because the experience was bad. Then 10 came and data collection started getting out of control, so I had to jump through a bunch of hoops just to make it usable and “private enough”. Eventually things got so bad around 2019 that I realized that I was spending more time fixing that pile of crap than the average Arch user and I decided to give Linux a serious try.

    I was somewhat annoyed by some UI/UX flaws but eventually I got used to it, and with the coming of Linux gaming I started using Windows less and less (it’s an AMD system so the Linux experience is excellent), eventually last year I realized that I hadn’t booted it in months so I just wiped that drive and started using it for games. I’ve also gotten a lot more paranoid about privacy and sandboxing proprietary software.

    Now with Windows 11 things have gotten so bad that even my students are making fun of it so I don’t think I’ll be coming back.