Who reads this anyway? Nobody, that’s…. Oh wait. Some people actually do. I guess I should put something worth reading in here then. Err… Let’s go with lorem impsum for the time being.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nam eu libero vitae augue pretium sollicitudin…

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • If you’ve already done a bit of programming, you can think of the terminal as a place that executes code. Just look at some bash scripts, and you’ll probably find it somewhat familiar.

    Just like you can load new libraries, you can also install new commands on your system. You can think of each program as a function in some programming language such as Python.




  • Like a cab, but it’s your car and you take care of everything.

    If you need a car only once a year when going to the airport, a cab will be cheaper. If you need to go somewhere at least once a week, driving your own car will be cheaper. Likewise, if you need only a little bit of cloud storage for your photos, free iCloud or Google Drive might be fine. If you need a whole lot of storage, self-hosting becomes cheaper.

    When you take a cab, do you need to worry about maintenance, gasoline, insurance, or other things? No. The same goes for cloud storage. When you throw your photos on Google Drive, you don’t need to worry about electricity bills, security updates, or hardware maintenance.

    When you drive your own car, you need to be a responsible driver and a car owner. Maintenance is your responsibility. Likewise, self-hosting means you need to be a responsible server admin.






  • It can be a rocky ride if you happen to have hardware that hates Linux. AMD video cards and intel wifi cards are well supported, so sticking with those is like playing this game in the easy mode.

    Every OS comes with compromises. With Windows, things generally are well supported, but you get a bunch of annoying features. It’s a package deal.

    With Linux, you get a different package with different compromises. There will be new things you need to get familiar with, and that can feel annoying. On the other hand, there’s no bloat or spyware preinstalled on your system. You have free rein to do what you want, and that can feel awesome and terrifying. With the right hardware, things just work out of the box. With the wrong hardware, some tinkering is required, and some hardware will never work. It’s a very different kind of package deal when compared to Windows.





  • As an absent admin myself, I can assure you that the system can take a surprising amount of neglect and abuse. There were times when I feared the system was beyond repair, but I’ve been surprised time and again by how resilient it actually is. Nowadays, you can also use your least hated LLM to give you suggestions and help with interpreting logs.

    The thing is, you can neglect your system for long periods of time, run system updates blindfolded, but eventually, the tasks pile up and catch up with you. My latest misadventure involved finding out the hard way that lots of packages that used to be in core, were moved to extra. You know, reading those announcements might be a good idea… Anyway, I was unable to update my system, because about half of the packages were no longer available in core. Eventually, I figured it out, enabled extra, fixed some of the stupid mistakes I made along the way, and the system was back to normal. Yay! After about two hours of messing around, I can finally get back to neglecting my admin duties again.