Often the question marked as a duplicate isn’t a duplicate, just the person marking it as such didn’t spend the time to properly understand the question and realise how it differs. I also see lots of answers to questions mis-understanding the question or trying to force the person asking down their own particular preference, and get tons of votes whilst doing it.

Don’t get me wrong, some questions are definitely useful - and some go above-and-beyond - but on average the quality isn’t great these days and hasn’t been for a while.

Google’s first quarter 2023 report shows they made massive profits off vast revenue due to advertising.

It is about control though. The thing that caught my eye is that they’re saying that only “approved” browsers will be able to access these WEI sites. So what does that mean for crawlers/scrapers? That the big tech companies on the approval board will be able to lock potential competitors out of accessing the web - new browsers, search engines, etc. but much more importantly… Machine Learning.

Google’s biggest fear right now is that ML systems will completely eliminate most people’s reason to use Google’s search, and therefore their main source of revenue will plummet. And they’re right to be scared, it’s already starting to happen and it’s showing us very quickly just how bad Google’s search results are.

So this seems to me like an attempt to control things from that side. It’s essentially the “big boys” trying to consolidate and firm-up their hold in the industry and not let newcomers rival them, as with ML the barrier to entry has never been lower.

Red Hat saying that argument in-particular shows they’ve pivoted their philosophy significantly, it’s a seemingly subtle change but is huge - presumably due to the IBM acquisition, but maybe due to the pressures in the market right now.

It’s the classic argument against FOSS, which Red Hat themselves have argued against for decades and as an organisation proved that you can build a viable business on the back of FOSS whilst also contributing to it, and that there was indirect value in having others use your work. Only time will tell, but the stage is set for Red Hat to cultivate a different relationship with FOSS and move more into proprietary code.

Don’t roll your own if you can help it, just use a distribution dedicated for use as a thin client. I was co-incidentally just looking into this last week and came across ThinStation which looks really good. There are other distro’s too, search for “linux thin client”.

I’ve been there. My mum struggled to communicate with me when I was in that period of my life, and so she’d buy me various books that she thought - sometimes through title alone - would get through to me. Almost all didn’t. Almost. One did.

Now, I will recommend the book of course, and more, but that’s not the message I want to give you. We’re all different, we’ve all got into this differently, and we all get out of it differently - what started things rolling for me may well do nothing for you. My message more is that the answer is within you, you just can’t see it - it’s hidden from you through no fault of your own; but with the right nudge, the right spark, and you’ll start to see a way out - so dim at first you scarcely recognise it for what it is, but it’ll nag at you, pique your interest, and slowly, ever-so-slowly, the snowball begins to roll.

Form me, the book was The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse.

I firmly believe that it’s no co-incidence that this book connected with me, it is astonishingly well crafted, the author is a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and several of his books, including The Glass Bead Game, “explores an individual’s search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality.” Reading it is a journey - it takes it’s time to get hold of you, presumably with different elements appealing to different people, then it starts to lead you down a very carefully crafted but almost invisible path to a self-realisation.

A modern author, Matt Haig, wasn’t on my radar when I suffered from depression, but he is a somewhat unusual author in that he writes self-help books and novels. His most famous book The Midnight Library is particularly good, and it was a page-turning read, though I’ve not yet read any of his other titles.

Finally, we’re getting into books that have nothing to do with self-help directly, but I think are just straight-up amazing and recommend them to everyone, but they’re inspirational too:

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss is the first book in The Kingkiller Chronicle’s, of which there are currently only two out of the three books at this time - so you will be left hanging, as we all have been for years - but it’s so very definitely worth it.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card is a book that spawned a series referred to as the Ender’s Saga or Enderiverse - it’s brillant on its own, but I highly recommend reading Ender’s Shadow too as it really adds to the first book in an unexpected way.

The author Kazuo Ishiguro is a phenomenal writer and also a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His books are very diverse, but from my experience so far (I’m not finished reading them all) they have something in common to Hermann Hesse’s books; they carefully take hold of you and pull you down a very carefully constructed path that you can barely see, but you feel like you’ve found the way rather than been led there as you must have been! The Remains of the Day is a period drama, not my cup of tea at all normally, but is brilliant and is so well written it made me realise I’d been missing out reading so much pulp sci-fi/fantasy! Another pick is Klara and the Sun, a sci-fi book set from the perspective of an android, which is incredibly well written and manages to shift your perspective on the story so much with so few words.

And so onto my final recommendation, of where to buy cheap books, but I’m going to be sneaky and tell the story of how my search for cheap books helped me overcome my depression.

Charity shops, aka thrift stores, are great for cheap second-hand books - most places will sell them for less than you can find them online - you just might have to do some hunting and regular visits to find them. Now, depending on where in the world you are, they may or may not exist. If they don’t, find out what happens to used books in your country and hunt them out there… it could be church fund-raisers, libraries, etc. But the act of actually browsing all the books and hunting for something new to read is a great activity in and of itself, if you set the goal that you’ll come back with something new no matter what!

But it was while looking at used books in a local charity shop that I realised they were looking for volunteers. So I started volunteering. At first I just stayed in the back listing books for sale online. Then I was convinced to help someone on the till, then asked to look after the till, then the shop, then eventually a paid position came up and I applied for it and got it.

I didn’t know it then, but that act of volunteering truly set me on my path to wellness. Initially I thought it was because of the objective good I was doing in the world, which would make sense - but looking back it wasn’t that at all. It was a more immediate sense of purpose, of socialising, of talking to people and listening to their problems, of getting social cues wildly wrong and learning, and so on. I was in full control of the rate of social interaction, but they always pushed me that touch more - with encouragement, kindness, and support.

Then one day I realised something strange - I was doing small-talk without thinking. It was almost terrifying, thinking back that I’ve literally just said something I’d not explicitly thought. But then it dawned on me… for the first time in over 20 years, I’d just been myself for a fleeting moment - free from worry and free from over-thinking; no conscious thought process martialling my thoughts and speech. It was in that realisation I knew for sure I’d eventually be OK. It took a long time, many years, and there were some bumps - but my rise to good health was inexorable.

Then the crazy part comes… dealing with emotions again! It had been so long since I last properly felt them, outside of expressing all emotions through negative emotions (i.e. I love my brother so much I would do X if someone did something to him"). I’d say I was actually manic for a while, having really high highs more powerful than the best drugs I’ve ever taken, and really low lows where I thought I was back at the start again. But having since seen my young nephews grow up, I realise now it was just learning how to deal with emotions again. It’s a wild ride, but one to be excited about and look forward to, not fear.

Another element that I really struggled with and slowed my progress was “blame”. Who’s fault was it I was like this? Mine? My parents? This event? That experience? It tore me up for a long time, there’s one thing worse than blaming yourself, and that’s blaming those you love. But over the years I came to see that it was a perfect storm, multiple overlapping waves that in isolation would have been tough but fine, but altogether at just the wrong times, sunk the ship. It was nobody’s fault that all these waves came at just the wrong times, that was chance.

So my advice is to read some of these great books and those others suggest, get involved with your community - there’s so many great causes desperate for your help, and set yourself on the path to find that first glimpse of the dim spark that will inexorably lead to your good health. You might not find it in days, weeks, or even months - but if you keep looking, even after a long break, you will eventually find it.

Good luck!

EDIT: Just to say, the Ender’s Game audiobook is amazing - tons of 80’s sci-fi sound effects!

I personally found Fedora to be rock solid, and along with Ubuntu provided the best hardware support out of the box on all my computers - though it’s been a couple of years since I used it. I did end up on Ubuntu non-LTS in the end as I now run Ubuntu LTS on my servers and find having the same systems to be beneficial (from a knowledge perspective).

If I’m okay with the software (not just trying it out) am I missing out by not using dockers?

No, I think in your use case you’re good. A lot of the key features of containers, such as immutability, reproduceability, scaling, portability, etc. don’t really apply to your use case.

If you reach a point where you find you want a stand-alone linux server, or an auto-reconfiguring reverse proxy to map domains to your services, or something like that - then it starts to have some additional benefit and I’d recommend it.

In fact, using native builds of this software on Windows is probably much more performant.

Containers can be based on operating systems that are different to your computer.

Containers utilise the host’s kernel - which is why there needs to be some hoops to run Linux container on Windows (VM/WSL).

That’s one of the most key differences between VMs and containers. VMs virtualise all the hardware, so you can have a totally different guest and host operating systems; whereas because a container is using the host kernel, it must use the same kind of operating system and accesses the host’s hardware through the kernel.

The big advantage of that approach, over VMs, is that containers are much more lightweight and performant because they don’t have a virtual kernel/hardware/etc. I find its best to think of them as a process wrapper, kind of like chroot for a specific application - you’re just giving the application you’re running a box to run in - but the host OS is still doing the heavy lifting.

As always, it depends! I’m a big fan of “the right tool for the job” and I work in many languages/platforms as the need arises.

But for my “default” where I’m building up the largest codebase, I’ve gone for the following:

• TypeScript
  • Strongly-typed (ish) which makes for a nice developer experience
  • Makes refactoring much easier/less error-prone.
  • Runs on back-end (node) and front-end, so only one language, tooling, codebase, etc. for both.
• SvelteKit
  • Svelte as a front-end reactive framework is so nice and intuative to use, definite the best there is around atm.
  • It’s hybrid SSR/CSR is amazing, so nice to use.
  • As the back-end it’s “OK”, needs a lot more work IMO, but I do like it for a lot of things - and can not use it where necessary.
• Socket.IO
  • For any real-time/stream based communication I use this over plain web sockets as it adds so much and is so easy to use.
• PostgreSQL
  • Really solid database that I love more and more the more I use it (and I’ve used it a lot, for a very long time now!)
• Docker
  • Easy to use container management system.
  • Everything is reproducible, which is great for development/testing/bug-fixing/and disasters.
  • Single method to manage all services on all servers, regardless of how they’re implemented.
• Traefik
  • Reverse proxy that can be set to auto-configure based on configuration data in my docker compose files.
  • Automatically configuring takes a pain point out of deploying (and allows me to fully automate deployment).
  • Really fast, nice dashboard, lots of useful middleware.
• Ubuntu
  • LTS releases keep things reliable.
  • Commercial support available if required.
  • Enough name recognition that when asked by clients, this reassures them.

I was using file merging, but one issue I found was that arrays don’t get merged - and since switching to use Traefik (which is great) there are a lot of arrays in the config! And I’ve since started using labels for my own tooling too.

I was recently helping someone working on a mini-project to do a bit of parsing of docker compose files, when I discovered that the docker compose spec is published as JSON Schema here.

I converted that into TypeScript types using JSON Schema to TypeScript. So I can create docker compose config in code and then just export it as yaml - I have a build/deploy script that does this at the end.

But now the great thing is that I can export/import that config, share it between projects, extend configs, mix-in, and so on. I’ve just started doing it and it’s been really nice so far, when I get a chance and it’s stabilised a bit I’m going to tidy it up and share it. But there’s not much I’ve added beyond the above at the moment (just some bits to mix-in arrays, which was what set me off on this whole thing!)

I hear they have improved performance now though

It’s still not great. Better, but still slow enough to make you question whether you’ve actually launched the app or not.

I did start with it and use it on a laptop, honestly I think that’s where it shines the most - but I guess the more windows you open the less useful it becomes. I think if there was a way to do the expose-like “view all things at once” (Super key) that worked across all workspaces, I’d be all over them. But as there’s no easy way to live view everything on all workspaces, I just don’t use them.

Yes, I love it! Really it’s the MacOS-like “Expose” feature that I find to be essential.

I would advise against using workspaces though, I find those actually sort of go against the core idea of it IMO. There are a few things I’d really like added to it, but for the most-part when you get into it it’s great.

My main desktop I have 4 monitors (I know, but once you start a monitor habit it’s really hard to not push it to the limit - this is only the beginning!) It roughly breaks down into:

1. Primary work (usually a full-screen editor)
2. Terminals (different windows, some for the project, some monitoring)
3. Browsers - documentation, various services, my own code output
4. Communication - signal, discord, what’s app (ugh), etc.

The key, literally, is you just press the Super key and boom, you can see everything and if you want to interact with something it’s all available in just one click or a few of key presses away.

On my laptop with just one screen, I find it equally invaluable, and is actually where I started to use it the most - once again, just one press of Super and I can see all the applications I have open and quickly select one or launch something.

It’s replaced Alt + Tab for me - and I know they’ve made that better, and added Super + Tab, but none of them are as good as just pressing Super.

The things I’d really love added to it are:

• Better tiling (including quarter tiling). It’s a sad state of affairs when Windows has far better tiling than Gnome.
• Super then Search, I’d like it to filter the windows it’s showing and shrink/hide the others, along with a simple way to choose one using the keyboard.
• Rather than having an icon for each window, I also want the tooltip information to always be shown (e.g. vs code project) and for standard apps to expose better information for that (e.g. Gnome Terminal to expose its prompt/pwd) and/or have a specific mechanism by which apps could communicate.
• Adding Quicksilver-like functionality to the launcher/search would be amazing. e.g.
  • Super
  • Sp… (auto-populates Spotify)
  • Tab
  • P… (auto-populates Play/Pause)
  • Return
• Session restoration - it just doesn’t work at the moment for some reason. Some apps do, some don’t. Some go to their correct position/size, some don’t.

I just have a static page that I randomly change - you can see mine here. In this case I was testing the idea of having text within an SVG for better scaling from mobile to desktop, and also I’m loving orange and purple at the moment for some reason! Oh, and I was testing automated deployments from CI/CD, so I always use my own base domain with those first tests!

Slackware was mine too - all it took was a box of floppy disks and tens of hours of downloading and installing! It was great though, something so different. But it was just a toy, and I went back to DOS/Windows on PC - mainly for the games and hardware support (Voodoo!)

A year or so later I spent a lot of time playing with Solaris and VAX/VMS at University and really developed a love for the command-line and UNIX environment. It was that which led me to my first job (with HP-UX) and my second (Debian/Yellow Dog). From then on I used it at home a lot more. Now I use Windows for games/gamedev, and Ubuntu for everything else (desktop, laptop, servers).

But it’s amazing how far things have come in some respects, but how some things have regressed over those 20 years - window managers/themes never reached the heights I envisioned in the Enlightenment hay day, session management/restoration/remoting seems to have been eroded away, virtual desktops/window management/tiling regressed and became fractured, the wonder of Compiz didn’t really move things in an interesting way, and I felt sure Quicksilver (for MacOS) was the future of launcher, but it’s not really been taken up - though the Expose feature is an excellent essential part of Gnome now (Activities)!

In some ways I think Linux has lost that “wow factor” that we used to have with all those cool features - but it is much more rock-solid and professional now! I use it more now than I ever have.

This is a truly excellent pair of articles, brilliantly written.

Explains the problem, show the solution iterating step by step so we start to build an intuition about it, and goes as far as most people actually need for their applications.

Are there any good alternatives?

We’ve started using Jitsi for video/screen-sharing and that’s going well so far - but it’s based very much around the “corporate meeting” concept, rather than “playing D&D with mates” or “online gaming with people”.

Mumble is decent enough for voice comms, but of course lacks video, which for my friend group is a deal-breaker. While the audio quality is noticably better most of the time, its noise suppression is not as good as Discord. It does have text chat, but lacks the utility of Discord’s chat - which we use in D&D for sharing information, images, note-taking, etc.

Things do game tracking/voice like Steam, Xbox Live, PSN, etc. but then each only supports their own platforms and services - whereas Discord is common to all.

I think what DIscord does well is bring together a few really established, tried and tested technologies, under one roof and integrates them seamlessly. There is definitely value in that, and I would be really interested in an open source/self-hosted equivalent.

My main concerns with Discord are:

1. They inevitably ramp up income earning opportunities and therefore eventually compromise the system.
2. It can’t be catalogued/searched easily.
3. It seems like a near-perfect platform for harvesting data for ML (and the platform has some traction with the ML community already).

I don’t think consolidation, compromise, and coming together in one common direction are the hallmarks of open source at all!

Filesystems, service management/startup, audio output, desktop environment, package formats/management/distribution, programming languages, shell, and so on, and so on - all have many, many options.

Open source is, if nothing else, fractured… it’s about choice, flexibility, and re-inventing the wheel not because it really needs to be re-invented, but because it’s fun to do so and useful to have something that perfectly fits your requirements.

We’ve made room for many package formats for decades, and will continue to do so for decades to come I’m sure.

Containerised everything is the future of computing and I think we’ll look back on how we do things currently with horror!

But yes, I am slowly starting to use more contained desktop applications. Server-wise, everything I deploy is now in containers.