DigitalDilemma @ digdilem @lemmy.ml

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549

Joined

2 yr. ago

You say that like it was a small thing, but small things don't create such bad feeling, cause most of the Centos volunteer team to resign, create off two entirely new distributions (Rocky and Alma). The subsequent paywalling of RHEL sourcecode and its accompanying spiteful communications make it clear where Redhat's focus is - or, rather, isn't. People judge companies by what they say and do, and I and many others are deeply concerned for the future of RHEL after the IBM takeover and are moving away from it.

I think there is a lot of nostalgia about the great work that Redhat did (and still does, at a smaller scale) and are overlooking what it's become but RHEL as a business product is not the force it once was. I think it's entirely possible that Redhat/IBM will simply pull the plug on RHEL and the entire EL universe will need some serious remapping if its to survive.

(Was a Centos user, still maintain 180 EL servers, am quite aware of the FUD, much of which originated and still does in the other direction from Redhat and its employees. The Centos 8 announcement came just after I'd manually migrated 60 vms to it, which then needed migrating again to another distro - so this did cause us some significant work and cost.)

I would not encourage anyone to join the EL universe as I don't consider it as stable as others.

TLDR; Redhat's being absorbed into IBM and they don't care about RHEL. RHEL (in my view) is dying a slow death. Without RHEL, there is no Fedora or Centos Stream. There'd also be no Rocky or Alma, as things currently stand.

(Although if that happened, I'd not be surprised if the users of Fedora merged with Rocky and Alma in some form of new and fully independent distro - we've already seen how well such disasters can be worked around)

Longer reasoning: Redhat, in my view, have made some unpredictable and frankly terrible decisions over the past few years with RHEL which have caused a great deal of concern in the business sector about its stability as a product. (Prematurely ending Centos 8 six years early, paywalling the source code, and more recent anti-rebuilder steps. They also treated the community team working for Centos appallingly throughout these leading to many resignations.) Further more, these were communicated without warning or consultation and have sometimes come across as petty and spiteful, rather than as professional business decisions.

IBM bought Redhat shortly before this happened, mostly for its cloud services. It seems from the outside that RHEL is being squeezed. There have been two major rounds of layoffs. In all, this paints a picture of a company that is in decline and we've seen a reduction in contributions to the excellent work done by Redhat in the foss world. IBM have a long history of buying and absorbing companies - I don't see why Redhat would be any different and RHEL doesn't make enough money.

Our company is moving away from EL and I know of several others who are doing so. We're all choosing Debian.

I think you'll find some ISPs will be reluctant to let go of CGNAT - they're doing quite nicely by charging extra for 'commercial' services where it's not in the way.

Fortunately, many of us know about cloudflare tunnelling and other services, so NAT really isn't a problem to self hosters and even SMEs any more.

Agree, and I switched over a couple of years ago. Only yesterday learned about Mermaid graphs and was impressed that Joplin does them natively.

That's great optics.

Not sure how workable it is to define how you would define "confidential information" without having already viewed the content. But the whole thing isn't very clever on a technical level anyway. Technically competent people will always find a way around such censorship.

I don't think Snowden's endorsement is the positive you think it is. Even if you can ignore treason, he's a pretty toxic person, by all accounts.

Instead of you installing linux on them, why not make it a project for the kids? Give them a bunch of distros to try and see what they learn.

Linux: 1995, Sco (At work), then got a copy of Slackware on a Cover-CD around 2000. Shortly after found Debian and have been using that at home exclusively for over two decades, now onto desktops and laptops as well as a couple of home servers. (I use EL distros, Ubuntu and OpenSuse at work nowadays)

Longer history: 1981: ZX81. 1985, Dragon 32. 1988 Amstrad CPC. 1991 an XT. 1992 A 386 sx25 with 1mb ram, and so on.

So you're using Kodi as the OS on the TV itself? Not the Kodi App or Kodi backend?

I'm still struggling to understand how that would work, and still have Jellyfin in the mix - could you please explain exactly what you mean?

Why use kodi *and *jellyfin? Jellyfin is its own thing, and without all the awful cruft that comes with Kodi.

It also has native apps for windows, linux and... FireTv.

IRC's not as popular as in its heyday, and while once it was the main choice for multi-playing gaming chat (Quakenet et al), that's largely gone elsewhere, but it's still very good for certain technical channels.

IRC has also proved to be remarkably resistent to commercialisation, mostly due to the users. Even when one of the biggest networks, Freenode, got taken over by a drug addled mentalist Reference who started insisting all all kinds of strange things, the users just upped sticks and created a new network. A bit of fuss, but the important stuff stayed the same and it's continued much as before as a new network, Librenet.

Others have answered your question - but it may be worth pointing out the obvious - backups. Annoyances such as you describe are much less of a stress if you know you're protected - not just against accidental erasure, but malicious damage and technical failure.

Some people think it's a lot of bother to do backups, but it is very easily automated with any of the very good free tools around (backup-manager, someone's mentioned timeshift, and about a million others). A little time spent planning decent backups now will pay you back one day in spades, it's a genuine investment of time. And once set up, with some basic monitoring to ensure they're working and the odd manual check once in a blue moon, you'll never be in this position again. Linux comes ahead here in that the performance impact from automated backups can be prioritised not to impact your main usage, if the machine isn't on all the time.

Some of the cheaper Thinkpads are terribly poor quality. Once a by word for ruggedness, now just another name.

Hopefully they escalate it to our MPs, who certainly have plenty to worry about when it comes to not wanting others seeing what they're doing online and might actually do something to protect privacy for once.

The way I help, as a Sysadmin, is primarily by using foss software in my job and feeding back with bug reports, issues and so on. I've raised several hundred issues on Github this way, and try to do them concisely, accurately and with as much relevant information as I can.

"We're shocked" - nobody.

But companies are crawling everything like mad - I've noticed a 400% upturn this year alone in bot traffic on a low traffic web forum and a few sites I host, so much so that I'm having to do some fairly heavy filtering upstream to keep them out. (They don't resepect robots.txt, obviously)

When bot traffic outnumbers legitimate traffic at least 10x, it makes you wonder why you're paying to host stuff.

I like this perspective, but it's the developers who get to choose in the world of FOSS software, and I suspect most would rather develop than package.

Learning the different formats, methods and then committing to re-packaging every update for eternity when you're often a single person or a very small group is a big ask on top of developing the software too, so they're going to select a method that's easiest for them.

So if there was a user-led method, it would still need to appeal to developers as well.

That's really neat, and in the Debian main repos.

micro looks very impressive. I'm too invested in vi to move away from that, but it's great to see alternatives, especially those focused on being easy to use (like jed)

Only weird thing from the cap I saw was that you need to edit a json file to change keybindings - doesn't that go against the 'easy to use' edict, or is that something that's planned to be changed?

This is exactly why I never buy Early Access games. The biggest thrill for me is starting a new game, and if that isn't as good as it can possibly be, then that opportunity has been wasted.

Sure, it /may/ get better at some undefined point in the future, but there's just so many games out there that are complete, and won't require re-visiting at some point because they got better. Once that first play is gone, it's gone.