I can understand why it excites you. But I’m old enough to recognize that if you cede control of your offline tools like IDE to them, they will eventually exploit it to make money by ruining your day. I’m perfectly happy sacrificing a bit of convenience to protect myself against rent seeking in the future.

Honestly in this day and age where everything runs inside containers, you should be able to do that in your home server. Distrobox proves it. Even a good alternative to vscode exists - theia by eclipse - that’s designed to do exactly this.

I don’t know what’s happening at github, but even the tree page rendering is annoyingly slow now. I wish they stopped ruining a working product by bloating it up with unnecessary ‘features’.

The same thing happens at Amazon. First they screwed up the product search by treating the user’s query as a suggestion rather than as a requirement. Now reports are coming out saying that the search bar has been replaced by an AI prompt with very badly summarized and often wrong results.

I don’t even understand why people like GitHub so much, its source management sucks.

I agree with this part.

GitHub bringing everything into one platform is atypical and obviously done for the goal of centralization.

Perhaps this is part of the answer to why people like github. Unlike you, most people love all-in-one tools. I once suggested a bunch of offline tools to use with git, with much better user experience than github. The other person was like, “Yeah, no! I don’t want to learn that many tools”.

Look for ways to do things separately and you will find much better tools.

The advantage of a centralized app is that all the services you mentioned are integrated well with each other. The distinct and often offline tools often have poor integration with each other. This is harder to achieve in such tools, compared to centralized hosts. The minimum you need to start with is a bunch of standards for all these tools to follow, so that interoperability is possible later.

Github is more than just git. We need decentralized solutions for associated services and persistently online repos.

They used to advertise Linux.

You don’t need to mention them by name.

I switched nearly two decades ago after I used a freeware network monitor on Windows and realized that it was making dozens of silent TCP connections online. Some were to Microsoft, while others were to unknown third parties. Just imagine your personal machine doing this!

Linux is actually easy to use these days. Installation is often easier than windows and hardware just works most of the time. Despite that, people have a habit of exaggerating the difficulties in using Linux or BSD. They very often feel like excuses to avoid checking it out.

If you want any change in this, you should formally express your concern using A2A missiles. If they protest, formally deny it. This is what they do after all, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, this is about as easy as it gets. Practically though, it isn’t going to matter. It sounds like run0 will be a drop-in replacement for sudo. We will know for sure in about 3 days (at the rate at which they assimilate features).

Sudo also blocks almost all environment variables, with the option to set or copy them on demand. I assume that run0 will have similar facilities to propagate variables on demand.

PS: This is my technical understanding. Personally, I don’t like systemd eating up all the other utilities.

Please add a single line of description of the software for those who don’t know. The name gives no clue.

My sincere belief is that the difficulty in self hosting is due to the lack of priority, investment and development, due to the perverse incentives of the SaaS model. I don’t think it’s a technical problem that cannot be resolved with sufficient work. There are PoCs that prove that it can be made as simple as desktops and mobile phones.

That page pitches Nomad as a direct and better competitor to K8s. Both are considered as container orchestration platforms, though nomad can orchestrate other types of jobs as well.

When it comes to scalability, the anecdotes I’ve heard says that Nomad is better. Even the page you provided says the same. (I did try Nomad. But didn’t scale it enough to test this).

The only real issue that I faced with Nomad in comparison to K8s is running certain infrastructure loads like CNI and CSI plugins (like longhorn and mayastor). They don’t just talk to K8s through the standard interfaces (which Nomad also has), they often integrate deep into K8s using operators and CRDs. Nomad doesn’t have the provisions to support such nonstandard deep integrations.

I have to disagree with both those assertions.

If a software is easy to self host, then there is no need to make it harder to deploy as SaaS. The latter will be irrelevant for most people.

And the problem of self hosting isn’t a circular problem as you project it to be. There are architectural changes that can make it positively easier to self host without exposing the sysadmin to needless complexity. The example I quoted before - sandstorm - was a step in this direction. Deploying and administering applications on sandstorm would have been as easy as deploying one on desktop (including cross app integrations). The change needed was to modify the app to work with the sandstorm platform. Unfortunately, the platform didn’t gain the momentum needed to ensure that all available apps would be ported. But it shows that the concept is viable.

In what sense? It’s a competitor by design.

The fundamental problem I see here is the cloud. We were supposed to have easy self hosted applications and data on cheap always-online hardware. Instead, companies promoted cloud services with the intention of rent seeking through subscriptions.

If you look at the software that went from open source to source available, you’ll notice that almost all of them are cloud applications. Why? The companies that created them were hoping to make money through the same subscription model. But then, big cloud players like AWS just outcompeted them using their own software.

Would this have happened if the FOSS ecosystem neglected the cloud hype and gravitated towards self hosting? Perhaps. But not as badly. We still haven’t seen enough progress towards self hosting. It’s still very hard for regular folks. Genuine efforts like sandstorm didn’t find enough momentum. I hope this changes at least now.

Microsoft uses a lot of Linux. Especially on Azure.

Most governments use some sort of enterprise Linux distros, not their own distros. Even when they do, it’s their distros. Why would they worry about censorship and surveillance?

I’m not as optimistic. Some people will complain and move to alternative platforms. But the vast majority won’t care and continue using the abusive platform, forcing the rest to use it sometimes. The best example for this is Reddit and Lemmy.