Mastodawn

#PSA: Do less.

There's a time to strive and perform, and a time to breathe and exist.

You don't have to self-host.
You don't have to run Linux (although I highly recommend not running Windows, and to a slightly lesser degree, not running MacOS).
You don't have to code.
You don't have to know all the things your friends know and consider to be "basic."

You can just be the very best you you can be.
Start with one little thing at a time. Focus on just one new good habit per week, or per month.

Life is short, but life is also really long. There's no reason to spend it angry or frustrated with yourself.

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 27, 2025

Have any advice for those of us who hypothetically self-host so much they can't tell if the internet or their server is down, have run Linux-only for years, code frequently, and know nothing "basic" but everything "weird"? Asking for a friend.

@amin @rl_dane monitoring via gatus, uptime kuma or nagios on a separate server sending you alerts via ntfy

Of course...all self hostable.

Gatus and kuma will let you know if any of your services are down.
Of course you then run into the problem of "what monitors the monitor", so stick a minimal gatus/kuma on your main fleet that just does uptime checks on you monitoring service

Eaaaasy! 😆

@amin @rl_dane seems maybe I missed the context of the thread...
Apologies! 😆

I cannot help with making friends... 😂

I mean, does it say something about our crazy community that we didn't even miss a beat and just assumed that giving concrete technological recommendations was needed? XD

@rl_dane @amin not so sure about concrete... I tried to imply the solution is absolutely ludicrous, but necessarily ludicrous, because self-hosting is fun except when it isn't

Edit: but even then it still sort of is

And when it isn't, BOY HOWDY it isn't.

"Self hosting NextCloud is super easy! Just install this snap/Docker and make these few configuration changes..."
> "Ok, cool, it's working!"
> "Wait, now it won't start. What do I do?"
"Ellifiknow, you know how to troubleshoot a SQL database?"
> "Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh"

@rl_dane @amin ah yeah... Well just don't use docker, RTFM, it's just a simple MySQL database a baby could do it. Oh, performance issues? Use the MySQL to Postgres migration script and reap the rewards.
Still performance issues? Have you set up your redis server? How about caching? Just tune your php-fpm workers and it will be fine.

These are REAL things done by REAL self-hosters, they've taken us for absolute fools.

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 27, 2025

Yeah, I don't use docker anymore.

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 27, 2025

And I try to exclusively use services which use Postgres, since I have it set up already.

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 27, 2025

No no no no I remember installing NextCloud via snap. It also installed all of gnome-desktop on my tiny VPS completely taking up all CPU cycles to the point I couldn't uninstall anything. I had to slowly run top (which responded super slowly) and kill all the processes.

Oh man, I remember Gnome bringing my computer to its knees circa 2019.

It was gnome-tracker. Killed EVERY box I ever ran Gnome on back in the day. Horrid.

And my little find script runs in (checks...) four seconds at the most once per hour, and the searches are faster than even krunner, using only grep.

How do they make this stuff so stinking BAD?!?

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 27, 2025

GNOME 40 was actually pretty nifty. That was the moment I first fell in love with Linux.

38 was the last one I used, I think. I was kinda done with it when they announced the integer versioning scheme. I've always hated that.

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 27, 2025

40 was the first with the new versioning. And it was very different from the previous versions. Very smooth, great use of the trackpad (hard to believe that's a phrase I can say). The dynamic workspaces were a game changer for me at the time, and the gesture to use them was a lot better in 40.

@rl_dane @amin gnome after version 3 is stupid. Gnome 2 forever! Although, back then I was still primarily using xfce4.

sotolf Aug 28, 2025

@paul @rl_dane @amin Yeah, I stopped using Gnome when they moved from 2 to 3 it went from a totally usable desktop interface to a kindergarden tablet interface.

@sotolf @rl_dane @amin i had a small laptop with low resolution back then I had gnome 2 on. The upgrade to gnome 3 really showed how it wasn't fit for low resolution screens as the top bar took up half an inch of the screen - add an application window's menu and buttons and you're left with very little workspace.
I don't think the sizes were configurable yet either, so I had to do some display scaling nonsense which made everything look crap.
Basically, in gnome's normal way, they didn't consider lesser mortals.

sotolf Aug 28, 2025

@paul @rl_dane @amin Yeah, in one way it was a good thing for me, it spurred experimentation, so I was playing around with xfce, icewm and so on for quite a while after that, and did a serious move over to wmii as the first tiling window manager that I used full time for a long time :)

@paul @sotolf @amin

It was the same deal a couple years back when they changed the icon sizes (to better suit 4k displays), and then said "five options is too many" when people with 1080p and lesser monitors complained about it.

Absolute princesses.

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 28, 2025

@paul @sotolf @rl_dane

GNOME 40+ worked great for me with a high DPI screen.

iac Aug 28, 2025

@amin @paul @sotolf @rl_dane I do like GNOME but on my hidpi (3k) screen with 2x scaling everything feels too big. So, with some extensions I made it to my liking.

Just the fact that the app drawer spreads out horizontally and the dock becomes huge is what bothers me and only the perfect combination of hiding things from the UI gets me this look of a more compact drawer.

@sotolf @paul @amin

Highly opinionated software/projects are only ok when you opinion doesn't absolutely suck, and especially when that opinion isn't forced on the entire community as the default.

Nobody is yelling at "Hot Dog Linux" (that's actually a thing, named after the garish Windows 3.x theme) for being ugly, because it's not the default anywhere.

Somebody gets the great idea to make something crappy like Gnome 3 or systemd the default everywhere, and then the apologists have the gall to say crap like "You're not being FoRcEd to use it!" as if it's a trivial choice to move away from the defaults, especially when they're system components.

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 28, 2025

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul

People in this thread are forgetting that I actually liked the DE you're all saying no one likes and it was the reason I first fell in love with Linux.

sotolf Aug 28, 2025

@amin @rl_dane @paul Well, you didn't experience the great thing we had before ;)

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 28, 2025

@sotolf @rl_dane @paul

I've seen pictures, and it would not have caught my attention at the time.

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 28, 2025

@sotolf @rl_dane @paul

It looks like Windows (based on the screenshots I'm seeing) and I was in a mindset of avoiding anything that even resembled anything I remembered from Windows.

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 28, 2025

@sotolf @rl_dane @paul

MATE is a fork of GNOME 2, no? I've tried that. Not my thing.

sotolf Aug 28, 2025

@amin @rl_dane @paul I haven't used DEs really since the GNOME 2 days, so I can't really tell you :)

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 28, 2025

@sotolf @rl_dane @paul

Wikipedia says yes.

@amin @sotolf @paul

It is, although they've tried to bring it to more modern times, with varying success.

@amin @sotolf @paul

One thing it has that I don't think any other linux DE has is searchable menus. That's a killer feature, when it works.

mirabilos Aug 28, 2025

@rl_dane @paul @amin @sotolf evilwm
also has searchable menus

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mostly by not having any menus to search

sotolf Aug 28, 2025

@amin @rl_dane @paul If you didn't change it around, kinda, yeah, but with compiz and some theming it could look great :0

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 28, 2025

@sotolf @rl_dane @paul

I was coming from Windows, I wouldn't have known how to do any of that stuff. I was looking for something that would grab my attention out of the box. GNOME 3.8-ish was good enough for me to stay, but it's GNOME 40 that really floored me.

@sotolf @amin @paul

RIP Compiz

@amin @sotolf @paul

I don't have a problem with the DE itself. That's a matter of taste, preference, and workflow.

Its everything else about it that wigs me out. Culture, structure, governance.

Somehow these types of conversations always go sideways due to semantics. Sometimes due to subterfuge, but mostly just honest miscommunication.

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 28, 2025

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul

I haven't looked too much into that side but I've liked what I've seen.

Gerva Aug 28, 2025

@amin @rl_dane @sotolf @paul I use and like gnome. #NoRegerts

@amin @sotolf @paul

I may be way off base, but everything I've seen from that community has been corporate-level insufferable smugness.

sotolf Aug 28, 2025

@rl_dane @amin @paul Yup, that's the same here, so at least you're not alone about that.

@sotolf @amin @paul

This kind of crap used to just incense me. Now I just roll my eyes. --

https://islinuxabout.xyz/systray/

Is Linux About SysTray?

Popular desktop environments have dropped the legacy concept of a SysTray. Here’s a list of newer, capable, cross-desktop APIs to use instead.

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 28, 2025

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul

Hm. That's not what I've seen browsing GNOME Planet or reading the HIG, but it's possible.

@amin @sotolf @paul

I mean, the HIG is fine, I guess, but that's just a document.

And I guess the latter is their forum or whatever, and yeah, I'm sure you'll find some helpful people on there being helpful.

But what about the way they've silenced people and ejected people from their org with zero transparency. (Don't ask me for deets, the last thing I want to do is go look up a lunduke article X'D )

What about their dismissive and condescending attitude towards their own users, saying "for the love of God, don't change this, it breaks my workflow!"

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 28, 2025

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul

And I guess the latter is their forum or whatever, and yeah, I'm sure you'll find some helpful people on there being helpful.

No, no, haha, "GNOME Planet" is essentially a combined feed of the blogs of GNOME designers/programmers. Similar terminology is used by a lot of other projects for similar combined feeds. (For example, Planet Debian: https://planet.debian.org/ )

Planet Debian

sotolf Aug 28, 2025

@amin @rl_dane @paul Of course they are treating the people they agree with well, others that don't follow their dogma and their patterns, not as much..

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 29, 2025

@sotolf @rl_dane @paul

It's just unfiltered articles from RSS feeds of anyone marked as an official developer (and I think possibly from devs of some apps in the ecosystem). 🤷

@amin @sotolf @paul

I've spoken to at least one official dev on here, and while the conversation was mostly cordial, his attitude was a bit much.

Ask @tripplehelix, he probably remembers the convo.

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 29, 2025

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul @tripplehelix

I don't actually have any beef in either direction (I am beefless—vegetarian, even); I don't use GNOME anymore or plan to use it in the forseeable future.

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 29, 2025

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul @tripplehelix

I'm more likely to code my own WM than go back to GNOME.

sotolf Aug 29, 2025

@rl_dane @amin @paul @tripplehelix I think I know what it is, and I remember him being a snobby "I know better what your need" attitude in conversation I had as well, or it might be someone else gnome dev at least.

@sotolf @amin @paul @tripplehelix

Yeah, that's pretty much it. Just gave off a really corporate odor.

mirabilos Aug 29, 2025

@amin @sotolf @rl_dane @paul indeed

@amin @sotolf @paul

Oh, that's neat!

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 29, 2025

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul

I've been meaning to make a "Polymaths Planet" for a while but it's not high on my project priority list.

@amin @sotolf @paul

...You have a priority list? I thought you had a "do everything all at once because I'm a scary genius kid" list. XD

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 29, 2025

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul

I only have so much actual bandwidth for projects, so I have a queue. ;)

Amin, minor deity of the legume realm Aug 29, 2025

@rl_dane @sotolf @paul

I did get a cool idea for a sci-fi story this afternoon. Haven't decided whether to make it a project of its own or roll it into the heist story I'd been toying with.

sotolf Aug 29, 2025

@amin @rl_dane @paul Is it a LIFO or FIFO? Or maybe a priority queue, which always was a weird name for a heap tree :p

sotolf Aug 28, 2025

@rl_dane @amin @paul Lunduke is a crank wouldn't touch anything he's been close to.

@sotolf @amin @paul

Lunduke is a rat, and the rats find the unmentionables along the floor.

He likes digging up dirt to make grandiose, ridiculous claims. But dirt is still... dirt, I guess.

Maybe lets change the subject. XD

Gnome 2 was good. I actually like old Gnome 2 better than modern Mate. Everything was just a bit more readable. I was comparing back-to-back in VMs running at the same resolution.

mirabilos Aug 27, 2025

@rl_dane @amin @paul maybe it sends the to-be-indexed data across dbus…

@mirabilos @amin @paul

I don't know. From the behavior, I think it was just generating a ton of io requests at once and spiking the sysload to oblivion.

mirabilos Aug 27, 2025

@rl_dane @paul @amin that’s why I tend to select software from a less complicated and complex age, with less layers of abstraction in between the layers of the onion…

Haelwenn /элвэн/

@rl_dane @paul @amin NextCloud often makes me feel like: Remember when NFS used to be seen as pain? Now we got more!