#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.

@rl_dane

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... 😂

@paul @amin

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

@paul @amin

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 @paul

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.

@amin @paul

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?!?

@rl_dane @paul

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

@amin @paul

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.

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

@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.

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

@sotolf @rl_dane @paul

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

@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.

@sotolf @rl_dane @paul

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

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

@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.

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

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mostly by not having any menus to search

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

@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.