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

@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... 😂

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"

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

@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.

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

@rl_dane @paul

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.

Aug 28, 2025

@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.

Aug 28, 2025

@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.

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.