No, the logistic problem Google “solved” in making YouTube functional and free was born from a time when dumptrucks of VC money made it viable. It will never happen again, regardless of innovation.

This is not a technical problem, and in the case of the YT monopoly, it’s beyond even a people problem. Google got the money, and google won. It will be very difficult to unseat them.

Well, hobbyist projects are surely not the only pillar of the open source systems

Your hunch is correct, they are, because the differentiator between open source and walled garden projects is freedom, and freedom will spontaneously generate projects based on an unfulfilled need. A paid market by itself will not.

In my early days of programming (late 80s), I was copying code from books and magazines. Then came windows and mac, and these were far less friendly to devs, and became more and more so.

Most of these tools were born of need and want, not because any infrastructure existed to pay them. Look at the list of apps in frdroid; most are very obviously solving a problem unique to the dev.

And there is one more thing to account for: for all the apps and scripts you see in a public code repo, there are many times more than that living on someone’s HDD that will never see the public eye.

The point you’ve ignored in your article is that this is simply the split free market creates. We’ve had this issue since the invention of transmissible ideas.

Fair enough, thanks for taking the time.

With respect, help me out here…

I process PDFs all the time, both assembling text and images into PDFs and extracting images, text, layouts, etc. My uses are mostly cleaning up metadata and unwanted elements so they render correctly in more environments. I use pdftk and imagemagick for this, generally.

Is bentopdf just a nice GUI for tools like these?

I’m struggling to understand what part of bentopdf is “self-hosted”.

Maybe I don’t understand the use case for bentopdf, and considering how popular it is, that is likely true. However, I don’t get what this does…

• it’s self-hosted, but the processing happens on the client? Is this just a local application?
• it only works with PDF documents?
• What advantage does bentopdf have over something like paperless ng?

Again, if this is obvious to most ppl, forgive me.

Synching fork has been passed to a new maintainer for a couple months now. The new github is https://github.com/researchxxl/syncthing-android.

If you were using the old catfriend1 version, update your fdroid version and the source will switch over.

This is all out in the open and is resolved, there have been several app updates since then.

We would need to know your DNS query path and whether you are querying from inside or outside your private IP space. If you are querying against public servers, then that is completely public.

I registered mydomain.com as my primary router’s domain

Routers don’t typically deal with dns except to forward requests upstream or hand out server addresses as dhcp options. Can you elaborate what you mean by your “primary router’s domain”?

I had some friction with Jessie to stretch and a little again from bookworm to Trixie. Nothing I couldn’t solve, but there are still a few edge cases that aren’t handled.

This is fine, but k8s is already a big ask for homelab and self hosting. And kamal requires a basic fluency in ruby, which is… not the most intuitive interpreter. I say this coming from years of managing chef.

When they bought Sun, they:

• killed Solaris, effectively
• tried to kill zfs too
• nearly killed mysql with licensing audits
• became borderline evil with licensing practices
• acted like complete assholes in court, holding up cases for years

Calling it “disobedience” is a clear indication that following the big corporations is considered “normal”.

Stop thinking like that.

It’s YOUR INFORMATION. You can be harmed by its abuse and you already know this.

I do not “disobey” anyone by self-hosting. The information belongs to ME. I alone have rights to its access and control. If google doesn’t like it, they can fuck off.

A minimum of 4 disks can be used with raidz2, but I understand if you want the stripe efficiency.

I believe the joke is that Nintendo are aggressively litigious.

Ah, well that’s one I don’t have any data on.

I feel the same way, and honestly, I’m happy to see others do too.

I’m almost done my exit from google, just the actual email left. Calendar, map data, photos, everything in drive is gone to my private infrastructure.

it’s the future

No doubt about that. It’s been “the future” for more than a decade. But even 5 years ago, Wayland was a complete dumpster fire if you strayed outside average use. So yeah, I’ve heard this before.

Of course, I had to turn that protection off because Steam is still X and my controllers back paddles popped up a permission dialog

I understand that this is a real sticking point with some use cases, I hope this is resolved soon. I’m definitely fuzzy on the workings of portals, compositors, input, etc.

Am I doing a good job convincing you?

This is the overwhelming response to my questions about Wayland, and it’s weird. Wayland isn’t a fancy new car I need to use to stay relevant. I work in terminals and a browser, Xfce is fine.

As I mentioned in another response, I am not trying to use the newest coolest thing, I work every day in Linux and I need my setup to be stable and predictable.

And no one needs to convince me, when xfce is finally discontinued or unusable, I’ll have to find a similar Wayland alternative. Nothing compels me to switch yet.

I am not trying to suggest that the old way is better, we have needed to move on from x11 years ago.

That is a good point, fair enough. I don’t really need this, so it doesn’t cross my radar.

Thanks for the response!

it’s hard to imagine needing to explain why Wayland has been better

I don’t really understand what you mean here, sounds like you’re describing a vibe, but that’s valid.

I have a multi-monitor setup with xfce and while it’s nothing to write home about, it works. Of course, I don’t need HDR. I guess my use case isn’t very demanding that way.

I have a wayland/gnome tablet because touchscreen, and I don’t see an appreciable difference in startup time, bit I have no empirical data on this.

I appreciate your response.

I am happy that keyboard and other I/o are being treated as separate from a security perspective.

Xorg fans

I am not as impressed by this comment snippet.

I am not a “fan” of xorg, and you should absolutely stop looking at it this way. This isn’t a matter of having a favourite car manufacturer. I am not commenting to convince everyone that xorg is “better”.

I simply use xorg. I have work to do, I use Linux to do it. My most stable and predictable configuration is using xfce, it just stays out of the way. I don’t care about ricing. I don’t GAF about GPU accelerated terminal emulators, especially when they bonk trying to connect to Solaris tty. I don’t care about HDR. If you do care about these things, that’s great, I’m not trying to diminish that.

I have been using Linux for almost 30 years, professionally for almost 25. I have been through Mir. I have somehow made it through alsa transition to pulseaudio, which sucked. I have been through Unity, the ffmpeg debacle, systemd, ndis wrappers, netplan, etc. Some of these new tooling options are better than previous ones, some aren’t. They effectively get the job done, and that’s the bottom line.

Never in my Linux experience have I seen such a sudden push to not only move everyone to new tooling, but to cast everyone using the old tools as somehow “refusing to move on”, especially in the last 2 or 3 years.

There will come a time when you will see your current tooling will be left behind and you’ll be in my situation. Have some grace about it.

And stop calling me an xorg “fan”.

and with more features.

Look, if you’re gonna tell x11 folks to provide examples of how Wayland is not meeting their needs, you need to meet the same bar and give a few examples of what these features are.

This is honestly what is holding me back from going all in on wayland… I don’t see any benefit.