jpaskaruk

@PieMePlenty

a large open source Free Software community

FTFY

@steel_for_humans

@steel_for_humans My take on Ubuntu/Debian, no authoritative aspect to this opinion, other than, I have been using one or the other my entire time using GNU, with a few brief forays into Arch.

First, my direct answer: if you're liking Debian, and you don't feel limited by it, stick with it. Both Ubuntu and Debian feel exactly the same, and almost always you can follow Ubuntu instructions on Debian and have full success.

Debian's trip is basically conservatism - they want a rock solid, dependable system, and to achieve that, package upgrades are slower and permanently behind Ubuntu. Unless you run Sid, Debian's "rolling release" version, which gets you basically the same packages (and instabilities) as Arch.

You won't really notice anything different, day to day, on Ubuntu, so it is an equally valid choice, subject to your opinion of Canonical. I find their business practices... questionable, so I moved to Debian full time at some point, but notably, back in my one Linux job, I ran Ubuntu cause we needed it for some dependency or other. They were also the first distro to really do an implementation where the difficulty of installing and managing it was approximately equal to Windows', but nowadays you install KDE on any distro and you've got a very robust system.

Notably, Ubuntu has announced they're getting into AI implementations, with an emphasis on Local Inference first, so if you're not radically anti-AI, that would be a very good reason to choose Ubuntu.

I find that on the rare occasions that Debian's packages do not provide a thing I want, I can get it by installing an AppImage or Flatpak or (in desperation) Snap, or in cases of extreme need, it's really not that insanely hard to build from scratch, as long as the devs are able to write good instructions/scripts. There is no need to run anything else, at this point, from a functional perspective.

Bonus suggestion: for your servers only, consider having a look at FreeBSD. A completely different experience, and many would argue, a better one.

One example: If you are setting up a project that needs a web server, on Linux you are highly likely to encounter a thing where some people use Apache, some use Nginx, I don't even know what all is out there now for web servers, but there will be many different tutorials, and good luck to you in sorting out which tutorial is good quality, and uses the good quality tools. I have literally reinstalled systems in the past, for want of a good tutorial that was on the distro I had, but I'm the sort of weirdo who enjoys that.

Linux, fundamentally, is beautiful anarchy, which is difficult for the individual alone in the world. You are endlessly bombarded with choices, and little to no explanation of why you might want to use one thing vs. the other.

FreeBSD, on the other hand, has an opinionated choice on web servers, and the package they intend for you to use (which I believe is still Apache) is called httpd - ie, in the land of FreeBSD, there is one best web server, the HTTP Daemon, or httpd. The documentation of httpd is rich and lush.

You can still use the other ones, in general, but if you use httpd, you will have a straightforward deployment going in a very short time, because there is one canonical way to do it, and it's easily found in one place (the FreeBSD Handbook).

It does also kinda force you to learn how things work at a slightly lower level, BUT it does so, again, with good documentation that you can read and understand, and reward is that you do things in a far more computationally lean way, and get way way more out of your hardware.

@Zorque I think the point that @lIlIlIlIlIlIl is making - remember, we all want the same thing here - is that every bit of effort put into trying to force Google to act in ways that they will never act again, in the end, is going down a memory hole at the end of its ripple effect on reality. And that's true, and worth acknowledging.

However, effort going into technical development of Linux-based portable devices, is only going to come from a select few people, and I would propose to say that the people who are working on new OSH designs for pocket computers that will eventually take the place of these corporate surveillance monoliths, these people are probably not the ones putting time into what we sometimes call "digital activism" (ie. posting on socials about justice). They post, you know, Git PRs.

So you know, you're both right, you just need to remember that different people are working on those two goals, and keeping Android as, umm, "sideloadable" as possible while the real nerds continue to save us is a worthy thing to do, if it even delays things by a year.

@Joelk111 @ObsidianZed Symfonium supports Jellyfin as its media source as well, along with just about every other non-streaming-service option you can imagine. I have a copy, it does track mixes that please my ears, just about everything I need anyways.

@Vegan_Joe Tailscale has an option for a public entry point on your tailnet - I have not used it, but this seems like what you're after.

@foggy @non_burglar I mean

What if you just want to self-host because it's fun?