A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.

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Joined 4 年前
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Cake day: 2021年8月21日

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  • We have some of these things. You can type in dpkg --get-selections to get a list of all packages on a Debian distribution. You can use apt-clone to install or transfer all installed packages to a new system, with a single command. You don’t need to install every package seperately. And Fedora will have a similar concept. I think the package manager also keeps track of some of the config files. You can use dpkg-reconfigure to configure your locale and several other things. These are being used for fully automated rollouts. And I believe other distros have similar tools and package managers. And then we have proper configuration management like johntash said.

    And remember, Linux is an organically grown ecosystem for quite some time now. We have things like the FHS and it’s always the same 3 locations where config files reside. But it’s not a tight ecosystem like iOS and there is no central authority mandating every developer on earth use the same config format and syntax to describe things.

    NixOS on the other hand follows a declarative approach. You’d compare that to Debian configured by Ansible (for example). Not Debian alone. And I mean go ahead and install some software which isn’t packaged yet, and you’ll find out why NixOS isn’t more popular. It’s a nice and clever thing, though. Both the declarative aspect and being immutable. But it comes at a price. And then we have some issues with the implementation and I think the error messages are always very unclear. That’s the two main issues I struggle with. It always requires very advanced programming concepts to do very simple things, and I often need to have a look at the source code to find out what to do. And if the config doesn’t apply, it often provides a very unhelpful trace, sometimes it doesn’t even say which of my config file broke. Earlier this week, I spent almost 2 hours to do something that would have been an “npm install && npm run dev” on a different distro. And that’s why it isn’t very popular. It is very nice, though.




  • Yes. I also have my own small VPS doing this (Piefed), Peertube, eMail, Nextcloud… for myself and family if they want. And that’s $8 a month. I wonder why it doesn’t scale down drastically with more users. I mean sure they generate a lot of requests. But then you only need to cache an image or pull in the posts and replies once for 12.000 users, while my server does that just for me. (Albeit for Lemmy, which is way smaller than Mastodon).





  • I think I’d rather do something constructive than in-fight on the Fediverse. Sure, Lemmy isn’t perfect. Not at all. I’d say love it for creating this online-space and pioneering the threaded conversations to some degree, hate the bad things about it. But don’t make this about hate itself or fighting. Instead, focus on constructivism and to create something positive. Focusing on the negativity (and even attracting such people by naming things a certain way) isn’t a good approach for that, if you ask me. I think it’s the wrong way of thinking. I mean this also needs to be discussed somewhere… But be careful with this. We have enough negativity on the internet. And this isn’t the idea behind Piefed.



  • You’ll find a different prevailing mood in different communities here on Lemmy. The people in the technology community (the example you gave) are fed up with talking about AI all day, each day. They’d like to talk about other technology at times and that skews the mood. At least that’s what I’ve heard some time ago… Go to a different community and discuss AI there and you’ll find it’s a different sentiment and audience there. (And in my opinion it’s the right thing to do anyway. Why discuss everything in this community, and not in the ones dedicated to the topic?)




  • Try finding out if it received an IP address, if the driver is loaded or if there are any error messages in dmesg. You might also want to give more information. Which ethernet card? Which version of Linux are you running? And there seem to be some similar reports on Reddit and in some Linux forums. I couldn’t find a solution, though. Maybe you just want to buy a cheap new network card.



  • Sure, I have an old PC with an energy efficient mainboard and a PicoPSU and I wouldn’t want anything else. I believe it does somewhere around 20W-25W though. And I have lots of RAM, a decent (old) CPU and enough SATA ports… Well, I would go for a newer PC, they get more energy efficient all the time… But it’s a lot of effort to pick the components unless some PC magazine writes something or someone has a blog with recommendations.




  • I know. I wonder if Mastodon has a complete set of terms of service somewhere, because the rules there look more like a summary to me and it’s not written in legalese. I would have expected a company to have more fine print…
    I can just tell you how it is. Ultimately, Mastodon (who operate the server) are a German company (a non-profit). And as such they have to abide by German law. And you can look it up, it has a specific paragraph on what you did. In fact a lot of countries have holocaust denial rules, in some it’s part of hate speech. But Germany is pretty strict, because of history. Unless it includes several million dead people, and then the specific methods the nazis used, and is meant to eradicate all jews, gypsies, disabled people, gay people… You can’t say it’s the holocaust. You can’t even compare it. So what you did will be deemed illegal. They do have a really bad death machinery set up. It’s just not the same one. So you need to say this. And I don’t think it matters what you were trying to say. I believe with hate speech laws, it’s about how it can be perceived by your audience. If they can be mislead by your claims, or someone feels offended… I think that’s what hate-speech laws regulate all around the world. They wouldn’t work the other way around since every offender could just say, that’s not what I meant, and it’s an immediate acquittal for anything. But I’m not a lawyer.

    So continue criticising Israel, that’s completely fine. Even the German politicians in the parliament do that nearly every day, these days. Just don’t be stupid and directly violate law, or a post needs to be removed. A company (or even Fediverse admin) can’t forward such a post to your followers, they’d be liable for spreading it. Whether they wanted or not…


  • I think Radicale, Baikal, SabreDAV or NextCloud are the most common choices. I read those names a lot.
    But I believe only one of those isn’t written in PHP.

    I’d really recommend digging into the “hacking” though. Unless you learn from your specific mistakes and avoid that in the future, you might run in to the exact same issue again. And I mean it could be a security flaw in the program code of the WebDAV server. But it could as well be a few dozen other reasons why your server wasn’t secure… (Missing updates, insecure passwords, missing fail2ban, a webserver or reverse proxy, unrelated other software… There are a lot of moving gears in a webserver and lots of things to consider.)


  • Donuts is right, though. Adding your analogy with the nazis is almost certainly what got your post removed. That’s the rule on places like mastodon.social. Once you confuse or misrepresent the holocaust or draw analogies, you’re out. Whether someone thinks this is correct or not, …it’s the rules. If you want to be able to say this, you need to find a different place, and it also needs to be in a different jurisdiction. Or skip that sentence and focus on the first part of your comment.