Is the current state of the AUR, despite the previous waves of attacks, and its troubled history, not evidence enough? The Arch team has never made the AUR a priority and I don’t see why they would start now.

The way I see it there are three possibilities:

• They do nothing.
• They shut it down.
• They give it up for adoption.

What is not going to happen is the Arch team putting time and effort into overhauling the AUR.

And you’re gonna see the Arch team wash their hands of the whole thing, like they did in the past whenever the AUR was in trouble.

That’s not real ownership.

The orphan package criteria is misleading. If you look at the infobox you’ll see that there are only 69 package “maintainers” for 100k+ packages.

They should find a better solution

Who’s “they”? Because it’s not Arch. Arch doesn’t want to have anything to do with AUR, and neither does any of the Arch-derived distros. They’re all perfectly happy taking advantage of it, of course, but not the responsibility.

Remove unmaintained packages and block the name for several months.

Alright, but that would mean most of AUR. Have a look at the package statistics box on the AUR homepage. Most packages fall under that definition in one way or another. The vast majority of the AUR is package some random person added once then never bothered with ever again.

Frankly I’m surprised that the AUR has survived for so long in its current form, for what is basically a shell script distribution system with zero supervision and zero safety guards.

They can also look for older R models, used. I have an R2 Arc Mini that can do 6 drives and it’s not too big.

If you think you might need more, get one with more slots up-front. Trying to add more HDD to a case that wasn’t designed for them sucks.

In Docker’s case is a non-issue because they were careful to use completely different names for all their packages. It’s only when the external repo uses the same names as the core that the dependency resolver can get confused.

Rant:

apt should either completely forbid external repos from using core package names (like Arch does), or look at both the package name and repo URL when deciding if a package is the same, not just package name.

I’m guessing that letting external repos “hijack” a package name was once upon a time seen as a feature and then they never got around to fixing it.

You say that but sometimes they come up with stuff that’s really useful and it can be very annoying to not have it. Like when they integrated compose into the main.

Also, if you later decide to switch to the official version you’ll have to handle the upgrade carefully or you risk wiping out all your images, containers, networks, volumes etc. Which can be fine if you have backups of all the relevant functional definitions and the volumes and so on, but obviously a huge pain if it catches you unprepared.

Mind you, this can also happen by tinkering with stuff in /etc/docker/daemon.json, which is how I originally learned to back up my shit.

Debian’s versions lag badly behind Docker’s. You’d always be missing the latest features. Docker introduces them at a steady pace and it can get annoying to see people talking about a new useful improvement and then months passing before it gets to you.

If you already know Debian that’s a big point in its favor. Nothing beats a distro you’re familiar with. (And I’d make the same argument if you were used to Ubuntu.)

I’ve used both Debian and Ubuntu Server on my home servers and I ended up returning to Debian.

• Debian embodies and follows the most essential Linux values. It’s open, it’s run by an open organization, it avoids proprietary stuff.
• Debian is long-lived. It’s been around for 30 years, it’s mature, self-sustaining, community-run project, and it will be around 30 years from now. Whereas I wouldn’t bet on Canonical being around in 30 years.
• The upgrade path for Debian is better than for Ubuntu Server LTS.(1) You can upgrade it in-place between major versions a lot more reliably and painlessly than Ubuntu.
• Debian is dedicated to being stable. (Please run stable, btw.)
• Debian is a lot more resource-friendly than Ubuntu Server.

I’ve ended up concluding that Ubuntu Server is Debian, just with more quirks. It offers nothing essential that you can’t do on Debian, and it will just complicate your life when the LTS support period eventually runs out (and even during LTS, when you have to jump through hoops like Ubuntu One to keep updates coming.)

(1) You can fuck up both Ubuntu and Debian’s upgrades by adding a lot of 3rd-party repos because apt doesn’t safeguard against external repos interfering with the core repos’ dependency graph.

So the trick is to keep the OS minimal, install only Docker from its repo and install anything else in Docker containers. That way you benefit the most from Debian being stable and very little from Ubuntu Server.

If you also need to run system containers and virtual machines you can add Incus later to the mix alongside Docker and still keep your host OS lean and simple.

You can also consider completely migrating to Proxmox later, which is also Debian under the hood but it’s a more turnkey solution. I wouldn’t recommend jumping straight into Proxmox unless you’re fairly sure that you’d need to run VMs. (If you’re unsure stick to plain Debian for now.)

I would recommend reconsidering how you obtain LE certs. I ended up on Certbot too because it lets you own what is a critical part of your selfhosted identity. Plus Certbot works well and it’s maintained by the EFF who also see it as a critical project. As a local script (basically) sky’s the limit regarding automation.

This is personal preference but I strongly prefer to locally control critical automations about my setup (certs, DDNS etc.)

The certs produced by Certbot are portable and you can use them with CF, local reverse proxies, or whatever other infrastructure you may need. Just need to get a copy to the proper place (securely).

I guess in the bigger scheme of things the question is whether you’re ok being tied to a particular service (like CF). I don’t, and I also don’t want to depend on the LE implementation of any particular reverse proxy (or their plugins).

PS: Oh and another tip: if you do end up using a CLI tool for certs, stick to Certbot. I’ve tried pretty much everything else and they all suck. It’s actually unbelievable how much they suck. Arcane and opaque, the lot of them, which is not something you want from a critical tool.

That’s a good point… was just looking into how I’d go about backing up my post+comment history and the only answer is basically “you need to use a special tool that pretends to be a lemmy client and fetches your history item by item”. I guess “host your own instance and migrate to that” is another one.

Which is surprisingly silly for what was supposed to be a more open platform than others. Heck, I can submit a GDPR request to Reddit and get a full dump of my account within the hour.

Does it have any particular benefits over using a random public instance? All I’ve heard is mostly needing heaps of bandwidth and storage.

It’s an interface for requesting stuff from the *arr stack.

I’ve just started using GarminDB to fetch .fit and .json files from my Garmin account.

Can I simply tell Dreeve to watch the directory where GarminDB dumps the files and it will pick them up?

Does Dreeve do something with the Garmin .json files too? Sleep data for example is in those kind of files, but since Dreeve has a Strava background I suspect it only deals with sports activities?

I’ve just stumbled across this post and it’s serendipitous because I just finished setting up GarminDB in a Docker container. It’s a Python CLI app you can use to download your Garmin stuff locally (which happens to be a bunch of FIT and JSON files).

You don’t have to use Docker ofc, you can also use a venv/pip to set it up somewhere and automate the backup command in any way you want.

It’s a happy coincidence because I was now wondering how to visualize the files. GarminDB also has some --import and --analyze options that parse the data into SQLite but they’re a bit buggy. Then you can use Jupyter notebook templates to produce something you can look at, but Dreeve might also be interesting (especially if it can monitor the folder where GarminDB dumps the files in read-only mode).

How is Unraid? I’ve been meaning to build a backup PC for my folks out of spare parts and I’ve been wondering what I should install on it.

I’d like it to start with a couple of mirrored HDDs, and have two writable Samba shares. One for random stuff and discardable stuff like music and movies, and one for important files where they’d put their photos and documents and which would get incremental backups with something like borg.

I can set this up on Debian ofc but it’s not a bad idea for it to be an OS that doesn’t need arcane knowledge to add/replace HDDs when needed.

On servers: Red Hat -> Debian (with a brief detour through Ubuntu Server for a couple of years).

On desktop: Red Hat -> Ubuntu -> Manjaro.

Switched away from Red Hat around 2004 after RHL was discontinued and split into RHEL and Fedora. You may think Fedora would’ve been a more obvious choice but it was still new in 2004 while Debian had 10 years under its belt. We also migrated the servers at work to Debian around that time and I had used Debian at school in the '90s so it made a lot of sense to use it at home.

Ubuntu on desktop was a fucking revelation when it came out (on CDs shipped free to your home 😃) in 2004. Early days Ubuntu was soooo good that I stayed with it until 2020, long after the magic was gone.

I mean I would’ve probably left eventually anyway given the whole snap and privacy and so on debacles but what really put me off was how it would almost never upgrade cleanly once you’ve added a bunch of 3rd party repos (which you wanted to do all the time on a desktop PC). Eventually I got so sick of it that I was determined to find a rolling distro where upgrades would never be a problem.

Tried a bunch of them during stay at home during the pandemic and settled on Manjaro + XFCE on the desktop and a fresh install of Debian stable + Docker on the server as a happy medium between “hands off” and “up to date”. I’m at a point where I like my Linux machines to just work and to need zero maintenance so I can put the time into other things instead.

I’d forgotten about LFS. Not sure if it should even count, for me at least, it’s not like I actually used it to daily drive. But I did use the knowledge from it to make a mini bootable “rescue” distro that I would put on backup disks so they’d be self-sufficient.