Good for you.

I learned a really strange (yet rather obvious in hindsight) lesson a week or so ago. I recently deployed Apache Guacamole at work for webby access to an RDP box with MFA. We are dumping MS’s RDG because it is not very flexible and is really complicated. One of my younger members of staff uses it whilst in the office and are almost pathetically grateful for me setting up the Guacamole thing 8) (WTF).

She’s an Apple aficionado. She can now use her Apple thingie as St Jobs intended and also connect to work stuff, which is largely Windows and Linux based but the Linux stuff is abstracted away to the browser.

The key point is that she considers herself as an Apple person for want of a better word and can be an Apple whilst using our corp MS and Linux gear and it appears to her that it is all integrated.

I’m 53 years old and have been doing IT for around 30 years. We really have to get to grips with how people think and work.

mead

Do you really drink a honey based brew?

There is almost certainly a binary version of gcc in Gentoo. I ran Gentoo for 20 odd years and also generally insisted on compiling everything. I recall gcc going from v3 to 4. My laptop ran for over a week on a glass table with a prop to keep the fan vent unobstructed.

I probably should have learned back then that I didn’t really understand exactly how the toolchain worked and how to get from ebuilds to binary code really works. I’m a sysadmin and not a programmer.

With hindsight, I suggest that you pick your fights with care. Use the bin versions of entire packages where available and enjoy the flexibility of USE when it will make a difference.

gcc is not the biggest lump you will compile but it does take a while. It was rather slower 20 years ago.

Mint has managed to become a meme and that’s no bad thing, per se, but it can look a bit odd to the cognoscenti. Anyone doing research by search engine looking to escape MS towards Linux will find Mint as the outstanding suggestion.

That’s just the way it is at the moment: Mint is the gateway to Linux. Embrace that fact and you are on the way to enlightenment.

I am the MD of a small IT company in the UK. I’ve run Gentoo and then Arch on my daily drivers for around 25 years. The rest of my company insist on Windows or Apples. Obviously, I was never going to entice anyone over with Gentoo or even Arch, although my wife rocks Arch on her laptop but I manage that and she doesn’t care what I call Facebook and email.

We are now at an inflection point - MS are shuffling everyone over to Azure with increasing desperation: Outlook/Exchange and MS Office will be severely off prem. by around 2026. So if you are going to move towards the light, now is a good time to get your arse in gear.

I now have Kubuntu on my work desktop and laptop. You get secure boot out of the box, along with full disc encryption and you can also run a full endpoint suite (ESET for us). That scores a series of ticks on the Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation and that is required in my world.

AD etc: CID - https://cid-doc.github.io/ pretty nifty. I’ve defined the equivalent of Windows drive letters as mounts under home, eg: ~/H: - that works really well.

Email - Gnome Evolution with EWS. Just works. Used it for years.

Office - Libre Office. I used to teach people how to use spreadsheets, word processors, databases and so on. LO is fine. Anyone attempting to tell me that LO can’t deal with … something … often gets … educated. All software has bugs - fine, we can deal with that. I recently showed someone how decimal alignment works. I also had to explain that it is standard and not a feature of LO.

For my company the year of Linux on the desktop has to be 2025 (with options on 2026). I have two employees who insist on it now and I have to cobble together something that will do the trick. I get one attempt at it and I’ve been doing application integration and systems and all that stuff for quite a while.

Linux has so much to give as an ecosystem but we do need to tick some boxes to go properly mainstream on the desktop and that needs to happen sooner rather than later.

Because Ubuntu LTS works very reliably

Ubuntu pulled a blinder many years ago with their LTS model. You get a new one every two years with five years support for each one and a guarantee of moving from one to the next. That gives you quite a lot of time to deal with issues, without requiring you to live in the stoneage.

For example: Apache Guacamole is a webby remote access gateway thingie. It currently requires tomcat9 because TC9->10 is a major breaking change. Ubuntu 22.04 has TC9 and Ubuntu 24.04 has a later version (probably 10). However Ubuntu 22.04 is supported until 2027. So we stick at Ubuntu 22.04 and get security updates etc.

Guacamole is currently at 1.5.5, and the next version will be 1.6.0. The new version will have lots of functionality additions. The devs will then worry about Tomcat editions and the like. Meanwhile Ubuntu will still be supported.

In my opinion the two year release/five year supported model is an absolute belter.

I find it amazing that so many distros with volunteers manage to curate a vast software ecosystem, reasonably successfully and yet some of the largest companies on the planet, worth more than $1T each cannot manage to find the resources to do it efficiently.

Imagine firing up a cmd or ps prompt in Windows and tying in: msiexec install adobe-hipster-app and it just works.

If I recall correctly Arch has … ssh into wifey’s laptop … python installed out of the box.

Run up a console and type python, and hit enter. Type in print (“Hello World”) and hit enter. There you go!

If you lack a python: $ yay -S python.

I’ve just moved my work PC from a cast off from a customer - it had a BIOS date stamped 2012, and was a rather shag Lenovo with a … Intel Core something and four GB RAM. Cheap though, ie free. I did wedge in a SSD to make it usable.

I run KDE which isn’t known for being tiny and I have a Postgres DB and a few containers for experiments running. The new box is a i5 Intel G13 thingy - HP mini jobbie. Luxury

To ensure that I am as disadvantaged as everyone else, I run ESET Endpoint AV and full disc encryption on it. It boots EFI and Secure Boot is enabled. I will pass a Cyber Essentials Plus audit (UK standard) without having to employ any misdirection. I’ve also read up on the US standards. The STIG for Ubuntu 22.04 is doable but my desktop is running 23.04 and 24.04 has just come out.

I run my company and we have some customers who have some rather more stringent requirements than others. We also have our own standards.

Errm, Wireshark. Please bear with me.

Wireshark is a shining example of an open source project completely and utterly crapping on the closed source competition. As a result we all benefit. I recall spending a lot of someone else’s money on buying a sort of ruggedized laptop with two ethernet ports to do the job back in the day.

Nowdays, I can run up a tcpdump session on a firewall remotely with some carefully chosen timings and filters and download it to my PC and analyse it with Wireshark.

OK, all so convenient but is it any use?

Say you have a VoIP issue of some sort. The PCAP from tcpdump that you pass to Wireshark can analyse it to the nth degree. Wireshark knows all about SIP and RTP (and IAX) and you can even play back the voice streams or have them graphed so you can see what is wrong or whatever. That’s just VoIP, it has loads of other dissectors and decorators built in.

So what?

The UK (for example) will be dispensing with boring old, but reliable, POTS (Plain Old Telephony System) by 2025. Our entire copper telephony and things like RedCare (defunct soon) will go away.

We are swapping out circuit switching for packet switching. To be fair, a lot of the backend is already TCP/UDP/IP that is shielded away from us proles. When SoGEA (Single Order Generic Ethernet Access) really kicks in then the old school electric end to end connection will be lost in favour of packet switching, which never fails (honest guv).

If you are an IT bod of any sort, you really should be conversant with Wireshark.

My home and work ones both have Zigbee and Zwave. The modern ZwaveJS integration is amazing compared the old effort. Also: ESPHome, NUT, Mossie (MQTT), nginx proxy manager, MariaDB, nodered, Piper and that, Remote Backup, Terminal and SSH, DSS VoIP Notifier, VLC.

HACS with a fair few custom cards etc.

Good on you mate. I have no idea why you are being downvoted when you are being the big man when called out.

I do understand your position - it is bloody annoying to have to remind people how the web works but in this case you are doing a “show and tell”.

When doing something like that I think you should show all and tell all. “Here’s what I did and how I did it and here’s how you can do it too”. That’s why I went in with the rather dodgy ankle reference! Think about when you see those influencers with worryingly pneumatic lips and arses that might double as seating for a friend. They show all, really all and some make a decent living at it. Now think about what sort of response you want for one of your show and tells.

I do confess that I used to do the same as you - I blasted away at someone on The Register a fair few years ago and was called out and subsequently apologised. That was a game changer for me and I suspect for you now. That doesn’t mean that you can’t get riled occasionally but make sure it counts and you are in the right or at least nearly right … OK you think you are right 8)

Cool beans!

Cheers Jon

PS I’m 53 today

Perhaps but if you are doing a show and tell, why not do the full tell?

I can remember when Google didn’t exist and Altavista was the cool kid, or when the www didn’t exist and gopher and WAIS were the tools of choice. … and I can go much further back.

My real point is: If you are going to show a bit of ankle, and it is yours, make sure that everyone realises it is your ankle. If it isn’t your ankle, then tell us whose it is. It’s not fair asking people to search for pictures of ankles and then try to guess which one you have posted about.

SO: Next door have got their lights up, why haven’t we? Me: (Enable NodeRed flows for gutter and pergola light strings that switches them on at dusk and off late evening) Right, that’s the missus pacified for a week or so. I should probably get BigTimer to sort that out itself.

Employee: I’ve got all the printers for monitored using an auto entries card. (Good skills) Me: (Installs an addon that can use VoIP to do text to speech to a phone) We warn off the customer and now they get a phone call from “things” that tells them what consumables to buy and also sends an email.

When I finally get around to sorting out my glasses so I can see what my soldering iron is up to, I’ll get many more gadgets installed. My computer room at work needs a tiny ESP8266 and four 1 wire Dallas SC temperature sensors, a bit of vero board, a resistor, power and probably a buck convertor and a case, which I’ll print.

I adore HA.

Start off with Thingiverse or similar. I recommend something like: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3553160 There are a lot of models there - those are .STL that you “slice” and send to your printer. There is this: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2187167 which is CAD models with the working left in - OpenSCAD in this case. You load it up, generate a .STL and then pass that to the slicer.

I have a large plastic cabinet in my garden for storing a lawn mower etc. The hinges died years ago. I have printed new ones. At least 20kg of plastic waste has been avoided being dumped a lot longer. I am well aware (now) that I should not have bought the bloody thing in the first place!

If you go the OpenSCAD route, you might like this: https://github.com/JustinSDK/dotSCAD - the author sadly passed away recently but his work is legendary in my opinion.

Once you get printing sorted out, then move on to your own stuff. … or not - give it a go! I have a large bag of very strangely shaped PETG experiments that went badly wrong and need recycling.

So that might be Matty and Miya Meiikaalayinen. Dealing with diacritics from a language that has none is a bit tricky.

Am I even close?

Into the void - Black Sabbath

You are using an account from l.w which is the largest instance in the lemmyverse so if you create a community, there is a good chance people will notice. You could also spin up your own instance but that isn’t for the faint of heart but you could sponsor one or hire someone to run one for you. You can run accounts on as many instances that will have you and they can be named whatever you like.

My real point is you have real options that don’t end with a walled garden dictating what you can and can’t do. It is a bit rough around the edges but give it time.

There is absolutely no reason why there isn’t an Arabic first instance or web of instances. Start off small and see what happens. Get a community setup on your instance and post about it. Don’t be discouraged if progress is slow. Inertia is rife in all walks of life. People in general are a bit crap! The fediverse is no different, especially because it is all rather new to a lot of people.

Arabic and Islam (there I’ve said it) are often conflated, so please keep the faith (hah!) and either find or develop your community as you want it.

Fediverse - effort required and a really crap colour scheme!

Good luck 8)

The Fediverse is rather different. I’m sure there will develop some sort of sign posting system to point out where to go but by its very nature, it will be subjective. Perhaps some sort of vivacity score could be used to judge how alive a community is and some way to show all communities across all instances in a say top 10 listing. In time communities with the same broad focus will develop a particular or set of focuses (foci, focae - not for me). Time will tell.

Lemmy is different to the walled gardens and it needs to mature and develop its own way of doing things. I love the fact that the largest instance went down with a bang for a while and the rest carried on fine. I feel for lemmy.world residents and admins - I’m a sysadmin myself. However that demonstrates the sheer power of the fediverse. I will be spinning up an instance eventually, once I’ve got the hang of using it and I run some quite important stuff at work.

Tools and memes will develop over time but make no mistake, the fediverse has hit its teens in life. What sort of adult we get will be interesting. We do need to keep it out of the hands of a single authority whilst still allowing civilized discussion, for a given value of civilized. Instances can refuse to peer with others so we can gradually develop networks that work for subsets of the human race. The tricky bit is enabling this to happen within earthly laws and boundaries. Governments hate decentralization for obvious reasons. Instead of Messrs Apple, Google, MS etc they potentially have to deal with me and you and the other n billion people on the planet!