1. I don't like surprise breakages. I am not prepared to fix a service my family uses midday on a Tuesday when I am working since it auto updated. I'd like to specifically make sure I have dedicated time and plan if something is going to go wrong.

2. My family HATES when things change. I try to run LTS versions of things, but annoyingly, some software like nextcloud doesn't have LTS version. One of the things my family likes the most, is that the stuff I host isn't constantly changing like commercial products. Having google photos change or netflix have a new interface randomly is very, very frustrating for them.

Since my homelab is completely internal, I avoid quickly doing updates (unless it is a critical security issue), and definitely avoid doing major version upgrades unless there is good value in it.

I would love to have hardware like Roku, but just run a jellyfin client, with no need to even have Internet, just access to my jellyfin server on my local network.

It would need to be family approved as I don't need another project. I am not interested in AppleTV or a Google device (unless it can be 100% degoogled).

Has anyone ever successfully gotten things like CoreELEC/LibreELEC to work well?

I wish jellyfin would just sell some hardware, preloaded with a great jellyfin client. I'd pay a premium for it to help fund software development.

[1] https://github.com/faratech/trashd

But at the same time it makes me a little sad. Part of the draw of Linux was being able to understand what was under the hood and how to bend it to your will.

I’m hope the community doesn’t lose sight of that in trying to gain new users.

People often talk about the year of Linux or what success is, and in my opinion, Linux had achieved success by 1996.

Trying to pull a casual user from windows or Mac OS is a worthy goal, but that shouldn’t be the end all be all metric.

At some point it needed a custom interface and the ability to reconfigure itself on the fly.

Adding in a GUI was not a reasonable option.

We ended up writing a GUI (in gtk) then using Xembed to embed the other process and communicate via a Unix socket.

What would have been a major rewrite (and likely a port to a different language) ended up being a few a days project and worked beautifully.

It really showed me how powerful X11 really was.

For example I was a big user of devilspie for placing windows in certain locations, on certain desktops, marking windows as sticky, or marking them as different types of windows.

I am still a heavy user of pidgin (I know I know but I’ve even written my own protocols for it). I really liked being able to place it in a certain position as a certain size, mark it as sticky, put it below anll windows, and mark the buddy list as a utility window. This places in the background, removed borders, and doesn’t include it in alt-tab or window list when you do the expose type of thing. Then I had a global key binding to bring it to the front of all windows or drop it back of all windows.

As far as I know, none of these paradigms even exist in Wayland and I’ve had to deal with less useful options or completely change my interactions which is unfortunate.

If a site is really mixing so much content (like Reddit) then they should really be separating their sites into different subdomains.

The only hard part for the web is that a site could lie since there is no gatekeeper, but some black lists can help with bad actors.

I know everything that is in our main branch by looking at jira.

Product mangers and executives often want a very different view or workflow and it is hard to bend jira to work for everyone. Jira would need to have things like parallel workflows on a ticket and that would just get confusing and complicated.

As a CTO I have declared that Jira is owned by engineering and it is our developers’ process.

But when friends and family ask for my recommendation I send them to Bitwarden and they pay for the service.

If it wasn’t for vaultwarden and the clients being open source I would not be using it nor recommending it.

I’d probably still be using keepass with manual sync and when friends and family ask for suggestions I’d probably shrug and say I don’t trust any of them.

In the 90s, I had:

    Instant Messenger with people I knew
    IRC channels for interests
    Forums for specific topics
    A Web Ring for my James Bond website

In the 2000s, we had:

    Social Media (Facebook), where you actually talked to people you knew and shared experiences with them

All of this still exists, but it just doesn't feel the same. I don't think it's simply because I grew up, or because I'm looking back with rose-colored glasses. And I don't think it's just because these spaces became ghost towns as people consolidated into a few large networks. The architecture changed. The Internet stopped being a destination and became a layer on top of real life that never turns off. Somewhere along the way, the business model shifted from helping people talk to each other to extracting as much attention as possible, and you can feel that in every interaction.

Maybe that's why something is missing.

Facebook now has too many connections, and is just designed for resharing and getting people to doom scroll. There's no real interaction with your friends anymore. It became a broadcast network pretending to be a living room.

On Reddit, I feel like the community is way too big. I don't know who I am talking to and have no connection with anyone on there, even for things that should be local, like my city's subreddit. It feels less like a neighborhood and more like a stadium where thousands of people are shouting over each other.

Hacker News feels the closest to a community, but it is still too big. I have never made a single personal connection here, so I don't even know what I am contributing to. It all just feels faceless and bland.

We still have "Instant Messaging", but my biggest issue is they are pretty much all tied to a phone and "always online." I have zero interest in having a long back-and-forth conversation on that medium, especially now that there is no status of the other people. Back in the day, you were online or not online, and that boundary created a kind of ritual. A conversation could actually be instant and FOCUSED because you both showed up to the same place at the same time. Now it's just a slow conversation over days that randomly interrupts what you are doing. The persistence feels more like an obligation than a hangout.

Most forums feel dead. IRC just isn't the same anymore, and I really dislike being locked into Discord or other proprietary platforms. Matrix bridging has been a godsend, but isn't perfect. I know these small communities haven't completely vanished, but they have been buried. In the old days, you found them through webrings and serendipity. Now you have to dig for them on purpose, and most people never will. My long time friends don't use them anymore, so they aren't useful in connecting to people I already have relationships with.

The Internet just doesn't feel connected or fun anymore.

Don't get me wrong, being able to do research and find information on the internet is better than it has ever been, and I am grateful for that. But the Internet seems to have split in two: it became an incredible tool for finding information, and a terrible tool for sustaining relationships. The Internet was touted as a place for connection, and I feel like that part is long gone. Or if it still exists somewhere, it's hiding in small corners that the algorithms never show us, while the rest of the web is optimized for engagement instead of actually being together.

I've given up on trying to use youtube's interface and now just rely on recommendations + rss (via freshrss) or tubearchivist to keep me up to date and organize the videos.

We decided this was a privacy and security risk, and have gone in a completely different direction, but it would not surprise me if most businesses used one of these companies and just went with whatever they suggested without understanding at all what is at stake or who has access to the data.