i try to make a new non-root user, but podman just keeps complaining about privileges when i run it under that user.

If you’re asking for help about an error message, then provide the error message rather than describing it in vague terms. There are many privileges it could be complaining about.

I understand you make a point about gender

No, you don’t.

Too much what exactly? Don’t use the functionality you don’t want.

Meanwhile on Windows it has basic GPU drivers for the entire OS bakes in,

Wut? Linux bundles drivers for tons of things out-of-the-box literally built as part of the kernel and many distros (e.g. Pop_OS) even provide NVidia drivers out-of-the-box as well.

First - I’d like you to reconsider you use of “grandma” as a stand-in for “somebody who is technically illiterate”. Maybe ask yourself why “grandpa” is not the go-to here and whether you may be perpetuating an ugly stereotype.

Second - I actually included handbrake in my list as an easier alternative to use.

Yeah, I could see that.

I’m genuinely confused about the use cases you all seem to have. When are you sitting in a field on your phone trying desperately to convert a .avi to a .mkv?

For desktops you just need to have ffmpeg or handbrake or ImageMagick installed - there’s nothing to “maintain”. Image conversion is as simple as convert test.jpg test.png.

Prefix can be just $HOME as well.

Why would anyone setup and maintain a server to do infrequent conversions of small files?

Notice that it hasn’t amongst mainstream consumers.

Good. Mainstream consumers don’t understand enough about networking and computer security to be trusted to self-host anything beyond desktop applications. And even that is debatable. They’re so bad at it that walled-gardens have become ubiquitous just to keep viruses from running rampant.

Yeah, this whole “Linux server” thing just isn’t going to take off.

Many “self hosters” simply aren’t comfortable with the basics and expect things to be just an app you install. A simple two-tier app/db architecture is too complex for them (hence the prevalence of sqllite these days).

I’ve run nextcloud for many years and was simply surprised to hear that it’s “difficult to manage and slow”. My experience has been quite the contrary - it’s been easy to keep up to date and has never failed an upgrade or lost data. And it performs “well enough” since I don’t use low-cost hardware for servers.

My only complaint is that I need to run occ from a terminal rather than having a web interface for it. Makes running it in a k8s pod kinda annoying.

I don’t think that’s a very accurate assessment at all.

It’s the sense I got. It made everything harder for me.

Every atomic distro supports distrobox and other containerization tools, and many support Nix and brew.

I like the idea of distrobox but it’s simply broken. Things just don’t “work”. I’ve hit weird problems each time I try to use it for anything meaningful (don’t ask what - I don’t remember and I was always jumping down rabbit holes to figure out how to just get things that should work working). And the shared home directory model is simply broken by design since you now get competing containers fighting over the same files. You can use per-container home directories and now you get to setup a linux environment from scratch for each distrobox. So much duplication of effort… What a terrible implementation of what is potentially useful idea.

I thought it would be kinda like using Docker but it’s so much worse. Docker works well because the containers are often pretty simple with few requirements. Desktop environments are messy.

And frankly it’s not really worth it in the end. pyenv, sdkman and others have basically solved that problem without adding weird things to debug. They genuinely “just work” and let you easily switch versions of java, python, groovy, etc.

But just think about all the problems you’re not having that you could be solving!

The whole “I bricked my system” thing is just ridiculous.

Near as I can tell they’re primarily aimed at desktop users who want to treat their computer like a smartphone.

I do software development and need a ton of tools installed that aren’t just “flatpaks”. IntelliJ, Pycharm, sdkman, pyenv, Oracle libraries and binaries, databases, etc. The last time I tried this I ran into a bunch of issues. And for what gain? Basically zero.

This is the sort of thing bacula was made for - physical backups spread out over multiple removable media (tapes mostly, but it can work with optical drives).

https://www.bacula.org/free-tape-backup-software/

It tracks where it puts your files, so it does have its own db that also needs backing up. But if you want to restore without needing to search manually through dozens of disks this is what you need.

PHP does actually scale better than something like Lemmy which is written in rust

Okay - How then?

But sure, you can act like you know more than the Nextcloud devs

I’m a web developer too - so I feel rather qualified to speak on the subject. I don’t think the Nextcloud developers are some sort of genius team of engineers but I’m not saying they’re stupid or anything - just that PHP does not scale better than “practically every other technology out there”.

It forks or creates a thread per request. It’s horizontal scaling which is pretty common with any webapp. I don’t know why they claim PHP is special here. It’s a very common way to handle requests and you can do that with lots of languages and frameworks. More CPUs = more threads = more scaling. Throw more servers into the mix and you’re now “infinitely scaling” right? Well… No. Because I/O.

Webapps tend to be I/O bound rather than CPU bound. So asynchronous I/O leads to much better performance generally with fewer resources. Because no matter how many threads and servers you put in the app tier you’re going to be limited by the disks on your database at some point.

The scaling, in particular, is a huge benefit of PHP over practically every other technology out there: to double the performance of a PHP server, you can simply have twice as many cores and things will work without any changes needed. Not only is the scaling you get pretty much 100%, unlike other languages, this scaling continues beyond a single server!

There is so much wrong with this that it’s difficult to know where to start…

My favorite (aside from tunneling) has been using ssh as a SOCKS proxy.

https://ma.ttias.be/socks-proxy-linux-ssh-bypass-content-filters/

Combine with “foxyproxy” to send all non-corporate-Internet" connections over your own ssh tunnel to keep personal web traffic private or to access services on your home network without needing a vpn.