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dan

@dan@upvote.au

Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
d.sb
Mastodon: @dan

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dan, (edited )
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Most of the time, that should be Alpine, because they provide the slimmest base image.

Distroless containers (e.g. github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless, Chiselled Ubuntu, etc) are often smaller than Alpine ones. Google’s smallest Debian-based one is around 2MB.

I have a Dockerized C# app… I’m going to try .NET Native AOT (which was improved a lot in .NET 8, released today) to compile it into a self-contained binary, and see how well it works with a distroless base container.

dan,
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Google’s distroless base images are based on Debian and are smaller than Alpine images.

dan,
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I’m pretty familiar with Linux server management, but haven’t ran Linux on the desktop in a very long time (I still remember the days of XFree86, which was the predecessor to X.org). If I install a mainstream desktop distro today (Ubuntu, Mint, whatever is popular now), does it come with X11 or Wayland out-of-the-box?

dan, (edited )
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What makes Fedora good?

I’ve been using Debian on servers for maybe 20 years now, so I’m very experienced with Debian on servers, but I’ve never really used the Fedora/RedHat/CentOS side of things.

The last time I used a Linux desktop was Ubuntu back in 2006 or so, back when it was still a new up-and-coming distro and they’d send you a free CD (very useful since I was using dialup at the time).

I’m thinking about which distros I should try since I want to switch from Windows. I’ve heard Mint and Pop OS are good? I might try Debian too. I used to love tweaking the OS back in my teenage years, but now I’m in my 30s and don’t have time to fix random breakages… I just want something stable that works well. (that’s why I was considering Debian)

dan,
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Thanks for the info!

dan,
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Thanks for the details!

I ran my college laptop through 15 system upgrades without any issues, nothing has been that reliable for me.

I’ve got a VPS running Debian Bookworm (12.0, latest version at the moment) that I haven’t reformatted since Etch (4.0, 2007). I’ve just done an in-place upgrade every time a new version is out.

That’s not a GUI setup though, so probably more stable when updating…

dan, (edited )
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It’s usually the apps themselves doing weird things - Using undocumented APIs, expecting the system to be set up in a particular way, relying on bugs in the OS, etc. Windows tries, and actually emulates old bugs for popular apps so they continue to work, but it can’t be bug-compatible forever.

Apps/games that work on XP should mostly work on newer versions as long as you set them to run with Windows XP compatibility (in the settings of the EXE), but there’s definitely edge cases.

Windows is still better than MacOS by far

dan, (edited )
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Plenty of old apps still run fine. I’ve got VB6 apps I wrote in the mid 2000s that still run. A previous employer has DLLs from 1999 still running in production on Windows Server - VB6 COM components with hundreds of thousands of lines of code in total. I’m reasonably sure than Office 2000 still works, too.

You do sometimes have to change the compatibility settings and run the apps as administrator (since they were designed for Windows 9x which didn’t have separate admin permissions) but often they work.

Even some 16-bit apps work fine as long as you use a 32-bit version of Windows (Windows 10 or older; 11 dropped the 32-bit build). The 64-bit versions of Windows don’t have the NTVDM component that’s required to run 16-bit Windows and DOS apps. It’s an optional component on 32-bit Windows and you need to manually install it.

A lot of effort is put in to backwards compatibility in Windows - Raymond Chen has blogs and books about it.

dan,
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It’s a pretty simple Visual Basic 6 app so I’d be surprised if it didn’t work using WINE.

dan,
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What you’re paying extra for are timely security updates for community-maintained packages that aren’t an official part of the OS. Debian doesn’t provide that for free either. Debian doesnt provide it at all since they don’t have any paid options.

dan, (edited )
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Definitely on Debian, and I think on Ubuntu too.

Package maintainers can be slow to update packages though. Debian have a separate security team that get patches out ASAP, and those packages go into a separate security repo. I imagine Ubuntu does the same. It’s that security team that only deals with “official” packages, meaning anything that’s not in contrib, non-free, or non-free-firmware.

dan, (edited )
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security updates I would be getting for free on Debian.

Debian contrib doesn’t get official security updates, the same as Ubuntu universe. www.debian.org/security/faq#contrib

In both Debian and Ubuntu, only the main repo gets official security updates for free. Ubuntu has a paid option for universe whereas Debian doesn’t have that option and relies on the package maintainer to provide any updates.

I’d still recommend Debian over Ubuntu though, for various reasons.

dan, (edited )
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Ubuntu and Debian are essentially the same here.

Debian’s contrib repo, which is the equivalent of Ubuntu’s universe repo, doesn’t get security updates from the Debian security team, as it’s not considered an official part of Debian. Package maintianers have to provide security updates. www.debian.org/security/faq#contrib

The difference is that Ubuntu provide paid support for contrib packages, including patches. Debian doesn’t have any official paid support options.

dan, (edited )
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No. All the official packages in the main repo get security updates from the Debian security team.

Only the packages in contrib, non-free and non-free-firmware don’t have official security updates and rely on the package maintainers. These are not considered part of the Debian distro, and I don’t even have them enabled on my servers.

Out-of-the-box, Debian only enables the main repo, plus the non-free-firmware one if any of your devices require it (e.g. Nvidia graphics, Realtek Bluetooth, etc). You have to manually enable contrib and non-free, and by doing that, it’s assumed you know what you’re doing.

In the case of non-free and non-free-firmware, they can be closed source software (like the Nvidia drivers) or have a non-open-source license that doesn’t allow distributing modified versions. In those cases, the Debian team is unable to patch them even if they wanted to.

dan,
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It’s from the phrase “big wheel”, meaning a person with a lot of power/influence. Similar to “big cheese”… It would have been better to use “cheese” instead of “wheel” IMO.

dan,
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Some people don’t like the new logo, but I personally like the symmetry.

dan,
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I love FairEmail but I’ve been giving K-9 a try over the last few days and it’s definitely a lot better than it was a few years ago.

dan,
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I use Mailcow and it works well. Easy to configure, and it uses Docker so it’s self-contained and very easy to move to a new server if you ever need to do that.

I’m using an SMTP relay for outbound emails, though. I didn’t want to have to deal with IP reputation issues, especially with Microsoft/Hotmail. I’m hosting my server on a VPS, and spammers in the same subnet can result in the entire subnet getting blocklisted. Configuring a relay is easy in Mailcow’s UI, and can be configured per domain.

dan,
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I tried Mailspring but it doesn’t support folders very well, and I tried improving that myself but my dev environment never really worked properly so I gave up.

It works well if you don’t heavily use folders (e.g. via Sieve filters).

dan,
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What does being federated mean in this case? Git is already distributed. Is it just for discovery, or do you mean for things like issues and discussions?

dan, (edited )
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Trac

That’s a name I haven’t heard in a looong time. I used to use a pre-1.0 version before GitHub became popular.

dan,
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That’s a great use of federation. Thanks for the info.

dan,
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Does it support connecting to aggregators like FreshRSS? I like FreshRSS since I can keep things (subscriptions, unread state, etc) consistent across all my devices. I currently just use the web UI on desktop and Readrops on mobile.

dan,
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This reminds me of something I saw online maybe 20 years ago now. Someone created a torrent with a name like “every IP address ever (hacking tool)” and uploaded it to Suprnova, which ended up having thousands of people seeding it. It was just a text file with every IPv4 from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255 😂

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