Others have addressed the root and trust questions, so I thought I’d mention the “mess” question:
Even the messiest bowl of ravioli is easier to untangle than a bowl of spaghetti.
The mounts/networks/rules and such aren’t “mess”, they are isolation. They’re commoditization. They’re abstraction - Ways to tell whatever is running in the container what it wants to hear, so that you can treat the container as a “black box” that solves the problem you want solved.
Think of Docker containers less like pets and more like cattle, and it very quickly justifies a lot of that stuff because it makes the container disposable, even if the data it’s handling isn’t.
I’ve been running the same installation of Manjaro since 2018, across three different machines. Each time I’ve upgraded hardware I just pop the SSD out and stick it in the new motherboard. Zero instability or troubles from that. Meanwhile I’ve done that to my wife’s Windows PC and it resulted in going through a whole rigmarole with calling Microsoft because the OS install was suddenly no longer activated.
Linux didn’t even care that I went from AMD to Intel to AMD.
Proton may not be perfect but it works for the vast majority of games at this point. And most mod managers can also run through Lutris, curious to hear which ones you’ve tried that didn’t work
I definitely wish there was a good NLVE for Android that was FOSS. Currently using LumaFusion because it’s the most powerful one I’ve found but it was $21 on sale
The solution for me is that I run Nextcloud on a Kubernetes cluster and pin a container version. Then every few months I update that version in my deployment yaml to the latest one I want to run, and run kubectl apply -f nextcloud.yml and it just does its thing. Never given me any real trouble.
Except they can absolutely come up with new things; their responses aren’t just cut and pasted bites of previous text snippets. They are generated based on a neural network’s idea of what the most likely next token is, and tokens are often fragments of words. There’s a reason you can have it do arbitrary things with text- Because it’s doing slightly deeper things than just imitation.
That’s pretty much what I do as well. It was an absolute game-changer for me when I discovered tiling WMs some ~7 years ago, because it meant super consistent keyboard shortcuts for getting to exactly what I wanted to interact with. I know where individual apps/tasks go, so I put them there. And then when I need to switch to them, it’s as straightforward as Super+[workspace].
Also helps a ton that i3wm’s workspaces only take up a single monitor at a time, which makes it excellent for jumping between monitors.
None of this is set in stone, but I usually follow a relatively consistent pattern:
Center Monitor
1: Primary/“serious tasks” web browser
4: Any remote or virtualized desktop I might have open at the time
6: Image/video editors. Also sometimes just misc usage.
8: Development web browser next to neovim
9: Steam/games
10: Misc. Often a DBMS or file manager
11: Misc. Often where I put any secondary tasks or second projects I need to reference
12: Misc. Often where I’ll stick any long-running tasks that I just need to check on every now and again.