Please, don’t expose VNC to the internet, ever. It’s a horrendously insecure protocol that uses plaintext passwords of no more than 8 characters and everything that passes over the connection is unencrypted and visible to anyone sniffing the traffic.

Once it was the only option, but there are dozens of better things out there now which should be used, even on a lan or vpn.

Why add age checks?

I’ve read this from several sources now and not found anywhere that explains why they’re doing this. Are they being threatened with legal action?

They do, but Linux is not dependent upon Red Hat.

Debian has always attracted zealots, many of whom were extremely… impolite… during the systemd wars, on both sides of that schism. Sadly, as in most things, the majority of reasonable, quiet, hard working community members get drowned out because, well, they’re reasonable, quiet and hardworking.

I think RH made a lot of important contributions to the Linux ecosystem and pushed it forward by a lot.

I agree - and historically they have led innovation in truly groundbreaking ways, but my personal view is that those glory days are a long way in the past now. Whilst they do still do some good work for FOSS, the purchase by IBM has in my view, changed objectives. To me, Red Hat has changed from being a profit making company that existed to support foss projects, to a subsidiary running foss projects to support a profit making company.

IBM don’t buy companies to make the world a better place.

Agree. Although Mariadb has drifted significantly (and with very good reason) in terms code, features and SQL - I still mentally parse “Mysql” as “MariaDb”. It’s one of the best forks I’ve ever encountered in all my time using foss. I currently maintain around 80 MariaDb servers and have remarkably few problems.

Much as I like to see variety in software, I do kind of wish more recognition of MariaDb was given, and more support.

Just installed debian on a S440 tonight to replace a HP Pavilion that had just ejected its charge port. Doubt the thinkpad will have the same problem, the HPs flex so much I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.

The thinkpad install was flawless, even had the wifi drivers in the installer without needing non-free.

That happened ™

It happens every day. Hundreds if not thousands of times.

Never heard of something like that, and I suspect anyone who started creating it soon filed it under “Really bad ideas” alongside “Whoops, why did my kernel just stop?”

sar is the traditional way to watch for high load processes, but do the basics first as that’s not exactly trivial to get going. Things like running htop. Not only will that give you a simple breakdown of memory usage (others have already pointed out swap load which is very likely), but also sorting by cpu usage. htop is more than just a linux taskmgr, it’s a first step triage for stuff like this.

/Colour/ Photocopiers cost about the same as a new car back then, so whilst they existed, they weren’t exactly within access to schoolkids.

I’ve been playing with computers and writing code since 1981, so have seen a few things change, and the past couple of years have been alarming from a world new stage, but that’s not so much about tech as global unrest.

It started with the cookie banners… “We value your privacy” == “Of course, it’s worth money to us” The internet has shifted a lot over the past couple of years particularly, and it was inevitable. Just as inevitable is the loss of the small internet (I speak as someone who runs several small websites that get scraped and stolen from constantly), and the attempts of governments to control it. That was all going to happen, and just as inevitable is the impossibility of complete control - it’ll just make life harder for the honest person.

We’ve seen some shitty changes to software too through global business. With hindsight, that was inevitable too - it took a long time for someone to realise just how locked in the likes of vmware’s customers were. How cloud and then AI additions were reasons to charge more for features we don’t like. There’s a lot of fear about global instability for obvious reasons, and that’s hard to shake.

But also… People haven’t changed. For every big name enshittification, there’s people sprouting two more things without such controls. Where we are now - founded largely because of shenanighans at Reddit. You mention Linux - again, most of it free and accessible and those are baked into it. (We’ll skip over Redhat here, I think, perhaps the exception that proves the rule). There’s a lot of free software projects that are born out of love for the free and open community. A place where respect is more common than rudeness.

So I’m certain there’s a balance. Yes, crappy things. But also good things. I’m constantly amazed at new inventions and how tech is genuinely improving life for many people. I grew up in England in the 70s and the quality of life today is better despite what we might think, but it’s also far more complicated, and makes us feel helpless and small. Back then, our world was small, we knew people. A disaster on the other side of the world took days to arrive on our newspapers, and we weren’t made to feel like we should do something about it.

Perception may be playing a big part in your view here, and you sound both burnt out and depressed. Not uncommon with the bombardment of badness in the news that we can do nothing about. Understanding that, and stepping outside of the doom cycle, definitely helps.

Ultimately, you’ve got to do what’s right for you. If tech is a hobby to you, then it’s the same as any other hobby. When it stops being fun, it’s time to find something else that you enjoy instead of, or as well as. Hope you find a better balance.

It doesn’t need the Dockerfile to run.

Thanks for the feedback, always interesting to hear how people might use a tool like this.

I do have email notifications in the roadmap, but to be honest, I’ve struggled to visualise how that might work for two reasons:

1. One of Taskpony’s goals is that it’s as easy to install and run as it could be. Configuring email settings takes a lot of detail (especially when running in docker where you can’t rely on a local smtp). I’ve thought about other tools like ntfy.sh, which I love, but the whole ecosystem of dozens of systems and tools for DM style notifications is too wide to support.

2. I wouldn’t use it like that, I’d use a calendar for distant events, and there’s no plans to support “Task must be done by” style timers, as again, I think the interface would get too complex. I keep Taskpony in a tabbed browser, and also as one of my daily bookmark folders, so it shows up regularly enough to show me.

Out of interest, how would you use notifications, or see how they’d work? Are you thinking of browser notifications? And if so, on what logic might they trigger?

Great that you’re using it!

And yes - sadly koyeb’s demo went down as I posted this link. I’ve quickly thrown up another demo here; https://taskpony.onrender.com/

Indeed, but I love writing in Perl and it still works great. It’s a shame it’s not more widely used.

Sure, I use them, for three good reasons.

1. Cheapest domain registrations around.
2. Cloudflare tunnel for free which allows me to reach my selfhosted stuff despite my ISP running CGNAT.
3. I host several website using Pages for free, so now I don’t care about AI or endless bots hammering my limited bandwidth, or having malicious attacks on my equipment.

Same. Been using debian stable for over two decades. It does everything I need,

At work we use EL distros in vms. All of them are backed up by image every 3 hours, so a non-booting system is generally best dealt with by simply restoring the whole vm from before the change.

I’m not opposed to atomics, but I don’t have the need and haven’t yet invested much time into learning their differences.