Sorry, but this post is really, really bad.

State clearly which distro and which versions of Gnome and dash-to-dock and perhaps what other extensions you are running, and there might be a chance someone is able to help you. (Also state clearly the source of your Gnome extensions).

Most of the hints/solutions in answer to this post are also not good. If dash-to-dock triggered the malfunction of the gnome-shell on your system, just login to a terminal and use dconf or gsettings to set org.gnome.shell enabled-extensions to an empty array or to an array w/o dash-to-dock.

I am happily running dash-dock@micxgx.gmail.com on multiple physical and virtual machines w/o any trouble, using the dash-to-dock provided by my package manager on different CPU architectures YMMV.

Using Debian for probably a decade now (before that, various Linux distributions).

IMHO only community driven distributions with great (in size as in quality) communities are worth investing time/energy and learning.

One reason to ditch Debian would be that the software I need to run would not run anymore on it or that there would be a too strong commercial influence on the project. Another reason is for play/entertainment where better options exist (SteamOS) or if I need up to date hardware support (Fedora).

After more than two decades with Linux, I will not play around with non mainstream distributions anymore. Have seen too many come and go, and in the end I would rather do something interesting with my computer than playing around with the Linux distribution of the week.

Java is IMHO one of the most underrated platforms outside of enterprise environments.

Most people also forget, that Java is not only a language, but also a platform, an ecosystem and active research is applied to many parts of Java.

Concerning Oracle: OpenJDK is actively supported by very different but big and capable companies (IBM, Amazon, Eclipse Foundation…). The quality of the language, libraries and documentation needs people which are payed to work on this, full time.

Bring to this the free IDEs one can get for Java - Eclipse and Netbeans are a little bit old school, but offer everything to build/debug and develop complex software.

Java is not my favorite programming language, but when I want to write interesting software and ensure it will be running for the next decade w/o significant changes, Java is really hard to beat.

Of course, in hindsight we know how to do a lot of things better as they were done in Java. Still, what other open source Language/Platform/documentation with the backing of capable companies and really independent and interoperable builds are out there?

One last note to all people which were damaged by Java in university or school: Usually the teachers/professors/lecturers have no real world experience of software development besides the usually university projects, and for the usual university projects which basically means getting small to midsize projects to run Java is total overkill.

Don’t confuse this with real world software projects in the industry, which are mission critical and need to work a decade from now on. Java was always a bread and butter language, but one which learned from other languages and even the verbosity makes sense, once one dives into code written a few years back by another person.

Thanks a lot!

Yeah, if I go down that road, I’ll probably just add a git commit hook on the repo for the Raspberry Pi, so that I’ll have a ‘push to deploy’ workflow!

You are asking exactly the right questions!

I have an Ansible playbook to provision the Pi (or any other Debian/Ubuntu machine) with everything need to run a web application, as long as the web application is a binary or uses one of the interpreters of the machine. (Well, I have also playbooks to compile Python/Ruby from source or get an Adoptium JDK repository etc.)

Right now I am flirting with the idea of using Elixir for my next web application, and it just seems unsustainable for me to now add Erlang/OTP and Elixir to my list of playbooks to compile from source.

The Debian repositories have quite old versions of Erlang/OTP/Elixir and I doubt there are enough users to keep security fixes/patches up to date.

Combined with the list of technologies I already use, it seems to reduce complexity if I use Docker containers as deployment units and should be future proof for at least the next decade.

Writing about it, another solution might simply be to have something like Distrobox on the PI and use something like the latest Alpine.

Thanks for the idea! I try to keep as little ‘moving’ parts as possible, so hosting gitlab is something I would want to avoid if possible. The Raspberry Pi is supposed to be sole hardware for the whole deployment of the project.

Wow, thanks a lot! Your answer is exactly what I hoped for when posting on Lemmy: I didn’t even know the docker-tarball thingy is a thing, it fits my problem space very nice in combination with cross building and it seems as easy as it can be. Excellent! :-)

Thanks, didn’t know about buildx, but it looks exactly like what I need to solve cross compilation.

AFAIK Podman only supports quadlets from version 4.4 and later, I am on version 4.3… so, technically you are right and it would work (for me end of the year or next year, when Raspbian gets an update to Trixie), I am mostly interested how people achieved this and automated this and if there are different/better approaches than the ones outlined by me above.

My development machine is an AMD64 and the Pi is an Aarch64… I have no clue how complicated cross-building images for a different architecture is?!? (I am thinking about using something like Erlang/Elixir, so I honestly don’t know at all.)

I am not totally opposed to use a registry (free or payed), but, correct me if I am wrong: If I just build the image on the Pi, it is already exactly at the one spot where I need it, so what problem is solved for me by using a registry?

Edit: Someone above mentioned docker buildx, so seems cross compilation is solved.

Thanks for the link!

Exactly, this is what I am doing right now (just for binaries, not execute Docker or Podman).

Would it be a problem, that my development machine is an AMD64 and the Pi is an Aarch64?

… I do not want to argue with you and Linux hardware support certainly is much better than decades ago (I was there, I know :-P) … but even my hardware, which was bought with Linux support in mind, I have several problems… one of my laptops WIFI card has problems with Linux sleep mode, one of my Lenovo machines has audio trouble with the microphone after being used for longer online calls and the list goes on. I hope that I am just very unlucky with my hardware picks, but when you have known hardware components in a mass produced device like Google Pixel, I hope we get Apple level support of hardware.

Unless you invested a lot of money and time, you are certainly already running an OS with a lot of BLOBs at the most important parts (WIFI driver, etc).

Given AOSP and a decent smartphone, I am basically at exactly the same level I am with running Linux on my desktop. Actually, the smartphone could be better, if it is a Pixel, because at least I’ll have 100% hardware support. … and again, AFAIK one will be able to run Debian in a virtual environment.

Long story short: I would never buy hardware with vendor lock in, but middle to high class Android smartphones are actually standardized hardware which run excellent with Linux. Total win for me.

there is no android phone that I am passionate about,

Not what you asked for:

A phone is a tool which should enable you to do stuff. Be passionate about friends, hobbies, art, not a piece of plastic.

Being forced to use iOS (work phone) and Android (Samsung, also work), both suck IMHO but Android sucks less.

My next Android will be a Pixel, as others suggested custom roms are the way to go, but even vanilla Android is more functional/open/practical for my needs than iOS.

I would never buy Apples shit with my own money: Dumped down, locked down and in the end you are renting a device from Apple to pay fees for their Appstore and Cloud offerings and vendor lock in. No thanks.