• 0 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 8th, 2023

help-circle


  • I’d argue it’s better to use actual alternatives. Half of the issue with free and open source software is that it’s userbase is too small. If more people used it, it could actually improve in many ways.

    Lets take gaming on Linux as an example. The userbase on steam is somewhere around 5%. So there is almost no incentive for developers to make games that run nativly on Linux. Its actually easier to run the games in a compatibility layer then to get a Linux port of a game. And although wine and proton work incredibly well, sometimes even running a game better than on windows; a Linux native version of every game would be ideal. Which will never happen with such a small userbase.

    Next you have the terrible business practices of these companies. Even if you use the pirated versions. You are in their ecosystem and their community. You increase their profitability and their stock price simply by continuing the industry standard.

    Pirated versions of software like this is excusable if you need it for work or sometihing. But imagine if instead of staying with the status quo, you use and help improve actual free and open source alternatives. Versons of software that don’t steal your data or monetize how you use it by selling your input to others or stealing it for “AI” datasets.

    Imagine using free and open source software that gives you feedom because your data stays on your devices, your creations belong to only yourself or who ypu choose to share it with, and you work with others to improve it; even if it’s by just submitting bug reports. Imagine using something like that which you find so altruisticly beneficial that instead of pirating the software that has no respect for you, you donate money to the devs of free and open source software. Yes, I’m a pirate. But I do donate money to the right causes and something that protects my freedom is worth both my time and my money.








  • If you are dipping toes into containers with kvm and proxmox already, then perhaps you could jump into the deep end and look at kubernetes (k8s).

    Even though you say you don’t need production quality. It actually does a lot for you and you just need to learn a single API framework which has really great documentation.

    Personally, if I am choosing a new service to host. One of my first metrics in that decision is how well is it documented.

    You could also go the simple route and use docker to make containers. However making your own containers is optional as most services have pre built ones that you can use.

    You could even use auto scaling to run your cluster with just 1 node if you don’t need it to be highly available with a lot of 9s in uptime.

    The trickiest thing with K8s is the networking, certs and DNS but there are services you can host to take care of that for you. I use istio for networking, cert-manager for certs and external-dns for DNS.

    I would recommend trying out k8s first on a cloud provider like digital ocean or linode. Managing your own k8s control plane on bare metal has its own complications.




  • I would say that if you are going to host it at home then kubenetes is more complex. Bare metal kubernetes control plane management has some pitfalls. But if you were to use a cloud provider like linode or digital ocean and use their kubernetes service, then only real extra complexity is learning how to manage Kubernetes which is minimal.

    There is a decent hardware investment needed to run kubernetes if you want it to be fully HA (which I would argue means it needs to be a minimum of 2 clusters of 3 nodes each on different continents) but you could run a single node cluster with autoscaling at a cloud provider if you don’t need HA. I will say it’s nice not to have to worry about a service failing periodically as it will just transfer to another node in a few seconds automatically.




  • You should try out all the options you listed and the other recommendations and find what works best for you.

    I personally use Kubernetes. It can be overwhelming but if you’re willing to learn some new jargon then try a managed kubernetes cluster. Like AKS or digital ocean kubernetes. I would avoid managing a kubernetes cluster yourself.

    Kubernetes gets a lot of flack for being overly complicated but what is being overlooked with that statement is all the things that kubernetes does for you.

    If you can spin up kubernetes with cert-manager, external-dns, and an ingress controller like istio then you got a whole automated data center for your docker containers.



  • Pass for personal use is great. Especially if paired with a self hosted private git repo like gitea.

    Pass works well on all platforms I’ve tried, even android and wsl (although I’ve not tried with iPhone).

    In a corporate setting. The biggest questions is going to be if there is already a secret store that has an API. If security will let you roll your own. How is it allowed to be networked. Who are the preferred vendors and is there any enterprise support available.