Yeah, I am one of those open source devs who doesn’t get paid for it. But I can’t really say it’s the fault of normal users. They’re just people trying to get by. The fault really lies in corporations using open source without supporting it. Some corporations do give back and support communities, but a lot just take and don’t give anything back.

Personally, most of what I write for my company, SciActive, is open source. The only thing I don’t release is my actual product (Port87), but everything I’ve built in order to build it (the ORM, Nymph.js, the UI library, Svelte Material UI, the WebDAV server, Nephele) are all open source.

I do get users shitting on these projects sometimes, but the majority of communications I get are respectful and gracious. It does sour the experience when someone acts rudely, but I try to not let them get under my skin. Some devs have trouble not being bothered by it, and for them, the rude users and lack of compensation are so much worse.

What keeps me writing open source though is that I just genuinely have a passion for writing code. I recently built a full text search engine into Nymph, and the whole process was so much fun. I think that’s what powers open source, genuine passion for what we build.

(There’s one project that gets shit on a lot more than my others, QuickDAV, which I’ve never really understood. A lot of people say they’d rather use SyncThing, which is fine, but they have different use cases, so it just baffles me. It’s like someone looking at Inkscape and saying they’d rather use GIMP.)

Thank you for being understanding. I shouldn’t have stated it as bluntly as I did either, so I think you were justified in taking it as condescending, and I’m glad we’re seeing each other’s view more clearly now. I think it’s awesome you’re getting into Linux, and even if you don’t ultimately do it, even considering self hosting is awesome. Getting Proxmox and your own NAS up and running is awesome too, btw. Something you should be proud of. I do want Linux and self hosting to be a welcoming space, so I’m going to try in the future to be more welcoming.

When you’re ready, you can email me at hperrin-friends@port87.com about my offer. The offer stands any time you feel ready to dive in. :)

Again, you just sound like you’re not interested in self hosting. I wasn’t even that condescending to you, but you took it that way. You said you don’t want to learn how to self host in a community about self hosting. Like, imagine if someone went into a community about bicycling and was like, “Well, I don’t want to ride bikes, but I like motorcycles because I don’t have to pedal.” You should expect a certain level of disregard in a community if you’re going into that community saying you’re unwilling to learn the basics of what that community is about.

If you’re not interested in self hosting, I’m not saying you’re not welcome here, because a. you are and b. I don’t moderate this community anyway, but I genuinely wonder why you’re here. You did say you might be interested in the future, so…

This is a genuine offer: if you want to learn how to self host, I will get on a video call with you and teach you how to set up some services on your home network and open them up in a secure way. I write and run my own servers, and have for well over a decade, so I am qualified to teach you what you need to know, if you want to learn.

Yes. You could learn everything you need to know by watching a 20 minute YouTube video, but you’d rather use a paid product instead. That’s, like, the definition of a skill issue. The issue isn’t that the software is hard to use, it’s that you refuse to learn how to use it.

And that’s not the fault of Jellyfin, because the “ease of use” of Plex is because it’s a paid product. They can afford to run servers to make everything work for you without having to put in any effort to learn. You’re using their servers to make it easy for you, and you’re paying to do it.

It’s fine if you don’t want to learn to set up a service, but it does make me wonder why you’re commenting on a self hosting community. It seems to me like you’re not interested in self hosting. (Not trying to assume, but what you said is not what I would associate with someone who likes to self host.)

Sounds like a skill issue.

Plex is not free. Plex is paid software, just like Google Photos or iCloud. The only free software is open source. Open source everything. Doesn’t matter if the client is open source. If the server isn’t, it’s not open source. (I’M LOOKING AT YOU, SNAP!)

Reduce the number of single failure points. How you choose to do that is up to you and what you can afford.

Nextcloud is pretty slow in general, but what you’re describing sounds unusual.

For one thing, Nextcloud is written in PHP, so it sets up and tears down its environment for every single request. But PHP has drastically improved over the years, so it’s not that far behind something like Node.

Facebook was originally written in PHP for the Zend engine, and since it was so slow, they forked (or more accurately, reimplemented) it to make HHVM.

Nextcloud still runs on the Zend engine.

Pretty easy. You can use a VPN if you want super secure access. I just use rsync over SSH.

Yeah, but it’s relatively expensive. It’s easier to have a friend willing to let you set up a pc on their network that your server backs up to. Even better if you can do the same for them.

Sure, but I’ve tried Frigate, and it’s not even close to Reolink in terms of ease of use. It was a giant pain in the ass to get it working to detect people in the camera. And even then, getting a push notification is something I couldn’t even figure out. And using it on a phone is really bad UX.

Oh ok. I was thinking wifi. Yeah, that’s strange that they won’t work with direct ethernet.

How would you connect them to your network? They have no inputs.

I would assume it’s based on TURN or STUN, since you don’t need to log in. What makes it suspicious?

Edit: I did some reading on their blog, and they only mention something like STUN and specifically say it’s only for connection, not for relaying, so I don’t think they use TURN. In that case, the camera is streaming video directly to your phone, so it sounds like it’s not ever passing through a ReoLink server. The benefit to ReoLink is they only have to run a STUN server, which is incredibly cheap (bandwidth wise), and the benefit to you is that the video never goes through anyone else’s server. The drawback is if you have a really restrictive firewall, or some funky address translation, you might not be able to establish a connection.

Reolink cameras are self-hosted. You don’t have to have an account in their app, and nothing is synced to the cloud. It’s all stored locally. They’re expensive cameras by comparison, but a. they’re really high quality, and b. they’re not subsidized by subscription fees.

I was like that for about 8 years after switching to Linux. Then I just started accepting most of the defaults. I have my fish configs and my tmux configs, and that’s about it.

I use Valve’s Proton and don’t have this issue. That’s not it.

The parts of Nvidia’s drivers that they’ve released as open source are not enough to game on. You have to add additional code to actually be able to game, whether it’s community drivers or Nvidia’s drivers.

Yes, you need closed source Nvidia drivers. That’s a pretty heavily discussed topic. Basically, it’s because Nvidia refuses to open source their drivers. They’ve started open sourcing some components, which is nice, for sure, but not enough to game on. I buy AMD video cards specifically because they work really well on Linux without any work at all.

I’m surprised you’re seeing issues on Hogwarts Legacy though. My wife and I have been playing it over the last few months on two different machines both with Bazzite and haven’t had any issues at all. We don’t use Nvidia cards, so it might be an issue with Nvidia’s drivers.

You should check out Port87. :) You wouldn’t need to change any of your addresses if you bring your domain on. Custom domains is $10/month though, so it would cost you more. Hopefully the features would be worth it for you, and if not, you can always migrate it again to a different provider. That’s something I love about email. If you have your own domain, you can completely avoid vendor lock in.

I meant that I made it. :) It’s my own email service, and I run it on Proxmox. So, take this with a grain of salt knowing that I wrote and run it, but I think it’s the best email service by far. I wrote an article about how it works really well for me here:

https://sciactive.com/2023/07/17/the-best-email-for-those-who-struggle-with-organization/

Feel free to sign up for free and try it out. :D