Even that is pretty temporary.

If you build a house, there’s a good chance, it will survive for decades or even centuries. The house I currently live in survived two world wars and heavy bombardment in one of them. I don’t think any software will manage that.

I think we (as an industry) need to be honest to ourselves and admit that pretty much everything we’re building is temporary. And not in a philosophical sense. 90% of the code I wrote in my about 10 years of professional work is probably gone by now - sometimes replaced by myself. In another ten years, chances are not a single line of code will have survived.

And most importantly for me personally: they seem to disregard people using multiple windows.

I rarely work in one window, and having a large screen for only one app is pretty stupid.

Gnome feels like it’s intended for small screen devices like tablets.

So, you fucked up and it’s postgres’ fault?

These patches do offer some benefits for cloud providers or in general orgs that host a bunch of different products on potentially the same machine.

I could see benefits in them, especially if the v3 or whatever addresses some of the issues.

You could easily throw the components into an old tower case.

Getting the PSU to fit could be a bit tricky due to the rather short cables.

Workstations, like real workstations, are another beast and not what’s typically referred to as “office PCs”, those are indeed rather sff builds.

Again, optiplex sff 3060 as an example, it has two SATA ports, one x16 and one x1 (I think) PCIe, and looking at the PCB, apparently there’s a version with m.2 slots. Sure, not exactly server grade storage, but if you manage to find some version with m.2 slots or invest 10€ for a cheap SATA card, you can get enough storage attached.

GPU wise, absolutely no idea. My optiplex has a wx3100 that I got for cheap and its self reported power draw never goes under 5W, but since this machine is a desktop, it doesn’t run all day.

Sorry, but you’re either pulling those numbers out of your ass or haven’t kept up with the real world for 25 years.

The numbers I’ve posted above are measured using an external meter. I’m German, I have a vested interest in knowing how much power my devices pull.

And you don’t think, office PCs pay attention to power consumption, given they are intended to run 8h a day?

My optiplex sff runs at about 10-15W in idle, and it’s an i5 6500. The t variant in my elitedesk runs at 5W.

If you don’t need actually public DNS, something like Tailscale might be an option.

I already thought about that, but never really could justify switching.

I would argue, though, that it’s not customization, but rather packages themselves changing over time and sometimes just break.

And sometimes you have crap like a full boot partition, because apt decided to keep all Linux versions for some reason.

The carelessness. Mac OS is far from perfect, but it just happily chugs along. Linux often creates problems by just existing for too long. It’s gotten much much better, but it’s still not good.

Yes, but it’s not Unix. That’s literally part of GNU/Linux’ name.

Mac OS is more Unix than Linux.

And a lot of people would call that incapable.

This is a form of learned, or rather forced to internalize, helplessness. People don’t even want to understand things, even though they absolutely could and ought.

I think you don’t distinguish enough between professionals and capables.

All your points are either “sysadmin” or “complete buffoon” and nothing in between. That’s not how reality works.

You absolutely are expected to be able to check your oil and just a few years ago, you were expected to be able to change your tires. That doesn’t make you a car mechanic, but a capable user.

I’m absolutely not a car guy, but I know how to change a tire. Why? Because it’s necessary knowledge. I also know how to file my taxes, even though I’m not an accountant or tax consultant. Again, because it’s necessary.

The sentiment should rather be, that the system maintains itself. And that’s actually something I would get behind.

Tinkering around is cool, but I’m in my 30s and when my girlfriend’s build pipeline finishes, I’ll be a father, I can’t spend 4h every week fixing stuff, I need a reliable platform to work on. Currently that is indeed a mix of Debian and Nix for me.

At least the normal update process should work completely transparently for the user.

Not a sysadmin, but a capable user.

People shouldn’t just accept technology as magic. They should understand at least the basic principles of the technology around them. Corporations want us to be dumb and incapable. Look at cars, you seriously can’t expect a normal person to fix anything on them. But that’s not because of inherent complexity, but because corporations want us to just buy new parts when they think it’s time.

Sapere aude was true in the 19th century and it’s true today as well.

I use Karch, btw.

Usually ~/devel/

On my work laptop I have separate subdirs for each project and basically try to mirror the Gitlab group/project structure because some fucktards like to split every project into 20 repos.

Exactly. But mods here are too butthurt to accept that and rather delete my comments, so they can live in their delusions - which was my point