Many of my self hosted solutions are just DIY cludges. I was talking to a friend of a friend on Saturday about media streaming and he told me all about his Jellyfin setup and then asked about mine and I was just like “I just store MP4s on an SSHFS drive and play them in VLC on my TV (which runs Linux Mint).” When the survey asked about the various types of software I was like “No… I don’t use anything like that… wait… yes I do! I just don’t use a prebuilt solution!”

tail -f of vim

Something very similar happens to me in some Windows games on Mint with Cinnamon, especially older games running using Proton. I’ve had it happen recently with Age of Mythology and Fallout New Vegas.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer for you, but I can tell you you’re not alone.

Are you me?

Pretty sure it’s possible to play LoL on linux…

Be as uninteresting as possible. Millions if not billions of people’s information of this sort is out there.

It runs my TV too, which is a 7-year-old Dell All-in-One touch screen that works great.

But with Linux, I just can’t believe how unstable it is, even when I do the absolute basic things.

That doesn’t sound right.

Start with Linux Mint. I’ve helped Boomers use it. My dad has been using it as his daily driver for almost 5 years and he doesn’t know the difference between an OS and a Word Processor (he keeps calling LibreOffice “Linux”).

Mint.

I use that on my gaming rig. Most everything runs fine through Proton or Lutris (Stellaris, Mass Effect, Fallout New Vegas, the Witcher, Age of Mythology, lots of classics). Minecraft Java Edition runs fine natively, including mods. Old games run great through Dosbox.

Mint itself is super stable Linux for your grandma. My dad’s been running it for five years and he doesn’t know the difference between an OS and a word processor (he keeps calling LibreOffice “Linux”). It was also my son’s first OS when he was about 8.

In fact, my wife and I already have a self hosted LubeLogger.

This article starts with an ideological objective (in principle, we object to killing owls, here’s an impassioned appeal to your heartstrings about how horrible that is) and then cites some research to build a case for the existing ideological conclusion (here’s some links to some studies).

And I get, that from a radical animal rights perspective, culls of any kind can be problematic. But as someone who’s done a bunch of volunteer work helping manage invasive species, I have a feeling the authors might not object to me spending my time cutting down Russian olives on the Colorado front range, or weeding out invasive Chinese grasses in San Francisco Bay estuaries (both things I have spent many hours of my life doing). IDK how they would feel about me killing and eating Louisiana bullfrogs in California streams and ponds (but those assholes are only there because humans brought them there, and they’re eating a dozen native frog species to extinction).

In this particular case, the only reason the barred owls were able to spread from the Northeast the way they did is because humans transformed the Great Plains into an environment they could live in (they need high perches for nesting and sleeping, they didn’t have that until European descended humans started planting trees and building buildings).

Spotted owls aren’t the only species of owl that barred owls compete with and kill (they also target ground nesting owls, and will happily eat great horned chicks as well).

You can make a radical animal rights argument that “killing owls is horrible full stop.” I don’t want to stop you from making that argument, but I don’t agree with it and I do want to provide a counterpoint to it. You can correctly argue that human industrial society (and the kind of decision making based in capitalism and the profit motive) are causing all kinds of really bad problems. I 100% agree with that assessment, but I don’t think “and therefore we shouldn’t kill owls” necessarily follows. I agree that we should encourage ecology to self-heal, but informed management of the damage we’re causing is also a worthy goal.

I’ve set up Lemmy, Forgejo, Nextcloud and Mastodon. Forgejo is unbelievably easy, Mastodon and Lemmy both are complex but if you follow the instructions you get there pretty quickly.

Matrix is like “Follow a book of documentation, then when it doesn’t work anyway, spend hours of your life troubleshooting a bunch of stuff that’s NOT in the documentation. Why is this so hard?”

It’s so much easier to set up and install than Matrix.

Jokes on them, I don’t keep shit in ~/Documents, all my goodies are on a network share mounted at ~/Netstore

If you didn’t have the screen sharing requirement, I would suggest Mumble. It does everything else you want and the ease of install is like “apt get and edit a config file.” The server configuration to get the rooms and privacy settings you want is a whole different story, it’s the OPPOSITE of intuitive, but once you figure it out it’s quite robust.

The right tool for the job as described is definitely Matrix, but it does take some advanced troubleshooting (in my experience) to get it working. Some folks I know say the Ansible playbook just works, but I’ve been part of three deployments and that’s NEVER ONCE been my experience. Maybe the Ansible playbook “just works” if you’ve been using Ansible regularly for years and sometimes dream in yml. That’s not me.

IMHO, when compared with the ease of install of Mumble (or even Lemmy), the difficulty on installing Matrix is somewhere in between a joke and something that should be a mild point of embarrassment to the dev team (who built a great tool, so I’m not out to shame them here).

But right now, we have a situation in America where activists and organizers BADLY need alternatives to third party hosted apps… and the team has built this great tool that only fairly hardcore sysadmin / devops folks can get working. The difficulty of installing / maintaining is the biggest obstacle to the immediate, swift and widespread adoption of Matrix by US activist groups. I should know.

The researchers discovered that AMD had been using a publicly available example key from NIST documentation since Zen 1,

lol… sigh…

There’s a learning curve, but if you’re familiar with WAF’s it’s not hard.

If you want to DIY something, I have a bash script that builds OpenResty with NAXSI from source. Most of the web apps I write anymore are actually in Lua, for OpenResty, maybe with an API written in something else. But I also help other members of my team deploy their Node and Python apps and stuff, and I always just park those behind OpenResty with NAXSI, just doing a standard nginx reverse proxy.

Every computer I own is an autobot. My primary machine is always Optimus Prime, has been since 2008. Other machines get other names generally slightly inspired by their role / nature. Bumblebee and CliffJumper are miniPCs of various persuasions, Preceptor is my “mess around with AI” box, my big server that handles most of my data and network services is Wheeljack, my Macbook is Mirage, my backup server is Powerglide, my TV (which is an old Dell all in One running Linux Mint) is UltraMagnus.

Neither did he last administration and neither will the next.

That’s like saying that neither tepid bath water nor boiling tea water are “cold.”