You’ll never take perl from me!

Google’s summer of code started 21 years ago and has been a positive thing from every angle.

Remember that back in 2005 Google was still largely running under its founding principles of “Do no evil” and I honestly believe it was a truly altruistic move. Certainly, a great amount of coders got access to skills and support they would never have otherwise, and a huge amount of projects benefited from it. Google weren’t the only supporters of it, I know Suse contributed and likely others.

So why do they still do it now that Google is all grown up and abandoned those founding principles?

I suspect it’s due to some or all of these reasons;

• Why not? It’s good PR and cheap advertising.
• They get to spot good developers early on and enhance their hiring quality.
• Those developers bring energy, skills and access to projects. Those are the active employees that every employer wants.
• The projects are used by Google so improving them is net benefit to the company.
• Cancelling it now would lead to bad PR and bad feeling. Even Google doesn’t want to needlessly waste a good thing. And if they did stop it, a competitor might swoop in and not only take the benefits from it whilst looking like the white knight.

Solid.

I like that you’ve done what I’ve done - considered what’s actually worth backing up and what can be replaced. So many people when selfhosting don’t make that distinction and get overwhelmed when they try to back up /everything/ - so much so they don’t bother, or half-arse it. (No 3-2-1, no periodic restores to test, no offsite or what-ifs etc)

Making that plan to save what’s important reduces the burden hugely.

If a debian based distro there’s several ways to copy your package choices from one machine to another, the likes of using dpkg --get-selections and using that output on the new machine with --set-selections, but probably the easiest way is to use apt-clone, which streamlines that process to install the same packages on the new machine.

As for your firefox and desktop packages, they’ll be saved in /home/username (usually in .hidden dirs) - so just copy all of that over.

Alternatively, use an image cloner like clonezilla to make an exact disk copy and install that.

Or run your machine as a vm inside Proxmox or another hypervisor. That way you can have instant snapshots before you do risky things, as well as multiple scheduled entire-machine backups.

Or ansible (which I do a lot of), which can set whatever packages and copy your golden-image files over as you want. (But keeping those up to date requires a little thought)

Um, do you? I don’t seem to need to, never had except for major release updates and changing sources.

Just now;

root@backups:~# cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)"
NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="13"
VERSION="13 (trixie)"
VERSION_CODENAME=trixie
DEBIAN_VERSION_FULL=13.5

Then “apt update” and “apt upgrade” followed by “reboot” and

root@backups:~# cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)"
NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="13"
VERSION="13 (trixie)"
VERSION_CODENAME=trixie
DEBIAN_VERSION_FULL=13.6

(My history)

 497  apt update
  498  cat /etc/os-release
  499  apt upgrade
  500  reboot
  501  uname -a
  502  cat /etc/os-release
  503  history

I do, and have printed instructions in a “When I die” sealed envelope.

But I think this is more of a people problem than a technical one. 99% of the pictures in my immich instance are of no interest to anyone else, along with most other things I back up. Some websites I’ve made I’d like to continue so have their source in github and on free hosting, but eventually the domains will expire and they’ll go away.

What you can’t provide is selecting what’s important enough to the family and what they want shared, which is the hardest part. And in some cases, that’s what people post on socials. How you want to be remembered is often just your facebook feed.

Good shout! I use syncthing myself to sync all my useful stuff between multiple devices seamlessly.

OS update fuss level is hugely dependant on distro though.

EL and rebuilds? Full new machine and copy services over (or if paying RHEL, use their migrator which can have mixed results). Agree, huge fuss.

Debian/ubuntu? Dist-upgrade, normally safe and much quicker.

Plus a bunch of rolling release distros that just keep up to date (but will occasionally add breaking changes that you might not be ready for)

Can’t so easily get around hardware issues, so build cattle that can be easily redeployed or scaled. Doesn’t fit all situations though.

rEFInd

Good shout. Not something I’ve heard of before and I’ve certainly had my share of problems with grub2, even recently.

Total agreement. So many unsung heroes involved in Debian. Work has agreed with me - today’s job involved migrating those load balancers to Debian underneath.

Genuine question: Do you think linux would be better or worse today without that influence?

Linux’s only objective is to get better.

Any commercial OS has the sole objective to make money for its owner.

Heh. ISWYDT

It wasn’t actually that, it’s just such a dumb question to ask, and insulting as hell.

Are you drunk?

Do you genuinely think that’s going to be soon?

Seem that I’ve been hearing about mainstream RISC being “just around the corner” for around three decades.

I know what you mean - although I’ve found the… receptiveness? on lemmy is generally better than reddit for most things, but yes, the scale is tiny in comparison.

A lot of the replies so far focus on fixing the problem yourself, which is awesome if you’re a coder.

But even reporting problems is a big help to all projects. Found a bug? Report it - give the right information and be cordial.

Also, contribute sensible suggestions. Some smaller projects suffer from a single owner not understanding how others might use their work because they don’t have that perspective (certainly an issue for me). Plus, getting involved and contributing this way can be a huge motivator to these small projects. It can be pretty disheartening to work hard on a passion project and not hear anything back from users.

It’s a lot of work, but if you’re feeling tired or overhwelmed and thinking negative thoughts about these releases - then don’t. It’s a good thing.

These are bugs that already exist and, in some cases, are almost certainly being actively exploited by criminals and government-backed organistions both.

Whilst we might ask that some are a little more responsible with their disclosures, overall this is a massive boost to computer security once we get over this hill of information.

It’s a positive thing, don’t be worried.

These vulns already existed. It’s possible the bad guys were already using them. This gets them out in the open and on their way to being resolved.

Just keep patches up to date with any modern and maintained distro and you’ll be grand.

fuck printers

Spoken like a professional.