Compare commits
11 Commits
Author | SHA1 | Date | |
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a7edf81e5b | |||
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1eefd1f840 | |||
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e527121e0a |
@ -11,8 +11,8 @@ pipeline:
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image: appleboy/drone-scp
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settings:
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host:
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- www3.int.metaunix.net
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- www4.int.metaunix.net
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- www1.int.metaunix.net
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- www2.int.metaunix.net
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user: xadmin
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port: 22
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password:
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@ -5,4 +5,5 @@ docker run -d --rm \
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--publish 4000:4000 \
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--name="jekyll" \
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jekyll/jekyll:4 \
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jekyll serve
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jekyll serve \
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--drafts
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@ -19,6 +19,10 @@ group :jekyll_plugins do
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gem "jekyll-coffeescript"
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end
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group :development do
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gem "webrick"
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end
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# Windows and JRuby does not include zoneinfo files, so bundle the tzinfo-data gem
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# and associated library.
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platforms :mingw, :x64_mingw, :mswin, :jruby do
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@ -28,4 +32,3 @@ end
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# Performance-booster for watching directories on Windows
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gem "wdm", "~> 0.1.1", :platforms => [:mingw, :x64_mingw, :mswin]
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@ -72,6 +72,7 @@ GEM
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terminal-table (2.0.0)
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unicode-display_width (~> 1.1, >= 1.1.1)
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unicode-display_width (1.7.0)
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webrick (1.8.1)
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PLATFORMS
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ruby
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@ -84,6 +85,7 @@ DEPENDENCIES
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tzinfo (~> 1.2)
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tzinfo-data
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wdm (~> 0.1.1)
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webrick
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BUNDLED WITH
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2.2.24
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@ -1,21 +1,32 @@
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---
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layout: post
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title: "Farewell, Atom."
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description: "Atom was an awesome text editor back in its day, and now GitHub is putting it to rest."
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date: 2021-07-17 09:32:11 -0400
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tags: text-editors programming foss
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title: "Farewell, Atom. Hello Pulsar!"
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description: "The awesome community behind the Atom text editor has stepped up and given us a replacement: Pulsar"
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tags: pulsar text-editors programming foss
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---
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Recently, back on June 8th of 2022, GitHub announced that it set an end-of-life of December 15th, 2022 for Atom. What was once a super popular text editor in the mid-2010s that has since fallen behind the times a bit,
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About a year ago on June 8th of 2022, GitHub announced that it set an end-of-life of December 15th, 2022 for the Atom text editor. What was once a super popular text editor in the mid-2010s that has since fallen behind the times a bit, is now a relic of the past to later be forgotten. This wasn't too surprising of a move, considering Microsoft purchased GitHub and they already had their own text editor in Visual Studio Code that was stealing Atom's thunder. Honestly it took Microsoft a LOT longer to make this move than I expected, but either way it kinda sucked seeing such a monumental piece of software (remember Electron? That came from Atom!) be put to bed.
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### History
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## The Community is Awesome. ##
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But the open-source community has a habit of not letting go, and for better or worse, a lot of times will put great effort into preserving old experiences. This is one of those such instances, and now we have [Pulsar](https;//pulsar.dev)! This is a fork on Atom that seems to have some steam behind it, not only re-branding it and keeping up the extensions installer, but also actively working on bug fixes and making it better!
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It's pretty much a drop-in replacement for Atom, even down to the extensions and settings that you once used. Things can get a little hairy at times but we'll get to that in a bit.
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### Technological Advances
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## It's going to take some time... ##
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Atom brought along with it some pretty awesome technological advances, the primary one being Electron. Initially referred to as "Atom Shell", Electron quickly took off as a way to utilize the open source web browser Chromium as a base for desktop apps, and build on top of it using web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and Node.js.
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Now like I alluded to a moment ago, it's a little rough around the edges right now. Just to name a few things:
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### Signing Off...
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* Automatic updates aren't a thing yet, so you need to check back for new releases - about once per month for the stable releases.
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* Installing it on Linux is kinda lame since you just get a raw DEB or RPM file to install manually instead of using a repo or something like Flatpak.
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* The Atom codebase had been left to rot for a bit, so there is a lot of API changes and supporting software upgrades to churn through.
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Overall, I'm going to miss Atom. Sure, Sublime Text was more performant and VS Code has a much larger community these days, but it still has a place in my heart since I used it for several years when I started getting more serious in my IT career and I thought it was kinda awesome how the community around Atom exploded so quickly. It seemed like Atom's community shot well past that of the other well-established text editors of the time, practically overnight. Plus I always thought the "a hackable text editor for the 21st century" was such a cool slogan. Suffice to say it has a special place in my heart, so I'll simply end this post with "Farewell, Atom."
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## The Community is Awesome. ##
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You see, the beauty of open-source software isn't necessarily that it's going to be developed better by having more eyeballs on it, nor that you can see exactly what a piece of software is doing. Those can definitely be good things, don't get me wrong, but where open-source really shines is when a company or some organization have had enough of developing a piece of software - I want to be clear I see no wrongdoing in this, sometimes good things just don't make sense - and instead of it just being left to rot, someone in the community can step up and take over. That really is an amazing thing.
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## Signing off ##
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There's not really much at this point, other than if you haven't yet I'd highly recommend you give Pulsar a try. Like I said it's still wonky in some spots - one thing in particular that I'm noticing as I write this is there's a permanent deprecation warning for an extension since an API changed it needs patched - but for the most part it kinda just works. I would honestly love to see this thing come to fruition with a full-blown community that's actively developing extensions and contributing code to kinda recreate what we once had, and give us a proper text editor that's competitive with VS Code like Atom was.
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And yes I know [Zed](https://zed.dev) is a thing from the original Atom devs, but it seems to be moving really slow and is currently only available on Mac, so I can't really use it or recommend it at this time.
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@ -2,7 +2,6 @@
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layout: post
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title: "All Adventures Begin with Microsoft Edge"
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description: "This is part one of my Web Switching series, where I'm taking a look at other web browsers to see if I'm going to permanently switch from Mozilla Firefox."
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date: 2022-06-09 11:54:26 -0400
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tags: web-switched web-browsers microsoft microsoft-edge
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---
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32
src/_drafts/sinatra-ruby-is-beautiful.markdown
Normal file
32
src/_drafts/sinatra-ruby-is-beautiful.markdown
Normal file
@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
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---
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layout: post
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title: "Sinatra (Ruby) is Beautiful."
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description: "Sinatra is a beautifully simple web framework. It's old, but it works!"
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tags: linux
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---
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By trade I'm a System Administrator/Network Engineer, so most of my days are filled with deploying applications, dealing with oddball software vendors and their lackluster documentation, licensing (yuck!), and planning/building out infrastructure to support operations. But I also like to do some coding on the side, and in particular I like to see what I can build to maybe be useful one day, and in particular I like spinning up web sites/apps.
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And thus [Sinatra](https://sinatrarb.com/). It's a very simple and lightweight framework for building web applications using a DSL.
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## The Exciting First Dance! ##
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## Some Quirks... ##
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While Sinatra is really easy to get going, there are some downsides to using it. First off, for anything more than just a simple web page (for which you'd probably just want to do plain old HTML or a static site generator like Jekyll), you'll want to add on some things. Things like controllers which help with code organization and flow; an ORM or at least some sort of database layer to handle storing/retrieving data; a templating engine to format and render web pages to users; a mailer tool to (obviously) send emails; and much more. This really can slow down development if you don't already have an idea of what tools are available in the Ruby ecosystem and your preferences for them.
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And on a similar note, because Sinatra is very barebones and unopinionated, you need to bring your own file/folder structure for your code, and there are several different wants to handle it. There's the classic single file app where everything is in one file, or you can break various bits and bobs out into different files but you need to find a way to either manually or automatically load those files. Oh, and you need to figure out how to define your code with Ruby modules or classes so they can be read/loaded/routed properly.
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Also, a lot of people won't like the fact that it's built on Ruby, which is comparatively a slow language, and in my opinion the syntax is a bit "too fluid" with the lack of brackets and whitespace requirements.
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## Padrino maybe? ##
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There's also this thing called Padrino, which aims to kinda standardize Sinatra a bit to get you through all of the usual code organization and boilerplate challenges, and also supercharge it with a CLI to generate models, controllers, or even a whole app!
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Frankly, this seems like a really cool tool, but it's not one that I've used extensively so I can't say for sure if it's rock-solid or not. It seems like a great way to go though, since it does tackle a lot of the issues that slow down Sinatra development, and frankly if I had run into this sooner (and not forgotten about it) then I'd probably use it more often.
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## That's All Folks! ##
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To summarize: I generally use Linux Mint on my PCs though Manjaro might take over the daily driver role soon, and I primarily use Debian in my homelab alongside a smattering of FreeBSD and RHEL-clones that might be getting phased out soon. Simple enough, right?
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@ -3,7 +3,7 @@
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<head>
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<meta charset="utf-8">
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<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
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<title>{{ page.title }}</title>
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<title>{{ page.title }} | Bit Goblin</title>
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<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/skeleton/2.0.4/skeleton.min.css">
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<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/stylesheets/lumbridge.css">
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<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.6.0/jquery.min.js"></script>
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@ -7,4 +7,6 @@ layout: default
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{{ content }}
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If you want to read more posts like this, be sure to subscribe to the [RSS feed](/feed.xml)! Else, if you like watching videos then head on over to [my YouTube channel]({{ site.links.bitgoblin_channel }}) or follow over on [Twitch]({{ site.links.twitch_channel }}) where I occasionally stream games. Feel free to join the Bit Goblin community on [Discord]({{ site.links.discord_invite }}) as it is growing. Finally, if you'd like to support me in my endeavors, head on over to [Patreon]({{ site.links.patreon_link }}) and pitch me a few bucks if you can.
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<hr>
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<p>If you want to read more posts like this, be sure to subscribe to the <a href="/feed.xml">RSS feed</a>! Else, if you like watching videos then head on over to <a href="{{ site.links.bitgoblin_channel }}">my YouTube channel</a> or follow me over on <a href="{{ site.links.twitch_channel }}">Twitch</a> where I occasionally stream games. Feel free to join the <a href="{{ site.links.discord_invite }}">Bit Goblin community on Discord</a> as it is slowly growing. Finally, if you'd like to support me in my endeavors, head on over to <a href="{{ site.links.patreon_link }}">Patreon</a> and pitch me a few bucks if you can.</p>
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|
42
src/_posts/2023-07-07-what-linux-distro-do-i-use.markdown
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42
src/_posts/2023-07-07-what-linux-distro-do-i-use.markdown
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@ -0,0 +1,42 @@
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---
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layout: post
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title: "What Linux Distro Do I Use?"
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description: "I love distro-hopping, but there are a few distros that I tend to gravitate towards."
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date: 2023-07-07 00:01:28 -0400
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tags: linux
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---
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"What Linux distribution should I use?" is a topic that is very frequently covered, and as much as I want to fall into that creative trap, I'm not going to. Instead I'm going to discuss a few of the distros that I use the most in my daily life to give you a real-world perspective on what works and what doesn't, and maybe help inform you to make a decision of what distro to run. Or maybe not, sometimes it's just fun reading about people using Linux!
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## Desktop ##
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Let's start with a tricky one: what distro do I use on my desktops? If you know me, then you know I like to distro-hop fairly frequently just to kinda get a feel for what's going on in the Linux ecosystem. However, I do tend to fallback on Linux Mint the most. It scratches the itch of having a slow-moving base system but also provides more up-to-date packages for frequently used apps like Firefox, and their implementation of the Cinnamon desktop really is quite nice. Also, a major plus is it also gets a lot of third-party software and community support simply by being based on Ubuntu, and the importance of this cannot be overstated. Want to run a weird app? It's got an Ubuntu download. Have a weird issue? The community's likely got a fix for you. Heck you can even use AMD's proprietary drivers on Mint, which are notorious being a pain in the ass to install, so long as you upgrade to the Ubuntu HWE kernel.
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Full stop, if you're looking for a distro to try out and you haven't yet, or if you're just a new user switching to Linux for the first time, I'd highly recommend Linux Mint. It really is a solid distro with a stable base (based on Ubuntu LTS), important apps like Firefox get updates instead of being an ESR release, it provides fantastic GUI tools like Driver Manager and Update Manager for those who don't want to use a terminal, and you don't have to worry about snaps or flatpaks if you don't want to.
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That said, currently I'm running Manjaro on my gaming PC/workstation and both of my laptops. The reasoning for this was, frankly, I was getting bored of Linux Mint, and I was seeing too many small-but-weird things cropping up, so I decided to mix things up. It had been awhile since I used Manjaro, so I gave it a try... and boy after installing it on my Galago Pro was I happy! My major gripe of the past - that I was having trouble mounting Samba shares for some inexplicable reason - was gone, and once I touched up my setup shell script for some new software additions (notably [Pulsar](https://pulsar.dev)) I was able to pretty much get going within like an hour. I don't know if this will be my mainstay, but I am pretty happy with it so far, and I can swap between desktop environments (yes I'm one of those weirdos that has like 100 DEs installed on my systems) freely without weird quirks popping up, like GNOME not going to sleep properly or display scaling acting inconsistently in KDE.
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## Server ##
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In a way, my server usage is simpler... but also more complex? As a baseline, everything in my homelab runs on Debian stable, and this is for a few reasons:
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1. I like the ~2 years update cadence that Debian stable releases give me, and having the extra third year to wait while supporting software like Puppet catches up is amazing.
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2. In my experience the Debian community has been quick with pushing security patches, which is important to me on a server.
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3. Things just generally don't change in between major releases, or when it does it doesn't seem to be as game-breaking as other distros can be.
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4. Most importantly, I started learning Linux server administration on Ubuntu Server (13.10 beta, but that's a story for another time), and over the years I've just felt most comfortable on Debian systems.
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The tl;dr is just that I love Debian and Debian loves me. But I do also have a couple other OSes running in my homelab, those being AlmaLinux/Rocky Linux, and FreeBSD. I always liked playing with CentOS and having a system that could run for several years without needing a major upgrade, and when CloudLinux got their replacement (AlmaLinux) out a few months later I hopped on that bandwagon and tried it out. Surprisingly everything just worked as expected, and I've had several servers running it since then. I've recently started doodling around with Rocky Linux now that RHEL 9 is out, but of course the RHEL-clones are again going through turmoil with Red Hat closing their source code, I feel like it's best to move off of a product that the upstream wants to kill off. It sucks, it was a great community that formed around it, but it is what it is. Fuck IBM.
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|
||||
FreeBSD only runs my internal mail relays and I think something else? I really like FreeBSD for what it offers - it satisfies the curmudgeon-side of me that hates a lot of SystemD's parts - but a lot of the tooling that I use on a daily basis either for work or video editing either requires or just runs on Linux. So there isn't a whole lot of want on my end to fully switch over to FreeBSD, especially since I'd lose access to Docker.
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## NAS ##
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||||
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||||
This is related to my homelab but I felt deserved its own section since it's its own rabbit hole of "what works best for X?" I'm actually running both of the popular DIY NAS operating systems in my lab - [unRAID](https://unraid.net) and [TrueNAS](https://www.truenas.com). My TrueNAS system is actually an old FreeNAS system I built back in the day using five 3TB WD Red drives, is currently housing 6TB Seagate Ironwolf drives, and is undergoing a transition to 8TB drives to squeeze a little more space out of it. I use this primarily as my "personal" NAS, where I store my TV shows, movies, music, and personal documents, and I also have a RAIDz mirror of two 1TB SSDs hosting my virtual machine disks. This thing has served me very well for about seven years now, and has undergone numerous hardware upgrades, drive failures and subsequent replacements, and OS/ZFS updates. It really is a solid product.
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||||
|
||||
The unRAID system I built to be my "Bit Goblin" NAS, which I use strictly for my Bit Goblin video file share and any files pertaining to the channel. This was built with unRAID for a couple reasons: I really wanted the ability to build up the array with new drives over time as I could afford them (I just bought a house and my budget was tight), and, like a lot of my projects, I just wanted to play around with something new. I didn't initially (and still don't) need the extra performance a proper ZFS array would grant me over unRAID's setup that only really nets you one drive's worth of performance at a time, so I prioritized the expansion abilities provided by unRAID. It sucks that it costs money, but hey, good software doesn't grow on trees, and so far I've been pretty happy with it.
|
||||
|
||||
I will mention that I also have a future plan to convert my "Bit Goblin" NAS into an archive/backup server and create a separate NAS with TrueNAS and a better caching setup when the time comes that I need extra performance. Which may come when I move to editing 4K video, or if I am able to hire a couple of video editors at some point, but again this is a potential plan for the future and nothing is set in stone yet. Who knows if I'll even get to that point!
|
||||
|
||||
## That's All Folks! ##
|
||||
|
||||
To summarize: I generally use Linux Mint on my PCs though Manjaro might take over the daily driver role soon, and I primarily use Debian in my homelab alongside a smattering of FreeBSD and RHEL-clones that might be getting phased out soon. Simple enough, right?
|
@ -1,5 +1,6 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
layout: page
|
||||
title: Blog
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
<ul id="post-list">
|
||||
|
@ -1,5 +1,6 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
layout: page
|
||||
title: Contact
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
If you're looking to contact me for business inqueries, feel free to email me at [gballantine@bitgoblin.tech](mailto:gballantine@bitgoblin.tech).
|
||||
|
@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
layout: home
|
||||
title: Welcome to Bit Goblin!
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Welcome! My name is Greg Ballantine and Bit Goblin is my passion project for creating YouTube videos on tech. I love tinkering with all things related to computers, and I enjoy documenting the things that I do so that others can use my struggles to ease their own. Whether it's buildings PCs, playing with networking gear, or exploring the beauty of Linux, there are lots of things to play with and try to help others with.
|
||||
|
@ -1,5 +1,6 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
layout: page
|
||||
title: Sponsors
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
These are the sponsors I work with...
|
||||
|
@ -1,5 +1,6 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
layout: page
|
||||
title: Support
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Unfortunately money doesn't grow on trees, and a lot of the stuff that I purchase to make videos on can be quite expensive. My content is available free-of-charge on YouTube, but if you don't mind helping support me financially any help would be much appreciated.
|
||||
@ -7,4 +8,3 @@ Unfortunately money doesn't grow on trees, and a lot of the stuff that I purchas
|
||||
The primary way to support my work is through donations on [my Patreon page](https://patreon.com/BitGoblin). I don't have any reward tiers over there yet, but I do plan on adding some rewards at some point in the future.
|
||||
|
||||
You can also support me by [joining Honey using my referral link](https://www.joinhoney.com/ref/9ohqcf9)! Honey helps you save money on popular websites by searching for coupons to get you discounts while you're shopping. And the best part is that it's free!
|
||||
|
||||
|
Reference in New Issue
Block a user