Yeah, my education is in electrical engineering and industrial automation. I’ve grown up using computers and like to learn, but I’ve never had any formal education on the subject except for high school programming classes, an intro CS course using Scheme, and a Python 3 bootcamp on Udemy. Everything else that I know is just from hands-on experience and using a search engine.

For hosting services and managing my domain, only a basic understanding is necessary, so I don’t feel held back by it. I do wish that I could contribute to my favourite projects, though.

I mean… you could just ignore it.

I have had a couple of instances where I updated a package through apt and those updates resulted in a binary which crashed on launch or a configuration/database error that prevented the binary from being launched, so it does happen.

The fix was relatively simple and I had it working again in minutes, but I think it’s still worth consideration as a potential point of friction, especially for users who don’t have the ability or desire to fix their own systems.

As an aside, I think you should want to know how to fix your system, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for non-tech people to be able to install an OS they don’t have to periodically tinker with to get installed programs to launch correctly every time with no fuss.

For so many people, tinkering is like washing the dishes and they simply don’t want to do it; an immutable system is like the dishwasher of tech purely in the sense that using it means that less effort is required from the user. I wouldn’t expect my non-tech wife to think Linux From Scratch would be a fun learning project (like I do), we are all different.

Hope this comment isn’t too tangential, I’m trying as a person to be less rigid in my thinking about how people do things because I think it holds us back and, really, it’s a testament to the value of open source software that we have all of these options available. I wouldn’t want there only to be one way to run Linux.

I am thinking that they wouldn’t define that as a broken package, since I would consider that a bug that would need to be addressed in the next release. I would expect a broken package not to be able to run rather than simply to have a broken function.

Think about it like this: they just want a PB&J because it’s quick, simple, and works for them and you’re telling them to go out to the store and get ingredients to make a salad because it’s quick, simple, and works for you.

You’re both right. You can eat your salad and they can eat their PB&J and all will be well in Linuxland. That’s the beauty of it.

So a few podcast apps support a service called gPodder, which provides cross-device syncing of subscriptions and episode progress, but the gPodder servers are slow and often time out, rendering the service useless.

oPodSync is essentially a drop-in replacement for gPodder. My use case is that I listen to podcasts on both my desktop and my phone, and I want episodes to be seamlessly accessible on both devices without having to manually do anything.

It’s very resource-light, so if you have any interest in podcasts at all it’s another piece of cool tech that gives you more control over your data. I used to use Player.FM, which is still a cool app, but I was paying them $13/year for a small handful of premium features I didn’t really think were worth that much.

Yeah, no worries if they’re not all useful to you. I still do the actual updates manually, Diun just tells me when to do them so I don’t have to routinely check project pages or follow an RSS feed.

Ah, cool. Thanks for the additional info. I never kept up with Watchtower since Diun fit my needs. I’ll check out Degoog; I don’t mind several hundred line config files though, I usually go through all of the config/env settings prior to setting up a new service.

You could look into:

• SearXNG (aggregated search engine)
• Mealie (recipe collection & meal planning)
• CryptPad (replaces Google Drive)
• oPodSync (gPodder-compatible podcast syncing server)
• Sure or Actual (personal finance tracking)
• Diun or Watchtower (container update tracker; IIRC Watchtower auto-updates by default, Diun does not)

Thanks for posting, I gotta add the random facts to my Glance dashboard now.