The smallest footprint for an actual scripting probably will be posix sh - since you already have it ready.

A slightly bigger footprint would be Python or Lua.

If you can drop your requirement for actual scripting and are willing to add a compile step, Go and it’s ecosystem is pretty dang powerful and it’s really easy to learn for small automation tasks.

Personally, with the requirement of not adding too much space for runtimes, I’d write it in go. You don’t need a runtime, you can compile it to a really small zero dependency lib and you have clean and readable code that you can extend, test and maintain easily.

Or you can just use vscodium.

If you use a dockerized environment, that will only work better on Linux. .NET8 is AFAIK natively supported on Linux, so there shouldn’t be too much of an issue apart from the usual clunkyness. Visual Studio will probably be more of a problem. The “easiest” way would probably be to switch to jet brains or vscode. If you are hardstuck on VS for whatever reasons, you probably should be able to do some voodoo with running it in docker and using the container as a remote desktop, but this will be PITA to setup and maintain.

Neat, thank you for the hint - only recently got a ccwgtv, and I’m still not used to the fact that you’re able to install apps like this 😂

Same for me on Chromecast, it’s pretty much unwatchable overnight, started probably about a week ago. I’m to lazy to set up adblocking for my full network, and I was fine watching the skippable 15s ads, and the occasional longer ones, but currently I mostly get at least a full minute of ads on my TV.

You’re right, containers are not VMs, and I’ve never claimed that. For the matter of basic unix access control for a beginner they are similar enough to treat them as such. It’s enough of a baseline for basic security for a beginners workload imo. For advanced use cases - absolutely do not treat containers as you would VMs.

Imagine your containers as very lightweight mini-VMs. Would you run everything as root in your virtual machines? Containers aren’t really that different to classical VMs from an operations point of view. You have a different attack surface, but it is still there, and running as a non-root user inside the container reduces this attack surface, and should IMHO be the default. Privileged containers and users may be required for specific purposes, but should not be the norm, if possible.