Once the downloads work again, this might help:

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virtual-machines/

none of Ubuntu’s many projects has ever become a long-term, distro-agnostic alternative to whatever it was supposed to replace, suggesting either low quality or insufficient effort

I’d add irrational hate against Canonical to the list of possible causes.

systemd was in the hands of one single guy with very controversial ideas in the beginning. It wasn’t really better than Upstart, yet got adopted by more and more distributions over time.

Unity worked smoothly when Gnome-Shell was sluggish as hell on the same hardware.

And you have fixed versions every half a year with a set of packages that is guaranteed to work together. On top of that, there’s an upgrade path to the next version - no reinstall needed.

Ubuntu’s slogan is “Linux for human beings” which fits quite well, I believe. Otherwise, it wouldn’t get recommended to newbies so often. If you want all the nerdy stuff, there are plenty of other distributions to choose from. 😉

But you are doing the work the computer should do by scripting your own startup process. Also, it will process your rc.local sequentially whereas systemd does things in parallel. If you have 5 different custom services that need network, your approach would have them started one after another. Systemd would wait for network access and then start them all in parallel. If one of those hangs, the others will still start in a few seconds (unless they depend on the hanging service) and the boot process will still continue.

Also, what about if some service fails? systemd can restart them automatically, you have commands to see at a glance whether your desired services are all running (i.e. the system is in your desired state), it manages the log outputs for each service, etc. etc. … it’s a huge comfort win and once you’ve written a few units, you won’t have to look everything up all the time.

[Unit]
Description=My service
After=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/myservice -d

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Put this in /etc/systemd/system/myservice.service, run systemctl daemon-reload followed by systemctl enable myservice and Bob’s your mother’s brother. Optionally, start it directly using systemctl start myservice. (On most systems, service myservice start will work, too.) It doesn’t get any easier than that.

And, if you start to automate your system’s configuration(s) using e.g. Ansible, it’s far easier to just place a few files in the filesystem and run a few commands than to modify the rc.local in an automated fashion without breaking something.

While I don’t really like the one-tool-for-everything approach with systemd and its various additional features (timedated, resolvd, etc.), I do like the main feature.

I like Ubuntu for exactly that: The bravery and manpower to try different things. I remember I loved their Init-System Upstart when it came out in 2006 - long before systemd got established. It made managing services and their dependencies far easier than with the SysV-Init system other distros had at the time.

Unity was miles ahead of Gnome-Shell in the beginning. And I loved the one-menu-bar approach - similar to macOS - as it saved screen space on smaller screens.

It’s easy to flak on Ubuntu for not keeping in line with “tradition”, but I believe we wouldn’t have some newer projects without Canonical trying something new and showing people what’s possible.

Exactly! PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) are a thing, too.

Even the 100MB/sec won’t work for long as these stupidly small MicroSDs tend to heat up A LOT and then go into throttling where the transfer rate goes down to <1MB/sec.

Did you also check out GoToSocial? It’s a very light Mastodon-compatible server, but comes without a user-facing GUI. So you need to use a client app.

However, I don’t know whether it can be easily migrated to from Mastodon.

Grafana and Prometheus are great if you have numeric things you want to monitor. CPU usage, RAM, disks, throughput, etc. You can then do lots of things with these numbers, mainly compare them to your other systems or alert when they go out of bounds.

However, I very much prefer Zabbix for my home network monitoring as this is not so fixated on numbers but can easily work with e.g. error messages in logfiles and alert on those. Or I can regularly check a website for new firmware versions and alert once the latest version changes. There are also lots of ready-to-use templates available from their Community Hub.

Yes! And if it gets too complex for simple checkboxes and formulas, there are a few places where you can enter JavaScript into a textbox. But it’s all inside the web GUI. No need to fiddle with files on the server.

Switched from CMK to Zabbix at my previous job. Zabbix is far more comfortable and has all the same possibilities that CMK has. But you can setup everything in the web GUI and don’t need to reload anything.

That’s because 90% of the issues happen on Arch first and are then prevented on the other distros. 😉

Shreddit and PowerDeleteSuite were last updated years ago. I’ve used redact.dev which can also edit your comments to random strings before deleting them as “deleting” on Reddit doesn’t delete anything but only hides it from public view.

I’m now also doing a manual pass by using a Google search for “mbirth” (incl. quotes!) followed by site:reddit.com and a date filter for everything of like 10 years ago and then manually delete all the comments the deletion tools didn’t catch via the API.

That depends on your hardware. It was very fiddly to get it going because the WiFi module in the Spectre wasn’t supported at first. But then someone released a driver for it. I also had to read a lot into the documentation and discussions to get my config together. But once that was done, it ran almost like a normal Macbook Pro and I barely had to touch the OpenCore config.

(OpenCore is a bootloader that changes things in memory so your laptop appears like an Apple device to macOS. You then use the normal macOS, can download macOS updates, etc.)

Here’s my config for the hp Spectre x360 13-4104ng for reference.

Had Ubuntu for a decade then got bored and turned my hp Spectre laptop into a Hackintosh and got hooked. So it’s macOS now.

I’ve read comments from some people that got their requested data only several months after the request. In the meantime, I’ve used PowerDeleteSuite to pull a backup of everything it could find (read their issue tracker for how to work around some export quirks) and will let it replace all my posts with

[This comment was deleted due to Reddit’s new policy of killing the 3rd Party Apps that brought it success.]

as long as the API still works.