I know it’s ELI5, but this is a common misconception and will lead you astray. They do not have the same level of isolation, and they have very different purposes.

For example, containers are disposable cattle. You don’t backup containers. You backup volumes and configuration, but not containers.

Containers share the kernel with the host, so your container needs to be compatible with the host (though most dependencies are packaged with images).

For self hosting maybe the difference doesn’t matter much, but there is a difference.

Try to come across friendly without sounding condescending.

First, empathize (I know those things can be tricky, it took me a minute the first time), then offer to help without judgement (I have some experience with these, would you like me to try?), then back off if they say no.

If they refuse help, you’ve done what you can, end of story. Don’t be pushy.

Key point here is to be nice about it. Don’t call them out or make them feel dumb. Don’t judge. You don’t know why they’re not getting it, and next time maybe it is you who is “dumb”.

Also, don’t expect everyone to share your intellect (it’s obvious to you) or curiosity (you want to know how it works). Most people just want their problem fixed and move on.

Definitively, but there is a huge list of popular games that have it, so I think it’s fair to warn people about it so they can make an informed choice and not become a disgruntled ex-Linux user.

I am hopeful that Valve, and the game industry in general, manages to come up with a solution for game developers can come up with a solution that works for everyone, but so far I have not heard of one. Meanwhile, I’m happy to skip some games to stay on Linux.

I did a quick check, and both The Last of Us Part I and II are rated Gold. In my experience, a gold rating is a good sign, but you may still need to tweak a setting or two. Definitively worth reading the comments and look especially if there are any known issues with your particular setup. Even things like dual screens, HiDPI, etc can sometimes make a difference.

The reason things are so unpredictable is it all works like Wine does: it doesn’t run Windows in a virtual machine: it re-implements the APIs (like Direct3D). This makes things fast (and sometimes faster!), when they work, but when the implementations deviate things can go off the rails.

It’s a legit concern, but like you said I think it’s very game dependent. Proton gets updates all the time, too. My recommendation is to look it up on protondb and see if there are major issues or tweaks you can apply. All I can say is there is no Linux tax on games. A game can run as well or better on Linux as Windows. It comes down to the specifics of the game.

There are some specific use cases, like some commercial software (Adobe especially) and online gaming anti-cheat, that don’t work on Linux, but other than that you have nothing to lose. And you can dual boot for those cases if you must.

Give it a shot and see if you like it. I, for one, am not going back.

That’s a great tip! It turns out I must have already tried some of that. I found multiple settings in about:config. Anything with a file picker works (open, save as), but the “open folder” from the Downloads dialog must just not use xdg-open, since none of the settings had an effect on that. It’s not the end of the world, but it would be nice to have my Dolphin bookmarks and places.

Edit: Adding this here in case someone in the future finds this searching for the problem. It looks like I’m bitten by the bug described in comment 55 (near the bottom) of this Firefox bug report. TL;DR: it works if I have Dolphin open already, but if not, it starts Nautilus. While this isn’t great, at least I have a workaround.

See if a light weight kubernetes installation is for you. Secrets are first class citizens in k8s. You can maintain secrets in a number of different ways, but they are exposed to containers the same way. They can become files or environment variables, whether you need.

I recommend looking at k3s to run on your Pi and see if that works for you. You can add vault software on top of that later without changing your containers.

Thank you for replying, very informative. I think I have most of the actions/types I wanted associated with my preferred ones now. The most noticeable one is Firefox when I open downloads from the menu. I’m not sure if Firefox uses xdg or not? I don’t mind GTK or Gnome at all, in fact I probably have spent more time on Gnome, but I do like when things are consistent.

Looking forward to this. I do have a question for the more seasoned people here: I installed Fedora 41 not too long after its release on a new PC, which has been my daily driver every since. Very happy with it, tweaked everything to my liking. However, by mistake I installed Workstation (with Gnome) and then switched to my preferred KDE Plasma as the DE. This has left some corners of my system with the Gnome look and feel, which is fine, but I prefer if it were more consistent.

My question:

1. Can I/do you recommend that I upgrade Fedora in place? I prefer this if it means I don’t have to reinstall everything.
2. Or do you recommend I do a fresh install anyway for a clean upgrade and at the same time clean up my DE? What is the least disruptive way to do this?

Are you telling me Beowulf clusters are back?

Jokes aside, it depends what you want to do. You can’t really build one powerful gaming PC out of multiple, but your can run parallel workloads in a number of different ways. What exactly, comes down to what you’re doing. A kubernetes cluster is different from a Blender render farm, for example.

As others mentioned you can just remote into the servers with ssh, vnc, rdp, etc. if you want physical displays on them, you can look for a cheap KVM which lets you control multiple PCs with one keyboard, monitor, and mouse.

This is not correct.

If you compile GPL licensed code and distribute the binaries, you are still obligated to make that source available under the same license, with your changes.

In the case of GPL, but not all open source licenses, this even applies if you link to (compile with) the GPL code from your own. The MIT license on the other hand, comes with almost no obligations.

What RedHat and others do is add support, services, and their own proprietary programs on top of the open source. The open source parts of that distro is and always will be free as in both beer and speech.

The non-free packages are often distributed via separate repositories to make the distinction clear.

That is just one way to fund open source software and is sometimes referred to as the RedHat model.

What OP is asking about is the donation model to fund software. You’re not required to donate, but if you enjoy the software and you can afford it, then there is your opportunity to give back.

As someone else pointed out, hosting and bandwidth isn’t free, so it’s important for these projects to find some revenue stream to pay for that.

I have one of my domains on Cloudflare and was thinking of moving the rest of them there. What makes it harder to move name servers away from Cloudflare than other places?