Thanks, but could you clarify which extension to move for Gnome? native window placement is AFAIK just for the overview.

Which extensions do I need?

Ah, sorry to read - I like the idea of Bcachefs and would have been happy to have it ready for production eventually.

OTOH it seems the recent years I read more about the drama about Bcachefs commits to the kernel, than about any technical parts of Bcachefs.

Welcome to Linux.

Concerning your questions:

How to keep your system clean?

• Subscribe to the security mailing list/blog etc. of your Linux distribution and for software that you use
• Update your system whenever there are updates available and reboot your system after applying the updates
• Activate the firewall of your system and block all incoming traffic which was not initiated by your own system
• Only install software which is distributed with your operating system or which is well known and you download from the official distribution page (for the sake of an example: If you use Google Chrome download the package/binary for your Linux from Googles Chrome page)
• Use an adblocker for your browser like ublock origin

What not to do:

• Never install software found on the internet or a forum
• Never run arbitrary script from the internet in your shell

Doing the above and applying some common sense should be fairly secure. As a rule of thump: Less software is always better and well known software will usually be better scrutinized and more secure. (YMMV)

As a normal desktop user your chances of getting your system infected when applying above rules are very low and they are your best line of defense.

Securing a Linux system, especially in depth, fills books, and detecting an infection is another topic for specialists. One way to improve your chances of having a non infected system is using an immutable Linux distribution like Fedora Silverblue, which should in theory be more resistant to infections and which should in theory allow to detect infections easily.

Unless you have a reason to expect being personally targeted (in which case: good luck to you ;-)), the answer to infections and similar is having regular full backups of all your data, so in case of an infection you can wipe your computer and recover everything. You should have regular full backups anyway, in case your SSD fails, your computer gets stolen and similar threats to your data.

Thanks for clarification!

… and I think you are point on, by now, the ship has sailed. I could use FreeBSD/OpenBSD on servers, but I’d rather run Debian everywhere. On desktops and for day to day usage, the BSDs are no viable options anymore, they simply lack support for common hardware (Wifi etc.) alone and the BSDs will realistically never be able to catch up the chasm anymore.

Not sure what you want to express. I actually used BSD a long time back, and the quality/documentation/coherence/beauty of the system are/were just on another level… Running Debian for nearly a decade now, because of compatibility (with hardware and software I need)… Linux improved a lot in the last nearly 3 decades and I am happy it exists, still I would be more happy if the BSDs would have stayed at least on an equal footing.

Fair point. :-)

At the end of the day, the OS has to run the software/applications one needs to get shit done… if it is macOS or Windows, that’s okay.

In my defense, I ran NetBSD for several years a long time back, and it was one of the best OS experiences I ever had. I am just old/pragmatic/flexible enough, to choose setups with less friction, if possible. ;-)

Still, I think it is a shame that Linux mostly took over the UNIX world and the BDS are left for hardcore nerds/embedding/game consoles and Solaris and co are not viable options anymore. Portable software and its stability benefited a lot from bugs detected on other platforms (OpenBSD was always a forerunner here).

Forced to use macOS at work, and for me it sucks (only slightly less than Windows):

• Slow UI (have to wait several seconds after login before spotlight is able to execute custom scripts)
• Finder is a PITA and one of the dumbest file managers I was ever forced to use
• No easy way to provision the system
• Annoying nagging to use all the Apple services/login with Apple ID
• Shitty software management (instead of a descent package manager, every fucking application has a popup for its own updates after opening, which breaks my flow)
• macOS only interacts decently with other Apple devices (iPhone etc.) and has its own ‘standards’, taking away my freedom to choose what I want to use.

Of course, your needs are your needs and if macOS fits your needs the best, all power to you.

Since you asked for OS and not Linux: OpenBSD and FreeBSD are beautiful systems w/o systemd. I would switch in a heartbeat if I wouldn’t need Linux for work reasons.

I am in software and a software engineer, but the least of my concerns is being replaced by an LLM any time soon.

• I don’t hate LLMs, they are just a tool and it does not make sense at all to hate a LLM the same way it does not make sense to hate a rock

• I hate the marketing and the hype for several reasons:

  • You use the term AI/LLM in the posts title: There is nothing intelligent about LLMs if you understand how they work
  • The craziness about LLMs in the media, press and business brainwashes non technical people to think that there is intelligence involved and that LLMs will get better and better and solve the worlds problems (possible, but when you do an informed guess, the chances are quite low within the next decade)
  • All the LLM shit happening: Automatic translations w/o even asking me if stuff should be translated on websites, job loss for translators, companies hoping to get rid of experienced technical people because LLMs (and we will have to pick up the slack after the hype)
  • The lack of education in the population (and even among tech people) about how LLMs work, their limits and their usages…

LLMs are at the same time impressive (think jump to chat-gpt 4), show the ugliest forms of capitalism (CEOs learning, that every time they say AI the stock price goes 5% up), helpful (generate short pieces of code, translate other languages), annoying (generated content) and even dangerous (companies with the money can now literally and automatically flood the internet/news/media with more bullshit and faster).

Sorry, but this post is really, really bad.

State clearly which distro and which versions of Gnome and dash-to-dock and perhaps what other extensions you are running, and there might be a chance someone is able to help you. (Also state clearly the source of your Gnome extensions).

Most of the hints/solutions in answer to this post are also not good. If dash-to-dock triggered the malfunction of the gnome-shell on your system, just login to a terminal and use dconf or gsettings to set org.gnome.shell enabled-extensions to an empty array or to an array w/o dash-to-dock.

I am happily running dash-dock@micxgx.gmail.com on multiple physical and virtual machines w/o any trouble, using the dash-to-dock provided by my package manager on different CPU architectures YMMV.

Using Debian for probably a decade now (before that, various Linux distributions).

IMHO only community driven distributions with great (in size as in quality) communities are worth investing time/energy and learning.

One reason to ditch Debian would be that the software I need to run would not run anymore on it or that there would be a too strong commercial influence on the project. Another reason is for play/entertainment where better options exist (SteamOS) or if I need up to date hardware support (Fedora).

After more than two decades with Linux, I will not play around with non mainstream distributions anymore. Have seen too many come and go, and in the end I would rather do something interesting with my computer than playing around with the Linux distribution of the week.

Java is IMHO one of the most underrated platforms outside of enterprise environments.

Most people also forget, that Java is not only a language, but also a platform, an ecosystem and active research is applied to many parts of Java.

Concerning Oracle: OpenJDK is actively supported by very different but big and capable companies (IBM, Amazon, Eclipse Foundation…). The quality of the language, libraries and documentation needs people which are payed to work on this, full time.

Bring to this the free IDEs one can get for Java - Eclipse and Netbeans are a little bit old school, but offer everything to build/debug and develop complex software.

Java is not my favorite programming language, but when I want to write interesting software and ensure it will be running for the next decade w/o significant changes, Java is really hard to beat.

Of course, in hindsight we know how to do a lot of things better as they were done in Java. Still, what other open source Language/Platform/documentation with the backing of capable companies and really independent and interoperable builds are out there?

One last note to all people which were damaged by Java in university or school: Usually the teachers/professors/lecturers have no real world experience of software development besides the usually university projects, and for the usual university projects which basically means getting small to midsize projects to run Java is total overkill.

Don’t confuse this with real world software projects in the industry, which are mission critical and need to work a decade from now on. Java was always a bread and butter language, but one which learned from other languages and even the verbosity makes sense, once one dives into code written a few years back by another person.

Thanks a lot!

Yeah, if I go down that road, I’ll probably just add a git commit hook on the repo for the Raspberry Pi, so that I’ll have a ‘push to deploy’ workflow!

You are asking exactly the right questions!

I have an Ansible playbook to provision the Pi (or any other Debian/Ubuntu machine) with everything need to run a web application, as long as the web application is a binary or uses one of the interpreters of the machine. (Well, I have also playbooks to compile Python/Ruby from source or get an Adoptium JDK repository etc.)

Right now I am flirting with the idea of using Elixir for my next web application, and it just seems unsustainable for me to now add Erlang/OTP and Elixir to my list of playbooks to compile from source.

The Debian repositories have quite old versions of Erlang/OTP/Elixir and I doubt there are enough users to keep security fixes/patches up to date.

Combined with the list of technologies I already use, it seems to reduce complexity if I use Docker containers as deployment units and should be future proof for at least the next decade.

Writing about it, another solution might simply be to have something like Distrobox on the PI and use something like the latest Alpine.

Thanks for the idea! I try to keep as little ‘moving’ parts as possible, so hosting gitlab is something I would want to avoid if possible. The Raspberry Pi is supposed to be sole hardware for the whole deployment of the project.

Wow, thanks a lot! Your answer is exactly what I hoped for when posting on Lemmy: I didn’t even know the docker-tarball thingy is a thing, it fits my problem space very nice in combination with cross building and it seems as easy as it can be. Excellent! :-)

Thanks, didn’t know about buildx, but it looks exactly like what I need to solve cross compilation.

AFAIK Podman only supports quadlets from version 4.4 and later, I am on version 4.3… so, technically you are right and it would work (for me end of the year or next year, when Raspbian gets an update to Trixie), I am mostly interested how people achieved this and automated this and if there are different/better approaches than the ones outlined by me above.

My development machine is an AMD64 and the Pi is an Aarch64… I have no clue how complicated cross-building images for a different architecture is?!? (I am thinking about using something like Erlang/Elixir, so I honestly don’t know at all.)

I am not totally opposed to use a registry (free or payed), but, correct me if I am wrong: If I just build the image on the Pi, it is already exactly at the one spot where I need it, so what problem is solved for me by using a registry?

Edit: Someone above mentioned docker buildx, so seems cross compilation is solved.