Computer at work…

Had a look at Cuttlefish (see also in German).

That showed me two things. First, professional developers like those at Google use Debian. 😛 And second, it wasn’t worth it – Cuttlefish is no Pixel device.

Anyway, since this is all compiled from source, my computer had to work for a while. I haven’t exactly timed the compilation and building of Debian packages, but my guesstimation would be some 25 minutes on my AMD 8 core with 16 threads and 32GB or RAM. See it working on all cores and threads (the Conky on the right side of my screen):

I ended up with 6.6GB of additional used hard disk space, more or less for nothing – so I removed it all again. Anyway, it has been a while since I heard the fans of my computer (and no, it didn’t get loud).

As always, thanks for reading.

Oha. If this goes on, then that’s it with secure phones…

This is bad. I mean really bad. And it could mean: no more “smart” phones for me, thank you very much…

So much for “Don’t be evil”. Until now I recommended to buy Google’s Pixel phones to anyone who wanted to hear my advice, but not anymore. And since I equally don’t like Apple (or any other hardware maker of throwaway hardware), that will be it for me.

Shame on you, Google. You *are* bad indeed.

Update, from Friday, 13th of June 2025: See also here (In German), and here (an AI-assisted translation into English of it).

Yup; Trixie will be nice…

Like I reported in my last article already, the upcoming stable version of Debian – called Trixie – has already less release-critical bugs than the current stable release, called Bookworm.

And thus I decided to have a look on Mitchie’s old Lenovo SL500 laptop which isn’t really used by anybody in this household anymore.

And what should I say? Runs smooth as expected. Here’s a screenshot from the XFCE session:

And here is one from fastfetch which I installed as a first add-on:

This will be a good one, too – like always. Thanks to all Debianistas who make this possible!

Oh, and this blog post was written with it, and on that old notebook.

The Debian devs are busy, and that is a good thing

When I first read about the hard freeze of Trixie – the next stable Debian version – I got excited, and looked up the remaining release-critical bugs page. I don’t remember the exact number as of May 18th, but it was around the 260 mark. As of now, it’s at 178:

I had seen it fallen below 200, but sometimes new bugs are added, so more work for those who are closing them, but better for us all. Once that green line is at 0 (zero), it’s ready as in Debian’s motto quando paratus est – they’ll release when it’s ready, not when some CEO shouts loud enough. Bonus heart points to Debian, as always 🙂

I’ve read elsewhere that one should avoid Linux distributions which release regularly, the main reason being given that not all bugs have CVE numbers, so they wouldn’t even get fixes, and simply taking a rolling release (like Arch, or in a sense, Debian Sid) would be better because you’d always have the latest and greatest software from upstream (the developers of those software packages). I don’t buy it. If a bug doesn’t have a CVE number, then mostly the devs of that package don’t know about the bugs as well, and many of the closed bugs in distributions like Debian, Fedora, and so on will go upstream and be fixed in newer versions because there are fixes already.

True; in Arch or other constantly updated distributions, you’ll always have the latest and greatest – I just got kernel 6.15 in Arch for instance:

I nevertheless find the work of the Debian devs important, and I’m very thankful for it. I trust these people because I know many of them, met them at local groups for breakfast or in pubs, and I helped the Debian team at gatherings like Linuxtag or FOSDEM already, I would have become a Debian developer myself, hadn’t I’ve been interrupted from that by joining commercial IT at my last employer (here in Frankfurt). That was good because it brought food onto the table, but I didn’t really have time for other things except family and work anymore…

Anyway, that’s history. Just wanted to take this as an opportunity to say thanks to the Debian team – oh, and to Arch as well of course. And thanks to you for reading, as always.

P.S.: as you can see at the release-critical bug status page, the number of RC bugs for Trixie is already lower than the one of the current stable release, which is Bookworm – so in case you’ll have a test machine around, try Trixie if you’re so inclined. I sometimes do that before the release day as well. Or even better, if you are capable to look at that bug list and close a few of them, that would be excellent! 🙂

Leave hosting to the pros…

Dhruv Bhutani writes in XDA: 3 reasons I self-host everything but my own email server

And basically he is right – email is by far the hardest part of hosting, and that was also the #1 reason I went back from a virtual (read: part of) co-located server to “simple” webhosting (read: managed but small).

But – there’s more to it than meets the eye. First it has to be defined what “self hosting” means. If that’s only your personal website, your calendar and address book etc. then yes, you can do most of that with a small home server. You’d need DynDNS if you want to give that a name, and a real external DNS service if you want a real TLD (like mine here at lonien.de). I used to split that service, so I could move my virtual server anywhere I’d like to without losing my domain name and everything – I’d just have to point that to the new location.

But even at home, I wouldn’t trust a small NAS and connect that to the outside world, except maybe over some kind of VPN like Wireguard (which again means: goodbye world to most) – that’s how I now run my calendar and address book on a Raspberry Pi5 instead of using Google or any other of the big guys for that. No one except me needs access to my calendar and my address (and phone) book, so that’s okay.

And your web site? Well here it gets a little more complicated. Not as complicated as email, true, but there’s still a lot to consider, and also a lot of work to do if you want to host that at home. Plus even then it’s not entirely cost-free; running a server adds up to your electricity bill, and you also have to consider the time you invest to keep it safe and up and running. Plus the cost of learning; you yourself also have to keep up to date with technology.

There’s more. in case you need any kind of reliable hosting, you have to think about redundancy. No one cares if your blog is down for a few days, but if you also run the blogs or websites of friends and family, or even the ones of some interest groups or – $deity forbid – paid ones, then it gets a lot harder. How do you distribute services, and avoid single points of failure? Will you use Cloudflare and/or Akamai for fast world-wide access, or even both? And a few virtual servers at AWS or Google or whatever other cloud you might rely upon?

Hosting ain’t easy, and this opinion comes from a former IT pro. Read this report about running an encrypted matrix server for a relatively small project like Gadgetbridge in case you’re interest. So even if you use public and free services like matrix.org, or wordpress.com or blogspot.com, you still have to think about others in the first place, and before you even start. And the same is true for the so-called Fediverse. Remember, that are other peoples’ resources, even and especially if you don’t pay for them for now.

No – hosting is anything but easy, and if you care for content more than for the technical stuff and the doing (and maybe being smug or proud that you can do it), then you should probably leave hosting to the pros.

And for mail anyway. I’d rather give 1€/month to mailbox.org (or any other trusted 3rd party) than to ever trying to do that myself again. Or take the big and free ones for that if you don’t care about privacy that much.

As always, thanks for reading.

Trying Alpine Linux

Sometimes it pays looking over the borders of your plate, as we say here in Germany. Looking at Alpine Linux, which is somewhat popular on servers and for automated installations, you can also use this as a desktop operating system; why not? I’ve tried it in a virtual QEMU/KVM machine on Debian, where I gave it only 2 virtual CPU cores, and also only 2048MB (or 2GB) of RAM. I followed the Alpine Handbook and also this short introduction to it, and so I ended up with a working Gnome desktop in not too much time (first boots take a while, that’s normal). Looks like this, with the actual Gnome 48 desktop:

Nice, and perhaps the fastest installation ever. Not for beginners, but if you’re curious about things like these, give it a try.

And as always, thanks for reading.

Caturday

Last Saturday in May ’25, and I realised that I haven’t published many cat photos lately. So here are two from today:

7e9_531075024877-bw-cats
Caturday
In the front: Bella
On my computer monitor: Tuna (RIP)
Photo taken with my Google Pixel 6a with GrapheneOS, converted to b&w using The Gimp
7e9_531080119874.PORTRAIT-bella
Bella, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2025

Like always, thanks for viewing.

A funny one, in case you know your stuff already…

Liam Proven wrote an article in The Register about “The elusive goal of Unix – or Linux – simplicity“. In it, he links to their own “cynic’s guide” as well as to an alternative of it.

Remember, this is partly funny and tongue-in-cheek, and partly for users on a more expert level of Linux and the UNIX world. I have tried many of the listed distributions like Suse, Red Hat, Gentoo or FreeBSD, and I also have briefly looked at things like MX Linux or Alpine. Still running Debian and Arch around here, while most of my family is on Ubuntu, for a reason.

Anyway, if someone finds that stuff interesting, it’s probably worth it. Thanks for reading, as always.

Arch Linux from a beginner’s perspective

Here’s an interesting read on XDA. Like his headline says, a long time Windows user gets his feet wet and installs Arch Linux – and he has very helpful points for the Arch developers in my humble opinion. I have some history with Linux, and even I had to learn how to do it, and the good thing about his article is also his conclusion that this is probably *not* for the beginners.

Recommended reading for those whose support on Windows 10 runs out coming October, and who might be thinking about something to replace it with, and that without spending money for new hardware…