It’s about time

Noyb now sued two German courts because of inactivity in the “Pay or OK” causes. I say bravo to this; I also wrote about the same thing to the EU in December ’22 already, and except an acknowledgement of receipt, never heard from them again in this case.

This must be the “speed” in digitalisation which we were promised by our new chancellor, and his rank of ministers… we obviously need an Austrian lawyer to keep this going.

And yes, “Pay or OK” is a slap into the faces of the poor – you either accept being spied upon, or you are locked out of information. Not okay; I boycott sites like Spiegel or Zeit.

How nice to have an international team of developers :)

Have a look at this problem with a Japanese font in the graphical Debian installer, which I’ve found via Planet Debian.

Aki understands a bit of Japanese, and some of their former schoolmates *are* half Japanese. I wouldn’t have seen or understood this of course, and not only because I almost never use the *graphical* installer – the old style ncurses one is familiar enough to me.

But thanks to Kentaro Hayashi for fixing this!

Sleek and speedy? I don’t know… but best for Windows users? Probably.

George Whittaker wrote an article about the new Linux Mint 22 in Linux Magazine. And indeed that is a fine distribution – as long as your computer has at least the 3GB of main memory to even start it. I tried the live image on my wife’s old Lenovo SL500 with only 2GB, and it didn’t even start that live image.

But I agree with Rich Edmonds of MSN in that it is probably *the* distribution for Windows converts, like those coming from Windows 10 who don’t have a machine capable of running Win11.

Any Linux would be better than going to Win11 of course, but this one makes it easy indeed. So if your machine has 3-4GB or more of RAM, give it a try. If not, try Debian. The newly installed Debian Trixie (which is not even out yet) runs in about 570MB once you have it on disk or on SSD, provided you’ll use XFCE instead of Gnome. With a Gnome desktop it needs a bit over 1.1GB when running, as tested in a QEMU/KVM virtual machine.

Oh, and Mint isn’t for newbies only – my friend Peter is certainly not new to Linux, but uses Mint regularly for new installations as he told me. I’m older, so I’m using its granddaddy which is Debian (Ubuntu would be the in-between parent, so to say) 😉

And regarding that headline above: I’ve tried Mint in a VM as well, and of course it’s nice, and also sleek and speedy – and it updates much faster than Windows as well 😉 It takes about 720MB or so when running idle, so its Cinnamon desktop is somewhere in between XFCE and Gnome.

As always, thanks for reading.

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 of 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.