Someone posted a blog here a little while ago. I wrote up a big response only to find that OP deleted the post. I figured I might as well post my response here since it took me 45m to type out of my phone 🫠

What an interesting list. Some of these suggestions are good with others are not. I think we can reorder things a bit and make this more reasonable.

~~Jenkins~~

Jenkins is terrible! It should have been killed off a decade ago. Seriously, just don’t use Jenkins. There are much better offerings now.

Source control and CI/CD

The current trend is to rely on your source control provider for ci/cd. You may or may not have a choice in this space so let’s name some big ones. GitHub, Gitlab, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, Gitea/Forgejo. They all act as a git server and all offer automation. Learn whichever your company uses. If you get to choose… GitHub is great! Gitlab is also good but the automations will be focused on bash and tend to get messy IMO. ADO is truly a Microsoft product with many nonsensical choices. I find it frustrating to use. I haven’t done ci/cd with bitbucket. If you want a foss option, check out forgejo (a fork of gitea). I have not used either yet though it looks nice and I really want to.

Containers

Docker is a fine choice. I really like some alternatives tools like buildah, podman, etc. but nearly every piece of documentation out there is based on docker. The choice is yours here but docker will probably give you the simplest experience.

Kubernetes is an amazing runtime environment! IMO should be used as a standard interface for running resources in a public cloud. However, this is a huge jump and you’ll want to learn at least a dozen good tools here. This one is a many years long practice but absolutely worthwhile. A quick and very incomplete list of tools: k9s, k3d, helm, kustomize (better than helm in most cases), flux, Argo (better than flux), istio. Seriously these are just the basics.

Infrastructure Management

While ansible is good, I would be looking to retire it at this point. A big possible exception is if you are running your own hardware and don’t have a great interface for alternative tools. If somebody just gives you a VM to use, then ya use ansible.

Terraform is great but don’t use it. OpenTofu is a foss fork and people should honestly just use this instead. But both tools have some limitations and oddities. People seem to love using terragrunt as well to make this easier to use.

If you’re using k8s, there’s also the open tofu controller. I’ve haven’t personally used it, but people I 100% trust in this space absolutely love it.

Observability

Firstly I like the numeronym instead: o11y.

Don’t use nagios. It’s old and there are better alternatives.

Elasticsearch is ok but I don’t really like it. Everything is stored as a document and just… eh, there are better options.

Prometheus is quite good.

Here’s the biggest mistake that people make today. Use OpenTelemetry as the core of your o11y solution. It’s the 2nd biggest CNCF project (right behind k8s) and it’s a fantastic tool. It lets you collect telemetry data and build data pipelines to whatever storage devices you want. That includes Prometheus and elasticsearch but you also can choose many more options as well with only tiny configuration changes.

ChatGPT

This entire post looks 100% like a copy/paste from ChatGPT. AI is a cool tool but OP, you should learn to use it a little better. Tell it to not use so much fluff text or such a rigid structure. Make edits afterwards. And most important of all, make sure it’s actually providing good info.

Ever since the database maintenance two Weiss so, I’ve seen far less content in my home feed. I decided to dig a bit today and found that I’m just not seeing content from certain subscribed communities such as !dailygames@lemmy.zip. Turns out the most recent content from there is 15 days old. That lines up perfectly with the db maintenance.

Sooo. Are there any known issues since then? Maybe something with federation?

I made some changes to disk partitions. Now I'm seeing an issue with mounts. It's not a big problem but it's definitely confusing me.

[alex@rog-g15dk dev]$ sudo mount /home-temp
mount: /home-temp: can't find in /etc/fstab.
[alex@rog-g15dk dev]$ cat /etc/fstab
New                                         Partition    /home-temp   defaults            0 0 # /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a device; this may
# be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices that works even if
# disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
#                      
UUID=5E74-A00E                              /efi         vfat         noatime             0 2 
UUID=53a2c9bc-31dd-4e52-902f-633867253481   /            ext4         noatime             0 1 
tmpfs                                       /tmp         tmpfs        noatime,mode=1777   0 0 
/dev/nvme0n1p2                              /home        ext4         noatime             0 2 
/dev/nvme0n1p3                              /steam       ext4         noatime             0 2

Can anyone explain what 'mount -a' is trying to mount?

Here's the context on the changes I made. My desktop used to run windows. I recently installed linux as well (dual boot). A bit later I destroyed the windows partitions. This left the beginning 2/3 of the disk unused.

Today I decided to reclaim that disk space. I created 2 new partitions, copied some data to them, updated fstab accordingly, rebooted, and grew the steam partition to 700GiB. That process had a couple of small bumps, including a partition that was mounted to '/home-temp'. I destroyed that partition before using it all.

So this error is definitely caused by me. That's fine. I'm just trying to understand what's going on and how to clean up the little mess.

I'm ditching Windows in favor of Linux on my personal desktop. And so I'm looking for advice on which distro I should start with.

About Me

I use Linux professionally all the time but mostly to build ci/cd pipelines and for software development/operations. I've never been a Linux admin nor have I ever chosen the distro I use. I'm generally comfortable using Linux and digging into configs/issues as needed.

Planned Usage

I use this machine for typical home usage: Firefox, a notes app (currently Notesnook), maybe office style tools like word and excel. I also use this for gaming: Steam, Discord, etc. Lastly and least important, I use this for a small amount of dev work: VSCode, various languages, possibly running containers.

What I'm Looking For

I'd like an OS that's highly configurable but ships with good default settings and requires very little effort to start using. I don't want it to ship with loads of applications; I want to choose and install all of the higher level tools. Shipping with a configured desktop is perfectly fine but not required. Ideally, I can have all of this while still keeping the maintenance low. I think that means a stable OS, a good package manager, stable/automatic updates, etc.

Last bit. Open source is rather important to me. I prefer free and free.

Anyone have good suggestions??

Edit

I'm aware of tools like Distro Chooser. They've recommended Arch Linux and Endeavor OS to me so far. But I'm not ready to trust them yet. I'm looking for human input.

Edit 2: Hardware Info

I'm running on an ASUS ROG Strix GA15DK. It's just over 2 years old. The hardware was shiny but not top-tier at the time. It’s not new at this point but also not old by Linux standards.

• AMD Ryzen 7 5800X Processor
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
• 16GB DDR4 3200 MHz RAM

Edit 3

It's official. I installed EndeavourOS! I got it to work without any issues. Yup, first try. It definitely didn't take me ~10 tries :D

Thanks for all the input all! Wonderful crowd here!!!