I attempted to find evidence to support this.

I found one reddit post claiming this, but they themselves did not provide any evidence.

freedom of religion is a human right bruh i did not say anything but i believe in god the banned me and claimed i was being homophobic 1. i said nothing about it 2. stfu even if i was

​Not exactly the most compelling piece of evidence, and this was all I could find.

I use this too, and it should be noted that this does not require wireguard or any VPN solution. Rathole can be served publicly, allowing a machine behind a NAT or firewall to connect.

I recently noticed that it's now integrated into Canvas, a FOSS online learning management software which my college (and my high school, and my middle school) have used.

To bad no one bothers with it, forcing everyone to use zoom instead. Which sucks, because the first day of online classes, zoom permissions weren't set up properly, meaning no one could join the meeting. Probably wouldn't have happened with BigBlueButton.

I used to spend a ton of time helping people on reddit with linux and related things, and the "why" matters immensely in that case.

XY problem was extremely common, where someone was trying to achieve a goal through "incorrect" means.

I also saw many, many people's issues where they wanted something, but were referring to it by a different name, ending up confused and lost. All I had to do was say "you actually want Y" and point them on their way, and they would be happy.

And then of course, sometimes people try to do something that's simply not possible (or more usually, not implemented in software.).

But in general, it's very difficult to help people who don't make it easy for you to help them, and part of that is explaining the "why", in addition to their issue.

I usually use nix to manage my development environments.

At the root of the git repo for my blog, there is a shell.nix file. This file, shell.nix, declares an entire shell environment, giving me tools, environment variables, and other things I need. I just run nix-shell while in the same directory as the shell.nix file, and it creates that shell environment.

There are other options, like VSCode has support for developing in a docker container (only docker, not podman or lxc).

I think lxc/incus (same thing) containers are kinda excessive for this case, because those containers are a full linux system, complete with an init system and whatnot. Such a thing is going to use more resources (ram, cpu, and storage space), and it's also going to be more to manage compared to application containers (docker, podman), which are typically very stripped down and come with only what is needed to run the application.

I used to use anaconda, but switched away because it doesn't have all the packages I wanted, and couldn't control the versions of packages installed very well, whereas nix does these both very well. Anaconda is very similar in usage though, especially once you start setting up multiple virtual anaconda environments for separate projects. However, I don't know if anaconda is as portable as nix is, able to create an entire environment from a single file of code.

I haven't experimented with it much, but:

https://iorate.github.io/ublacklist/docs

It appeals to me for management of a windows machine for a few things:

• Lots of machines at once, over winrm. Although ssh is the default, as ansible is linux first.
• I don't have to learn powershell - the shared language means the windows teams and the linux team don't have to learn eachother's language. In ansible, it's very easy to avoid the footguns that come with something like bash, especially after you install the red hat linter, ansible-lint, which warns of ansible's own footguns.
• easy to version control it
• premade stuff: the official "modules" are massive and do a lot. There are also community packages: https://galaxy.ansible.com - of course, you should probably check any stuff you run first. But ansible is very easy to read.
• built in secret management. Encrypt secrets, but still be able to use them smoothly with the automation framework.

For just one machine? Task scheduler is probably good enough. 2-3 machines, managed remotely? Ansible is at least worth looking at.

Edit: also, really good docs. Like, check out this active directory module with examples: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/microsoft/ad/object_info_module.html#ansible-collections-microsoft-ad-object-info-module

The examples are very helpful, with things like getting a list of ad users. I used that to create a ansible script to shuffle all ad user passwords - while being a a linux lover who hates windows and has literally never touched ad before this.

https://github.com/CSUN-CCDC/CCDC-2023/blob/main/windows/ansible/testing/users.yml

https://github.com/CSUN-CCDC/CCDC-2023/blob/main/windows/ansible/roles/domain/tasks/main.yml

https://the-guild.dev/blog/judging-open-source-by-github-stars

On phone rn, but I'd love to see someone run the fake star checking project at projects like this.

(There is a learning curve to packaging stuff yourself.)

"Learning curve" is an understatement. Nix is one of the most poorly documented projects I've seen, next to openstack. Coming into it with no background in functional programming didn't help.

Maybe I shouldn't have tried to package openstack on nix.

But I've tried to package other stuff, like quarto, and that was a nightmare. Nixpkgs didn't have an updated pandoc and I spent an eternity asking around for help, to try to package it. An updated version just got pushed to unstable a few days ago. The same matrix channels I joined to ask for help have been discussing this since then. Props on them for getting it working, but anyone who says that you can easily package anything, is capping. You need to have an understanding of the nix language, nix packaging (both of which are poorly documented), and a rudimentary packaging ecosystem of what you are trying to package.

Don't even get me started on flakes vs nonflakes.

I still use nix-shell for all my development environments, because it's the best way for reproducible environments I can share I've found.

Yes.

Ubuntu and debian both use apt, but differing repos. Different versions of ubuntu/debian use different repos, with newer/older software.

For example would you visit a website if it was hosted on Windows server? If they use ESXi? Or if user account are managed with Active Directory or firebase?

No, and I visit cloudfare websites too.

But I still agree with everything OP says. Like the warnings in the F-Droid android app store informing users that an app promotes non-free services, but it doesn't stop me, or anyone else, from installing them. I simply think people should be informed that services are less free than they can be, and made aware of the many risks that come with non-free services. It's an idealist stance, a goal to push our reality towards, rather than a way of life for most (those who treat it like a way of life are very, very rare).

But this is a false analogy anyways. Windows servers aren't banning users behind tor, or cgnat for no apparent reason like cloudfare is. I think we should discourage the use of nonfree services, but it's not a yes/no binary. Certain things are more free than others, and we should encourage people to choose the freer option. Cloudfare tunneling a linux service is more free than hosting your website using vendor locked cloud tech (AWS s3, lambda, dns, etc). Hosting your won website on an windows server is still not free, but arguably more free than vendor locked cloud stuff. Linux deployments using only FOSS is arguably the most free software you can get, but you still have to deal with nonfree hardware and drivers.

I still use GitHub. But I hate that it has no ipv6 connectivity, meaning that those who don't have ipv4 are excluded, and it's absolutely unacceptable for a tech company of all things, to not keep up to date. The moment federation gets added to forgejo or another one of the self hostable git forges, I will switch (but probably mirror stuff for recruiter purposes), since that's more inclusive than github, but right now, they are not more inclusive than github because instances are small and do not interoperate.

Definitely the clipboard manager. On kde, it's klipper. This is actually such an underrated piece of software that I can't live without. Windows has one too, but they added their's a little after all the linux desktop environments got one by default.