The Joy of Leaving the Cloud
Continuing to tell stories of joy in Linux and OSS land to counter the prevalent doom scrolling. I have been quite happy having transitioned off my SSDNodes.com hosted VPS, replacing it with Linux Mint Beelink box. I haven’t missed my VPS in the slightest, and now my local server is much more powerful and easier to develop and deploy too.
First Cloudflare tunnels allows me to securely share apps and web sites I develop without poking holes in my home network. It’s still a pain in the but to set up, but my “fake people staff” have taken almost all of that pain away. I say “fake people staff” to no derail this post which isn’t about fake people at all.
Synchthing is a wonderful OSS that does the one thing I really wanted most from NextCloud. NextCloud is wonderful in its own way but is finicky over time, IMHO. Once I set up my Mac mini as my hub, and the rest of my machines sync with it, it’s easy and wonderful. I can develop on any of my machines at any time. They all have my ~/projects dir shared and it’s just a few moments before any file written to one appears on the rest. It’s also greatly reduced my use of OneDrive. I never did get Linux and OneDrive to play nicely.
Linux is the best platform for Docker. My LinuxMint machine is a Beelink (Chinese brand) machine that I run headless, and it has 64gig RAM - bought well before the crazy RAM pricing. On linux ALL your ram is sharable with Docker without having to run “Docker Desktop” which is just a vm on Mac and Windows.
I find Docker itself to be a joy. It’s a great way to run multiple, many multiples of apps on my one server without them conflicting with each other. So many software stacks are available on Docker Hub - web servers, databases, you name it.
When I’m having my fake staff build apps for me, I deploy to Nginx web server as responsive web apps. Sure beats having to develop and deploy mobile apps, and yet I can still easily access and run them from iPhone and iPad.
Linux itself underpins the whole thing. This same machine was rebooting every night with Windows 11, and I couldn’t fix it. My Fake employees couldn’t fix it. No nightly reboots with Linux. Something did go wrong a week ago that I still don’t know what happened. It’s a computer, things happen.
Shoutout to Nomachine that I use to Remote Desktop into this Linux Box from my Mac laptops.
It’s a great time to be a fan of tech.