i try to make a new non-root user, but podman just keeps complaining about privileges when i run it under that user.

If you’re asking for help about an error message, then provide the error message rather than describing it in vague terms. There are many privileges it could be complaining about.

I understand you make a point about gender

No, you don’t.

Too much what exactly? Don’t use the functionality you don’t want.

First - I’d like you to reconsider you use of “grandma” as a stand-in for “somebody who is technically illiterate”. Maybe ask yourself why “grandpa” is not the go-to here and whether you may be perpetuating an ugly stereotype.

Second - I actually included handbrake in my list as an easier alternative to use.

Yeah, I could see that.

I’m genuinely confused about the use cases you all seem to have. When are you sitting in a field on your phone trying desperately to convert a .avi to a .mkv?

For desktops you just need to have ffmpeg or handbrake or ImageMagick installed - there’s nothing to “maintain”. Image conversion is as simple as convert test.jpg test.png.

Why would anyone setup and maintain a server to do infrequent conversions of small files?

Notice that it hasn’t amongst mainstream consumers.

Good. Mainstream consumers don’t understand enough about networking and computer security to be trusted to self-host anything beyond desktop applications. And even that is debatable. They’re so bad at it that walled-gardens have become ubiquitous just to keep viruses from running rampant.

Yeah, this whole “Linux server” thing just isn’t going to take off.

Many “self hosters” simply aren’t comfortable with the basics and expect things to be just an app you install. A simple two-tier app/db architecture is too complex for them (hence the prevalence of sqllite these days).

I’ve run nextcloud for many years and was simply surprised to hear that it’s “difficult to manage and slow”. My experience has been quite the contrary - it’s been easy to keep up to date and has never failed an upgrade or lost data. And it performs “well enough” since I don’t use low-cost hardware for servers.

My only complaint is that I need to run occ from a terminal rather than having a web interface for it. Makes running it in a k8s pod kinda annoying.

Yeah, I tried it out to see what they were doing and just didn’t see the point. Just make a plug-in for IntelliJ.

This is the sort of thing bacula was made for - physical backups spread out over multiple removable media (tapes mostly, but it can work with optical drives).

https://www.bacula.org/free-tape-backup-software/

It tracks where it puts your files, so it does have its own db that also needs backing up. But if you want to restore without needing to search manually through dozens of disks this is what you need.

PHP does actually scale better than something like Lemmy which is written in rust

Okay - How then?

But sure, you can act like you know more than the Nextcloud devs

I’m a web developer too - so I feel rather qualified to speak on the subject. I don’t think the Nextcloud developers are some sort of genius team of engineers but I’m not saying they’re stupid or anything - just that PHP does not scale better than “practically every other technology out there”.

It forks or creates a thread per request. It’s horizontal scaling which is pretty common with any webapp. I don’t know why they claim PHP is special here. It’s a very common way to handle requests and you can do that with lots of languages and frameworks. More CPUs = more threads = more scaling. Throw more servers into the mix and you’re now “infinitely scaling” right? Well… No. Because I/O.

Webapps tend to be I/O bound rather than CPU bound. So asynchronous I/O leads to much better performance generally with fewer resources. Because no matter how many threads and servers you put in the app tier you’re going to be limited by the disks on your database at some point.

The scaling, in particular, is a huge benefit of PHP over practically every other technology out there: to double the performance of a PHP server, you can simply have twice as many cores and things will work without any changes needed. Not only is the scaling you get pretty much 100%, unlike other languages, this scaling continues beyond a single server!

There is so much wrong with this that it’s difficult to know where to start…

Oh man, I’d forgotten about trac!

Yeah - the decentralized nature isn’t that big of a deal, most people treat it like it’s centralized anyway…

The most amazing thing about git was they way they track changes (file contents rather than names) which allows it to branch and merge almost effortlessly. Search for “SVN Tree Conflict” for an example of what I’m talking about. Oh, you renamed a file that you modified on a branch? Your life is hell now.

SRV records won’t help with browser traffic.

It’s bad form to just say “set this variable to this value” without any explanation about what that variable does and why that value helped.

Your configuration may not work or may be detrimental for others.

Others have written on the topic. Including Greg KH - one of the major Linux maintainers.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2025/2/19/222

memory safety isn’t impossible in C

In practice it is.

C is also faster than JavaScript, uses less memory, I wouldn’t consider a scripting language to even be a choice for writing a backend server if I can use a compiled language instead.

Neat.