Maybe, but it’s hard to know that. Something running in the firmware of a chip in an embedded device is harder to identify than something powering the whole device. There’s also no reliable, publicly available statistics on embedded OSes I could find. So yeah, Linux might not be the most common kernel for embedded systems.

I’ve heard people say things along the lines of “the Linux revolution never happened”.

Utterly false. Linux is, by a huuuuuuge margin, the most popular OS kernel in the world. It’s the most popular kernel for mobile phones. It’s the most popular kernel for servers. It’s the most popular kernel for SBCs. It may be the most popular kernel for embedded applications, but it’s hard to know that. The only place it’s not the most popular kernel is desktops/laptops.

Yep. When I was a cashier in a grocery store, I had every code memorized except some of the less popular bulk nuts. A human cashier is way faster than a self checkout.

I can’t answer that for you. I’ll tell you, I don’t think a computer science degree is a waste.

I live in California, so any place that sells alcohol needs at least one real cashier. A lot of places took that “at least one” to be an upper limit, not a lower one. For a while there, going into Albertsons was a nightmare. Twenty minutes shopping, another twenty waiting to check out because everybody had alcohol.

Any place that is replacing junior devs with AI is probably going to really regret it when they have no senior devs in a few years. Being a junior dev in a team is kind of like an apprenticeship. You learn the trade, but you also learn the shop. Then when the senior dev moves on, you have all that knowledge and can step into the role of senior dev. If a team decides to not have junior devs anymore, then they’ll have no one to take over when a senior dev leaves.

So the answer is yes, it is already replacing junior devs, but that’s only because management hasn’t learned how bad of an idea that is yet. Ultimately, it will cost them more through losing foundational team knowledge.

You also have to hold an AI’s hand the entire way through coding something, whereas you can kind of just let a junior dev go do their own thing, and eventually they’ll probably get it right. An AI “agent” tries to hold its own hand, but that doesn’t seem to work out usually when I’ve tried it. It starts making changes that are really bad, then just seems to always double down and eventually make a huge mess.

Yeah, that’s probably true. Remember how all the execs decided to replace cashiers with robots, then the stores started losing money because a. it made stealing a lot easier and b. people would avoid stores that only had self-checkout robots and never had anyone to help you because a robot doesn’t know where the flour is. Now the self checkouts are being decommissioned and we’re going back to regular human cashiers. It turns out cashiers do more than just scan barcodes. But, upper management didn’t get to where they are by being smart.

I’ve been a professional software developer for over two decades. There is zero chance my job will get taken by an AI any time soon. Anyone who thinks my job is to write code doesn’t understand my job. That’s like saying a bus driver’s job is to turn a steering wheel.

My job is to turn vague ideas and nondescript feelings into APIs and (sometimes) UIs, then turn those into specs, then split those into tasks, then sometimes I’ll write the code for them and sometimes someone else does. About 90% of my time is turning ideas into plans, and about 10% of my time is turning those plans into code.

When I was young and was a junior engineer, my job was more to receive the specs from the senior engineers and turn that into code, but even then, I was still designing my own stuff. Maybe more like 40/60 time instead of 90/10.

Now that I’m a grizzled old man forged in the fires of task management software, I’m doing almost all of the design work myself. I manage a project that has about 250,000 lines of code. An AI isn’t going to be able to build new features into that, let alone decide which features to build in the first place.

Ok, thank you! If I can add support for that, I definitely will.

If Calibre-Web can sync with WebDAV, it should work. I don’t know about it though, so I don’t know if that’s possible.

I’ve never even heard of that. There’s an NPM package for it, so I might be able to add it if that package works in React Native.

Is this used for syncing read state, or just keeping a catalog of your own books?

I’ve used WebDAV with Nephele:

https://hub.docker.com/r/sciactive/nephele

It works with multiple users and has built in browser support.

Owlfiles on mobile makes it easy to import all your photos to it.

Ok, so it’s been long enough for you, that you can’t even conceive of not knowing how to use a GUI anymore. Good for you, I guess.

It’s not any more complicated than a GUI, it’s just that the dozens of hours you spent learning to use a GUI was a long time ago, and you don’t remember how complicated it was.

Also, you’re probably exaggerating, because dozens of hours is way longer than it should take to become proficient at the terminal. There are resources online that you can use to learn in a few hours.

I wouldn’t call it complicated, but yeah, it’s special knowledge. So is all of self hosting.

It’s been a long time since I learned, so I don’t remember exactly what I used, but at a cursory glance, this one looks good:

https://www.terminaltutor.com/

Also, learning to read man pages will help a lot. Here’s an article on that:

https://itsfoss.com/linux-man-page-guide/

I do remember using “terminal cheat sheets” like this:

https://phoenixnap.com/kb/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/linux-commands-cheat-sheet-pdf.pdf

So yeah, even though I specifically said you’d probably accuse me of saying something and specifically told you I wasn’t saying that, you still accused me of it. You should work on your reading comprehension.

Now, you said that a desktop edition is virtually the same as a server edition + a prepackaged GUI. I gave you plenty of reasons they’re not.

As an IT professional, you absolutely should know this. So far, the only skill you’ve shown any true mastery of is misguided condescension. So instead of arguing against a point I didn’t make, if you’d like to argue against my actual point, feel free. Otherwise, maybe realize you’re not as educated as you thought, and learn.

I mean if that’s what you think, I can tell you don’t work in the industry. Desktop editions generally have more than just a “prepackaged GUI” on top of a server edition.

• Server editions generally have text based installers. This might not seem like a big deal, until you’re installing on a system that doesn’t have any graphics, just a serial console.
• They almost always have an easy way to do headless and network installations.
• They sometimes have additional security modules, like SELinux, different kernel boot parameters, or even different kernel versions. (Although this is less common nowadays.)
• They’re also missing an audio server (different than a GUI), and usually a print server.
• They can often be GBs lighter, which makes a difference when you’re installing on virtual machines with limited disk space.
• They sometimes use different file systems by default (like Fedora used to).
• They might create different swap setups.
• They usually have very different network defaults. Like, desktop editions usually have a firewall, whereas server editions usually don’t (or it’s not enabled by default).
• Server editions often include terminal tools that desktop editions don’t.
• They’ll sometimes have a different network manager (Ubuntu Server uses systemd-networkd while Ubuntu Desktop uses Network-Manager).
• Server editions almost never come with userland file mounting tools like gvfs.
• Sometimes (like in Fedora) a server edition will come with remote management solutions like Cockpit.
• The home directory skeletons will be vastly different on a server vs a desktop.

That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are plenty more I could find.

Now, since you seem like you might accuse me of it, note that I did not say that a server edition and a desktop edition can’t be swapped back and forth by installing and removing packages and changing a bunch of config. They can. But, it’s not “just” some GUI stuff that makes a desktop edition, and it’s not “just” the lack of a GUI that makes a server edition. They are usually quite different.

Source: I’ve been a professional Linux server administrator for 16 years. But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself. Install Ubuntu server, then run sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop and see if it’s exactly the same as installing Ubuntu Desktop.

We’re talking about servers here. Linux is the market leader in server software by an absolutely enormous margin.

There’s a reason that’s not very popular outside of corporate intranets.