Open Source

Let me preface this post by saying that if you’re trying Linux for the first time, install Fedora. Fedora strikes a great balance of new features, stability and a “just works” factor. I’ve been using Fedora as my daily driver for years and the main reason I switched to Arch is because I wanted the Arch DIY installation experience, imperfections and all. That said, here goes! I installed Arch Linux on my Thinkpad P14s Gen 1 ( AMD )....

For a while, I was daily driving Fedora Linux on a Microsoft Surface Go Tablet/Laptop hybrid. The hardware with Linux is a brilliant experience, but I needed some bigger screen real estate and more RAM for my work, so I had to invest in a real laptop to replace it. I began to feel bad about the Surface Go 2 gathering dust. I figured it has enough power to host a few services and podman containers in Linux for my modest home server requirements ( Plex, PiHole, File Server, SSH Jumpbox etc....

I recently decided to set up PiHole in a Podman container for network-level blocking of DNS requests to some of the nasty stuff on the internet. For a long time, I’ve never bothered with such a thing, but these days I’m sharing an internet connection with my family, who use the home internet connection from a whole range of devices. To manage Linux containers on my humble home server, I prefer Podman instead of Docker because it’s daemon-less and doesn’t need to be run as root....

I’ve always felt drawn to the ethos of both Skateboarding and Open Source software. When Rodney Mullen did his TED talk a few years ago, he touched on similarities between the two when he compared skateboarders to Linux kernel hackers. Since then, I’ve pondered about all the other common ground between the two. Community Skateboarding and Open Source both thrive when people come together and collaborate. Linus Torvalds was a student who was tired of paying for UNIX, so he started writing a free operating system as a DIY hobby while releasing the source code to the community....