Just another Swedish programming sysadmin person.
Coffee is always the answer.

And beware my spaghet.

  • 13 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • In general, browser benchmarks seem to often favor Firefox in terms of startup and first interaction timings, and often favor Chrome when it comes to crunching large amounts of data through JavaScript.
    I.e. for pages which use small amounts of JavaScript, but call into it quickly after loading, Firefox tends to come out on top. But for pages which load lots of JavaScript and then run it constantly, Chrome tends to come out on top.

    We’re usually talking milliseconds-level of difference here though. So if you’re using a mobile browser or a low-power laptop, then the difference is often not measurable at all, unless the page is specifically optimized for one or the other.









  • I’ve been looking at the rewrite of Owncloud, but unfortunately I really do need either SMB or SFTP for one of the most critical storage mounts in my setup.
    I don’t particularly feel like giving Owncloud a win either, they’ve not been behaving in a particularly friendly manner for the community, and their track record with open core isn’t particularly good, so I really don’t want to end up with a decent product that then steadily mutilates itself to try and squeeze money out of me.

    The Owncloud team actually had a stand at FOSDEM a couple of years back, right across from the Nextcloud team, and they really didn’t give me much confidence in the project after chatting with them. I’ve since heard that they’re apparently not going to be allowed to return again either, due to how poorly they handled it.


  • I’ve been hoping to find a non-PHP alternative to Nextcloud for a while, but unfortunately I’ve yet to find one which supports my base requirements for the file storage.

    Due to some quirks with my setup, my backing storage consists of a mix of local folders, S3 buckets, SMB/SFTP mounts (with user credential login), and even an external WebDav server.
    Nextcloud does manage such a thing phenomenally, while all the alternatives I’ve tested (including a Radicale backed by rclone mounts) tend to fall completely to pieces as soon as more than one storage backend ends up getting involved, especially when some of said backends need to be accessed with user-specific credentials.


  • Well, things like the fact that snap is supposed to be a distro-agnostic packaging method despite being only truly supported on Ubuntu is annoying. The fact that its locked to the Canonical store is annoying. The fact that it requires a system daemon to function is annoying.

    My main gripes with it stem from my job though, since at the university where I work snap has been an absolute travesty;
    It overflows the mount table on multi-user systems.
    It slows down startup a ridiculous amount even if barely any snaps are installed.
    It can’t run user applications if your home drive is mounted over NFS with safe mount options.
    It has no way to disable automatic updates during change critical times - like exams.

    There’s plenty more issues we’ve had with it, but those are the main ones that keep causing us issues.
    Notably Flatpak doesn’t have any of the listed issues, and it also supports both shared installations as well as internal repos, where we can put licensed or bulky software for courses - something which snap can’t support due to the centralized store design.