HAproxy is good at what it does but it’s only good at proxying and simple rules.

It’s possible to write very complex rules/ACLs with HAproxy… stick-tables, ACLs with regexes on whatever HTTP header, source or destination ACLs, map files, geoblocking, lua scripting, load-balancing from round-robin to host header load balancing, dynamic backend servers provisionning through DNS… Not that you can’t do it with Nginx (it started as a reverse-proxy before becoming a jack of all trades), nor that nginx isn’t a great tool (it is!), but HAProxy can do very complex things too. It also follows the good ol’ UNIX philosophy of “one program to do one thing and do it well” and thus doesn’t try to be a webserver, hence why you need a webserver behind it to serve anything from static files to PHP/Python/whatever.

You’re welcome! scratch and distroless are indeed basically the same thing, scratch being the ‘official’ docker minimal image while distroless is from google - as I’m more a Kubernetes user (at home and at work) than a Docker user, I tend to think about distroless first :) - my apologies if my comment was a bit confusing on this matter.

By the way, have fun experimenting with docker (or podman), it’s interesting, widely used both in selfhosting and professional environments, and it’s a great learning experience - and a good way to pass time during these long winter evenings :)

A bit late but you might want to have a look at docker multi-stage build documentation which does exactly what you did (start from a base image then copying stuff from it to your own image), something like that:

FROM someimage:sometag AS build
[do stuff]
FROM minimalimage:someothertag
COPY --from=build /some/file /some/other/file
[and so on]
USER somebody
CMD ["/path/somecommand"]

Which will simplify building new images against newer “build” image newer tags easier.

btw, you were quite creative on this one! You also might want to have a look at the distroless image, the goal being to only have the bare minimum to run your application in the image: your executable and its runtime dependencies.

good old x201 here (i5-720m iirc), 8GB ram, sata ssd. Debian stable. No DE, just stumpWM. Not watching 4k youtube videos but runs fairly well for a 13 years old machine.

Nope. That’s called the burden of proof. You started by saying “gimp is shit”, it’s up to you to prove it, it’s not up to the people responding you to disprove your point of view. What you’re doing right now is called a fallacy and just totally discredit yourself.

If you are in France, or around Europe and don’t mind sending your Pi via mail to them, Faimaison and Tetaneutral do propose small computers hosting in their datacenter racks, Pi type included, but also NUCs, respectively for 24€/month (bit expensive but small structure compared to Tetaneutral edit: it’s ~15€/month nowadays) and 5 to 10€ / month. That’s just an example. Generally you’ll get one IPv4 and one /56 or /64 IPv6 prefix.

You might want to look near your location if there is a LUG, non-profit ISP, or non-profit colocation proposing the same kind of services. You may even meet some nice people! But it’s definitely doable at least in Europe.

Can confirm, recently installed it on a friends’ dell G3 laptop and I was quite impressed to see that it recognized both the nvidia graphics card and the intel GPU without a hitch, and installed the nvidia proprietary driver directly from the live usb.

Then I installed it on my wife’s mother thinkpad x260, because she was bored with Windows “getting in [her] way” (her words, not mine) and wanted to try something else (70 years old grandma, main usage is web browsing, mails, some accounting on LibreOffice Calc, Zoom with her friends and… that’s all). Everything worked out of the box (well, the x260 is pretty standard by the way). I showed her how to upgrade, how to use her software, how to install or uninstall software from the package manager GUI, and how to use workspaces. She didn’t call for help once, and, for the moment, when I ask her about it she’s quite pleased with it.

I’m a Debian and OpenBSD guy but recently got a second hand thinkpad yoga X390 laptop and decided to give Pop a try on it. From touchscreen to touchpad gestures to automatic screen rotation in tent or tablet mode - everything works out of the box (except for the fingerprint reader, but well, we’re used to that). Basically it’s Ubuntu 22.04 LTS without the snap hassle and a recent kernel (6.4 right now). For what I tested it on, it’s always been a pleasant experience.

Of course, YMMV, and I might as well go back to my trusty Debian Stable + flatpak setup if things goes awry but right now I’m quite impressed with what they’ve managed to do.

Recently I used testdisk/photorec to recover photos from a dead sd card. Made a small donation and sent a big thank you to the developer. As you said, sending appreciations and thanks for someone’s hard work is an important thing to do, and if applicable, small donations. Right now I’m quite ashamed I’ve never did the same for Vim while Bram was still alive, especially since Vim is one of the most important tools I daily use :/.

I use Vim since 31 years. Started in 1992, on Amiga with Fred Fish disks. I use Vim daily at work since 20 years. It’s like a second home for me, a familiar tool which makes me confident that it’ll help me manage whatever task I throw at it. I never had the pleasure to encounter Bram to tell him how much his work helped me throughout the years. I should have sent a “thank you for your hard work” mail when it was still possible. Now I can only send condolences. And some money to the ICCF. That’s the least I can do.