Through an old article in my RSS, I came across this very long twitter post. I found it worth sharing as it expands one of the directions tech is moving in, rapidly. Will we all welcome it? Will it blend well with FOSS? Will it run EMACS or VIM?!? … Source Twitter Post Copied in full below for easier reading Paperspace and Rollapp have my head spinning. It’s so clear this is the future and so clear hardly anyone sees it.

This story already circulated plenty in months past, but I decided to link it today after a good co-worker discussion on who writes history, and always being willing to learn facts. In our case, our discussion started with referring to Hunting Hitler, and understanding at the close of the war, people needed to hear we got him!, even if it wasn’t accurate, and he was actively being searched for. The same goes for Japan in 1945, the American public, at least in the short term, needed to hear that the Atomic Bomb developed at great expense and sacrifice ended the war.

It is no secret that my favorite distro for Linux after much trial and error, landed on Arch Linux.

I found I prefer the rolling release model vs major version upgrades and the AUR (Arch User Repository) is incredible for finding and installing packages. That being said, it’s biggest win is the Arch Wiki. I find however, that no matter how often that is repeated in the Arch circles, you still find forums full of solutions that the Arch Wiki covers better, or even conflict the Wiki.

While all my personal systems are exclusively running Linux, as is the nature of working in most IT Support roles, the base of my shared company workstation in the office is Windows 10.

After a bunch of article reading, research and testing, this is a quick summary of what I use to have what has worked for me as a fully functioning i3 graphical desktop, running via WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) on a functioning X-Server. For me at least, I’ve found it works much better than when I tried to have a VM running on the workstation, as it’s far from new or high performance.

As I have continued my expansion into self-hosting as well as the fediverse, the one challenge I still had was image posting and sharing in an easy and clean looking way. For images on websites like this, especially from a mobile device, FTP uploading has just been inconvenient and disrupts the focused writing activity.

I had already dabbled a bit in Pixelfed, by joining Pixelfed.Social when it was still open for registration. This let me test the functionality for a service similar to Instagram or Imgr, but without ads or tracking. The final leap was setting it up self-hosted so that I could fully own that image data.

Over the last year, I’m progressively been keeping a closer eye on ARM-based systems as they’re growing in power and usability. I currently have a retro game system based on a Raspberry Pi 3B+, and it’s already a great system. As we’re getting into 2020, I’m seeing a lot more articles and posts of the Pi4, at least the 4GB model, making a decent basic workstation and office computer. This is assuming that use case is similar to that of a Chromebook, focused on web and terminal type software.