What if the new account user, who is working on a product that integrates with what the vast majority of selfhosters run, just found Lemmy?

This happens on Reddit, and basically my problem is that these users often don’t have enough experience to be able to actually give solutions. Reddit is full of people who think they have a good solution, dealing with comments of people explaining that what they are struggling with is actually a solved problem (or a skill issue). No one cares about your vibecoded slop that implements 1% of the features of an existing open source solution (they used to not be vibecoded but we still didn’t care). It being paid and proprietary is just even more annoying.

My idea of requirement to engage with the community is also about being able to ensure that the users are technically competent. If they are experienced, it will show up in the discussions we can see and review. For their benefit, if they lurk, then they can take a look at what is being used, and what problems actually exist, instead of making assumptions.

If they really believe their product is so good, they can spend a few weeks helping people with Linux questions and sharing their (non product related) insightful thoughts on Lemmy so I don’t dismiss them instantly when they finally advertise it.

Not everybody does. It’s just sometimes.

If the tarball was dynamically linked against specific distro’s libraries though, then it wouldn’t work on all distros.

They also often provide RPM packages for Red Hat systems. Not always though, and I use Arch (btw) anyways.

snap is likely the most secure by avoiding user namespaces, using AppArmor only and thus being very flexible (also for use for kernels, drivers, browsers …) but it is proprietary, nobody likes it and Canonical doesnt wanna stop somehow.

Snap does seem to support user namespaces. Although I want to comment that user namespaces are not universally insecure. When an application is confined within a user namespace, seccomp rules restrict it from being able to interact with the user namespaces subsystem, walling it off from the increased attack surface.

distrobox/toolbox

Distrobox excels for when you need some proprietary tool that ships it’s packages as a repo for Ubuntu but not much else. You spin up a distrobox for Cisco Packet Tracer, or VSCode (the proprietary microsoft one, not Arch’s Code-OSS and Unity.

Then, once you’re done, you can just delete it all.

nix doesnt have any of these, but sandboxing is hard, there is either stable or unstable, changing and configuring things is very complex. Likely no official packages. Still the method I prefer.

Nix is what I use, and it was frustrating to have to hack a lot of it into place, but I feel like it has the most potential. Unfortunately the flakes nonflakes split, in combination with the split of “distros” like determinate nix, flox, and so on, and the governance concerns really hold it back. It has horrific documentation, for the most part caused by the above (flakes are “experimental” and so can’t be included in official docs), and it is frustrating the lengths I have to go to to make stuff work that should be easy.

For example, GPU acceleration of Nix packaged apps on non Nixos systems. I figured out how to do it:

(config.lib.nixGL.wrappers.mesa pkgs.gzdoom)

source

But I think it’s just straight up impossible to do this via imperative package installs, outside of home manager. And it’s kind off important if you want any GUI app whatsoever to work.

But now that I have it working, I use Nixpkgs exclusively and am able to avoid the AUR entirely. To me, the AUR is a last resort, only for something like say, system level printer drivers (thankfully I’ve never needed to install anything to get printers to work). By ensuring that I only use the AUR once in a blue moon, I can make sure that I actually review the PKGBUILD when using it.

They are probably referring to the way that snap, flatpak, and distrobox are available as official packages in most linux distro’s repositories, whereas nix isn’t. I have encountered this frustration for sure. Debian and Arch provide nix packages, but many other distros don’t.

In addition to this, nix requires manual setup if you install it from the repos, which is annoying. And then you have to do further manual setup to enable flakes, and then you have to figure out how to install packages and it’s not fun.

So the main way people install nix is via the curl | bash scripts various “distros” of Nix provide.

It is possible to detect and moderate them, as long as your mods haven’t been disappeared and replaced by people who’s job is to accept bribes. And also when we can actually see people’s history, since reddit now has an option to hide your history from others because of course.

My usual method is to focus on content, rather than writing style. The AI bots can write a lot, or be brief, or whatever, but they don’t actually contribute to the discussion. They just kinda paraphrase and restate what has been said, or when trying to sell a product they disagree and go “Are you sure this isn’t an problem?” to everybody in the thread telling them that it’s actually a skill issue.

Sometimes they’ll be a little better, but it’s often surface level stuff that can be found at the top of a google search of keywords.

This also makes it possible to tell the difference between ESL speakers who are using AI to clean up their writing style, and true bots. Since the ESL speakers will actually have something to say, but bots won’t.

And then: https://xkcd.com/810/

Unraid is an example, that I consider fairly reasonable. Sure, it is a subscription.

But all of the services are docker containers. What unraid brings to the table is a nice management UI, and the ability to mix and match drive of different sizes in a single raid pool. It makes having a fairly resilient self hosting setup easier than trying to do all of this stuff from scratch.

Nice features sure, that many people find worth paying for, even if I don’t. But they are just nice to haves. If the company ever dies, it’s absolutely possible to export the data and move to say, portainer, or docker via the cli, or podman, or anything that can run containers.

On reddit, there is a community called r/progressionfantasy, which is about a specific type of fantasy fiction. They have a rule that self promotional posts (for paid books) must be preceeded by 10 comments, and actual engagement with the community.

This is a reasonable compromise, in my opinion. Known community member who has been answering questions and contributiting to discussions?

I would be okay if they dropped a paid product of good quality and with a reasonable business model (please no vibecoded slop).

But drive by ProductNameAccount users who have never posted on lemmy before a bunch of self promotional posts? Yeah ban that shit.

lmao. I hate takes like this.

It’s not about making the website impossible to get to, it’s about making the website more difficult and annoying to get to than an alternative productive activity/site.

Part of making it difficult to get to is technical.

I use Vanilla music. It was the only music player I found that would keep my place in my long running playlist that I have on shuffle all the time. It gets through all the songs, shuffles, and then queues through all the songs again, reshuffled. Other players I tested would forget the place, or that music was playing in the first place, and that was frustrating.

I stream it to my computer by connecting my phone to my computer via Bluetooth. I think it’s was a new KDE feature, but now my Linux laptop will pretend to be a headset/speakers, and the Android phone will just play to it. It’s so amazing. Because then I can listen to audio from both my phone and my computer at once pretty easily, and keep my spot in that one playlist I keep running. Unfortunately, it has an annoying issue where it drops out (but doesn’t pause the audio) when the CPU is used too much. Lemmy post: https://programming.dev/post/45725312

When I want a more reliable setup, like when I am compiling things, I usually plug my phone into my computer and use srcpy. This can stream the android screen to the computer over ADB, but I just stream the audio, since that’s all I care about.

Unfortunately, there isn’t really a good solution for remote controlling android or ios devices. Meshcentral can view, but not act. Also, the user must initiate the connection from their end.

I was investigating this (for android tablets), and the solution I came too was to enable android debug tools (adb) over wireless (but in this case, remotely), vpn the phone into a remote server to connect them. Then, you should be able to run adb commands remotely (which lets you uninstall apps). And then over adb, you should be able to stream the screen and control it via genscrcpy.

Actually, the first solution I was going to use was device farmer: https://github.com/orgs/DeviceFarmer/repositories , but the above is basically how device farmer works.

I eventually gave up on remote controllung android devices because it wasn’t needed and it would have been a complex deployment.

A simpler solution for your usecase is probably to spend a night cleaning up her phone, and then enable kiddie mode on it. That would disable app installs unless she calls you to approve it. In addition to that, (idk about ios), but you can actually install apps on android devices remotely via the google play website.

It has installed suspicious certificates.

I dug into this, and it looks like it has been fixed: https://github.com/rustdesk/rustdesk/discussions/6444#discussioncomment-12039260 , and no longer does that.

So Rustdesk can be used entirely open source (since the proprietary management web UI is not critical), and it no longer installs certs.

So maybe it had problems a while ago, but it looks clean in these regards now.

Lmao stop spreading more FUD. They have a paid, proprietary web UI to make management and administration easy. But you can get all the critical components needed to actually run the software from the source.

I was just wondering about the Chinese connection bit.

I actually can’t find any evidence of this. The company appears to be headquartered in Singapore, CEO’d by an American dude.

For your usecase, I would recommend Rustdesk.

But I would also like to mention Meshcentral. Meshcentral is a hosted application that lets you remotely manage multiple devices. It’s different from meshcentral in that it maintains a constant connection, and you can do things like view files, run administrator CMD commands, in addition to being able to remotely connect and control the computer at any time.

It’s more designed for managing a small enterprise environment, than individual support like OP is doing. The constant connection is designed to be a cheap, open source alternative to Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions that do something similar. It is invasive though, since it is essentially a backdoor you put in the computer, whereas rustdesk is temporary, and only works when you have it open and are actively connected and using it. That’s why rustdesk is more suitable for individual support than meshcentral is.

Although I wouldn’t recommend it for OP, I’m leaving this up for anyone in the future who might be searching for “remote tech support” or similar, and maybe they will find Meshcentral more appropriate.

oh no, rustdesk does have some significant problems. I could give you a nice list. It’s just that nobody cares, they don’t matter, and we don’t have a good alternative.

This user’s main account is Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.org (probably). You can take a look through their post history to get an idea of why they might make this comment…

It’s open source, and the relay’s are e2ee (and audited), but they can also be self hosted.

1. Do you have actual technical issues with rustdesk?

2. Do you have an alternative software you would recommend? I hate when people spread FUD or say “don’t use/do this” without actually providing an alternative. Drives me nuts. Because if you don’t present an alternative to a software that someone needs, your complaints are kinda meaningless and a waste of everybody’s time because they’re gonna end up ignoring the complaints and using the tool they need.

Woops, a duplicate?