Stage 2:

Documents folder? You want to rule my whole computer, dictate some nonsensical folder structure and then you act like, out of the goodness of your heart, I can have this little set of folders, deep in your weird structure, to store my stuff? And you’re even telling me how to sort it? On my own hard drive connected to my own computer?

I liked agile as it was practiced in the “Extreme Programming” days.

• Rather than attempt to design the perfect system from the get-go, you accept that software architecture is a living, moving target that needs to evolve as your understanding of the problem evolves.

• Rather than stare down a mountain of ill-defined work, you have neat little user stories that can be completed in a few days at most and you just move around some Kanban cards instead of feeding a soul-sucking bureaucratic ticketing, time tracking and monitoring system.

• Rather than sweat and enter crunch mode for deadlines, the project owners see how many user stories (or story points or perfect hours) the team completes per week and can use a velocity graph / burndown chart to estimate when all work will be completed.

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But it’s just a corporate buzzword now. “We’re agile” often enough means “we have no plan, take no responsibility and expect the team to wing it somehow” or “we cargo cult a few agile ideas that feel good to management, like endless meetings with infinite course changes where everyone gives feel-good responses to the managers.”

Having a goal, a specification, a release plan, a vision and someone who is responsible and approachable (the “project owner”) are all part of the agile manifesto, not something it tries to do away with. I would be sad if agile faces the same fate as the waterfall model back in its time and even sadder if we return to the time-tracking-ticket-system-with-Gantt-chart hell as the default.

Maybe we need a new term or an “agility index” to separate the cases of “incompetent manager uses buzzword to cover up messy planning” from the cases of “project owner with a clearly defined goal creates a low-bureaucracy work environment for his team.” :)

That would (just like Git LFS) store full, separate copies of every single version of the large files I manage. I really, really don’t want to go there, nor do I have even a fraction of the hard drive space for that…

That’s what I meant when I wrote “Git submodules can only point to a whole different repository” - they can’t point to a path inside a repository, only to another repository root. That unfortunately renders them useless for me (I’d have to set up in the order of hundreds of small repositories for the sets of shared data I have).

I’m already using Git for source code related versioning, but some use cases involving large binary files with partial updates aren’t well covered by Git (I’ve gone into some detail in my reply to @vvv@programming.dev).

There’s also the lack of svn:externals in Git. Git submodules can only point to a whole different repository as far as I’m aware.

I’m already using Git, thus my experience with Gitea. I am well versed with svndumpfilter and git-svn to extract and migrate individual Subversion repositories to Git.

I’m not only hosting code, but I have several projects involving large binary files with binary changes. Git’s delta compression algorithm for binary files is so-so. Git LFS is just outsourcing the problem. Even cloning with --depth 1 --single-branch gives me abysmal performance compared to Subversion.

So I’m still looking for a nice WebUI to make my life with the Subversion repositories I have easier.

After finding out that tools that are to “bureaucratic” don’t stick with me (bureaucratic as in, I need to fill out forms to create projects/tasks, update them and follow defined workflows), I ended up with Trilium.

It at first looks like a very free-form note taking app (a tree of documents on the left, click and edit away), but it has a lot of extra functionality that lets you construct journals and tasks lists in the document tree (like its Task Manager which is already set up in the Demo notes of a new Trilium install).

Linux Unix since 1979: upon booting, the kernel shall run a single “init” process with unlimited permissions. Said process should be as small and simple as humanly possible and its only duty will be to spawn other, more restricted processes.

Linux since 2010: let’s write an enormous, complex system(d) that does everything from launching processes to maintaining user login sessions to DNS caching to device mounting to running daemons and monitoring daemons. All we need to do is write flawless code with no security issues.

Linux since 2015: We should patch unrelated packages so they send notifications to our humongous system manager whether they’re still running properly. It’s totally fine to make a bridge from a process that accepts data from outside before even logging in and our absolutely secure system manager.

Excuse the cheap systemd trolling, yes, it is actually splitting into several, less-privileged processes, but I do consider the entire design unsound. Not least because it creates a single, large provider of connection points that becomes ever more difficult to replace or create alternatives to (similarly to web standard if only a single browser implementation existed).

I have a Windows VM that runs Visual Studio and a small number of developer tools so I can test my code on Windows. And another windows VM that runs Daz3D, Clip Studio Paint and the Epic Launcher (to download stuff from the Unreal Engine Marketplace).

Sometimes I misuse either VM by creating a snapshot and installing Garmin Connect so I can update the music library on my watch :)

SuSE Linux (a German distribution), some niche, single CD distrubution, Debian for a while and, finally, since ~2006, Gentoo on my servers and since ~2015 Gentoo as my desktop.

Debian and its derivatives never felt right for me. I find too many drawbacks with binary packages (non-configurable build options, therefore dependencies that can’t be disabled, relying on humans to keep ABI compatiblity, trouble integrating my own packages or unstable versions) and I just don’t like systemd.

It’s weird, I’ve seen more than enough of those “Install Gentoo” memes, but I find it the most pleasant system to run in the long term.

I’m on OpenRC, so I can’t say anything about systemd, but I have several SSHFS mounts (non-auto) listed in my fstab:

sshfs#root@192.168.0.123:/random-folder/ /mnt/random-folder fuse noauto,uid=1000,gid=100,allow_other 0 0

Is that similar to what you’ve tried in your fstab? I’d assume replacing noauto with auto should just work, but then again, I haven’t tried it (and rebooting my system right now would be very inconvenient, sorry).

It also might require you to either use password-based login and specify the password or store the SSH keys in the .ssh directory of the user doing the mount (should be root with auto set).

I’m a little put off by the inconvenient command line and the mandatory bells and whistles (flathub is nice and all, but must it be baked into the main executable rather than having the package manager as an optional thing on top?).

So far, AppImage just looks superior to me. Works without installing a runtime into my system, no need to become root and integrate an app into a system-wide managed package repository, I can just run it.

Oh my, thank you very much for pointing that out!

I might have to give it another chance, then, perhaps I’ll shift my games partition back to NTFS once I can free up enough space.

I’m in the same boat. I’ve ended up using Paragon’s commercial ext4 drivers ($20) and while they absolutely work, they’re case sensitive and many Windows apps (especially Bethesda games) open their files with random upper/lowercase spellings that don’t match the files.

I’ve done this (shared 3 NTFS partition in a dual boot setup) from 2017 to the end of 2023 without issues.

The trick was to disable “fast startup” and hibernation. Otherwise Windows happily shuts down with the file systems in an inconsistent state. It’s just a question whether one can live with that in their Windows install.

I’ve used the old ‘ntfs’ driver that supposedly can’t write to… write files ranging from 100,000+ small files in folders to individual 200+ GiB files on NTFS partitions. It works pretty well and I have used it for video editing (few huge files), software development (many tiny files), Unreal Engine + Unity, Linux Gaming w/Steam and more. Rock solid.

After hearing that the ‘ntfs’ driver is supposed to be read-only, I switched to ‘ntfs3’ instead of using ‘ntfs3g’ (same code, but compiled into the kernel instead of running outside via ‘fuse’). From that point onwards, I’ve had major file system corruption nearly every day:

• Copying files into folders suddenly made 90% of other files in the folder disappear. Could be fixed by copying about 1000 random files into the folder and deleting them, then the missing files would come back into existence.
• Files that suddenly go bad. Can’t be written to, moved or anything. Often happened in software development when compiling my project, suddenly the intermediate build directory was bust due to undeletable files.
• Folders that suddenly contain themselves or one of their parent folders as sub-folders.
• Folders that contain a specific file infinity times. This way, I found out that even a harmless file manager like KDE’s Dolphin can become a behemoth that eats 100+ GiB of RAM and keeps trying to read the “list” of files in a directory without limit.

Personally, I’ll never use ‘ntfs3’ for serious work again. But ‘ntfs3g’ is generally considered very stable, maybe my issues are specific to ‘ntfs3’ or my RAID setup (weird nested mdraid thanks to Intel) is to blame.

My final ‘fix’ was to move everything to ext4 and buy Paragon’s $20 ext4 drivers for the dual boot Windows install. It’s only seeing any use once every 2 months. Sadly, these drivers are case sensitive even on Windows, rendering Bethesda games unplayable when installed on those partitions, for example.

But if you piss him off, he’ll turn right back into Windows95man and send you into DLL-hell.

I’m not up-to-date with current NAS systems anymore – I’m running an older QNAP NAS (TS-453), and it has their proprietary “Container Station” which can run web applications in Docker + LXD containers. Not FOSS, though the containers very much are and can be moved to other systems.

As an alternative, FreeNAS/TrueNAS sells NAS systems where at least the software side is FOSS. They’re quite expensive, though.

The prices of other brands also quickly breach silly levels, but a basic 2-bay NAS is about ~$250 for QNAP, ~$200 for Synology and ~$1000 for a TrueNAS. Without hard drives.

If you’re not interested in the data storage side, a Mini PC w/Proxmox (popular Docker/LXD container engine w/browser-based management) or even a direct install on a Raspberry PI are possible for under $100.

I’m running a few on my NAS:

• Taiga to manage projects. It’s as easy and pleasant to use as Trello, but with velocity/burndown charts and the whole “agile” thing, but you can also turn parts of it on and off (per project even).

• Trilium completely cured me of messy note-taking habits, simply by winning on the convenience side. I was firmly in the “folder tree of markdown documents” and “my Sublime Text tabs of random notes have no number” camp before.

• I’m considering Habitica which lets you set up rewards and achievements for your real life (i.e. apply addictive reward/progress loop from video games to motivate your real self to do things). Also Wger for exercise tracking, but I’m not sure they’re the right thing for my ticket/tracking-averse self (I wish there was something that covered the whole MyFitnessPal/FitDay and the whole Polar Personal Trainer/Garmin Connect side, but FOSS and self-hosted).

For leisure, I also run Stash (it bills itself as an organizer for your porn library, but it’s really good for any kind of clips), Jellyfin for my music and movies and currently both Mango and Kavita for books and comics.

Not in any KDE release I know, and I’ve been using it since KDE 3.

Tested right this moment: if I press the mouse button down on a video, nothing happens. If I release it keeping the cursor within a ~5 pixel radius, the movie plays. If I move the cursor further than ~5 pixels, it begins a drag-and-drop operation.