sam
@sam@cablespaghetti.dev
790 following, 702 followers
https://cablespaghetti.dev/hosting-a-fediverse-instance-on-an-original-raspberry-pi.html
@sam this was fun!
I spotted a typo: `apk install acme.sh`
Should be `apk add…`.
I also wonder if the periodic script actually runs with the .sh suffix? If my memory serves me correctly you may need to drop the .sh suffix or it will now run.
@sam MUST - RESIST - URGE - TO - BOOST. 😁
Also, very inspired domain name for a Homelab. 😂
@sam sounds like the theoretically unlikely* situation of two independent devices trying to use the same v6 address.
*Unlikely given the depth and breadth of the namespace, but...
Have you set a static address on this one?
@sam
While it's in faulty state, can you run tcpdump to see if traffic is actually getting to it?
Via a v4 connection, obviously! Something like this:
tcpdump -n -i eth0 '(tcp and port 22) or icmp'
Make an SSH connection and see if the inbound SYN packet reaches the interface, or the interface itself responds with an RST or ICMP port/host unreachable.
No packets? Provider.
Packets and ICMP? Your problem!
@WiteWulf
One slightly weird thing I had is that inbound #ipv6 traffic on both SSH and HTTPS was returning a "connection reset by peer" for a while. It seems to be working now, but if some IPv6 folks can check https://cablespaghetti.dev loads properly over v6 for them now, it would put my mind at rest.
@sam Works for me.
@sam
Are you telling me that your mastodon server was on a pi?
In preparation we’ve been doing a lot of cleaning and purging of junk. The number of bags of stuff that has come out of this house is truly spectacular! I wish I could say we’re finished but the work will continue next week.
I really need to start selling some computer stuff as well. If anyone in the UK happens to be after a AMD Ryzen 3900XT based workstation/gaming PC let me know…
If you’re a UK resident and/or a UK citizen, please make sure you sign this petition. It’s at almost 80k signatures and it’s got 3 weeks left to get to 100k.
‘Legally enshrine the right of adults to physically transition using NHS services’
I've boosted this toot. Will they do anything besides discuss this in the parliament?
p.s.: you'all will need more than 100,000 votes to counteract any invalid ones. From 14,000 to 40,000 extra votes.
@clacksee Dont remember signing that one but it says I have (mentioning just in case its a problem and other people are getting the same message)
@RavenLuni
It was the same for me.
@clacksee possible problem with the site then - that would stop it getting signatures
@clacksee Seems to work.
Now at 78951 signatures
Or " 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 , 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 5 4 3 2 1 0 1 0 signatures" as copy/paste would have it.
@clacksee wait, did it mean anybody will be able to do a transition for free? Cool.
@nikhotmsk
I mean, they can. The problem right now is that the wait list is multiple years long. This is just to ensure that the government doesn’t remove that right.
I may have to move it to slightly more powerful hardware for my own sanity…
@sam Is the entire OS dying or won't your init system handle the restarts?
Folks who had websites in the year 2000, how/where were you building websites then? Someone I know is writing a book and the protagonist (non-techie type) builds a website. I was thinking Geocities/Angelfire/Tripod, but maybe that's more late-90s? (I def had a GeoCities site, but I can't remember if it was in 2000)
@sophie I had a GeoCities site in the 90s. In the 2000s, my ISP (Comcast) offered free space for a personal website, so I had it hosted there. I want to say that ended in the mid 2010s, but TBH I just can’t remember.
@sophie I was teaching computers to teenagers in 2000 and we did a mix of HTML, CSS & MS Frontpage
@sophie That was peak Myspace. That was probably the last time the most popular social media platform expected or allowed people direct access to the HTML.
@mistersql In 2000? Myspace didn't launch til 2003
@sophie Ah, thought you meant the decade. 2000 exactly, final days of FrontPage. Lots of tiny webhosters that let you upload html to an ftp site.
@sophie I clearly remember making a geocities site in 1999. I think I got MS FrontPage in 2000, possibly 2001 though. I would say that some people were still using notepad, typing in code from books at this point.
@sophie Local ISP offered hosting under tilde dirs, so put text-edited html there for a while. Think I got my own domain around then and quite possibly ran the site off a linux box at home? Geocities was definitely still a thing tho
@sophie mine was basically all static html, hand-rolled like some feral woodland creature
@beep In notepad, I trust?
@sophie Same as Ethan, though when I discovered PHP and includes it felt like magic. 🤯
Originally in Notepad, monochrome...but Notepad++ came along with syntax highlighting! This was 2003/2004 for me I think, if that helps!
@sophie @beep May '98, me with notepad + my colleague with Photoshop 4 = first web site for the company we worked for back then. Once I showed it can work and there's no black magic in web design, I got back to Borland C++ Builder 3 and some video programming that was my real job and the crew quickly dove into Macromedia.
@sophie definitely built my first website using Microsoft Front Page and Tripod.com in maybe even as late as 2001 :D So Tripod definitely tracks.
@sophie Text editor (!Edit on my RISC PC at the time) and then upload it via FTP to my ISP's provided free 100Mb web space.
@sophie My ISP was Albatross, in Norwich, and they gave customers a bit of webspace. As for writing it... hand authored, angle bracket by angle bracket, in whichever text editor I was using at the time (either BBEdit if I had the old Mac IIci then, or FTE if my machine was Linux; can't remember) and then uploaded either by command line FTP or with Fetch. But I was a techie type even back then, so I suspect this isn't necessarily normal :)
https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-btinternet?sort=-date
@sophie Geocities and Livejournal in 2000, plus work for first clients on basic hosting, but prior in 98/99 was handcoded HTML on my university server.
@sophie Some Microsoft Front Page definitely, then an early version of dreamweaver. Before eventually just using notepad to edit stuff.
@sophie Geocities aside pre-2000, some dude I knew from IRC (EfNet?) had a web server and gave me some space in return for some (fledgling) design/dev work - I've had the same domain since June 2000 (25 years!). Homesite / PhotoShop / FTP were the weapons of choice.
@sophie by 1999/2000 I had moved on from writing table layouts in notepad on Geocities/Anglefore/Fortunecities etc to subdomains on cPanel shared hosting or my own domain on cPanel shared hosting and writing table layouts with rounded corner gifs in CuteHTML, transferring files with CuteFTP. CPanel hosting opened up the world of server side includes and eventually php includes 🙌
Sounds like a sweeet project!
@sophie hand-built using Joe, the Linux command line editor. Running on Apache on my own machine. Dynamic stuff was Perl as CGIs (programs you hooked into the web server that received the request and output the html, which got sent back to the browser.)
@sophie I had a Geocities site in 2002, as did some of my classmates. Angelfire and Lycos were still in use too IIRC 😊
@sophie Static site generator that was a bunch of hand written Ruby scripts, and a LiveJournal to post emo poetry to.
@sophie Geocities, both using the web portal and FTP.
I was working on a project in sixth form in ~2001 to create a website for AS-Level Computing. Geocities’ portal stopped working for some reason, so I learned to use FTP on the Windows 2000 command line.
I watched the VNC server switch on, and the head of IT spying on me. He came down to the library to ask me what I was doing 😄
@sophie I too used the space provided by our ISP. I still have the page, iframes and all 😍
(I had it on Tripod as well, for some reason. Not sure which I considered the main.) Anyway, that’s what I used 1998-2002.
@sophie Hand-rolled in emacs and possibly hosted on Demon, or maybe I’d sorted out an actual server at that point. I wish past me had actually made a note of these things.
@sophie, static HTML mishandled in Dreamweaver or HomeSite FTPed to shared hosting hooked up to a free domain from NameZero, or some such.
@sophie I bought a domain name and maybe 50mb space from a UK host in 1998, that I was still running in 2000. I hadn’t got to grips with any server side language, so I was just uploading HTML files I was writing in Notepad along with images I was making in Paint Shop Pro.
@sophie I started building in 2000 and it was mainly on Geocities. I also tried Angelfire and maybe Tripod more briefly but I didn't learn html right away so wysiwig was easier for me.
A couple to several years later I'd learned enough html that I got away from Geocities and was always looking for free hosts that didn't force a giant banner ad. I remember using Awardspace, might've used HostRocket, and I think there were others I don't remember. Much later (2015?) I used Jolly Leaf for a bit.
@sophie Probably 3 or 4 years later, but using then (and still using now) Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. Although some of my pages (local startup homepages full of all my 'useful' websites) was written in Notepad++ using HTML and CSS (modified from on-line examples).
@sophie ISP offered a massive 10MB hosting; everything coded in SimpleText.
Later migrated to PHP, BBEdit, and… probably F2S (c 2001)
@sophie By then? By hand with light automation. My GeoCities site was ca. 1996/1997. By 2000 I was writing it in Emacs and using html-helper-mode. Found a snapshot of my old about page:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010210181003/http://www.cstone.net/~mphall/tools.html
@sophie by hand, but less technical people were using Microsoft Frontpage or similar and ftping them to a hosting provider
@sophie your ISP account usually provided space for a website and an email account.
Your username was used in the directory of your site. For instance http://cantv.net/user/~goliath
And your email would be goliath@cantv.net
@sophie I've hosted my own with my own (crappy code) since 2002. I did run a little Web agency with some others, so had my own hosting.
@sophie mostly FrontPage Express and uploading via FTP.
I had some space on my university's server and then, later, on a shared space run by a friend.
@sophie universities would actually allow all CS students to just have these domain.something/~username/ folders open to the world where we could place the HTML that we wrote on a text editor like emacs, vim and the like (and we’d barely bother with CSS) and nobody bothered to consider there was any reputational risk in that
cc'ing @StefanMuenz, who wrote the most popular german language HTML tutorial/reference around that time
@sophie I had a site on Tripod from about '98, then on Geocities from '00-02. Static HTML written in Notepad (admittedly I learned HTML mostly by "view source" and ripping off bits of other sites that I liked).
@sophie
My first website was hosted on the university's servers. They set it up so computer science students could create a directory in their home directory and add the html there.
@sophie Definitely angelfire and writing plain HTML in notepad. Would get HTML books from flea markets for cheap as reference.
@sophie for me it was handcoded html in notepad and ftp'ed it to freeserve webspace that came with my dad's ISP. Might be a bit tech rather than non techie... Live journal was kicking off in '99 which might be more appropriate for the protagonist?
@sophie 2000 was the year before I started freelancing, but at the time I was managing part of a science association's website and running personal and project websites on various servers. The association server was in house. I was hosting websites on university servers and servers being run by friends (and small indie ISPs).
Geocities, as I recall, was waning by 2000.
Coded websites using either Dreamweaver or Hotdog Pro (wonderful coding software from Australia).
@sophie In 2006 my very first website/blog was built with RapidWeaver on my Mac and hosted on Aquaray. As soon as Apple released iWeb I started using it for my website/blog.
Then I switched on Wordpress for the blog and homemade landing page for the website.
@sophie Frontpage Express and then Macromedia DreamWeaver.
I myself wrote in Notepad and then Notepad++.
@sophie I think around then I was using Dreamweaver and its amazing templating and FTP sync. It was a hair past my Geocities/Tripod phase but I was still on dial-up and using shared LAMP stack hosting.
@sophie I think GeoCities was the go-to for non-techies until MySpace came around in '03. Aspiring techies would have been coding up home pages in HoTMetaL or HotDog (...or - ugh - MS FrontPage.)
(Circa 2000 I would have been moving from Macromedia Drumbeat & Dreamweaver to Allaire ColdFusion & HomeSite. Ahh, ColdFusion was the bees knees.)
@sophie
I used website builders like Dreamweaver, FrontPage, and early TYPO3 mainly as visual aids, but most work was hand-coded in HTML4. Layouts relied heavily on tables and frames. Video and interactive media were embedded using Flash (SWF) or Java applets. Full manual builds were the norm, since CMS tools were limited and dynamic content required custom back-end scripting—often with Perl. And honestly, we couldn’t care less about missing HTTPS or security in general back then!😎
@sophie I had several GeoCities sites in the mid-late 90s, as well as one hosted through my ISP (internet service provider) of the time, EarthLink.
In the early 2000s, I had a personal site on my university student web server. I also started using shared hosting services to host my own domains. I know MediaTemple was one of the big ones, but the name BlueHost (or something like that?) also seems familiar.
Many of those sites were static, but I did use some cgi scripts for managing parts.
@sophie did many sites 1993-2002 writing html in BBEdit text editor, uploading to server with good old Fetch for ftp (still use that). Lots of educators had Unix email which came with disk space what some call tilde spaces for the ~ before the username in a url
@sophie In the 2000's I think it was Geocities, Tripod and ISPs. Netscape Comunicator had an html editor.
@sophie building? Wasn’t ~2000 the years of Dreamweaver, GoLive and Frontpage? Then FTPing to a cheap hoster, who was responsible for domain and email services too…
@sophie I registered my first domain around '98 through Strato, a shared hoster here in Germany. Back then they offered a whopping 1MB webspace in their smallest plan called "Webvisitenkarte" (~online business card). That was enough to upload some HTML/CSS and a few asset images. For larger images I used free hosting at purespace, which was a free tier of Puretec, which was affiliated with 1&1. I had accounts on geocities, tripod, and such, but never really used them because of that domain.
@sophie I had a Geocities site around 1996 (I still remember the neighbourhood/number!), but by 2000 I was all PHP outputting HTML and Inlined CSS 😬 uploaded via FTP. No version control whatsoever.
@sophie ISPs typically let you have a web site by uploading it to the public_html directory in your home directory. It would then appear at http://someisp.com/~username/
I wrote in raw HTML.
@sophie another raised hand for Homesite here! I used the snippets feature often when I was coding static HTML, and it was helpful when I started learning PHP.
I had access to Dreamweaver but often switched to the HTML editor instead of the WYSIWYG editor -- although it was good with "onion skins" if your boss said something needed to be "pixel-perfect" and you were building with tables.
For my personal site, I moved from GeoCities to Dreamhost in the early aughts, and been there ever since.
@sophie I went though the Angelfire -> Tripod -> Icestorm pipeline to having a domain with Dreamhost in 99 or 2000 - can’t remember exactly when!
Good morning Fedi!!
@Christian_Freiherr_von_Wolff I got a new fridge once. Put the box in the living room and my cat was like "guess this is home now".
@alice "I deny the legitimacy of the box, but I actually fit inside it pretty well, more or less." is an actual thought I've thought.
@alice I bet Schrodinger really and truly regretted using a cat in his random example back then. Probably heard no end of this stuff, lol.
@alice My kin! Ferrets are so cute.
Edit: Weasels are also cute but are not ferrets, even if my little racoon eyes mistake them. Lol
@alice it's ferret friday 🥳
@gulli I'm on board with #FerretFriday! They're so adorable 🥰
@alice
Hi Alice 👋
You wake up, I get sleepy
It came with a driver CD-ROM! How retro is that! I have some old machines with optical drives, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the norm in 2025…
@sam mini CD-ROM no less :)
@sam Can the cartridges be loaded with marmalade, or would that make it jam?
ICE's current funding is < $3 billion USD.
trump's "big beautiful bill" expands that to over $40 billion.
A passage of this bill creates the American SS.
For those who think that petitions might have some effect (if only discomfort)
We, the undersigned, call on the UK Home Secretary to urgently proscribe the "Israel Defense Forces (IDF)" as a terrorist organisation, under the Terrorism Act 2000. We believe their actions meet this definition and that they pose a threat to the safety and security of innocent civilians.
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/yvette-cooper-proscribe-the-idf
#Proscription #Petition #Cooper #HomeOffice #Parliament #SauceForTheGoose #SauceForTheGander #Israel
SpaceX Burnt Up 472 Starlink Broadband Satellites in Last 6 Months https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025/07/spacex-burnt-up-472-starlink-broadband-satellites-in-last-6-months.html
@bullivant Well in the UK you can't chant kill Israeli (which should be banned) but Israelis can kill Palestinians
I would which is morally worse? Hmmmm....
@Robo105 @bullivant Well I suppose you can’t just suspend the law just because Israel seems to be able to do whatever it likes.
@mark @bullivant True and much of it is driven by evangelical desire to have nuclear war in the middle east which will herald the second coming. Insane
Half a million Spotify users are unknowingly grooving to an AI-generated band
A supposed band called The Velvet Sundown has released two albums of AI slop this month.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/half-a-million-spotify-users-are-unknowingly-grooving-to-an-ai-generated-band/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
@arstechnica What a profound, fundamental insult to everything that makes us human. Disgusting people.
@hedders @arstechnica you will see horrors beyond human comprehension but the worst part will be the things you won't even notice.
@arstechnica surprised ai's fell for that given how little spotifies pays.
Project Hail Mary trailer.
If you’ve read the book, watch the trailer because it looks good!
If you’ve haven’t read the book, do yourself a favor and skip the trailer because it spoils a key element of the story. I can’t believe they put that in the trailer.
The book is fantastic and well worth a read. The movie looks good from the trailer.
I've had admin powers at 5+ companies' Google Workspace/G Suite over the past decade or so. Every single one had groups which were misconfigured, often so anyone in the whole company could join without approval or see the message history at https://groups.google.com without being a member at all.
This is because for any sensible configuration of Google Groups when using it for email groups you have to use the "Custom" permissions mode. The default Public mode doesn't allow external people to email the group, but does allow the whole company to see all the messages. The default Team mode, has the same problem of everyone being able to see all the messages.
Also let's not forget that dangerous little "Anyone in the organisation can join" toggle at the bottom which is on by default. So any random new starter can join your confidential company directors group and get all the emails sent to it.
Giving Google the benefit of the doubt here, I think the reasoning might be that Google Groups is intended as a kind of company forum, not for private email groups. However that isn't how anyone uses it in my experience...
@sam agree this is absolutely crazy, it's been like it forever, i wrote about it a couple of years ago as part of a guide on securing Google Workspace:
@sam it's simply because they sometimes neglect to annihilate the technology they merge with to give them an advantage. Google acquired Usenet archives in 2001, merged them with Groups, made Groups a "Usenet client" then pushed for Usenet obsolescence by having the new posts not use Usenet but using the same UI. Usenet was meant to be public, Groups was not. But you can't claim that if you use privacy by default.
Ok, EVERYONE so far has been all in on Mona. I used Mona up until Ivory was available. So I'm curious what people find most compelling about Mona vs other clients?
@ttscoff @drdrang @rho @sashk @benfsmith @jimmylittle I was an Ivory user, then started splitting time between Ivory and Mona, then eventually went all in on Mona. One of the things I really love about it is how customizable the UI look is. I know, silly little thing, but there are a number of custom built templates available to us and they’re amazing.
It’s also fast, stable, and works the way I like.
@ttscoff @drdrang @rho @fahrni @sashk @benfsmith @jimmylittle
@MonaApp works a lot better with VoiceOver.
@ttscoff Crazy amounts of customisation; no missing posts if you’re running more than 400 behind current.
@ttscoff been using Mona before ivory showed up. Dislike somewhat Mona’s UI: confusing settings, same with the way it shows quoted posts. So since ivory been out been using it primarily. Checking Mona occasionally.
@ttscoff @drdrang @rho @fahrni @sashk @benfsmith @jimmylittle
For casual use, Ivory is fine.
But when I need all the features, I use Mona on macOS. You don't realize how much is missing from most clients until you use Mona.
@ttscoff @drdrang @rho @fahrni @sashk @benfsmith @jimmylittle When twitter died, I was using the app which the Mona dev had made for that platform (can’t recall the name for it), so moved to Mona when that was available. I too, like the customisability of Mona but the main thing, for me, was a single purchase option rather than a subscription. If I was rich, I might run Ivory - it does look nice - but I’m not.
@ttscoff @drdrang @rho @fahrni @sashk @benfsmith I just never got into the Tapbots aesthetic. I had Tweetbot, Netbot, Calcbot, and Pastebot. They're all great apps, but they never worked the way I expected, so they never stuck with me. I think it's just the icons and interactions are all too cutesy for me. I still have Ivory on my phone now, but never use it.
@ttscoff @drdrang @rho @fahrni @sashk @benfsmith @jimmylittle Mona lets me choose fonts & colours. I paid for a year of Ivory — and loved Tweetbot/Calcbot/Weightbot/Convertbot (& still use Pastebot) — but Mona is less opinionated.
This is going to be an experience!
@sam ..."vertically challenged"... like this way to phrase it 😄
Must be huge to hear Linkin Park live!
I tried tuning various parameters but after some reading came to the conclusion that lots of small files with very little RAM is about the worst case scenario for XFS.
This week, while I was in The Netherlands, we had an air source heat pump installed by Octopus Energy.
They seem to have done an *excellent* job, and we no longer have a gas boiler or even a gas meter!
So now, of course, I'm trying to work out if we can get solar and a couple of home batteries to increase our resilience - and eventually have close to zero bills... ⚡
On the resilience from home batteries and solar though, watch out. Most systems will turn off in the event of a power cut. It’s something about avoiding back-feeding to the grid. If you want this you need to specifically get a system with an “emergency mode” or something like that.
@dajb @sam @slothrop Would love to have a heat pump but our property couldn’t accomodate one. And there are plenty of good alternatives to Tesla, in fact Octopus has their own preferred one. But yes the real rub for us is retrofiting the off-grid capability. My recent calculations had us breaking even at year 10-12, the natural lifecycle of the battery.
Congratulations on the new heat pump! A colleague of mine had #Octopus install one for her earlier this year, and she's delighted with it. We went with #GoodEnergy because Octopus wasn't able to help us, but I'm convinced Octopus would've been better value if our house had been suitable.
We're not yet ready to buy a battery — I want to go through a winter with the new heat pumps so that I know how much capacity to buy — but I've heard good things about #Victron. You might give them a look. They seem to be a bit more expensive than canned systems like #Powerwall, but a lot more flexible.
@CppGuy @dajb @fedops @sam @slothrop
my relatives have a Victron system feeding a battery bank (Pylontech, not sure if those are still made).
A couple of weeks ago they lost grid power for around 1,5 hours. The Victron automatically isolated the solar/batteries from the DNO service cable to avoid backfeeding but kept the house on supply. It was daytime so most of the power demand was handled by solar, the battery reserve was barely touched. (there is a quite a high power demand in that house even during summer and yet it was possible to behave as normal for the entire duration of the power cut without even implementing load reduction measures).
@sam it's specifically the synchronization on the grid frequency. Your system needs to support "island mode". There are many that do.
On the autonomy aspect - do the math first. In our latitudes producing enough energy November - February means having a LOT of panel area. Especially if you plan to heat electrically.
@dajb @slothrop
@dajb we had one fitted two years ago, also by Octopus. The standard of work was superb.
As expected, by itself it doesn't save us much financially compared to gas heating but it's using one third of the energy, which is pleasing.
Good news, I fixed the radio in the retired police cruiser.
Bad news, the speakers appear to be disconnected.
Hopefully they just disconnected them, and didn't divert power to somewhere else.
It's a good thing I know a teensy bit about electronicals, this car is going to be an adventure.
@sam I should also probably try to figure out how to disable the child safety locks on the back doors. It no longer has the convict cage, but the doors don't open from the inside no matter their locked state.
We love stories like this 💜 www.reddit.com/r/linux_gami...
New Backyard Ultra world record by Phil Gore (AUS). 119 yards or 797.3km in 119 hours or 4days 23 hours. 😳🙌
https://runnerstribe.com/latest-news/phil-gore-breaks-backyard-ultra-world-record-with-119-loops/
@sam Maybe set less and/or smaller log buffers? See "logbuf" and/or "logbsize" mount options in the xfs man page. The default logbuf value might be too much for a memory-constrained system.
She's trying to install KeeWeb now, a tool she's used to. It's another deb, and once installed it just doesn't work. 😆
The Year of the Linux Desktop my arse.
I love Linux and open source in general. It just depresses we have zero chance of making a desktop that's non-nerd friendly. Your interface to the rest of the world has to be 100% usable and friendly, otherwise people bail immediately.
This should be a solved problem. But we can never agree on anything and make a "standard" interface that everyone can use. It's scratch-your-own itch and make yet another desktop/window manager/compositor/whatever.
ANYWAY.
Anyway I point new users at Linux Mint rather than Ubuntu now, but obviously everyone has their different opinions which is probably part of the problem. 🤷
@awfulwoman Agree. In addition to "own itch" also: assuming that "more choice" is always great and that if you provide several half-baked solutions, someone(tm) will improve them.
@simulo @awfulwoman I’m one of the nerds and I still prefer to use Apple stuff just because they give me a consistent UX. I don’t even bother to customise much, I’ll use it in the way they prescribe because then I don’t have to worry about it and can concentrate on the actual things I need to use a computer to do
@awfulwoman I used to love this aspect of Linux when I was a student and had time to mess around with stuff (like compiling Fluxbox from source because I didn't like the default window manager on the uni machines). Now I'm a grumpy old man and want things to Just Work.
@awfulwoman this makes me flash back to when OS X first appeared and all the BSD folks were going "oh, it's just built on FreeBSD". YEAH BUT IT ACTUALLY FUCKING WORKED IN A SENSIBLE WAY
@awfulwoman The Year of the Linux Desktop is every single year from about 1997 to present, right?
Not sure about your arse.
@awfulwoman which version of Ubuntu is this? On my 24.04 desktop a .deb package is associated with the Software Install application and seems to just work as expected.
@_steve This is a 1 hour old 24.04 install.
@awfulwoman I just downloaded the same Dropbox package you are trying and it works correctly for me. I don't recall doing anything to my Ubuntu installation to make .deb association with the installer app. This install is only 10 days old or so.
@_steve So what's your expert opionin, Steve?
@awfulwoman Right click a .deb package and choose Open With... then make whatever app your default choice.
You are right that in this day and age it should just work. Could just be a fluke that it didn't on your install.
@awfulwoman Yeah trying to install a lone .deb package is always a pain.
If you're looking for a solution, there is a Dropbox flatpak from flathub. Which isn't enabled by default on Ubuntu, but once set up once, should be good to go. Definitely annoying, but then basically all software should be available from sort of repo.
I basically refuse to install a .deb file manually. I wish websites would stop advertising them...