I think it’s too early to be making decisions based on this alone.

No problem, and yes, that’s correct - once you have your own domain then you can hop between providers a lot more easily as you don’t need to change a thousand web accounts when you do. It’s also useful if you move into self-hosting in the future.

docker’s cli makes a lot of sense to me. Anything that supports “application logical-command --help” gets a big tick.

But yeah, bash itself is great.

(Have read you’re not interested in self hosting - I think that’s very sensible. It’s a lot of work and even then, very difficult to do it well and be reliable)

Suggest finding a reputable email provider, and they will require payment.

I recently moved from gmail to proton. The migration process was very smooth, with proton copying over all my existing email and calendars from gmail. However, their web clients are very slow in comparison (since they’re encrypted - click on an email and it’s 3 seconds or so to open, an eternity!). I find that annoying enough that I’ve setup thunderbird via a proxy, but that has negated some of the ease of use.

There are quite a few good options around, maybe others will chip in with recommendations.

Once you have a new mail client, your user@gmail.com address will not be valid. However, if you want it to, you can keep your old email account with gmail as well, and have it forward all incoming email to your new home. That allows you to gradually move your accounts over at your own speed. I think this is important as there will be more than you expect of them, but the process isn’t hard.

Most of those new providers will also allow you to use a personal domain, and multiple users. So you can register a domain that stays with you - that’s the domain.org bit of your email address, and multiple users - the bit before the @.

The good providers will have guides and documentation about helping you through this also.

The Garmin stuff (I’ve used Oregon a lot - various models since 2011) auto-saves tracks as GPX and is very reliable about that.

The newer stuff also saves as .FIT with extra info.

When you plug these into a computer by USB they appear as a normal extra drive, with the files available natively. As /u/Shimitar says, they don’t need the cloud, or an account (unless they have changed that)

They’re also pretty robust and weather proof.

Downsides - expensive. Sometimes limited features. The cameras on the Oregons are useless, and you mention a camera is needed - so it depends what features you want, your budget, and the range.

I’ll look into OpenSUSE as a potential alternative

You could do worse!

I’ve worked with OpenSuse for a few years and I really like the people involved. They’re stand-out in that they’re European based (no bad thing in today’s uncertain world if you’re not American yourself.) They’re a german organisation but the employees are spread through Europe and further afield and they’re a really, really small concern, but IME, they genuinely care about doing the right thing, even if that comes before financial growth. One example of that is their tutoring programs and, unlike many organisations even in the FOSS world, I get the feeling they genuinely uphold their guiding principles

I use Debian myself at home and at work and it’s my go-to for everything, but if it didn’t exist, OpenSuse would probably be the next on my list and although I’m not working with them at present, I would happily do so again.

BTW: are you aware the Linux Foundation is an US entity and funded by (among others) most US IT megacorps?

The Linux Foundation is not Linux. It is a nonprofit organisation that supports linux and encourages open standards.

It does not own nor control Linux; no single entity does.

Fedora is a community project but ultimately owned by Redhat. They own the trademarks and the domain. They could stop support for it at any time they, or their owners, IBM, decide it’s not in their interests to continue supporting, or even allowing, it. People will say “Sure, but you could fork it” and I don’t doubt that it would be forked, and there’s enough userbase to make that fork successful and arguably better, but then it wouldn’t be Fedora.

That does seem unlikely since Fedora is a fundamental part of Redhat’s upstream for their main Linux project, RHEL and would require a bit shift in their model, but they have made some odd decisions over the past few years that have upset the community. (Ending Centos Linux 8 with very little warning, and then trying to block source distribution for the rebuilders that stepped in to replace Centos Linux. Centos was a community owned project back along, by the way, founded by Greg Kertzer who was forced to give it up, which indirectly led to Redhat taking control over it and ultimately ending Centos linux entirely. This was its own huge controversy and did not paint Redhat in any kind of warm and fuzzy light)

So I don’t trust Redhat as much as I did half a decade ago because of these reasons, and more generally because of their corporate sellout. No matter what their supporters and community say, Redhat are a for-profit company that made decisions which upset the community even before it was bought out by a huge multinational with a long history of choosing profit over ethics.

So stick with Debian if you want to stay clear of corporate linux ownership. I’m afraid that does include the entire EL group - Fedora, RHEL, Centos Stream and even the rebuilders, Alma and Rocky. (Two projects that I really love but are vulnerable to further changes by Redhat)

Not morons, just lying to achieve a different agenda.

I used wview for years, and published a couple of weather stations publically. Sadly that looks to be abandoned now.

Nowadays I just run Home Assistant and combine an anenometer, a rain tip gauge and about a million different temperature sensors into that, mostly with 8266’s running Esphome to collect and forward that data. It’s a fun and cheap little hobby if you like collecting data. The gauge and anenometer were off aliexpress for about £5 each, the esps about the same, and temp sensors less than a quid each. All software foss of course, and uses almost no resources so can run on any linux server.

Heretic! MS-DOS 6.22 is where it’s really at!

Please, don’t expose VNC to the internet, ever. It’s a horrendously insecure protocol that uses plaintext passwords of no more than 8 characters and everything that passes over the connection is unencrypted and visible to anyone sniffing the traffic.

Once it was the only option, but there are dozens of better things out there now which should be used, even on a lan or vpn.

Why add age checks?

I’ve read this from several sources now and not found anywhere that explains why they’re doing this. Are they being threatened with legal action?

They do, but Linux is not dependent upon Red Hat.

Debian has always attracted zealots, many of whom were extremely… impolite… during the systemd wars, on both sides of that schism. Sadly, as in most things, the majority of reasonable, quiet, hard working community members get drowned out because, well, they’re reasonable, quiet and hardworking.

I think RH made a lot of important contributions to the Linux ecosystem and pushed it forward by a lot.

I agree - and historically they have led innovation in truly groundbreaking ways, but my personal view is that those glory days are a long way in the past now. Whilst they do still do some good work for FOSS, the purchase by IBM has in my view, changed objectives. To me, Red Hat has changed from being a profit making company that existed to support foss projects, to a subsidiary running foss projects to support a profit making company.

IBM don’t buy companies to make the world a better place.

Agree. Although Mariadb has drifted significantly (and with very good reason) in terms code, features and SQL - I still mentally parse “Mysql” as “MariaDb”. It’s one of the best forks I’ve ever encountered in all my time using foss. I currently maintain around 80 MariaDb servers and have remarkably few problems.

Much as I like to see variety in software, I do kind of wish more recognition of MariaDb was given, and more support.

Just installed debian on a S440 tonight to replace a HP Pavilion that had just ejected its charge port. Doubt the thinkpad will have the same problem, the HPs flex so much I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.

The thinkpad install was flawless, even had the wifi drivers in the installer without needing non-free.

That happened ™

It happens every day. Hundreds if not thousands of times.

Never heard of something like that, and I suspect anyone who started creating it soon filed it under “Really bad ideas” alongside “Whoops, why did my kernel just stop?”

sar is the traditional way to watch for high load processes, but do the basics first as that’s not exactly trivial to get going. Things like running htop. Not only will that give you a simple breakdown of memory usage (others have already pointed out swap load which is very likely), but also sorting by cpu usage. htop is more than just a linux taskmgr, it’s a first step triage for stuff like this.