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Free Software (and OSS) Leftovers

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OSS
  • Where’s the Yelp for open-source tools?

    We’d like an easy way to judge open-source programs. It can be done. But easily? That’s another matter. When it comes to open source, you can’t rely on star power.

    The “wisdom of the crowd” has inspired all sorts of online services wherein people share their opinions and guide others in making choices. The Internet community has created many ways to do this, such as Amazon reviews, Glassdoor (where you can rate employers), and TripAdvisor and Yelp (for hotels, restaurants, and other service providers). You can rate or recommend commercial software, too, such as on mobile app stores or through sites like product hunt. But if you want advice to help you choose open-source applications, the results are disappointing.

    It isn’t for lack of trying. Plenty of people have created systems to collect, judge, and evaluate open-source projects, including information about a project’s popularity, reliability, and activity. But each of those review sites – and their methodologies – have flaws.

    [...]

    Solomon Hykes, Docker’s co-founder, strongly disagrees. “GitHub stars are a scam. This bullshit metric is so pervasive, and GitHub’s chokehold on the open-source community so complete, that maintainers have to distort their workflows to fit the ‘GitHub model’ or risk being publicly shamed by industry analysts. What a disgrace.”

    Hykes isn’t the only one who views GitHub stars as a misleading flop. Fintan Ryan, a Gartner senior director, thinks stars are just a game that confuses marketing and the code that’s actually on GitHub. And Microsoft project manager for open-source development on Azure, Ralph Squillace, tweeted, “In my opinion and for Microsoft project [engineering] and management they are worthless. [But] There are always people who seize on them anyway.”

  • How Nextcloud simplified the signup process for decentralization

    When you download the mobile or desktop app, the first thing you see is a choice for "Log in" or "Sign up with a provider."

  • Community Member Monday: Pranam Lashkari (Collabora/GSoC)

    Today we’re talking to Pranam Lashkari from our Indian community, who is working in the LibreOffice ecosystem at Collabora, improving the web-based version of the suite…

  • Hello world from Eostre Emily Danne, intern with the FSF tech team

    In my hobby work, I've worked on making OS installs highly reproducible - my / is a read-only squashfs image that gets periodically rebuilt, my /etc is a git repo, and I keep my /home distributed across a few machines via Syncthing. At the FSF, I'm applying that experience by reimplementing some infrastructure as neat little scripted installs. Without revealing too much about our infrastructure, we have some systems that were created using forgotten knowledge by previous generations of sysadmins; it's my job to turn the arcane shell invocations in their ~/.bash_history files into something we can eventually manage with Ansible, though for now I'll just be writing shell scripts that do the same thing.

    This also comes as Trisquel is about to release version 9.0, so I'll probably end up testing that too.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.