Think Windows on one side, vs Linux (and the BSDs) on the other (with macOS initially being in the middle and increasingly swaying to becoming even more constraining than Windows). Think proprietary gaming consoles and mobile IAP-chasing games, vs game platforms that encourage participation like TIC-80 and LÖVE. Think US-centric proprietary social networks (Facebook, Twitter) and services (Dropbox, Google Suite) vs distributed social networks (Mastodon, Pleroma, Diaspora etc.) and self-hosted services (Nextcloud, Cryptpad etc.).

What are most people sacrificing to the altar of promised convenience? Literally both time and money: our attention, higher costs; also our autonomy (you’re locked in) and our privacy (… so platform owners can mine your attention and monetize what they observe of your behavior).

If you believe in capitalism, this is bad news. If you don’t it’s even worse.

[...]

But in other jurisdictions like the US, regulation might be a long time coming, except maybe in California (plus the companies we’re trying to unshackle users from are mostly US-based). So a lot of the solution has to be bottom up.

We simply need to lower barriers to entry, both actual and perceived, to using the platforms we’re championing. Some involve compromises (e.g. Flatpak is a great way to abstract away the differences between Linux distributions, to the point that it’s easier to install proprietary apps, including Steam – which improves the availability of games on Linux despite, yes, being proprietary). Some involve corporate backing (e.g. Fedora on Lenovo laptops). A lot would involve being more welcoming to newcomers, and bridging the actual usability gaps there are.

It’s hard enough to overcome incumbency and the network effect. Let’s not make it harder for ourselves.

• Kubectl: Developer tips for the Kubernetes command line - Red Hat Developer

  Get started with in-cluster configuration, sudo-like user impersonation, and the new kubectl debug command in the kubectl Kubernetes CLI.

• New developer onboarding features in Red Hat OpenShift 4.6 - Red Hat Developer

  Developers asked for a more intuitive path to the developer perspective, so we’ve created one.

  Starting with OpenShift 4.6, non-privileged users logging into the OpenShift console for the first time will land on the developer perspective by default.

  Once in the developer perspective, first-time users are offered a guided tour of the user interface (UI). Developers who opt-in to the tour are guided through UI areas, starting with the topology view. The demonstration in Figure 1 shows how to launch the guided tour.

• Time management: must-have tools and strategies for sysadmins | Enable Sysadmin

  Learn to be intentional about planning out your daily tasks and remember to leave time for yourself, your family, and your friends.

• Advantages of Using Linux Virtual Machine or Linux Server Hosting

  With Linux, you do not need to worry about security, and you can download software from the Internet. Many online sites offer you Linux hosting and Linux server hosting. However, you have to check for the reliability and quality of the website. It should be an established website with many years of experience.

  You can check the Linux hosting and Linux server hosting providers and determine which one will suit your requirements. They should have enough information on their website so that you can get all the relevant details. The website should also explain the technicalities well. The website should provide details about the services offered and the cost that you will have to pay.

Zoom has been a boom since Coronavirus started, it seemed to be one of the very few software in the world capable of handling the planet’s digital transfer of most face-to-face communication since people were forced to stay in their homes during the quarantine. Governments, schools, universities, hospitals, companies, enterprises… All of them went to Zoom in order to face the new communication hassle.

Its stock market increased by %500 since the beginning of the pandemic, and tens of of millions of new users worldwide signed up for its premium plans. Everything sounded so great so far for Zoom, unlike most of the human race standing on the other side of the equation.

Until, an investigational report by the FTC showed that Zoom lied about its end-to-end encryption for years, and that its so-called E2E secure communication is actually false marketing. Of course, users and developers around the world had no way of verifying Zoom’s marketing claims easily since it was a proprietary, closed-source application. And thus, they were not able to check the source code by their selves to verify those claims.

Zoom being fully proprietary is why people started switching into open source zoom alternatives, like Jitsi, BigBlueButton and many others, so that they don’t remain in Zoom’s jail locking all their remote communications in one place.

• Terraform vs Ansible: What's the Difference?

  The way DevOps as a culture is gaining momentum, tools like Ansible and Terraform witnessing a huge demand and popularity.

  Both tools are considered as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions which helps in deploying code and infrastructure. While Ansible acts as a configuration management solution commonly abbreviated as “CM”, Terraform is a service orchestration or provisioning tool.

  Note that there are overlaps and these terms are not necessarily mutually exclusive. This is what confuses people and this is why I am going to compare Ansible and Terraform.

  I'll explain what are these tools used for, what are their pros and cons. This will help you decide whether you should use Ansible or Terraform in your projects.

• An Introduction to the Kubernetes Operator Pattern (YouTube)

  Earlier this year I did a short talk for Halihax, a local technology community, providing an introduction to the Kubernetes operator pattern. This was my first attempt at giving any kind of a talk (outside of demos at work), but hopefully it will prove useful to someone out there.

• Sysadmin tales: Take a look back at an old school IT prank | Enable Sysadmin

  Set your Wayback Machine to the early ’80s. Disco was dead and gone, pop rock was making waves, and consumer computers were available enough that some schools started figuring out that teaching computers was something they should do.

  My school was one of those—the lovely Manheim Township High School in Neffsville, PA. A classroom was repurposed as a computer lab, as the prior computer area was barely larger than a closet and only had four terminals connected to some type of "miniframe" computer, with one Apple II computer on a rolling cart.

  [...]

  Now, the cable to connect the computer to the monitor was pre-VGA; it was just a simple RCA connector, as everything was monochrome. No screws to help hold the connector on tight. My friend and I (I don’t recall who had the idea, but I’d like to think it was me) decided to cross-wire all the monitors, so the monitor for one seat was connected to the computer at another seat. We did it side-by-side where we had to, but the ones on the island were really fun as we could connect them so the computer on one side of the table would drive the monitor on the other side of the table.

• Create your first Knative app | Opensource.com

  Knative is an open source community project that adds components to Kubernetes for deploying, running, and managing serverless, cloud-native applications. It enables more productive development with less interaction with Kubernetes' infrastructure.

  There is a large amount of information out there about Knative, networking, and serverless deployments, and this introductory tutorial covers just a bite-size amount of it. In this walkthrough, I'll use Knative with Minikube to create a Knative app—a simple container that prints messages in response to a curl command or in a web browser at a link provided by the deployment.