"Okay, so the reason I initially did this was because I didn’t want to pay Contabo an extra $1.50/mo to have object storage just to be able to spawn VPSes from premade disk images."
I think there's a sweetspot between " I spent 50 hours to save 1.50$/mo" and "every engineer should be spending 250K$/mo in tokens".
Host employees still need to eat, if we can't afford 1.50$/mo, then we aren't really professionals and are just coasting on real infrastructure subsidized by professionals that pay for the pay-as-you-go infrastructure.
It's still possible to go even further to these extremes, there's thousands of developers that just coast by on github pages and vercel subdomains. So at least having a VPS puts you ahead of that mass competitively, but trying to save 1.50$/mo is a harsh place to be. At that point I don't think that the technical skills are the bottleneck, it's more likely that there's some social work that needs to be done, and that obsessing over running doom on curl is not a very productive use of one's time in a critical economic spot.
I write this because I am in that spot, but perhaps I'm reading a bit much into it.
> I thought it was a neat trick, a funny shitpost that riffs on the eternal curl | sh debate. I could write a blog post about it, I tell you about how you can do it yourself, one thousand words, I learn something, you learn something, I get internet points, win win.
It can be a problem but it can be also just a human following their special interests that give them joy.
For me as a ADHD person engaging with my special interests is a hard requirement to keep my mental health in check and therefore a very good use of my time.
The cost for 1 hour of cloud CPU time is the same (barring discounts), no matter who you are. THe cost for 1 hour of engineer time varies wildly. If you're a non-profit or a solo dev, you may even consider that cost to be "free."
If your engineer costs are far lower than what AWS assumes they are, going with AWS is a stupid decision, you're far better off using VPSes / dedicated servers and self-hosting all the services you need to run on top.
This is a strange claim.
Whether someone is getting paid or not to do something is what determines who is a professional, not whether or how much they're paying someone else. (And that's the only thing that matters, unlike the way that "professional" is used as a euphemism in Americans' bizarre discursive repertoire.)
To put an example, suppose you hire a painter, and they show up with non-work attire, no ladder, no brush, they ask you to buy a can of paint for them and a brush. Compared to a contractor that bills you flat and brins their own ladder, has work clothing and shoes, an air pneumatic spray painter, a breathing mask. Who is more professional?
It's part of a broader debate for sure, OP seems to have done it more for the experience than to actually save 1.50$.
I think hacks like these have a positive effect on the industry. It pushes back on meaningless, encroaching monetization and encourages Conatbo to reevaluate their service offerings to ensure they justify the price.
1.5$/mo is still in the toy realm, (and games can be very good for practicing before the real stuff), but using tricks like this to save 50$/mo or 500$/mo or 5k$/mo or 50k$/mo and so on can definitely cross the threshold into actually (massively) useful.
The biggest challenge in crossing that bridge is matching up clients with bad engineers but good budgets, with good engineers with no budget. There's probably thousands of engineers that are currently spinning 5$/mo into impressive architecture for their blog or their 2 user startup, and clients throwing buckets of cash into tokens and zapier/n8n. The world needs Cupids that match those together.
The only area I think Windows may be better is the graphical user interface. Now, the windows interface annoys me to no ends, but GNOME annoys me and KDE annoys me too. I have been more using fluxbox or icewm, sometimes when I feel fancy xfce or mate-desktop, but by and large I think my "hardcore desktop days" are over. I want things to be fast and efficient and simple. Most of the work I do I handle via the commandline and a bit of web-browsing and writing code/text in an editor, for the most part (say, 95% of the activities).
Sway + foot with keybinds to provision each workspace to your liking is pretty nice. No desktop, but really flies for your use case (mine also). Bind window focus to your most comfortable keys.
Nah. You're right about Gnome and KDE, but Windows is even worse because you can't exactly escape away from microsoft's insane labyrinth or awful wm. Frankly, not a fan of the Xerox bloodline of desktop interfaces in general. mpx/mux heritage is the one I like. 9wm, cwm or dwm. Closer to Engelbart and just generally all around better.
Just because something looks similar doesn't mean it's equivalent. Binary programs are executed on the CPU, so if there's an interpreter involed it's hiding in the hardware environment. That's outside the scope of an OS kernel.
If you have a shell script in your filesystem and run it, you need to also provide the shell that interprets the script. Author omits this detail and confuses the kernel with the shell program.
Linux can easily be compiled without support for initramfs and ramdisk. It can still boot and run whatever userland sits in the filesystem.
"Linux initrd interpreter" hurts my brain. That's not how it works.