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Building a Linux Desktop for Cloud Native Development
- haolez 7y agoI was hoping for something like ChromiumOS. I'm not sure what's the point the author is trying to make here.
- nickthemagicman 7y agoYeah, I guess the gist was to buy a computer, install linux, and the packages you need? I wasn't sure either.
- giancarlostoro 7y agoI am still waiting for a Ubuntu Spin that attempts to do this. It would make for a nice change.
- piotrkubisa 7y ago> I am still waiting for a Ubuntu Spin that attempts to do this. You made me curious: what does mean _this_ in your comment? What do you like in ChromiumOS and would like to see in Ubuntu? What is in Ubuntu that you would like to have replaced with a ChromiumOS-like alternative?
- giancarlostoro 7y agoPossibly some lightweight custom DE based on Gnome's SDK, like tiling manager possibly, to give it a ChromiumOS vibe, but you can still use other utils from Ubuntu. But one that's not too focused on shortcuts only.
- piotrkubisa 7y agoCould you expand what do you mean by "ChromiumOS vibe" (ELI5)? Do you look for a i3 inside GNOME Shell? PaperWM[0] is an example of a tiled scrolling (window) manager based on GNOME SDK (Mutter) that runs in GNOME session. [0]: https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
- tapoxi 7y agoFedora Silverblue and Endless OS do this, they're both based off of OSTree for treating filesystem-as-image and expect software to be run in Flatpak or OCI (Docker) containers. There's some rough edges in Silverblue at least, but its a neat way to work.
- diffeomorphism 7y ago> Note: if you are having issues with any of the images, this may be because they are coming from an Amazon server. Reload the page without your add-blocker, or view it from another browser. So are these affiliate links or something? Why would I want to invest work to turn on ads?
- marcus_holmes 7y agoit was actually nice reading the article without the images
- stratosgear 7y agoAffiliate link masquerading "article”. What does mouse buying suggestions have to do with any of that....?
- ekianjo 7y agoSo it's an article about hardware, screens, and typical linux command line tools? What is the whole point he is trying to make that is not covered in 1000s other articleS?
- yebyen 7y agoI don't know that he needs to make a point, can't he just publish a guide about his own setup like 1000s of others do? As for why it's notable and on the front page, if you don't know who Alex Ellis is, I strongly suggest you take a closer look at the OpenFaaS org on GitHub, if you're at all into K8s or want to do serverless stuff on K8s. Last week I had heard of this guy and thought I mostly knew why he was notable, but this weekend I started to try working with OpenFaaS, and found no less than 5 or more important projects under his name while traveling down the rabbit hole of "what's the best way for me to run this as a developer" – if my experience is not unique, then that answers it for me, why HN apparently cares what his setup is like in particular. Check out K3sup and inlets-operator, for example. The most surprising problem I solved on his dime this weekend was "how do I use cert-manager to get certificates for my Kubernetes ingresses, when the K8s cluster is private and LetsEncrypt can't reach it?" – I wasn't even hoping to solve this, but it just works out of the box, with a handful of apps provided through "k3sup app install" (including cert-manager, of course), your ingresses can get a public IP for long enough to perform the HTTP challenge, and your private cluster can get TLS certs handled automatically for a couple pennies, without any awkward certificate secrets hand-off process (where an admin carries the TLS certs from an internet-facing cluster over to the private cluster, for example, as I've heard of others doing to bootstrap their private clusters.)
- tgeorge 7y agoYep pretty much.... I didn't have any takeaways from it. Years ago I had a Gentoo desktop which was fun but hard to maintain. But, these days having VMware or Virtual box with Centos or Ubuntu is easier to deal and develop with.
- wltprgm 7y agoYea, to be specific, using Ubuntu 18.04 on one SSD for his cloud tools development, Kubernetes Go controllers? Because MacOS doesn't cut it. And his Windows 10 Pro on another SSD.
- ngcc_hk 7y agoI got a nuc8i5 (not i7 like his and not 10 as well) as I would to try Hackintosh as my last purchase of mbpro15 really break the bank. but I never reached there. It now runs windows and linux very smoothly. Just swap the nvme 512g. His experience seems useful as I still have a 512g for Hackintosh. May be I should try the min ubuntu 18 like his and then try the external ip access. Good article I say. But not sure about he said ok with the noise. May get the noiseless case and do win/linux with it like this : ignore the Hackintosh part: https://youtu.be/tUUP8K3RqAo https://youtu.be/tUUP8K3RqAo
- mwcampbell 7y ago> chrome - [...] A faster browser than Firefox, sorry, not sorry. What about fighting the Chromium monoculture? Is the difference in browser speed so great that you can't tolerate the extra lag in Firefox in order to fight Google's dominance?
- swiley 7y agoIn my experience chrome isn’t even faster on Linux.
- wayneftw 7y agoThere is no problem with a monoculture based around a common browser kernel. Proof: Every cloud company uses Linux and this has created nothing but opportunity for ~~Linux users~~ everyone!
- evanrelf 7y agoOf course it would create opportunity for Linux users, because Linux became the monopoly. All the BeOS people are now out of luck. Your analogy doesn't make sense.
- wayneftw 7y agoBeOS users can still use that if they want. Nothing stopping them at all.
- markstos 7y agoAlso nothing but opportunity for those looking for kernel flaws, of which their many. The Linux kernel monoculture is a devastating weakness.
- wayneftw 7y agoNo it’s not. It’s an opportunity to fix things once for everyone instead of having to fix things a hundred times for a hundred different operating systems.
- acollins1331 7y agoWho is the audience for this blog? Developers that don't know how to buy a computer and install Linux? Lmao
- blinkingled 7y agoInteresting that the author had fan nose / heat issues with the Lenovo Ryzen mini PC. I really hope AMD and OEMs get it together and make sure thermal design for their PCs allows for stability and noise reduction. Older HP workstations are a good choice for noise, price and power. I have my noisy 2U machines under a bed in my downstairs room - but that requires a hard wired home and a spare room.
- dsr_ 7y agoI built a 3400g in an A300 mini chassis. It's very quiet and very small. I don't know what Lenovo's issues were - maybe not enough vertical space?
- blinkingled 7y agoCould also be thermal management issues on the software/ driver side of Linux. I remember reading about Linux kernel patches in that area very recently.
- ankit70 7y agoWhich keyboard is he using? Looks very cool!
- protanopia 7y agoHe mentioned it near the end of the article. Durgod Taurus K320 TKL https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078H3WPHM https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078H3WPHM
- davidjhall 7y agoI read the headline quickly and thought this was building a Linux Desktop on the Cloud and thought it would discuss hosting a performant desktop dev environment on AWS/DO/Azure. Anyone have great success with that?
- ckdarby 7y agoThis is also what I thought :(
- evook 7y agoTried that with a fully specced out machine. It doesn't matter if VNC, X11 XDMCP, Teamviewer, Anydesk or some of the more obscure things I tried out. The latency kills all the fun.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoWhat about a machine with an Nvidia GPU? The game streaming latency is surprisingly good assuming you're in the same region.
- saber6 7y agoYeah I think this only works for edge computing (eg <5ms from you). Very interesting space for the future though!
- VikingCoder 7y agoI'm very much reminded of this: https://www.geek.com/chips/john-carmack-explains-why-its-faster-to-send-a-packet-to-europe-than-a-pixel-to-your-screen-1487079/ https://www.geek.com/chips/john-carmack-explains-why-its-fas...
- cat199 7y ago> The latency kills all the fun. I've found that while it changes the constraints on what is fun, some fun is still possible, and the ability to preserve state across devices/locations sometimes offsets the 'loss of fun' e.g. coding / light 'ops' stuff that is just 'graphical text' is fairly bearable to me in the ~100ms range with good compression/low bandwidth settings, since often you can blindly type some code/commands and take a breath while the UI updates. Video/Graphics/Etc or heavy GUI interactivity starts to get a bit painful. one clear benefit to cloud is faster in-cloud bandwidth/latency which could make up for the less responsive UI depending on your use case
- whirlwin 7y agoWhy do you need a special machine for cloud native development? I have created a GitGub repo with cloud native dev tools which is more than what I usually need. https://github.com/whirlwin/cloud-native-workspace https://github.com/whirlwin/cloud-native-workspace
- PascLeRasc 7y agoJust to clarify one of the points in the article, in the U.S. I believe we can't deduct business costs like Zoom anymore unless you're 100% self-employed. BYOD-type deductions were unfortunately removed by the current administration.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago> BYOD-type deductions were unfortunately removed by the current administration. Did you mean specifically the executive branch, or also the Congress? It's a sincere question: I'm not really clear on what the IRS can do on its own vs. what requires legislative changes to the tax code.
- jsight 7y agoI believe he means by congress, specifically the 2017 tax bill.
- anaisbetts 7y agoThis is some pretty serious affiliate content marketing :-/ Do we really need a guide on why you should install Ubuntu on a NUC?
- luord 7y agoI liked the build, but I'll stick to my system76 laptop and using chromium and vim. I'll probably replace the laptop when the one they, system76, are reportedly building themselves is released.
- ddoeth 7y agoWhy did he stack those 3 alexas on the loudspeaker?
- tkainrad 7y agoI have a similar post on my blog about setting up a Linux workstation for software development. I think one important aspect that is not covered in OP's very nice article, is command-line setup. Switching from bash to zsh and starting to use plugins for improved history search, autocompletion, syntax highlighting and more was a huge productivity boost for me: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/#boosting-command-line-productivity https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/#boo... Especially relevant when dealing with lots of different tools, as is very common with cloude native development.