todotoro

So, I bought a Pinetime with tariffs applied to go with GrapheneOS. It came to me about $50 USD shipped. For that price, I would do it again if it broke.

My needs are very basic, I can control music, see notifications, and get my heart rate on a graph when I work out. I only switched to this from Sensor Watch, simply because of the heart rate sensor.

Speaking of, you would be surprised what you could make a Sensor Watch do for you with no connectivity to your phone. I had totp for work, chess, and sunset/sunrise times as well as a onboard temp sensor.

Suffice to say, I think nowadays Ill readily pay more for FOSS with less features than something else just on principle. So I wouldn’t let what could be conceived as a “bad deal” stop you if your convictions are strong enough.

If you decide to go the Kunernetes route, you can try k3sup to bootstrap your VMs k3s, it a nice half step abstraction between Ansible and running curl yourself:

https://github.com/alexellis/k3sup

I’ve landed on k3s as my k8s distro in my environment for a number of reasons. It seems to have the “mindshare” of selfhosters, and theres lots of k3s documentation to peruse. I also really like that you can preload manifest files if you do decide to use Ansible, which makes cluster deploys that much more organized.

If you want to go a little off beat, you could try “Canonical K8s (not Microk8s)” as a snap. That worked REALLY well, and lets you do cool shit like “k8s enable loadbalancer” to automatically enable whole components for you, if you just want to focus on “consuming” Kubernetes instead of building it. I did notice a little overhead doing it as a snap, but my Proxmox node that runs the VM is purposely low spec (Celeron quad core if you believe it, 7 tdp tho)…so your hardware wouldn’t likely notice a difference.

https://documentation.ubuntu.com/canonical-kubernetes/release-1.32/snap/tutorial/getting-started/

If youre doing Proxmox already, if you don’t already have a VM template and/or Terraform/OpenTofu with Proxmox operator…it may help to tool on that too. Easier to destroy/build VMs when you get frustrated.

I am a container evangelist, I find excuses to convert my jobs into Kubernetes workloads, and I frequently use the likes of podman for one off apps/processes and development. I use Flatpak frequently to isolate dependencies for the likes of Steam and Heroic.

I really wanted to like Bazzite or Bluefin, but I can’t deal with the overhead from the rpm os-tree updates. I would frequently notice hitches for my use case (sunshine streaming), and the hoops I had to do to configure Nvidia drivers (for it to then not work as good as other distros) was tiresome.

I went back to Arch (EndeavourOS), and I improved sunshine performance and had a driver that worked with less fiddling.

I’m saying all this because, while I’m glad to see any Linux distro grow, I hope it starts delivering what it says on the tin eventually without compromises that I experienced. Markering on it being immutable and container focused is true, but I dont see the benefit (aside from more stability which as others pointed out, is already stable is most cases)?. Right now, its a simple to configure (assuming most defaults work for your setup) distro that is finding a growing niche amongst some users (obviously by the data shown). And thats good enough for now at least.