Most of my career is built on MS’s stack (I fell into .NET development and got good at it. Now I’m in the same boat as COBOL, Java, and Ruby-on-Rails devs: I’m basically a software doula.)
Every job I go into now I’m reccomending they get a migration plan for self-hosting and self-owning. The American tech system is collapsing. AI is causing massive ruptures in knowledge: it obscures searches, it deskills devs, it’s castrated the junior-senior-principle ladder such that we’re not training enough developers to even pass along all of the knowledge of how current systems work. SaaS is reaching the enshittification threshold and all those businesses that moved everything into the cloud are about to discover that they’re hostages and the sinking empire will drag down a lot of collateral damage with it.
Not that my tiny customers have enough of an IT budget to buy their own servers with the recent price hike on memory and ssds.
Self hosting doesn’t necessarily imply you need your own hardware.
I’m of the opposite opinion - would you mind elaborating on how a selfhosted-on-nonowned-hardware setup would work?
I believe you, but many people self host on rented hardware for various reasons. For example “proper” self hosting comes with upfront cost. But self hosting ln a VPS comes with reliability, uptime, predictability. But you’re still the master of the software you host, of backups, etc.
So, running a VM in the cloud is somehow different from “running everything in the cloud”? I’m genuinely confused here, willing to bet I’ve misunderstood something.
It’s a VM that you set up, you have the image yourself, you could put it on a machine in your living room if you had to.
“I’m paying for a colocation of a machine I administer” is very different from “I’ve written my application such that it can only run inside an AWS system”
Only way to fix this is for people and corps to stop giving them money for anything.
But it’s E C O S Y S T E M!
The entire French government is abandoning Windows for Linux. It is absolutely possible to change the entire ecosystem; just hard to hit that catalytic point, but more and more people are going that way, thankfully. Maybe they’ll even eventually find Lemmy!
I think the Dutch are doing it as well. I’m all for it, when I switched my laptop over from Windows 11 to NixOS, it stopped running at like a 100 degrees while doing nothing more than streaming video and light compiling.
Sweet, go Netherlands! And I also wanna move my desktop to NixOS! Got any tips or warnings for a first-timer who’s mostly used just Mint?
I would recommend being familiar with config files and comfortable with the command line and bash. It’s a very powerful being able to rebuild your OS at will. I would also look into Bazzite if you are interested in immutable distros.
I recommend firing up a virtual pc first with the distro first to get a feel for it.
I tried it in DistroSea and just cannot stand the GNOME environment… I think I’ll probably just stick to Mint. Thanks, though!
