I am a devops engineer and application architect who spends their entire day developing automated docker deployments for custom applications from scratch and I manage all our reverse proxies and TLS termination and certificates.

5 years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what a docker container really was. Thankfully migrating legacy apps to docker on Linux hosts is my full time job and it has allowed me to become proficient enough in a fairly short amount of time.

We all have to start somewhere and shitting on someone for not knowing something now will dissuade them from ever learning it and potentially remove a future contributor to the open source tech stack before they ever even get started.

I would go Debian for stability.

I like fedora since it updates a little more frequently than Debian, but it isn’t a full on rolling release. I used opensuse tumbleweed for a while and it broke on me several times.

I also used arch for a while, but I’m a dad to young children and I just don’t have the time to fuck around with my OS anymore. When I have time to work on my personal dev projects, I just want to drop into tmux, launch neovim and go. After some distro hopping I landed on Fedora with KDE for my desktop and gnome on my laptop. I also have an old netbook running antix with iceWM and an old thinkpad running fedora i3. The latter 2 machines are my hard focus machines.

This is interesting to me. I run all of my services, custom and otherwise, in docker. For my day job, I am the sole maintainer of all of our docker environment and I build and deploy internal applications to custom docker containers and maintain all of the network routing and server architecture. After years of hosting on bare metal, I don’t know if I could go back to the occasional dependency hell that is hosting a ton of apps at the same time. It is just too nice not having to think about what version of X software I am on and to make sure there isn’t incompatibility. Just managing a CI/CD workflow on bare metal makes me shudder.

Not to say that either way is wrong, if it works it works imo. But, it is just a viewpoint that counters my own biases.

No new devices, but I migrated my homelab from an intel nuc to an old recycled HP z240 with a p1000 gpu I got for free. I had Nextcloud and jellyfin on it, but jellyfin gets the majority of the use.

I then added a gitea docker container to my server for my personal projects. Then I configured a miniflux container with some of my favorite RSS feeds for a lightweight way to view my feeds on my computer.

I would like to get pihole configured again in a docker container(I have only ever run it on a raspberry pi), but I have small children and a baby and they make it hard to find extra time in the day.