wltr

I’m same as you (7 years though), but I have Fedora as a family computer. I mostly like it. I used Fedora for a year almost exclusively a couple of years back, and I quite enjoy the experience as a macOS refugee. Tried Silverblue (immutable distro), it looks even better for an average folk, but I haven’t used it for a long time to comment on that.

Recently, a Fedora installation broke on me (bad kernel upgrade), and was so for a month, spanning 4 kernel upgrades. I had to manually boot into a working kernel (F8 during boot in grub), and remove the new kernel. I avoided updates till there was a newer kernel version, tried again, to no success. It took them a month to fix the regression, now it’s good back. The kernel versions were since 6.17.10 till 6.18.4, and time frame was since December 14th till January 12th this year. It was relatively trivial to troubleshot (I used ChatGPT for assistance, but I was knowledgeable of what I was doing).

I have no idea what would a regular new user do. I have no idea how a Silverblue version would handle this situation, I have a regular Fedora Workstation installed.

However, apart from that, I have been running Fedora without any issues for years. One computer runs about 5 years now. The other served me for a couple of years, now it’s Arch Linux server, but it had no issues at all.

I guess I’d avoid Ubuntu. I might have tried Bazzite (if for gaming) or Pop_OS! (for their Cosmic Desktop thing). I have no other distros in mind. I don’t like Debian, especially for a desktop, it’s too old, and running testing… well, I’d rather run Arch then.

Fedora has RPM Fusion, which is kind of AUR, so distros based on it should theoretically have it too. But I don’t have any first-hand experience with that.

Can you explain this DNS thing further, please?

I start with what I understand. DNS stands for domains name system, which means a huge database of domain names and their IP addresses. When I ask for a website, DNS tells my computer / browser which IP addresses to look for, to reach the website.

At home, I have Pi-Hole and Unbound. The first one censors DNS addresses by not including domains that serve advertisements. It can work with various DNS providers, including those from Google or Cloudflare. Unbound allows me to self-host DNS database, periodically fetching it from somewhere. That way my ISP may not see … here I’m not sure what, DNS lookups? It sees which IPs I reach, so I assume there’s no big difference, if they’d want to know which resources I reach for. Frankly, I don’t understand this solution entirely, perhaps unbound is for something different. I used Pi-Hole without it for years, only recently I added unbound, because it was quite easy to do with DietPi distro.

Cloudflare actively promotes their WARP service, for people to use their DNS servers. They have three options, four ones, three ones and two, three ones and three. My guess is they theoretically can analyse these DNS lookups for some reason. (E.g. by partnering with three letter agencies, doing some service for them.)

What is DNS in the context of my website being registered with them? When I reach to my website, or any other website registered with them, what would happen? Isn’t the record everywhere already? I cannot understand what this means in this (different, isn’t it?) context.

The rug pull scheme ‘now you pay us for DNS too!’ seems unlikely, for some reason. If it’s no different from what they provide as a free service. If it’s something else, I assume you can migrate to any other registrar, unless you’re too heavy into their ecosystem.

On a personal note, I’m not too heavy into their ecosystem, I hope. I have a couple of static websites hosted for free with Cloudflare Pages. Plus I have a bare metal file server with images which is shared to the internet with Cloudflare Tunnel. I’m nobody with a few readers, tens of posts and hundreds of images, and I chose this architecture because I don’t understand how to properly self-host my blog on a residential connection (meaning dynamic IP behind a CG-NAT or what it’s called). When I do, I may drop them in favour of a simpler architecture. But also I was curious how it works.

So, saying all this, I still don’t understand what this them being an authoritative registrar means in this context. Perhaps I lack some web dev skills to understand that properly. When I had my domain with Squarespace, they allowed more than Cloudflare, but I lack understanding to properly formulate that, to even understand what it was. I think I could host my top level domain with Cloudflare Pages only when they are my registrar, while having those Pages on a subdomain was trivial even with a different registrar. If I remember that correctly now, I might’ve been confusing some things here.

Thanks for your previous explanation, it was quite informative.

Thanks! I haven’t thought of com as being the real TLD, actually!

Thanks! It’s a bit more clear now.

To contribute to the discussion, I remembered that with Squarespace (my previous registrar), I had unlimited redirects, which I used heavily. I am not really sure about the unlimited part, perhaps that was hidden somewhere in the interface, and they have limits, and I just never saw them. But I remember Cloudflare communicated I have like 10, so I decided to not use it for nice-to-have but not really needed things. E.g. I used a subdomain for a blog, and created redirects for typical misprints in my name. Was handy, but not really needed. I should have document this, but I was too busy at the time, and now, almost a year later, I don’t really remember. There were differences with Cloudflare and Squarespace.

My first registrar was Google domains. As always, they killed the business. And sold it to Squarespace. I’ve been their customer for a year or two, nothing bad I can say, except the price was about 1.5 or even 2x of that from Cloudflare for com domain, so I migrated there. I have no deep understanding of the nuances, so I cannot say whether Cloudflare is a bad actor. At least I trust them to not elevate the price, as it’s not their primary business, sell domains.

I see that, but what does it mean in practice?

I have my domain with Cloudflare too, and at this point, I’m not aware of these DNS servers. Can someone explain it a bit? I know what DNS is, but I don’t understand what’s the use case for having them elsewhere. I’m not to argue, just didn’t know where to register a domain, so I went with them. I’m concerned with the future of the domain either, but don’t understand the issues at this early point.

What you meant is not simple, but rather familiar. While I agree, my mother used Windows for many years, but she forgot that experience partially, due to using iPad for like 15 years. So, Gnome is simpler for her, as it’s similar to her most recent experience.

My perception of Plasma is that’s too complex, even for me. While Gnome’s logic is very different, it’s not difficult to grasp, to be effective with it.

Anyway, if we’d go with the theme. Are there some you’d like to recommend? I’m still balancing between going with Gnome and teaching them it, and just going with the Plasma and making it similar to what they had.

It’s even worse than advertisement. As it’s useless.

The less options, the better for a new person to jump in. Modern Gnome is a DE I can recommend everyone. ‘It’s like Mac but simpler,’ I advertise it. I like it even as a pro user, though. But even if we, the pro users, couldn’t work with it, that’s okay. Many pro users hate modern Gnome, and use other environments. But having one with limited options and an opinionated design hurts nobody, and helps a lot. I can install it for an elderly parent or a friend, and they can use it without much assistance, as it’s not very far from their tablet or smartphone.

My bet is that there’s some weirdly complex things that become too niche edge cases that are difficult to transfer.

My opinion is when your logic becomes too complicated, maybe you want to have some sort of custom software. But, on the other hand, I understand that if it works already, there’s no need to break it either.