How do you know “it has no memory leaks, crashes, ANRs, no performance problems, no network latency bugs or anything” if you built it just yesterday? Isn’t it a bit too early for claims like this? I get it’s easy to bring ideas to life but aren’t we overly optimistic?
Part of the "one day" development time was exhaustively testing it. Since the tool's scope is so small, getting good test coverage was pretty easy. Of course, I'm not guaranteeing through formal verification methods that the code is bug free. I did find bugs, but they were all areas that were poorly specified by me in the requirements.
Here's a copy of my Mastodon post [1] from Oct 2025:
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I had a job interview yesterday, which happened via Google Meet.
Even though I use my desktop Linux workstation and Firefox 99% of the time for everything, my first instinct was to do this interview on a MacBook and Chrome, to avoid surprises and not look unprofessional if something doesn't work, which has happened in the past. Last year, when I was asked to share the screen during a daily, I had to say "um, I'm sorry, Zoom and desktop sharing don't work on my system."
But I thought I'd first do a test on my workstation, just to see if maybe I shouldn't be concerned anymore. I was sceptical.
The ideal scenario was that on my standard GNOME 48 / Wayland / PipeWire desktop I'd be able to use Firefox for this call, and AirPods, a Logitech webcam, and desktop sharing (5K ultrawide scaled at 125%) would just work with no tweaks whatsoever.
And it did!
I've been using Linux on the desktop for over 20 years (on and off, but mostly on) and I know how to hold my Linux systems, but the situation with Bluetooth audio and desktop sharing in previous years has been... spotty. I was less worried about AirPods — I switched to PipeWire ~3 years ago and so I know Linux audio has been rock-solid and pretty much solved already. But desktop sharing used to be hit-or-miss, highly dependent on whether you used X11 or Wayland, further complicated by the use of Flatpaks.
Since my test went well, I did the interview on the desktop machine. It went smoothly, with no surprises.
Therefore, I announce 2025 as the Year of the Linux desktop :)
There’s always risk of a rug pull or going the wrong direction with “open-source” software developed by a for-profit company (Plex, MinIO, Mattermost in this example).
When choosing software that I run in my “homelab” I lean towards community developed projects first. They may not always have as high quality as the ones offered by commercial entities but they’re just safer for the long term and have no artificial limits (Plex). I used to be a happy Plex customer (I have Plex Pass) but several years ago I had enough of their bullshit, switched to Jellyfin and couldn’t be happier!
For me it was the creep of "Not my content" constantly showing up front and center post Plex updates. I'd have to navigate to some side menu to actually access the content I set the entire fucking service up for. Jellyfin has never done that. It's just my content and only my content and I don't have to fight against nonsense slipping in each update.
Not op but ugh having to update my Plex server/apps every few months after not having used it for a while, yeah having to have a subscription to the mobile app now to stream from your own server using your own phone. Don't get me wrong its great when it works but i'd prefer something more ... open.
Also a plex pass holder. Been using it for years, and finally pulled the trigger to buy Plex pass lifetime because I wanted to move away from flickr and love that I could automatically upload photos taken on my phone to Plex.
... not a week later they've announced that they were getting rid of that feature
Then they forced everybody into having us username accounts, change things so I couldn't just visit my media servers address directly.
I also leverage Plex for live TV but they still don't support most OTA HD channels for licensing reasons.
Then they got rid of "watch together" , which has been heavily leveraged by family and friends over the years (re-implementing it is the second highest most requested feature right now in their suggestions).
Now they have the new pricing model where you must have Plex pass or some other subscription service if you want to be able to watch stuff stored on your own media server if you're doing it outside of your local network.
It's getting frustrating and despite people begging for certain things (e.g. Watch together) they seem to just be ignoring what people are asking for and focusing on weird stuff like sharing your watch history with random people or trying to turn Plex into a social media platform.
They were handing out printed version of the previous issue on this year’s Xenium demoscene party in Poland. Amazing stuff. Feels good, like good old demoscene zines.
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