
Building a Linux Desktop for Cloud Native Development - alexellisuk
https://blog.alexellis.io/building-a-linux-desktop-for-cloud-native-development/
======
mwcampbell
> chrome - [...] A faster browser than Firefox, sorry, not sorry.

What about fighting the Chromium monoculture? Is the difference in browser
speed so great that you can't tolerate the extra lag in Firefox in order to
fight Google's dominance?

~~~
wayneftw
There is no problem with a monoculture based around a common browser kernel.

Proof: Every cloud company uses Linux and this has created nothing but
opportunity for ~~Linux users~~ everyone!

~~~
markstos
Also nothing but opportunity for those looking for kernel flaws, of which
their many. The Linux kernel monoculture is a devastating weakness.

~~~
wayneftw
No it’s not. It’s an opportunity to fix things once for everyone instead of
having to fix things a hundred times for a hundred different operating
systems.

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ekianjo
So it's an article about hardware, screens, and typical linux command line
tools? What is the whole point he is trying to make that is not covered in
1000s other articleS?

~~~
yebyen
I don't know that he needs to make a point, can't he just publish a guide
about his own setup like 1000s of others do?

As for why it's notable and on the front page, if you don't know who Alex
Ellis is, I strongly suggest you take a closer look at the OpenFaaS org on
GitHub, if you're at all into K8s or want to do serverless stuff on K8s. Last
week I had heard of this guy and thought I mostly knew why he was notable, but
this weekend I started to try working with OpenFaaS, and found no less than 5
or more important projects under his name while traveling down the rabbit hole
of "what's the best way for me to run this as a developer" – if my experience
is not unique, then that answers it for me, why HN apparently cares what _his
setup_ is like in particular.

Check out K3sup and inlets-operator, for example. The most surprising problem
I solved on his dime this weekend was "how do I use cert-manager to get
certificates for my Kubernetes ingresses, when the K8s cluster is private and
LetsEncrypt can't reach it?" – I wasn't even hoping to solve this, but it just
works out of the box, with a handful of apps provided through "k3sup app
install" (including cert-manager, of course), your ingresses can get a public
IP for long enough to perform the HTTP challenge, and your private cluster can
get TLS certs handled automatically for a couple pennies, without any awkward
certificate secrets hand-off process (where an admin carries the TLS certs
from an internet-facing cluster over to the private cluster, for example, as
I've heard of others doing to bootstrap their private clusters.)

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davidjhall
I read the headline quickly and thought this was building a Linux Desktop on
the Cloud and thought it would discuss hosting a performant desktop dev
environment on AWS/DO/Azure. Anyone have great success with that?

~~~
evook
Tried that with a fully specced out machine. It doesn't matter if VNC, X11
XDMCP, Teamviewer, Anydesk or some of the more obscure things I tried out. The
latency kills all the fun.

~~~
cat199
> The latency kills all the fun.

I've found that while it changes the constraints on what is fun, some fun is
still possible, and the ability to preserve state across devices/locations
sometimes offsets the 'loss of fun'

e.g. coding / light 'ops' stuff that is just 'graphical text' is fairly
bearable to me in the ~100ms range with good compression/low bandwidth
settings, since often you can blindly type some code/commands and take a
breath while the UI updates. Video/Graphics/Etc or heavy GUI interactivity
starts to get a bit painful.

one clear benefit to cloud is faster in-cloud bandwidth/latency which could
make up for the less responsive UI depending on your use case

~~~
evook
Obviously you can get work done with it, I also can imagine that getting
accustomed to a type and think about it approach while taking a breath might
be worth the ability to preserve states. For me preserving states across
devices/locations has been solved 10 years ago, though nowadays in extreme
situations I just don't do any work if it's not my device. I won't enter any
credentials on a device that's not mine or hasn't been in my physical control
since being setup. I'd rather fly home. Nothing we do is that important.

For me a low latency is the single most important thing when using a computer.
Having 1000hz input device rate on the mice, proper NVMe SSD and 144hz/240hz
Display rate makes all the difference of a decent computer experience.

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stratosgear
Affiliate link masquerading "article”. What does mouse buying suggestions have
to do with any of that....?

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diffeomorphism
> Note: if you are having issues with any of the images, this may be because
> they are coming from an Amazon server. Reload the page without your add-
> blocker, or view it from another browser.

So are these affiliate links or something? Why would I want to invest work to
turn on ads?

~~~
marcus_holmes
it was actually nice reading the article without the images

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ngcc_hk
I got a nuc8i5 (not i7 like his and not 10 as well) as I would to try
Hackintosh as my last purchase of mbpro15 really break the bank.

but I never reached there. It now runs windows and linux very smoothly. Just
swap the nvme 512g.

His experience seems useful as I still have a 512g for Hackintosh. May be I
should try the min ubuntu 18 like his and then try the external ip access.

Good article I say. But not sure about he said ok with the noise. May get the
noiseless case and do win/linux with it like this : ignore the Hackintosh
part:

[https://youtu.be/tUUP8K3RqAo](https://youtu.be/tUUP8K3RqAo)

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PascLeRasc
Just to clarify one of the points in the article, in the U.S. I believe we
can't deduct business costs like Zoom anymore unless you're 100% self-
employed. BYOD-type deductions were unfortunately removed by the current
administration.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
> BYOD-type deductions were unfortunately removed by the current
> administration.

Did you mean specifically the executive branch, or also the Congress?

It's a sincere question: I'm not really clear on what the IRS can do on its
own vs. what requires legislative changes to the tax code.

~~~
jsight
I believe he means by congress, specifically the 2017 tax bill.

------
blinkingled
Interesting that the author had fan nose / heat issues with the Lenovo Ryzen
mini PC.

I really hope AMD and OEMs get it together and make sure thermal design for
their PCs allows for stability and noise reduction. Older HP workstations are
a good choice for noise, price and power.

I have my noisy 2U machines under a bed in my downstairs room - but that
requires a hard wired home and a spare room.

~~~
dsr_
I built a 3400g in an A300 mini chassis. It's very quiet and very small. I
don't know what Lenovo's issues were - maybe not enough vertical space?

~~~
blinkingled
Could also be thermal management issues on the software/ driver side of Linux.
I remember reading about Linux kernel patches in that area very recently.

------
whirlwin
Why do you need a special machine for cloud native development? I have created
a GitGub repo with cloud native dev tools which is more than what I usually
need.

[https://github.com/whirlwin/cloud-native-
workspace](https://github.com/whirlwin/cloud-native-workspace)

------
tkainrad
I have a similar post on my blog about setting up a Linux workstation for
software development. I think one important aspect that is not covered in OP's
very nice article, is command-line setup.

Switching from bash to zsh and starting to use plugins for improved history
search, autocompletion, syntax highlighting and more was a huge productivity
boost for me:

[https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-
workstation/#boo...](https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-
workstation/#boosting-command-line-productivity)

Especially relevant when dealing with lots of different tools, as is very
common with cloude native development.

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anaisbetts
This is some pretty serious affiliate content marketing :-/ Do we really need
a guide on why you should install Ubuntu on a NUC?

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luord
I liked the build, but I'll stick to my system76 laptop and using chromium and
vim.

I'll probably replace the laptop when the one they, system76, are reportedly
building themselves is released.

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haolez
I was hoping for something like ChromiumOS. I'm not sure what's the point the
author is trying to make here.

~~~
giancarlostoro
I am still waiting for a Ubuntu Spin that attempts to do this. It would make
for a nice change.

~~~
piotrkubisa
> I am still waiting for a Ubuntu Spin that attempts to do this.

You made me curious: what does mean _this_ in your comment? What do you like
in ChromiumOS and would like to see in Ubuntu? What is in Ubuntu that you
would like to have replaced with a ChromiumOS-like alternative?

~~~
giancarlostoro
Possibly some lightweight custom DE based on Gnome's SDK, like tiling manager
possibly, to give it a ChromiumOS vibe, but you can still use other utils from
Ubuntu. But one that's not too focused on shortcuts only.

~~~
piotrkubisa
Could you expand what do you mean by "ChromiumOS vibe" (ELI5)? Do you look for
a i3 inside GNOME Shell?

PaperWM[0] is an example of a tiled scrolling (window) manager based on GNOME
SDK (Mutter) that runs in GNOME session.

[0]: [https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM](https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM)

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ddoeth
Why did he stack those 3 alexas on the loudspeaker?

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ankit70
Which keyboard is he using? Looks very cool!

~~~
protanopia
He mentioned it near the end of the article. Durgod Taurus K320 TKL

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078H3WPHM](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078H3WPHM)

