For me, Firefox and without iCloud Private Relay engaged, Maxmind is within about 2km and doesn't get the city correct (but we're right on a border), and IPinfo is about 15km as the crow flies (and gets the city entirely wrong).
For cloud-like provisioning experiences and paying by the hour you can use DigitalOcean, Vultr, or alternatives.
Deploying GPUs? Something like CoreWeave may be optimal.
Want inexpensive costs for dedicated hosts? Hetzner, OVH.
There are many, many advantages to using AWS but equally many alternatives that are viable and which aren’t “doing it yourself” in a hardware and network sense.
None of this is to say DIY is a terrible choice either and everyone’s got an opportunity to consider time (initial setup; ongoing maint), costs, and also expertise and ability to do a good job.
Linode is a good small cloud too in my experience. Personally, I would steer clear of Hetzner and OVH, but that still leaves various low-cost small clouds on the table. In my experience, Hetzner disables accounts without warning if you run at 100% for too long. OVH is good for alpha software that is okay with a week-long unannounced downtime and full data loss.
Due to inflation, the cost equation is rapidly changing to where lowering cloud expenses is vital.
I have been using OVH since 2005. Still waiting to loose my data.
Uptime wise I had 2 outages last December with one of my server with them (electrical issue). Prior to that I don’t even remember, maybe in 2018 or something. Thankfully I had no server in Strasbourg, I saw pictures of their containers datacenter there and decided to choose Roubaix.
OVH is great if you need a lot of bandwidth. Servers price are no longer as competitive as before.
I’m hoping that they finally execute an M4 Extreme, oriented towards Mac Pro. There was rumor they’d do this in M2 era but it didn’t come to pass unfortunately.
Be aware that discussing anything in the CM5 Forward Guidance document is tricky, the document still says -
"This whitepaper is restricted and covered by the Raspberry Pi Ltd non-disclosure agreement (NDA). It should not be copied, shared, or duplicated without permission."
Eben Upton was refusing to be drawn on specifics when Jeff Geerling and others chatted to him [1] about roadmaps recently. Nevertheless, the rumor is that CM5 will be drop-in compatible with the CM4, the details of that have been available via their NDA portal [2] for a few months now, but I think even this leak on Twitter (just a box with a label) is a breach of an NDA / embargo, so we might not know officially for a little bit yet?
Best for what, and for whom? Just saying “Best Distro” feels like an extraordinary claim.
To give two examples of where it might not be best — running Fedora on a server, or running Fedora on a workstation where you need long-term stability and support for running CAD/CAM or CFD software which doesn’t play nicely with major OS changes every few months.
Fedora does have a Server flavor that has all the nice default settings you hope for in a server/headless environment.
But on long-running machines (i.e. not containers or temporary boxes) I concur.
I use either RHEL or AlmaLinux for those. But given that RHEL and AlmaLinux are based on Fedora, I don't really consider them to be different. Everything you know and love from Fedora (for the most part) will be the same there. For example most of my setup scripts I write for Fedora work without change on AlmaLinux, and package names, config files, etc are very (though not entirely) consistent.
Software like CAD/CAM is indeed a lot more painful on Fedora, although IMHO that has basically been solved by distrobox. For softare like that that wants a specific Ubuntu version or whatever, I just install it in a distrobox and export it back to the host. My biggest complaint is that it usually works so well that I sometimes forget it's inside a distrobox :-)
> support for running [...] software which doesn’t play nicely with major OS changes every few months
Half-kidding, this is a normal experience for people with macbooks coming from macos, ie updating the os and praying that all software will be working properly after. So it is probably not such a big deal in this case.
