This week I learned that kdenlive crashes often, Openshot takes forever to import assets, and Blender really is the tool for everything
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How do you even start with Blender? Where did you learn to use it?
Bit by bit, youtube videos, took me a while to be honest.
As much as I would like to vote Redhat and Fedora “off the island”, as it were, I have to acknowledge that they are a major driving force in the progressive development of the Linux world that I wouldn’t want to disappear. They make big upstream contributions to projects like the Linux kernel, Wayland, etc.
Also see “Who really contributes to open source”.
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This is an excellent point and well documented. I just wonder how many of these github contributions are directed to desktop and how many to the server market. I suspect that (Redhat being who they are) the majority of them are not for the desktop.
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This week, I learned about some fancier nginx configuring. I have this exotic situation, where I set up two separate nginx servers, one acting as a frontend, and one as a backend. This weird arrangement saves me the cost of renting another static IP address for a VPS.
Thanks, Nginx devs, for such strange server acrobatics that you make possible! 
Thanks! I, for one, would love to see some podcaster do some deep diving into this, to explain and characterize what all those mainline linux kernel commits (from the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Redhat) are generally for (desktop, server, or what).
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This week saw the update from Mint 20.0 to 20.1, on my laptop, without any troubles. This has been different in the past. Usually, i’d have to start from scratch, because the upgrade wouldn’t go all that well. This time around, not a cloud in the sky. Upgrade, reboot, go! Thank you Mint!
Somehow, somewhere, it doesn’t sit well with me, knowing that Google and Microsoft are “helping” the Linux kernel along. Maybe i’m paranoid, but me too, would like a good review on this.
That way i’d know something about what’s going on in that sphere.
it totally depends on the company but Red Hat is kind of the exception in that they provide a lot of work on both. Pipewire for example is not really any value to the Server but Red Hat is working on Pipewire. Now stuff like systemd is for both so you could argue server first for that one but I’d say both. Red Hat also work on Wayland and have maintained X for a while so it’s kind of a mixed bag sort of thing for Red Hat.
Canonical used to be heavily in Desktop but that end a couple of years ago I think with the end of Unity. SUSE is likely mostly in the backend or server world. The other companies are kind of most likely in server and enterprise.
Based on my experience in Linux I think Canonical did the most but have slowed down desktop effort to a crawl and Red Hat has always been seemingly infrastructure stuff for desktop so maybe like a 30% / 40% approach to it consistently.
Right now, I feel like Desktop is secondary at best and likely not a priority for all of the major players.
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Good to know; yet sad that the desktop is seemingly being left behind. I think that some of the movement away from desktop is fueled by the general population’s fixation with mobile. People balk at paying $1000 for a decent laptop; all the while 4 people in their household carry $800 - $1200 phones with them at all times.
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Well, consider that $1200 phone only costs $30 a month for 3 years. People justify that cost. Yet, even $400 on a used Lenovo, a machine 1000x more productive, can’t be justified to them. At this point I think addiction drives the cell phone market.
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Spot on!
Data gets acquired/sold much more easier on a mobile then on a desktop/laptop.
I’m sure everybody here knows, but for those who don’t, silicon valley employs behavioral scientists who are tasked with keeping your eyes on that screen as long as possible and have as much interactions as possible. (again, gathering data for selling purposes).
Right now there are tons of people at a point where they gladly spend 1000$/€ for a phone which is practically useless after 3 years. And they’re liking it too!
It’s a sad state of affairs, imho.
A desktop/laptop should be your primary instrument to work with. That is something you own and control. Or, if you go the mobile route, use Graphene, LineageOs, VollaPhone, etc…
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This week, I learned the hard way that when the clappr webpage-embedded Javascript video player encounters a totally-legit wildcard SSL certificate, it throws a vague error. Use a valid non-wildcard SSL cert, and it’s happy again.
I decided to try installing Lineage OS on my phone this week. Its a Sony Xperia XZ1. I only had one problem with TWRP where it would not boot into the TWRP environment after the first boot and restart and wouldn’t boot past the Sony logo. Fastboot could detect the device but not what it was or it’s serial number but it was enough to reboot from the command line into the bootloader and then boot TWRP from the computer not the phone. It’s working now and I like Android 10, its newer than where Sony stopped updates and I can get many more years out of this device.
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This week, I tested out the Nextcloud desktop client, on my Ubuntu desktop. It went really well.
I also tried out Linode’s “Migrate” feature, to move a Debian VPS I host with them from one datacenter to another, lowering the latency a lot. This went smoothly.
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I always wanted to put something functional or useful on my old and now unsupported Samsung Galaxy S3 Neo. No, not Lineage etc. I flashed it with Ubuntu Touch. 
Finally it supports my device. It is very recent. I almost gave up. Now I need an adapter for the nano sim. Except the camera everything works. I hope they will fix the rest. Now my S3 runs with a supported Linux OS. I can remember my wife wanted to throw it away, it was actually hers and I was like, wait, some day I will put proper Linux on it.
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This week I made friends with certbot, learning how to automate SSL certificate renewal, complete with restarting nginx after a new cert gets installed.
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That’s great! I will read this because in December I learned my friendship with Certbot was on rocky terms when it didn’t renew and I couldn’t get to my server!
At first I had a very old certbot package from Debian stable, but I installed from snap instead, as per the official certbot documentation.