the other day someone asked if given the choice of docker and podman which would I pick, I said "incus"

my opinion about innovations in infra during my 25-year-long career as a sysadminess:

- puppet/ansible/etc. was a mistake and a net negative
- cloud was a mistake and a net negative too
- virtualisation, ibid.
- generative "AI" was the worst of all the mistakes
- nix actually solved problems, but it created as many new problems as it solved, but it's interesting so it gets a pass*

*as in the technology, not the company that profits from killing migrants

- prometheus+graphana are overengineered and needlessly koolaid-y, but they do the job. their predecessors (collectd, zabbix etc.) kinda sucked too, prometheus is ok.

- borg is pretty cool actually, love borg

- fish (the friendly interactive shell) is the greatest innovation in the history of unix since the creation of journaled filesystems. it's friendly *and* interactive!! fish!!

- it's trendy to hate rust now and the legit reasons to hate rust are piling up, but I like the ecosystem of rust linux CLI tools not just because they are efficient and colourful, but because they added some much-needed daring to a stagnant space.

- I had too many issues with zfs and all of them were super hard to debug issues. I trust brtfs less than zfs. bcachefs guy is dating a chatbot. I still run ext4.

- very happy nis/yp died.

- very happy sendmail died.

- very happy we have wireguard now, my only complaint is debugging could and should be way easier than echoing variables to /sys/something, but still compared to openvpn it's a godssend. please let openvpn die too, please do this for a girl I'm begging you

- I kinda don't get why we all moved from apache to nginx and at this point I'm afraid to ask.

- likewise I resent the point where everything start being daemons on port :8123 rather than using an existing httpd.

- ip/ss is cool and all but I'm not so convinced it was worth the trouble switching.

- nftables is great and definitely worth the trouble, finally linux firewall is as reasonable to configure as an average BSD ca. 2001

- postgresql was always superior to mysql on every count, including the reasons that people cite to pick mysql (configuration simplicity, resource usage, I think that's all the reasons). there was never a reason to use mysql instead of postgresql and there still isn't.

- people keep doing at the code layer stuff that should be done at the DBM layer, like data validation and triggers. this is proof that DBMs (including postgresql) failed at UI.

- git works fine but dear gods the UI. kind of an encapsulation of everything bad about Linux. personally I much prefer fossil to git, but you probably never heard of it

- there used to be an expectation that every information you'd need would be offline, in /usr/share/doc/HOWTO/ or manpages or info. in retrospect this was the peak of information availability in my career. moving to HTML APIs and website tutorials was a downgrade, moving from that to StackExchange/reddit another downgrade, and now it's slop.

- NetBSD was underrated, and is still underrated, and will probably be underrated forever

- I wish somebody along the way had made something like Emacs (a dynamically reprogrammable, interactive text-based operating environment) without the baggage of Emacs