Philosophy on Tom Meurs

Linux Is for Everyone: Why This Blog Now Welcomes Beginners Too

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:28:00 +0100

My neighbour is 70 years old. He’s used Windows his whole life. Last month he asked me: “Tom, I keep hearing about Linux. Is that something for me too?”

He’s not the first. Over the past year I’ve had the same question from friends, family and colleagues, each in their own shape. “I want to get off Windows, but where do I start?” “Is Linux hard?” “Can I still use my normal programs?” To me these are easy questions. I’ve been running Linux since SuSE 6.0, back when you picked your hardware by whether a Linux driver existed for it. If you’ve never seen a terminal, they’re not easy at all.

Infrastructure as Code for People Who Need to Understand

Sat, 30 May 2026 19:45:00 +0100

Someone opens a cloud console, clicks through a wizard, accepts a few defaults, and a resource appears. The dashboard goes green and everyone moves on. That’s still how a lot of infrastructure gets built in 2026, and I’ve built some of it that way myself.

I can’t work like that for long. When I click a button and infrastructure appears, it feels borrowed. I want the configuration written down somewhere I can read it back, and I want to know why something exists, not only that it exists. The console gives me a green tick. It doesn’t give me any of that.

The Lost Art of Software Optimization: What Demoscene Taught Us About Sustainability

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 20:42:00 +0100

Most of us ship software the same way now. Pick a framework, pull in a few hundred dependencies, and the service idles at a gigabyte of RAM before it does its first useful piece of work. Nobody profiles it. If it’s slow, you scale up. Compute is cheap, your time isn’t, and the bill goes to someone else. I don’t say that as a complaint. I’ve done it, and I’ll do it again on the next deadline.

Self-Hosting for Everyone: A Vision for Digital Agency

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 14:00:00 +0100

Most people keep their photos at Google, their mail at Gmail, their documents in whatever cloud came with the phone and their passwords in a browser built by an advertising company. Every byte sits on a server they don’t own, under terms they didn’t read, in a country they didn’t check. Nobody finds that strange anymore, because the alternative looks like a second job.

I want to talk about that alternative, and about why it sits behind a wall most people will never climb.

The space container thought experiment: systems thinking for survival

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 14:00:00 +0100

You wake up. It’s dark. Somewhere a fan is humming.

Your eyes adjust. You’re in a container. Metal walls, a few small windows, and behind them stars. Just stars. No Earth anywhere.

There’s a note taped to the wall:

“You have everything you need to survive. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. Good luck.”

I bring this one up with friends when the evening has gone quiet enough for it. It sounds like science fiction, and the first reaction is usually a joke about the toilet. Then somebody asks what’s in the room, and we’re off. What the experiment takes away is an assumption I’d never said out loud before I ran it. That there’s an “outside” that absorbs my mistakes and refills my supplies.

Why I self-host everything: on sovereignty, agency and control

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 18:00:00 +0100

For a long time the cloud was just the water I swam in. I provisioned managed Kubernetes, clicked through the console, pasted a Terraform module someone else had written, and shipped. It worked. The bill landed every month, the dashboards stayed green, and I didn’t look underneath. Why would I? I trusted it the way you trust a lift. Press the button, doors open.

Then one afternoon a managed service fell over and I sat there with nothing to debug. No host to SSH into, no log I was allowed to read, nothing underneath it I could open up. The status page said “investigating”. Refreshing a page someone else controlled was the whole of my afternoon.

Unbreakable - My Fascination.

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 20:00:00 +0100

As a kid I called the things that fascinated me unbreakable. Indestructible never fit, because indestructible means it never breaks. Unbreakable means it keeps working after it breaks.

I know exactly when it started. A photo of an A-10 Thunderbolt II back from a mission with half a wing gone, the tail in tatters and the fuselage full of holes. It still brought its pilot home.

Luck had nothing to do with it. Somebody sat at a drawing board years before that mission and decided the plane had to come home looking like that.