Posts

My neighbour is 70 years old. He’s been using Windows his entire 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, friends, family and colleagues have asked me the same thing in different shapes. “I want to get off Windows, but I don’t know where to start.” “Is Linux hard?” “Can I still use my normal programs?” To me these questions seem obvious. I’ve been running Linux since SuSE 6.0, back when you had to specifically pick hardware components that actually had Linux drivers. To someone who’s never seen a terminal, they feel genuinely daunting. ...

Here is how privacy works today. You read the policy. You dismiss the cookie banner. You hunt through three settings menus for the opt-out toggle that someone deliberately buried. You do this to exercise a right that should have been the default. And while you are still on the first paragraph of the terms of service, every click, scroll, hover, and the exact timing of your keystrokes has already been harvested, packaged, and sold. We have accepted this as normal. ...

I run VMs constantly. Testing Kubernetes deployments, trying out a distro I read about, running Windows for that one stubborn application, isolating an experiment so I don’t wreck my actual machine. KVM/QEMU is the right tool for all of it. Near-native performance, completely open source, baked straight into the Linux kernel. Nothing to phone home, nothing to license, no vendor deciding what I’m allowed to do with my own hardware. ...

Here is how a lot of infrastructure still gets built in 2026. Someone opens a cloud console, clicks through a wizard, picks some defaults, and a resource appears. It works. The dashboard turns green. Everyone moves on. I can’t work that way. When I click a button and infrastructure appears, I feel like I borrowed it. I want to see what’s happening, I want the configuration written down where I can read it back, and I want to know why something exists instead of just that it exists. The console gives me a green checkmark. It doesn’t give me understanding. ...

Picture your homelab disk dying tonight. Not corrupting, not throwing SMART warnings for a week first, just gone. The GitLab that holds every repo you care about, the password vault, fifteen years of family photos, the home automation that runs your house. All of it on a drive that has decided it’s done. Can you answer what happens next without your stomach dropping? If not, you don’t have backups. You have hope, and hope is not a strategy you want to discover the limits of at 2am. ...