Ansible playbook is perfect for this. All your configuration is repeatable, whether on a running system or a new one. Plus you can start with a completely fresh newest version image and apply from there, instead of starting from a soon-to-be outdated custom image.

Postgres handles NoSQL better than many dedicated NoSQL database management systems. I kept telling another team to at least evaluate it for that purpose - but they knew better and now they are stuck with managing the MongoDB stack because they are the only ones that use it. Postgres is able to do everything they use out of the box. It just doesn’t sound as fancy and hip.

It turns out there’s still plenty I don’t know, and I spend much more of my time confused and frustrated than I did before. The cool part is that I’m now confused and frustrated by really interesting problems.

This is spot on. Your whole response ist just a trove of insight, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate so eloquently.

Yeah, it’s the same for me. The content is awesome but requires a lot of concentration.

As you mentioned, with Fedora the best alternatives are immutable spins. Updating means downloading a new base image, applying overlays and additional installations to it and on the next reboot you start from that image. You can configure it to keep as many previous versions as you need and boot into those directly on startup. Since you never change your current image once it’s built, you can’t break a known good system. You can only ever break your next version and in that case, just boot the previous.

I’ve created an Ansible playbook that configures a vanilla Kinoite the way I want it. No need to back up the system if I can recreate it with less than a megabyte of text files. Secrets are in my password vault, personal files are in my personal cloud and get synced to and from the laptop continuously. I would never go back to backing up system files as opposed to recreating it with a playbook. That seems so wasteful in hindsight.

Flatpak with Fedora 39 must have come a long way. Almost every tutorial with workarounds or discussion of broken features you can find online is now obsolete. It just works out of the box, especially under KDE. Mostly. That makes searching for actual issues extremely hard because I find myself chasing down paths of issues that have long been resolved.

The Lenovo business models (ThinkPad series) are amazing value. My 11 year old laptop is still going strong.

Just stay far away from any Lenovo non-business models.

The Tesla truck is already there and just needs to be built at scale.

Full self driving has been fully achieved in 2017 and will reach end consumers next year (as claimed by Tesla every single year since then).

It is desirable that SpaceX rockets fail hard instead of succeeding in their missions.

Musk has truly mastered this principle and only now are people getting impatient. Most investors still regard him as too big to fail. Either Elon will be able to present sufficient success in the next few years or that bubble will burst very violently. He has almost used up the good will he has built up over years (earned our not).