Limited mental capacity these days, so I don’t have the spoons to properly research and implement a solution at the moment. I installed Nepenthes last year, but I’ve never managed to get round to integrating it into my site. It’s low priority at the moment.

Around 2010, I used to work at an MSP, and once had a customer that ran a custom LAMP stack website for local radio UK stations web presence. It was a bit slow, running on a dedicated physical server, but every time it snowed, the website would 500 out - because of too many requests to the “School Closures” page. The site had no caching other than Apache’s internal cache, but PHP pages could not be cached because “reasons”, and the original developer was “not available”. I optimised their MySQL indexes, increased the number of Apache workers, and it improved the render time per page and number of concurrent connections. Stress testing looked good.

Anyway, some months later, 2AM one snowy morning, I was on call, and it went down again. This was when I discovered the school closures problem. After diagnosing, and then liaising with the customer to discuss the options, I was told “just make it work”. I ended up modifying the PHP script to add some “on spec” caching that saved the HTML to a temp file in ramdisk, and only re-ran the query-and-render code if the cached copy was more than 5 minutes old. It was hacky, but it did the trick, and I was finished by about 4 AM. This hack was later applied at their request to a number of trouble-points in the source tree, as and when things broke.

We recommended adding a Varnish cache, and found a more generalised caching library but they wouldn’t/couldn’t authorise engineering work for this - they were running on a shoestring - and they already had the tech break-fix contract with us, and decided it was sufficient to just spot fix things as they broke rather than fix the root cause.

I left that MSP in 2012, so I don’t know what happened after that, but as far as I know, the site could still be running… unlikely, but possible.

I have my blog address (which goes to my home server) in my Mastodon profile, and every time I post on Masto, my server gets a request from every Mastodon site that federates with my instance - i.e. hundreds of requests. It’s no problem for my server, because my blog is a static site, but for anything that dynamically generates every single page impression (like worpress or joomla), it could be a problem. Caching settings might help, I suppose.

Truth is, though, I get far more traffic from vulnerability scanners and AI crawlers that don’t honour robots.txt (or aren’t yet listed).

As others have stated, Ubuntu was never a minimalist distribution.

When Ubuntu first came out, most common CD drives could only work with CDs of a about 700Mb capacity, but assuming that the tech would keep improving, it was reasonable to suggest this. It was never because Ubuntu was touted as “lightweight”, though. Then writable DVDs became almost ubiquitous, and they eventually migrated to that. In the meantime, USB flash drives were getting cheaper, and Linux installer tech was also improving, so eventually (quite early actually) these were supported too. But this was simply a logical progression of tech development and catering to the predominant baseline capacities of storage media.

If you want a proper minimalist, try PuppyLinux or DamnSmallLinux. If you want to run on a Raspberry Pi (or one of their other supported SBCs) try DietPi.

Interested to know if this is for international travel, or just within your country’s borders? I would be concerned with this going through airport security, whether in carry-on or checked luggage - x-rays can damage electronics, and the potentially suspicious appearance of electronics to the non-technical could cause problems.

Could be QOS or packet shaping going on at your ISP, or just throttling or congestion. Speed tests only really test for typical traffic patterns, so will give you a warped view: it certainly disagrees with your observed measurements. There are lots of factors that can affect how quickly traffic passes between two hosts on the internet, but domestic broadband is generally the worst of all worlds - you usually share bandwidth with other subscribers, and although the throughput can be quite good, the latency and error rate can be quite bad, and you can get fragmentation as frame sizes can differ between network segments, causing buffering especially when congestion is occurring. Your ISP might also have deprioritised your type of traffic, or they might be dropping packets, which causes retries, and thus slows your connection down.

Had to do some work with SuSE post Novell acquisition for a customer. IIRC the package manager is a bit odd, but I haven’t looked at it in what nearly 15 years, so I can’t really remember much about it. What I CAN remember involved running packet traces using Wireshark - it was mostly network problems, I think, so nothing to do with SuSE. It was certainly very popular in Europe, though I have no idea what they’re doing these days!

You never know … maybe THIS year!

The way windoze 11 is going - people really hating it - you never know, but I’m not holding my breath. Linux is still very niche, and people are wary of “strange” “new” things, especially FREE ones - where’s the catch? I’ve seen it surge and blossom over the years, but it’s still got a really tiny install base (as long as you don’t count Android and embedded tech, where the OS and kernel are largely irrelevant to the user). But I don’t see people moving over to Linux in droves any time soon, really: I’ve seen too much.

For context, I’ve been using it since [dredges up old memories] slackware was new, so about 1994, when a work colleague and I installed it (off about 20 floppies) onto an old 386sx PC with probably 4MB of RAM. Been using it ever since - and from Red Hat 4 onwards (about 1999) it’s been my only OS on my own computers. I’ve always preferred it, and I’ve seen it grow in so many ways - I’d still use it if it was illegal. I haven’t tried EVERY distro, but I have tried most. These days I mostly stick with Debian or Debian-based distro’s (I’m currently on Mint LMDE).

Don’t have any experience with this particular model, but I have found that with most printers on Mint you don’t have to “do” anything at all - if it’s on the network or plugged into the USB, the system will find it and install a driver automatically. I’ve used MANY printers with Linux over the years, and some were a right PITA to set up, but so far all the printers I’ve tried with mint have “just worked”. The only problem I’ve had recently was that when I updated to the Debian Trixie based LMDE 7, a bug in CUPS misconfigures EPSON ET2860 when automatically discovered, but it still works on stock Mint 22.3 without manual intervention. The fix is to manually add it, rather than accepting the auto discovered one, so it’s a problem with the discovery function, not drivers, and I suspect it’s due to some kind of quirk with this printer’s firmware that defines how it interacts to discovery queries on the local LAN.

Sounds great, look forward to seeing that. After using it a bit more, another thing occurred to me - there’s no way to open arbitrary files. I don’t use MarkDown for “just notes” or “just one thing”, I keep markdown files all over the place. I had set the repository directory to be that of my blog posts during first run, but then I can’t open things in my notes directory or documents folder, and I can’t see anywhere in the settings dialogue to change it. Am I missing something?

Yeah “but not as annoying” lol. No idea what you mean about jeeps: I’m in the UK, and not a car enthusiast either.

Seems quite good - I’ve tried a LOT of MarkDown editors over the years, but until quite recently, I’d stuck with Zettlr for a long time. I’ve recently reinstalled my laptop, which made me look for alternatives to some software, and I’ve been playing round with MarkText for the last few days, which seems nice.

HelixNotes is definitely good - if I had to drop MarkText, I think I could get on well with it. I like that they have a debian repository, so I can keep it updated with the usual system update software. I downloaded the AppImage as a quick test, but it didn’t work because it was compiled against an old version of glibc.

The only thing I don’t like so far is the format toolbar is at the bottom of the editor screen, and I haven’t found a way to move it.

What about Microsoft Bob? Doesn’t that count as their first attempt?