I don't mind UI, but I think it's a bad approach.
Instead of hiding all those complexities of the server behind UI, I would like to see each part of the application teach me how to achieve the same result in CLI. That would be useful for people to teach themselves, because UI comes and goes but basic linux commands - will stay
I have been using Webmin/Virtualmin for all of my 15-years as a web host. I love it, although it can be a little idiosyncratic in places, once you know how to operate with it, you won’t ever need anything else. It’s never been the most bleeding-edge or fully-featured, but it’s also never fallen behind with security and compatibility updates, and it’s had a surge in new development lately, which is exciting. On a Debian system, it’s always been rock solid for me.
Virtualmin in particular is more targeted towards production web servers, but I think they’re both something of a happy medium between a GUI and the terminal; The interfaces are all pretty explicit about the components you’re interfacing with, and nearly all of them include the ability to pop open the conf files to edit them directly.
The extensive UI isn’t the most flashy or polished, but it’s functional and if you get bored enough (as I did) you can theme the entire thing with a single CSS file (be prepared for a lot of ‘!important’ and other things that will drive UI/X folks nuts), and make it look rather stylish.
The only downside (and this isn’t really a downside for production servers) is it’s opinionated on how some things “should” be configured. It’s not restrictive, per se, but it’s not very tolerant for “coloring outside the lines”. You can run an Apache or Nginx reverse proxy, but if you want to use Caddy or Traefik or something similar, this may not be the admin panel for you.
Myself, I just run Webmin/Virtualmin on my production servers, and use a separate server for Docker and apps, where I’ve used both Cockpit and Portainer, but generally tend to stick with the CLI. The command line will always be the best, most efficient way of interfacing with Linux. Once I’d learned enough to be comfortable, I found it becomes increasingly preferable for most common tasks.
Both can have their place. I'm pretty familiar with the podman cli, but having a dashboard I can access from a bookmark in my browser is handy when I just want a quick overview of everything.
JIRA replaced Project Management job a long time ago. If you select for proactive, driven, autonomous engineers, you don't really need to oversee them or tell them what to work on. Now Tech Lead or Product Manager is a whole different job
https://penk.in/ - one day I will add a proper blog in there and testing bed for tech, but for now it is as it is.
The background image is the one I took in Iceland, really proud of it
When running your own backup server, you're forgetting about scenario(however less-likely) when Google Photos will loose your photos, or if your google account gets banned with no ability to call anyone in Google to dispute that. In this case you can safely rely on your own backup to have those files at hand.
I was skeptical about this scenario until one day Gmail lost 1 year worth of my emails. It's just gone. All other emails are there, but not this particular year. And there is no person who you can call to talk about that.
They're missing the key feature I'm looking for: Decentralized backup to the same devices owned by people I choose. That's the "someone else's computer" part of what I want in a "cloud."
I can already easily run such things on my home computer. It's having remote (encrypted) backups and redundancy if my own system goes down that I'm looking for.
There was a post about 2 years ago on HN so that people would post links to their blogs. Somebody saved that post and extracted all the links in to the CSV file with their name and karma, and put it on a website(it's not there now).
I've downloaded that CSV file and slowly went through all 1626 blog links over the last 2 years. I finished just about a week ago. It was quite a journey! Some links I would glance at the homepage and immidiately close, and some I stayed for days - reading all interesting articles from the Archive link. It was a blast!
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