brendaningram

It's Go on the backend, Postgres DB, Go HTML templates, a bit of jQuery but otherwise everything uses pure JS. It was (and is intended to be) deployed to AWS, and uses SES for notifications and S3 for client storage (e.g. uploading product images).

Sure thing. Feel free to get in touch and we can chat :)

I agree. I'm happy to open source it, and will likely end up doing so.

Good advice, thanks :)

That is definitely an option, and I am completely happy to do that.

One of the most significant ones is with constant network dropouts. I'm not talking about Wifi or some weird and wonderful adapter either. Wired ethernet on an Intel i219 - constant dropouts and when you're browsing (e.g. with Firefox) it regularly fails to resolve the host and/or load a page. I've tested this and confirmed it is a problem in Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Neon.

Another issue is with the Gnome version of Ubuntu (doesn't appear in Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Neon etc). When you install BitWarden into Firefox, any time you tab into the password field, it crashes the plugin. Sounds like a problem with the plugin, except it isn't. It's known that Ubuntu packaged an old and/or incompatible library that causes it, and they didn't make any attempt to fix it. Meanwhile, Fedora, Elementary, other flavours of Ubuntu, and Debian all work perfectly with Firefox and Bitwarden.

They may be little things, but they aren't edge cases. They're usability 101 for normal desktop users, and they should just work. I understand though that Ubuntu does "just work" for millions of other users, and I hope that continues to be the case.

Debian Stretch (see my separate post here for more info)

Unfortunately, I think Canonical has lost their focus on the desktop user. Every version of Ubuntu since 16.04 has had major issues for me. I have given every one of them a chance to redeem themselves, right up to today trying 18.10. Still no dice...

For me, as boring as it sounds, Debian 9 (Stretch) with XFCE is rock solid as a daily driver. I'm not some fuddy duddy doing nothing but text editing either. I code every day with Golang and Postgres 11 using VSCode. I make music using Bitwig (and sometimes Ardour). I use Shotwell and Gimp for my photography. I run the latest Krita in the (probably vain) hope that I can become a better artist. And I write my always-in-progress novels with the latest Libreoffice 6.1 and FocusWriter.

So to the people asking for a distro that has a better policy on quality, I don't think you can go past Debian.

I suspect that part of the reason that "as traffic rises, the quality of journalism is dropping" is because the types of articles that increase "engagement" appeal to the type of person who doesn't value quality literature, spelling, grammar, or story telling. And so it becomes a downward spiral.

Here in Australia, news.com.au is the main offender. The subject matter of their stories is ridiculous, and the quality of the writing doesn't even classify as journalism.

But it won't change. Society is happy with what they're being fed.

The people that value quality storytelling and journalism are writing (and reading) books.

Thanks for taking the time to do those comparisons. Very interesting. I was always too afraid of using a "terminal text editor", but the last 12 months or so I have made the effort to learn, and it's been quite enjoyable. Having said that, I'm still torn between Focuswriter and Vim for writing my prose, and I haven't settled on one or the other yet.

I've been using Debian Stretch (which was previously Debian Testing) for the last 2 years. I didn't ever have a single problem. But as the months passed I kept getting miffed about old packages. Yes, there are backports etc, but it just didn't feel current enough. I loved the stability though.

When the difference in Firefox versions got to 50 vs 54, and I had written myself a custom bash script to keep Firefox updated, I went looking...

I've been running F26 since the early alpha days, and I have to say that I haven't had a single problem in that whole time. I've been running it on my brand new i7 desktop machine as well as a 7 year old HP laptop. Both have been superb. Performance of Gnome 3.24 is great. Stability of the platform as a whole is rock solid.

In fact, the only issue I have come across is with MakeMKV (which I have written about elsewhere). Other than that, all of my use cases have been rock solid. For reference, they include:

* Firefox (with Lastpass, uBlock origin, HTTPS everywhere, privacy badger add-ons)

* Evolution (for email, contacts, and calendar)

* taskwarrior

* ledger (with some hledger experimentation)

* Gnucash

* MakeMKV (for creating MKV files for my LibreElec HTPC)

* Shotwell (for my 15,000 file photo library)

* Quodlibet (for my 140GB music library - including a growing FLAC library)

* vim (for all my writing)

* git (for my writing and my code)

* Krita (with a Wacom tablet for illustrations for some book ideas I have)

* gimp (for image editing. e.g. I mocked up a photo of my house with how it might look with a grape vine covered pergola)

* Libreoffice (including my wife using it for her study, opening and editing MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files from the Uni)

* Ardour & Calf Plugins for music recording. I also experimented with BitWig, which was fantastic, but I prefer to support OSS.

* Golang (1.8, for my own personal development projects)

* Postgres (for same)

* qemu and virt-manager (for virtual machines)

I was a Microsoft .NET developer for almost 20 years. I've been a Linux user in my own time for a bit over 5 years. I'm now happy to say that I use Linux 100% for every single computer related task I have, and I couldn't be happier.

So far, the move to F26 has been fantastic, and it gets my highest recommendation to anyone else that might be considering it.

P.S. I also happily use F26 for the occasional 0AD game :)

I haven't had a single issue with Firefox (54) out of the box. I know that some add-ons can break the multi-process windows feature, but out of the box has been fine, both with clean VirtualBox installs and bare-metal desktop installs.

You can use the "Dash to Panel" extension in Gnome to provide a Windows 7 like bottom panel. I discovered it recently, and it has made my Gnome experience 1000x better.