I’ve seen a lot of people saying things that amount to “those tech nerds need to understand that nobody wants to use the command line!”, but I don’t actually think that’s the hardest part of self-hosting today. I mean, even with a really slick GUI like ASUSTOR NASes provide, getting a reliable, non-NATed connection, with an SSL certificate, some kind of basic DDOS protection, backups, and working outgoing email (ugh), is a huge pain in the ass.
Am I wrong? Would a Sandstorm-like GUI for deploying Docker images solve all of our problems? What can we do to reshape the network such that people can more easily run their own stuff?
Technology is complicated. Period. Anything that “seems” simple is in reality extremely complicated underneath the hood. A GUI is nice as long as it works. But if for some reason it doesn’t, you’re shit out of luck.
It’s not the command line that’s hard but the lack of proper documentation and tutorials that makes things hard.
I would say specifically the hardest part for self hosting is the grok’ing of how SSL works and setting it up right with automatic renewal.
There’s a lot of extra steps involved often.
Id also say understanding how routing works and why you need a reverse proxy is the other big one.
So you want non-technical people to set up botnet members?
There’s this thing called ‘money’ which people who can’t do a thing give other people who can do the thing well to make them do the thing.
This seems unnecessarily snarky.
As I can attest after playing with pfsense for years, GUI or not, if you don’t know what you’re doing you’re going to have a bad time.
For me personally, command line gives me a better understanding of what’s really going on. But then again I’m an old Unix nerd. But once I know what’s going on, I prefer the fancy GUI.
Yep. Agree but kinda the inverse of your takeaway.
I prefer to skip the gui when I know what’s going on. It’s just a waste of resources in many cases and sometimes obfuscates options that otherwise are there.
For example on my opnsense box the NUT package doesn’t work in the gui. Never has. But I have setup an innumerable number of nut instances with that same ups. I did it via the cli and it works, even when the gui says not possible.
