The sort of program that once set up, just ticks along without fuss or bother forever.

For me, as I’m replacing the vms today which I set up five years ago and haven’t needed to touch since;

  • HAProxy
  • KeepaliveD

Not easy to learn, but once they’re running, they both go on forever.

    • nfms@lemmy.ml
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      9 days ago

      My small selfhosted system appreciates this very much. Having Debian as my base OS makes everything easier.

    • Dingaling@lemmy.mlOP
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      9 days ago

      Total agreement. So many unsung heroes involved in Debian. Work has agreed with me - today’s job involved migrating those load balancers to Debian underneath.

    • JoYo@lemmy.ml
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      9 days ago

      It’s a blessing and a curse how stable it is. I think less bleeding edge is better but when shit like audio and GPU are fucked they’re pretty much always fucked until dist-upgrade time.

    • madthumbs@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      It ‘was’ uCollage, but whiny, obnoxious, ungrateful LiGNUts ruined it like many other unpaid softwares by driving a critical developer (Ueberzug) to quit or sellout.

      Many LiGNUts probably work for Microsoft, because Microsoft gains when they cause issues, and mislead and lie to people.

  • tirateimas@lemmy.pt
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    9 days ago

    So many. So many little utilities that just work. To mention a couple I think no one will mention because they are not sexy: Okular and Ark

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      9 days ago

      Okular works so well at this point that I use it to annotate all my PDFs if I don’t explicitly need free-hand drawing (and xournalpp otherwise).

    • Broadfern@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Ark is the best. It can open any type of zipped/compressed file, and it puts even 7zip to shame.

    • GatoMoto@lemmy.zip
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      9 days ago

      Big fan of the KDE suite of software. I’ve tried alternatives, but always come back to plasma and associated software

    • Elting@piefed.social
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      8 days ago

      Cant get VLC working properly on my linux and I miss having it. Ive been thinking about switching to LMDE because of it.

      • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
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        8 days ago

        I think ffmpeg imploded or something? And maybe VLC is maintaining their own fork? But it got split into a bunch of pieces or something, I don’t know, but maybe installing one of the alternate sources of the ffmpeg packages might work for you.

      • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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        7 days ago

        Consider alternative ways to get it, e.g. static binary, other package managers e.g. am, AppImage, etc.

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    9 days ago

    KCalc. Man, it just computes! It can add, subtract, and even multiply. It’s never given a wrong answer.

      • Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club
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        7 days ago

        Just because one thing is better than another doesn’t mean the other isn’t good!

        But thank you for the tip. I actually don’t like KCalc. My post was a joke because I thought the question was kinda dumb.

  • reluctant_squidd@lemmy.ca
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    9 days ago

    Based on my experiences running multiple servers and pcs on multiple distros for more than a decade, almost all problems originate between the keyboard and the chair attached to the machine running Linux.

    Misconfiguration is usually the culprit.

    Oh and important note: I run Arch BTW

  • ElectricMachman@lemmy.sdf.org
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    9 days ago

    Syncthing. Absolutely ace bit of software. I remember it being a little questionable in 2013, but today it performs exactly the same task, just more reliably. Love it.

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      9 days ago

      Yep I love it. It’s how I keep my password manager synced between devices. It can be finicky to set up but just works without thinking after that.

    • Dingaling@lemmy.mlOP
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      8 days ago

      Good shout! I use syncthing myself to sync all my useful stuff between multiple devices seamlessly.

  • Eugenia@lemmy.ml
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    9 days ago

    Anything from Debian. I even run Debian-Testing, and it’s rock solid. Also, Linux mint, on my other partition.

  • Peasley@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Firefox + uBlock Origin + sponsorblock. Set it and forget it.

    I haven’t seen an advertisement or a sponsored segment on my desktop in over a decade, and same with my phone for several years. I’m astonished how willing most people are to put up with a constant barrage of ads coming from devices they own

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      7 days ago

      can i interest you in an AdNauseam instead? It blocks ads, but it also “clicks” the links to poison the data.

      • Prathas@lemmy.zip
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        7 days ago

        That’s literally what I was about to mention as well. I would just suggest that you change the clicking frequency from the default, which is every single ad, to just moderate, so that they don’t detect that you’re clearly sabotaging the system and may otherwise discount your clicks.

        But yeah, be sure to mention that AdNauseam is a uBO fork. There’s literally no reason not to move to it.