In the early 2000s when I began to use Linux, a lot of things seemed a bit experimental and iffy. I would install and reinstall distros and software. Nowadays I feel that it is generally more stable, and there are long periods when everything works just as it should.
But occasionally things still go wrong. After installing a new version of Darktable photo editing software in a flatpak, the application started to crash. The problem was with the database – I hate databases; they so often seem to be a source of problems. I’ve now gone back to an earlier version of Darktable and hope that it will be quiet.
In between, I learned a bit about another photo editing program, Lightzone, which seems to be simpler and doesn’t have a database – a plus, from my point of view. But still something wasn’t right – there’s always a learning curve.
I think a better solution to these matters could be not to require elaborate photo editing software at all – my new old Fujifilm X10 is capable of producing good results that do not need editing – other than cropping and rescaling – which I can do adequately and easily in XnView.
I have been having other software issues as well, with both the fediverse servers I use. Epicyon didn’t work for a couple of days, and now the site won’t open again. Hubzilla has suddenly stopped allowing me to add photos to albums that I create – probably a file authorization problem that has come since upgrading to a new version.
I think the solutions to these problems are probably not too difficult – but they will take time to identify, and I ask myself whether this is something I want to continue dealing with. My blogging software is so much more simple and trouble-free. “Simple and trouble-free” is irresistably attractive. Social media software is better for repeating or linking to posts and images that have already been published in my blog, while following others who have interesting posts. I’m not sure that I really need to run a server at all for that.
My current blogging software is a simple Lisp program created in and employing emacs. The photo gallery software is another small php program that doesn’t depend on a database. I didn’t create either of these programs, but the possibilities for something to go wrong are slight, and the system is fairly secure, since anyway the whole caboodle is uploaded from local files. Still something went wrong the other day, after a Chromium update. The blog began to use a wrong font. I solved the error by changing the font’s file-name from a *.woff to a *.woff2, if I remember rightly. That wasn’t too painful.