Over the past 25 years I’ve played with a lot of Linux distributions. Many of those distributions have fallen by the wayside as developers shift focus, companies fold or are acquired by other companies, and so on. At the same time, new distributions, by the dozens it seems, have popped up to replace them. While I have always been curious about the various distributions I have increasingly begun to realize that for the most part the differences between them isn’t that great. When you really look at them most of the “new” distributions are simply riffs on other distributions, usually – but not always – Ubuntu.

If you’ve ever watched House Hunters on HGTV or any number of YouTube videos on moving to other countries one of the common themes you’ll hear is that people are moving “for a slower pace of life”. I’ve also run across dozens of articles in various magazines and websites that speak to this, as well. And it’s something I’ve never really quite understood. The question that always comes to my mind is, “why can’t they find that here?”

There are four things that have become increasingly irritating to me: The increase in advertising in damn near everything; The expectation that everything requires an app; The increasing “connectedness” of the things we use; and, the shift to a subscription model for almost all software. Today I want to focus on the subscription model.

The Issue

The main issue is that so many software companies have shifted to a subscription model for their software. But it’s not just software. Certain “features” of appliances and cars, and it seems many other things that we use and depend on have increasingly starting requiring subscriptions for their use. Some of this parallels the increasing expectation that we will be online and connected and a shift toward connected services which basically means that unless you are connected you don’t have access to those services.

My wife and I have been on the road for ten days. Starting in Atlanta, we flew to Portland, ME where we spent three days. Portland was an interesting experience. We live a suburban life, so going to a city that is alive with people, tourists and locals, was quite a change. At the same time, it was actually a lot fun.

I wasn’t sure what I expected. The weather was awesome and actually a bit warmer than we expected. The town itself had a good feel to it and it’s actually one that I might want to revisit at some point. There were several things that surprised me, though.

For the last year or so I’ve been running a Proxmox server that hosts several virtual machines (VM) one of which, itself, hosts multiple docker images for services on which I rely. In addition to the VMs, I also run several LXC containers on the Proxmox server that provide some additional resources I frequently use.

While watching some videos a few days ago I ran across a video where the presenter was demonstrating the use of XCP-ng. If you’re not familiar, XCP-ng is similar to Proxmox in that it is a type 1 hypervisor. A type 1 hypervisor is the operating system that allows one to run multiple VMs as if they were on the bare metal.