Linux is not really suited for the post-apocalitic no-internet world, the way the repositories are built and software is packed (almost nothing is static, a lot of dependencies on other packages everywhere) just makes it really impractical and hard to deal with those scenarios. Flatpak / containers and friends even make this situation worse because you can't easily mirror the repositories and there's no straightforward way of exporting a Flatpak as a solid file that can be shared around and installed everywhere - the current tool for that doesn't account architectures and dependencies very well.
Windows however is a much more solid and good option, yes, it's painful to hear this but in Windows you can get an exe from a friend in a flash drive and it runs as is. Same goes for installers, reinstalling the OS etc. There's only a couple of .net framework installers that will cover dependencies for 99.99% of stuff in a few MB. The same goes for macOS, however it depends on a lot of software signing nowadays and certificates that can expire and you then have a problem.
Why is this important?
Because intelligence agencies (in Europe) allegedly don't want to depend on Google (most likely NSA controlled) and might be using the data from OSM and they want to make sure it is good.
When facebook was all over removing anti-vaxx posts and "misinformation" that later turned out to be very close to the truth that guy was okay with "working close with the regime", now he suddenly isn't. I wonder...
Experience? Data loss, it's the most unreliable thing and prone to failure, even long file names or paths seems to break it and you'll lose data without warning.
Filebrowser is great, it just lacks two things 1) 2FA and 2) the always upcoming OnlyOffice integration. If we got those two nothing else could ever compete with it. It already does pre-views and text editing, but Office documents would be great.
There's the privacy and constant tracking part of it, but it is also about not being hostage of the company. What if Drive is suddenly a payed-only service OR they lock me out of my account? I can recover faster and cheaper from a failing HDD in my NAS than I ever could from a locked (or deleted) Google account.
I've seen / was burned too many times by free software and services that suddenly disappeared of became overpriced and I don't want to be on that position again. Google is well known for killing stuff as well.
In the simplest form it might be SSO. It does support multiple users and if you look for instance at the filebrowser it’s very possible to pass the username. But yes, this is very simple, very crude and exactly what a lot of people need.
Hmm… some people are going to say that basic auth would be insecure, I’m not going to be there because in this particular case it’s about the same thing.
However, this might be easier to configure and manage permissions than basic auth. Also this works cross-domain and basic auth will require full re-auth for every domain. Another obvious advantage is that at some point I plan to integrate 2FA.
You can backup the entire file then. I get your point, but it also seems like you’re referring to some container-based approach where you would place this inside a container and then mount the config file to some path. While some people might like that approach, that kind of goes against the original idea here, I didn’t want to run yet another instance of nginx for auth, nor another php-fpm - the ideia was simply to use this on a low power device , no containers, no overhead of duplicate webservers and PHP, just a single nginx running a couple of apps on the same php-fpm alongside this.
The thing with PHP in this case is that I was already serving a ton of simple websites / small apps like freshrss that use PHP and by making this tool in PHP it means I don’t need yet another process running and wasting resources, can just re-use the existing php-fpm for this.
For what’s worth PHP is better than it looks, and my implementation is very crude, but also small and auditable and contained to a single file. :)
This is going to be controversial but...
Linux is not really suited for the post-apocalitic no-internet world, the way the repositories are built and software is packed (almost nothing is static, a lot of dependencies on other packages everywhere) just makes it really impractical and hard to deal with those scenarios. Flatpak / containers and friends even make this situation worse because you can't easily mirror the repositories and there's no straightforward way of exporting a Flatpak as a solid file that can be shared around and installed everywhere - the current tool for that doesn't account architectures and dependencies very well.
Windows however is a much more solid and good option, yes, it's painful to hear this but in Windows you can get an exe from a friend in a flash drive and it runs as is. Same goes for installers, reinstalling the OS etc. There's only a couple of .net framework installers that will cover dependencies for 99.99% of stuff in a few MB. The same goes for macOS, however it depends on a lot of software signing nowadays and certificates that can expire and you then have a problem.