SpaceCadet

Raspberry Pies (is that how you pluralize it?), and especially their SD cards are not the most reliable pieces of hardware. I've already had a few die on me.

As for how annoying outages are, I guess that depends on how many people and services you have on your network relying on a functioning DNS. I am running two pihole instances on separate hardware in a keepalived virtual IP setup, with a replicated configuration. Sounds complicated, but it's really easy.

It's just nice to be able to reboot or perform maintenance on my pihole knowing it won't impact DNS, and not having to worry about interrupting my girlfriend streaming her Netflix series or whatever. For example, just a couple of weeks ago I converted my bare-metal pihole installation to a dockerized one, which was a couple of hours of work, without any DNS downtime at all.

It isn't so much about the payload of the DNS requests, but about the content that would have been loaded if the DNS request hadn't been blocked.

If you load a page that has 100kB of useful information, but 1MB of banner ads and trackers ... you've blocked a lot more than 66%. But if you block 1MB of banner ads on a page that hosts a 200MB video, you've blocked a lot less.

Also a 66% blocked percentage seems very high. I have installed pihole on 2 networks, and I'm seeing 1.7% on my own network, but I do run uBlock on almost everything which catches most stuff before it reaches the pihole, and 25% on the other network.

Misleading statement. It doesn't block "traffic", it blocks DNS requests... you don't know how much traffic this corresponds to.

So you can't become root on your system unless you switch to that tty? That sounds like a gigantic pain in the ass.

Me use apt. Why use many letter when few letter do trick?

I ... have no problems with that. I wouldn't do what you do, but it's your server and kate's a good GUI editor. I use it too when I'm in a GUI workflow. The only issue I have with kate is that it hangs if a mountpoint (NFS or Samba share) is temporarily unavailable.

Personally I am of the nonanoist denomination. I will curse all the demons of hell when on a new system I type vipw or systemctl edit some.service and I am unexpectedly faced with the demon called nano. Words cannot describe how much I loathe this pityful excuse for an editor, this usurper of editing powers, this illegitimate occupier of the editor symlink. How dare you insult me, the omnipotent god called root, by presenting me with a training tool for novices?!

Fortunately, there are ancient spells that can nullify its powers. 'I command you: be gone Satan', I will utter under my breath as I carefully type in the magic incantation to cast it back into the fiery chasm from whence it came:

apt -y purge nano

The thing is, simple can mean two things, and they are quite often at odds with each other.

It can mean simple to understand, or simple to use.

For example, a piece of software that's just a binary, a config file and a man page describing the config file and the software's behavior is generally quite easy to understand. Like, you can fit the idea of the program entirely into your mind and "comprehend" it, though it may not be easy to use for a novice.

By contrast, a piece of software that contains additional layers for easy of use, like a GUI to edit options, may be simple to use, but not necessarily simple to understand. The additional layers add more complexity that does not contribute to core functionality of the program, it can become unclear what gets changed where when you click on buttons, the config file is likely not documented, human readable or editable, or it may even be a completely opaque configuration database (the registry), ... So making the software more simple to use, often makes it harder to comprehend.

I, and I think many other nerds, like software that is simple in the "comprehensible" sense, we want to be able to wrap our head around it completely and we don't mind putting in a little bit of effort to achieve that comprehension, whereas other people prefer to hit the ground running.

LOL yes, I had a look at those too when I was looking for a more minimal terminal. Noped the fuck out when I read you had to recompile the tools to configure them.

It's not that this is beyond my skill level, but that is just so ... why would I want to do that?

I installed Debian Buster and ran Firefox on my Pentium 3 750 a couple of years ago. It wasn't very fast or very usable, but I ran it.

I mostly use that system for retro games in DOS 6.2 and Windows 98. The Debian installation is my utility OS for when I want to transfer new stuff to the DOS partitions, because it's way easier to connect it to the network.

Communication is key

Sure, but honestly it sounds tiring if this kind of discussion is a recurring thing.