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Comment by bitpush | Hacker News Reader

> In the pre-cloud days, open source worked - authors distributed their software, and everyone "hosted" it for themselves (i.e. ran it on their own PC)

This is just rose tinted vision of the past. None of the software of the past had the capability, reliability or robustness of modern sass.

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Yea. When people talk about how simple things were in the past, I think they oblivious to the fact we were all writing out X11 configs by hand and having them break in all sort of strange and interesting ways. Open source has always been very "I gave it to you for free, I'm not going to hold your hand".

I've written X configs by hand, but only to get a few extra pixels of overscan. I've never needed to do this. My experience has always been that things just work. The UI has never been great, in that I need more explanation than the built-in manuals provide – unlike, say, Windows 95, where you can learn everything you need to know by clicking around – but it's not hard to avoid breaking things, and it's not that hard to learn to do new stuff if you have a good book (or, lately, blog post) to consult.

The amount of sleepless nights because an update broke sound, video or networking on Linux is uncountable. It was fun though.

I'm rather baffled by that statement, with docker its...as easy as its ever been

"capability, reliability or robustness" has nothing to do with ease.

Docker was first released 11 years after AWS though, so I'm not really sure that it counts as "pre-cloud".

Regardless, I agree that Docker has made self-hosting stuff pretty easy, and arguably even easier than it was in the pre-cloud days.

that statement does not make any claims about capability, reliability or robustness. the claims are rather cost and independence.

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