Samba VS Node RED

Samba

The TLDR is that you create the filesystem on Linux/Raspberry Pi. Then you "export" that file system via some software to remote computers. You can use Samba (https://www.samba.org/) to create CIFS shares which can be mounted by either Linux or Microsoft Windows devices. There are of course other software/protocols you can use to export the filesystems like NFS, iSCSI, CEPHFS, etc; but these are a bit more complicated than what a novice can deploy. I would start with Samba/CIFS and then branch out once you get more experienced.

You could try to use samba via cgo.

I think you want a CIFS/SMB client? A quick search turned up smbc, which looks like it does what you want. All three crates are based on libsmbclient, which is a C implementation from the Samba project.

Remember kids, there is always Samba.

> First, the article doesn't say that "Linux is not ready for the desktop" - or concern itself with this as an abstract question.

Well, it does, but in a sarcastic manner:

"Yeah, let's consider Linux an OS ready for the desktop :-)."

> Also, I find the "GNU/Linux is already ready for the desktop; I and others use it" argument tired. I've used GNU/Linux for the desktop in 1998, but it sure as hell wasn't ready then.

Conversely, that it doesn't work for certain people does not mean that "it is not ready", which the post does state (sarcastically) as I pointed out above.

> Many use cases aside...

I'm not sure how the browsing, docs and email is miserable, maybe you can expand on that. The video editing is indeed a bit limited from my experience too. However, I don't think "limited proprietary options" is a problem. The community largely and specifically avoids proprietary software. Proprietary incursions into the community are generally seen as a negative thing. And for the lack of codecs, software patents for the most part are to blame.

And then it just comes to my original statement; many things stated in the article are non-issues to most Linux users or just falsehoods:

- Neither Mozilla Firefox nor Google Chrome use video decoding and output acceleration in Linux.

Firefox does.

- NVIDIA Optimus technology is a pain

NVIDIA is a pain.

- You don't play games, do you?

I do.

- Linux still has very few native AAA games.

So "it's not ready" because it doesn't have AAA games? What a pitty.

- To be fair you can now run thousands of Windows games through DirectX to Vulkan/OpenGL translation (Wine, Proton, Steam for Linux) but this incurs translation costs and decreases performance sometimes significantly.

No, not 'significantly' for dxvk.

- Also, anti-cheat protection usually doesn't work in Linux.

For good reason. Blame the dev, and don't make it work on Linux.

- Microsoft Office is not available for Linux

Thankfull.

- LibreOffice often has major troubles properly opening, rendering or saving documents created in Microsoft Office.

And whose fault is this? Use ODT.

- Several crucial Windows applications are not available under Linux.

Thankfully. Also, 'crucial' is subjective.

- In 2022 there's still no alternative to Windows Network File Sharing.

It's available since 1992: https://www.samba.org/

- Linux doesn't have a reliably working hassle-free fast native (directly mountable via the kernel; FUSE doesn't cut it) MTP implementation.

I can transfer files to my phone just fine.

- Too many things in Linux require manual configuration using text files.

No.

etc.

I have a media server that runs ubuntu, and today I wanted to copy some files off of it from my windows laptop. But the samba shares weren't showing up in file explorer (but they showed up on fine on my macbook).

brew info samba samba: stable 4.16.0 (bottled) SMB/CIFS file, print, and login server for UNIX https://www.samba.org/ Not installed From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/HEAD/Formula/samba.rb License: GPL-3.0-or-later ==> Dependencies Build: [email protected] ✔ Required: gnutls ✘, krb5 ✔ ==> Caveats To avoid conflicting with macOS system binaries, some files were installed with non-standard name: - smbd: /usr/local/sbin/samba-dot-org-smbd - profiles: /usr/local/bin/samba-dot-org-profiles ==> Analytics install: 1,477 (30 days), 3,287 (90 days), 6,917 (365 days) install-on-request: 1,459 (30 days), 3,246 (90 days), 6,863 (365 days) build-error: 5 (30 days)

Good question.

I expect that we're moving into a phase of AIs talking to AIs, and initially it'll be wasteful (because it'll be mostly English), but eventually, they'll derive their own language and seamlessly upgrade protocols when they determine they're talking to an AI. No clue how that will come about or what that language will look like, but honestly, it's kind of exciting.

Really interesting to think about how they might handle context, as well. Even though we have much bigger context windows (and they'll only get larger), context management is still a resource-management issue, which we'll probably continue to refine, as well. Imagine different strategies for managing both what is brought into the context of each request, as well as what form it could take (level of detail, additional references or commentary on it, etc). Things could get really unreadable even in English, and still be very interpretable for an LLM.

W.r.t. the graph-oriented interfaces, are you thinking something like Node-RED [1]? I'm seeing more and more people mention having LLMs produce non-text or structured outputs, like JSON, UI, and other things. Easy to imagine an LLM that wires together various open-source platforms, on-demand. Something like Node-RED for pipelines/functions, some UI tools for visualization/interactivity, other platforms for messaging, etc...

[1] https://nodered.org/

I skipped to chapter 9 in the article ("Clogged"), and it looked like Pipes failed because it didn't have a large enough team or a well-defined mission. As a result they couldn't offer a super robust product that would lure in enterprise users. "You could not purchase some number of guaranteed-to-work Pipes calls per month" is the quote from the article.

The reason I think that interesting is because that's the model these days for everything from AI tokens to Monday.com seats. It makes me feel like Pipes was before its time.

That said I've been collecting different "business glue" products that are similar to Pipes. To me, like you say, they aren't as interesting, exciting and intuitive as Pipes was, but maybe it just takes a little more digging. I tried to focus on open source tools but some aren't.

- n8n io: https://n8n.io/integrations/mondaycom/

- Node-RED: https://nodered.org/ (just read about this one in this thread)

- trigger dev: trigger.dev

- automatisch.io: https://automatisch.io/docs/

- Activepieces: https://www.activepieces.com/docs/getting-started/introducti...

- Huginn: https://github.com/huginn/huginn

- budibase: https://budibase.com/

- windmill: https://www.windmill.dev/

- tooljet: https://www.tooljet.com/workflows

- Bracket: https://www.usebracket.com/pricing (just SalesForce <-> PostgreSQL)

- Zapier: zapier.com/

Anyway I hope some of these are fun!

Source: https://github.com/node-red/node-red

I believe Node-RED (https://nodered.org/) the way to go. It's just an NPM package to install and you can run it how ever you wish (even on Windows). It has a friendly and helpful community with even the main developers tirelessly answering even beginner level questions. In fact the community forum its THE friendliest forum I've ever been a member of by a large margin. Node-RED's development is supported by the JS Foundation and it's completely free and open source. It's widely used in the industrial automation industry and even integrated by some PLC manufacturers such as Siemens.

Does anyone know if their are plans to implement something like this (or if there are already custom nodes out there). I'd like to experiment with things like looping and incrementing values (like a for loop) for a Ksampler for example. It's only an example though, so I am not looking for a ksampler specific solution; just a generic way to have a variable (e.g. Seed value), run some nodes that use that value, increment the value, and then loop back to the beginning until some sort of condition is met. Node-Red (an event driven node based programming language) has this functionality so it could defintely work in a node based environment such as ComfyUI (see here).