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Linux system administrators have seen remarkable salary growth leading into 2025, with the increasing reliance on Linux in enterprise IT and emerging technologies driving up demand significantly. The current average salary of $80,000 annually represents not just a number, but a reflection of how critical Linux expertise has become in today's technology landscape. This growth trajectory has been consistent and purposeful, supported by the fundamental role Linux plays in cloud computing, containerization, and modern DevOps practices.

Open-source software is built on contributions from both volunteers and corporations, but an emerging body of research and commentary suggests that unpaid or underpaid contributors are often exploited to sustain enterprise-backed projects. Companies frequently benefit from community labor under the pretexts of "learning opportunities," "future job prospects," "developer prestige," or doing "service" for the community. Below, we examine evidence of this dynamic across major projects and foundations, and how ideological frameworks like meritocracy help justify the extraction of free labor.

Linux's openness has led to a rich variety of distributions ("distros") – different variants of the operating system tailored to diverse preferences. This fragmentation of desktop Linux is often seen as a double-edged sword. On one hand, it provides users and developers with choice and fosters innovation; on the other, it can pose challenges for software compatibility, user adoption, and developer effort. In this report, we delve into the current state of Linux fragmentation with recent statistics, developer insights, commentary from Linux leaders, and a look at efforts to standardize the ecosystem.

Containers have revolutionized how we develop, test, and deploy applications. While Docker is the most well-known containerization technology, Podman offers a compelling alternative that doesn’t require a daemon running in the background. Podman is a free and open-source container engine that’s compatible with Docker while providing additional security benefits through its daemonless and rootless design. This tutorial will walk you through setting up Podman on Ubuntu and getting started with basic container operations.

Ubuntu systems rely on APT (Advanced Package Tool) for package management. While APT is powerful, its output can be overwhelming and difficult to parse at a glance. Enter Nala, a frontend for the APT package manager that offers a more user-friendly experience with cleaner output, parallel downloads, and useful quality-of-life features. If you’ve ever been frustrated by APT’s verbose and sometimes confusing output, Nala might be the tool you’ve been looking for in Ubuntu 24.04 and newer versions.

Running AI models locally provides enhanced privacy, reduced latency, and complete control over your infrastructure. In this guide, we’ll walk through setting up DeepSeek models (like DeepSeek-R1) inside a Proxmox virtual machine with GPU passthrough. This configuration allows the AI model to access your NVIDIA GPU directly for significantly improved performance.

GNOME is probably the most used desktop environment on Linux; its latest iteration (codename “Bengaluru”), ships with many performance improvements and some new features, as the ability to limit the battery charge straight from the “control center”, in order to preserve its health and increase its lifespan. By default, when this feature is active, a battery will start charging only when under 75% of its capacity, and will stop charging when it reaches 80%. In this tutorial, we learn how to replace those values with custom ones.

Managing storage in Proxmox VE can be challenging, especially when disk space usage doesn’t match expectations. This guide provides practical commands to analyze Proxmox storage from the Linux command line, identify space usage by virtual machines and containers, detect unaccounted storage space, and troubleshoot common storage issues to help optimize your Proxmox environment.

Self-hosted budgeting applications provide complete control over your financial data while offering powerful tools to manage your personal finances. Firefly III is one of the best open-source options available, featuring comprehensive expense tracking, budgeting capabilities, and insightful reporting. This tutorial will guide you through setting up Firefly III using Docker on Debian or Ubuntu systems.

When talking about backup solutions, on Linux we are spoiled for choice: in the previous tutorials, for example, we talked about creating encrypted and efficient backups with Borg and Restic. Kopia is another free and open source alternative to those applications: it is written in Go, and it is able to create secure backups, both to local filesystems and to cloud-based storage services like Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Backblaze B2 and Google Cloud Storage. Unlike Borg and Restic, Kopia comes also with an officially supported GUI interface: KopiaUI.

Setting colors in your Bash scripts can significantly enhance the visual output, making it easier for users to follow along. In this article, we will explore how to set different colors in your Bash scripts to highlight information, errors, or simply to beautify the console output.

The Docker pull command is one of the essential commands that allows users to download container images from a registry to their local machine. This command is often the first step in the container deployment workflow, enabling developers to retrieve pre-built images before running containers. As part of the core set of Docker basic commands, understanding how to effectively use the docker pull command is essential for anyone working with containerized applications.

Monitoring is a critical component of any infrastructure setup. Prometheus and Grafana are powerful open-source tools that work together to provide robust monitoring and visualization capabilities. This tutorial guides you through setting up Prometheus on one server and Grafana on another, creating a distributed monitoring system.

Docker has revolutionized application deployment by enabling consistent environments across development and production. At the heart of Docker is the Dockerfile, a script containing instructions to build an image. However, creating efficient Dockerfiles requires understanding certain best practices and avoiding common pitfalls. This tutorial will guide you through Dockerfile optimization techniques and help you troubleshoot common errors.

In the Linux world, your choice of shell can significantly enhance your command-line experience. While Bash is the default shell on most Linux distributions including Debian and Ubuntu, the Z shell (Zsh) with the Oh My Zsh framework offers a more visually appealing and feature-rich alternative that can boost your productivity and make terminal work more enjoyable.

To enhance user privacy and reduce the risk of activity tracking on Linux systems, you can mount temporary directories such as /tmp, /var/tmp, and /var/log in RAM using tmpfs. This ensures these directories are cleared at every reboot, leaving no logs or temp files behind. The tmpfs filesystem is a RAM-based filesystem that stores all data in volatile memory rather than on a persistent storage device, making it ideal for privacy-focused configurations.

Logs are an invaluable aspect of troubleshooting and debugging Docker containers. When running applications within Docker, capturing logs efficiently allows developers to diagnose issues quicker and remediate them effectively. In this article, we will explore various methods to capture and analyze logs from Docker containers to gain insights into their behavior and resolve any arising issues.

Docker is an essential tool for developers and system administrators working with containerized applications. This guide provides a comprehensive overview of Docker’s basic commands on Linux, covering everything from creating and managing containers to troubleshooting common issues.

Checking if Docker is running on your Linux system is crucial for managing containerized applications effectively. Understanding how to verify the status of Docker can help mitigate issues with your Docker environment, especially during development and deployment.

Sorting the output of docker ps can be helpful when you’re managing multiple containers and need a clearer view of what’s running. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through creating a Bash function that organizes this output in a more readable way using built-in shell tools like awk and sort. This builds upon Docker basic commands like docker ps, docker images, and docker inspect to create more powerful container.