As I said on the first line, no ranking of any kind can be trusted 100%, I pointed out an alternative to distrowatch, and why I would trust it a bit more, not saying I really trust it, or that I believe every result.

It is less popular so it could be a case like OpenMandriva has it integrated to upload automatically for all its users by default, or they found another way to game that ranking.

When I see any ranking, I do research when I see a distro that is suspiciously positioned, and I haven’t heard about outside the place I saw it referenced, and even so I always stick to mainline distros.

Honest results would need a standard way that every distro adopts and make an opt-out (not opt-in) regular upload thing similar to what linux-hardware.org does, and be actively trying to mitigate or deny certain distros or specific actors from tampering with the results, and we don’t have that.

Page rankings, clicks, scripts, etc. are not enough if every device doesn’t ping it in a legitimate way (fake user agent or other means), and there is always the case of people that will opt-out or block this as they don’t want to be tracked.

On your point of something like Alexa Page Rankings, the thing I would add is that, at least for me, if it is a ranking shown by a corporation, it is not trustworthy.

I think there is no ranking site that can be 100% trusted.

That said, I trust linux-hardware.org a bit more than distro watch, even if it’s not as popular, because you have to intentionally download an app/script for it to scan and upload your distro/hardware data (so no page clicks or just traffic, you must have the distro installed), and if you repeatedly try to upload the same distro/hardware data, it doesn’t count multiple uploads on its statistics, if they are not at least a month apart.

Edit: and even on linux-hardware you have strange results like OpenMandriva and ROSA as Distros on top 15, and I have never heard of them outside there, and from what I can find they are somewhat popular in Russia and some parts of Europe

There is an update on the RSS situation of selfh.st; TL, DR: seems to be related to ways to monetize, so now it’s available to paid subscription, but for free have to visit site to read.

https://selfh.st/post/2025-08-08-introducing-member-perks/

As others have already commented, what you need is a Dynamic DNS service, where you register a subdomain, and setup a small program or script on your computer that pings the DDNS server every few minutes, that way you leave that running on the background, and if the program detects that the IP with the request changes, it will update the subdomain to point to it automatically.

You could access the blog from the subdomain of the DDNS directly or if you get your own domain, you can point it to the DDNS.

If you want a recommendation, I have been using DuckDNS for years, and it has been pretty reliable.

what is a good solution to keep a music folder backed up

syncthing (file sync, update: removed this, not needed, actually need a backup solution)

Backup solution, you could use Borg or Restic, they are CLI, but there are also GUI for them

how can I back up my Docker setup in case I screw it up and need to set it all up again?

learn to use Dockage to replace Portainer (done, happy with this)

If you did the switch to Dockge, it might be because you prefer having your docker compose files accessible easily on the filesystem, the question is if you have the persistent data of your containers in bind mounts as well, so they are easy to backup.

I have a git repo of my stacks folder, with all my docker compose files (secrets on env files that are ignored), so that I can track all changes made to them.

Also, I have a script that stops every container while I’m sleeping and triggers backups of the stacks folder and all my bind mount folders, that way I have a daily/weekly backup of all my stuff, and in case something breaks, I can roll back from any of these backups and just docker compose up, and I’m back on track.

An important step, is to frequently check that backups are good, I do this by stopping my main service and running from a different folder with the backed up compose file and bind mounts

Same, have used it for years, both on terminal and with qtpass GUI, on Linux and Windows desktops, the lack of a maintained android client, has me looking into keepassxc and vaultwarden, still haven’t made a switch.

There is an intro video to see the features, is really good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_-hgsX2V0

• Not everyone that uses Linux is against proprietary software or only uses FOSS.
• There are people that just heard of Linux, are just trying it out, or have an issue, and already use Reddit, or is what the search engine points them to go for help, or to ask questions.
• Reddit has a lot more reach for the common people than any other platform at the moment, there are still people that prefer to ask on Reddit, than go to a specific forum or another platform to ask (If I remember right, it still happens with some apps like Jellyfin that moved out of Reddit, but people still ask there)

These are just a few of the reasons that come to my mind.