Not in my experience. I've run both Windows and Linux for the last decade and Windows is the only OS that I ever have problems with updates wasting my time and breaking things. I've been running image-based Linux for the last two years and the worst case is rebooting to rollback to the last deployment. Before that it was booting a different btrfs snapshot.
Fun aside: I had a hardware failure a few years ago on my old workstation where the first few sectors of every disk got erased. I had Linux up and running in 10 minutes. I just had to recreate the efi partition and regenerate a UKI after mounting my OS from a live USB. Didn't even miss a meeting I had 15 minutes later. I spent hours trying to recover my Windows install. I'm rather familiar with the (largely undocumented) Windows boot process but I just couldn't get it to boot after hours of work. I just gave up and reinstalled windows from scratch and recovered from a restic backup.
My servers are pets not cattle. They are heterogeneous and collected over the years. If I used k8s I'd end up having to mostly pin services to a specific machine anyway. I don't even have a rack: it's just a variety of box shapes stacked on a wire shelf.
At some point I do want to create a purpose built rack for my network equipment and maybe setup some homogenous servers for running k8s or whatever, but it's not a high priority.
I like the idea of podman-systemd being an impl detail of some higher level orchestration. Recent versions of podman support template units now, so in theory you wouldn't even need to create duplicate units to run more than one service.
It works pretty well. I've also found that some AI models are pretty decent at it too. Obviously need to fix up some of the output but the tooling for conversion is much better than when I started.
I've run my homelab with podman-systemd (quadlet) for awhile and every time I investigate a new k8s variant it just isn't worth the extra hassle. As part of my ancient Ansible playbook I just pre-pull images and drop unit files in the right place.
I even run my entire Voron 3D printer stack with podman-systemd so I can update and rollback all the components at once, although I'm looking at switching to mkosi and systemd-sysupdate and just update/rollback the entire disk image at once.
The main issues are:
1. A lot of people just distribute docker-compose files, so you have to convert it to systemd units.
2. A lot of docker images have a variety of complexities around user/privilege setup that you don't need with podman. Sometimes you need to do annoying userns idmapping, especially if a container refuses to run as root and/or switches to another user.
Overall, though, it's way less complicated than any k8s (or k8s variant) setup. It's also nice to have everything integrated into systemd and journald instead of being split in two places.
Oh yeah I agree. There's a lot of fun problems to solve with Minecraft servers. I didn't mean to imply that there are no reasons for good chunk gen. I'm primarily into technical survival so my personal priorities wouldn't be chunk gen.
Chunk gen makes sense to implement last or never. If you want a performant Minecraft server you need to pregen all the chunks anyway. You can still later regen chunks that have never been visited to get new chunkgen on updates since chunks store the inhabited time.
I think Minecraft server re-implementations are pretty neat and I like to see when a new one comes out. There are also specific purpose server impls like MCHPRS for doing fast redstone compilation for technical minecraft.
They're often used in Entity Component System architectures since you have O(1) add/remove/find, & O(n) iteration. Iterations are also packed, which is a bonus for cache efficiency.
Can be difficult to implement well, but the concept is simple and a neat example of a useful specialty data structure. Take a look at https://github.com/skypjack/entt
Fun aside: I had a hardware failure a few years ago on my old workstation where the first few sectors of every disk got erased. I had Linux up and running in 10 minutes. I just had to recreate the efi partition and regenerate a UKI after mounting my OS from a live USB. Didn't even miss a meeting I had 15 minutes later. I spent hours trying to recover my Windows install. I'm rather familiar with the (largely undocumented) Windows boot process but I just couldn't get it to boot after hours of work. I just gave up and reinstalled windows from scratch and recovered from a restic backup.