Glad someone made this point. My next printer will definitely be a tank printer. It’s basically flipping the business proposal back to “pay for the printer up front” instead of “pay for the printer whenever you buy ink”. My current printer was cheap enough that I basically spend enough on ink to buy a new printer every few years, given degradation of cartridges when they’re left after opening.

Up until now I’ve been using docker and mostly manually configuring by dumping docker compose files in /opt/whatever and calling it a day. Portainer is running, but I mainly use it for monitoring and occasionally admin tasks. Yesterday though, I spun up machine number 3 and I’m strongly considering setting up something better for provisioning/config. After it’s all set up right, it’s never been a big problem, but there are a couple of bits of initial with that are a bit of a pain (mostly hooking up wireguard, which I use as a tunnel for remote admin and off-site reverse proxying.

Salt is probably the strongest contender for me, though that’s just because I’ve got a bit of experience with it.