I know exactly what you mean. Just for general information, I’ve found another android client that I think it’s better than Conversations. It’s called Monocles chat (and it’s on f-droid). On matrix/xmpp I install the whatsapp bridge. I can convert a few close family members but no way everyone. For me it’s an acceptable compromise. I get the close members to use my servers/apps, everyone else through the bridge so I can at least have all the chat in one place

Why not host your own git repo (e.g. gitea) so you can do 2 or 4 without opening services outside?

The chat server (matrix and xmpp have different ones, but same functionality) that act like a whatsapp desktop client. Have you ever run whatsapp desktop client on your pc, where you have to pair it with your phone? Same thing, but you do it withing a special “bridge” (usually as a bot) in matrix or xmpp. So you get all the messages in one place. But it doesn’t work for calls, just for messages.

Frienda no, but I do use whatsapp bridges so I can have all conversations in one place.

Family with extreme nagging, and because I’m the IT guy of the house so they kinda trust me/can’t be bothered to try and out-talk me.

Gajim on pc (I use arch btw - well endeavourOS because I can’t be bothered) and don’t remember what on android (there is the full list or clients and capabilities on xmpp.org)

No.

Yeah ok. First of all, because I can 😁. I mean z what’s good being an IT nerd if I can’t change stuff when I want?

Jokes aside, I’ve been reading more recently on matrix and looks like there are some security issues in the design of the app/protocol. I’m on mobile now, I’ll look for sources when I’m on pc. Also I don’t like that it is a server centric system (so data is primarily on the server instead of the clients). Also it takes more resources than I was expecting. For less than 10 users I can’t have less than 4gb of ram (on a dedicated debian server, running docker) or it swaps so much it kills the system.

So basically I’m testing out if xmpp is a better system for those issues.

I’ve been using matrix for years to this purpose, but moving to xmpp/prosody now

Having multiple interfaces in each vm can lead to issues with routing if you screw something up.

Like you said I’d expose the services via reverse proxy in the public vlan, and enable ssh access on the firewall only from a jumpbox or the ip of your pc (or maybe the vlan you are in).

well ROCM is supported in Linux https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-linux/en/latest/

I’ve installed it on my (single) AMD GPU (I thought it was for something else) on EndeavourOS (which is, obvs, arch btw :D).

I’ve been using endeavourOS for about 1y now, after a few years of Mint (and 20years of everything else. Yes, I’ve used gentoo as well back when it was only install from stage1). It does feel faster (on the same hw) but I’ve never done any real benchmarking, so it could be just “new shiny feeling faster”. I’ve found an article a few weeks ago comparing boot/compression speeds of different distros. In your particular case I wouldn’t be using Debian as I feel you’d need quite up-to-date drivers, and Debian is conservative (and that’s a good thing personally, I use it on my servers).

I’ve been told that zerotier is even better. Haven’t tried it myself (it looks more complicated to selfhost) but the guy suggesting it knows waaaaay more than me on these things. Just if you want to look into another option.

For what it’s worth (from a random guy on the internet) selt-hosting tailscale is quite easy! 🙂

I’m self hosting headscale (foss implementation of tailscale control server) for this scenario. Works great!

I had a 2cv. I still miss it. I don’t miss slack

Gentoo. Good idea on paper, takes a lot of time to get ready for arguable benefits

I always say, an OS is a tool, not a religion. I use Linux at home 98% of the time because it fits what I need to do and it’s snappier than Windows on my hardware and gives me more control, or maybe I know better how to do certain things in Linux nowadays that I’ve left Windows mostly behind. I use Windows at work because that’s what dictated, and also because MS Visio is only on Windows (I could use MacOS with Omnigraffle, but Macs are not available at my pay grade. Whatever). They pay me to work and be productive, and this means using Outlook/Teams, AD SSO integration with Edge, all the VPNs/network control/DLP agents. And luckily now I can use Linux subsystem in Windows, so I can work on the cli when I need to do something fancy. They don’t pay me to spend hours trying to find a way to work with their systems other than what’s supported.

On the topic at hand (bootloader issues). Never had a problem personally, but Iast time I did proper dual booting (on the same drive) was with Windows8.1. Now I have different drives, with the bios configured to boot from the drive with Linux. If I want to boot on Windows 10 I actually have to change the boot sequence. And even then there is grub (from an old dual boot setup).

sorry for late reply. So far is great. I can feed it custom paths on my NAS and it doesn’t touch the pictures/import them/etc. (which was the main requirement for me). It just works with what you feed it. Face recognition is good. Search is good. The 3rd party app (uhuru photos) is not great, but still under development. But the mobile interface works anyway well enough.

I have been using opnsense on a very cheap celeron nuc for a few years, very happy with it

As everyone said, debian. I use it for my mail server, the docker server, podman server, matrix, headscale. On docker I also have nvidia drivers for hardware video decoding in jellyfin.

I tried immich, photoprism and piwigo. I settled with librephotos. Iirc it was because of the face recognition capabilities and read the photos from my nas.

I know it’s a typo, but Sustemd would be great for AmogOS! 😂

I would argue that adding a software to start at boot is either a software installation process, or a management policy process. No regular Windows user has ever asked me how to start a software automatically at boot/login (and as the “IT guy” I had a LOT of friends and people asking me all sort of things). Also, you are talking about “being in the same place for 25 years”. This is not an interface issue, is an habit issue. In the past 25 years how to start things at boot has changed from init.d scripts to systemd (yeah yeah, let’s not start about systemd now, I don’t care), but one new “skill” to learn in 25 years is not a big deal. You learnt how to do it in win98 and never had to learn a new thing. I’ve learnt how to do it in init.d, and had to slightly change once. And I could probably still use init.d, but I went with the flow.

Show me how to mount drive so that it will be available for ALL the apps I install, without touching terminal in Linux

Hum, all of them I’ve been using in the past 10-15 years, under Gnome and Cinnamon. Unless I misunderstood your point, it’s been a feature for a long time. I don’t like the terminal, I have to look up the options for commands all the time because I forget them all the time. Even symlinks now I can create from the file explorer (yes, ln -sf is quicker, but I never remember if it’s target then name or the other way around).

The problem I see with linux is fragmentation, the internal culture wars, so every (major) distro is slightly different. On the other hand, at least there is differentiation, and you can use the best distro for the job at hand. I wouldn’t use Linux Mint for a server (yes, you COULD, but it’s not its native use case), but my dad has been using it happily for the past 10 years (and Redhat and Ubuntu before that) with minimal supervision.

I’ve seen people entering the workforce without knowing how to use Windows (either IT illiterate or coming from MacOS), so it would be the same to them learning a Gnome menu or Windows menu (sorry, I’ve never used KDE, it’s a long story, but I guess the same would apply).

For enterprise is cost of support and ecosystem. There are (or at least there were) less tools to manage a Linux desktop fleet than a Windows one. And I suppose (but really speculating at this point) that a Linux engineer with those skills costs more than a Windows one (as they are more scarce).