hendrik

That “either” means, it doesn’t matter which path you took, from now on the following text applies to both… So you don’t need to care.

No support for any of the free social media platforms like Lemmy…

Correct answer. There is no general purpose AI model that can fit ino 1GB. These small models exist, but they do very specific small tasks. Sentiment analysis, object detection, word embeddings for vector databases…

For coding, answering questions and generating text, you’d need like 6-8GB minimum. For maths way more than that and they’ll still be throwing dice instead of giving correct answers.

Meh. You’re right… However… Most things will run either Doom or Linux (or both). And nobody cares whether they have been designed to do it, or not. 🐧

I have Linux (OpenWRT) running on a router with 64MB RAM and 16MB of flash storage. And it works flawlessy. Also have Linux on a second WiFi router, my TV (LG WebOS), one phone, a laptop and a computer. (And I forgot about the Raspberry Pi and the VPS.)

Sure. I think there are some areas where self-hosting is kinda mandatory because other solutions don’t fulfill my requirements. But I don’t think a password manager is part of that. It stores the passwords encrypted in the cloud anyways, $0-$10 a year isn’t much and I think Bitwarden has a good track record and you’ll be supporting them. Self-hosting is a nice hobby and I think integral part of a free and democratic culture on the internet. But it doesn’t have to be every tiny tool and everyone. Do it if you like, otherwise it’s fine if you support open source projects by paying a fair price if you want convenience and they offer a good hosted service.

Lots of people like and recommend Bitwarden. I think followed by KeePass on second place.

I self-host stuff because I can, because I learn something while doing it and it gives me control. And I’m running that server anyways, so I might as well install one more service on it. If you don’t want to spend your time managing and maintaining servers and services, go for the official (paid) service. That’ll do, too.

If you’re worried about your internet connection going down, either use a VPS in a datacenter or just use software that syncs to your devices. I think Bitwarden does that, your passwords will be available without an internet connection to your server. They just won’t get synced until the server is reachable again.

Sure. It’s constantly pulling all the posts, comments and likes from potentially hundreds of instances and writing it to it’s database to make it accessible to you once you decide to open Lemmy. It’ll get updates from the network every few seconds (unless all the Americans are asleep) and that’ll cause some database operations on your side.

Concerning the requirements: You’ll need some form of server, and probably a domain name. If you’re doing it at home, make sure you have a proper IP address and can forward ports. I run a Piefed instance, not Lemmy. It uses a few hundreds of megabytes of RAM and a bit of CPU and disk. It doesn’t cache media files as Lemmy does so I can’t comment on the storage size. It’s 3GB for me.

I think about 8 years. I’m not sure. I bought it when 6TB drives were the best value for money. I’ve managed a few other storage systems in my life and usually they fail soon, ideally while still under warranty, or they last quite some time. But there are exceptions. And I’m not entirely up to date anymore. I wouldn’t recommend skimping on backups. At some point in time they will fail. But in my experience it’s completely random. You can’t expect a drive to last like 2 or 5 years. They’ll do whatever they want. And on average last way longer than 2 years or whatever refurbished drives have lasted when they get re-sold.

I’ve had one of my 6TB drives fail this year. And I occasionally hear from my friends or extended family that they have harddisks fail. Sometimes I help scrape off the data on it, if it’s someone who doesn’t do backups. So it definitely happens. Just not super often. And SMART also didn’t warn me this time. All these drives were purchased new. I’m not sure about OP’s question. Maybe I’ll try a refurbished drive myself.

Everything has pros and cons. I’ve seen 3 laptops (of my family) with batteries that looked like a baloon after several years. I’ve subsequently removed or replaced them. I’d definitely check on them every now and then. A UPS is nice. Burning down a house isn’t. I haven’t seen them catch on fire (yet), they supposedly have at least some protection. But definitely get them out of the laptop once they’re dead anyways or don’t look alright. Everyone is responsible to make that decision on their own. Take care.

I usually do the expert install and don’t install a graphical environment in the first place. But your solution should be fine, too. I think you can show running services with systemctl and then disable unneeded ones. For example systemctl disable gdm but there shouldn’t be that much running on a plain Debian anyways.

For powersave I run powertop in auto-tune mode as a systemd service. A description is here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Powertop

Unfortunately, the Debian Wiki doesn’t seem to have a lot on laptop power saving. The Arch wiki has some more (random) info: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management

I’d say do the powertop systemd service on startup, set the multiuser target or disable the login manager and that’s it.

You could use some containerized mail server like Mailcow. They’re pretty alright to set up and should work fine for low volume. At least in my experience. Unless you don’t want to deal with mail yourself, then you should maybe consider a paid service. But I don’t have any experience with those.

Ah okay. I wouldn’t know. I played Minetest instead of Minecraft. And the community there seems to be nice albeit a bit small. I learned a bit of Lua and contributed some smaller fixes to some mods. But I guess the gaming and modding community for propriety games is a bit different than the open source community.

Most open sorce licenses do, not just the GPL. I’m not sure what Minecraft modpackers do. But in the free and open source world, you’ll always find that attribution. Sometimes they have a list who wrote the software and who maintained it for what timespan.

Usually that’s done by the network routing. Add a default(?) route(?) or make the software bind to the vpn interface. I’m not sure. I think firewall rules can do the same thing. If you’re using docker, I’d advise you to use “gluetun” that seems to do everything for you.

Usually people do copyright violation with bittorrent. That means they tend to make sure the routing or dns doesn’t leak anything. I think that’s usually done by running the software inside of some containers or virtualization. If you do that your setup becomes simpler than inventing a dozen or so firewall rules. Either use gluetun or make the container bind to the vpn in its entirety. So practically the same setup everyone uses for pirating, just that you don’t pay for a VPN service, but do that (server) part yourself on your virtual server. Everything else is a good bit more elaborate and complicated…

I think what you’re trying to do is called a VPN. Set up a VPN that tunnels all the torrent traffic to and from the virtual server.

Most people use either Matrix or XMPP. Both work.

There is a nice overview of chat protocols here: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/

I mostly use matrix as of today. I think it’s alright. It’s a bit difficult to explain encryption and device verification to other people… I think that could be designed better. But apart from that it works very well. So does XMPP which I’ve used before that. Have a look at the messenger matrix and all the options before deciding on an ecosystem. I’d take one of the friends and do some evaluation before dragging the whole group in. You can do that with some pre-existing servers before learning how to host the server part.

And btw: With most of them you can just use some public servers. You should do that unless you’re willing to put in the effort to maintain an own server. That’d give you complete control over the infrastructure… But it’s also a liability to maintain a server, do the updates etc for a group of friends and maybe years to come… End to end encryption will keep the content of your messages private, anyways. (If you use it.)

Good point. I think it’s super important to make this decision early on. Whether you want to invest time and do self hosting, or not and you’ll want to use managed services or regular non-free platforms. Doing things by yourself certainly teaches a lot. I do it. And I gain knowledge, independence and I think it’s important to understand the tools I use on a regular basis and not let Apple/Google take care of my life. And since I do a lot of things with computers, I can make good use of the gained knowledge. However I can also feel how someone wouldn’t want to do that. They might have other hobbies, a stressful job or a family and it’s quite some time that I spend digging through configuration files, reading documentation and maintaining stuff. It has to be worth it in some way, or it becomes a liability. And I think that’s not super obvious when starting the journey. I’m glad we have managed services which give independence without spending too much time. But I also prefer going all the way and learning lots of stuff.

Sure. I usually do the same thing. The laptop on which I’m typing right now is a refurbished Dell one and I really prefer a bit older enterprise hardware to new consumer hardware. Nice build quality, no nonsense and Linux runs great on that device. And it cost me a fraction of a new machine. However… with the intended use-case of a media center I’m not sure. Intel always adds hardware acceleration in their iGPUs and the modern codecs are quite demanding. I wouldn’t buy an older generation that doesn’t really support AV1. I’m not sure if hardware from 2 years ago can do that. And if someone buys a new TV set which supports HDR or something and then the recently bought, refurbished media center is out of date again… that also doesn’t help. Maybe I’d buy a new one in this case and just use it for the next 10 years. That’s also sustainable. But yeah, you have to pay attention to the details if you’re buying off-brand. But that also applies to most computer hardware, regardless. It’s a bit more of a lottery with cheap and off-brand devices.