hendrik

I went with the option with keyfiles. I keep backups of LUKS headers and keyfile in case a harddisk gets damaged. Currently have that stored as a file attachment in my password manager.

I’ve been using it for quite some time now and I don’t see the issue. I mostly use Gnome and that’s kind of polished and minimalistic(?) looks very cohesive to me. But I believe the same applies to other desktop environments as well. My package manager mostly gets out of the way and I don’t have to pay too much attention to that. I even get browser extensions and all the stuff that ties into another from one and the same distro maintainers. I’ve tried other operating systems as well, but for the other ones I needed to install 50 small utilities to make it usable and those kind of fight each other as well. On Linux, I try to avoid Flatpak and I wouldn’t use Snap at all. We still(?) have most software available as proper packages.

I can see how image editing might be an issue. We have what we have and for the rest you need to get one of the commercial products running.

I use KaniDM and configured everything with OAuth2. That was the easiest and most straightforward I could find. But I don’t think they bothered implementing LDAP. Other platforms I tried are Authentik, Authelia, Keycloak, Zitadel… They’re all a bit heavier and have other/more features, but there wasn’t one I really fell in love with.

I’d say use something like zeroconf(?) for local computer names. Or give them names in either your dns forwarder (router), hosts file or ssh config. Along with shell autocompletion, that might do the job. I use scp, rsync and I have a NFS share on the NAS and some bookmarks in Gnome’s file manager, so i just click on that or type in scp or rsync with the target computer’s name.

I’m not sure about anything useful. Best thing would probably be to install Linux and donate them to people in need. For experimentation, sure, set up a Beowulf Cluster, learn FreeBSD, Orchestration, Kubernetes, Ansible… Use them to test your microservice architecture software projects, software-defined networking…

I get a lot of ads everywhere. And trackers. On most of the news sites, social media platforms, my email provider, .places where I look up information, … The majority of the internet is commercial and financed through advertisements. With few exceptions, like personal/indie blogs and places like this one. I mean if you read just blogs and Wikipedia, you might already be alright. But that’s not how 99% of people use the internet.

Yeah, Youtube ads won’t be blocked by a DNS blocker. You need a browser plugin for that. I use Firefox, uBlock and Sponsorblock. That removes most of the ads everywhere, including Youtube.

Well, it’s a mass-produced, embedded device, designed to do one specific task. I guess lots of the video related stuff is assisted by hardware and they usually strip down the embedded Linux to the minimum needed. Because every Megabyte of storage costs extra and they need to hit some 99,- or 89,- price point. Furthermore, they don’t want it to boot for 20 seconds, so these devices generally don’t contain any extras. Similar things happen on wifi routers, the ones below $100 usually contain similar amounts of memory (or less). At least the last time I bought one.

Google the product name and Linux. If nothing turns up, you need to find the name of the SoC / processor and google that. Find out if it’s supported by Linux and what other people did to install Linux. You might need additional hardware though, like a serial or JTAG adapter and a soldering iron. Plus the required expertise. And I must warn you, that thing has 1 GB of RAM and 256MB(!) of flash storage. You won’t be able to do much with those specs. Like a slow FTP server or one small website or a few other tiny services which don’t use a lot of resources.

I think Baikal or Radicale would be the usual contenders for that

SATA is more reliable than USB. And SSDs are faster, but more expensive than a harddrive. In the end all of this is possible. You need to see how much space you need and what you can afford. Unless you need it to be quiet/silent or super fast, a regular harddrive might do.

With the minute difference that we actually have salvation to offer, and it’s not just some scam or a made up product… 😆

Nice that you were able to fix it. I think writing systemd unit files is a super useful skill. And systemd is a powerful tool. With the dozens of different things it can do and monitor for you.

I usually give each separate service its own user account. So teamspeak would get a teamspeak user and group and I’d write a system unit file to start it as User=teamspeak and Group=teamspeak. That’s also what you’ll find in most tutorials. But you can do it your way (as a user service), too. Whichever makes it easier to maintain and administer the stuff. I guess with the user sessions, you’d have to log in with that user(?) and the way I do it, everything runs completely unattended at system start and I never log in with those user accounts.

You don’t need to write any Before= or After= directives, unless you want to set up or tear down some environment for these services. Maybe have a look at an example for a service file for teamspeak, the arch wiki says there is some example out there. I don’t use it myself, as it’s not Free Software, but good luck convincing your friends to switch to Mumble😅

I think as written, I’d say these words are more FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt)

And I’ve been running servers for quite some time as well. SearXNG seems rock solid. And it’s tested. And when I had security issues in general, it was because we didn’t do timely updates. I haven’t really ever been affected by zero days in my hobby linux endeavours. Okay, we had a few nasty things in some more fundamental building blocks and sometimes people using slower distributions had been fine… But I don’t think it applies here. With these kinds of things, the latest stable release is your best bet. Not a previous version with bugs in it, which have been fixed since. And especially not an unmaintained project.

They’re likely referring to the sentences outlining the differences between searx and SearXNG in searX README (archived Github repo). I think it was about some feature to report bugs to the project. And NG having a faster pace of development.

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair
• https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/GRUB_2/Reparatur/

I’d say Live-CD/USB and use the recovery mode to fix GRUB. Grub has to appear so thet’s the first issue. If you’re lucky it’s the only one and you can skip the more complicated steps.

Difficult to tell what this is about. I’d say ideally, we have people keeping an eye on Firefox, and some forks available, so we know what the program code actually does and not just rely on reading their legalese. I mean ultimately, that’s what open source is about. But yeah, not a nice move. Any maybe too unspecific to apply in some jurisdictions. I don’t have the slightest clue what “help me experience online content” means, so I’d say it may be void where I live, as I can’t know what I’m agreeing to.

I’d say if it’s as power hungry as people say, it’d maybe make a good on-demand backup solution. Install some NAS distribution and power it on once a month, make backups of your *arred collection and your laptop/workstation and shut it off again.

I’m with netcup.com and I’ve been happy. But some people complained their support isn’t the best and they sometimes don’t answer. I’m not sure about the details as I’ve never needed support. Maybe you want to ask someone else. And make sure to choose the correct server location as most of their servers are located in Europe and you don’t want that latency if you’re living in the USA.

I mean you can host anything. It’s just not reachable from the outside. And Fediverse or anything that gets data pushed in, won’t work. The common method to handle all of this is to use some tunnelling solution.