The cables seem to increase exponentially don’t they? First, you have a few computers and a half dozen cables powering things and linking everything together, then you add a couple servers, maybe a second nic on your NAS, and another switch or two since things are now further from the router. Suddenly your office looks like a giant bowl of spaghetti covered in prop 65 stickers.

I think they’d love it if all us poor’s died of preventable disease, violent crime, died in their wars, starved to death in food deserts, or willingly subjugated ourselves to become their servants and concubines. If only the rich are left, then essentially the game starts over again.

The enlightened poors want to remove the top 10% of the pyramid; the rich don’t care what happens to the bottom 90% as long as they get to keep growing their money, power, and control.

If we stop buying their products, stop working in their businesses, stop consuming their media, and start reappropriating their assets, the balance of power would shift very quickly.

Having said that, I’m a hypocrite who bought something off Amazon in the last 3 months, works for a megacorp, and continues to use big tech in many aspects of my life out of convenience. I’ve maybe made 20% of the changes I need to make to feel happy about my level of ideological purity and I have an advantage because I understand computers, philosophy, and politics better than most normies in my life.

I run a beelink mini, not the weakest one, not the most powerful one, and it handles docker containers and VMs fine. I don’t have a tkn of integrated storage, but rather this machine handles apps while a separate NAS does all the file storage. Most I ever had running was 2 VMs and a handful of negligible docker containers but I still had plenty of ram and CPU to spare. I also think the minisforum stuff looks good. Their n5 pro nas just came out and would have made a good server with room to grow. I decided against it because I have parts and I want to use them :-) so the beelink is holding down the fort while I Frankenstein together a rig from my old gaming PC in a huge case that will host all my apps and less critical media. Home assistant which will stay on the beelink because it needs high availability. I’ve been curious how the lowest priced minisforum models would fare.

Strawberry is great and so was Clementine before it. It’s really a step up compared to what the average distro bakes into their default bundle of applications.

Interesting username. Are you a fellow student of Internet Comment Etiquette?

I know at least some of my containers use Postgres. Glad to know I inadvertently might have made it easier on myself. I’ll have to look into the users for the db and db containers. I’m a bit lost on that. I know my db has a username and pass I set in the docker compose file and that the process is running with a particular GID UID or whatever. Is that what your talking about?

I miss this from cloud hosting. It’s helpful to be able to save, clone, or do whatever with the current machine state and easily just flash back to where you were if you mess something up. Might be too much to set up for my current homelab though. My server does have btrfs snapshots of everything directly in grub which has let me roll back a few big screwups here and there.

That was my first thought. How do you keep it cold enough to run in a place like Arizona, Spain, or Mexico? It also reminded me of my Windows Mobile days before I had a smartphone when someone on a Windows Mobile forum took a Dell Axim x51v and built a dock for it that exposed all the ports so he could use it with an external display as an infotainment/nav system. He called it the Aximizer. An old android phone with a micro-hdmi port might be the modern equivilant.

https://youtu.be/ELANGsiaq5M

Went through and verified that a number of things were backing up and updating correctly. I feel a little less weight on my shoulders knowing things are working as they should.

I followed a similar path. When I was on Gnome I hated plasma. When Gnome 3 dropped I tried a bunch of stuff like Cinnamon, Budgie, Xfce, Lxde, etc. and settled on Plasma which has only continued to be great over the hears. I value the tweaks and the fact that it can be configured 100% desktop centric without a bunch of touch/convergence stuff getting in the way.

I appreciate their philosophy. I’ve been a Linux user since the early 2000s and have cycled through 30-40 distros at least. I’m not a highly technical user. I would consider myself a solid intermediate. For a daily use system I prefer arch, but my servers run Debian. Most of the people writing install guides for the software I deploy seem to use Debian so I run into less issues this way. It can be hard to follow a guide for Gentoo when you’re using Hanna Montana Linux, know what I’m saying? Same thing with Debian. It’s just a solid choice with the bonus of having a better, more ethical philosophy, and the benefit of being widely adopted and supported by people who can help when you get stuck. I don’t even mind gnome on my servers since it works well with a single screen and it’s super rare that I actually need the server GUI anyway.

Willingness to independently learn and the capacity to let the frustration roll off of you. You will occasionally want to bang your head against the wall, but give yourself the grace to learn.

No shade to Gnome, because there is a place for them in the ecosystem, but this is why I moved from Gnome 2 to KDE (with a few stops along the way). One size will not fit all.

KDE for the desktop and xfce for the laptop

It might be a dumb question, but how does it have it’s own OS like a NAS, or is it basically a box attached to the host and everything is done via software? I encountered some confusion between enclosures, DAS, USB array and some of the other terms I was seeing.

Huh, I hadn’t heard of CachyOS. It seems like everyone went Arch>Manjaro>EndeavorOS. It looks good from the screenshots and I like seeing my favorite DE/WMs in there. If I don’t know what any of those acronyms and technical terms on their page mean, would I still get something out of it? I’m about due for my every-few-months wipe and reinstall.

We’ve been on similar journeys. I started with Ubuntu Warty Warthog and happily remember all the desktop effects lost to time (emerald window decorations anybody?). I went through a Windows phase and settled back into Linux. My newest epoch is the age of self hosting and I’ve been learning a lot especially since the advent of Lemmy. I also play games, but I’ve been using a fully segregated Windows PC for that, though I’ve used Linux in the past.

The last time someone asked this question a lot of people said Mint packages are too out of date. I love Mint, I used Mint for several years, but the graphic driver stuff seems to depend on being very up to date. Someone else could probably explain it better than me. Perhaps it’s not relevant anymore, but I would look into it.

As for KDE, it’s really good now. I used to cling HARD to Gnome back in the old days and really disliked KDE, but things really got shaken up and KDE has been absurdly good for a few releases now. The steam deck even uses it. Also, a lot more distros seem to have releases for more than one desktop environment now. I guess what I’m trying to say is stuff you used to like may suck now and stuff that used to suck could be S-tier. Good luck getting back into Linux. Don’t get discouraged. It’s gotten a lot easier since old timers like us were hacking around on Ubuntu in the early 2000s.

Has friend 2 set his name servers to something custom, or is he using your network’s default? My partner uses an iPhone and it has some sort of built in DNS so she doesn’t benefit from me installing DNS based adblock on the network. You could see if a similar thing is at play.

I’ve been a Linux user since 2005ish and a DJ since at least 2013. I’ve tried a lot of music players including Rythmbox. I settled on Clementine/Strawberry or Amorok, depending on use case. Haven’t used either of them recently.

With that said, there is no right answer. Find one you like!

You can sync Obsidian with your own storage location. There are plugins to do a lot of what you’re asking for. Downside is that it’s not open source, though your content is all stored in plaintext so you won’t lose it due to lock-in. It also might be more than your asking for and a simpler, more tailored, solution may be out there. Paired with a self hosted Nextcloud server, you may solve a bunch of your PIM needs at once.

I’m in the same boat. I have to change it every now and then to break the visual fatigue of staring at the same theme for weeks. I miss Compiz with Emerald and whatever we were using 5-10 years ago. Themes are less transformative nowadays. I used to have crazy themed and now it’s hard to find something that isn’t just a recolor of a fairly plain theme.

Having said that, someone shared this great theme roundup here on Lemmy a while back. I used the purple one and now the Solaris color one. https://quickfix.es/2023/10/going-off-theme-the-prologue/