Ansible is nice but I’ll repeat (as I said in another thread) it’s kind of advanced and gives a much better return on investment if you manage several hosts, plan to switch hosts regularly, or plan to do regular rebuilds of the environment.

Programming is generally not needed when self-hosting. At best you might learn Ansible, Puppet, Salt, or Terraform, but that’s for advanced scenarios (e.g. easily shifting the workloads between machines or into the cloud).

Learning the ins-and-outs of containers will get you the biggest return on investment. They’re not strictly necessary but most tools will expect that is the common use-case and the community won’t be as much help. Until you know more about containers I would also recommend Docker over Podman. It has a few more “conveniences” than Podman and orgs like LinuxServer will target Docker as the engine.

Infinite? Nah. I’m sure I’d use the money for good but even well-intended I do think there is such a thing as too much intervention.

I don’t think I encrypt my drives and the main reason is it’s usually not a one-click process. I’m also not sure of the benefits from a personal perspective. If the government gets my drives I assume they’ll crack it in no time. If a hacker gets into my PC or a virus I’m assuming it will run while the drive is in an unencrypted state anyway. So I’m assuming it really only protects me from an unsophisticated attacker stealing my drive or machine.

Please educate me if I got this wrong.

Edit: Thanks for the counter points. I’ll look into activating encryption on my machines if they don’t already have it.

Debian with XFCE works well on my old netbook (~15 yr old).

Played computer games for a few hours in a non-ergonomic position and instead of taking breaks or resetting my position I just powered through. So off and on for the last 6 years I’ve had chronic pain in my elbows.

Nah, that’s where the puppets live. The puppet masters are all over the place.

As long as you use bash in your shebang you won’t know the difference. Fish even has conventions for applying environment variables to be available in both shells. I’ve used Fish for a couple years and my biggest gripe (which is still minor) is that command snippets off the Internet don’t always work. In those cases I either switch to bash temporarily or fix the command to work in Fish.

Most smaller brands don’t have the excess funds to lobby, etc.

Not sure I’ve seen the same latency with installing things but I’ve also layered very little. Doing things the immutable way is definitely more challenging but I don’t mind the challenge. I think I have more fun configuring than actually using my system.

I’ve been mostly happy with Bazzite (Fedora based) but sometimes the immutability aspect can be frustrating. I might say any old distro with a regular Timeshift backup is good enough. OP already said they tried Mint, which works well with Timeshift, and I don’t know if it’s improved with it’s update frequency.

Converting CO² back to O² by atom smashing.

I agree. This can’t be the solution. It also doesn’t not have to be part of it either.

With a bit of a double-entendre, “It powers the world”, since it’s the most common server platform.

More funny: “It’s not an OS. It’s a hobby.”

Yarn and Tamagotchi. 😒

I get to sleep in on Sundays. Otherwise it’s basically the same as how I was brought up.

Right. When a request comes in, Traefik, for one, will hold the connection until the service is back up then forward the request as usual. This works for UIs as well. You’ll get a temporary loading page then redirected to the requested UI when the service is up.

It probably would work well with those as long as the startup time was quick (my containers come up almost instantly) and the initiating clients can handle a bit of latency. I didn’t notice any hiccups in my use at all.

Not useful on its own but https://sablierapp.dev/ was really useful for me in getting back resources from some of the heavyweight containers I use. For those unfamiliar with it, Sablier can stop containers that go idle and then spin them back up automatically when a request comes in. It requires Traefik, NGINX, or Caddy running always so it could complicate your server but for me I couldn’t do without it.

Printing and scanning. I only print like one thing every couple months and scan things every 6 months, but a backlog is growing. My printer is over 10 years old but it worked well on Windows. Despite their site saying it supports Linux I just can’t get it to print or acknowledge any data is being sent. I’m contemplating a newer printer since deals are going on right now.

Update: Woooo! After a few weeks of fiddling with the install scripts and CUPS config I got something to print via Linux! That being said I’m upgrading, not giving up, to a new EcoTank printer.