Maybe one of the Fedora Atomic distros would be up your alley? https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/

I don’t think NixOS meets the bill. You’d be learning and troubleshooting a whole new language just to setup your system and modify the core configuration.

How did you manage to convince them?

Admittedly I’ve only used it with a preconfigured theme and no need for real customization. If you do need those features, I’d imagine the other commenters are correct.

I would also recommend Hugo, and believe it meets your requirements. The header markdown looks very similar to what you wrote, and it has tags. I’m not sure about a tag “cloud” the way you imagine it, but it’s worth looking into.

I think btrfs ticks all your boxes. I would suggest yabsnap for snapshots. Then if you want a backup off-disk use borg or btrfs has a way to transmit (sync) to a remote. Yabsnap has a command which will make a script to restore from backup, which you can review and run.

I have a Canon MX340 (maybe pixma?) that works with gutenprint. The ADF is a bit messed up but it otherwise works as intended. If you have a similar model, it will probably be supported.

I have DS4 working in Arch with Wine. As someone else mentioned, the hid-playstation kmod just worked out of the box. The key for some games to work properly was to add a SDL2 gamepad mapping.

Also see section 3.10 here which may be relevant: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamepad

I have a storage VPS and use Borg backup with Borgmatic. In my case, I have multiple systems in different repos on the remote. There are several providers, such as hetzner, borgbase, and rsync.net that offer borg storage, in the event you don’t want to manage the server yourself.

I believe you can set dolphin to be like this. I have it so I can either double click to go into a folder, or expand it for the tree view.

Both the T14s and X1 Carbon would be good options. I also have an x390 which I quite like.

I don’t know how steamos works, but if it’s arch-based, can you just do pacman -Syu to update?

kitty, nvim, fish, zed, mpv, btop, borg. Weird how all the gone ones have short names. Depending on the system, I would add tlp as well.

For my desktop, I have two disks. One is root, one is home. They are single BTRFS filesystems with automated snapshots, compressions, and a few subvolumes. Works great.

For a laptop, similar but with only a single disk/partition and FDE. Also works well.

Arch on desktop/laptop because I’m very comfortable with it, and I can set it up the way I like.

Debian on servers because it’s stable and nearly everything has a package available, or at least instructions for building.

Same as OP, but I’m not likely to change them out. I’ve tried a lot of distros over the years and this is what works best for me.

You could get started with Qt, specifically the legacy widgets. There are bindings for Python available (pyside or pyqt) if you don’t want to learn C++ or another language right away. You can also port your GUI definitions to other languages at a later date.

Have you been wronged by njalla?

I think having an external owner is preferable.

I know you said consumer GPU, but I run a used Tesla P40. It has 24 GB of vram. The price has gone up since I got it a couple years ago, there might be better options in the same price category. Still, it’s going to be cheaper than a modern full fat consumer gpu, with a reasonable performance hit.

My use case is text generation, chat kind of things. In most cases, the inference is more than fast enough, but it can get slow when swapping out large context lengths.

Mostly I run quantized 8-20B models with the sweet spot being around 12. For specialized use cases outside of general language, you can run more compact models. The general output is quite good, and I would have never had thought it was possible 10 years ago.

ETA: I paid about $200 USD for the P40 a couple years ago, plus the price for a fan and 3d printed shroud.

I would do FDE yeah. My current laptop setup is with systemd-boot and a special initramfs that allows me to unlock it with a yubikey, with fallback to password. Fair warning, this exact configuration is not particularly easy to setup.

There are also modules which enable early network connectivity along with a SSH server, meaning you login and unlock it remotely. I have not tried this.

Debian does not frequently require rebooting under normal circumstances. Kernel updates are not that frequent, and you can usually put it off for a bit if you don’t want to deal with it.

Congrats! I just got a similar running on Arch with a 5700 XT. When I looked at it a couple years ago, it wasn’t really possible. Now, smooth sailing.

Yeah, you can turn off registration without a token. Then, if you want someone to register you can issue them a registration token, or manually create their account.

Federation can be turned on, on a case by case basis.

You can set rooms to invite only and not discoverable. Alternately, you can use an invite-only space that allows users to join rooms from there.

The first two parts are done in the server config, see the synapse docs. The last is done once the server is setup and running as an admin.