How much is your time worth? “Free” is the cost of the licensing but you take on the role of IT now (in addition to whatever your role in operating the bar is now). If you’re comfortable with being the IT department (managing the infrastructure, applying updates, running and testing backups, watching security notices, troubleshooting when things go wrong, providing user help desk support) then maybe.

I’m comfortable with all of that - I’d still pay for the license if I were using it for a business.

Once you figure out how to do something on NixOS you don’t have to go through all the troubleshooting/learning over and over.

That’s how learning works.

I use VMs a lot for desktops doing development work. It’s certainly possible, with some caveats. Here’s a bit of a knowledge-dump that may be helpful.

Multiple displays can be tricky. If you just want a single monitor you’re fine. But hypervisors have varying support for more than one display and some do it better than others. VirtualBox had the absolute best support for it. Hyper-V has “support” for it but only really if you use their preferred Ubuntu install. I’m not sure how libvirt handles it. Remote display protocols have varying support and can be options - rustdesk seems to support it very nicely (one window per display like VirtualBox) but I’ve had lots of keyboard issues with that.

Running VMs is less efficient, you’ll need more memory in the base system to handle each VM but it sounds like you’re pretty decked out there.

Access to hardware can be tricky. Hyper-V sucks at this - don’t use it if you can help it. I’ve never quite done gaming in a VM but I suspect this would be the most problematic. I have done libvirt pass-through of an nvidia card but only for video encoding/decoding with Jellyfin - which does work just fine. But VM displays tend not to be well accelerated so I would expect other issues. As an example my hyper-v Linux guest can’t play video above a small resolution without the audio skipping and losing track.

I’d avoid Hyper-V entirely. It absolutely sucks as a desktop environment. It relies heavily on RDP “enhanced mode” for everything, has shitty support for hardware pass-through, etc. Just a complete fail.

VirtualBox was really quite good for a desktop environment - but Oracle is more lawfirm than software company these days. There are hidden license issues with using any extensions (for, e.g. accelerated displays).

Libvirt I don’t have as much experience with unfortunately. I’ve usually emulated Linux on Windows not the other way 'round.

This only works for simple workstation stuff, not for power users trying to get max performance.

This is quite untrue. I do professional development work in a hypervisor VM. It’s not “as fast” as native but it’s more than adequate.

As the saying goes, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Meh - I’m pretty confident this sort of rant is well worth ignoring.

That was long before I even noticed how disgusting people many Rust programmers are.

His entire argument is rather undercut by his grandpa-level ranting about “discord” and the use of JavaScript on rust forums.

Link local adresses.

You can do gaining in literally any distro. My pop install runs steam just fine.

No. People here grossly underestimate the performance of hdds. Streaming is an easy task for hdds.

No - you shouldn’t be putting bash <(curl ...) into a post and telling people to run it at all. It’s bad and shouldn’t be normalized in any way. Take. It. Down.

Please do not normalize running scripts directly from websites.

Is there one distro that can do all these?

Yes, basically all of them.

Asking open-ended distro questions means you’re just going to get a list of people’s personal preferences stated as “facts”.

Yes, I already agreed with you…

Ehh, yeah, it used to work fine. You’re right that is a much harder things to do these days

You only need a static address for hosting email or VoIP.

Email works fine with non-static IP addresses. I suspect VoIP does too.

Not sure if it’s exactly what you’re looking for - but subsonic/airsonic/etc. can do on-the-fly conversions when downloading to mobile devices. There are several mobile apps available that will cache files locally as well.

God I hate those. The worst way to distribute apps.

After opening things up more on Plebbit/Seedit, we got hit pretty hard with spam and some NSFW content. It got out of hand fast and honestly, its worse than we expected.

It’s a p2p decentralized social network. I’m honestly surprised you got anything that’s not kiddie porn and drug spam.

Seedit is a serverless, adminless, decentralized reddit alternative. Seedit is a client (interface) for the Plebbit protocol, which is a decentralized social network where anyone can create and fully own unstoppable communities.

In the plebbit protocol, a seedit community is called a subplebbit. To run a subplebbit, you can choose between two options:

First, they take the dinglebop, and they smooth it out with a bunch of schleem. The schleem is then repurposed for later batches. They take the dinglebop and they push it through the grumbo, where the fleeb is rubbed against it. It’s important that the fleeb is rubbed, because the fleeb has all of the fleeb juice. Then a schlami shows up, and he rubs it and spits on it. They cut the fleeb. There’s several hizzards in the way. The blamfs rub against the chumbles. And the ploobis and grumbo are shaved away. That leaves you with a regular old plumbus.

Yes