wltr

To tune the question slightly: what about USB SSD? I thought of doing the same thing for a different PC. (For HTPC.)

‘Oh come on!’ was my initial reaction, but I’ve read your website, and thought: ‘hey, that sounds nice!’

I’m not going to migrate all my Arch boxes (basically all my x86/64 boxes), but I may use it somewhere else, just to test the idea.

I loved the idea of Atomic Fedora, but it did not work seamlessly, and to my experience, it did the opposite: worse than a regular Fedora. I needed to babysit it, and also it didn’t auto switch the previous working system for me. Perhaps it’s me who missed something. As an idea, though, I think that’s what should click to a normie: you tell them to install this distro, get your handful of apps as Flatpaks and forget about the system, as it manages itself.

To keep this topic alive, let me ask you a question: how would you know what’s a working state, so you need to return to the previous one? Does it mean it didn’t boot, or anything else? Just yesterday, I had faced a weird issue: my old trusty MacBook Pro serving as a server now, had no WiFi (it has Ethernet port, but temporarily I cannot use it, so it’s wireless). The broadcom-wl driver switched to linux-headers, which I didn’t have installed. I don’t remember me changing anything, and fortunately that was an easy fix (with an external USB WiFi card): just install Linux headers, and it would rebuild itself. So I’m just curious whether it’s even possible to find out a stupid issue a normie user may face.

On the other hand, perhaps the distros like this are meant to be installed by someone skilled to then be used mostly unattended by a regular user.

Unfortunately, where I am, prices aren’t that generous, but I have an unusual interest in very old hardware, so most of my servers can be bought for like $20 or less. Most of them are junk hardware nobody needs. They’re very useful for many cases, especially if we talk self-hosting / personal servers. I bet you can easily serve a small community with a $20 computer. Recently, I started being very picky about power consumption (we have massive blackouts here in Ukraine, due to the Nazi terrorist state, Russia, shelling our civilian infrastructure; but not just that: power efficient hardware is better for the planet), but one thing that isn’t obvious: you can keep the hardware off when unused. It’s trivial to turn it on, or wake up, depending on the use case.

So, if anyone new reading this, I urge you to try this with any spare computer you can find. You may be surprised how good it may work with Linux (server or even desktop).

I may need to do a proper write up on that one, as it’s quite a long story actually. The main thing is, though: it’s hard to believe how actually good modern hardware is. You can do a lot with a Raspberry Pi, not to say Mac mini. Over the decades, I accumulated some old hardware which serves till it would break. And then I’d replace it with similar hardware, I guess. E.g. I have a media server, which is a simple lighttpd web server running on an obsolete Intel Atom computer. It’s slow, but it does its job at serving files. I have old MacBook Pro hosting my Immich library.

All that is rather a self-hosted territory, but I’m pretty confident I can host a production grade stuff off my own hardware. I have been using the cheapest options at DO/Hetzner, so I definitely can host off a maxed out Mac mini or similar.

All that lives at home, or in the office (I am allowed to have some hardware there). I think the main restriction is the gigabit internet… but hey! That’s plenty too!

If I’d ever come to some serious level of hosting, yes, I think I’d co-locate at some data centre. I see very little need in cloud services, as all I need can be done with the bare metal. And it’s so much fun! Feels like magic, seeing an old laptop you’d throw out otherwise, serving as what would be a full-blown server just two decades ago.

Hetzner was good for me, but I went all-in on bare metal, with no looking back.

My bet is that the tech bros hang in the same bar, and they’re just doing that for fun, and they don’t really care about the plebes not getting it.

Glad I left Digital Ocean like almost a decade ago, yet it still feels I’ve been with them for too long.

If so, I’d rather keep using it with like 10 different accounts (to overcome free limits, when needed) in Firefox containers.

Haven’t used one myself for years (close to a decade). Installed it for a relative about 5 years ago, never maintained it ever since.

What’s wrong with it?

It worked pretty well on an ancient PC which was running some Windows 7 if not XP. Can’t remember really. The relative is about 80 years old, so all he needs is a browser. So, Chrome OS came naturally. The hardest part was, for some really stupid reason Google wants Google account password to be entered upon booting, and not some other password. PIN code didn’t work for us for some reason. The solution I took is we changed the password to his birthday (perhaps with some A letter, if it wants at least one letter to be present). The password included dots, which was trivial to enter with a Numpad. Like A1945.09.05. But personally, I just hate it. There are use cases when you can allow a computer to have no password. Here, Google forced us to use less secure password, out of convenience. I’d prefer to have my Google account having stronger password, and forcing no password of my computer at all. The potential security risk is someone breaking into the house, and surely they’ll be very dumb to steal that computer, to have … what? YouTube history of some old fart? But that’s a bit of a different story anyway.

Me, I’d rather go with some very minimal distro and maybe even kiosk-mode browser, if necessary.

Still, what’s wrong with ChromeOS? Did I miss something important? Beyond Google dropping ‘don’t be evil’ obviously.

Honestly, I don’t understand whether there’s anyone who doesn’t need normal codecs. I hate this part of Fedora, as I always need to remember to install these codecs.

Take a look at the immutable distros like Fedora Silverblue. It would install updates automatically, and has the ability to always rollback to a working version. I haven’t used it long enough to have version upgrades tested. Perhaps it asks for user input. These upgrades happen twice a year.

If I was doing that these days with my current skills, I’d install some minimal version of Arch Linux and probably would remote into it once in a while to update, or invent some simple script to do the updates unattended. The lesser the packages the easier the whole task.

Also, don’t forget there’s Chrome OS which you can install on a regular PC. (It was called Chrome OS Flex last time I did that for a relative.) It’s the easiest I can remember right now. That’s for situations when all they need is actually just a browser. For those cases Chrome OS shines.

If you don’t setup or activate exit node, no traffic is routed through any of your nodes. All you have is the access to the nodes. Which is what you need. I tested exit nodes only recently, they’re very easy to setup as well, but I found no practical need for my use case.

I think installing and logging in should be trivial remotely. Like hey mum, install this app, and log in (trivial with Google or Apple accounts). The rest is on you. Just test the waters yourself first, you’ll get the idea, it’s pretty straightforward. Even if it’s not what you’re looking for, you’d have more information and skills to move to the next thing.

I’d suggest you to investigate either Tailscale or similar solutions. I’m using Tailscale, and it’s really easy to set up. It can automatically connect to the VPN when you access their resource, and the internet works as well. So technically, they can be connected all the time. That’s much safer than the alternative of just opening a port, and dealing with things like CGNAT.

The alternatives to Tailscale I know about are Headscale (which you need self-hosting), Netbird, WireGuard. At least, but there are more.

And search for tunnels as well. You could utilise Cloudflare Tunnel, but I wouldn’t go that way.

I’d suggest testing waters with Tailscale as it’s the easiest, and tweak from there. They have a YouTube channel which helps at starting, I found it just recently. (I use them for a year or two now.)

I keep repeating this for a decade. Buy a used old iPhone (like SE) and get a no fancy phone which is mostly fine for that use case.

While I have no respect for Windows people, it’s interesting to read through their failures. Yeah, do Windows instead of spending bits of your time to make an effort at learning something new.

I mean it, in a non-sarcastic way. You can start with Windows, and if you won’t give up on this hobby, I bet you’d come to some open source system instead at some point. After all, the entire self-hosting point is not in ditching Windows, but ditching proprietary thing corporations lure people to use, to farm their data and money too. And attention, not the least thing. It’s just that Windows is precisely the very thing a self-hoster would despise.

Having one to boot into ‘launch that game’ mode makes sense to some, but running it to run some services 24/7, makes little sense, if at all.

Do you mind elaborating on that Wallpaper Engine thing and also Natalia shell. What are they? I’m familiar with Niri, but never used it myself. (Not sure I like scrolling logic, I use barebones Sway.)

I’d like to compliment on it changing that when you open a full screen app. Yet, these tiny pixels look so little difference that it looks very much off to me indeed. And I’d prefer to have no dock at all. So I use Sway for myself. It’s that I interact with KDE sometimes.

It’s nice to have you back! Thanks for letting me know! I’m glad my curiosity triggered you to discover this thing. Net positive for both of us! :)

Gabe is just such an amazing pun, if we can call it that way.

Do you mind elaborating more on the topic? I see them stressing that the licence is AGPL and it didn’t change. Is there anything else that is not obvious from the first glance?

Thanks a lot! I’d explore that. I don’t know about others here, but I’m not even considering a non-self-hosted solution. But it’s great to know upfront that it would require a powerful server to have languages other than English.