You might want to look up SMR vs CMR, and why it matters for NASes. The gist is that cheaper drives are SMR, which work fine mostly, but can time out during certain operations, like a ZFS rebuild after a drive failure.

Sorry don’t remember the details, just the conclusion that’s it’s safer to stay away from SMR for any kind of software RAID

EDIT: also, there was the SMR scandal a few years ago where WD quietly changed their bigger volume WD Red (“NAS”) drives to SMR without mentioning it anywhere in the speccs. Obviously a lot of people were not happy to find that their “NAS” branded hard drives were made with a technology that was not suitable for NAS workload. From memory i think it was discovered when someone investigated why their ZFS rebuild kept failing on their new drive.

Another option is subpaths: xyz.ddns.net/portainer

Just one open port, to your reverse proxy (nginx or other).

The client updating no-ip with your dynamic IP is independent of the reverse proxy software.

This sounds like a FOSS utopian future :)

There’s a few projects that have started towards this path with single-click deployable apps, you could even say HomeAssistant OS does this to some extent my managing the services for you.

I believe one of the biggest hurdle for a “self hosting appliance” is resilience to hardware failure. Noone wants to loose decades of family photos or legal documents due to a SSD going bad , or the cat spilling water on their “hosting box”. So automated reliable off-site backups and recovery procedures for both data and configs is key.

Databox from BBC / Nottingham University is also a very interesting concept worth looking in to:

A platform for managing secure access to data and enabling authorised third parties to provide the owner authenticated control and accountability.

Why did they have their own builds of these projects in the first place? Did they have custom patches they maintained?

They were too preoccupied on wether they could, they never stopped to question wether they should

I know your pain! (Cries in Nvidia laptop) when i bought mine i literally couldn’t find a laptop with AMD graphics in my region.

There is some hope these days. In addition to the previously mentioned Frameworks laptop, there’s also this TUXEDO Sirius 16 - Gen1. (Tuxedo is a German company specializing in Linux-compatible computers). It might not be exactly what your looking for, but AMD graphics laptops are so few and far between I thought I should put it out there.

I third Proxmix

I run most stuff as Docker images inside a VM, but also a few services as LXC containers and some non-docker stuff in other VMs

Like taiyang said, SteamOS is based on Arch which is super not newbie friendly, but the desktop modes “desktop environment” is KDE which available on pretty much any Linux distro, including beginner friendly ones like (K)Ubuntu and Fedora (although I’m not sure how beginner friendly Fedora is, regarding proprietary drivers and codecs)

Damn, finally! A gaming laptop with AMD graphics :D it looks overall well specced too

Sadly I’m not in the market cause I bought a gaming laptop with Nvidia 2 years ago, and it’s still way too good to justify replacing. Too bad laptops with AMD graphics were made of Unobtainium until now

It’s not a cardinal sin, it’s called being a brave pioneer :)

Anyway, fwiw I’ve noticed something similar where steam just (re)starts all of a sudden while playing. Like I notice the game gets sluggish, then focus changes to the steam client, complete with the “new offerings” sale popup that comes when starting steam. And I did have steam overlay UI freeze completely recently but restarting the game and steam fixed it.

Kubuntu 22.04, X11, nVidia 3060 with 525 driver

Like others said it’s mostly just practice.

What helps is to align the (short) ends and hold them flat between your index finger and thumb. Use your free hand to get them in order. Once they’re in order, keep holding them still between your index finger and thumb using one hand, then use your free hand to slot on the connector

Edit: also bending them back and forth a bit will soften them up and reduce them curling in all sorts of directions. It also weakens them, so don’t overdo it (mostly only works for solid cable, the type meant for permanent installations like inside walls)

Thanks for the thorough explanation, Fedora atomic, os-tree and Universal blue is such a new and different way of thinking about the OS compared to the traditional desktop installs. It’s also a lot of new jargon so thanks for taking the time to explain each component

In addition to the CPU throttling itself due to thermals like you said, you should also be aware that all Ubuntu’s are replacing more and more traditional packages with snaps for an increasing number of applications.

Step 1 (by the system) of opening a snap application for the first time (since boot) is to extract the compressed snap image, which makes startup time significantly longer (like several seconds for something you would expect to be instant). Once the application is started performance should be the same as if the application had been installed as a traditional .deb package.

You should also consider adding flatpak support and flathub. Applications installed as Flatpaks generally integrate better in the desktop than snaps, and flathub has a large and growing selection of apps. The flathub website has a few command lines you can copy-paste to enable flatpak and flathub support, then apps from Flathub will show up in the Discover app store.

Personally I use Kubuntu and use both Flatpak and snap apps, but generally prefer flatpaks when they’re available. And any software where I don’t care about having a recent version I install as a traditional package because it’s more lean

Kate on Linux, Notepad++ on Windows.

Also, Kate on Windows (it’s really good)

Wow that’s awesome! Props to etnoy for creating such a polished PR for this feature

I can’t wait to simply point immich at my existing photo structure :)

For RPi the two major causes of issues (in my experience) are low spec power supplies and low spec SD-cards.

Power supplies drop voltage when the loads gets too high, which is especially pronounced with high power USB devices like external harddrives.

SD-cards tend to get worn out or give write errors after enough writes. Class 10 SD cards are recommended for both speed and longevity. And ideally try to avoid write intensive stuff on the SD card

“On a DVD”… 😅 in some decades that might as well be like saving your video to 8mm film. Gotta call some specialist antique dealer on the other side of the continent to find the right tech and right adapters to play it back on modern hardware

Thirding a reverse proxy. Probably Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM) is the easiest reverse proxy to get started with, if you don’t want to deal with plain nginx config files

It’s also available as a standalone desktop application, which work perfectly even when you’re offline

Yes! I can not recommend draw.io aka diagrams.net enough! (I still don’t understand why it has two names and which name is the current “correct” one)

It works both in the browser, or as a downloadable standalone application that works 100% offline.

My favourite feature is exporting PNG or PDF with the complete diagram XML embedded as metadata, which means they can be opened and edited again by draw.io

It’s very useful not only for networking, but all sorts of diagramming needs