Since switching from Gmail three years ago to Proton, I’ve not had a single spam mail. I also use aliases most places so that I can disable it if I start receiving spam on one.

Nice - I’ve done a similar thing for my mom, except she was transitioning from macOS (but had used Windows a lot previously for work). So far she has had a package conflict that broke the package system (Signal was installed from their PPA) which raised a rather ominous error message for her (“Your package system is broken”). I could fix it easily as I had set up VNC via SSH, and that worked as expected first time I needed it, but it’s not something she would be able to do by herself. And I still haven’t installed Singal in a way that won’t break things later yet…

She still uses her old Macbook on and off, and there are some things she only has access through that machine. I want to set up better cross platform solutions for her. Especially file sync and images needs to be fixed, but I’ve not landed on a way to do that. I could set her up with an account on my Nextcloud, but I don’t like having access to her files and I also would not want to be liable for her files disappearing. Same with images. I use Nextcloud for images myself, have thought of setting up Immich. But same thing here, don’t really want to have access to her stuff (not sure if Immich can be set up to be E2EE?)

I’ve been running tge AIO container for several years now and it is running perfectly fine. I only enable whatever I use, so for instance no Collabora.

But for Collabora, while it should be good for single-person use, if you require some kind of collaborative simultaneous work, you should probably set up the high-performance backend. I did this at work for a NC-instance hosted via Hetzner and it works well when we tried it, but we don’t really use those kinds of tools much in our daily work.

It depends on what service - some, like Jellyfin, are accessed only from home IPs which are static (for music through Jellyfin I use offline mode to prevent too much mobile traffic), so I can add those specific IPs in the whitelist. Otger services I need to access from elsewhere, and I can add entire subnets (i.e. for my phone carrier network or VPN servers). Those change once in a while and that is annoying. Other services I want publically available.

Jellyfin especially still has some unsecured endpoints where it would be wise to take some.extra precautions. I think the risk some people seem to think this poses is a little overblown (i.e. rights holders finding your instance and reverse mapping your entire library and suing you to oblivion), but better not risk it.

What kinds of things are you planning to expose? What I expose I hide behind a reverse proxy with IP whitelists. Whatever I don’t need access to on the go I don’t expose.

I put encrypted backups (borg or restic) on a storage box from Hetzner. One local copy on a different drive and one remote. Keep your encryption passwords safe though, otherwise they aren’t worth much.

Oh, and I plan to report status of the cron jobs that run these backup scripts via MQTT and display backup status in Home Assistant. But haven’t started that yet. So far I dump the logs and view them occasionally.

I installed Mint on a newly acquired used Thinkpad for my mom, to get her used to it as her Macbook is showing signs of giving up. So far it was smooth sailing until one day the package system broke due to some conflicts (I had set up Signal via their PPA). I had already set up remote access so I could easily fix it for her in a matter of minutes, but she would never be able to fix it herself even though the instructions were clear. Other than this though, she enjoys it. But I still need to set up a couple of additional things, in particular file sync and some way of managing her photos.

My go-to! There’s a Python version, bpytop, as well - not sure why you would want that over the C+±version though.

Nice, thanks - I’ll check out Unfa! I hope to get started soon, but I tend to be slow starting these things, so don’t expect any DMs just yet - but I’m saving your post for future reference, so perhaps something will tick in eventually :) Thanks for the offer in any case!

I want to get into using Ardour. I tried setting up my stuff via the Flatpak version, but it seems I should probably avoid that to get stuff to work properly, so I am planning to pay for the precompiled binaries soon.

But I am new to DAWs in general - do you or anyone else know of a good introduction to DAWs via Ardour?

I use my WF-1000XM5 on Linux fine, paired normally IIRC. Any reason your set would be different?

I think their point was to make sure they are done in order, i.e. update before upgrade, not the other way around as in OPs example.

If you are already into, or want to get into self-hosting you could set up a media server like Jellyfin or Navidrome and use a mobile client that works with the one you choose. I am using Jellyfin with the Finamp beta on Android. I use it only in offline mode when I am out and about.

I sometimes hear people complain about some issues with Jellyfin, although I have not had any of those myself (I have a comparable collectiom to you). I run all music through Musicbrainz Picard before adding it to the server, so I think that may be a pre-requisite for a smooth experience. Navidrome is perhaps more forgiving.

What benefits are you getting from actually updating the 8BitDo-firmware as opposed to… not doing that?

Can it be used without arr-integrations? As just a way to keep track of stuff users would love to have available, but currently isn’t?

Invoicing I just used inkscape but it’s not great. Be prepared to make some sacrifices, but it’s all worthy to get rid of microsoft.

How is Inkscape used for invoicing? You cretate the invoice as vector graphic template and just replace the text?

I don’t ever do any invoicing myself, so I am not clear on the requirements here. But a template in LibreOffice Draw could perhaps work for this purpose? There might be some way to programtically replace the fields, and if you store client and project details in a database it should eventually be a matter of choosing which client to bill for which project and click “Go!”. I would aim for such a self-made setup to be independent on any license-ridden software. But again, I don’t do this, so I might have missed some important part of the puzzle.

No. I have a RTX 3050 Ti Laptop which I have not had many issues with. The biggest issue I have experienced was that a game completely froze at the same point every time. This was due to a regression in their drivers. They spent their sweet time fixing it to, and following the issue thread highlights one of the main issues with their drivers being non-free: extremely competent users providing logs and effort to troubleshoot, but unable to work on the fix themselves. And what seemed to be summer interns replying once in a while and nothing happening for a long while.

But that said, I find the hate overblown. You could get tge impression that running Linux on a machine with an Nvidia-GPU will instantly burn down your house or spawn a portal to hell. It will not. I will get an AMD card at the next crossroads, but I am not ditching my card now just because it is Nvidia. It works fine enough.

Had a 6-year old Macbook Pro that was increasingly difficult to use due to the small SSD-drive (I think only 128GB?). Coudn’t really update the OS without uninstalling most stuff due to this. In addition, I had started to get the urge to tinker with stuff again, but ran into roadblocks often (often following a guide to do something in the terminal only to get stuck at inatalling something from apt). Same time I got more and more fed up with Big Tech, so when I was buying a new laptop to replace it, the choice to avoid Apple and Microsoft was obvious. Having used a terminal on macOS, doing work on HPC-clusters (which obviously ran Linux) and moving an increasing amount of my workflow to Got Bash on Windows on my work machine (all three of which reinforced my level of comfortability with the terminal and desire to use it), the prospects of the terminal was more enticing than frightening.

Now I have been a full-time Linux user for three years, my partner, brother and mother have since switched, I manage some bare metal Linux servers for work and IT has finally agreed to allow me to ditch Windows for Linux (although they are taking their sweet time setting it up, so I am still waiting to actually get it).

I like FreshRSS - I also have some readers that connect to my instance, like FluentReader that provides a better full article view, but I mostly use FreshRSS directly these days.

I got the Epson ET-2815 (non-cartridge, tank-based inkjet). Works pretty well with Linux (they have drivers available, but not officially supported). Had to set it up on WiFi via app (which was an annoying process) first though, but I could have just wired it up and then I wouldn’t need that. Maybe it is possible to somehow set it up on WiFi some other way after you have connected directly?

Got tripped up once because I could not connect to it via the utility software (while printing still worked). Turned iut that was due to me being connected to VPN, and for some reason the request went through that (which I think is a little suspect…), so it couldn’t find it. So I have to disconnect VPN to do that. You will not have access to this heavy self-cleaning program on Linux, but you should probably avoid it anyway because it wastes a lot of ink and deposits in this sponge you then would need to buy and replace every now and then.

Biggest issue I had was that it stopped printing some.colors after a while. Had to do a manual cleaning by opening it, removing these dummy cartridges and connecting rubber tubings to the nozzles and pump isopropyl alcohol through. Was a lot of research and took some time to get working again. Think maybe my humidifier was the issue, as it tends to deposit some white powder around my home that I think caused a clog. We’ll see this winter as I fire it up again.

EDIT: Printed a fair amount and the tanks lasts a long time. If you go inkjet, then this is the economical choice. More expensive upfront, but much cheaper in operations. But you still have the drying issue wich could cause you to have to do what I described above. Or print regularly at least. If you don’t need color, laser is probably your best bet.