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.

Do you run the files through something like MusicBrainz Picard first? I want to uniformly tag all my music anyway, so I would do that regardless of which media server I used, but it could be doing a poor job if it does not have a MusicBrainz ID associated with it?

What kind of issues are you experiencing with Jellyfin? It has worked perfectly for me, but I see the sentiment repeated many times so I guess it’s not that uncommon to experience issues. I run it via Docker, mount volumes like I do with other media types, and add properly tagged music in an Artist/Album directory hierarchy. No special tweaking.

You can export your data from Spotify, and use that as a basis for downloading songs via for example yt-dlp (this can be automated), or slowly build it up again over time in whatever system you set up by buying the albums/compilations containing the songs.

If I were you, I’d make sure to tackle one thing at the time, and set aside some time to figure it out, where the goal is not to for instance play games, but set up a game for play later. That way you can focus on the first part, instead of trying to rush that. So for example, when you are trying to set up Home Assistant, spend time just getting Docker to work first. I’ve fallen into that trap many times before, where I ended up not reading the messages properly because I was impatient and just wanted to get to the end fast. Once you get more familiar with Linux, this stuff gets quicker because more of the steps involved with any task is familiar to you already, and the troubleshooting threads you find on different forums are less Greek.

For specifics:

1. For Docker, when you feel ready to try that again, I’d recommend setting it up together with a GUI, like Portainer. If you follow the official guides to install Docker and then Portainer, you should have a web UI accessible that makes dealing with containers easier. I generally like doing things in the command line, but for containers, I prefer to have a GUI.

2. When it comes to Home Assistant, I’d honestly go for either Home Assistant Green or Yellow from Nabu Casa (you’d support the Open Home Foundation directly this way). If you want to set it up yourself, I’d go the route of a dedicated single board computer, like a Raspberry Pi, and use Home Assistant OS. I tried to set it up as a container as well before, but there are certain limitations you avoid by just running their OS directly on dedicated hardware. It’s been running smoothly for me since I set it up on my Raspberry Pi 4.

3. It is good to learn about Wine and Bottles, but I’d start out with Steam (and Proton), Heroic and Lutris. I’ve had much headaches getting stuff to run properly on Heroic and Lutris, but I think the trick here is to avoid Flatpaks for these sorts of things, because there are many dependencies, and you are dependent on a good permissions setup for Flatpaks. Your mileage may vary though, I’m sure there are plenty of people with painless experiences with Flatpaks here.

I got a reply from someone who had got it working under Wine before, so I will go ahead and order it. I will check if the drag and drop-approach works then as well, which would be preferable for any custom tracks. I’ll update on what I find out when I get the pedal!

And thanks for the link to the community, I will definitely follow that one. I fear this can become a very expensive hobby, I have gone from 0 to 3 in a short time, and I find myself wanting ones that I currently don’t have the skills to make proper use of…