ITT people trying to be edgy but I’m going to say invading Russia in the winter.

Stealing other people’s cultural heritage is their cultural heritage

This is why they removed the apps. They want to be driving traffic through the app, and the 3rd party apps prevented that from happening.

Honestly the way I always look at it is just take the lifetime cost and divide it by the yearly cost and if I think the product/license deal will exist for that long (and I’ll use it for that long) it’s worth it otherwise not. Like, I have lifetime Plex and frankly I don’t expect the, to exist forever but I like the premium features and I’ve had lifetime for long enough that I’ve saved money.

Not mine but my partner’s machine (which I build and largely maintain for her) is a custom Debian install on ZFS root using ZFS boot menu and running a custom minimal i3 desktop environment.

Honestly, if you’re doing regular backups and your ZFS system isn’t being used for business you’re probably fine. Yes, you are at increased risk of a second disk failure during resilver but even if that happens you’re just forced to use your backups, not complete destruction of the data.

You can also mitigate the risk of disk failure during resilver somewhat by ensuring that your disks are of different ages. The increased risk comes somewhat from the fact that if you have all the same brand of disks that are all the same age and/or from the same batch/factory they’re likely to die from age around the same time, so when one disk fails others might be soon to follow, especially during the relatively intense process of resilvering.

Otherwise, with the number of disks you have you’re likely better off just going with mirrors rather than RAIDZ at all. You’ll see increased performance, especially on write, and you’re not losing any space with a 3-way mirror versus a 3-disk RAIDZ2 array anyway.

The ZFS pool design guidelines are very conservative, which is a good thing because data loss can be catastrophic, but those guidelines were developed with pools that are much larger than yours and for data in mind that is fundamentally irreplaceable, such as user generated data for a business versus a personal media server.

Also, in general backups are more important than redundancy, so it’s good you’re doing that already. RAID is about maintaining uptime, data security is all about backups. Personally, I’d focus first on a solid 3-2-1 backup plan rather than worrying too much about trying to mitigate your current array suffering catastrophic failure.

Another option is to avoid the installer entirely and install from a live environment using chroot and whatever your distro’s installation bootstrap tool is. I started using this method to install Debian on ZFS root using this method for a while and it’s become my go-to method for installing most distros as it gives you the most control over the resulting OS. It will also often take some distro-specific knowledge but is also a valuable learning opportunity.

I tend to agree - I have no love lost for Microsoft but I’m also willing to admit when they’ve got some good tech.

I think they may have dropped the feature but I distinctly remember being disappointed in the feature that it wouldn’t download MP3s to your server so I’m pretty sure it existed at one point.

I think a lot of people use Tailscale and add their external clients to a dedicated tailnet. How are you hosting Plex without opening any ports though?

Honestly the writing’s been on the wall for Plex for a while now. I think it was when they introduced podcasts or news or something that it first became clear to me that Plex was trying to grow beyond a software company for self-hosters and prepare themselves for an IPO or something. I still use it simply because their client availability is second-to-none and I’ve got a bunch of people signed up already, but I’ve already made my peace that the “Plex getting shittier” line and the “Jellyfin getting better” line are getting closer and closer to crossing each other.

Especially with ChatGPT you don’t really need to be that good at it, just good enough to read the script over and to know how to execute it.

Hey… it sorts properly alphabetically

Yeah basically all a “distribution” is is a selection of software and configurations, and they distribute (hence the name) that software and configurations as a bundle. It definitely can be daunting to learn all of this at once as a newcomer, but on the other side of that coin I’ve seen many people begin their Linux journey on a “beginner friendly” distribution who come to see that distro’s configs as default and need to unlearn/relearn many habits as they progress through their journey. I think, too, that often people who are immersed in the Linux world don’t have a great perspective on what is/isn’t confusing for a new user and often end up obfuscating things with other things that are just as complicated, if not more.

This is true, but I don’t know if you’d be counted as a seeder on that list though if you don’t have the full torrent.

While I find that I agree with his takes like, 55% of the time, I do agree that Debian and Arch are basically the S-tier distros. So many of the other ones are basically just opinionated Debian or Arch, and while those can be useful when you’re getting started, I’ve found that for the long haul you’re better off just figuring out how to configure the base distribution with the elements of the opinionated ones that you like rather than use those distros themselves. Also, RIP CentOS. I would have put that in a high tier before the RHELmageddon (not top tier mind you, but it had a well defined use case and was great for that purpose).

It depends if you’re using them all. Systems where I have lots of applications installed (especially graphical ones) will have lots of packages, my bare-minimum container hosts will have few. I think there’s also an element of selection bias here, because people posting screenshots of neofetch on their system are also likely to be people who intentionally run very minimal systems focussed on minimizing the number of packages so they can brag about it on the internet.

TL;DR - the right number of packages to have is as many as are required for your computer to do what you need it to do, and not too many more than that.

Something I’ve found very helpful is time tracking. I have an app on my phone that is always running a timer where I input a task and a project (basically a category for the task). What this has forced me to do is to consciously decide when I’m doing a thing, and it acts as a kind of lightning rod for my attention. When I start a new task, I need to decide that is what I’m going to do and put it into the app, and if I find myself drifting from the task I must either stay focussed or decide that I’m not able to focus on the current task and instead focus on what is distracting me. It helps me remind myself that “now is the time for X, not for Y.”

I’m personally a big fan of OpenAudible. It’s not free, but it’s not crazy expensive and it does all the work for you. You sign into your Audible account in the app, it will pull your library, download each book, decrypt it, and convert it to the format of your choice (I usually do M4B). I’ve been using it for years and it makes downloading your Audible library in an ongoing basis a breeze.

So two things about this:

1. Tailscale doesn’t actually route through Tailscale’s servers, it just uses its servers to establish a direct connection between your nodes. You can use Headscale and monitor the traffic on the client and server sides to confirm this is the case. Headscale is just a FOSS implementation of that handshake server, and you point the Tailscale client there instead.

2. Doesn’t renting a $3 VPS and routing your traffic through that expose many of the same vulnerabilities regarding a 3rd party potentially having access to your VPN traffic, namely the VPS provider?

For what it’s worth, I generally think that the Headscale route is the most privacy- and data-sovereignty-preserving route, but I do think it’s worth differentiating between Tailscale and something like Nord or whatever, where the traffic is actually routed through the provider’s servers versus Tailscale where the traffic remains on your infrastructure.