Reminder that you can go for hybrid approaches; receive email and host IMAP/webmail yourself, and send emails through someone like AWS. I am not saying you can’t do SMTP yourself, but if you want to just dip your toes, it’s an option.

You get many of the advantages; you control your email addresses, you store all of the email and control backups, etc.

…

And another thing: you could also play with https://chatmail.at/relays ; which is pretty cool. I had read about Delta Chat, but decided to play with it recently and… it’s blown my mind.

If you are going to run Jellyfin or some other media sharing, the key is if you need to transcode media (recompress because the playback device cannot handle it or not). Likely not, nowadays, but research that. If you need transcoding, research; you might get by with an old CPU, or maybe hardware transcoding support, but it’s difficult.

Outside transcoding, for file sharing/streaming, every simultaneous client will require additional horsepower and disk transfer usage. If you are the sole client, then likely you can do with an old CPU. But if you and three people more in your household are going to be using the system at the same time, it might be a bit complex.

One of my home servers is a 4gb of RAM, with a “Intel® Celeron® CPU G1610T @ 2.30GHz”. It’s very old and low end, but for file sharing it works quite well, but it rarely has more than a single simultaneous user.

But now with the end of Windows 10 looming, I need to upgrade a family member’s computer to Linux.

Why?

Did they ask for Linux? Do you have authority over them?

So this needs to be something that both is not going to break on its own (e.g. while doing automatic updates) and also won’t be accidentally broken by the users. … There’s no way I’m going to be able to handle long-distance tech support if things break more than once in a blue moon.

Issues appear. I would be more focused on setting up remote access than choosing a distro.

I’d choose something LTS that has been around for a while (Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL-derivatives, SuSE if there’s a freely-available LTS, etc.).

If you are not against the use of Google products, ChromeOS devices are about the best well-designed low maintenance operating systems. (Not Flex, a ChromeOS device.) But you would be sacrificing Firefox and LibreOffice, which might not be an option. (And technically, it’s running a Linux kernel, if I remember correctly.)

https://dgross.ca/blog/linux-home-server-auto-sleep did the rounds lately.

But you’ll need another system to always be on to handle this.

In many cases, you can “fake” this in other means. For example, I had Remmina configured to run a script to send a WOL packet and wait before connecting via remote desktop to a computer.

Yep, I do that on Debian hosts, EL (RHEL/Rocky/etc.) have a similar feature.

However, you need to keep an eye for updates that require a reboot. I use my own Nagios agent that (among other things) sends me warnings when hosts require a reboot (both apt/dnf make this easy to check).

I wouldn’t care about last online/reboots; I just do some basic monitoring to get an alert if a host is down. Spontaneous reboots would be a sign of an underlying issue.

Try a LiveCD or installing Windows to an external drive (or if you are able to dualboot, although I don’t recommend dualbooting in general).

As for your original question, all PC/component manufacturers invest time in making their stuff work on Windows. Few do the same for Linux. Linux has a ton of people working to make hardware work, but it’s always going to be an uphill struggle if you don’t choose hardware explicitly for Linux support. Although I think your most recent issue is hardware (but I can’t know for sure).

Remember that Google News has RSS feeds! They are very well hidden, but they are there.

However, they are also a bit bad.

I started https://github.com/las-noticias/news-rss to postprocess a bit Google News RSS feeds and also play with categorization. I found spaCy worked well to find “topics”, but unfortunately I lost steam.

how do you like the titan pocket?

Honestly, it sucked a bit. The keyboard deteriorated quickly and I couldn’t touch-type without looking at the screen like I did on real BlackBerries. (Plus, it didn’t handle accents nor writing in Catalan well :( Also I had my second swollen battery last week, so I decided to ditch it.

…

I don’t know. Now I have a Pixel 9A and I should play with the Linux VM feature. It should be possible to run Firefox for Linux, which would then support keyboard shortcuts. But even though the Pixel has 8gb of RAM and the processor feels snappy, I suspect it will suck a bit. But really if Linux applications could handle well a physical keyboard…

Yeah, I think it’s sad that we had beautiful phones with a physical keyboard as late as in 2018 with the Key2, but no one bought them… and people are slowly realizing that… maybe keyboards on phones are good. I see that Google is adding more and more physical keyboard features to Android, so perhaps some day…

Although my preferred way would be if services such as WhatsApp didn’t force people to use iOS or Android, and using niche OSes on niche phones was more viable.

I think Cloudflare Tunnels will require a different setup on k8s than on regular Linux hosts, but it’s such a popular service among self-hosters that I have little doubt that you’ll find a workable process.

(And likely you could cheat, and set up a small Linux VM to “bridge” k8s and Cloudflare Tunnels.)

Kubernetes is different, but it’s learnable. In my opinion, K8S only comes into its own in a few scenarios:

• Really elastic workloads. If you have stuff that scales horizontally (uncommon), you really can tell Amazon to give you more Kubernetes nodes when load grows, and destroy the nodes when load goes down. But this is not really applicable for self hosting, IMHO.

• Really clustered software. Setting up say a PostgreSQL cluster is a ton of work. But people create K8S operators that you feed a declarative configuration (I want so many replicas, I want backups at this rate, etc.) and that work out everything for you… in a way that works in all K8S implementations! This is also very cool, but I suspect that there’s not a lot of this in self-hosting.

• Building SaaS platforms, etc. This is something that might be more reasonable to do in a self-hosting situation.

Like the person you’re replying to, I also run Talos (as a VM in Proxmox). It’s pretty cool. But in the end, I only run there 4 apps I’ve written myself, so using K8S as a kind of SaaS… and another application, https://github.com/avaraline/incarnator, which is basically distributed as container images and I was too lazy to deploy in a more conventional way.

I also do this for learning. Although I’m not a fan of how Docker Compose is becoming dominant in the self-hosting space, I have to admit it makes more sense than K8S for self-hosting. But K8S is cool and might get you a cool job, so by all means play with it- maybe you’ll have fun!

Thanks for the long writeup!

I’ve been using a BlackBerry Bold, Classic, KeyONE… then the Titan Pocket. Keyboard shortcuts for apps never seemed superuseful for me, while I longed for keyboard shortcuts in apps (e.g. ctrl+l to open the URL bar in a browser).

There’s a distinct lack of information on Clicks and other ways to have a phone with a physical qwerty (e.g. the Minimal Phone), esp. about the things that really matter about keyboard usage. Hopefully more people publish their experiences as you did.

https://programming.dev/post/36053940/18886266 looks good.

I haven’t tested this, but I would expect there to be ways to do it, esp for VMs if they are not LXC containers.

(I try to automate provisioning as much as possible, so I don’t do this kind of stuff often.)

The Incus forum is not huge, but it’s friendly, and the authors are quite active.

Oh, that’s precisely the combination that was tempting me. Have you written somewhere about your experiences?

Came in here to mention Incus if no one had.

I love it. I have three “home production” servers running Proxmox, but mostly because Proxmox is one of very few LTS/comercially-supported ways to run Linux in a supported way with root (and everything else on ZFS). And while its web UI is still a bit clunky in places, it comes in handy some times.

However, Incus automation is just… superior. incus launch --vm images:debian/13 foo, wait a few seconds then incus exec foo -- bash and I’m root on a console of a ready-to-go Debian VM. Without --vm, it’s a lightweight LXC container. And Ansible supports running commands through incus exec, so you can provision stuff WITHOUT BOTHERING TO SET UP ANYTHING.

AND, it works remotely without fuss, so I can set up an Incus remote on a beefy server and spawn VMs nearly transparently. + incus file pull|push to transfer files.

I’m kinda pondering scripting removal of the Proxmox bits from a Proxmox install, so that I just keep their ZFS support and run Incus on top.

The problem with the standard Gboard non-ASCII method is that you have to use the touchscreen.

What the article mentions is that on iOS, you can hold E, then press 2 on the physical keyboard to enter É.

When I used a Blackberry, I could type out longish messages without even looking at the phone, but I had to rely on autocorrect for the accents (which worked pretty well for Spanish). If this method works, I could do the same, but not relying on autocorrect.

Do you, by some chance, write in any language that requires non-ASCII characters? (Such as ñ in Spanish.)

You can apparently touch-type non-ASCII characters with Clicks on IOS, I’m wondering if it works similarly on Android.

My phone died last week, and I was very tempted by the Razr with Clicks, but I haven’t seen much about using it outside English. In the end I went cheap and bought a Pixel 9A :(

Touch keyboards suck, but double so if you type in multiple languages, need non-ASCII, and on top of that you want to use shells. GBoard is not bad at detecting the three languages I regularly type in, but my BlackBerries were superior.

If you speak Spanish, a month ago or so I was pointed at https://foro.autoalojado.es/, might be interesting to discuss the in-person stuff, although it doesn’t seem like it’s reaching a critical mass of activity :(

When I learned Git I think there were not decent tools, so I got used to the command line.

I occasionally use gitk for reviewing my commits- it’s nicer to see the files modified and be able to jump back and forth, although I get I could use git log -p instead.

I’m an Emacs user, but I don’t use magit (!)

I like some of the graphical tools- some colleagues use Fork and I like it… but as I’ve already learned the CLI, I don’t see the point for me.

I could use learning some jj because it automates some of the most tedious parts of my workflow, but I’m getting too old.

Yup, came here to mention PaperWM. I used xmonad in the past, but I executed it on top of Mate to have an “easy” desktop environment.

Nowadays Gnome extensions providing tiling is the equivalent “easy” method. Gnome is not for everyone, but it works out of the box- then you add the fancy tiling window management on top.

For people who have bounced off systems that require much more set up, I think they are a good option.