Bro, you’re being asked where, not how.

Go for it. You don’t need to install Linux in order to start getting your feet wet. Get a USB 3.0+ flash drive and put a “live” (CD/USB, whatever the distro wants to call it) distro on there. There are plenty of directions out there on how to make one from Windows. Most live distros nowadays are persistent, so any programs you install will be there next time you load it up. It will definitely be slower than a normal install, but it’ll let you get a feel for how things work.

Go ham wild on there, break stuff, see if you can fix it, don’t, then remake it again. Try different desktop environments (DEs) and see what you like. Your distro of choice is less important if you’re just starting, but any of the big ones will be fine. I’d recommend trying a few different DEs from the same distro, see what you like the feel of, then try a different distro with what you liked best. They’ll usually all have gnome, kde, and a third lightweight option, but in my experience if Wayland (the other choice is X11) works well, kde and gnome will feel pretty light. I use kde Wayland on this guy and trust me, this review is giving it a lot of grace. Windows 10 was completely unacceptable on it, so if your specs are any better then this, you’ll be fine with whatever you choose. Beware that Nvidia cards have driver issues, they’re fixable but if you do have an Nvidia card, I’d just use the built in graphics chip for trying out Linux at first.

Don’t start with arch, btw.

LXIX my balls! Haha got’em.

Believe it or not, this is the second time I got to make that joke within an hour.

Did you do the nextcloudpi install?

I don’t think that’s a great comparison. You’re most likely never allowed to paint your door. I would say it’s more like curtains, your apartment has proprietary curtain rods, that you can’t put your own curtains on for some reason, so you ask all your neighbors how to change them. They respond with “have you tried opening and closing your curtains yet?”, “Try vacuuming them to get the dust off”. Then you finally get a hold of the landlord and they say you can’t replace them.

That’s true, but that’s true of everything. Not every microbe can survive in every environment, and the number of microbes that survive is really what determines contamination. If you start off with one, it could take years before it reaches a noticeable level. If you start with a few billion, then it could be a few days. When you do a through clean, you’re ensuring that you can reach your expected storage time by eliminating as many microbes as you can.

But in the end, if they don’t hurt you plants and your plants are getting the fertilizer they need, how much does it really matter?

Have you tried boiling the water before use?

Also, you could try different methods to sterilize your equipment. Heat, alcohol, and acid are all different ways to sterilize, and if you’re only using one method you can end up inadvertently selecting for hardier microbes. Scratches in plastic or a build up of calcium can end up providing a safe place for microbes to survive a rinsing/soaking sanitation method. The fertilizer itself or the water could be the source of your microbes as well.

What I would do is clean with vinegar for an hour or over night depending on how dilute the solution you use is, rinse with previously boiled water (make sure it’s thoroughly rinsed before the next step do not mix bleach and vinegar unless you’re prepared for nasty fumes), sanitize with bleach solution for 15+ minutes, then slosh and rinse with 70+% rubbing alcohol for a few minutes and let drip dry on a sanitized surface, cover any containers that aren’t immediately going to be used with foil to let them completely dry out, but so particles can’t fall in them.

The vinegar will help sanitize, but for this purpose it’s mostly used to remove mineral deposits, so if there isn’t any cloudy residue at all on your equipment, it might not be necessary.

You shouldn’t need to do this every time, just on occasion. From then on, be sure to boil your water before use, or prepare your fertilizer at boiling or just under boiling temperatures if it won’t degrade the fertilizer.

Didn’t upstart show up in jaunty jackalope? I don’t recall systemd being all that big back then. Also, jaunty booted in 30s to desktop on a 4200rpm spinning rust IDE drive, Intel m processor. In my book they succeeded there but yeah, the attitude they have about contributing to current projects is bullshit.

If you don’t need a laptop, I’ve been having a blast with using mini/micro/tiny business PCs off of eBay. I’ve had zero issues installing Debian on them, and they’re designed to be easy to maintain by IT departments, so Wi-Fi, storage, RAM, and even CPUs are all replaceable. They are mobile CPUs, so if you need the heavy lifting of desktop CPUs, you’d probably need to go with a larger form factor.

I’m a cheap ass who mostly gets old hardware, so it’ll probably be a while before I get to see the benefits of that.

Yeah lsblk, lsscsi, fdsik -l , go have a coffee, come back later and hit enter on dd

Then realize you typed the command wrong and panic when you don’t get an error.

Check eBay for used business micro/mini/tiny PCs. They’re pretty cheap, and low power consumption. They’re mostly Intel processors, so that’s what you make of it. If I were you I’d look for i3 processors 9th gen and up, i5 and i7 8th Gen and up for transcoding. They can hardware transcode pretty much anything but AV1, vp9, and hevc 12bit but the processors are powerful enough that they can transcode those to x265/264 to a device or two using the CPU without issues.

If you don’t plan on transcoding, I’ve had no issues with a 5th Gen i5 NUC doing server things, but I do offload any processor heavy things to my 7060 micro (8th Gen i7) machine if I want it done quickly.

Metal ones will degrade much faster than plastic if you’re putting bleach in the tank. It’s best to just clean the bowl as the tank shouldn’t really need sanitizing.

Ahkshually, they’ve only had 6 birthdays. They’re still 24 years old.

As mentioned many times I’m sure, I use my rpi’s as a pi-hole/VPN. It’s nice having them as dedicated devices for low power things, if my main server ever fudges up, my VPN still works and internal DNS is still resolved. If I’m not home and get complaints from the family that jellyfin isn’t working, I can either fix it remotely or wake up my dev server for them to use in the meantime.

I also have an rpi 1 as a “dedicated ssh machine” that I can ssh into in case all of my other machines have gone goofy. If for any reason my two main devices aren’t accessible, that one will be because if there’s power to the house it will turn on. It does literally nothing else, so there’s very little chance a power outage will corrupt anything. It does require that the pivpn device is working if I’m not home, but I prefer to leave that to it’s own …devices.

This one gave me the confidence to post my setup, I salute your bravery (°_°)7.

The best of luck with your future insurance claim.

Uggo = uptime

• Old Synology NAS for storage
• Optiplex 7060 running jellyfin, paperless, *arr stack, handbrake, ripper, maybe some other containers.
• NUC5 running nextcloud (nextcloudpi) baremetal and an audiobiokshelf container

I would think that the power led would be on if there’s power going through the motherboard.

Are you referring to the power led or the disk usage led? I think on my nuc the only other led is the disk usage one, which looks like a soda can. The power led is always on, but doesn’t indicate standby or operating as far as I’ve seen.

It’s likely there’s another boot device that’s taking priority over USB, if USB is even enabled in the bios. I’ve had a few computers that try to pxe boot after internal drives, so it never went to usb until I futzed with the boot order to remove pxe. It’s likely not that you didn’t have an SSD in it, but that USB drives aren’t high enough on the boot list, or not at all. You could try finding what the boot selection key press is on boot, then blindly picking first, second, third option etc. to see if anything gets a hit (frantically press boot key during start up then hit enter after a few seconds, then reset and do it again if nothing happens after about 30 seconds, but hit down, then enter.)