Generally desktop hardware is surprisingly power efficient, especially with lower-midrange components. Right now my home server is running on an ewaste HP Elitedesk.

For software, I’d really go for a config that uses ZFS over EXT4 for the data storage. ZFS is so battle-tested that anything you might find you want or need to fix or change, someone else has already documented the same situation multiple times over. Personally I went with a config like Apalrd’s with using proxmox for a stable host OS with good management and to create the zfs pool, then a container running cockpit for creating and managing the shares.

Currently that server has a 800GB Intel Datacenter SSD for boot and VM storage, and 2x 4TB HDDs in a ZFS mirror for NAS storage, an with a i5-4590 it’s running 6 Minecraft servers via Crafty Controller, Jellyfin, the Samba shares and I’ve spun up other random servers and VMs as desired/needed without trouble. Basically all of the services which run 24/7 are in LXCs because running Debian VMs on my Debian host seems too redundant for my tastes.

This is where I’m at too. If I go crazy and start installing stuff natively to experiment I end up with extra stuff auto configured that’s no longer needed and random problems I’m too lazy to figure out how to solve. Flatpak doesn’t do that and I don’t have to worry about that. I can install random stuff to play with and uninstall it cleanly. Some packages need more system access than flatpak gives natively and with those I’ll make the decision of if I want to set it up and tear it down manually or not.

Storage is cheap, my time not so much.

If you are administrating systems it’s extremely useful to know how to work with stuff by command line, both for remote administration via SSH or Ps-session and for rapid troubleshooting/settings changes and of course for emergency recovery when everything is super broken.

Honestly I personally use a mix of both GUI, CLI and hosted admin portals (the 11 ton gorilla in the room everyone arguing over GUI vs CLI forgets about) and will shift between tools depending on what is best for the given job.

Of course if you’re just an owner-operator, see Joe Average in Anytown America with his household laptop, the GUI tools are the only thing you’ll want to use and even that might get overwhelming or scary, but Joe Average is more often than not these days going to not even own a computer and instead just use their phone. That’s the other thing many folks in these threads forget, is the home computer is a market on life support. The average “not a computer person” does not own a computer at all, they use their smartphone for literally everything

Winget install [programname]

winget search [programname]

winget upgrade --all --silent

Oh look, its also super easy in Windowsland!

Btop will also show disc and network utilization while running much lighter than glances. Personally I keep both btop and htop installed on all of my machines because I feel like htop is better for quickly killing a processes when needed

Honestly, if it’s important enough to RAID, it’s important enough to do right and run full fat ZFS.

You could also go the mdadm route with individual disks but ZFS pools are so battle-tested that whatever unholy edgecase you manage to create will almost certainly be something someone has encountered before, and it’s probably well documented somewhere how to recover from

I certainly agree, but you can’t replace your entire software, server and groupware stack in a day. Start by transitioning the easiest stuff off of Microsoft, tie it into your existing stack then slowly transition away. Shutting off the last domain controller is a lot easier when you only have a handful of Windows workstations that rely on it than when you have 5000 of them

And you can just install Edge if you really want to. It’s on flathub

I have a bad professional habit of treating windows machines like Linux, abusing PS Sessions like its SSH, downloading everything via winget, and generally trying to do as much of my admin work without popping open RDP as I can. Sometimes that works super well, and sometimes it throws me for a loop. But most importantly, it opens certain doors that remain shut for folks who insist on always RDPing in and using the GUI

Ubuntu supports AD authentication out of the box, so for users whose duties primarily occur in a web browser that rapidly becomes a vary viable option

I don’t know about the Mac experience specifically but Krita was incredibly intuitive as someone who hasn’t touched creative software in about 15 years. I downloaded it a couple of weeks ago, doodled a little, then remembered I suck at digital drawing and closed without saving

Oh and once you done all of the writeup actually submit it to the devs so they can work with it instead of leaving it to languish on a random web forum

Huh that’s very interesting!

rm -rf / only deletes everything on the / partition and any currently mounted filesystems, since efi is its own partition and not mounted it wouldn’t be touched

And also don’t run commands that require you to type in “do as I say” before they run

You’re right! I finished Sourcery like 6 months ago and have read a bunch of other books since then so my memory was kinda foggy. But that’s exactly it, the magic exists and can be powerful but it’s simply more trouble than it’s worth

I think you might have responded to the wrong comment?

This is the one thing I really appreciated about the Discworld books on a recent re-read. The wizards are hilariously incapable of doing anything useful. Terry Pratchett doesn’t give a super clear series of rules for the magic system but it’s abundantly clear that the wizards are incapable of actually useful magic, and mostly just get too tired up in internal power struggles to ever do anything. And in the book Sourcery, the first sourcerer (one who can create new spells) to grace the disc takes over the world, realizes running the entire world is too stressful and tedious then creates his own pocket dimension to play with magic in instead (I’m oversimplifiing here, skipping over a bunch of interpersonal stuff related to a sentient wizard’s staff run by a dead guy who tricked Death among other details but that’s the general gist)

By making the wizards so useless it bypasses any of the logical problems posed by creating a world with magic in it. There’s no “why no use this spell” “why not magic out of this problem” etc. all because the wizards are too useless to actually do anything

That’s just the spam that gets through! On my ancient ISP-provided email it’s primarily distributed via compromised accounts from the same provider. And what I see targeting the corporate world tends to come from newly setup email servers or newly setup accounts on paid email providers

I’ve noticed it definitely varies depending on how you access it. The web version is flawless as long as the software has the resources it needs to run (my server is slightly very over-provisioned and gets crazy IO delay pretty frequently from running too much on too little).

The official Android and IOS apps are pretty good but do glitch and hitch from time to time, but apps on other platforms are less perfect. Also the third party Streamyfin and Swiftfin apps both seem to work a bit better than the official one but have their own quirks to be aware of.

The Roku app only just got consistently usable around 3-6 months ago, and still prefers to crash without displaying an error when fed media it can’t direct play, and for some reason some user profiles just don’t work on it. I don’t have anything else to try other apps on but that’s my experience so far

I haven’t really used Plex so I don’t know how clean of an experience it provides, but Jellyfin is very usable and honestly at this point most of the problems I have are specific to my media or my setup and not so much problems with the software itself