I can recommend Debian or Fedora. They are both mature distros that are pretty easy to install and generally work well with minimal fuss and are easy to maintain. I often see Linux Mint recommend, including in this thread. I’ve never used it so I can’t speak to it. But I have every reason to believe it’s a solid choice.

As for transfer process, since you mention using spare disks, NTFS filesystems are supported and you may be able to just copy files off of them. I don’t know if bitlocker is supported.

What I’ve found helpful, specifically to the threadiverse is to occasionally scroll through all and find communities that sound fun, interesting, or uplifting to subscribe to. And otherwise browse by Subscribed. Makes it a more pleasant, less doomscrolly experience.

It’s not perfect. This is still a pretty niche place so that’s not a huge amount of content. And it doesn’t solve the problem of the vast, soulless modern internet as a whole. But still, it makes one thing a bit nicer, and that’s not nothing.

Also this. On some unremarkable HP office PC that’s probably about a decade old. No ad filtering or anything as it interferes with others in the house. I’ve thought about trying a second unbound serving with adblocking for me, but haven’t gotten around to it.

The 3b just has USB 2, so even with slow spinning rust, that’s going to be a bottleneck. But it’s probably still plenty fast as a remote storage device for media storage.

Edit: said I didn’t know OP’s use case but in re-reading they did say. Edited accordingly.

Tangential, but anyone passing by this comment and doesn’t like popcorn after working at a theater?

Whenever I see a bowl of popcorn it reminds me of that smell of popcorn and coke mixed together in a garbage can. It’s not so bad that I don’t eat it at all. But if I do, I have very little.

Fine points. And I am considering that simplicity might be worth it. Except for:

Another fix might be moving towards software that doesn’t require the capacity to reverse updates frequently.

Totally solid advice, but I love my rolling release distro though. So for the time being I’m willing to accept the associated risk.

Your comment as well as @stupid_asshole69@hexbear.net were really food for thought for me. stupid_asshole69 advising against, and yours as a cautionary tale.

This would be a complex stack to accomplish my goal. It occurs to me that it’d be mdadm (raid 1) > LUKS > btrfs since btrfs can’t do encryption which is right in the middle of that stack, so I couldn’t use it’s raid 1 functionality. If any of those pieces break, all the protection they would have otherwise provided me goes out the window.

And I’m not really worried about losing data. I already backup my personal files and most of my configs. The appeal with this kind of setup is the data redundancy and fairly quick recovery. But a partition clone like what saved you also works pretty well for that purpose. I don’t know what I’ll do just yet, but definitely taking all that in to consideration.

I wasn’t familiar with timeshift so I took a look at it. My primary use case for snapshots is to take one before updates. So I can load from the snapshot if there’s issues. It doesn’t look like using it with ext4 would fulfill this use-case. But it looks like it also supports btrfs snapshots so could be useful as a UI to configure that.

Hearing roughly a decade of successful use, especially on systems with constrained resources, certainly makes me lean further towards btrfs.

its RAID ≠ 0/1/10 are buggy, but 0/1/10 are considered reliable.

btrfs has been solid and done everything I could want. It was a huge upgrade from mdadm and lvm

@ikidd@lemmy.world said that btrfs is poor at software RAID. I’ll do a little research in to how it fares for RAID 1 vs mdadm. I don’t see any reason I couldn’t do mdadm>luks>btrfs if that’s the better choice. But if btrfs is reliable and with comparable performance, I’d certainly rather do that.

It’s the shits at software RAID, but that’s rarely a thing on a workstation.

I am using a RAID 1 mirror over two disks. So that’s good to know. I’ll do a little research and see if it’s better to let mdadm handle that.

Look at btrfs-assistant for adminstration. That’s what Fedora ships with, I think it uses Snapper in the backend.

Doesn’t look like that’s in the void repo. But that’s ok, I don’t mind learning the command line tools.

I don’t know specifically about a medical lab tech program. But I do know about clinical software in general. It is by and large proprietary Widows software. Seems like something you may encounter. But said software could be delivered via Citrix, which does have a Linux client.

I feel like I was aware of this (much time has passed), but I think it’s something we discovered by trying it out of curiosity.

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Risk is also a factor re: self hosting.

• You’re exposing potential attack vectors, which is particularly concerning if self hosting = home hosting.
• Also with home hosting, it’s probably against your ISP’s TOS. It is for mine (I actually read it!). Will they do anything? Probably not. But it’s a risk.
• You could face legal issues if someone posts illegal content, since you’re hosting it. Even unwittingly.

Those concerns are what stop me. Because I otherwise think I’d enjoy hosting a little corner in the fediverse.

NixOS is a declarative distro. Meaning it you can declare pretty much every aspect of it from what software is installed to how the system is configured from a config file.

Using you calandar example, you can list Thunderbird (or whatever) as a package you want in the configuration and it will be installed. You can also use that same configuration on another machine and produce the same environment.

Relevant to the original point, since all your software is listed in a text file, you can easily see exactly what’s installed.

Void for desktop/laptop. These are the things I like about it.

• Rolling release
• Initial installation is minimal, and doesn’t foist a specific DE or other unessential software on me.
• No systemd
• Nothing similar to Arch’s AUR. I know a lot of people love it, but I do not. I mention as the distros are similar.

Debian for my server. But I plan to migrate to Devuan.

• Stable and well tested
• Huge package selection
• Pretty ubiquitously supported. If for whatever reason what you want to run isn’t in the repo, .deb packages and apt repos are often available.
• Minimal installation available.

For those like myself who hadn’t heard of GoToSocial and are curious what it is but don’t want to watch a video, it is as you might guess an ActivityPub based microblogging platform. With a focus on smaller instances capable of running on low end hardware. According to their site, anyway. https://gotosocial.org/

A search of the comments didn’t turn up any mention of seedboxes. So I’ll throw that hat in the ring as an option.

On a Pi4.

I was running it on a VM on the home server but then any downtimes that machine had were also HA downtimes. Decided that mattered enough to run it on it’s own hardware.

Maybe self host your own VPN on a VPS and connect the jellyfin server as a client as well as any other devices you want to see that jellyfin server as other clients and configure the VPN server to not override your default routing and to allow clients to see each other? In my head I don’t think that would conflict with your protonVPN connection.

Your traffic would be encrypted between devices so I wouldn’t say https is nessesary and thus no certs needed.

The rubs that occur to me are that I’m not sure you can do this on a free tier VPS which is the only option I see given your financial limitations. And your devices all need to be able to connect to said VPN.

Edit: Slightly less worse English.