This is a bit of a slog, but I have tailscale and rdclient running on an iplay mini 50. I have a SIM card in it, but I am on wifi 95% of the time, and it connects back to my desktop at home running Fedora. Not quite as good as being in front of it, but it’s a pretty reliable workflow, and I can switch the same remote session to my laptop if I need more screen size.

Steam and Lutris work well! I can game on XFCE Mint just fine. I actually have an easier time of it than on a number of distros, thanks to the combination of flatpaks and the Ubuntu base. But, I am not “the kids”.

I checked, it’s still there! (It doesn’t append, it overwrites, so no, I just have a file with the current date and time accurate to within two minutes.)

I did the hackiest, lamest thing back in the day… I had my client write the current date and time to a file on the share every two minutes as a Cron job… Kept it working for months! I saw it on a forum somewhere, tried it, and… Shocked Pikachu face I don’t know if I ever disabled that Cron job! Haha!

I’ve had two different unihertz models, and neither of them could stay on any wifi, and both of them dropped calls like crazy. I contacted customer support, and they ‘offered’ to swap for another exact same phone, if I paid to ship both ways, and I didn’t mind having no phone for a month. Jelly 2, and Atom XL. The Atom was especially bad as it has a giant bloody antenna sticking out the top of it, and still no WiFi!

Avoid Unihertz.

Does it give you anything? Can you select safe mode or nomodeset from the grub menu, or do you get no grub menu at all? I almost pulled the trigger on a used getac system a while back, but couldn’t justify the cost. If you get it working, please tell me how it goes under Linux!

He was the worst! Zuckerberg levels of pseudo-humanity. Of course, he got promoted up and away.

Ugh. There’s a book about how to be a better boss, and one of the things it says is that adding a mild curse to otherwise normal speech will convince people you are being sincere. My boss read it.

“Well, this damn job isn’t going to build itself!”

“Aw shit! Lunch is over! Back to work!”

It was so awful.

This is actually a real problem… A lot of digital documents from the 90’s and early 2000’s are lost forever. Hard drives die over time, and nobody out there has come up with a good way to permanently archive all that stuff.

I am a crazy person, so I have RAID, Ceph, and JBOD in various and sundry forms. Still, drives die.

Commenting to register my interest.

I will confess that I was tempted to throw some snarky comment about Linux, but I got over the urge.

Ditto, except mine just died one day. I put it away for bed, woke up, flipped it open, Nada. Brick. I felt it was a bit slower than I’d like, but got pretty good battery life.

Really tempted to try a Musebook, based on Risc-V, because apparently I’m a sucker for punishment.

Yeah, I did try that. Basically, if I doubled the memory I allocated, I gave it half again longer before it crashed, but it still crashed, eventually.

It’s no big deal, this was last year, I may try again one day. Loving Searxng though!

I tried running yacy for a while but it just ran for a bit less than a day then ran out of memory and crashed, over and over. Tried to figure out the problem, but it’s niche enough that I couldn’t get anywhere googling the issue.

I shouldn’t talk because I dip in and out, but I do that because I like the possibilities. Like, what if someone comes up with a concept, but no one tries it, and it turns out to really work? Like, I like immutability as a concept, so I’ve tried Silverblue, Kinoite, and Bazzite. If nobody gave it a go, then the concept would die on the vine.

Also, I like seeing different ways of thinking about technology.

I have dyndns, have since they were 10$ a year, and I’ve gradually realized that my ISP changes my IP on average less than once a year…

I have a thumb drive with Mint Mate installed on it and it runs fine on a 4gb i5 - 3rd gen.

I have it working with LaCP’d 4gb networking for the transfers. Five nodes. I agree though, It’s a beast on RAM.

I have tried a couple of Proxmox clusters, one with overkill specs and one with little Mini PCs. Proxmox does eat up a fair amount of memory, but I have used it with Ceph for live migrations. Its really useful to me to be able to power off a machine, work on it, then bring it back up, and have no interruptions in my services. That said, my Mini PCs always seemed to be hurting for RAM. So that’s my pros and cons.

You mean I didn’t need to spend years and thousands of dollars learning Linux and servers? Oh man! Oh wait, I’m getting ads in Windows on the start menu. Yeah, I’m happy.

There’s a series of Lemmy posts called the Linux upskill challenge that goes step by step through setting up and using Linux. I tried self hosting and jumping straight in too, and it sucked.

What worked for me:

1. Start using open source versions of stuff, like switching from Chrome to Firefox, Office to Libre Office.
2. Set up Virtual Box, and practice running server apps on Linux on virtual machines, until you’ve done a few Linux VMs and gotten used to the interfaces and commands.
3. Dual boot a laptop or desktop, one by one getting your daily use apps working in Linux.
4. Distro hop a bit. I never thought I’d land on Fedora, but here I am.
5. Get used to running and configuring servers from the command line.
6. Host some stuff with VMs and get used to the networking and bridging and stuff.
7. Containers!

I’m still in the middle of 6+7. Not super comfy with Docker quite yet, but getting there. I really do love having my stuff self-hosted though. Well worth the effort.