Oh noes! Who could have seen this coming?

/s

That’s awesome! And yeah, Linux Mint was a great choice. I assume you will be asked to do maintenance on these computers, and there should generally be less maintenance involved with Mint than other distros. And since it’s a programming school, linux would be way better than windows. 👍

that’s a good point. I’ve only used caddy for handling certs for all the docker containers on my server. for local uses, you generally don’t need certs, although there are some apps that communicate with an offsite db that requires a secure connection.

Thanks, that sounds like a good setup. Keep everything local, and then rsync or backup certain more important files to cloud backup.

That’s a good point. I may just sign up for Proton VPN.

my ISP mostly. Just want to avoid getting a copyright warning from them. Hasn’t been a problem, just being safe.

I keep hearing about WireGuard being better, but also harder to set up and configure, so I went with Openvpn. I’ll look into WireGuard, and see if I’m brave enough to set that up. For the hosting company, they didn’t point out anything against p2p traffic in their TOS. 🤷‍♂️

Since I already have a vps to run websites and other stuff, I just wanted to spin up my own instance of Openvpn on the same vps in a docker container, so it wasn’t any additional cost. If Openvpn doesn’t work well for me, I may just go with a basic VPN like you said. I don’t torrent enough to need a seedbox. I’m just a filthy casual when it comes to torrenting. 😛

Thanks for the info, very useful. I’m generally trying to hide my traffic from my ISP, when I’m torrenting some movies. I’m not doing a ton of p2p stuff. Not enough to need a seedbox. I’ll share/seed some stuff from my local hard drive. Nothing sits in my vps.

I understand that although the IP addresses I connect to can be hidden from my ISP by my own instance of openvpn, it doesn’t hide that my vps is connecting to those IP addresses. I think I’m okay with that. I’m not connecting to super sketchy sites. Generally, I’m trying to avoid getting some copyright warning letter from my ISP. Although that’s never been an issue, I just thought I’d be safe.

My vps has a domain name, but it does have privacy protection where my name won’t show up on a whois lookup. Not sure how much that helps, but I thought it was good to have.

In terms of a good p2p vpn services, it seems like a lot of the usual ones being advertised on podcasts and youtube are bad about privacy, and it seems like Proton may be the only one that I know of that seems good. Any recommendations for good vpns are welcome. I may just go that route if Openvpn isn’t good enough.

I am in the same general region as backblaze. My vps is in a city that’s 6 hours drive away from my backblaze region’s server.

I looked into that, and decided against it cuz I like having a vps where I can also do other stuff with, like my own self hosted vpn. Small stuff.

🤣

Niri is awesome, it’s the type of computer interface I’ve always imagined I wanted, let alone a wm. I’ve previously used i3, and then Hyprland, which were both very good, but they always felt a bit restrictive and missing something. I didn’t like how if I open just one app or window, it has to fill the whole screen until I open a second app/window. And it bothered me that I can’t center the left most window if I wanted to. Niri does both things out of the box. If feels very flexible and intuitive.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know if Niri increases my productivity, but it definitely improved my user experience.

In my mind, having windows open at full height and be continuously added to horizontally just makes sense. However, it is also flexible enough where you can tile windows vertically as well.

I like being able to put my personal apps in one workspace, and then all my work apps on the next workspace down. With i3 or hyprland, I need about two for my personal and three or four for my work. I can easily have up to 9 workspaces with regular tiling wm’s, and that gets out of hand in terms of organization and trying to find that one app I needed. With Niri I will use at most 4 workspaces. I think that’s a good amount and works well for me.

I really like the somewhat new Overview function, it works well. Sure it does seems like something obvious to have, but honestly, if Niri didn’t have it, I would still be happy since everything else is pretty much exactly what I wanted.

For me, Linux is about having options. And Niri fits this ideal very well, because you can use Niri in a similar way to regular wm’s and more.

I’m a cheapskate, but Niri is such a good project, I will definitely donate to them. Now I just need to overcome my laziness. :P

I do like Mint, but now I’m thinking Bazzite might be better for a beginner or average user because all those configurations and default apps/packages meant to make gaming easier also trickles down to having things “just work” for a casual average PC user. 🤔

oh shit, someone call Alanis Morisette!

Awesome! I’ve been wanting XFCE on wayland. Although I love using Niri, there may be some cases where I want to use a DE, and I would prefer a lightweight one. XFCE being stuck on x11 kinda kept me away from it. In some ways it doesn’t matter, but it would be nice to go wayland.

KDE and Cinnamon are both great, but I will always prefer something lightweight and snappy.

Yeah, non working holidays only take away time for me to serve my corporate billionaire masters. 😤

🤓

Yeah, if the gov and corpos are gathering intel on us, we should do the same to them and warn each other of possible threats. 😤

Open source and proprietary software development have very different goals. Open source is generally about making software that’s useful. Proprietary software’s goal is to make money by any means necessary. Viewing it from that angle, open source devs and the community are more motivated to keep an eye out for backdoors. While proprietary software, they won’t give a fuck until something affects their bottom line. Just because of that, I feel safer using open source software in general.