Human Crayon

I run proxmox on my server, VMs within that. It has an excellent backup service built in (not the proxmox backup server, that’s separate) that you can set a schedule for and it keeps to it. Very customizable, all my backups (tested monthly) have restored fine for the past few years. If you’re looking for something to run your homelab, I highly recommend it.

I’m going to say this now before anything happens: backup, backup, and backup. Make multiple copies, store them different places. Please dear god backup your data, because no one else will.

Be careful with “like new” claims. I’ve had people in the past pull that with me, and the drive had 8 years of time on it.

If possible, serverpartdeals.com has an excellent range of used drives. Stick with the manufacturer refurbished. They come with a good warranty and so far have been rock solid for me (5 year timeframe).

Determination, patience, a willingness to learn anything you need to.

If you have those, in time, you will be able to get your lab up and running. I started mine with a minimal knowledge of Linux (I could install it from a USB and poke around). Now it’s the center of my families digital life.

You’ll get there in time.

Building a new, bigger, storage server using TrueNAS scale. I’ve been on CORE forever and it works well. Running out of space, though, and might as well upgrade the OS too.

I would highly suggest separating your storage from your compute. I’ve found this to be a cheaper and more flexible option over the years.

It works on up to 5 devices at the same time. I’ve used signal on my phone, with it also open on my computer with zero problems. Syncing is instantaneous.

I love my Nextcloud instance, too. Zero problems in the past 4 years. I don’t run many extensions on it, though. The mobile app works great as well.

Trillium plus its sync server in a VM is my goto for notes. Mobile isn’t a problem (I usually drops everything into my notes app, then expand on it when I’m in front of a full keyboard at home).

Not sure how I could get through my day without either of these two.

This weekend is getting Foundry VTT up with a reverse proxy and certs for voice/video chat. Spinning up a new VM in proxmox and getting HAproxy configured for it (it’s used for the rest of my services).

Ease of installation would be a huge one. Pop was run the installer from USB and go. After it was online there was just installing steam and whatever games I wanted. I have not dug further into void or what its capable of. I wanted as little fiddling as possible. To me the interface felt good out of the box.

I mainly sought out Pop!OS after reading about people’s experience with it and gaming and liked what I heard. I jumped directly from windows 11 to Pop. If void works for you, that’s awesome. This was my “how do I get it running now without messing around” moment. I really just wanted to game, immediately after install. Later on I started to fiddle with things.

They sunset “Don’t Be Evil” a while ago.

I will second Pop!OS. I have it installed on my gaming desktop and have been very satisfied with its stability and ability to play every game I’ve wanted to. Between Steams Proton layer and Wine (with the wineglass GUI) there is nothing I want for right now.

(I do run an AMD card, YMMV with an Nvidia one as I cannot speak to experience with that).

I do use Mint for my laptop/daily driver outside of gaming and love that as well. In my mind the two distributions fit the use cases well.

I miss those buttons in Netscape.

Mint for my daily driver, PopOS for my gaming machine. Happy with both.

I have installed PopOS and so far it’s been very stable. Most of the games I play are on Steam and support has been pretty awesome (BG3, CP2077, Valheim, Warhammer 40k: Inquisitor). For non-Steam games, WINE with the Wine Glass GUI has been great, allowing me to run older windows games without a problem.

EDIT: Forgot to add I’m running an Ryzen 7 3700X, 16GB ram, RX 5700XT

EDIT EDIT: +1 for Mint as well. Outside of my gaming PC, it’s my daily driver on my laptop.

They are also strong enough to pull down stray branches stuck in a tree.

Media I don’t take as seriously as other backups. Except for a few hard to find ISO’s, I have a Fractal R5 case that I’ve crammed full of all the rando extra drives I have sitting round, and pool those all together in TrueNAS. So far it’s more than the total storage of my media NAS. It gets a monthly backup automatically.

I over reacted and took the Linux route. It wasn’t just one thing that prompted the change, but copilot was the icing on the cake.

I’ve been unhappy with windows for a few years, but it’s always been easier to ignore it and continue on. Something in me must have snapped about the same time a few guys at work were talking about gaming on Linux. Worked out well for me, might not work best for everyone.

I did this the moment they dropped copilot on my taskbar without any prompting. It was my gaming machine so it took a little getting used to, but it’s been solid ever since.

I did not ask for an AI chatbot in my os. I don’t want an AI chatbot in my os.

This is the one I use and it’s awesome. Allows you to upload to nextcloud or most other providers.