The one point that has basically been solved is NAT traversal. Thanks to Wire guard, Tailscale and the like. The relevant parts are open source and can be used basically as a library.

I don’t know how recent your experience is with installing Linux, but there are no “hacks” required, haven’t been for many years. In 99.5% of cases everything just works, including sleep & suspend. This is just incredibly outdated or just plain bad advice. There is no tech-savvy-ness needed to use it either.

I’ve installed it for as tech illiterate people as you can imagine and told them “just use it like you have before”. They had a few questions where the answer would usually be “well what did you do before”, told em to try and that was that. I personally found the PCs to feel faster, but that’s my own comment, not theirs. I don’t think they noticed.

These days, you can install any of the gaming focused distros (Bazzite, CachyOS, Nobara, …). And you didn’t have to do anything. It just works, and works well. Steam is either installed or suggested initially. Really trivial.

That really depends on how the VPN is setup and configured on the company side. And possibly how the applications it their servers are configured as well. In our case, absolutely nothing breaks and it just works.

I know that isn’t the point of your comment, but what issues do you have with Logitech hardware on Linux? I have just mice from them, but honestly an embarrassing amount. I just use Solaar and I can configure all I need? I also have always only used the onboard memory (so I can move them between computers), and don’t really use macros though…

Yes, in serious. I’m personally not much of a Lego collector and/or builder, but two close friends of mine are. They were big Lego fans and collectors for most of our lives (decades). I’d say 10-15 years ago they started to complain about declining QC and just generally lower quality. Molds were clearly used for much longer, parts having worse tolerance and either not fitting well or being lose. Then the creative side also got worse, with kits just not meeting previous standards either. Clearly just being cranked out for the sake of releasing something, often under license (Star wars, marvel or whatever).

Then when the patent ran out, some (select few) of the alternatives started to gain favor. Unfortunately I don’t remember who, but I can ask next time I see either of them. Not saying everything they make is great, but actually less problems with gas parts, and some kits are apparently just like old Lego.

They have for a whole. Their whole business model was having a patent. When that ran out, the predictable happened.

I mean their quality was already going down hill in the lead-up to the patent end. Everyone else being allowed to compete on even ground just showed how bad their quality had actually become.

the form factor is easy to get around

Why did you just ignore everything I wrote, but you still replied to me? No, it isn’t easy to get around. You can use a server to game, but the server mainboards and CPUs expect and work with differently configured memory (registered DIMMs). All the AI infratructure uses that type. You can’t use that memory in a normal PC. Wikipedia reference if you’d like to read about it, but a relevant quote:

[…] the motherboard must match the memory type; as a result, registered memory will not work in a motherboard not designed for it, and vice versa.

You would have to un-solder all the chips and remanufacture new memory modules, and nobody is doing that, especially not at scale. It might be an actual buisness model to do that once the bubble pops, but it isn’t a problem that’s “easy to get around”.>

It no longer works as a shortcut, but the actual bypass still works. In practice the command line you have to enter just got a bit longer is all.

At least last time I needed it, to that still worked fine. It’s been a few months.

You can’t put the kind of memory used in servers (registered ECC dimm) into normal/personal computers. It’s not just that the ECC won’t work, they don’t work at all.

That’s different with unregistered ECC dimms, those will work (at normal spec speeds), but the ECC part will just be unused. These are in the minority though for servers, in practice they are more used in workstations.

First my context: I’m also running multiple Proxmox hosts (personal and professional), and havea paperless-ngx instance (personal/family). I tried Firefly, but the effort required to get it to a point where it would be if use to me was too high, so I dropped it. Haven’t used n8n.

For the setup I’d just use the Proxmox community scripts, if you haven’t heard of them. Makes updates trivial and lowers the bar to just trying something to basically zero.

Paperless-ngx I actually use, cause it means I can find something when i need it. It’s all automatically ocr’d and all you have to do is categorize them. With time, it’ll learn and do this for you. You can (manually) setup your scanner to just directly upload files to the “consume” folder and it just works. PC/server power is near irrelevant, it just means OCR takes slightly longer, otherwise it’s a web server. You can run this just fine on a raspberry pi.

I don’t have any real automation setup, so I can’t really comment on that. My advice is to just install it, see what it does and how it feels. Try to anticipate if and how much automation you need. Many aspects of all this are of the “setup once” variety, where once it’s working, you don’t have to touch it again. Try to gauge if the one time effort is worth it for you, then go from there. As I said, it was fine for paperless for me, but not for Firefly (but I might need to revisit this).

Many people look at the game graphics and think it’s a joke, but the gameplay is actually great, even by today standards. If you’re even a little into transportation games, just give it a go. It’ll also run on a toaster.

DuckDNS had been unreliable when I used it, but it’s been a while. I swapped over to desec.io but their signups aren’t always open. Can highly recommend them though, and they offer many paths to update the IP, including DynDNS(2) protocol or just ddclient.

Also works with certbot for Let’s encrypt certificates using dns challenge.

Never run something like Vaultwarden with unencrypted traffic. Throwing in a self signed cert is basically free insurance. You never know when even in your “trusted network” something starts listening in. Just why risk it?

Teams actually has Linux builds on the AUR. Obviously they are wrapping the web version, but it does integrate much more nicely with the GUI. I’m running the version that uses your already installed electron. I don’t have to use chrome for teams, which is the real upside for me.

Ssh over Internet is fine as long as it’s properly setup (no password auth, root not allowed, etc.). Obviously a VPN is even better.

That’s unfortunately how that works. That’s why there is a lot of abandonware. Software or games where the original copyright holder no longer exists or doesn’t care. Copyright doesn’t magically disappear.

It’s a tragedy, but that’s how the law works.

I would like to add that I did look at the GitHub before commenting. And I still didn’t get it. Matthew with just explain what it does, but also why is different from the common tools/suggestions that seem similar. Maybe it’s more about highlighting the differences (or the additional capabilities).

Ah now I understand the purpose. I only use it for my (personal) dotfiles, which as a term is ambiguous at best, but in my case I mean config files. That was how I essentially misread your title. Obviously all those files are owned by my user, and most live in ~/.config or similar locations beneath my home directory. Things like application preferences, basically.

Obviously your tool also works for this, but I now understand it’s more meant for system wide config files.

I’m also just using GNU stow into a git repo. It needs no configuration file and just works on any system. Rolling out a new system takes 2 commands. I really don’t see the need for a specialized tool for this use case.