When my paid service started giving me ads I stopped watching it. I’ve been paying them since before streaming and in the past couple years stopped paying because T-Mobile started paying. When T-Mobile quits paying we’ll close the account.

Mine is definitely a hobby… possibly a borderline addiction. I am an IT person by day and then selfhost a bit at home. Most of my equipment is good old eBay specials (R720xd, R610), or just accumulated over the years (a few HP Microservers, RAID enclosures, etc).

The uptime is decent but my ISP isn’t great, plus one of the servers has been having issues so until I find a few hours to focus on it, it is not something I would consider “acting like a paid IT”.

Not to make myself sound like a bad IT person, but my homelab is held together with hope and scripts to recover when it goes down. One day I’ll cluster some lower power proxmox systems with portainer and ensure everything important has a way to fail over and backed up offsite (no, I’ll probably just take a nap if I get a free afternoon lol).

Sometimes people in these communities don’t realize how they come off, tone is hard over text, and I’m just as bad in person (thankfully I work remote most days).

I just use the default one and put a couple folders on the home screen (one for stores, one for games, one for media, one for utility), then a couple widgets on the next screen over.

No, the only persistent notification I have to put up with is Tasker.

I honestly can say how far from stock it is because I have no clue when the last time I saw unadulterated Android (if ever lol), but it doesn’t have a lot of crap added to it.

I haven’t had to do anything special for signal, Home Assistant has some issues with permissions and not always reporting back if its on in the background. Still trying to figure out why its fine on mine but not on my son’s phone.

The fine tuned controls for things like network access, storage and contact scopes, etc. are just amazing.

I use Tasker to handle stuff like shaking for a light, enabling certain DND settings, etc.

I would love a phone that could dock and be a desktop replacement, I’m fine with using moonlight or something else to reach back to a server for games or bigger lifts than my phone can handle.

I wholeheartedly agree, I thought it was cool until I realized the security concerns. FDE and pass phrases only please. If only someone could convince more companies to allow proper TOTP instead of wanting you to use their proprietary authenticator.

Its been on every Pixel since the 7 I believe, I realize that’s only a couple iterations but its out there.

I switched to Graphene in December and I can’t say it enough, GrapheneOS is everything I wanted Android to be for the past 15 years.

I used to unlock my desktop with my face a long time ago (20 years or so)… No clue when it came to mobile devices, I could totally see Apple bringing that to mobile first.

Dude, you jumped from “theft” to murder in under 50 words, no need for the hostilities and it doesn’t have the slightest thing to do with “AI porn” or answering writing prompts. While that can be a use of AI, its similar to the way you can use a pizza cutter to slice cheese if you want (even if that’s not what it excels at).

In a digital age, the ability to train a model on a specific topic and use it to automatically iterate through an instruction set (while “learning” about outcomes outside of the original training material), can be the difference between thinking your infrastructure is secure or actually securing it.

LLMs have their use in the world, a lot more use than stuff like copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Ever wonder why you can easily get a cheap ripoff of patented goods? Its because not all countries follow the laws of other countries.

All that being said, you don’t have to agree, it changes nothing and having opposing views actually makes the world a better place as it spurs discussion and thought. Thank you for being part of such a great community, and thank you for engaging with me and others!

Believe me, I love debating laws and policy, but I’m 99% sure you’re taking the piss and any discussion wouldn’t be in good faith.

If you aren’t just trolling, take a few minutes to read up on why the US (and every country with the capability) hasn’t decided to dismantle their entire nuclear stockpile, or stopped research into nuclear weapons. If you don’t have time, the 10,000 foot overview is no one wants to fall behind, if they do they they fear that they wouldn’t be able to defend themselves against the same… AI is no different, tell the world to stop researching it and all you guarantee is that countries that don’t listen to the global community will outpace the ones that “play fair”.

I mean you were pretty damn correct in your statement. Fedora is not officially supported, neither is Debian, a couple popular derivatives are though. My guess is Canonical and IBM were willing to add stuff to make AMD feel confident enough to list them as “Officially” supported.

Personally I’m not a fan of RHEL or Ubuntu but absolutely love Debian. Part of me feels like I would like RHEL if I used it enough, but I use Window’s daily at work and still don’t like it…

I need to try Arch sometime… My son says great things about it, If I ever feel like Debian can’t do something I’ll give it a try.

I mean that is an option. Much like banning nuclear weapons, it’s easier said than done.

Late to the party and after reading through some of these setups I may have to expand mine soon (it never ends does it?), here is what I have right now.

Unraid (Dell R720XD, dual Xeon E5-2670 v2, 64GB RAM, 12 x 6TB in 12 disk array with 2 parity disks, 800GB SSD cache pool)

-NextCloud

-Plex

-Emby

-Gitea

-Backrest

-MariaDB

-Netbootxyz

-Trillium

-Traccar

-Vaultwarden

-Adguard-Home

-Unifi

-Homebox

-Nessus

-Headscale

-Collabora

-*arrs

-Jupterlab

-Mealie

-SearXNG

-IT-Tools

-EmulatorJS

-Youtube-DL-Material

Proxmox (old Intel server S2600WT2, dual Xeon E5-2620 V2, 768GB RAM, 5 x 2TB disks):

-Zap2XML

-Immich

-Mumble

-NextPVR

-Stirling-PDF

-WebTop

-Frigate

-MCServer (gameserver)

-SDTDServer (gameserver)

-SFServer (gameserver)

There are some other things floating around in my homelab that aren’t really ‘selfhosted’ things, just important to the home network:

3 HP Microserver Gen8’s

-x1 with ESXi hosting pfSense

-x2 with TrueNas Scale for backups

R610 with ESXi for a few remote desktops and Home Assistant (which I’m sure I’ll move to docker at some point).

Life in general. I was nearly 40 when I realized three important things; I have the word ‘senior’ in my job title, other people look to me for direction, no one steering this ship really knew to begin with.

Much like how one day you will pick up your kid for the last time and not realize it, eventually you look around and notice you and your peers are in charge (for better or worse).

Oh man, that would suck. I do not ever use an external USB port for that exact reason! Aside from a few desktops and laptops around the house all my equipment has an internal USB port for the purpose of a boot drive (I always assumed that was the reason).

All production stuff needs backups. Personally I try to keep boot device backups saved to another device as an image so if one goes down, I can clone it to a USB real quick and restore the blink to the lights; ideally I should also keep them off site, but I don’t like to use cloud providers (tin foil hat and all).

I have a few servers that have been booting from USB for years. Two of my old freenas boxes (now just hosting backups of data from unraid), have been booting off the same USB sticks for almost 10 years now. In addition to the freenas boxes I use internal USB drives on Unraid, ProxMox, and ESXi hosts (had to try them all).

Its a risk, but having a cloned USB as a backup can mitigate it a bit.

Don’t give up too easily friend. I’ve been slowly moving some of my hone systems away from Window’s, and much like you, I’ve spent close to 20 years as a Windows admin. I have the advantage of using Linux on my always ancient laptops over the years and it is my personal opinion that Debian is the way to go.

Give LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) a go, it is very familiar to navigate coming from Windows and isn’t going to have constant updates breaking stuff (looking at you Arch).

First thing after installing run apt-get update, then add the Nvidia drivers (add the source to your sources and install, if you need help, post back and we’ve got you!) and reboot.