Human Crayon

This is the correct answer.

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.

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.

Mine is a snap install that started 3 years ago on virtual box and was ported over to proxmox. It has never broken, updates automatically, and generally seems to work just fine.

It doesn’t load instantly, but it doesn’t drag by any means.

I second the R5 case. I have one for my NAS and it’s been a dream to work in.

I’ve been using Trilium Notes for the better part of two years and love it. I have used Obsidian and similar markdown apps, and I find it frustrating to add images due to the need to store them in a separate folder and reference them instead of just pasting them into the page and being done with it. To me, that’s a barrier for notes when I’m trying to brainstorm. I really do like markdown, but it doesn’t work with my though process.

I have a sync server setup at home (with no outside access) and do my main writing inside my network. For notes on the go I use the Notes app on my iphone (its quick and easy) and then drop the notes into Trilium when I get home.

I have all my spare drives pooled together into a frankenNAS system in a spare Fractal R5 case. Whatever media fits gets a backup on there (in order of personal importance). Otherwise I will reacquire all my ISO’s should disaster strike.

I miss those buttons in Netscape.

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

I’m a big fan of separating my storage from my compute. I have plex running on one computer, and all the storage for it on a separate one. This allows you to have a lower powered NAS and just serves up files, and a higher spec’d (or smaller) computer for running Plex/Jellyfin.

I have a buddy who uses a mini PC with quicksync to serve up Plex to a few family members, and pulls everything from a larger NAS box running TrueNAS full of disks.

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.

I have (more than I’d like to admit) recovered entirely from backups.

I run proxmox, everything else in a VM. All VMs get backed up to three different places once a week, backups are tested monthly on a rando proxmox box to make sure they still work. I do like the backup system built into it, serves my needs well.

Proxmox could die and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. I reinstall proxmox, restore the VMs and I’m good to go again.

Might I suggest Server Part Deals for drives? Excellent track record and very responsive. They are my goto for refurbished enterprise drives and have never let me down.

Came here to say I had something similar happen with my NAS a year back. Thought it was the drives, then the controller it was attached to. Turns out it was some crappy blue breakout cables causing the drives to error out and disconnect.

Ordered new breakout cables of a different brand and have zero errors since.

Second the upgrading of storage. If you think you need 512GB, get 1TB. If you think you need 1TB, get 2TB (if possible). You always need more storage than you think you need.

I love Affinity, moreso than anything Adobe makes. I also work in the creative suite all day as a designer. If Affinity would expand to linux, I’d suggest the switch whinin our department immediately.

At least Affinity doesn’t screw around with Pantone support. They have that figured out.