downhomechunk

vim is for nerds.

I've been daily driving Slackware since the late 90s or early 00s (don't remember). There's no systemd, and no drama. I run KDE plasma 6, steam with proton, flatpak, rocm for AI shenanigans and whatever else I want. Even the rolling release is solid as a rock. There are dozens of us! And we're not all greybeards. I started going grey in high school, but I ate cookies for breakfast today because I'm both a grown ass man and a child.

My wife is my barometer for how beginner friendly any tech is. She had zero issues adapting to popOS. She had many issues when I tried to force Slackware on her.

I've been on a retro kick. Recently I've been messing with a Pentium 233 MMX. I burned a tinycore Linux CD a couple days ago so I could make this:

Make sure your laptop bios allows iommu to be enabled. This is the only way I know to pass your GPU directly to a VM. And even this is still pretty fiddly.

Don't dismiss the steam/proton rec. Or dual boot.

Preach!

Glad I'm not the only one.

I build from ewaste and keep things deliciously trashy looking.

I've been wanting to get matrix up for my family and friends to chat with my 6 year old on her tablet. I found nextcloud talk to do all the things I wanted with none of the hassle. My daughter is a ridiculous texter.

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-m1s-with-4gbyte-ram/

I've been using the original m1 running a lineage OS based android TV for a couple years. It's perfect. I added a nvme drive for a "DVR" in tivimate, but we rarely use it. I use a cheapo 2.4ghz remote from Amazon.

Your approach works too. Something like CasaOS answers OP's question directly. I was thinking about how I started on this journey. I wanted to play with enterprise level tools at home on repurposed e-waste. So I started with proxmox. But I also came to the table with a couple decades of Linux experience under my belt.

Those scripts make it so easy. You can paste a command, accept defaults, watch some text scroll by and finish with instructions on how to access the tool you just installed.

My homelab is low power as well. I'm currently running zero VMs. Everything is done with LXCs. You can run a pi hole on 512 MB RAM.