If this needs to be "hardware" level, I saw https://openterface.com/ recently. The PiKVM-style projects are also a bit adjacent to this.
koala
joined 7 months ago
How much storage you want? Do you want any specific feature beyond file sharing?
How much experience do you have self hosting stuff? What is the purpose of this project? (E.g. maybe you want a learning experience, not using commercial services, just need file sharing?)
To be fair, if you want to sync your work across two machines, Git is not ideal because well, you must always remember to push, If you don't push before switching to the other machine, you're out of luck.
Syncthing has no such problem, because it's real time.
However, it's true that you cannot combine Syncthing and Git. There are solutions like https://github.com/tkellogg/dura, but I have not tested it.
There's some lack of options in this space. For some, it might be nicer to run an online IDE.
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To add something, I second the "just use Git over ssh without installing any additional server". An additional variation is using something like Gitolite to add multi-user support to raw Git, if you need to support multiple users and permissions; it's still lighter than running Forgejo.
Reminder that you can go for hybrid approaches; receive email and host IMAP/webmail yourself, and send emails through someone like AWS. I am not saying you can't do SMTP yourself, but if you want to just dip your toes, it's an option.
You get many of the advantages; you control your email addresses, you store all of the email and control backups, etc.
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And another thing: you could also play with https://chatmail.at/relays ; which is pretty cool. I had read about Delta Chat, but decided to play with it recently and... it's blown my mind.
If you are going to run Jellyfin or some other media sharing, the key is if you need to transcode media (recompress because the playback device cannot handle it or not). Likely not, nowadays, but research that. If you need transcoding, research; you might get by with an old CPU, or maybe hardware transcoding support, but it's difficult.
Outside transcoding, for file sharing/streaming, every simultaneous client will require additional horsepower and disk transfer usage. If you are the sole client, then likely you can do with an old CPU. But if you and three people more in your household are going to be using the system at the same time, it might be a bit complex.
One of my home servers is a 4gb of RAM, with a "Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU G1610T @ 2.30GHz". It's very old and low end, but for file sharing it works quite well, but it rarely has more than a single simultaneous user.
But now with the end of Windows 10 looming, I need to upgrade a family member’s computer to Linux.
Why?
Did they ask for Linux? Do you have authority over them?
So this needs to be something that both is not going to break on its own (e.g. while doing automatic updates) and also won’t be accidentally broken by the users. ... There’s no way I’m going to be able to handle long-distance tech support if things break more than once in a blue moon.
Issues appear. I would be more focused on setting up remote access than choosing a distro.
I'd choose something LTS that has been around for a while (Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL-derivatives, SuSE if there's a freely-available LTS, etc.).
If you are not against the use of Google products, ChromeOS devices are about the best well-designed low maintenance operating systems. (Not Flex, a ChromeOS device.) But you would be sacrificing Firefox and LibreOffice, which might not be an option. (And technically, it's running a Linux kernel, if I remember correctly.)
https://dgross.ca/blog/linux-home-server-auto-sleep did the rounds lately.
But you'll need another system to always be on to handle this.
In many cases, you can "fake" this in other means. For example, I had Remmina configured to run a script to send a WOL packet and wait before connecting via remote desktop to a computer.
Yep, I do that on Debian hosts, EL (RHEL/Rocky/etc.) have a similar feature.
However, you need to keep an eye for updates that require a reboot. I use my own Nagios agent that (among other things) sends me warnings when hosts require a reboot (both apt/dnf make this easy to check).
I wouldn't care about last online/reboots; I just do some basic monitoring to get an alert if a host is down. Spontaneous reboots would be a sign of an underlying issue.
Try a LiveCD or installing Windows to an external drive (or if you are able to dualboot, although I don't recommend dualbooting in general).
As for your original question, all PC/component manufacturers invest time in making their stuff work on Windows. Few do the same for Linux. Linux has a ton of people working to make hardware work, but it's always going to be an uphill struggle if you don't choose hardware explicitly for Linux support. Although I think your most recent issue is hardware (but I can't know for sure).
Remember that Google News has RSS feeds! They are very well hidden, but they are there.
However, they are also a bit bad.
I started https://github.com/las-noticias/news-rss to postprocess a bit Google News RSS feeds and also play with categorization. I found spaCy worked well to find "topics", but unfortunately I lost steam.
how do you like the titan pocket?
Honestly, it sucked a bit. The keyboard deteriorated quickly and I couldn't touch-type without looking at the screen like I did on real BlackBerries. (Plus, it didn't handle accents nor writing in Catalan well :( Also I had my second swollen battery last week, so I decided to ditch it.
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I don't know. Now I have a Pixel 9A and I should play with the Linux VM feature. It should be possible to run Firefox for Linux, which would then support keyboard shortcuts. But even though the Pixel has 8gb of RAM and the processor feels snappy, I suspect it will suck a bit. But really if Linux applications could handle well a physical keyboard...
Yeah, I think it's sad that we had beautiful phones with a physical keyboard as late as in 2018 with the Key2, but no one bought them... and people are slowly realizing that... maybe keyboards on phones are good. I see that Google is adding more and more physical keyboard features to Android, so perhaps some day...
Although my preferred way would be if services such as WhatsApp didn't force people to use iOS or Android, and using niche OSes on niche phones was more viable.
Hah, no worries. I think it's just an unusual use case and... well, I recognized it because I'm obsessed with PiKVM lately and those things!
I'm not superknowledgeable on USB, but Linux has features to do this; they are called "gadgets" in this list:
https://docs.kernel.org/usb/index.html
I have used this to turn a RPI Zero into a virtual USB drive with these scripts: https://github.com/alexpdp7/rpi-zero-usb-iso/
Likely by searching the Internet for USB gadgets you might find good explanations about requirements. I know there are unexpected difficulties- I'm using a Pi Zero instead of a nicer Pi because... nicer Pis can draw too much power over USB and bork what they're connected to. So be careful.