I’m a good chemist, but not IT advanced. Started using Debian out of the box last year on miniPC. Running Jellyfin only on that local machine. Don’t understand coding, but copy/ paste terminal instructions from trusted sites. Have 1TB music, films and documents. Want to move all photos from Google.
You must log in or register to comment.
Small advice, document everything.
Preferably in an easy, maintainable way. Like markdown in a git repo.
I find that digitalocean (which is a VPS provider) has great tutorials.
I often tend to search “how to X site:digitalocean.com”, despite hosting almost everything on my own hardware.
I’m somewhat of a chemist too, tho, it was back in the 60s…and in my basement…but yeah.
everytime you copy paste a terminal command, try see if you can understand what it’s doing with:
$ tldr mycommand (you need tealdeer installed)
and
$ mycommand --help
imo this is way more concise and beginner friendly than reading man pages
For all its flaws. Low level tech support, rubber duck, command explainer is something LLMs do really well. Kept my early mistakes off the web and got me where I needed to be most times.
I haven’t had that experience. More often than not I’ve found properly made software breaks in ways that tell you why. I seem to get stuck going in a circle of doom with llms.
I must have been having more basic problems than you. I found LLMs to present the most common solution, and generally the most common way of setting it up is the “right-way”, At least for a beginner. Then I’d quiz it on what docker compose environments do, what “ports: ####:####” meant, how I could route one container through another. All very basic stuff.
By the time I wanted to do non-standard stuff I was better equipped with the fundamentals of hobbiest deployment and how to coax an LLM into doing what I needed.
Goes without saying I’d take the output of the LLM to Google for verification, then back to the LLM for a hobbiest’s explaination, back to Google for verification…
Properly made software has great documentation and logs. If you know how to access those logs and read documentation (both skills in themselves)… Not to mention not all software is “properly made” some of it is bare bones and just works ™.
I like YunoHost. That’s an all-in-one solution to do the selfhosting for you. So you won’t learn a lot about the intricate details of the tech, but you can install things with a few clicks. That’s nice if you just want to use stuff. And that project has some track-record. I’m using it for years to self-host Peertube, Immich a Nextcloud and a few other things.
Thanks, bookmarked and depending upon my ability to learn, plus time available, this, or something like it may be the way for me.
+1 for yunohost, though it can be a slow solution. However it will get something up and running easily, provide certs etc. and let you start out on self-hosting. With a half decent old pc you can host a load of services. You could run your own lemmy instance for example. However a lot of newer things are often broken or fail to work in Yunohost (funkwhale and discourse are a couple of things that are beyond redemption)_
