Back when I was a freshman in college, I had a regular laptop (Sony Vaio) and at the time netbooks were popular and my girlfriend (now wife) had got me one for Christmas.

Win 7 starter was garbage, XP was fine, but not ideal. I ended up trying out Ubuntu netbook remix since it was supposed to be lighter on resources. At the time I was a pre med student and wanted something for knocking out documents, and reading papers with enough battery to get me until I had to go to work. The iPad wasn’t out yet so that wasn’t an option.

I had a ton of fun getting it working, even the Broadcom chip was a fun challenge. Once it was working, I just really liked the look and feel. I preferred the Unix file structure to windows as well as the terminal experience, using bash vs powershell.

I ended up writing a few programs and apps for myself specifically for that netbook, and it quickly became my primary way of interacting with a computer. I eventually ported my Sony over which had the challenge of writing a couple drivers to get some things working with minimal compatibility.

Following this, I switched from pre med to software engineering and eventually graduated with a degree and I have now been working with software and using Linux ever since. Even now, I am the sole Linux system administrator in the company I work for and manage a handful of servers and deployments.

I run fedora 42 gnome on a surface pro 7+ that needed a new home. Great tablet. I do not like the touch screen keyboard resizing when I type to suggest words, but I haven’t found a way to address that.

Other than that, it has been great.

You can do that on Bazzite. The only thing I would say is that Bazzite is an atomic fedora distro meaning that the core OS is immutable and everything lives on a layer above the base OS. This helps stability for the OS and make rolling back and repairs much easier. But sometimes installing apps, especially apps that interact with the base OS can be a bit of a pain. On top of that, atomic distros are less common, which means that if you are looking for help, it will be a little harder to find stuff online.

Overall, I like fedora. I have used basically all of the DEs, but tend to hover between KDE and Gnome. Fedora is a little more recent than Debian, but it isn’t a rolling release like Arch or OpenSUSE. This means you get some of the newer kernel features, but the updates are still staggered and released at intervals and tested. I find it to be very stable.

Sorry I didn’t get back to you right away. But this is correct. I just have Prometheus scrape cAdvisor.

I just did the same thing. Grafana with Prometheus, cAdvisor, Loki, alloy. It has really stepped up my overall systems monitoring.

I didn’t think I would use the trackpads much, but now that I have them, I can’t move to a handheld that doesn’t have them. They are just too convenient.

I am a devops engineer and application architect who spends their entire day developing automated docker deployments for custom applications from scratch and I manage all our reverse proxies and TLS termination and certificates.

5 years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what a docker container really was. Thankfully migrating legacy apps to docker on Linux hosts is my full time job and it has allowed me to become proficient enough in a fairly short amount of time.

We all have to start somewhere and shitting on someone for not knowing something now will dissuade them from ever learning it and potentially remove a future contributor to the open source tech stack before they ever even get started.

I would go Debian for stability.

I like fedora since it updates a little more frequently than Debian, but it isn’t a full on rolling release. I used opensuse tumbleweed for a while and it broke on me several times.

I also used arch for a while, but I’m a dad to young children and I just don’t have the time to fuck around with my OS anymore. When I have time to work on my personal dev projects, I just want to drop into tmux, launch neovim and go. After some distro hopping I landed on Fedora with KDE for my desktop and gnome on my laptop. I also have an old netbook running antix with iceWM and an old thinkpad running fedora i3. The latter 2 machines are my hard focus machines.

This is interesting to me. I run all of my services, custom and otherwise, in docker. For my day job, I am the sole maintainer of all of our docker environment and I build and deploy internal applications to custom docker containers and maintain all of the network routing and server architecture. After years of hosting on bare metal, I don’t know if I could go back to the occasional dependency hell that is hosting a ton of apps at the same time. It is just too nice not having to think about what version of X software I am on and to make sure there isn’t incompatibility. Just managing a CI/CD workflow on bare metal makes me shudder.

Not to say that either way is wrong, if it works it works imo. But, it is just a viewpoint that counters my own biases.

No new devices, but I migrated my homelab from an intel nuc to an old recycled HP z240 with a p1000 gpu I got for free. I had Nextcloud and jellyfin on it, but jellyfin gets the majority of the use.

I then added a gitea docker container to my server for my personal projects. Then I configured a miniflux container with some of my favorite RSS feeds for a lightweight way to view my feeds on my computer.

I would like to get pihole configured again in a docker container(I have only ever run it on a raspberry pi), but I have small children and a baby and they make it hard to find extra time in the day.

Well put!

Funny enough, at the time this was new, I was not a fan. But as time has gone on, I have had a very “you don’t know what you got till it’s gone” relationship with it.

Fedora strikes a good balance for me. I come from arch and opensuse. I like the stability of fedora, but I like that it also gets updates faster than Debian. Most software I have found has Fedora considerations.

However, I have been using Ubuntu LTS for my self hosted media server.

I did the same thing when I started self hosting. I followed some guides that recommended all these tools. The more I learned, the more I realized I hardly used some of the stuff but when I disabled them it broke the stuff I did use. That’s when I took the time to wipe my system and build from the ground up, but this time actually understand what I was doing and not just blindly following guides.

Good luck!

I don’t think you’re crazy. Sometimes when my shit gets bloated and I start getting confused about how things go together, I wipe everything and start fresh to refresh myself and organize better.

Came from Arch and OpenSuse. Fedora has been such a great switch. As I’ve gotten older and became a dad, my computer time at home is limited and I don’t have endless evenings to troubleshoot shit. Fedora has been stable for me for the last 4 years. I use the KDE spin.

That might be the case. But I have done a great job of reducing the power load of my server from 1200 watts down to 65 watts. And I am slowly trying to get the point that I can off load my servers to solar and battery. I live in a place with not so great of sun.

But I realize I didn’t include that in the original post. So, fair point and thanks for the info!

I would want to do a cluster. Just to learn how that works. But just thinking of the electricity cost, I would personally donate them.

I probably wouldn’t do it. I do have AI help at times, but it is more for bouncing ideas off of, and occasionally it’ll mention a library or tech stack I haven’t heard of that allegedly accomplishes what I’m looking to do. Then I go research the library or tech stack and determine if there is value.

I never used Plex. Up until my kids were born I used to just watch my videos on my desktop, but now I find myself watching on my phone and TV more often. My Jellyfin server has been super stable for the last 6 months or so running on a super low powered machine and external hard drive. The only issues I have is with movies with Dolby digital, they tend to get out of sync when scrubbing the timeline. I am assuming that is due to the lower power of the machine. But, I have a 400watt desktop with a 7th gen i7 and a pascal Quadro P1000 that I am planning on migrating to. Then adding a 20tb internal drive for storage. Hopefully that will resolve the small issues I have seen with it.