astrsk

Have you tried Penny’s Big Breakaway yet? Been eyeing it and based on your list here, seems right up your alley.

If you don’t need to host but can run locally, GPT4ALL is nice, has several models to download and plug and play with different purposes and descriptions, and doesn’t require a GPU.

For ableton, you can run it in wine and it can work well enough to do things. It’s an OK experience at best and flat out doesn’t work at worst. Kiss your VST plugins goodbye with that though, gotta stick to the built ins which do all work when it’s working overall.

Otherwise, check out bitwig studio, made by ex ableton devs and natively runs in Linux. Still gonna be hit or miss on 3rd party plugins but the app is on par with ableton as an experience. Price in the same range too. Best short explainer is ableton meets logic in terms of usability.

While generally true, I believe there’s a lot of weird custom wireless communication out there. Plenty of mice and keyboards refuse to communicate over a standard HID protocol which leads many to not work for enterprise type devices / appliances. Anything with an HID / Console port (like some KVMs) for management will just not respond properly to key presses even if the downstream usb host can detect presses properly. This is extremely nuanced and not at all the same as something like Logitech G-Hub only being windows so customizing the buttons / RGB on the M/K is a questionable adventure for normal users.

It’s the Linux version of steam taking advantage of idle time to process shaders. It’s a critical part of making all those proton launched games working right. I wish it had better control for when to run it but it is what it is.

Yeah the box shows up as a monitor in the system display settings, can even enable it and use it like a normal display. The headset will do the spatial tracking and you can recenter with the headset button. It’s just small and low resolution so you can’t even use it for productivity. Until the app works, no games at all.

Index works mostly fine. Sometimes it drops out but my Bluetooth stack hasn’t been the most stable on this install. Arch btw.

I did grab the PSVR2 PC adapter box and it does work to get a display showing in the headset as another monitor which is pretty sweet. But the PSVR2 app on steam just straight up doesn’t work in any form of compatibility mode I’ve been able to try so it’s no dice there.

My biggest concern with SteamDeck was that it would become a 1-2 year upgrade cycle device. I don’t expect the hardware to last 7+ years like normal console lifecycles but I’m very glad to hear they’re being patient and aggressively supporting the software side.

Borg backup is gold standard, with Vorta as a very nice GUI on machines that need it. Otherwise, all my other Linux machines are running in proxmox hypervisors and have container/snapshot/vm backups regularly through proxmox backup server to another machine. All the backup data is then replicated regularly, remotely via truenas scale replication tasks.

Isn’t UTC meant to be… you know, universal?

So far it’s fine. Not much of a difference on the surface. Except floatplane videos in Firefox have distorted audio now after the update. Might be unrelated but it was directly after updating. Oh and my Application Menu crosses into the monitor to the left of my primary screen which is a bit annoying. Nothing showstopping here.

For clarity, the recommendation is specifically 3 copies of your data, not 3 backups.

3-2-1 backup; 3 copies of the data, 2 types of storage devices, 1 off-site storage location.

So in a typical homelab case you would have your primary hot data, the actual device being used to create and manage that data, your desktop. You’d regularly backup that data into warm storage such as a NAS with redundancy (raid Z1, Z2, etc). Followed by regular but slower intervals of backups to a remote location, such as a duplicate NAS with a secure tunnel or even an external drive(s) sitting at a friend or family member’s house, bank vault, wherever. That would be considered cold storage (and should be automated as such if it’s constantly powered).

My own addition to this is that at least one of the hot / warm devices should be on battery backup in case of power events. I’ll always advocate that to be the primary machine but in homelab the server would be more important and the NAS would be part of that stack.

Cloud is not considered a backup unless the data owner is also the storage owner, for general reliability reasons related to control over the system and storage. Cloud is, however, a reasonable temporary storage for moves and transfers.

I self host services as much as possible for multiple reasons; learning, staying up to date with so many technologies with hands on experience, and security / peace of mind. Knowing my 3-2-1 backup solution is backing my entire infrastructure helps greatly in feeling less pressured to provide my data to unknown entities no matter how trustworthy, as well as the peace of mind in knowing I have control over every step of the process and how to troubleshoot and fix problems. I’m not an expert and rely heavily on online resources to help get me to a comfortable spot but I also don’t feel helpless when something breaks.

If the choice is to trust an encrypted backup of all my sensitive passwords, passkeys, and recovery information on someone else’s server or have to restore a machine, container, vm, etc. from a backup due to critical failures, I’ll choose the second one because no matter how encrypted something is someone somewhere will be able to break it with time. I don’t care if accelerated and quantum encryption will take millennia to break. Not having that payload out in the wild at all is the only way to prevent it being cracked.

Do VLANs with multiple wireless and wired clients using OPNSense and OpenWRT dummy APs count? Still haven’t quite figured it out.

Eh, at least you can still take notes very easily and reinstall DE later.

I’d prefer GNU’s ddrescue just because I find it more robust and has better progress output. It’s functionally the same interface but lets you use a mapfile to resume sessions should anything happen to interrupt the copy.

Arguably I’m against this because you never know what’s going to happen and the conventional wisdom for appliances like this is to just backup any important configs, backup your containers and vms, then do a fresh install from the latest install media on the new disk followed by a restore of the backups. It might take a little more time but it’s negligible and allows you an opportunity to review your current configs, make necessary changes, and ensure your backups are working as intended.

According to this Blu-ray has some of the worst expected shelf life, with the exception of BD-RE.

I have the same model, powering 3 machines with an average load of ~125w when it switches to battery power. I have a NUT host on one of the servers which will broadcast the outage for the other machines and the whole stack shuts down after 30 seconds and switches off the UPS at the very end. Gone through about 4 or 5 true power events now and double that in testing (overzealous I know) but the UPS is 2.5 years old now and is doing just fine. I have a spare battery because I heard ~3 years is normal but so far no indication it’s reaching replacement yet.

I think the important thing for these is to not run them down to 0. They’re only good for one event at a time and shouldn’t constantly be switching over without basically a full day of recharging again (more like 16h to recharge).

I can see consistent brownouts and events being a problem for these little machines. I’m planning on upgrading to a rack solution soon and relegating this one to my desktop in the other room (with a fresh battery of course).

Fun tidbit, DuckDuckGo has a bang for it, I use it all the time.

!a2 <program name you want to replace>

A2 has been changing a lot over the years. I have found it’s UX to be going in the wrong direction and it feels like it’s on a path towards too much ad monetization and spoiled trust. For now it seems fine still but it does list alternatives to itself which could use some love and support along the way as A2 grows.

For steam, it’s identical to windows. Literally do nothing other than install steam, install game, and hit run. The only time it’s a problem is if a game offers a native Linux version but the native version has been hamstrung by the publisher (see: rocket league). In which case all you do is go to the properties of the game, force a proton version, and it will redownload the windows version and work just fine. The only other exception would be for multiplayer games that have not upgraded their anticheat version to one compatible with proton. That’s starting to be more rare thanks to steamdeck.

As for wine, Lutris is a great example of an application with community maintained/driven configurations for popular games and applications to be installed in a couple simple clicks and works the majority of the time.

For other applications, it really depends. My general rule is— if it’s not on steam and nobody has made a script for Lutris, I’ll look for native and open source alternatives. If I can’t find one, then look for instructions on setting it up with wine by hand as a last resort. Finally, can I just live without the app instead?