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.

Hmm… Would be interesting to find out what kind of effect that has on the average marriage or relationship 😅

Likely everyday stuff… Meeting minutes, phone or video conferences and such…

I think after initial installation, you open a browser with the post-installation step and configure a username and password there. I’m not entirely sure, it’s been some time since I did it. But depending on installation method, I don’t think it has a provided password.

General password advice: Check caps lock, and if you use like a German keyboard if ‘z’ and ‘y’ are swapped.

I think pretty much any mosfet / h-bridge / motor control board with pwm should do.
If you have those 4-wire fans with a pwm input that accepts 3V3 logic, you might even be able to attach them directly to the ESP:

• https://github.com/KlausMu/esp32-fan-controller#wiring-diagram-for-fan-and-bme280

But that’s not all fans, I had some mixed results with that.

Yes. Steam is available on Linux, pretty easy to install and it comes with a compatibility layer (Proton) which works quite well.

Linux is a bit different than Windows. But I’d say just using it is about as complicated as using Windows. You’ll just have to try and see whether you like it. And if it’s hard or easy for you to relearn a few things. I mean if you’re in the Browser and Steam all day, those will be the same applications and also look and work the same way. Other than that you could face some issues with gaming hardware and you have to fiddle with things, or everything works out of the box. You can’t tell beforehand.

Seems printer drivers are amongst the worst. I had a brother inkjet printer/scanner combo a while back. Pretty much the same issues. Also what they call driver and offer on their website really sucks. Now I have one from Epson and that just pops up on Mint (and other distros) and I can print right away, no driver installation necessary. And it even started reporting toner levels after some update. Sadly I can’t recommend the printer either, I had several other issues with the thing itself. But this kind of roulette with hardware is really annoying. And I believe it’s really pronounced with those consumer printer/scanner combination devices. The expensive business printers regularly work way better, at least that’s what I’ve seen.

Hmm, interesting. But we all have different experiences anyway. I believe my mom’s computer “broke” twice in the last two years during some major Windows updates. One time some service pack broke a lot of printers for quite a while and she was affected as well. I don’t remember what the second incident was, since I didn’t fix it, but it also required manual intervention. And she doesn’t even do a lot with the thing except office stuff, documents and mails, so I doubt she was at fault.

I certainly also had stuff break on Linux, but it’s been kind of quiet the last years. But I’m kind of the wrong person to judge since I currently don’t take part in everyday Windows use. At least not when I get to decide and maintain the computer. But I feel it has improved as well. There has been a time where I had to install my gaming windows several times because the order in which I installed all the drivers mattered for some reason. It got cluttered and slower over time so I had to reinstall it during the lifetime of a computer. And I had friends infected with trojans and cryptojacking malware every other month or so. Back then I had a very comfortable life full of hubris with my Linux on the desktop. Granted, it needed more fiddling at that time, but that was acceptable. But times have changed and everything got better and it’s nothing like that anymore. And for a long time now.

Unpopular opinion, but I install Linux on my computers and they just work for like 5 years straight, with me spending exactly 0 hours each day fixing anything. Whereas I fix other peoples stupid printer issues and Windows becoming incompatible with the hardware or some nasty messages from some antivirus or strange software, multiple times a year…

I see however how some disgrunteled people would write something like this.

Maybe Discover isn’t the best choice. I believe that’s made for the KDE desktop and Gnome should come with “Gnome Software” per default?! I’m not entirely sure what kind of concept Fedora has. I usually use the command line or some of the older package managers with more options and settings, so I can’t really tell what’s best here. These modern and shiny ones also regularly confuse me and I install Flatpaks by accident or whatever. Maybe try something else, maybe the Fedora community has some recommendations for a better one.

Okay, that’s weird. It shouldn’t try to remove sudo. That’s just silly. But I haven’t used Fedora, I have no idea what’s going on here.

Hmm, that doesn’t show a lot of details but it seems correct. Gnome should have an Extension manager. It should show up if you type some first letters of the word “Extensions” into the app overview. Maybe look if shows up there and got activated.

The Gnome-shell extension is supposed to show up as a button in the top right menu. How did you install it? Should be called “gnome-shell-extension-gsconnect”.

I don’t have good first hand experience, but i know the Awesome Selfhosted list has a plethora of them.

I did some wardriving a long time ago but never used those internet connections. And I shared my connection before and had a Freifunk router. With the neighbours not so much. I’m mostly nice to them and ask before borrowing their stuff.

I think that’s a size where it’s a bit more than a good autocomplete. Could be part of a chain for retrieval augmented generation. Maybe some specific tasks. And there are small machine learning models that can do translation or sentiment analysis, though I don’t think those are your regular LLM chatbots… And well, you can ask basic questions and write dialogue. Something like “What is an Alpaca?” will work. But they don’t have much knowledge under 8B parameters and they regularly struggle to apply their knowledge to a given task at smaller sizes. At least that’s my experience. They’ve become way better at smaller sizes during the last year or so. But they’re very limited.

I’m not sure what you intend to do. If you have some specific thing you’d like an LLM to do, you need to pick the correct one. If you don’t have any use-case… just run an arbitrary one and tinker around?

Thanks! I’ve updated the link. I always just use Batocera or something like that, which has Emulationstation and Kodi set up for me. So I don’t pay a lot of attention to the included projects and their development state…

I didn’t include this, since OP wasn’t mentioning retro-gaming. But Batocera, Recalbox, Lakka, RetroPie are quite nice. I picked one which includes both Kodi and Emulationstation and I can switch between the interfaces with the gamecontroller. I get all the TV and streaming stuff in Kodi, and Emulationstaation launches the games. And I believe it can do Flatpaks and other applications as well.

https://plasma-bigscreen.org/ from KDE? I’m not sure if they’ve replaced that since. Wikipedia says it’s unmaintained. Depending on your use-case, you might want to have a look at Emulationstation, Steam Big Picture and Kodi Plugins, as well.

Idk, can you easily replace the Location Services? The captive portal checker? GCM with a different push service, or the built-in Webview with a better version, and have the permission system and the firewall of the operating system prevent proprietary apps from having too much access and phoning home, unless they’re designed to allow it? …I mean sure, you can replace the default keyboard without much effort. But I thought all of the other things were impossible on a stock ROM and then you don’t even have things like storage scopes and so on?

Well, I already own a Pinephone and I can tell you it’s not a viable alternative. It’s awesome and great for tinkering. But try and use it for 2 days in real life and you’ll buy another Pixel and fit it with GrapheneOS, just to get on with your day. At least that’s what I did. It has minor hardware woes, major software issues, there is no modern standby and you just won’t get a notification if your friends change plans. And it’s 50 more annoyances like this each day. You constantly need to work around things like not being able to buy a train ticket. And the browser is as sluggish as on a first/second gen Android from 18 years ago. And a Librem isn’t substancially better, just 3x the price.

(And I’m not sure about Rossman’s take on Purism. They definitely made some bad decisions and severe mistakes. It is hard to do this. Projects run over budget. But it’s not necessarily all malice. I think Rosmann exaggerates it a bit for Youtube clicks. It’s more some stupid (and very questionable) business decisions. But there is more nuance to it.)