Yep, got Timeshift hooked up to make a snapshot each time I update my system and I can boot into them via GRUB. Haven’t needed that so far, thankfully, but it’s there just in case.

Btrfs because it sounded cool when I first read about it and worked fine so far :3

That site is lovely, thank you!

As I mentioned in the post, my money budget is around 1000€ as a target, but it extends both up and down. I can stretch if needed, but if that’s comically overkill then I’d be happy to go lower. Time budget… not too high, but also not super low. I can certainly spend a day or two setting everything up. Electricity costs are certainly a factor, power prices here were some of the highest globally, even before the extreme increases lately.

Also thanks for the tip of the S3 backup, it’s probably a good idea to have an extra copy of important data off-site, yeah.

Understandable and fair. I enjoy trying different stuff though. I’m not saying other people need to switch to another terminal emulator, I’m just here to ask what everyone else is using and then try it out myself, for fun :3

Edit: To add onto that, if I didn’t wanna try new stuff, I’d still be on Windows. I never had any major problems with it until I discovered the things Linux does better, and so if I just went with what seems fine I’d still be using Windows now. There’s not an inherent problem with that, of course, but overall the switch has benefited me. I like trying new things, you know?

I am on EndeavourOS and install packages via the command line and on top of that I primarily use Neovim, so I spend a decent amount of time in the terminal

I was considering the VPN option, but as you mentioned for game servers that’s not reasonable, and for some of the collaborative tools I’d prefer being able to give people I don’t trust that much access, for instance people at work/university, to work together with them on whatever would be needed.

If I just decided to make the home server a home-only server, that would ease a lot of my worries. I guess I could get a personal one, with sensitive info but only home network access, and just rent a second one? It’s not like they’re that expensive if you’re just doing small-scale things and find a decent provider

Most people here suggested meme names, but that’s actually a really great idea! And the names are pretty beautiful on top of that. I hope OP chooses this despite it being far from the top comment.

It depends on what you’re used to and the programming languages you use. I learned typing on a German QWERTZ keyboard and while that works for languages like Python and Haskell, which are indentation-based, but for languages which use braces like Java, C, Rust, or similar, it can be annoying to have to use altgr+7 or altgr+0 for { and }. Thus I switched to a US ANSI layout, which was nicer for those specific characters, but caused problems when typing local characters like öäüß. After switching to Linux I set up a compose key, letting me press compose + a + " for ä for example, and while that’s a decent patch, that still breaks the typing flow. So now I’m in my ergo keyboard phase and trying to get my own personal layout going, which meets my own needs for needed characters, based on a colemak-dh design.

Oh, I did not even know it supported RSS/Atom, that’s lovely! I think I’ll move to that then, thank you :D

Newsboat, which others recommended, also seems interesting, but I personally appreciate images, so that one is sadly a no-go for me, even if being able to ssh into a home server to check up on news, instead of having to sync the feeds across multiple devices, would be absolutely lovely.

After reading all this, and generally being predisposed towards Arch since my experience with EndeavourOS has been rather comfortable so far¹, I’d say I’ve less been rationally convinced of using it, but rather not deterred enough. So I think I’ll just go with Arch, but make sure to keep my home folder in a separate partition, so I can bail if needed, with Fedora as my preferred backup.

1: Well, I say it’s been comfortable for me, and that’s true, but a friend of mine who installed EndeavourOS at the same time as me recently booted his pc up to find a terminal staring back at him. He says he didn’t do anything weird, and didn’t even update, but who knows. If I understood him correctly, reinstalling (one of) the Kernel(s) (I think he has two installed, one as a backup) fixed the issue. Problem is that this takes time, and when you’re not home, with shitty or possibly no wifi, that’s gonna be a big problem.

I’ve already considered Debian, but… I dunno, this isn’t what I’d call the most logical reason, but I just kinda don’t like it as my desktop OS. I’d use Debian over basically anything else for a server, but as a desktop OS I don’t like the vibe.

Keep in mind, I started using Linux this summer and in a few years I’ll probably look back at this wondering why I was such an idiot, but I gotta fall and get a bloody nose first to notice ;3

Huh, I never expected anyone to recommend Arch to me because you have to tinker too much with an alternative distro. I thought simplicity was the reason why people liked NixOS, no?

Because of course the arch wiki has the info needed. I should’ve just checked there from the start, thanks!

Huh, neat. On my current EOS Desktop PC it’s a bit too late to uninstall everything and reinstall it as a Flatpak, but I’ll keep that in mind for new Linux installs. Thank you :3

Excuse me if this is a bit of a dumb question, as I have never particularly worried about packaging methods and simply installed what I needed from the official Arch packages or AUR, but how does Flatpak lead to fewer updates? I know it sandboxes things, that’s why I’ve been interested in it for applications I don’t quite trust like Discord, but I never got around to actually switching applications of that sort over and trying the format out.

Speaking of Discord, hooking that out of the “normal packages”, aka everything I update via yay, would be beneficial anyways, since it’s the only thing that forces me to update my system by saying how I’m oh so lucky about a new update coming out and I don’t wanna mess with partial system updates. That’s kinda besides the point though, I just wanted to complain.

Personally, instead of Tmux, I’d recommend trying Zellij. I started with Zellij right out of the gate, but a friend of mine who dislikes Tmux a lot quite enjoyed Zellij, so I assume it’s somewhat better.

Of course I can’t entirely generalize from this, however my 2080Ti worked perfectly out of the box on EndeavourOS. Game performance is also mostly similar to my Windows install - if they ran well, they still do, and if they ran badly, then the same goes for that as well.