I am a Fedora fan, but I do think that they may have issues with needing to upgrade every year. I am currently holding off on a Fedora 40-41 upgrade on my school laptop until finals are done, just in case something breaks.
I’ve been on Fedora since about 32ish? And I’ve had a couple of times where the upgrade didn’t go smooth.
For grandparents, I’d probably lean towards Debian with Gnome.
I did this for a few systems, but it doesn’t do major build updates. I’m getting full screen “You need to upgrade” notifications on a few 21h02 machines now, yet Windows update says it’s up to date.
This is a bit of a slog, but I have tailscale and rdclient running on an iplay mini 50. I have a SIM card in it, but I am on wifi 95% of the time, and it connects back to my desktop at home running Fedora. Not quite as good as being in front of it, but it’s a pretty reliable workflow, and I can switch the same remote session to my laptop if I need more screen size.
Steam and Lutris work well! I can game on XFCE Mint just fine. I actually have an easier time of it than on a number of distros, thanks to the combination of flatpaks and the Ubuntu base. But, I am not “the kids”.
I checked, it’s still there! (It doesn’t append, it overwrites, so no, I just have a file with the current date and time accurate to within two minutes.)
I did the hackiest, lamest thing back in the day… I had my client write the current date and time to a file on the share every two minutes as a Cron job… Kept it working for months! I saw it on a forum somewhere, tried it, and… Shocked Pikachu face I don’t know if I ever disabled that Cron job! Haha!
I’ve had two different unihertz models, and neither of them could stay on any wifi, and both of them dropped calls like crazy. I contacted customer support, and they ‘offered’ to swap for another exact same phone, if I paid to ship both ways, and I didn’t mind having no phone for a month. Jelly 2, and Atom XL. The Atom was especially bad as it has a giant bloody antenna sticking out the top of it, and still no WiFi!
Avoid Unihertz.
Does it give you anything? Can you select safe mode or nomodeset from the grub menu, or do you get no grub menu at all? I almost pulled the trigger on a used getac system a while back, but couldn’t justify the cost. If you get it working, please tell me how it goes under Linux!
This is actually a real problem… A lot of digital documents from the 90’s and early 2000’s are lost forever. Hard drives die over time, and nobody out there has come up with a good way to permanently archive all that stuff.
I am a crazy person, so I have RAID, Ceph, and JBOD in various and sundry forms. Still, drives die.
The two things that popped into my head are Immich and Nextcloud. I think Nextcloud is generally more useful, but Immich is more specifically targeted at Photos. As for how to synchronize it… Syncthing? Personally, I hate setting up Syncthing and so I don’t really use it myself anymore, but once it’s set up, it really does take care of itself. Poke the computer once a month to make sure it’s still alive, and you’re set.
You could probably host Nextcloud at one site and just have a client computer at the next site set to auto sync everything.
Been running NextCloud for a while, not for photos, but for just general Google Drive replacement.
Commenting to register my interest.
I will confess that I was tempted to throw some snarky comment about Linux, but I got over the urge.
Ditto, except mine just died one day. I put it away for bed, woke up, flipped it open, Nada. Brick. I felt it was a bit slower than I’d like, but got pretty good battery life.
Really tempted to try a Musebook, based on Risc-V, because apparently I’m a sucker for punishment.
I shouldn’t talk because I dip in and out, but I do that because I like the possibilities. Like, what if someone comes up with a concept, but no one tries it, and it turns out to really work? Like, I like immutability as a concept, so I’ve tried Silverblue, Kinoite, and Bazzite. If nobody gave it a go, then the concept would die on the vine.
Also, I like seeing different ways of thinking about technology.
I have dyndns, have since they were 10$ a year, and I’ve gradually realized that my ISP changes my IP on average less than once a year…
I have a thumb drive with Mint Mate installed on it and it runs fine on a 4gb i5 - 3rd gen.
I have it working with LaCP’d 4gb networking for the transfers. Five nodes. I agree though, It’s a beast on RAM.
I have tried a couple of Proxmox clusters, one with overkill specs and one with little Mini PCs. Proxmox does eat up a fair amount of memory, but I have used it with Ceph for live migrations. Its really useful to me to be able to power off a machine, work on it, then bring it back up, and have no interruptions in my services. That said, my Mini PCs always seemed to be hurting for RAM. So that’s my pros and cons.
You mean I didn’t need to spend years and thousands of dollars learning Linux and servers? Oh man! Oh wait, I’m getting ads in Windows on the start menu. Yeah, I’m happy.
There’s a series of Lemmy posts called the Linux upskill challenge that goes step by step through setting up and using Linux. I tried self hosting and jumping straight in too, and it sucked.
What worked for me:
I’m still in the middle of 6+7. Not super comfy with Docker quite yet, but getting there. I really do love having my stuff self-hosted though. Well worth the effort.
Yup! Security updates, but not build updates. You’re good until 23H02 goes out of support, then you’ll have to reinstall 11. At least, that’s what I understand. My 21H02 machines just never get the push for 22,23,24 etc major build updates.