The appeal for me to use immich is the AI search.

I have over 100,000 photos I have taken. I can do a search of “blue sky with pink clouds and a moon” and it will show me the photo I want.

The way I did it before would take me 2-3 days of looking at every photo one by one to find that photo.

The other benefit of the server is I can access all these apps from my laptop, phone, desktop, or using my VPN from anywhere in the world.

The one that was way more useful then expected is immich. I have over 100,000 photos I took during my life and it usually takes me DAYS to find a specific picture I need.

I installed immich and let it AI scan everything for a week or something. Now I can search for something specific like “it’s a black square in the middle of the photo and has a little knob on it” and it finds me the photo I need.

It’s also cool to see photos of people, organized by the individual by searching their name or clicking on their face.

I usually check the proton DB website, to read the comments and see what people do to fix games and software.

Just recently I used it to get old CAD software to run, had to lower the proton version to 6 or something and it worked.

I did do custom firmware for the internal drive for 4k ripping, but didn’t find the right firmware for the external ones (years ago). Maybe I can find it again once we unpack our storage. We are moving to another state now. Thanks for the info!

That’s awesome you have a server for ripping. I made a dedicated machine using my old desktop.

Ryzen 1700, 16gb ram, 12 dvd / Blu-ray drives (one drive does 4k Blu-ray’s) and 2 more usb Blu-ray drives on top.

I ripped so many thousands of DVDs that my neighbor gave me after he passed away.

I’m in the middle of moving so everything is packed up. But this was the rack before we moved.

Networking, 3D printer, black and white laser printer and a color laser printer, several servers.

I had home assistant, Plex, Minecraft server, 7 days to die server, and many other services.

Servers are Ryzen 5950x and the other is a threadripper 24 core.

The other side of the rack was HDMI switchers and some game consoles.

Going to miss the 1gbps fiber internet, we now have Starlink.

I used a spreadsheet and labeled each box AA, AB, AC… BA, BB, BC… FA, FB, etc. it’s 2 digit codes for each box.

I then took pictures of every box as I’m filling them, and make a list of all contents in the spreadsheet.

In the end we have way too many boxes! Yikes. lol Maybe I should have gotten rid of more stuff.

I use several of the suggestions above, but also for IOS (iPhone) I use “Firefox Focus” and it clears everything when I close it and I can watch ad free.

I have been able to play most games fine on Linux mint.

If he plays Minecraft bedrock he can use “Minecraft bedrock launcher” which loads the android version (if you own it on the play store). Minecraft Java works find on Linux, but I prefer bedrock to use a controller.

Some PC games I play in “bottles” which lets you run windows programs.

I also have “heroic games launcher” that lets me play epic games, gog games and Amazon games.

I remember when I setup my Wordpress website years ago I had permission errors, so the Wordpress install needed read/write access to the website directory. Maybe the same in your case?

I run mint on a ideapad flex and it’s been great. Touch screen works, speakers, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, gaming, etc all good. I got the laptop cheap with a broken screen, I replaced the screen and added a bigger NVMe and it’s been great.

I self hosted many websites for about 20 years, but sadly I had to take it all down this year. In the process of moving to another state. Also going to really miss my 1gbps unlimited fiber connection.

I hosted my websites from windows server 2003, 2008, virtual machines, Linux, and other ways. It was fun times. I have very good up time using 2 servers and UPS battery backups.