I only recently started using C-r to search in the command history. Game changer!

For me it was Windows 7 end of life. I always liked to tinker, and at the time I didn’t wanted to spend the money to get a macbook, so I tried Linux, eventually moved completely to it and never looked back.

I daily Trisquel on my secondary laptop (corebooted X230), and it’s great!

The main issue regular user would face with these 100% Free distro is wifi cards compatibility. Most will not work and the ones that do are old and slow.

Genuinely helpful advice! Thanks!

Maybe trying with some Raspberry Pis for your services (takes up less space, low power) and building a dedicated machine for the NAS, as suggested by @hodgepodgin@lemmy.zip, but that’s a whole different budget.

Otherwise, maybe going for some mini-pcs, more recent second-hand PCs (stronger CPU for video encoding) or just more RAM and more disks.

I guess the final price will depend on what exact machine you can get your hands on.

Nice project!

Given the tight budget, here is what I would do, especially if you are not too constraint by space and don’t mind a few extra watts of power consumption. The Raspberry Pi are getting expensive, and the 200USD will barely get you a RPi5 nowadays. You said there is no market for you for second hand sever hw, but I’m guessing it should not be too hard to get used office desktop PCs.

• Get two of these. Maybe Optiplex or Thinkstation. You can probably get something decent <50USD each.
• Get two small SATA SSDs for the OS (128 - 256GB), around 30USD each.
• Get your storage drives. You should get 3 of them so you can have ZFS raid redundancy.
• On one machine, install TrueNAS and your storage drives. Default RAM is probably enough.
• On the other one, upgrade the RAM to 8 or 16 GB (~50USD), install your favorite Linux distro, and you can run your services, accessing the storage with NFS!

To me it feels safer (against my own mess-up) to separate the storage and the services, plus this setup is fairly upgradable. You’ll probably have space to add more storage drives, even maybe a cache SSD; increase the RAM; add a third machine etc.

Of course it’s just one idea, maybe other another layout might fit your use-case better, idk.

Good luck!

Thumbs up for the thorough recap!

I am dailying Aeon for a while, which is a OpenSuse + GNOME version of Bazzite, which I also tried. I can highly recommend both!

Nvidia GPU can be troublesome on Linux indeed. Mint might not be the best option in that case. If you are flexible, distro-wise, I cannot recommend Bazzite enough.

You can get an image with all the needed Nvidia drivers and configs, that should bring you the smoothest possible experience with your hardware, especially for gaming!

Good luck!

That’s great! Love to see more GN and Lvl1 collabs!

Great to hear you’re willing to move to Linux!

Like other comments pointed, there is no such thing as “most secure”. It’s a deep rabbit hole and it’s better in general to assume that any device connected to the internet is at risk. Hell, any storage can be compromised if the entity interested put enough effort into it.

I recommande reading the page on Privacy Guides, it gives a good overview. In general, you should consider your thread model: what is you situation and why do you want security or privacy for?

• Regarding security, I would say for a general case, any modern, popular Linux distro with full disk encryption is probably good enough and as secure as any other OS. I would recommande going with a Fedora Silverblue or an OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but the more popular Ubuntu or Mint are great as well for new users.
• If you also want “good enough” privacy, you should focus more on the software you are running, and the situation of your data, especially in your usage of your web browser. But that’s a different topic entirely.
• If you actually want more advanced security though, that’s where it becomes difficult/fun. You need to consider what you are trying to protect yourself from, specifically. Virus? Maybe a compartmentized OS like Qubes might be a solution. Physical access to your device? You can get a dead man switch that kills you system disk if your laptop is taken away from you. You want to hide your OS install from a security inspection? You can set a deniable full disk encryption with a facade OS that protect your from a rubber hose attack. Probably many other things exist I am not aware of.

But anyway, if your question is “Is a Linux distro at least as secure as my previous Windows”, the answer is definitely YES imo. And if you want MOAR, it’s gonna be a fun ride!

[edit: and yes, updates! Update you system plz.]

Damn that’s a good looking mini rack! Great job!

I don’t have much experience or advice about Proxmox, just wanted to show appreciation ✌️

This.

In my experience, once you have the potential hardware compatibility issue fixed, it’s smooth sailing and simply a matter of getting used to the different tools on Linux!

100Mbps up because copper T^T

Other systems should not be able to see your data on a Linux install as long as the disk is encrypted, which is proposed during the install of many distros.

AFAIU, ransomware will try to lock all devices, USB drives, etc, so no, your Linux install is not safe from that if it is on the same machine. Even machine on the same network might be at risk.

How to prevent ? Backup! Loosing your entire machine data should not be an issue but just a matter of re-installing the OS and recovering your data from a backup. Have at least two backup, including one outside of your house.

About dualbooting though… Putting Windows + anything else on a single drive is a really bad idea and Windows WILL try and take over it, at least breaking the boot partition. More concerning, and it actually happened to me recently: when putting a Linux on one disk and Windows on an other in the same machine, the Windows somehow still managed to break the Linux boot partition…

So if you can afford it and really want to have both OS, you should try and have two machines or at least install Linux on a drive that you can easily unplug.

I hope this will be helpful, good luck!

It’s atomic Fedora with KDE

Plan 9 it is !

Thanks for the detailed reply! You’re not the first to mention gitops for k8s, it seems interesting indeed, I’ll be sure to check it!

I see, that makes sense actually! Thanks for the message!

I saw the landscape website before, that’s a LOT of projects! =O

My goal is to have a k3s cluster as a deployment env and try and run the services I’m already using. I don’t need to have any advance load balancing, I just want pods to be restarted if one of my machine stops.

How about I’ll do anyway? <3