No, not really: even at idle the fans are still moving air, and the laptop is warm enough that you can notice it. You CAN force them off, but then you’ve got a laptop that gets unbearably hot pretty quickly, so that’s not really a workable tradeoff.
I’ve honestly just kinda given up and use the M1 for everything because it literally never gets warm, and never makes a single sound unless I do something that uses 100% CPU for an extended period of time.
Windows task manager is a poor indicator of actual clock speed for a number of reasons, one of which is that it’s going to report the highest clock speed and not the lowest one, which in highly multi-core CPUs isn’t really representative of what the CPU is actually doing. Looking at individual core clocks and power usage is more indicative of what’s actually happening.
That said, I’ve had pretty bad luck with x86 laptops with the higher-end CPUs; even if you get them to fantastic power usage they’re still… not amazing. I managed to tweak my G14 into using about 10w at idle, which sounds great, until you look at my M1 Macbook which idles under 3w.
If thermals are really a concern, you may want to look at the low voltage variants, and not the high performance, though that’s a tradeoff all on it’s own.
If you want to keep up with trending topics, find news outlets you believe provide you the proper coverage of what you’re after, and just follow the RSS feeds instead.
Mastodon/Lemmy/Reddit/Facebook/Twitter are there for people to post hot takes on the news, not just share the news. RSS is the way to go if the news is what you’re after, and not people commenting on the news.
Eh, I wouldn’t go about ‘the self-hosted admins didn’t do anything!’. There never really was a time when the majority (or even a meaningiful minority) of users hosted their own email.
In the beginning, you got your email address from your school or your ISP, and it changed whenever you left/changed providers, so the initial “free” email came from the likes of Hotmail (which rapidly became Microsoft), Yahoo (which was uh, Yahoo), and offerings from the big ISPs of the era, like AOL and whatnot.
You still had school and ISP email, but it just rapidly fell out of fashion because your Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL email never changed regardless of what ISP you used or whatever, so it was legitimately a better solution.
And then Google came along with Gmail and it was so much better than every other offering that they effectively ate the whole damn market by default because all the people who were providing the free webmail at that time didn’t do a damn thing to improve until after Google had already “won”.
So if you want to be mad, this is firmly Microsoft and Yahoo’s fault for being lazy fucks.
Keep in mind that you’re going to be retrieving and storing a huge amount of data running these scripts, and you should expect to need more than a $5 1gb of RAM vps to do it without it being a shitty broken experience for you.
We’re talking dozens of gigabytes of storage for the database, plus effectively a need for an infinite amount of storage for the image caching, plus enough RAM and CPU resources to effectively process the whole Threadiverse.
Anything on the public internet is some amount of risk.
It sounds reasonably configured, and for a single service that’s been fairly robust, the only thing you really should make sure you’re doing is updates - better if you configure automatic updates, so you don’t even have to think about it.
unattended-upgrades is what you’d want on a Debian-alike for updates, and Overseerr depends on how you installed it.
Another point of view is that OSS and Linux is absolutely amazing.
With a very limited set of exceptions, you can grab Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever, make a USB boot drive, and be in a GUI and shitposting on the internet in about 5 minutes.
Linux has grown tremendously from when I started using it, which was when you’d probably have to end up editing a config file for X11 to add the modeline so X knew the resolution and refresh rate of your monitor because there was no auto-configuration for anything more than like 640x480@60hz (and even that might not work).
And in just a few years we went from very very few games working with Wine, to damn near everything that doesn’t need ring0 rootkits working almost perfectly.
So yeah, it’s not perfect, but it’s absolutely light years from where it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago and maybe focusing on how great it actually is vs bemoaning the things that still need work will help keep you motivated.
That said, at the end of the day software is just a hammer: you use it to build something. If Linux doesn’t work but MacOS does, or Windows, or whatever does then use what works. There’s no point in using something that doesn’t do what you want to the point that you’re angry/stressed/tired of dealing with it, because life is way too short to spend all your time fighting broken software when all you wanted to do was draw a picture or play a game or watch a movie or whatever.
They’re not wrong in that most people aren’t suited to or should be running what is effectively public services for other people from some surplus Dell R410 they found on eBay for $40.
That said, it’s all a matter of degree: I don’t host critical infra for people (password managers, file sharing, etc.) where the data loss is catastrophic, but more things that if it explodes for an afternoon, everyone can just deal with it. I absolutely do not want to be The Guy who lost important data through an oversight on an upgrade or just plain bad luck.
But, on the other hand, the SLA on my Plex server is ‘if it works, cool, if not I’ll fix it when I can’ and that’s been wildly popular I haven’t had any real issues, because my friends and family aren’t utter dicks about it and overly entitled, but YMMV.
TL;DR: self-hosting for others is fine, as long as the other people understand that it’s not always going to be incredibly reliable, and you don’t ever present something that puts them at risk of catastrophic loss, unless you’ve got actual experience in providing those service and can do proper backups, HA, and are willing to sacrifice your Friday evening for no money.
Alternate option: see if the performance of the various cloud gaming providers meets the mom approval factor. She’s not playing anything the extra latency is really an issue with, and you can then avoid the hot, noisy, expensive gaming laptop category entirely and just get almost ANY laptop your mom likes, instead.
The only comment I’d add here is that you should make sure you have a real domain, that you’ve paid actual money to, when setting this up. ActivityPub assumes the domain is immutable, and the free dynamic domain names you can get (or free TLDs like, say, .ml was) are a bad choice. Spend the $10 or whatever, because if something happens to your domain name, you cannot just update it in the database and fix federation: it completely breaks everything in a way that’s not repairable.
UptimeKuma is what I use; it’ll watch tcp connections, docker containers, websites… whatever. And the notifications are pretty comprehensive and probably cover anything in 2023 would want to be using.
Just to be pedantic, it’s not pull, it’s push: the data is POSTed from the server that hosts the community.
Right now loading a page makes a bunch of API queries to pull all the related data for the posts, votes, sidebar info, and so on AND the API is very untuned and sending way more data than the WebUI/a client needs to actually generate a page: hence my ‘it’s less efficient’ comment, though this is certainly something that can be tweaked to improve performance between the back and frontends.
I will, however, admit that this is only true if someone is actually reading the content they’re subscribed to. The ‘subscribe to everything’ scripts turn this math on its head because now you are using resources to gather data you don’t care about.
ActivityPub isn’t anything more than JSON over HTTP(s); there’s no reason at all that you couldn’t simply tunnel all the traffic using hidden services over Tor using nothing more than the Tor daemon to create a hidden service and the proxy functionality to route all outbound HTTP traffic over Tor.
ActivityPub is not a distributed network: you don’t have communications between servers in a mesh, the server that owns a community(ex. fediverse@lemmy.world) pushes out JSON data to any subscribers.
Small servers won’t talk directly to each other, unless they’re subscribed to communities on each other so having a lot of small servers doesn’t actively impact the load on each other, but only on the larger servers that have the more active communities.
And, even then, the JSON requests are going to be a lower impact than a user actively browsing the site, though probably only marginally and maybe not in all cases.
I’ve found enough interesting people to follow (along with Mastodon users, of course) that I’m happy, but that’s entirely a personal and very subjective opinion.
Agree with this comment: Firefish is much better than the current state of Mastodon, especially since all the complaints you have are basically being wont-fixed by the current dev team.
Honestly, from all the Gen Z and younger kids I know in my life the big thing that’s probably killing the fediverse is it’s not a media-first platform.
Not a one of them really participates in text-primary social media, which is what Lemmy definitely is.
Mastodon supports it better, but there’s so much gatekeeping around the “right way” to share media content that the few people I know that tried to use it just bounced off it because they couldn’t figure out the technical and social aspects of how to interact, because it’s just piles of conflicting opinions.
They will, however, spend an insane amount of time on TikTok or Youtube or Twitch or Instagram or Snapchat endlessly watching whatever comes up and scrolling along to the next thing or sending pictures/videos of whatever they’re doing at that moment to their friends.
I was attempting to say CSAM without saying CSAM.
Three words: creepy anime porn.
I understand not liking Apple, but my point was more that x86, even good x86, is still literally hot trash if you want anything resembling modern performance.
I really hope that someone steps up with ARM-based laptops that can natively run Linux (because screw Microsoft and the shitty ARM stuff they’ve done to date) and that they ship at a reasonable price and with sufficient performance. Until then, the sole vendor that can provide cool-running, silent, high-performance ARM with 15ish hours of battery life is… Apple.