I’m about to graduate with an M.Sc. in Computer Science - can’t wait to be hired as a Senior Engineer!

Lmao.

In that case I can really highly recommend it. Nixos on the server is fantastic anyways, and the only hurdle to recommending simple-nixos-mailserver is that most people are not familiar with nix… 😄

It’s a bit unconventional maybe, but I vote simple-nixos-mailserver - IF you are curious / willing to learn nix. It’s essentially just sanely configured dovecot, postfix, rspamd.

My config for those three combined is about 15 lines, and I have never had an issue with them. Slap on another 5-10 lines for Roundcube as a webmail client.

Since it’s Nix, everything is declarative, so should SOMETHING happen to the server, you can be up and running again super quickly, with the exact same setup.

Yep, that’s right. In theory you could share the encrypted DB with the public and not degrade security. (Still don’t do that though…)

We were talking about SwiftKey

Who knows?

Unless a piece of software is open source, you cannot know.

Fail2ban allows you set different actions for different infringements, as well as multiple ones. So in addition to being put in a “local” jail, the offending IP also gets added to the cloudflare rules (? Is that what its called?) via their API. It’s a premade action called “cloudflare-token-multi”

I switched a couple of months ago, from SwiftKey. Had been using that for ever, long before Microsoft bought it.

NGL, the transition was a bit rough, and the first month my error rate spiked. All good now though, plus Futo has a bunch of super useful features SK never had. Overall, very happy.

We expose about a dozen services to the open web. Haven’t bothered with something like Authentik yet, just strong passwords.

We use a solid OPNSense Firewall config with rather fine-grained permissions to allow/forbid traffic to the respective VMs, between the VMs, between VMs and the NAS, and so on.

We also have a wireguard tunnel to home for all the services that don’t need to be available on the internet publicly. That one also allows access to the management interface of the firewall.

In OPNSense, you get quite good logging capabilities, should you suspect someone is trying to gain access, you’ll be able to read it from there.

I am also considering setting up Prometheus and Grafana for all our services, which could point out some anomalies, though that would not be the main usecase.

Lastly, I also have a server at a hoster for some stuff that is not practical to host at home. The hoster provided a very rudimentary firewall, so I’m using that to only open necessary ports, and then Fail2Ban to insta-ban IPs for a week on the first offense. Have also set it up so they get banned on Cloudflare’s side, so before another malicious request ever reaches me.

Have not had any issues, ever.

Yeah, +1.

I’ve been an avid fan of applocation launchers like rofi and dmenu on the desktop forever, and the “swipe down and immediately search” feels as close as it can get to the mobile equivalent of those.

When I first switched to nix, I made an error copy-pasting my hashed password into a secrets file.

Reninstalled the system 5 times, each time immediately locking myself out, almost

Managing ~35 machines without issues now though.

Dang, oof

Might even be worth checking if https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware has a straight-up fix for the issue.

😭

I usually do, I promise. Anyways, that was 6 years ago. We’re stil going strong, making the most of life in this universe :)

Sorry, I should have gone more into the actual belief. For her it was less of an “if I make a decision that leads to my death in this universe, there surely is a parallel universe where I did not!”, it was “if I die in this universe, thanks to an infinite multiverse, there must be one where I spontaneously start exisitng with all my exact memories from the previous life”.

Oof that reminds me…

When my partner and I had already been living together for a while, we had one of those “cuddle on the couch and deeptalk” days, when she confided that, while she was not religious in any traditional sense of the word, she felt immensely comforted by the thought of an infinite multiverse existing.
“If there’s an infinite amount of parallel worlds, then I choose to believe that even if I die here, life goes on in another world, so in a sense my being and existence do not simply vanish completely. Same for you! And hey, even if we both die, we’ll get to continue living together in some version of the infinite multiverse!”

It was clearly a thought that comforted her a lot, and at the same time a rather intimate belief that she chose to share with me. So, like the idiot I am, I stared her in the face blankly and went “There’s an infinite amount of numbers between 0 and 1, and none of them are 2”.

I really regret that. She let me know later that that one sentence shattered the belief for her. Which is sad, because it’s such an innocent thought. There’s no religious behaviors or conditions or rituals attached to it, it’s just comforting.

I have been scrolling on the front page for a couple of minutes now, and I was going to write that it’s literally all conspiracy theories, but that’s not true, there’s also some “sponsored” posts AKA ads sprinkled in.

What a sad joke.

If you think the fediverse is too centralized, you can always host your own instance. You get all the same “free speech” benefits (plus no free-speech ban on drugs and porn), without having to put one foot into that cesspit of a site.

Edit: oh, and that has to be the worst moderation system ever devised - at least if you are a woman or any kind of minority. Good fucking luck in finding a random jury of users who will ever, ever ban a racist or sexist piece of shit on a platform like this. Come to think of it, that’s probably the idea and justification behind the system: being able to loudly proclaim “we have a democratized ban system ensuring moderator overreach is impossible!” does make a great dogwhistle for “you can be a terrible human on here, don’t worry”

It
Dozen (read: doesn’t)
Even
(states of) Matter

Generally I agree with everyone else, Linux Mint is great.

However, if you really want to not worry at all, you could just buy a laptop from e.g. Tuxedo or System76. They come with Linux preinstalled (I think in the case of Tuxedo at least, you even have a choice of which Linux Distro?), and are guaranteed to have no hardware “difficulties” with Linux, i.e. even if you put another distro on it, you won’t encounter driver issues.

(Those have become very rare anyways, but do put a damper on the “Firsttime Linux Experience” if you do encounter them…)

Generally I agree with everyone else, Linux Mint is great.

However, if you really want to not worry at all, you could just buy a laptop from e.g. Tuxedo or System76. They come with Linux preinstalled (I think in the case of Tuxedo at least, you even have a choice of which Linux Distro?), and are guaranteed to have no hardware “difficulties” with Linux, i.e. even if you put another distro on it, you won’t encounter driver issues.

(Those have become very rare anyways, but do put a damper on the “Firsttime Linux Experience” if you do encounter them…)