Btrfs doesn’t have encryption, so you need to do it with luks to an mdadm raid, and build btrfs on top of that. Luks on mdadm raid is known to be slow, and in general not a great idea.

Why involve mdadm? You can use one btrfs filesystem on a pair of luks volumes with btrfs’s “raid1” (or dup) profile. Both volumes can decrypt with the same key.

A standard called SystemReady exists. For the systems that actually follow its standards, you can have a single ARM OS installation image that you copy to a USB drive and can then boot through UEFI and run with no problems on an Ampere server, an NXP device, an Nvidia Jetson system, and more.

Unfortunately it’s a pretty new standard, only since 2020, and Qualcomm in particular is a major holdout who hasn’t been using it.

Just like x86, you still need the OS to have drivers for the particular device you’re installing on, but this standard at least lets you have a unified image, and many ARM vendors have been getting better about upstreaming open-source drivers in the Linux kernel.

To the contrary, I would expect the sample to skew more towards people who have a heavily customized X session and strong opinions about window managers while drastically underrepresenting average GNOME users who stick with the default Wayland session. Someone who likes their custom setup can still be waiting for a Wayland equivalent while casual Ubuntu users have been defaulted to Wayland on new non-nvidia installs since early 2021.

I tried to do this a while ago with a GNOME system, setting GDM to automatically log me in, but I ended up always getting prompted for my password from gnome-keyring shortly after logging in which seemed to defeat the point. If you use GNOME, you might want to look at ArchWiki’s gnome-keyring page which describes a couple solutions to this problem (under the PAM section) which should be applicable on any systemd distro.

In 2014, MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 were released under a Microsoft shared-source license (Microsoft Research License) which forbids redistribution

In 2018, both versions were published to GitHub and relicensed as MIT, making them properly open-source

Today, MS-DOS 4.00 was added to that repo, also under MIT.

For years I’ve been using KeepassXC on desktop and Keepass2Android on mobile. Rather than sync the kdbx file between my devices, I have each device access it through the network. Either via sftp, smb, or nfs, but regardless I need to connect to my home’s VPN to access it when away from home since I don’t directly expose those things to the outside world.

I used to also keep a second copy of the website-tied passwords in Firefox Sync, but recently tried migrating that to Proton Pass because I thought the PIN feature might help, then ultimately decided to move away from that too and start using the KeepassXC-Browser plugin instead. I considered Bitwarden too but haven’t tried it out yet, was somewhat deterred by seeing people say its UI seems very outdated.

There’s only one case I’ve found where Wi-Fi use seems acceptable in IoT: ESPHome. It’s open-source firmware for microcontrollers that makes DIY IoT sensors and controls accessible over LAN without phoning home to whatever remote server, without trying to make anything accessible over the Internet, and without breaking in any way if the device has no route to the Internet.

I still wouldn’t call Wi-Fi use ideal even there; mesh can help in larger homes and Z-Wave/Zigbee radios tend to be more power efficient, though ESP32 isn’t exactly suited for a battery-powered device that’s expected to run 24/7 regardless.

Yes.

My home server has dropbear-initramfs installed so that after reboot I can access the LUKS decryption prompt over SSH. The one LUKS partition contains a btrfs filesystem with both rootfs and home as subvolumes. For all the other drives attached to that system, I use ZFS native encryption with a dataset that decrypts with a keyfile from that rootfs and I have backups of an encrypted copy of that keyfile.

I don’t think there’s a substantial performance impact but I’ve never bothered benchmarking.

Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll give it a try sometime.

Stylus/handwriting oriented note taking. Stuff like Samsung Notes or Goodnotes (or OneNote, though it does a lot more) in the Android space, or e-ink options like Remarkable’s stock software.

If I just want to use a keyboard for everything I have great FOSS options like Joplin and Standard Notes, but when I want to use a pen instead it feels like no other freedom-respecting option seem to even remotely approach the usability of just sticking with real ink and moleskine-like paper notebooks.

Even someone willing to pay an upfront fee for proprietary apps will struggle to find good options that allow syncing and reading (let alone editing) your notes on other devices/platforms without resorting to a monthly subscription.

Something I’ve noticed that is somewhat related but tangential to your problem: The result I’ve always gotten from using compose files is that container names and volume names get assigned names that contain a shared prefix by default. I don’t use docker and instead prefer podman but I would expect both to behave the same on this front. For example, when I have a file at nextcloud/compose.yml that looks like this:

volumes:
  nextcloud:
  db:

services:
  db:
    image: docker.io/mariadb:10.6
    ...
  app:
    image: docker.io/nextcloud
    ...

I end up with volumes named nextcloud_nextcloud and nextcloud_db, with containers named nextcloud_db and nextcloud_app, as long as neither of those services overrides this behavior by specifying a container_name. I believe this prefix probably comes from the file-level name: if there is one and the parent directory’s name otherwise.

The reasons I adjust my own compose files to be different from the image maintainer’s recommendation include: to accommodate the differences between podman and docker, avoiding conflicts between the exported listen ports, any host filesystem paths I want to mount in the container, and my own preferences. The only conflict I’ve had with other containers there is the exported port. zigbee2mqtt, nextcloud, and freshrss all suggest using port 8080 so I had to change at least two of them in order to run all three.

if the featureset is not clear enough at first glance

My experience as someone who has barely dabbled in Matrix, tried comparing clients, and knows a lot of people who stick to Discord: a lot of Discord users heavily use custom emotes, voice chat, and screen sharing. It’s not even easy to figure out which Matrix clients support each of those features without installing everything and trying it out. There’s a clients comparison on matrix.org that mentions Voip but not stickers or video.

For stickers alone:

• Element is widely considered the go-to Matrix client but uses a strange integration system for predefined sticker packs instead of the MSC2545 stickers that more closely resemble what users coming from Discord would want.
• Cinny seems to have the best support for stickers/emotes but its site doesn’t mention them at all. It supports uploading and managing sticker packs at either a channel or user level, provides a nice picker UI to send any picture from those packs as either a large “sticker” or a small inline “emoji”, and allows using them for reactions.
• FluffyChat mentions stickers on its site and has the second best sticker support, with all of those except reactions and a graphical sticker picker for inline emoji (need to type them as shortcode).
• SchildiChat, Nheko, and NeoChat have some sort of limited support for custom stickers/emoji. NeoChat is the only one of those that advertises stickers on its main site. Nheko mentions them in a GitHub readme.

Being able to freely use custom emotes without paying for a Discord Nitro subscription nor server boosts would be a great selling point but it’s not something most users would be able to figure out before signing up. The limited client support isn’t great; e.g. Fluffy is the only Android client that supports sending custom stickers but some people may dislike the chat bubbles style UI.

I have configured custom Android kernel builds to enable more USB drivers, enable module support, and tweak various other things. For one tangible example of the result: I could plug in a USB Wi-Fi adapter and use it to simultaneously connect to another Wi-Fi network with the internal NIC while also sharing my own AP over USB. On an Android device of all things. I have also adjusted kernel builds for SBCs (like Pi clones) to get things working at all.

I have never seen any reason to configure a custom kernel for my own desktop/laptop systems. Default builds for the distros I’ve used have been fine for me; if I’m ever dissatisfied with anything it’s the version number rather than the defconfig. The RHEL/Rocky kernel omits a few features I want (like btrfs) but I’d rather stick to other distros on personal systems than tweak a distro that isn’t even meant for tweaking.

Not every work environment is the same.

When I first started with my current employer I was given a system with RHEL preinstalled and I replaced it with Fedora on my first day. I was told to use LUKS and given a normal OpenVPN profile but otherwise they don’t control or monitor anything about my workstation. No matter how many years or decades I stay at this company, it’s extremely unlikely I’ll ever touch an OS that isn’t Linux-based during work time.

Every previous job I’ve been at also had me use Linux for my primary workstation, because my field of work more or less requires it, but some have needed me to access a separate Windows system/server/VM on rare occasions.

I recommend giving dnf the -C flag to most operations, particularly those that don’t involve downloading packages. The default behavior is often similar to pacman’s -y flag and so the metadata sync ends up slowing everything down by orders of magnitude.

I’ve long known about it. I don’t seriously use it, but I would if only my Wi-Fi router was fully supported. It’s an Asus one (that I got for free from T-Mobile a decade ago) so I installed Asuswrt-Merlin on it instead.

Following the recommendation of homelab communities, I got into OpnSense (a BSD-based firewall system for x86 hardware only) last year, still keeping my Wi-Fi router as a dedicated AP. In hindsight I somewhat regret that choice and probably would’ve been better off buying a new OpenWRT-compatible router and using it to handle firewall/routing/AP all in one device instead of wasting the power draw of another separate N100 system. I like having wireguard and vnstat in my router now, which Merlin didn’t offer, but I know OpenWRT has those too and I don’t have any other needs that warrant a higher-power router.

I’ve been using it since it felt usable enough in GNOME to me. Around 2015-ish, give or take a year. GNOME leading on Wayland support is a big part of why I switched to it from Xfce back then. Nowadays KDE and others have plenty good Wayland support too (better in some ways like allowing server-side decorations and global shortcuts) but I just haven’t felt like trying to properly experiment to see what I like.

I’ve always avoided Nvidia on my desktops. Stuck with either radeon or intel and never had any exceptionally big issues with them on Wayland. Though other things like hardware accelerated video decoding have had a history of being spotty on some drivers/GPUs.

That’s actually a choice you’re offered during Debian’s interactive install. When you’re offered the option to set a root password, if you leave it empty the system will disable direct root login and instead give your first normal user sudo access.

Debian. I was in a similar boat to OP and just a couple weeks ago migrated my almost 8-year-old home server setup from Ubuntu LTS to Debian Stable. Decided to finally move away from Ubuntu because I never cared for snap (had to keep removing it with every upgrade) and gradually gained a few smaller issues with Ubuntu. Seems good to me so far.

I considered RHEL/Rocky but decided against them largely because I wanted btrfs for my rootfs, which their stock kernel doesn’t have, though I use a few Red Hat developed tools like podman and cockpit. Fedora Server and the like have too fast a release lifecycle for my liking, though I use Fedora for my desktop. That left Debian as the one remaining obvious choice.

I also briefly considered throwing a Debian VM into TrueNAS Scale, since I also use this system as a ZFS NAS, but setting that up felt like I was fighting against the “appliance” nature of what TrueNAS tries to be.

The main reason people use Fandom in the first place is the free hosting. Whether you use MediaWiki or any other wiki software, paying for the server resources to host your own instance and taking the time to manage it is still a tall hurdle for many communities. There already are plenty of MediaWiki instances for specific interests that aren’t affected by Fandom’s problems.

Even so, federation tends to foster a culture of more self-hosting and less centralization, encouraging more people who have the means to host to do so, though I’m not sure how applicable that effect would be to wikis.