I’ll have to add that if going for path 1, be sensible and make sure you know if you have been hacked, to not expose your friends to malware by accident. You might even want to host a honeypot for learning this part.

Quite a few recommendations echo the same sentiment: get a whatever computer, start by installing xyz Linux, and go from there. Instead of direct recommendations I’ll present some alternative paths you may find useful to balance your self-hosting style against.

Path 1: Get a cheap VPS and host something like File Browser to transfer some low-stakes files between friends&family. Add services and beef up the server as you need. Doesn’t matter too much if it gets hacked, it’s separate from everything else and you’ll learn to harden it over time when you learn to consider an exposed server insecure by default. Also your financial stake is really low, sub 5€/month and you can quit at any time when there’s no unique data on the VPS. Grow your stake slowly along with your confidence in how well you can secure the thing.

Path 2: Get 3 identical 1-4TB drives and an SSD boot disk on some random computer, and install TrueNAS for home use. It has a large self-hosting community and nicely abstracts away the Linux side of things. No worries about exposing ports, just host anything you’re okay using just at home. Think: Jellyfin, Paperless, Home Assistant. You might find this useful if you never intend to really learn Linux in the first place and just want to solve some of your digital problems locally with some money invested. Later, add a mesh VPN like Tailscale or Netbird to safely access it from outside your home.

Path 3: Get heavily into networking and start by getting complete control and understanding over what happens in your network. OPNsense, adguard, OpenVPN/wireguard, pihole, ddns, ids/ips, VLANs. Do this if you’re a control freak and are willing to commit to updating your stuff and keeping track on potential attack vectors.

I started out with path 3, but have moved more or less towards a mix of 1 and 2 and no longer expose ports on my home router. If I’ll end up getting more than one device, I’ll probably install TrueNAS on one and make the rest a baremetal Talos cluster. Now my stuff runs on one device so it makes most sense to be Proxmox, this is however not advice, I work in tech and full well realise this is not an easy system to run.

Didn’t realise there’s a windows version of sudo rm - rf /

Might it be that you didn’t re-lock your bootloader, or so? But if this was many years ago, many things may well have progressed since. I wouldn’t know details of that time, just recently switched over from Apple.

Not all Finnish banks require play services for their apps, if any. Mine works just fine on eOS. Don’t know about Mobiilivarmenne, if you’d rather use that

Oh yeah, a lot of pure nonsense in there as well, gotta filter out the relevant bits.

And I do realise it’s pretty hard to say especially from outside the USA whatever was going on as I don’t ultimately know my way around the election system. So my point is basically that I wouldn’t be too surprised if it turned out to be shady. Europe has now had its first cold shower moments with Trump II so what I hope is people stop parroting stuff like “It’s a developed country, of course their elections are free&fair”.

Glad to see this doesn’t get downvoted to oblivion on Lemmy at least. On Mastodon I have encountered quite some hostility on anything that could be seen as “blueanon”.

Took some time for the topic to federate, there were 10s of thousands of ppl on the subreddit about this immediately after election day having a look on the numbers. But cool that it did.

I think the sub was “somethingiswrong2024” or so, if it still exists, haven’t been on reddit lately.

If the friend likes windows server specifically, they’re in for a ride…

At least ING’s app works happily in eOS via Aurora Store.

Good for you. Doesn’t match the experience of most creatives I’ve met.

Oop, yes, meant to say pawn.

Well I thought it was funny anyway

Many people’s income, especially in creative fields, simply depends on specific software. Photographers, video editors come to mind; having a certain style and efficiency to your workflow might just be the thing that keeps the cash flow positive. There’s often no time or energy to even think about an alternative, sadly. This is one of the things why I think it’s crucially important we don’t demand, even implicitly, that people switch everything at once. I just installed Spotify flatpak on a friend’s Debian. No regrets. Every little switch matters in the end.

Adobe stuff still doesn’t work reliably on Linux to my knowledge. And having to even consider any kind of virtualization is a huge deal for anyone who’s using the technology for some other purpose than technology, which is most of the users.

Oh lord

EndeavourOS is pretty good at making using Arch a bit easier in an opinionated way.

Fedora’s usually do a good job making the keyboard thing consistent. If you’re gaming and want something that you don’t need to adjust all the time check out Bazzite.

In any case give KDE Plasma desktop a shot especially if you’re used to how Windows works. I mean a more vanilla version that what Garuda probably came with.

The people saying tiling managers are the shit are the ones who have been Linuxing for quite some time. I think newcomers should just always go for a major, mature, opinionated desktop first. KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon. Mate or Xfce if you really like some old school aesthetic or have no RAM to speak of (<4GB). Distro choice comes after, I don’t recommend base Ubuntu for most people because of the risk of enshittification from Canonical that I see on the horizon.

No I know. But there’s no going around the keyboards physically having a different number of modifier keys left/right of the spacebar. Macs have 4 left, 2 right, my desktop keyboard has 3 left, 4 right. And there’s no way that I have found in either KDE or GNOME by which I could wire the Macbook keyboard to function exactly like in macOS in each and every application. There are so many pitfalls if you attempt. And the window management features would be different anyway. And thus my old macbook will always feel like a Mac to my fingers (after using it with macOS for a decade), but behave differently now. I might adjust if I only used Linux, but since I have to use an actual Mac on the daily, it’s not clicking. Cross-use is just not a good experience.

It’s been great overall, after about one full year now. The only major complaints are keyboard-related. Between my work-supplied macbook that runs macOS, my old macbook that runs GNOME, and my desktop that runs KDE, keeping my muscle memory in tune with keybinds and shortcuts and window management is a headache. Maybe sometimes I’m thrown off by some command line tool not being available on Mac or Linux or it’s named differently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_from_the_Ministry

Mediating, as in managing interactions between people who refuse to understand each other (or you for that matter). Being able to talk your way around, de-escalate, and just in general “make everyone happy enough” is going to both be super AI-proof but also make the journeys of you and those close to you much safer on this planet.

I believe it is a skill that can be learned. It’s not really taught anywhere directly though.

If you’re more technically inclined, whatever practical skills you need to live without money. Food, shelter, water, and energy related. If you can confidently and cheaply fix whatever necessity there’s broken in a house, you’ll be valued.

Don’t learn skills that require complex equipment that you don’t own and control yourself, because that equipment can be taken away from you at any time. Eg: most forms of AI usage

It does rub me the wrong way too, implying men are in general not in control of their relationships and their opinion matters less.

I’m in a lot of the same landscape as you, currently running a mac but ubuntu/fedora with gnome is looking at me from behind the corner. What’s blocking me at this time is client IT policies, in order to access stuff in their network it has to be their device and they don’t ship linux so. Next year it is.