Steam and Lutris work well! I can game on XFCE Mint just fine. I actually have an easier time of it than on a number of distros, thanks to the combination of flatpaks and the Ubuntu base. But, I am not “the kids”.

I checked, it’s still there! (It doesn’t append, it overwrites, so no, I just have a file with the current date and time accurate to within two minutes.)

I did the hackiest, lamest thing back in the day… I had my client write the current date and time to a file on the share every two minutes as a Cron job… Kept it working for months! I saw it on a forum somewhere, tried it, and… Shocked Pikachu face I don’t know if I ever disabled that Cron job! Haha!

I ran a mediawiki for almost exactly that for a while on a really old computer that was collecting dust. Eventually I turned it into a VM. I still have it somewhere… You could totally host that on linode or digital ocean.

There are a lot of problems, but there are a lot of things we aren’t worrying about now, either. AIDS was killing millions, and there was no treatment. The Satanic Panic. People were exposed to lead and asbestos everywhere. Duck and cover drills in schools for when the nukes went off. I mean, we’re all scrambling to figure out how to stop climate disasters, but then they were scrambling to stop some nutter on either side from pushing a button and ending the world! Where I come from, they still took kids away from their parents for the crime of being Aboriginal! Things change.

I choose to be optimistic. All through the twentieth century, overpopulation and mass famine were looming spectres, and better crops, phosphate fertilizers, falling birthdates all led to us not really being that worried about that. Read Stand on Zanzibar.

Crime rates are down all over the world.

The inequality? 1920’s. The FTC and the EU are (finally, IMO) taking big tech to task for their monopolistic behaviour. It’s moving slow, but there is starting to be the political will to address the challenges.

Things go in cycles.

Does it give you anything? Can you select safe mode or nomodeset from the grub menu, or do you get no grub menu at all? I almost pulled the trigger on a used getac system a while back, but couldn’t justify the cost. If you get it working, please tell me how it goes under Linux!

I am in school, and make heavy use of Teams and Office, and do just fine in Linux! 365 on the web, Libre Office, and Teams in a Flatpak. My instructors can’t wrap their heads around it. I’m the only one in my program! (IT, no less.)

This is actually a real problem… A lot of digital documents from the 90’s and early 2000’s are lost forever. Hard drives die over time, and nobody out there has come up with a good way to permanently archive all that stuff.

I am a crazy person, so I have RAID, Ceph, and JBOD in various and sundry forms. Still, drives die.

The two things that popped into my head are Immich and Nextcloud. I think Nextcloud is generally more useful, but Immich is more specifically targeted at Photos. As for how to synchronize it… Syncthing? Personally, I hate setting up Syncthing and so I don’t really use it myself anymore, but once it’s set up, it really does take care of itself. Poke the computer once a month to make sure it’s still alive, and you’re set.

You could probably host Nextcloud at one site and just have a client computer at the next site set to auto sync everything.

Been running NextCloud for a while, not for photos, but for just general Google Drive replacement.

Ditto, except mine just died one day. I put it away for bed, woke up, flipped it open, Nada. Brick. I felt it was a bit slower than I’d like, but got pretty good battery life.

Really tempted to try a Musebook, based on Risc-V, because apparently I’m a sucker for punishment.

I shouldn’t talk because I dip in and out, but I do that because I like the possibilities. Like, what if someone comes up with a concept, but no one tries it, and it turns out to really work? Like, I like immutability as a concept, so I’ve tried Silverblue, Kinoite, and Bazzite. If nobody gave it a go, then the concept would die on the vine.

Also, I like seeing different ways of thinking about technology.

I have dyndns, have since they were 10$ a year, and I’ve gradually realized that my ISP changes my IP on average less than once a year…

I have a thumb drive with Mint Mate installed on it and it runs fine on a 4gb i5 - 3rd gen.

I have it working with LaCP’d 4gb networking for the transfers. Five nodes. I agree though, It’s a beast on RAM.

I have tried a couple of Proxmox clusters, one with overkill specs and one with little Mini PCs. Proxmox does eat up a fair amount of memory, but I have used it with Ceph for live migrations. Its really useful to me to be able to power off a machine, work on it, then bring it back up, and have no interruptions in my services. That said, my Mini PCs always seemed to be hurting for RAM. So that’s my pros and cons.

I own the remake, and I actually had a fan site for it… And got to interview John Freaking Carpenter for that fan site, as he did the music for Sentinel Returns. It was exactly as awesome as it sounds.

Sentinel… From waaay back. Like, Commodore 64 age. I think it would be a perfect VR game, too.

WildStar got done dirty… It hit at the wrong time, but was so much fun. I could never get any friends to play with me. Le sigh.

You mean I didn’t need to spend years and thousands of dollars learning Linux and servers? Oh man! Oh wait, I’m getting ads in Windows on the start menu. Yeah, I’m happy.

There’s a series of Lemmy posts called the Linux upskill challenge that goes step by step through setting up and using Linux. I tried self hosting and jumping straight in too, and it sucked.

What worked for me:

1. Start using open source versions of stuff, like switching from Chrome to Firefox, Office to Libre Office.
2. Set up Virtual Box, and practice running server apps on Linux on virtual machines, until you’ve done a few Linux VMs and gotten used to the interfaces and commands.
3. Dual boot a laptop or desktop, one by one getting your daily use apps working in Linux.
4. Distro hop a bit. I never thought I’d land on Fedora, but here I am.
5. Get used to running and configuring servers from the command line.
6. Host some stuff with VMs and get used to the networking and bridging and stuff.
7. Containers!

I’m still in the middle of 6+7. Not super comfy with Docker quite yet, but getting there. I really do love having my stuff self-hosted though. Well worth the effort.