But it would not work on older non-GNU versions of tar.

GNU introduced the “–foo” style long options, and it was a long time before Unix versions began adopting them.

Not everyone that disagrees with a law is in a position to immediately change it.

That wasn’t luck - it was best practice backup strategy.

Tell me you’re bi without telling me you’re bi

Nah. Replacing the kernel is probably planned for the next point release - it’ll just be GNU/systemd

It doesn’t break apt, Canonical just broke their version of apt just to prefer snaps now.

FTFY

Only reason it wouldn’t work is Canonical killing the .deb package. That was an unforced error. So no, still not a good idea.

Nope - it was Unix not Linux. The minus makes the command invalid on many Unix versions of tar (though most modern BSD versions allow it)

Sorry, it was Solaris - you just blew it up (the minus is invalid on many Unix versions of tar)

For a privacy friendly OS, surprised nobody has mentioned Freedombox

It’s designed explicitly for your use case, along with an easy path to other self hosted services. When you’re ready for more than it offers through the web interface, it’s a full Debian install under the hood - so you can install whatever you need to. Privacy friendly and super stable, with smooth upgrades to new releases and security updates for old versions several years after the new one is available.

As far as hardware, your old computer is probably more powerful than a Pi and can support more drives, but the Pi will be more power efficient. As others have mentioned, if you care about your data long term then backups are a must, so a separate NAS or a Pi with a large drive for backup storage is a good idea as well, whatever OS you choose.

kwin supports a tiling mode which it sounds like they’re already using, so … yes?

Probably because one of his alts was on dbzer0 and was banned for transphobia

There’s more truth to that than most people realize: Linux is only one kernel option in Debian:

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

Debian GNU/NetBSD

Debian GNU/Hurd