that does kinda ring a bell wrt nvidia vs amd eGPUs. i feel like there was another gotcha but they were able to make it work. I’ll have to watch/read the walkthroughs again.

the other reason I’m interested in those other OEMs is because they offer shit like 64g ram models. I dont often need it, but sometimes I’ll be working on a hobby project where having a lot of ram is nice.

basically I’m looking for a desktop gaming PC / dev workstation, because thats where I spend 95% of my time.
but I’m willing to sacrifice a bit of gaming performance and a bit of money, to be able to play some lighter games while on business trips, and to work on my hobbies while visiting the in-laws for a week. My inlaws have a mouse and keyboard, and i dont need a mouse and keyboard for the kinds of games I’d play on an airplane. i want to have all my files available offline, without constantly having multiple devices online and syncing.

I also have been chasing after the convenient 1-device dream for a long time, and I’ve always thought that portable consoles and tablets were too compromised of an experience (although the surfacebook gave me pause when it came out) - but some of these portable gaming PCs actually make me hopeful.

Thanks, I’ll give that a look!

I was trying to avoid exactly this tangent with people judging the setup I want.

I’m not looking for a less mobile setup, and I’m not especially budget conscious. I want a gaming PC that can pump out frames to my superultrawide screen on my desk, and I want a gaming PC that I can throw into my backpack and do some light gaming on an airplane, and I want a development workstation that I can take to my in-laws and do a bit of coding while I’m visiting them.
I don’t want 2 (or 3) devices, because I don’t want to manage extra devices that I only use occasionally, and I’m willing to pay a little extra for the convenience, even if I was convinced that 2 or 3 devices would be cheaper.

What I want are reviews comparing the relatively beefy ayaneo/onexgamer devices that seem to do what I want out-of-the-box, vs the big-name devices that I see lots of reviews for, so I know which one I actually want.

What device do you have, and do you have firsthand experience with it attached to an eGPU? Or is this based on specs?

The Lenovo ones don’t support eGPU well because they (like the other big names) have custom graphics silicone that needs custom drivers, and they haven’t bothered to add support for eGPUs to their drivers, although the hardware supports it.

The ayaneo and onexplayer just use the standard OTS amd graphics hardware and standard amd drivers, which do support it.

Idk if the bazzite has found custom foss drivers that add eGPU support to Lenovo devices, and also I’m basing this on reviews a few months old from people who are using the out-of-the-box software, not installing a new OS on it. IIRC someone used the Lenovo with SteamOS and it didn’t support eGPUs but it’s been a while so I may be misremembering that review, or it may have been a preview or speculation or something.

My understanding is that it’s just trueNAS scale under the hood, and that migrating between the two is fairly painless.

Yeah fair.

It’s also kinda a fuzzy area, because some of their code is open source, but not all.
And iirc they’re partly funded by the folks who make trueNAS, but supporting a project supported by open-source folks isn’t the same as supporting open-source folks themselves.

I figured it toss it out there anyways though.

Not practical advice, but since you’re throwing out alternatives, one that I’ve had my eye on is hexOS.
It’s a trueNAS scale (fork?) by a bunch of ex-unraid devs with the goal of making trueNAS as easy as unraid.

It still has a few more months of beta, though, so I haven’t tried it. Also, like unraid, it has a paywall.

That’s good, if at least one surviving synced device survives then you still have access. Still a big “if” in a catastrophe, but a much better proposition.

What is the data retention policy for the local vaults?

Thanks for your useful and actionable feedback that clearly explains the problem. So trustworthy /s

No, my problem is that I need my password manager to access my backup, and I need my backup to get my password manager.

Do we work at the same place? Lol

I totally get you, despite some pedantic disagreement about what “spam” means. I’m in the same boat a bit.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve kinda leaned into it in the sense that “if they’re gonna make us use it, then I want to be in a position to steer the direction”. While I discourage its use and preach to people about it’s evils, I also try to improve the AI tools and processes that we’re using. That probably makes me part of the problem, but it relieves a bit of the pressure of how shit it is day to day.

I’m actually kinda bearish on AI.
Or rather I think that either it’s a bubble that will pop, or before too long it’s gonna cause a global depression. Maybe a bit of paranoia and doomerism.

I don’t trust my setup for something like this.

My server and NAS go down in a fire, and I’m not gonna have the key I need to get the backup so I can restore my password manager lol

I’m gonna pick up a few of these I think.

That NoteDicovery looks pretty slick. Its exactly what I was looking for a few months ago, and I’d absolutely pick it up if I didn’t just fall in love with the silverbullet’s ability to execute code embedded directly in the markdown; a feature that I expect to use almost never, but atotally smitten with.

As a side note, all these email archiving projects almost do something I want, maybe folks here can help me:
I’ve heard that self-hosting email is not worth the pain, but I also don’t want to leave my email history in the hands of these megacorps I don’t trust. These archive projects solve that problem, but they’re not email clients. I don’t want to archive and delete an email just to find out actually I need to reply to it like a month later.
What do you recommend for this usecase?

Eclipse che was, afaict, the first to really make major progress in this space.

Vscode and codespaces basically stole the whole thing… But then they actually provided it in a way that was easy to use.

So while I don’t like the theft, I think that the result is great, and I don’t like that OP lists it as something nobody wants.

Why are you including codespaces in there??? That’s a feature I wish more open-source projects made use of. Pristine working dev environments, on demand? Yes please

Using an AI is a great way to get learning materials tailored specifically to you.

But after you’ve learned from it, before you move on to another topic, you HAVE to verify your understanding against more trustworthy sources that you previously couldn’t understand. Ideally with an online course that actually gives you a test.

Outside of VPS firewalls settings and fail2ban, is there anything else you’d recommend to harden the VPS?

Idk about audio but they rate limit video pretty quickly. Audio might be low enough bandwidth for them to not care, but be cautious

Is there a reason not to use pangolin for the public stuff too?

I’m just about to make the switch from CloudFlare to pangolin on VPS, and I wanna make sure I’m not missing anything

They do basically what I’m describing, just not as well because they don’t have as much of an incentive. Are end users willing to pay for these more advanced models?

Well there you go. It could be authoritarian, except an authoritarian govt isn’t subsidizing it. Exactly like I described.

Governments, however, are willing to pay that amount. Why?

You keep walking straight into the points I’m making.

That, in itself, isn’t authoritarian

Wrong. Setting up a super invasive surveillance system is inherently authoritarian, even if they initially happen to use it for reasons that don’t typify authoritarianism. You have to bend over backwards so hard to keep it from becoming authoritarian, that it will just naturally corrupt any entity that deploys it, even making the monumental assumption that an entity that deploys this didn’t have the intention to use it for nefarious purposes from the start.

it’s only authoritarian of there’s some enforcement arm to enforce obedience or punish disobedience.

Is a rather clumsy piece of mental gymnastics. Not only have you said it before. You can use this argument, coupled with your earlier “it’s constituent parts aren’t authoritarian” to argue that nothing is authoritarian.

Again, I disagree. Something is only political when used for political ends.

And again this is just the pro-gun argument. Fine on paper, useless in reality.

I’m making the argument that it is possible for software to be political even if it wasn’t created as such. I only need to show that a single case is possible.
You are making the argument that it is impossible, and you keep trying to prove it by example.