This was a really nice tech review! I think she took a sensible approach and didn’t bog it down with advertisements for new features no one cares about.

When I was using Librewolf maybe 4 years ago, it was never up to date with Firefox. I thought it could be a potential security risk, sometimes it took months to incorporate Firefox security updates. Has that improved recently?

This is great advice. I think the smaller NAS is a prudent investment now, and the more capable server can come later. I think I don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of good and keep me from investing in a local storage solution.

I think this is great advice. You’ve made me realize that I’m entering a stage of my training that is notorious for lack of free time, so maybe I’ll leave the self build tinkering for another day. It is more important for me to get the local storage going sooner than later but I will plan on building a tinkering PC someday.

I’d like to ask a clarifying question.

I’m interested in building a computer to self host from that would exclusively run on my local network. I would like to have some storage (on the order of 2x 16TB HDDs in RAID1 or 3x in RAID5) but also have the ability to host some other services, like Nextcloud, Arr stack, RSS feed, Immich for photos, and a Joplin server. I would probably put Wireguard on there to access these services remotely (but not the *arr stack).

Someday I might want to host some services that are accessible from the internet (not Wireguard), but I think that is for another time in my life.

I am gathering from your comments that, for more than strictly local storage, it is probably worth building a server with storage, rather than trying to stretch a Synology NAS to do all of this for me. Does that sound right?

I’ve been toying with this idea for a while and am not sure if I sound just go with a Synology or self build. But I think I have more interest in tinkering with the system than a Synology would allow. I’m not totally new to self hosting, I have a VPS that serves a few apps and my blog online, and use an RPi at home to serve a few things. I suppose a third option is to buy the NAS, but then build a computer to host the other applications using the NAS data.

I think that one is the only logo with any soul to it. The rest are so flat! I like the old opensuse logo, but I get that it doesn’t fit with the rest.

I will swap out the default font with a monospace Nerd Font. I’m currently using the Cascadia Code Mono Nerd Font, but I will change it every so often.

I have a similar feeling about it. I think I would prefer the customization of KDE, etc, but GNOME just works for me right out of the box. I don’t think I change anything except the monospace font nowadays (in Tweaks). It works great and gets out of the way. For people who do not like the GNOME workflow I suspect it would be horrific because there is far less customization.

It might not be what you are looking for, but I think nnn is a interesting reimagining of terminal file navigation/management.

If you only want the drive part of google–meaning just files–then seafile was way faster for me than nextcloud.

I thought you are supposed to install extensions through the web interface, not the command line

I think NixOS needs an approachable installer or config builder

I’m looking forward to Read You incorporating FreshRSS api. For now I’ll happily use FeedMe

Photoprism is really quite nice for a containerized solution.

For mostly photos I’m a big fan of Digicam

On my VPS, every night I shut down the docker containers, then backup everything (including postgres & mariadbs) with borg using borgmatic, upload to backblaze b2, then restart the containers.

Also shout out for the TinyBit launcher fork for someone who wants custom icons and a few extras with the same concept

And I think that is a totally reasonable purpose to host it! I just wanted to see if I understood this correctly. I like the concept but am not sure if I want to spend another weekend setting up another VPS.

What are the privacy implications of you being the only person using an instance? I was under the impression that part of the privacy from SearXNG was by obfuscation because of many different people searching from the the same instance. I thought about self hosting it, but didn’t want to share with the vps I pay for now.

I’ve been a kagi subscriber for justa about a year and it’s been great.

Good point! I suspect it’s a lot more than we think. My parents are definitively still involved in doing this.

But on the other hand, does exchanging contacts mean anything to Facebook anymore? I don’t think that’s important to their income stream anymore. If the OP meant “these sites are still going strong but aren’t what they were when they began”, then of course I agree.