I believe that was an electron app for the PC. There was a flatpak available as recently as a month ago. I remember seeing it when I was looking for good music players. not sure how well it works.

I use both. I have some things I want in VMs and others in containers. I run a VM to run containers in podman alongside my “normal” VMs.

Proxmox has its own ability to run containers but I was more familiar with docker/podman.

Your DNS provider may offer static hosting as a paid service. I’m using porkbun and their static hosting is pretty cheap, plus they handle SSL and whatnot for me.

i have very few services and tend to lean into virtual machines instead of containers out of habit. i have proxmox running on an old mini-pc that needs to be replaced at some point. 16GB of RAM in it, 4 cores on the CPU (it’s an i3 at 2ghz), and a 100GB SSD.

VMs and services are as follows:

• ubuntu vm
  • runs my omada controller in docker
  • used to run all of my containers in docker but i migrated them to podman
• fedora vm
  • runs several containers via podman
    • alexandrite, where i’m composing this now!
    • uptime kuma
    • redlib for browsing reddit
    • kanboard for organizing my contracting work
• dietpi in a vm to run pi-hole (migrated here when my pi zero-w cooked itself)
  • this also handles internal dns for each server so i don’t have to type out IP addresses
• home assistant HAOS vm

home assistant backs itself up to my craptastic nas and the rest of the stuff doesn’t really have any backups. i wouldn’t be upset if they died, except for my kanboard instance. i can rebuild that from scratch if needed.

i’ll be investing in a new mini-pc and some more disks soon, though.

whatever you go with, you might have an issue with it being constantly plugged in if that’s your plan.

I used to run a piratebox off a nexus s years ago and I’d regularly unplug it to let it run off the battery for a while. constant charging can cause excess heat and that’s not good for the battery.

for me it was less about things being a little bit harder and more about being unable to travel from the airport to lodging or work offices without paying out of my own pocket, which I couldn’t afford anyhow.

typically I would just buy a cheap prepaid stock android phone for this and use as much fake info as I could.

that’s the hard part for me. daily life is bearable with a dumb phone but i live in a semi-rural area. when i go to civilization it’s high friction without a smartphone.

i tried to do this recently but it created a lot of friction in daily life. once the masses have moved on, it’s hard to keep the old stuff, sadly. it’s really frustrating.

i, too, was alive at a time when all this convenience didn’t exist but a large part of the world has moved on with forcing privacy nightmares.

some of these “conveniences” are requirements for people. i keep a lot of my personal digital activities isolated (offline gps, minimal invasive app usage on my phone, custom ROM, blah blah) but when i have to travel for work, i am required by the company to use ride sharing (relies on gps), commercial messengers, and other invasive commercial apps (that rely on phone based payment systems). typically i pick up a stock android phone and a pay as you go plan for this to use as a “burner”, using false information where possible.

sure i guess i could quit my job and go hang potatoes in somebody’s garage for $0.13 USD per year but i’ve made my bargain with the devil.

the lines between privacy and convenience are fuzzy and ever moving. it’s best to approach this with a bit of threat modeling first. figure out what you’re actually worried about and what you can tolerate, then decide how much convenience you’re willing to suffer.

guess i’ll have to yoink it out of my phone when i get some motivation. thanks!

while it’s a bit more than a tablet, I scooped up a gen 3 yoga x1 thinkpad off ebay for somewhere around $300 USD. i’m running bluefin on it and it works great for most of my general computing tasks. the screen folds back into a tablet mode and the keys recess when it does. that functionality “just works” on a fresh bluefin install for me.

the stylus that sits inside the body of the laptop doesn’t function and i suspect that it is a (non-replaceable) battery issue. i bought a larger lenovo stylus for the device after some research and it works great (plus i can replace the battery). it’s a CCAI21LP1520T4 model. i think it was about $35 USD.

the only downside is it’s a bit heavier than a tablet and it can get kind of warm over time but i’m doing development on it and have several docker containers running for that purpose. that might be a me problem.

i like that it has a headphone jack and an sd card slot. there’s also a sim card slot but i doubt that’s usable with linux.

Lots of good recommendations here. I use antiX on an ASUS EeePC X101CH and it works pretty well. I think the last release is a year old, though.

i know there were a lot of recommendations for tailscale/headscale (and they’ll keep coming because it’s the current market darling) but i’ve found netbird to be more ergonomic for my needs.

nerds.

for my car and motorcycle, I have an older Garmin dedicated GPS that still gets updates and has routed me better than Google maps in the past. it doesn’t require a subscription, though some newer ones do. I think I can update it with open street maps if the worst happens.

I use Organic Maps on my phone, which uses open street maps. It works pretty well but I often need the actual address for a location as opposed to the business name or search won’t work.

I’m a Kagi subscriber so I try to use Kagi Maps in the rare instance that I’m looking things up on my computer. It is a bit more limited.

can these use an egpu?

i’ve tried to do this on several occasions but sadly i have to travel at odd intervals for work. part of that is ride “sharing” services, apps to unlock doors (no web alternative), and notifications from work on the go.

the last time i tried this i simply kept a spare stock phone for when i had to travel for work and i just set it up before a trip and then wiped it after. it’s extra effort but it’s doable.

this pain in the ass seems to be cyclic with regards to open source things. over the last 30 odd years of my being in the flow of doing my own thing with my own hardware, it seems like we hit peaks and valleys of “company does something frustrating” -> “community sorts it out”. rinse and repeat.

it’ll be bumpy but someone will figure it out and we’ll start the cycle again.

podman is also rootless.

sure. i’m not saying fractional scaling looks bad but if they came from no scaling, suddenly having scaling can be a little jarring and can feel like a “lower” resolution. i regularly run fractional scaling in GNOME and it looks just fine. it’s a pretty solved problem at this point for the major desktop environments.