I cannot count the number of times Debian Upgrade broke on me. My memory tells me I had issues with all upgrades (on various machines with mostly defaults) since Debian 8. It’s 13 now. I did follow the correct upgrade process and quite familiar with it, yet every single time I had issues at least for some of the desktops of my elder relatives and friends that I managed. Arch was just stable. And manual intervention is usually needed only if you have this particular thing installed. So, quite seldom. For servers, I think that was much better for me, but now I’m either Arch or Fedora (for situations where I don’t bother with setting my personal environment).

I have reinstalled Arch on the same machine only once, after SSD of my super old MacBook Air got corrupted. I haven’t used the laptop for like five years. Weirdly, a reinstall went well, and it looks like the SSD works well so far. Apart from that, my oldest system is about 7 years old, and it’s running well. I have no reason to reinstall. That very machine is a server. Also, I had a MacBook Pro broke keyboard on me, I simply rsynced my entire system to another MacBook Pro, and was done within about two hours. Needed to update /etc/fstab and maybe something else too. So, apart from Arch becoming a bit of a meme, I cannot recommend it more. It taught me quite a lot too. It was mostly stable for me.

Not much from me, but it wasn’t clear to me whether you were successful with WireGuard. I’m not, till today! So I can’t recommend Tailscale more! Others recommend things like Headscale, or others, I plan to migrate to them one day. But so far, Tailscale was really good for me.

Apparently, it’s dangerous to mention Arch— but I’d dare to do just that!

That may work for a family, but won’t work for a smart company that uses chat occasionally. We’re having like three managers who’d use the chat all the time, while the rest of the company may send 10 messages a month. Company subscription price would be an absurd one for that situation. We’re able to self-host any chat solution, yet I’m not sure which one. It looks like none fits the criteria, with the exception of Matrix perhaps. But I haven’t hosted it myself yet, and it looks like they’re looking for ways to motivate self-hosters just not do that.

I think I have something same, I absolutely hate Gimp for many years. The plugin does not change much, so do not expect miracles. Yet, it helps me tolerate the pain of an absolutely awful UX. Yet, you still need to relearn. Also, check out Krita, it’s good, and is similar to Photoshop in many regards. What I do, is simply edit some images for web development. So it’s not much, and that’s how I can tolerate Gimp.

Is there something specific you do? I hated Gimp for eternity, but PhotoGimp plugin paired with the newest (v3) Gimp isn’t that bad. I do enjoy the experience, mostly. Perhaps I just got used to it, but it’s quite usable for me.

Have you explored what it takes to self-host a notification server? I explored Zulip, and it looks similar, but I haven’t explored the notification server yet.

Oh, I watched a Korean dorama about that, the name is Death’s Game (2023). Wasn’t very good to my taste, but the idea is quite interesting.

I did, while it mostly okay, I don’t like the mobile notifications limit. Even for a family, ten people is quite small, as inviting a couple of friends would reach the limit.

With all the chat options, I’m looking for a self-hosted fully controlled version. So for me, that’s a bit weird that a self-hosted version is crippled in any way. If Zulip allows me to self-host the mobile notification thingy, then I think it’s a good alternative. I haven’t explored that yet.

Do you know of a better alternative? No irony here, I’m looking for something similar for family and company (50 to 100 people) setting. Was thinking of deploying Mattermost. For family, we settled on Matrix and it mostly works. We are at their default server, and I’m considering self-hosting it in the future. Yet, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to have Matrix deployed for a company. It lacks too many features, including search. Mattermost looked like the best option for me. I did try it locally a couple of months back, and mostly liked it.

However, I never liked them as a company. They have been giving me those ‘we’d give you the community this wonderful opportunity to develop the software for us, for free’ vibes. Now, it feels like my impression correct.

That sounds quite good, actually. I mean, I have a gazillion bash scripts, but I can keep them. I think I don’t care about posix, or whatever it’s called, for my day-to-day navigating the shell.

I tried to learn it, but failed. Looks like I’d love to use both, but I have no idea where to start. Any suggestions?

I use it on a Raspberry Pi 2B and Orange Pi Zero, both work wonderfully for the task, and it looks like Pi-Hole can work fine even on a router. Both of my SBCs are passively cooled, that’s why I decided to comment on the photo: you don’t need a computer this powerful to run it. As far as I remember, my very first Raspberry Pi (v. 1B or something like that) handled this task very well too. I temporarily retired that SBC in favour of Orange Pi Zero, so I cannot say for sure, but I think that computer had no issues with being fast enough for Pi-Hole. Really, give it a try if you didn’t, it’s ‘install once and forget’ type of software. Perhaps it should be updated periodically, but I don’t manage that. The only nuance with it, you need to have two computers, for the redundancy. Otherwise you’d be having downtimes when you need to turn off the SBC, or even reboot it.