I love this so much. It reminds me of how AMD Threadripper came to be.

Apparently Threadripper was a skunkworks project by some of the engineers at AMD that they worked on in their spare time. They wanted to see if they could basically slap together a bunch of normal CPU dyes into on mega chip with a high speed/bandwidth interposer connecting them together.

It was almost abandoned and they had to fight to get it taken seriously. But it proved to be a viable product, and singlehandedly was responsible for decimating what was left of Intel’s place in the HEDT market so badly, that after several years of failed attempts to keep up, Intel officially announced that they wouldn’t be competing in that space anymore.

It’s such a cool thing when talented and passionate people come together without having to be subject to strict marketability and just try to create something awesome and revolutionary.

The Steam Deck kicked off an entire new market for handheld gaming devices that had real power to play modern PC games. And despite a bunch of competing and copycat products, the Steam Deck is still king.

I love mine, have close to 200 hours on it, which for me is a ton. I’ve barely gamed on my main PC in the last year, it’s just so much more comfortable to play on the couch or in my bed.

Jellyfin for only music streaming would probably be fine, if it’s just you using it. PiHole would be good, you could probably get a low impact distro on there to run Docker containers, but only pretty light services on it.

About to build my first really nice homelab NAS for Jellyfin, archiving, etc. targeting between 30-40TB if all goes well :)

?..It’s a great tool that provides all the security of VPN access without having to struggle with the more technical aspects of spinning up your own VPN, and it’s zero cost for personal use.

You could also use Netbird if you wanted, but I have been using Tailscale extensively and it’s awesome.

IP white lists and firewall exceptions will help, but exposing ports on your home router is almost always a bad idea, especially for something as trivial as a game server.

I would highly recommend Tailscale. It’s free for up to 3 users, and if you have more friends than that, I would have them all sign up with free accounts and then share your laptop device with their tailnets.

It’s very easy to setup and use, costs nothing, and will be far more secure than opening ports and trying to set up IP white lists, protocol limitations, etc.

Tailscale creates something called an “overlay network” it’s basically a virtual LAN that exists on top of your real network and can be extended to other people and devices over the internet. It’s fully encrypted, fast, and like I said, very easy to set up.

Try using Tailscale, it’s an overlay network that acts similar to Hamachi. It’s totally free for up to three users and you can just use your Minecraft Microsoft email to sign up.

Tailscale

It works on all platforms and is fast, easy, and secure. And you don’t need to do anything sketchy with your router like opening ports.

well, that didn’t last long lol

Thank you!

Blech! Why would somebody sully such a wonderful device with a piss patty OS?

Good luck!

Every time I tell myself I’m done with Brotato…it sucks me back in.

I’ve been thinking of using Linkwarden for a while now. As my computer usage spreads across more and more devices, having a single place to go for all my bookmarks would be fantastic.

Performance and how configurable things are, plus ease of use.

For instance, my default router/modem device from my ISP was super clunky and confusing. I needed to set up some custom port forwarding and firewall rules. The aftermarket router I bought was faster, had way better wireless coverage, and the UI was so much easier to set up the configs I needed.

So it’s up to you, from what you said, seems like you probably would be good with the default from your ISP.

Yeah, I have a friend who was very interested in switching to Linux on his gaming computer.

His game of choice is Arma 3, which I play and runs great on Linux. But then he asked me, “what about mods?” He plays Arma with a massive amount of mods, and not just Steam workshop ones, all kinds.

I tried to replicate all his mods on my installation as a proof of concept, but after over 2 hours, it still didn’t work.

Having really solid and easy modding would be awesome.

My ghost will haunt GoG’s corporate offices until they relent and transfer my games to the person who’s name I keep creepily spelling with frost on their mirrors & windows.

Almost certainly fake, but what a horrible thought.

Nintendon’t mind being total dickheads.

For general system stats, I like btop. It runs in the terminal, so you can monitor it through SSH remotely. It also is much more readable than some of the other older top process monitors.

Docker desktop is a nice GUI interface for local docker container management, Portainer if you want something more enterprise grade.

XCP-ng or Proxmox if you need a bare metal hypervisor. Both open source, powerful, mature, and have large communities with lots of helpful documentation.

I think you can migrate ESXi VMs directly to XCP-ng. I have moved onto it about 6 months ago and it has been solid. Steep learning curve, but really great once you get the hang of it, and enterprise grade if you need stuff like HA clustering and complex virtual networking solutions.

XCP-ng hypervisor main box for my VMs, mostly Ubuntu Server but some Alma Linux VMs too. TrueNAS Core for my NAS box.

Might start switching my VMs from Ubuntu Server to Debian soon, we’ll see.