You don’t need to rebuild your server from scratch to use Ansible or any other configuration management tool. It helps, though, because then you can ensure you can rebuild from scratch in a fully automatic way.

You can start putting small things in control with Ansible; next time you want to make a change, do it through Ansible. If you stop making manual changes, you’ll already get some benefit- like being able to put your Ansible manifests in version control.

(I still use Puppet for configuration files, installing packages, etc. It just does some stuff better than Ansible. Still, Puppet is harder to learn, and Ansible can be more than enough. Plus, there’s stuff that Ansible can do that Puppet can’t do.)

Dotfiles are a completely separate problem, tackle them separately. Don’t use Ansible for that, use a dotfile-specific tool.

I think having a solid/stable virtualization layer is very helpful. Whether that’s Proxmox, Incus, or something else, it’s a matter of taste.

You can then put NixOS, Guix, Debian, Arch, whatever on top.

That’s what I use too. Coupled with soju it’s an easier experience for me. And they are both in Debian 13!

WebTorrent Desktop is a bit abandoned, but last time I tried it, it still worked despite some warts (I think it wouldn’t work with newer Chromecasts).

My notes also have:

• https://github.com/asapach/peerflix-server
• https://github.com/hauxir/rapidbay
• https://github.com/anacrolix/torrent?tab=readme-ov-file#downstream-projects (This library is good at streaming, software using it should too)

I like Pop, but note that Gnome has a few extensions that implement tiling (I use PaperWM). I believe KDE also has some tiling support.

Certainly, many of the hardcore tiling environments are too bare and require significant effort to get to a usable state (esp. on laptops, where you want wireless network applets), and it’s unfortunate that it is no longer so easy to mix and match components (e.g. I used to run xmonad on top of Mate).

Having said that, I’ll have another go with the beta!

Is it an option? Can’t find it. (But GitHub is confusing and I’m old, so maybe there’s something?)

Hah, no worries. I think it’s just an unusual use case and… well, I recognized it because I’m obsessed with PiKVM lately and those things!

I’m not superknowledgeable on USB, but Linux has features to do this; they are called “gadgets” in this list:

https://docs.kernel.org/usb/index.html

I have used this to turn a RPI Zero into a virtual USB drive with these scripts: https://github.com/alexpdp7/rpi-zero-usb-iso/

Likely by searching the Internet for USB gadgets you might find good explanations about requirements. I know there are unexpected difficulties- I’m using a Pi Zero instead of a nicer Pi because… nicer Pis can draw too much power over USB and bork what they’re connected to. So be careful.

If this needs to be “hardware” level, I saw https://openterface.com/ recently. The PiKVM-style projects are also a bit adjacent to this.

But now with the end of Windows 10 looming, I need to upgrade a family member’s computer to Linux.

Why?

Did they ask for Linux? Do you have authority over them?

So this needs to be something that both is not going to break on its own (e.g. while doing automatic updates) and also won’t be accidentally broken by the users. … There’s no way I’m going to be able to handle long-distance tech support if things break more than once in a blue moon.

Issues appear. I would be more focused on setting up remote access than choosing a distro.

I’d choose something LTS that has been around for a while (Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL-derivatives, SuSE if there’s a freely-available LTS, etc.).

If you are not against the use of Google products, ChromeOS devices are about the best well-designed low maintenance operating systems. (Not Flex, a ChromeOS device.) But you would be sacrificing Firefox and LibreOffice, which might not be an option. (And technically, it’s running a Linux kernel, if I remember correctly.)

https://dgross.ca/blog/linux-home-server-auto-sleep did the rounds lately.

But you’ll need another system to always be on to handle this.

In many cases, you can “fake” this in other means. For example, I had Remmina configured to run a script to send a WOL packet and wait before connecting via remote desktop to a computer.

Try a LiveCD or installing Windows to an external drive (or if you are able to dualboot, although I don’t recommend dualbooting in general).

As for your original question, all PC/component manufacturers invest time in making their stuff work on Windows. Few do the same for Linux. Linux has a ton of people working to make hardware work, but it’s always going to be an uphill struggle if you don’t choose hardware explicitly for Linux support. Although I think your most recent issue is hardware (but I can’t know for sure).

how do you like the titan pocket?

Honestly, it sucked a bit. The keyboard deteriorated quickly and I couldn’t touch-type without looking at the screen like I did on real BlackBerries. (Plus, it didn’t handle accents nor writing in Catalan well :( Also I had my second swollen battery last week, so I decided to ditch it.

…

I don’t know. Now I have a Pixel 9A and I should play with the Linux VM feature. It should be possible to run Firefox for Linux, which would then support keyboard shortcuts. But even though the Pixel has 8gb of RAM and the processor feels snappy, I suspect it will suck a bit. But really if Linux applications could handle well a physical keyboard…

Yeah, I think it’s sad that we had beautiful phones with a physical keyboard as late as in 2018 with the Key2, but no one bought them… and people are slowly realizing that… maybe keyboards on phones are good. I see that Google is adding more and more physical keyboard features to Android, so perhaps some day…

Although my preferred way would be if services such as WhatsApp didn’t force people to use iOS or Android, and using niche OSes on niche phones was more viable.

Thanks for the long writeup!

I’ve been using a BlackBerry Bold, Classic, KeyONE… then the Titan Pocket. Keyboard shortcuts for apps never seemed superuseful for me, while I longed for keyboard shortcuts in apps (e.g. ctrl+l to open the URL bar in a browser).

There’s a distinct lack of information on Clicks and other ways to have a phone with a physical qwerty (e.g. the Minimal Phone), esp. about the things that really matter about keyboard usage. Hopefully more people publish their experiences as you did.

https://programming.dev/post/36053940/18886266 looks good.

Oh, that’s precisely the combination that was tempting me. Have you written somewhere about your experiences?

The problem with the standard Gboard non-ASCII method is that you have to use the touchscreen.

What the article mentions is that on iOS, you can hold E, then press 2 on the physical keyboard to enter É.

When I used a Blackberry, I could type out longish messages without even looking at the phone, but I had to rely on autocorrect for the accents (which worked pretty well for Spanish). If this method works, I could do the same, but not relying on autocorrect.

Do you, by some chance, write in any language that requires non-ASCII characters? (Such as ñ in Spanish.)

You can apparently touch-type non-ASCII characters with Clicks on IOS, I’m wondering if it works similarly on Android.

My phone died last week, and I was very tempted by the Razr with Clicks, but I haven’t seen much about using it outside English. In the end I went cheap and bought a Pixel 9A :(

Touch keyboards suck, but double so if you type in multiple languages, need non-ASCII, and on top of that you want to use shells. GBoard is not bad at detecting the three languages I regularly type in, but my BlackBerries were superior.

Yup, came here to mention PaperWM. I used xmonad in the past, but I executed it on top of Mate to have an “easy” desktop environment.

Nowadays Gnome extensions providing tiling is the equivalent “easy” method. Gnome is not for everyone, but it works out of the box- then you add the fancy tiling window management on top.

For people who have bounced off systems that require much more set up, I think they are a good option.

Well, it’s more procedural than object-oriented because it’s easier to avoid object-oriented programming than procedural code :D

(Note: I wouldn’t call defining classes OOP until you start using inheritance. Overriding __str__ and stuff might count, but not a lot to me.)

Personally, as time goes on, I use inheritance less.