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)

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).

When I learned Git I think there were not decent tools, so I got used to the command line.

I occasionally use gitk for reviewing my commits- it’s nicer to see the files modified and be able to jump back and forth, although I get I could use git log -p instead.

I’m an Emacs user, but I don’t use magit (!)

I like some of the graphical tools- some colleagues use Fork and I like it… but as I’ve already learned the CLI, I don’t see the point for me.

I could use learning some jj because it automates some of the most tedious parts of my workflow, but I’m getting too old.

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.

I switched to Emacs over two years ago because I was getting too comfortable in VS Code. If VS Code didn’t have the “dodgy” stuff, I would recommend it to everyone without reservation.

Emacs has been a pleasant surprise. The latest versions have introduced Eglot (LSP), EditorConfig and a few other odds and ends that make it very close to being usable with very little configuration. My latest suggestion for getting started is JUST two lines of config, and I think you can scale easily.

I just wish Emacs had started from the outset with more common keybindings- it makes it hard to recommend because you need to make a significant investment. I think it’s worthwhile, but still…

However, due to how it’s evolving lately, I suspect it might become even easier to get started with time. If they rolled in to base Emacs automatic LSP installation, that would be huge, for instance.

I discovered Open Food Facts very recently. I was supersurprised because the mobile app is very neat, and I didn’t expect there would be so many products (edit: in Spain). I’ve sent two contributions so far.

Also, you can download their database. If I had some time, I’d try to run some queries on it. (I’m on a low sodium diet and sometimes you find the most unexpected products with little salt, but it’s time consuming.)

edit: also, I forgot, the app is on F-Droid, another nice touch.

I like to live on the edge of time and therefore have the feeling that debian based distros (although being very stable) are too “old” for my liking.

Nowadays, with Flatpaks, so many software providing binaries, etc. this does not matter so much. If you want, you can even use something like Distrobox to have containers for tools using whatever bleeding edge distro you want, but still have a solid stable underpinning.

Debian also has more stuff than you would expect in backports. The main sticking point is yes, you’ll be stuck in Debian 12’s KDE until 13 comes out. But that might be sufficient for you?

(You could also use Debian Testing, which is basically a rolling release. But I’d consider stable first.)

I’m still a huge fan of Ventoy, but lately I have been finding more and more issues with it.

So I decided to investigate using a Raspberry Pi Zero with a USB adapter to create a virtual drive:

https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/hardware/using-an-rpi-zero-as-an-usb-drive-to-install-operating-systems.md

It’s very wonky and manual at the moment, but I have managed to boot all Linux ISOs successfully so far. Unfortunately, I think only ISOhybrid works OOB, so Windows ISO do not work. I have found some scripts to take Windows ISO and make them ISOhybrid, but haven’t gotten around to doing that yet.

I think it should be doable to package this nicely.