I’ve had good luck with refurbished Dell laptops. My primary laptop is a refurbished Dell Latitude 11" 3120. Bought it for ~$250 at beginning of this year and currently have Fedora on it. It’s not very powerful. I use it primarily to browse the web, watch movies/tv, and vnc/ssh to my other systems. Can last about 5-6 hours streaming video from jellyfin at 50% brightness, other stuff barely uses any power and can stretch out to 9-10 hours if I set display brightness even lower.

I’ve always bought Windows laptops then put linux on them so I’m used to verifying that tools such as TLP are installed, configured, enabled, and working. There is too much variety with laptops for all of them to be handled automatically unfortunately so I always verify it. If a laptop came with Linux pre-installed then it might be good to go ootb but I’d still verify.

Quick way to check if a program is using hardware video acceleration is with a gpu top utility.

Intel - intel_gpu_top

Nvidia - nvidia-smi / nvtop

AMD - radeontop / nvtop / amdgpu_top (just did quick search, don’t have any AMD powered on to verify)

Self-host your own ACME server. Then you can use certbot pointed there.

These instructions are old so not sure if newer/better ways, https://blog.sean-wright.com/self-host-acme-server/

Is MariaDB on spinning disk or ssd?

I initially set up Nextcloud with MariaDB on spinning disk but it was slow even completely empty. I moved that container to ssd & performance was a lot better. The web UI may still have some slow loading parts but I can’t say for sure since rarely use it. Caldav+carddav+Nextcloud client are how I usually interact with it.

They still build recommendations even if you’re not logged in, you can see them in the sidebar after you load a video. Imo they only removed them from the homepage to try convincing people to log in or create account, it’s all about increasing user numbers, ad engagement, and data collection these days.

Sounds like bridge mode is needed for the vm’s network interface in virt.

I would say proxmox ve is easier to start with.

Does TrueNAS have a web UI that works well on mobile browsers for file download and upload? If it does then could probably use for simple scenarios.

The container method used should be whatever you are more familiar with or prefer. They both have their own quirks, pros, & cons.

SELinux - If you don’t want to deal with SELinux then set it to permissive mode. If you want to keep in enforcing mode you need to create the appropriate policies, https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/using_selinux/configuring-selinux-for-applications-and-services-with-non-standard-configurations_using-selinux

Firewall - If you don’t want it’s protection then look up instructions to stop & disable it on your distro.

Port forwarding - From linux container side you either need to specify host networking or the ports you want to allow through, there is no avoiding that if it needs to be network accessible. If you want it internet accessible then you need to setup port forwarding on your router.

Have you looked into something like yunohost? It may be the kind of thing you’re looking for.

EndeavourOS on desktop and laptop side of things.

If router supports it, a static route via connected machine with IP forwarding enabled might work. OpenWrt has packages for things like tailscale and zerotier so could do it without an extra machine too.

For 3, if router supports it could also try doing static route via Tailscale joined machine that has IP forwarding enabled

If your router lets you try adding a static route for the tailscale IP/subnet to the laptop with IP forwarding enabled.

Yep, I only played through couple races & was a few beers in, it felt acceptable for me at the time. Not sure how it would be with the latest gen Elgato cards & they are pricey so best to buy from store with a good return policy.

I have never seen a capture device with USB interface have any kind of usable latency, you’ll want one with PCI Express interface.

Elgato makes a capture card with PCI Express interface, I had a friend who used one to play all of his consoles on big virtual screen in VR. I tried out Mario Kart 8 for the Switch and it played great.

For the OS side a few ways.

• Clone & then rename+change drivers
• Ansible/chef
• NixOS

For home folder side of things a dotfile manager, cloud services, and file sync tool will take care of most things. I use chezmoi for dotfiles & nextcloud for file syncing. Firefox is only cloud synced service I still use for now. I have yet to find any decent sources of information on dotfiles so gonna be stuck going through those stupid things to figure out what you want to sync.

Yes, my order status has been at preparing to ship for awhile now. I been wanting a good Linux tablet to replace aging iPad and hoping this works well enough for me. I’ll try to remember to update post on how I like it when it does arrive.

My current workaround for that is adding whatever I want to shuffle into a playlist. I have one with some sci-fi shows in it that I regularly use. Smart collections is my most missed feature from Plex.

edit: nvm, doesn’t sound like it would help your use case, read through it too quick first time round

Was it the official container image or 3rd party? Whichever it was, they should get notified so that init script can get fixed to prevent similar happening to others.

Intel Quick Sync video saw a lot of improvements on 8th gen & since it’s all so old the pricing differences between 7th & 8th gen are going to be negligible.

Yep, 8th gen (Coffee Lake) saw a lot of improvements in Intel Quick Sync, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video#Hardware_decoding_and_encoding