methodicalaspect

Nightly rsync to two NAS boxes in the house (TrueNAS Scale and a Synology). Docs go in NextCloud, hosted on a VM in my basement, which is also backed up to the Synology by Proxmox. Also backing up my main machine (Pop!_OS) and my wife’s laptop (ThinkPad E595, also Pop!_OS) using Spideroak One.

Cosmic - both the GNOME extension and Epoch 1 - is my favorite tiling DE. It just makes the most sense to me, in a way that no other tiling environment has.

If you’re using Debian as a daily driver you can always use a Flatpak if you need a newer version than what’s available in the repos. The foundation is solid, though, and that’s what matters - it’s one of the things that keeps bringing me back to Debian for office workstation use.

Powerwash Simulator.

Is it possible to run what you need in a VM? That’s how I’ve been running things that need Windows to function correctly and it hasn’t broken yet. Can even get 11 working with an emulated TPM, including Windows Subsystem for Linux inside the VM if you’re feeling particularly bored.

…no, I don’t want to put all my stuff in OneDrive. No, my settings shouldn’t sync across everything. No, I don’t want to log in with the same account on all devices. I already have email and do not want to use outlook.com thanks. Stop warning me that I did not agree to put all my stuff in OneDrive, it’s really not necessary. What do you mean I can’t change my wallpaper unless I activate? Are you telling me that your antimalware solution that comes bundled in the OS isn’t able to block malicious ads in the browser that also comes with the OS? Why do these applications that I never installed keep showing up in the Start menu? What’s up with all these calls to Azure-based websites in my Pi-Hole logs when I’m away from my desk? Why are my CPUs going at full blast when I’m just staring at the desktop?

After seeing some of Craft Computing’s videos on YT I’m considering getting my hands on one of those cheap Erying mainboards off Aliexpress with a laptop CPU on it. Seen those as low as 140 bucks with a 13th-gen i5, just add a cooler and desktop DDR4.

Absolutely, and it’s usually up to the organization disposing of the drives to set and document the standard by which they abide.

Somewhere, an ISO27001 auditor’s jimmies started rustling.

Same…but with Ungoogled Chromium as Flatpak because it made me feel the least dirty.

Pi-Hole’s great. Got my primary instance on a Pi 4 and three secondaries (one per vlan) on LXCs. Works so well it feels weird seeing ads when I’m not at home, I’m actually considering using Tailscale to route all my queries through my home connection.

I’ll second the Pop!_OS recommendation that others have been posting. Don’t get me wrong, Linux Mint is great, though I personally prefer Linux Mint Debian Edition over the Ubuntu-based one, but I think Pop!_OS is just as easy to use while presenting a different look & feel. Pop tends to support newer hardware as well: despite being stuck on an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS base until Cosmic is finished, System76 releases new kernels to support the hardware they sell. They’re currently running kernel version 6.6.6, as opposed to Ubuntu’s 6.2.0 (I think – that’s what server’s on, at least).

I gave my wife, who “hates computers,” a laptop running Pop!_OS when her Windows 10 one failed and, apart from the standard new PC complaints, I haven’t heard anything Linux-specific. She runs two businesses on the thing; the only changes I made to the standard Pop!_OS software were to replace LibreOffice with OnlyOffice, and to replace Geary with Thunderbird.

Not entirely sure why this reply is being panned (was at -6 when I first saw it).

OP is in the process of upgrading their PC to a Ryzen 9. If we make the assumption that this Ryzen 9 is on the AM5 platform, the CPU comes equipped with an IGPU, meaning the RTX 3060s are no longer needed by the bare metal. So, installing a stable, minimal point release OS as a base would minimize resource utilization on the hardware side. This could be something like Debian Bookworm or Proxmox VE with the no-subscription repo enabled. There’s no need for the NVIDIA GPUs to be supported by the bare metal OS.

Once the base OS is installed, the VMs can be created, and the GPUs and peripherals can be passed through. This step effectively removes the devices from the host OS – they don’t show up in lsusb or lspci anymore – and “gives” them to the VMs when they start. You get pretty close to native performance with setups of this nature, to the point that users have set up Windows 10/11 VMs in this way to play Cyberpunk 2077 on RTX 4090s with all the eye candy, including ray reconstruction.

Downsides:

• Three operating systems to maintain: bare metal, yours, and your partner’s.
• Two sets of applications/games to maintain: yours and your partner’s.
• May need to edit VM configs somewhat regularly to stay ahead of anti-cheat measures targeted at users of VMs.
• Performance is not identical to bare metal, but is pretty close.
• VM storage is isolated, so file sharing requires additional setup.

Upsides:

• If you don’t know a lot about Linux, you’ll know a bunch more when you’re done with this.
• Once you get the setup ironed out, it won’t need to change much going forward.
• Each VM’s memory space is isolated, so applications won’t “step on each other” – that is, you can both run the same application or game simultaneously.
• Each user can run their own distro, or even their own OS if they wish. You can run Fedora and your partner can run Mint, or even Windows if they really, really want to. This includes Windows 11 as you can pass an emulated TPM through to meet the hardware requirements.
• Host OS can be managed via web interface (cockpit + cockpit-machines) or GUI application (virt-manager).

It’s not exactly what OP is looking for, but it’s definitely a valid approach to solving the problem.

I’ve been waiting for a beta of the Debian-based version. The Ubuntu-based version seemed to run reasonably well on my old Thinkpad T460, but I didn’t try too much serious stuff on it that I don’t already do on regular Debian with Distrobox.

Debian’s great for this.

I’m also running NextCloud (the official AIO Docker image) on Debian. Great for that too.

How recently did calling become supported? About a month ago I was still unable to even log in using Firefox unless I used a user agent switcher, and even then only text-based messaging worked.

Depends on what level of responsiveness you need from the support team. I run it in my home lab and haven’t needed to raise any tickets as all the info I need to solve problems is readily available on their forums or in assorted blog posts. A company relying on it for their critical infrastructure would probably be best-served with Standard (4-hr response within a business day) or Premium (2-hr response within a business day).

If those still aren’t quick enough it may be worth looking into a partner of theirs, or into another commercial option altogether. I’ve interacted with the Red Hat support team on some high-severity issues and they are top-tier; that was unrelated to virtualization, though, and they tend to push the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization solution quite hard. I’m talking a response time of minutes.

If I’m using kvm on any standalone (non-clustered) hosts on the data center it’s typically on Ubuntu LTS, knowing that the company I work for has a Canonical support agreement in their back pocket, but we haven’t needed it.

That’s good as well, of course. I use QEMU with virt-manager and cockpit on my office workstation running EndeavourOS and it’s glorious. Keeps Windows from ever being installed on the bare metal.

From a usability perspective, though, I think Proxmox lowers the barrier to entry, as the web UI feels considerably more powerful out of the box than cockpit. An interesting bonus is that you can add it to an existing Debian install, including one with a DE, though it’s not something one would want to do in production.

Bitwarden is the shit. As if the free tier weren’t good enough, the annual subscription is dirt cheap and you don’t have to remember more than the master password anymore.

TrueNAS Scale. It’s based on Debian instead of FreeBSD (like TrueNAS Core) and has KVM virtualization and k3s containerized app support built in, in addition to being a NAS operating system.