Ultimately Google is going to do this to every customer in the end, its systems for detecting problems are buggy and you don’t get to speak to a human to fix the problem so a simple automated error becomes fatal. Its going to happen at some point and its a lot easier to migrate when it all still works than afterwards when it doesn’t.

Universities have been running Linux since the very early versions. Slackware was pretty common back in the 90s and 2000s and universities had labs full of them not least because there weren’t really laptops so they had to have enough machines for all the students. Universities have been heavily involved in the development of unix from its inception and a lot of the tools were initially written by university professors.

Trustpilot in itself is a very problematic website as well that biases towards positive reviews. Companies can engage there and get reviews removed when the person won’t further engage with the company that has wronged them and get the reviews removed. So if an organisation has bad reviews and its engaged on trustpilot they must be really bad.

AMD has unfortunately a long history of abandoning products before its reasonable on its graphics division. Its not really acceptable, up until earlier this year my NAS/server was running a 3600 and its only for power saving purposes I changed that as its still a very workable CPU in that role.

It really depends on the project. Some of them take breaking changes seriously and don’t do them and auto migrate and others will throw them out on “minor” number releases and there might be a lot of breaking changes but you only run into one that impacts you occasionally. I typically don’t want containers that are going to be a lot of work to keep up to date so I jettison projects that have unreliable releases for whatever reason and if they put out a breaking change its a good time to re evaluate whether I want that container at all and look at alternatives.

So no its not safe, but depending on the project it actually can be.

Linux was in use on some university machines although I lot of them were still running Sun hardware OS. The main distribution I used at the time was Slackware.

Over the years I have used OSMC for my TV. I have never used it for streaming however always internal across the network streaming of my own content. It worked reasonably well for the most part although I have had issues with Samba in recent versions and have stopped using it. I can’t say much about its streaming, mostly for that you need a supported android or similar device rather than an open source one.

I have done this a few times, so long as the drive isn’t mounted it works fine.

One advantage of this approach compared to clonezilla is you can pipe it through netcat or similar and move it to another machine. You can also first pipe it through gzip as well to save on the transfer bytes a bit as well and then on the other end just store the compressed image or unzip it. Combine a few tools together and you have quite a lot of capability for complete image backups but its usually best done for the boot drives from a live USB.

Ideally for your router you want something that runs an open source firmware (OpenWRT, DD-WRT, OPNSense, FreshTomato). Its better because you get a completely unlocked everything you need system with security patches for the hardware’s true lifetime. Every router company stops with the security updates after a few years and then at some point it becomes part of a bot net or one of this mass hack events. Its best not to play in that game and instead run some open source firmware from the outset.

The best way to start is to look at the website for openwrt.org and use their filtering to find a device that supports your needs (at least 5 LAN ethernet ports I guess and some wifi but AC sounds like it will do). The other option is a more typical 4 LAN port router which will give you a lot more options and then add a switch to that, doesn’t sound like you care too much about it being managed or >1gbps so they are also dirt cheap.

Metube is great and also has some browser plugins as well so it’s as simple as right click and send to metube on a YouTube link. Wish there was one for android too but alas not yet that I have seen.

I don’t think modern Raspberry pi’s make much sense unless you are using GPIOs or really need the low power consumption. The 3 and the 4 were OK price wise but the pi 5 is quite close to all these N100 mini computers and they are a lot more performance and expansion compared to a raspberry pi 5 and still quite low power.

Either a Topton or similar N100 based machine or a mini PC second hand is the way to go at the ~$100 mark. The mini PC will be faster and probably more expandable and cheaper but also more power consumption.

Another possibility for cheap VPS is Contabo they are quite good value. Netcup is good value as well.

I used Invidious for about a year and it was a constant string of bugs. Every release was a risk and quite often updates would get lost or the database would explode in size and consume all the drive space. Its not a project I currently use or recommend until it stabilises.

Hugo? As in your generated site or you have some sort of service that costs hugo that generates and deploys your site or something else?

It has been slowly improving. It used to be a lot worse but I have a lot less issues with it now than I did before all the changes. Its not the fastest best way to do anything, there are better calendar, file sync, email etc etc applications out there in every category that run better but its also quite an easy way to make a lot of things happen.

The new Linuxserver.io docker image at the very least has solved the annoying update cycle NextCloud has and seems to have fixed the need to do that every few months. I haven’t ever had it die but I don’t push it hard and I keep the plugins to a minimum because I just don’t trust it and it doesn’t run all that well.

For not a lot more you can now get NUC like machines with Celeron’s, Pentiums and get to choose NVMe SSDS and RAM amounts and even Wifi cards (so wifi 6e or 7) and 2.5 gbit/s ethernet. At these sorts of prices they are running into the low end of NUCs at $100 and they don’t compete well on a whole range of factors. They are still cheaper but its not the 30-40 of the Pi before prices went nuts and this new higher price point isn’t as clear cut.

Its not very price competitive now. Its moved into the low end N100 territory with ITX boards and while its smaller and a bit less power its no where near as performant. They will still have some use in smaller applications but 5V x 5A is a chunky cable. I am not convinced this is the way now.

I do both. I have a custom built NAS based on a Ryzen 3600 and ZFS across 4 drives which runs about 20 self hosted applications and stores the majority of my files but its only accessible from within the home. I also rent a small VPS for personal webspace and hosting self hosted apps I want out of the house.

In the past I have also hosted raw servers from Hetzner or bigger VPS from Amazon for the purpose of hosting a game server. Alongside those I often had community applications like website, forums, wikis and custom chat and voice comms services.

Its all self hosting to me since I run it. The various options are all about the trade offs of security, accessibility, cost and performance. The cheaper cloud options when you add it up can be cheap compared to buying and running your own hardware when you take into account electrical costs and the likely hardware replacement needs within 5 years. The big cloud providers aren’t price competitive but Contabo/Hetzner really surprisingly are especially if you pay a lot for electricity. But then if you need a game server it can be quite hard to find good fast CPUs on the cloud and its not going to be 24/7 for communities, so the trade off flips back to having your own.

Since I got 1 gbit/s fibre internet my need for internal NAS has definitely reduced as the internet is nearly as fast as the local network so I could now have my NAS needs remote.

One of the reasons I do it is because Google is a bad partner. They will cancel your accounts and delete the contents for no reason, offer no way to get it back and they just don’t care. They will happily do that to companies that pay them thousands a month, they really just don’t care. Even if you don’t buy into the company being evil and privacy invading its also just unreliable to use as any moment they could blow all your data away without reason.