An interesting customer base might be small communal organisations. At our local scouts troop I had a discussion with a friend, who is also in IT. His idea (not fleshed out) was to provide small local organizations with a stack of already configured open source software to support the typical needs of such organizations (like a wordpress website, a nextcloud for file storage and common calender, limesurvey for surveys and event registration, mailman3 for mailing lists,…). Depending on the needs you could sell the initial setup process (your personal work in setting up and skill transfer) or ongoing support. Though such organizations normally don’t have much money to give away. So probably its not really worth your time financially (though probably really appreciated in the community).

I cannot find callibreoffice. Where can I get it to try? Or do you mean Collabora?

I really need a libreoffice calc on my android phone. Not just opening (where currently only Microsoft Excel on Android works for me) but also editing and saving to my connected nextcloud (where I have also problems with Excel)

Had it installed a few months ago. I really would like this to be good, but unfortunately its not. Mainly it is really really slow. For the games flow to work, you need more speed. A factor of 2 would already help. And flow features like grinding on lines and bouncing on rocks.

I don’t know about Mikrotik, but it might also be interesting to buy something, that is running on OpenWRT, an open source router OS. That way you would have maximal configurability. I recently purchases a GL.iNet AXT1800 for my own home lab (though I’m currently only using it for the isolated homelab, not for the rest of the house). You can even host stuff directly on the router with OpenWRT. I currently have Centos 9 repos hosted there and DHCP/TFTP for network installation of VMs via PXE boot.

I know, that GPUs are often problematic with linux, mostly due to driver issues. I’ve had my share of this with my ubuntu desktop. Or is there currently something new/specific, that I missed? Either way I currently don’t want to do things with GPUs.

I want something with some beef on it. I want to experiment with an Openshift cluster and that needs quite some resources. So I decided to go with the mentioned NUC.

Ok, I will check them tomorrow (I really need to sleep soon, as its already 2am). I mainly want to experiment with different technologies, that I already know from work. Openshift, Docker, Puppet and Ansible for example.

Currently I’m not focussing on media stuff, more on experimenting with different technologies, that I use for work (like Openshift, Docker, Puppet, Ansible). Having dedicated hardware, that gets me further than some small VMs on my PC will be great for that.

Though I might move to media stuff in the future. Heard a lot about jellyfin, for example. Though then I need to upgrade my home network too. It still is limited to 100mbit. But I already have wired connections through most of the house.

Thanks for your fast answer

It’s good to know about the possibility with thunderbolt network adapters. I think I’ve already read about that somewhere. At this point I haven’t really though about high speed network connection (my home network still runs on slow 100mbit routers and switches). Thanks for that tip

Ok, that sounds like a solid recommendation for the NUC. I think I can live without IPMI, especially since this is the start of my homelab (besides my RaspberryPis)

I’ve heard a lot about proxmox and I will definitely try it out before any other solution. Running VMs and containers side by side is a great plus.

At this point I haven’t really looked at the router-with-custom-firmware game. I heard about openWRT and OPNsense, but I definitely need to do some research on that. Interesting site, though it looks terrible on mobile.

Thanks for your recommendations

In fact I already have a Synology NAS, that I have my backups on. I guess as long as the data connection doesn’t need to be high speed, I can use some space on that (or even upgrade the 2TB space in my NAS in the longrun). So I probably don’t need a full tower. My main concern was, if a NUC would be overpriced in relation to other similar products.

It was a friend who helped me install ubuntu 8 on my PC in dualboot when I was like 14/15 years old. Was already a computer nerd, though my friend was way more into everything Linux related. I got hooked there, though at that time it was a real pain in the ass to use wifi in ubuntu. I wouldn’t call me obsessed, but I really don’t like using Windows. I have to for work and I despise it.

Isn’t your shell showing autocomplete options on oressing tab? Like the subdirectories? That way you don’t need multiple cd and ls calls

One big problem that I see with the current system is, that - like everything in capitalism - it works with the attention economy. Big projects with many functions (like computing platforms) get much attention, especially from companies, who donate and contribute for their own good. But there are many small projects, often small libraries, that are developed by single persons for free, but used everywhere. If I remember correctly the disaster with log4j was such a case. Real developers surely know even better examples. The funding of such widely used software can effect the security of our whole IT stack.

The average user only uses what is already in their devices or very easily obtained and already known by them. On PCs you got Windows and Microsoft of course pushes their products (Edge, MS Office, OneDrive,…). On Smartphones you have Apple and Google controlling the devices way more than with PCs and being Gatekeepers through their appstores and preinstalled apps. Why would the average user try to research to find FOSS alternatives in that big pile of proprietary and monetized apps or jump through hoops to actually use them (keeping things FOSS is not easy on smartphone due to policies from google and apple)? The big players are controlling the market and they try to only allow FOSS when it benefits them.