Surely you could run Syncthing in a docker container or flatpak or something to force it to work on the same machine. I don’t know what mechanism is used, but you can spoof a lot on Linux.

I must have missed that promotion, any chance I could order some?

It’s the one I recommend, but honestly have never actually used. I’ve gotten a few people to successfully switch with it and got a few others away from Ubuntu (my first distro), hence why I keep recommending it.

Then you’d be wrong. Unless you pick SQLite and that’s all you need.

Generally speaking, if a professor recommends something, it probably sucks. Their information is incredibly outdated and is usually whatever they used in their own undergrad program.

At school I learned:

• Java
• PHP
• MySQL
• C#
• C++
• Racket (Lisp)

Each of those has a better alternative, with C# being the least bad. For example:

• Java -> Kotlin
• PHP -> Python
• MySQL -> SQLite or Postgres
• C# -> Python (desktop QT GUIs) or web stack (e.g. Tauri for desktop web stack)
• C++ -> Rust (non-games) or a game engine
• Lisp -> Haskell

Formal education is for learning concepts, learn programming languages and tools on your own.

Postgres. It’s more strict by default, which leads to a lot fewer surprises.

Here’s my rule of thumb:

1. SQLite - if it’s enough
2. Postgres
3. MariaDB - if you don’t care about your data and just want the thing to work
4. MySQL - if you sold your soul to Oracle, but still can’t afford their license fee
5. Something else - you’re a hipster or have very unique requirements

Persistence and reading comprehension.

There’s no need to learn Python or any programming language to self host stuff, you just need to be able to follow blog posts and run some Docker commands.

I’m a software dev and haven’t touched a single line of code on my NAS. Everything is docker compose and other config files.

I’m behind CGNAT, so I have a local DNS server that resolves to the internal IP, and regular DNS resolves to my VPS, which tunnels into my home network through Wireguard.

If you’re not behind CGNAT, you’ll just hit your router after DNS resolution and you’re golden.

I think it’s more that devs see Linux support as a liability. Linux market share is low, and supporting Linux opens them up to Linux specific cheats, so they’ll need to spend resources on Linux specific mitigations. Why do all that for ~2% market share, most of whom seem content not playing their games?

I don’t think we need to jump to conspiracy theories. If Linux adoption gets to 10% or so and still see this issue maybe the conspiracy theory carries some weight.

You’re doing fine. Have a wonderful day.

Idk, just install it? Since you’re a Mac person, it’ll probably be easier to install on a non-Mac device, so from what you listed, I’d recommend either the micro PC (not sure what that is? AMD mini PC or something?) or the old PC.

For distro, I recommend Linux Mint or Fedora. They’re both easy to install, have large communities, and largely do what you want out of the box. You’ll need a USB drive, and then just follow instructions to “burn” an ISO (that you’ll get from the Linux distro website) to the USB drive, boot from it (probably mash F11 or Delete to get to the boot menu as the PC boots), and follow the instructions to install. Make sure you’re okay losing all data on the PC before installing, because it will replace everything.

After that, learn whatever strikes your fancy.

Good luck! Feel free to post back if you get stuck.

Doesn’t Windows as well?

Regardless, Windows recording literally everything I do is worse than logging the apps I open.

Battle for Wesnoth is fantastic too.

I’ll have to check it out.

I’ve also considered trying the openSUSE MicroOS versions as well (Kalpa for KDE and Aeon for GNOME). I use Tumbleweed on my systems right now, so that would be a natural transition.

It does look nice. My main concern is the read-only root, which seems annoying to deal with for non-gaming stuff. I’m a dev and sometimes need to install new dependencies and whatnot. But I’m sure there’s a good workflow for that as well.

I never said it was. I said it’s a problem that limits Linux adoption.

No worries. I also don’t play MP, so the vast majority of games just work for me. However, we’re talking about broad market adoption, not you or me.

Absolutely:

• lots of games don’t work
• anti-cheat games in general still don’t work, and that’s a massive market
• some games have terrible perf through Proton

That said, most games work fine on Linux, but the ones that don’t are pretty popular.

The only real limitation for Game Pass on Linux is market share. There’s no way Microsoft passes up that money if Linux gaming gets big enough.

But it’s apparently the easiest, since Valve is already working on it. You just need to shift a significant portion of technical users to Linux and the other use-cases will follow.