Desktop PC with a lotta hard drives in it and big fans that don’t have to spin fast and make a lot of noise.

I use a USB DAS JBOD enclosure with fans, which is also an option if you have a mini-PC and just want a bunch of drive space.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCDDGHMJ

This particular enclosure has physical buttons that lock in place so that the power state is restored on power loss, something that (to my surprise) a number of USB DAS enclosures apparently don’t do.

You could try reducing the fan speed. That might be okay, if the hardware doesn’t actually need the cooling. If the BIOS has fan curves, go fiddle with that. If it doesn’t, dedicated fan controllers do exist.

If the server is a standard ATX motherboard and if your rack has vertical space, you can also probably get a new ATX case of whatever sort you want, preferably taller, and get something with larger, slower fans and transplant the hardware. A lot of rack servers are vertically-cramped to let a datacenter put as many in a rack as possible, so you get stuff like 1U machines with those dinky 30mm fans. In general, the larger the fan, the less noise per airflow.

searches

https://www.amazon.com/RackChoice-Mini-ITX-Rackmount-Chassis-Standard/dp/B0D296DVD8

I’ve never used that, but it’s a 3U and has three 120mm fans.

If you don’t care about cost, there are also sound-isolated racks. These have some sort of sound-blocking material like plywood on the outside and sound-absorbing foam on the inside. I have been interested in these in the past, because I would like one, but everything I’ve seen has been absolutely obscenely-priced, probably because datacenters don’t care about noise, and few people are running racks in homes or offices. I doubt that the people that sell them get much volume.

EDIT: Example sound-isolated rack:

https://tripplite.eaton.com/smartrack-quiet-server-rack-18u-sound-suppression~SRQ18U

I’m pretty sure that most developers that use web UIs do so for portability.

There are non-Web-based cross-platform GUI toolkits, like Java’s Swing.

As to why cross-platform desktop toolkits haven’t really caught on…I’d say that it’s because there are things that you can’t really abstract all that well. There are ways that a well-written MacOS app should function, ways that a well-written Windows app should function, ways that a well-written GTK app should function, and so forth.

EDIT:

I dread writing any native GUI that I got desperate enough to try writing a TUI but that’s unbelievably worse!

Honestly, the same is true of TUIs, too. Like, MS-DOS/Windows TUI conventions and Unix TUI conventions aren’t really the same. Like, in a typical Unix TUI program, I expect “q” probably quits. At text prompts, I expect that I probably have readline support and likely the vi/emacs key support there. It probably defaults to white-on-black. In an MS-DOS TUI program, Escape probably exits, and I’m probably using white-on-blue. I’m probably using Code Page 437 box-drawing characters.

EDIT2: ncdu on Unix:

WordPerfect for DOS:

On the other hand, then your mobile provider can’t see what you’re doing, so six of this, half a dozen of the other.

So would it be possible for a whole bunch of people to ddos google/other big popular websites ipv4 to ipv6 translation such that their services would still function over ipv6 but make everyone’s day awful if running ipv4. Enough angry customers and pissed off users seems like a very effective way to get isps and mobile service providers to get their act together and start issue sing ipv6 to people.

Trying to DDoS attack Google’s IPv4 services to get your mobile provider to provide IPv6 support seems kind of…indirect.

If you haven’t already, try clicking a mouse button in-game? Some games switch between gamepad and keyboard+mouse modes based on the last input they’ve seen, and don’t treat mouse movement (which might be very slight) as counting as a “mouse mode switching event”.

The traditional first program for a language is one that displays the text “hello, world”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello,_world

A “Hello, world” program is usually a simple computer program that displays on the screen (often the console) a message similar to “Hello, World!”. A small piece of code in most general-purpose programming languages, this program is used to illustrate a language’s basic syntax. Such a program is often the first written by a student of a new programming language,[1] but it can also be used as a sanity check to ensure that the computer software intended to compile or run source code is correctly installed, and that its operator understands how to use it.

https://riptutorial.com/excel-vba/example/13182/hello-world

Now, you might want to do something more-elaborate too, but maybe make that the second program rather than the first.

I don’t produce music, but for transcription, you might look at Rosegarden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosegarden

If you want nondestructive editing, my understanding is that you might want Ardour rather than Audacity. I personally find Ardour’s UI a bit confusing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardour_(software)

Gotcha.

Luanti says that it requires a Intel UHD Graphics 630 GPU or comparable. That’s significantly more powerful than Intel HD 2500:

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-UHD-Graphics-630-Desktop-Coffee-Lake-i3-vs-Intel-HD-2500-Desktop-105-GHz/m359294vsm7696

…though I agree that Luanti and Minecraft-type games in general are fun to try if you haven’t.

That being said, for anything in Ubuntu, I mean…there’s not much penalty to try it, aside from the download time. It’s free, so…shrugs

I mean, that’s not a problem if you’re playing it in Steam – will just transparently work, unless you have an ideological desire to run a Linux-native binary.

But I don’t know if the system requirements will work.

Lethal Company’s system requirements on Steam says that it requires a NVIDIA GForce GTX 1050.

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-HD-2500-Desktop-105-GHz-vs-Nvidia-GTX-1050/m7696vs3650

The GTX 1050 is an order of magnitude more powerful than an Intel HD 2500.

Ah, gotcha. Well, so, for Metal Slug in particular, I’m pretty sure that there’s Metal Slug releases on Steam.

Yeah.

https://store.steampowered.com/search?term=metal+slug

If you’re wondering about a Steam game, you can check ProtonDB to see comments from Linux users as to any compatibility issues.

https://www.protondb.com/search?q=metal+slug

The Steam installer is in Ubuntu. So install that, run it, and stuff in Steam should be available.

For MAME, I can’t personally recommend a frontend. MAME iteself is already packaged in Ubuntu. You’re going to need the ROM files, which are floating around out there on the Internet (probably something like mslug.zip, mslug2.zip, etc, and there will probably be some dependent ROMs for the system in question. checks Probably called neogeo.zip, the system ROMs, since it’s a Neo-Geo game. On my system, the roms are stored in ~/.mame/roms (the tilde representing one’s home directory, if you’re not familiar with the convention).

RetroArch is also an “emulate many different types of hardware” emulator in Ubuntu, and you might consider it to be more-approachable; it can apparently also act as a frontend for MAME, though I haven’t used it as such.

For games kind of like Metal Slug…hmm. I haven’t really played much in that line recently, though they used to be popular in the 1990s. These recommendations are gonna be pretty old, but I guess side-view platformer shooters, like Contra. Bionic Commando. You could probably emulate these, and I’d guess that they’ve likely also seen Steam releases. I’m wildly out of date when it comes to current games in the genre, though. “Metroidvania” games might fit this too; they tend to be a more-slow-paced genre, with backtracking and traveling all around a large map while a character gains abilities and powers, but they do the side-view shooter thing, but they have the platforming and shooting aspect. Those have seen a lot more development in recent years.

Older Contra games:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1018020/Contra_Anniversary_Collection/

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=1628%2C5379&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

There’s a list of Metroidvania 2D platformers on Steam sorted by user reviews; I’ve generally found Steam review score to be pretty accurate as to how much I like a game (though there are a few exceptions). I…actually own a copy of Rain World, though I haven’t played it, but that should run on your system and I’ve seen a lot of people praise it, and it’s highly-rated there. It is considered to be difficult (which arcade Metal Slug games aren’t, if you throw enough quarters at them).

I haven’t played Captain Commando or Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, but both look like isometric beat-em-ups. I haven’t played anything there in a long time either; I think the last game in the genre I played was probably the arcade Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, from something like the 1990s, when they were a popular genre in the arcades. Here’s a list of Steam beat-em-ups sorted by user review, though:

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=4158&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

That’ll mention the release year, and I’d guess that anything aside from new, 3D-perspective games would be fine.

In general, fast-paced, drop-in-and-play type games have a genre — albeit a very broad one, “Arcade”, and while my experience has been that it’s something of a grab-bag for a lot of different types of games.

Here’s a bunch of Steam “Arcade”-tagged games sorted by user reviews.

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=1773&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

On that list, of the games near the top, I can say that I enjoyed HoloCure and Vampire Survivors, which are in a fairly young genre of video games kicked off by Vampire Survivors — games where the main character keeps automatically-attacking and getting increasingly powerful while increasingly-powerful waves of enemies come at them. Geometry Arena. Nova Drift, which is kind of a modern take on Asteroids. Both of those have one guiding a ship around the screen dodging attacks and shooting back; they shouldn’t be particularly graphically-intensive, don’t require much from 3D hardware.

EDIT: You don’t mention them, but shmups were also popular in the arcade (maybe a little prior to the era with the games you mentioned). These have a constantly-vertically or horizontally-scrolling level with a little spaceship that shoots enormous amounts of firepower at enemies. In recent years, “bullet hell” shmups have become more-popular, which tend to have extremely large numbers of projectiles on the screen at once; not quite my cup of tea, but many people like those. Shmups have remained a genre that is very gentle in terms of hardware requirements. We have a dedicated shmups community on the Threadiverse, !shmups@lemmus.org, so if you have specific interests, they might give better recommendations.

EDIT2: Nova Drift lists Intel HD 4000 as their minimum system requirement, so I might want to forego that or be prepared to return it if it doesn’t start; I don’t know if it’ll run. Intel HD 4000 looks like it supports DirectX 11.1, and Intel HD 2500 apparently does 10-point-something in terms of hardware functionality.

Do I have to use steam?

No, but it’s a relatively-plug-and-play way to get access to a lot of commercial games.

GOG.com is another alternative, and there are a few other stores.

There are also free games in your existing distro. They aren’t generally comparable to commercial games, but they’re there.

Which tittles do you recommend for integrated intel hd2500 graphics on linux

I mean…that’s pretty broad. Maybe if you could list some games that you like, or a genre at least?

I can list games that I like, but they might fall completely flat with other people.

From a performance standpoint, that’d be probably any 2D game and…let’s see. The HD 2500 was released in 2014, and wasn’t a stellar performer at that time, so probably any 3D game that was released prior to that date?

Like, you can probably look at any list of popular older games for ideas; doesn’t need to be Linux-specific.

searches

https://gamesreq.com/50-best-games-for-weak-pcs-2025-edition/

From that list, games that I’ve played that I enjoy are Half-Life 2, Hades, Terraria, Vampire Survivors, Slay the Spire, Balatro, Fallout: New Vegas, Far Cry 3, FTL: Faster Than Light, Bastion, Transistor, Don’t Starve, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, Max Payne 2, Factorio, and Rimworld, all of which you can get on Steam and have worked fine for me on Linux, but…again, it really depends on what sort of games you like. There are games on there that are popular that didn’t particularly rub me the right way (e.g. Dota 2 is popular, but realistically should be played multiplayer, which I don’t want to do. Ori and the Blind Forest is pretty, but didn’t grab my personal interest). But…they might be exactly what you’re looking for.

Also can i get a recommendation about using mame emulators.

MAME is a particular emulator, which emulates many different types of hardware. There are a number of different frontends to it — setting up MAME manually takes a bit of work, though it’s how I’ve used it — but I’m not sure what you’re asking. If you just want recommendations for an emulator and not specifically MAME, then maybe list a system that you’d like to emulate (e.g. Super Nintendo, or whatever). If you want a frontend recommendation, I haven’t used other frontends myself, though you might get recommendations from others. If you want a recommendation as to games for older systems that you could run emulated in MAME, that’s another possibility, but again, I think I’d ask what sort of games you’ve enjoyed or a genre or something.

Honestly, a lot of people are probably posting in !selfhosted@lemmy.world when their questions really are better-suited to another community. Not just on hardware, but on other technical questions. I don’t think that it’d be a bad thing if they posted in the other places.

However.

End of the day, you need to split up a community when either (a) the traffic is too much of a firehose of content to be able to identify the most-interesting stuff, which isn’t the case for me for this at all or (b) there’s too much unrelated stuff showing up and people are getting a lot of stuff that they don’t want thrown at them. I think that there’s enough overlap between the interests and knowledge of most of the subscribers here and what’s covered that it’s probably not producing a lot of stuff that they aren’t interested in or where their knowledge isn’t relevant.

Like, we have a handful of video-game-specific communities, but they see so little traffic that just using general-purpose video gaming communities like !games@lemmy.world still works pretty well. Maybe some genre-specific communities, like !shmups@lemmus.org.

I think that if we, say, grew the Threadiverse userbase by a factor of ten, then some of the higher-traffic communities that exist now really should split up. But as it is, I personally am not too fussed about having more-centralized stuff from a user standpoint. As things stand, I tend to say “I’d like to have more traffic in the communities I’m in” than “there’s too much traffic and I need help in filtering it down”.

change the default SSH port

Any port scanner — take nmap — is going to turn this up. $ nmap -p0-65535 <hostname> takes a little longer than checking a single port, but what’s the threat that you’re worried about? Someone brute-forcing a password? That’s going to take a hell of a lot longer than that, and you use strong passwords that will make that wildly impractical, right? A zero-day remote exploit in OpenSSH’s sshd? If someone gets one of those, they probably aren’t going to waste it on you.

SSH is also trivial to fingerprint as a protocol. Here’s me running netcat to my local SSH instance:

$ nc localhost 22
SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_10.0p2 Debian-7+deb13u2
^C
$

It ain’t rocket science to identify an SSH server.

I personally think that port-knocking isn’t a great idea and just adds hassle and brittleness to something, but I’d do a port-knocking setup before I tried running sshd on a nonstandard port.

If you honestly don’t trust SSH, then okay, fine, wrap it with a VPN or something with real security so there’s another layer (of course, that raises the issue of whether you trust the VPN software not to have remote exploits). Or have one host that you can reach and bounce from there to another host or something.

There are ways that I’d say are useful to try and secure an SSH instance. Use keys rather than passwords. Whitelist user accounts that can be connected to remotely.

But anyone who is likely to be a real risk to your system is going to be able to find an ssh server running on a nonstandard port.

so I figured that using pipewire to co-ordinate this would be the easiest way forward, except it turns out that it’s a (GUI) user space process, which doesn’t make sense on a server with no GUI users.

I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “(GUI) user space process”, but if it’s that it’s a systemd user process (e.g. it shows up when you run $ systemctl --user status pipewire rather than $ systemctl status pipewire, which appears to be the case on my system, where there’s one instance running per user session), then you probably can run it as a systemwide process, where there’s just one always-running process for the whole system. IIRC, PulseAudio could run in both modes. I don’t know if you have concerns about security on access to your mic or something, but that could be something to look into.

searches

Sounds like it’s doable. Not endorsing this particular project, which I’ve never seen before, but it looks like it’s possible:

https://github.com/iddo/pipewire-system

PipeWire System-wide Daemon Package (Arch Linux)

This package configures PipeWire, WirePlumber, and PipeWire-Pulse to run as a single system-wide daemon as the root user. This setup is optimized for headless media servers, HTPCs, or multi-user audio environments.

every hardware website I’ve checked so far, either don’t have any mini pcs, nucs or similar, or they have zero information about the hardware.

Well, if they give you the manufacturer and model number, you should be able to look them up with the manufacturer.

I’m not on there, but you might have more luck in !localllama@sh.itjust.works

You might also want to list the hardware that you plan to use, since that’ll constrain what you can reasonably run.

Ah, so I bet what they’re doing is looking like a single VPN from the Android OS level, setting a default route into that, and then doing routing in userspace.

I have not used such a configuration, but I believe that it’s fine to have multiple WireGuard VPNs concurrently up, at least from a Linux client standpoint. I have no idea whether your phone’s client permits that — it could well be that it can’t do it.

Your routing table would have the default route go to a host on one of them (and your Internet-bound traffic would go there), but you should be able to have it be either. Or neither — I’ve set up a WireGuard configuration with a Linux client where the default route wasn’t over the WireGuard VPN, and only traffic destined for the LAN at the other end of the WireGuard VPN traversed the WireGuard VPN.

From Linux’s standpoint, a WireGuard VPN is just like another NIC on the host. You say “all traffic destined for this address range heads out this NIC”. Just that the NIC happens to be virtual and to be software that tunnels the traffic.

EDIT:

It sounds like this is an Android OS-level limitation:

https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/261526/are-there-technical-limitation-to-multiple-vpns

In the Android VPN development documentation you can find a clear statement regarding the possibility to have multiple VPNs active at the same time:

There can be only one VPN connection running at the same time. The existing interface is deactivated when a new one is created.

That same page does mention that you can have apps running in different profiles using different VPNs at the same time. That might be an acceptable workaround for you.