In my opinion so far yes, I’ve only been on it a few weeks, but think of the immutable as locking down the root partition and any vital directories to the OS and not allowing your user to modify anything. In the event of a bad update, it’s easy enough to select the previous boot in Grub and be on your merry way.

I have a special needs adult step-daughter who’s PC I manage and I always need to keep it updated, setting it up on their Bluefin version which uses Gnome which she loves. So, I may do it this weekend. She’s currently on Endeavor OS (Arch based) but it keeps getting kernel updates daily it seems and with those a reboot. Additionally, for whatever reason, her system goes to sleep without warning sometimes so if I’m updating it, it’s gone to sleep. (Super weird). I’ve never had it do this before with Standard Arch linux so I think its something to do with Endeaver. I’ve never bothered to troubleshoot it to be honest. With a setup on the BlueFin (Aurora Linux is KDE), enabling Auto updates should be a breeze and then she’s golden for being updated without my intervention.

I use Aurora Linux which is the sister one to Bazzite, both are Fedora 41 based images. They strongly encourage using the FlatPak approach to installing software. After using it for a few weeks now, I can see why. One of the things with the immutable setup is once you install a program, you have to reboot to get it to run, but with Flatpak, it isn’t so. I think Flatpak has it’s merits - if they have an app which you normally use, then it’s easy enough to install and go.

For the Fedora side of things, you can “layer” apps over it using the rpm-ostree but they encourage you to only do that as a last resort. One of the things they enable you to do is install additional OS’s containerized which integrate with the desktop environment. For example, right now, I can only run Scrcpy in a different OS (That I’ve been able to figure out so far), so I just spin up an Arch OS container and launch it from there, and can interface with my phone normally. As I understand too, the developers plan on disabling layering in a future release. To be honest, I don’t think I have but one thing layered and that’s my Label Printer’s driver.

The benefit for me using the immutable system and this is the hardest thing to grasp for a lot of people including myself is that it truly is set and forget type of updating. With Arch, you can become sort of addicted to checking for new releases, and I’m not going to lie, it’s amazing to get some of the newest releases of your favorite app or browser especially when they fix something. With Arch, it’s generally there. With my system, I turned on auto updates, so it’s not too uncommon to bring the system up in the morning and see that updates have been given (I don’t notice them usually). It’s nice not having to worry about that as much.

https://9to5linux.com/mozilla-firefox-134-is-out-with-support-for-touchpad-hold-gestures-on-linux

At least has some of them. I think they always grab the betas and aggregate the release notes/changes during the nightly/beta tests.

Hmmm…my system is a Dell Optiplex 990 SFF PC so about 14 years old and seems to run Youtube without issues or buffering. I have yet to see if any local media does the same. But I’m also running 16gb of RAM which is the system’s max and it’s pretty much not had any issues since giving it that much.

I’m not 100% sure on the KDE release cycle, as I understood, the KDE update was full of bug fixes today to the 6.2.4 from 6.2.3, and the Fedora team integrated it in their releases quickly so this might have been a faster than usual release. I’m thinking when KDE fully releases their new OS to replace Neon, I may try that one, it’s also supposed to be immutable which would be the chef’s kiss for me. :)

I prefer the WYSIWYG get with Joplin and mostly because I’m stuck in my ways!! LOL
Nothing really wrong with it though, it’s just not for me. :)

To add to this, I have tried Obsidian notes which is super highly recommended by many. I also have tried self hosting Bookstack for logging my notes etc… But every time I tried it, nothing ever matched what I could do with Joplin which was exactly as what other said, rock solid and I have yet to run into any device which can’t handle the client. I will say that the launch time on the one on my machine (Arch Linux) is a bit slow, but after it’s launched, it’s very easy to bring up and use as needed. :)

I did, but it’s a home machine, personal use. So, it didn’t matter for me, but for family…that was another story! :) I just pulled the main boot drive, put a different one and installed it and went through the process. Then went back to the Proxmox drive after.

I’m in the same boat, I tried Incus or rather LXD a couple months back and gave up after a little while due to pressing business needing the Proxmox machine up again.

I have two main requirements which I have for my server:

• It must support Home Assistant OS as a VM and a USB Dongle (Zwave) I found this as a possible solution for LXD systems: https://seanblanchfield.com/2023/05/home-assistant-os-in-lxd

• It must support NFS exports so I can share my storage and data drives. I’m pretty sure since it’s on Debian, I can install Cockpit and it’s sharing plugin for this.

I think the thing which scared me off at the time too was the lack of GUI which I think I may have missed. This may be a solution: https://blog.simos.info/how-to-install-and-setup-the-incus-web-ui/

I was just thinking about Incus the other day so this might be a good time to look into it more!

Sadly, it’s for Haswell and higher, I’m on an older Sandy Lake CPU so could not get it to boot and then I saw in their Wiki about the requirements. Yeah, it’s an old PC. (~14 yrs old and as temperamental as a teenager!) :)

I use Gotify I self host it and it uses an app on my Android, super easy to set up and use. I tie in Home Assistant and a few other setups with it and it runs great.

I deal with an issue with Firefox where it causes my Home Assistant dashboard become non responsive if the tab is not the primary one always on screen. I think it’s something with the forced snoozing of tabs. I’ve tried other Firefox based browsers and face the same problem. So this leaves me with… Chromium based browsers. As a Linux user, it’s either Firefox or Chromium based. With that said, I have not had the issue with the Chromium base, but because it’s mostly consumed by Google, I reject it mostly.

I did find that Zen was very nice to look at, and they do have an opinionated way of setting up the tabs (I don’t care about the vertical tabs). They also seem to be wanting to roll out their own extension store? In the form of “Zen Mods” but are also cross compatible with Firefox Extensions so that’s good I guess. I use a rolling release (Arch) OS, so I do see a lot of updates to Zen, the devs seem to be really working on it. For now - I’m on Firefox dealing with the unusual Home Assistant thing. I’ve used Firefox since it was before version 1 so I’m a bit stuck in my ways. :)

I really wish that there was another browser engine there which I could use which supports the Adblocking and Bitwarden (My most important extensions). It’s a bit disappointing to see that Edge, and all other browsers have adopted the Chromium base. I am hoping that with the latest judgement and order against Google to sell off the Chrome browser, sticks and if so, that the new owner(s) will strip it of some of the garbage which has been forced on the code base. (Manifest v3 comes to mind). The only Chromium based one I tolerate on my system right now is Ungoogled Chrome and Vivaldi, who has said that they are resisting the Manifest V3 as much as they can and have a somewhat decent adblocking built in using their end. Even though I have DNS level adblocking, Ublock Origin fills the gap with some of the ads which gets past my end.

You just have to turn it off. It’s an accessibility feature if you don’t want it:

Not a software one, but back when I was a teenager doing hardware modifications (or attempting to at least), I had a very valuable to me Atari 130XE computer (35 or so years ago) I wanted to solder in some extra RAM or some chip (I don’t recall now) but I had problems removing the old one so I called up my friend who did electronics repair the Mainboard. It was raining that night I took it to him so I did what I thought was best. Put it in a black garbage bag to protect it. Lets just say the next morning is when I found out that Static + circuit boards is a bad thing. Never more than a valuable less for me than at that time. He was a good friend though and out of the goodness of his heart, he gave me a replacement one so I wouldn’t be without. (Mind you, these were out of production and considered obsolete at the time maybe worth $40 at the time) and not yet vintage as they would be seen today where in some markets can fetch upward to a few hundred more as is.

I have an Rpi4 4gb model and run Uptime-Kuma who’s sole purpose is to monitor my server and alert me if it should go down. I also have it acting as a Tailscale exit node.

I’m about 99% sure it does, I don’t use it that way but It does allow DNS zones. For example:

It’s a lot more technical then Adguard Home for sure. Both work just fine though, I came from Adguard Home as I use a PXE server to provision some of my devices and Technitium is super easy to configure that.

I had to create an account as per the usual process for these types of apps, but it was all local. I never had to do one to connect to their servers. I know it generates a unique instance ID which I believe phones home to their servers but I don’t mind personally.

As for my experience, a lot of it is locked behind their paid plans, so I just keep it limited to what I use which is fine. I do like it as it does better than NocoDB for my needs (the input forms is what I needed) and it does better there. I don’t recall the other reasons for not using NocoDB otherwise, but it’s a long while.

Their pricing is here: https://baserow.io/pricing

So, that’s mostly what is locked behind. My sleep form I built which feeds the database:

Overall, it does meet my needs so that’s all I ask. :)

In no particular order, the most essential ones are those I constantly use throughout my day and also weekly.

Proxmox holds all of these in different LXC’s and VM’s

• Home Assistant
• Pocket-ID - https://github.com/stonith404/pocket-id (Exclusive Passkey login system as in -no un/pw just your Passkey which - doubles as an OIDC provider)
• Homepage (By Ben Phelps of gethomepage.dev)
• Vaultwarden
• TechnitiumDNS which handles all of my DHCP and Adblocking in a one system, extremely capable software especially useful for SOHO too.
• Baserow - Airtable alternative. It holds certain items of importance like what MAC address each device in my home network holds and what IP It uses in an intelligent view. I also was using it for a while to log issues with my sleep where I deal with insomnia, so I logged how well I slept, how many times I woke up, how long it took me to fall asleep etc. That was a simple form I created using drag/drop in Baserow and called by a URL.
• OpenVSCode server - makes editing my Homepage (above) yaml and my docker-compose files a breeze! It’s especially nice when you edit it something and it auto saves almost instantly. Makes some of my services change in real-time!
• UptimeKuma - Simply one of the best out there for me
• Gotify - I get alerted to my Tuya based dehumidifer tank being full via Home Assistant, Downtime alerts from UptimeKuma and a variety of other services which I deem higher priority alerts over “fix when you can” ones.

Aside from that, i do have other services I use every so often like Memos, Joplin Server (holds most of my notes), Pingvin and a few others.

Honestly, if I have the option to keep it toggled on/off I’m fine with it, but I also don’t see it in my latest update which came in last night. But not too concerned yet (Pixel 8a) so it’s still pretty new I guess. :)

Instability you ask? This is like a slow creep to instability and freeze your system. It’s called the Bash Fork Bomb (look it up if you want), but it’s a copy/paste you put in and it slows your system down by consuming all the system resources and cause it to lock up HARD. It goes away after a system reboot, though.

I was going to post the code here, but decided to play nice. But if you are curious:

https://itsfoss.com/fork-bomb/

(edit: Made ‘slow’ ‘slows’)