Ceph. I have some Raspberry Pi’s that I’m going to set up a cluster with. Just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I half expect the performance to be relatively terrible, but maybe it won’t and I can try to build something on top of the cluster in a sort of hyper converged setup.

It’s completely overkill for a small home lab but that’s what makes it fun.

Just use Debian. Why use the inferior downstream distros when you can go right to the OG? You are already halfway there.

Debian doesn’t have a corporate sponsor so there is no risk of getting spammed or giving someone your personal information.

Maybe something I should look into again.

Yes! I’ve used that before.

I spun up a trial version of Windows Server and tried to get it working. It seemed to want a Domain environment and I didn’t want to go down that road. There probably is a way to do it without setting up a Domain but I didn’t feel like messing with it at the time.

I have a Windows VM on my server. If I need MS Office or any Windows-only program I just use Remmina to RDP in and get stuff done.

Windows has pretty good touch support over RDP so I can even do this from my phone or tablet if I need a full desktop on the go (using a VPN).

I bet manpower costs are significant as well. How many people are needed to run this thing? You probably need engineers with an esoteric set of skills to put it back together and manage it which would not be cheap.

Edit: I looked it up, it is running SUSE Enterprise Linux, so maybe management isn’t as specialized as I expected.

I think there are two options personally.

1. The Windows 11 LTSC version just leaked on Chinese forums. I wouldn’t use that ISO but would wait for the official release. Seems like the “best” version of Windows.

2. Use Chris Titus’ WinUtil on a normal install: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil. He has put a lot of effort into this tool and it works great.

If you want to go full try-hard you can do it yourself. Buy NTLite and go to town on stripping stuff out. You’ll probably break something but it is fun to play with.

Why not just run TrueNAS Scale? It’s a NAS built on top of Debian?

I have a copy of Microsoft Office 2013 on a Windows 11 VM.

Microsoft Outlook puts attachments that you open in some insane temporary folder. That’s fine for viewing a file but god forbid you save without changing the full path.

It’s super tricky and problematic. Organizations like AIPAC have many American politicians in their pocket. They pump a huge amount of money into lobbying our government promoting Israeli interests. But this argument gets awfully close to “the Jews have all the money and control the world” type conspiracy thinking which is very frustrating.

This is super cool! Been following these guys for a while.

Have the speaker issues been fixed yet? That’s the one thing holding me back from permanently switching. I would also prefer Debian over Arch or Fedora.

I’ve been playing around with Alpine recently and I quite like it. Now if I can just get my virtual desktop Alpine container to work correctly I would be very happy haha.