Dictating notes into my journal (eg obsidian/mediawiki/dokuwiki) is very nice though.

The 3d stuff was great! The NVIDIA glasses were wild!

It’s a shame it died off tbh.

Well the folding aspect is pretty good.

Software otoh…

Yeah if this is for a small number of users, I would recommend wireguard or tailgate.

Port forwarding is asking for trouble.

Yeah but ublock origin more than makes up for it.

And Dark Reader. I simply don’t understand why chrome doesn’t have dark mode on android.

Matrix works over i2P and Tor, just proxy the service.

P2P chat could include retroshare but it’s not really a solution due to a variety of ux issues.

I wasn’t aware of that. I’ve even seen vendors using it.

I know it’s E2EE and open source but there is a lot of Metadata.

What other limitations does it have?

I often remote into my machine, so it’s a lot easier to type the command.

Yeah I hear that, good point.

Arch has great documentation but also a bit more config.

I would vote for Fedora over debian though. Debian packages are so far out of date that it becomes a pain and copr works quite well.

Phi3 is pretty good for the size of the model!

Also subs of the Microsoft libraries used to train models are quite good.

Oh and copilot, whether you like it or not, it’s quite a technical achievement in terms of response time and accuracy.

Codestral and Yi:34b, are pretty good.

If it’s just a server, Alpine and docker will do most things with good reliability and security.

Otherwise I’ve actually always used void and arch. While those aren’t typical choices for a server, it shows that it’s hard to go wrong.

Choose a distribution that appeals to you and it’ll work great.

For this use case, alpine sounds good.

Yeah I think if I looked deeper into it I could have got it a bit leaner.

But it was simply easier to use distrobox and share the image.

I totally agree that nix is a more elegant solution to the problem though.

See also Inkscape.

Doesn’t quite fit OPs want of self hosted, but still very good.

There is also Asymptote and tikz for more technical stuff.

In terms of recommended distros, I would say have a look at endeavourOS.

A nice compromise between the abstraction of eg Ubuntu and the technical requirements of eg Arch.

I’ve recommended this distribution to quite a few new users to great success.

Nix is really useful as well. But it’s not always a one-for-one replacement.

One problem I hit with nix is the size, after adding latex and a few other related packages, The install time took a very long time And the amount of space consumed was over 150 GB.

It wasn’t too bad because I was able to put it on a compressed ZFS data set but it wasn’t great. Whereas distrobox and podman built quicker, had a smaller size and it was easier to move the image between machines.

The other issue I hit with it was having to set environment variables for QT.

Definitely a nice piece of software just a little rough around the edges.

I suppose that’s my point. I have tried alternatives and many are good for many things but Docker works for all things.

But Docker is a bit of a sledgehammer approach by packaging a whole operating system.

Downvotes: Docker is contentious among some in the community.

Based on your use case, you may find your current workflow fairly incompatible with the Linux approach. However, id recommend you try nonetheless, always worth the learning experience even if it’s not your cup of tea.

Feel free to reach out if you need any support. always happy to help.

I point your attention wolfballs.

I may not agree with most of the perspective, but the author’s opposition to censorship is admirable.

Yeah free speech isn’t always free, but I’d rather the freedom to read things I disagree with. Others may disagree though.

Well I typically write my own dockerfiles so I have a good understanding of how a lot of software works, I’m sure others do too. It has increased the reproducibility of my stack, my understanding of dependencies and the reliability. Docker is not just docker compose up

Yeah the containers can be large and usually will lead to large downloads. I have tried bubble wrap and raw chroots but the tooling around docker is a lot better. The change to php8 was a pain, hence why I went docker. An alpine base with clearly defined deps gives me a container that is thin enough but I can move from a Gentoo box to arch for free. This, for my use case, is great.

I put everything in a docker container and it’s been, mostly, a net positive. You may laugh at me but it works very well for my use case.

Overall, net positive. I recommend everybody try it and use where appropriate.

This isn’t a religion and subscribing to dogma for want of suckless stacks won’t always be the best path to the end goal.

However, you’re right, docker may not always be the best call and it may promote bloated garbage.

Absolutely, the portability and encapsulation is great.

If you want to spin it up by hand, go for it, but containers make things very easy with no downsides.