Yup!

My Computer

This Computer

This says it all

Main character moment.

The content creator? I don’t know anything about him. The video stands on it’s own merits though. It seems well researched and quite balanced.

My server is usually between 30w-40w (that’s about 20-25p per day electricity cost in the UK at 25p/kwH).

That’s with the aforementioned processor/ram, a Gigabyte A520M motherboard, 1 case fan, the stock cooler, a 120gb 2.5" SSD, 2 4TB 3.5" HDDs and 1 8TB 3.5" HDD (all drives always spinning).

It’s running OpenMediaVault as OS and 5 docker containers 24/7 (Flatnotes, FreshRSS, Kavita, qBittorrent and RecipeSage). Other than that I use it for media access from a MiniPC running Debian w/ Kodi accessing it via SMB (the server doesn’t transcode).

Regarding Incogni, this video explains them pretty well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX3JT6q3AxA

Looking at the price of that Ugreen DH4300 (in the UK) it’s about 30% more than I paid to build my own server (Ryzen 5 3400g /w 16gb ddr4). If you can get second hand ddr4 for a decent price it’ll probably still be a cheaper option and allows you to do your own maintenance/repairs in the future.

Aren’t parental controls already in place on most mainstream things?

I’m not sure how much more accommodating for the less technically inclined it can get than settings > parental controls > enable.

I’ve been enjoying using FreshRSS, RecipeSage, Kavita (ebook library/reader) and Flatnotes. My server OS is OpenMediaVault which i’ve been very happy with.

Here’s a pretty good video that explains what Incogni and their ilk are and aren’t.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX3JT6q3AxA

I’d much rather have to find space for my server than for 1000s of Blu-rays/DVDs/CDs.

Yeah, it has more graphical abstraction than Arch but nowhere near enough for a beginner!

I have Seagate Barracuda drives in my NAS because I didn’t know about CMR vs SMR before I bought them.

2 of them are backups, the other spins all the time. The bulk of my storage is video files with infrequent adding of new stuff. The active drive has qBittorrent seeding from it 24/7 so it can be a bit noisy.

Other than that, you’ll see lower transfer speeds from SMR drives but nothing to worry about if it’s small writes or infrequent copying of large video files. It also takes an age to run a long SMART self test - 18hrs on an 8TB HDD that is 75% full (this’ll get worse as it gets closer to full).

So SMR drives aren’t ideal but they’ll do the job for a “write once, read many times” style of storage. I wouldn’t buy them at all for a RAID setup. If you can, you’d be better buying refurbished enterprise drives but I have no idea what availability there’ll be where you are.

If you have a mobile phone you just just connect it to your laptop via USB and turn on tethering to use your mobile data.

They’ve been doing that for over 5 years. Also, “ditches Windows” would mean not offering Windows.

https://www.neowin.net/news/lenovo-is-going-to-offer-its-entire-thinkpad-lineup-with-ubuntu-linux/

50w… holy shit!

My server with 1 SSD, 3 HDDs running multiple docker containers doesn’t usually pull more than 35-40w.

My router tops out at 8w and my wireless access point at 5w IIRC.

You’ll probably like this youtube channel then :)

https://www.youtube.com/@BreadOnPenguins

If you mean games with anti-cheat then it’s the developers of either the game and/or the anti-cheat who don’t support proton, not the other way round.

I don’t use Flatpaks much but having read many posts about Linux stuff it seems possible your issue is permissions. IIRC you can use Flatseal to fix that.

Not sure how much help it’ll be to you but often the best place for technical info is the Arch Wiki. Good luck!

You can install newer kernels from the update manager in the system tray. Then it’s View > Linux Kernels iirc.

Your issue is possibly something to do with configuration of Pulse Audio / PipeWire. Probably the best place to ask would be on the Linux Mint Forums.