cloudwanderer

Hello Everyone,

i'd like to ask for your opinion on the following issue:

i've created my own knowledge base based on asciidoc, with some custom shell scripts and a go application for creating backlinks, tags etc. I've chosen this way, as most solitions are based on markdown, which is not standarized and very limited compared to asciidoc, especially from a dev pov.

All my editing, searching etc. is done via neovim, which is very comfortable.

However, i'd like to improve the user experience with the setup, as i'd also like to see the rendered version, especially when adding mermaid diagrams and other things.

I've tried some plugins for the browser, which render the view and update automatically, however they are not in sync with my nvim, so i have to scroll on every save, if i want to see the rendered version. That's not ideal.

Any ideas?

Ideally I'd like some kind of application template, where i can embed a terminal / neovim and a webbrowser, ideally linked via lua scripting, so it integrates nicely. It can also be a completely separate application like anytype, however i've not seen anything that has a proper vim-like module editing support & allows for asciidoc rendering instead of markdown.

Hello Everyone,

as you can see on my screenshot, i am using an intel based mac for years now, which i customized to my needs. However i have reached the limits of this machine in terms of customization options and would like to move to linux to test it out as a daily driver. I'm actually quite happy with mac from the pov that everything just works, however there are certain things that annoy me, but apple does not allow me to change them.

As a newbie in terms of desktop linux (i've used ubuntu roughly 12 years ago as a daily driver and am familar with headless linux), i'd like your advice.

Specifically I am looking for:

• a minimal, fast system
• keyboard / shortcut based - all interactions can be done from keyboard (within common sense limits)
• all keys can be custom mapped (i have muscle memory of my custom keys for certain actions, so i'd like to keep them)
• all can be configured from dotfiles (worse case shell scripts and ansible)
• very low ressource consumption, snappy system with no delays.

I'd like to try NixOs due to it's unique configuration ability, however on a headless server it was a buggy pain just weeks ago (for example user passwords just vanished/changed without any external influence, not allowing access anymore), so i'm open to alternatives.

What i am looking for in advice is:

• a minimal, configurable (file based for git) tiling window manager
• a top status bar like you see in the screenshot that i can freely configure
• as much terminal emulator based as possible (i honestly mostly only need a browser and the terminal, most other apps have a TUI that i can use with the keyboard, see the above requirement)
• terminal based package management as easy as brew (maybe Nix?)
• custom keyboard layout (I am not a native english speaker, so i mapped all non-english characters to my option keys with the english layout as the base)
• Option to use 2 keyboards at once (come by default when using Karabiner Elements) as i combined 2 small keyboards to one to a fake split keyboard ;)

My current stack on macos is Hammerspoon for heavy customization, Karabiner Elements, yabai, kitty (and alacritty, for ssh, as kitty is bad with ssh in my personal experience), sketchybar. firefox (customized for privacy)

Any good recommendations or dotfiles? Anything i should look out for as a MacOs User?

Thanks in advance!

Hello!

Recently i've been planning a home server with proper storage ability, but I got stuck at the details. I hope the experience in this community can help creating a proper plan on how to create my own (first) home server.

Motivation I've been using Cloud Services, especially Google Photos, for years now in order to store and share what i needed. However recently i'm trying to remove my dependency on cloud services and companies significantly, also with data privacy in mind. Therefor i'm planning to self host what i need.

Requirements

Energy Consumption I'm from a country where the energy prices exploded compared to the average salary. So the enegery consumption of the whole system, including storage and others, should be very low. i'm thinking 10 Watt or less in idle. I know it is challenging, therefor i'm asking for support.

Storage I actually do not need much. I estimated that 2TB are sufficient at a minumum. It should be redundant at least 1x, maybe with an additional cold storage added to the mix.

Compute Once i have a home server, it will not end with just storage. i'll probably have to run services like NextCloud or maybe some in direction of Home automation. I also might want to add security cameras to the mix (not long stored, just in case of incidents)

Initial Thoughts and Ideas

My initial idea was to use the Intel N300 with 8 cores and 6W TDP, however that chip does not seem to be released anytime soon. Therefor I was looking at the N100 with 4 cores and the same TDP. The N305 from Intel is interesting, but has higher energy consumption.

Next i looked at the mainboard options. There are some interesting MIni PCs with the N100, including some passive options, but they would only enable me to have max one M.2 and one SATA 2,5" drive, so I would need to see how i can add redundancy to it (or simply use both of these as SSDs with sufficient storage and call it a day, while adding a slow usb drive for additonal storage) There are also new mainboards from Asrock with N100s coming out, which look interesting as well, but would add costs for all the hardware required to run it.

Price wise HDDs would be the better option, however they since they use more energy, they might not be the ideal way for this build. I thought about it and if i add an SSD as the main storage which acts as a cache, i can use the hdds as simple backups. As i do not need them most of the time (once a day backup update would be suffficient) I could in theory power them off most of the time and only power them on for backup updates when needed. Do you know of any ways to handle this automatically for example via shell script? Most of what i found would require me to manually plug them back in via USB.

As for operating system etc. I've been thinking about Proxmox, TrueNas, NixOS and others. as i do not need VM's, most of my services will be available a container, the TrueNas with Docker / Podman Containers might be ideal. Adding full VMs to the system with only an N100 seems insufficient.

RAM: Most systems with the N100 go up to 16 GB. However I think 32GB would be better with many containers just to be future proof. It might be overkill.

Wake up on LAN support might be interesting too. I'm not sure if that would be supported by my choices so far.

Usage

Initially, the system would not be used most of the time. The most often action would most likely be syncing photos from iOS or Android automatically to storage (any recommendations for that?) as a picture or 2 migh be added daily. Everything else is infrequent, which the highest traffic on the system due to looking at the pictures.

Once it's running, this might change of course.

Summary

In summary, i'm just starting to plan this server and I would appreciate it, if you could give me some guidance on how to implement it the best way or point out mistakes i did in my thought process so far.

I also have a Raspberry Pi 4 that i can add to the mix, however it only has 4GB RAM, so it won't be able to do much alone.