This is why we (still) need a Flattr-like service to somehow gain critical mass.

Ignore all the well-meaning geeks here urging you to become a full-time programmer, go with either of the choices you suggest, and just follow the prompts. You’ll find it’s all incredibly easy and that you’re worrying for nothing.

If you want to tweak things, then think about that later. Just get started.

This is from 20 years of experience. Personally I use nothing but the terminal and a web browser. But the reality is that you only need the latter in today’s computing.

Immigration policy, hmm?

Positive sign. This country is always ahead of the curve.

More irrelevance about desktop market share in a world where soon almost nobody will have a desktop computer.

You are confusing middle-class Americans with everyone else in the world.

Even if it were 26% it would be somewhat irrelevant. Ordinary people do not use desktop computers any more. To repeat (because in this community there’s a lot of stubborn resistance to this fact): ordinary people do not use desktop computers any more.

To be clear, I do, and you do. But we are a small and shrinking minority.

Good question. Some are saying that you won’t get enough eyeballs on dedicated support forums, but by that logic we should just have one community called “General” which the whole world can spam freely on any topic. Personally I don’t want to have to wade through obscure threads about command syntax here, I want to read news about Linux.

By the way, if ever you want to discuss that subject, please consider doing it here rather than at lemmy.ml! There are more users there but IMO this is a better home for the flagship Linux community.

So, a bookmarks list basically.

Prediction: you’ll never actually read most of what ends up on this to-read list.

ITT: lots of generic VPN advice by people who have no experience with the specific problem.

Since this can be easily pulled off from the laptop, I want it to be encrypted

And the laptop can be easily pulled off the desk so you might want that encrypted too.

This is the only answer you need to read. It’s a non-problem if you just do this, and there’s no reason not to do it.

Possibly it’s about personality types. I was only going on my own experience. Of always being told by a chorus of experts “Oh no you don’t want to do that!” and ending up being terrified to touch anything. When I now know that I usually had nothing to be afraid of, because dangerous things tend to be locked down by design, exactly as they should be.

it depends how secure you want your network to be. Personally I think UFW is easy so you may as well set it up

IMO this attitude is problematic. It encourages people (especially newbies) to think they can’t trust anything, that software is by nature unreliable. I was one of those people once.

Personally, now I understand better how these things work, there’s no way I’m wasting my time putting up multiple firewalls. The router already has a firewall. Next.

PS: Sure, people don’t like this take - you can never have enough security, right? But take account of who you’re talking to - OP didn’t understand that their server is not even on the public internet. That fact makes all the difference here.

Immutable distros like NixOS don’t stop you from tweaking stuff, they just record every tweak centrally, so that you can undo them and do rollbacks.

Others can confirm that I’ve got that right. Haven’t tried it but the idea sounds great.

I would like to have a system when I know what I did, what is opened/installed/activated and what is not

Story of my life after 20 years on Linux. Maybe we could call it “modification anxiety”.

I believe this is the case for an immutable OS.

Once I planned to do just this, converting my Ubuntu into Debian (or maybe it was the other way round). I assumed it would just be a matter of changing the repos and then apt full-upgrade and boom! new distro. Still, I decided to do some research first - you know, just in case. Whatever I learned made me abandon the idea in a hurry. Perhaps I’ll try again but this time skip the boring research step.

This has the feel of a marketing questionnaire. “Are you not ready to give a 5-star rating to Linux? Click here and we’ll get right back to you!”

Oddly enough, I’m struggling to think of a single experience or feature. The decisive benefit of Linux specifically and FOSS in general is something less tangible: it’s the feeling of empowerment and control you get. A computer of any kind is always something of a black box. Knowing that you have full control over it, even if you don’t understand everything, is revolutionary. I’m certainly not going back.

Isn’t this like saying “What phone numbers do you have in your address book?”