Amazon has their own Linux dist that is relatively popular among their customers

https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-2/

As for your question, consider thus: I think many users here have the resources to make their own personal Linux distributions without drawing from an existing base distro. Yet very few do. Why do you think that is? There’s a lot of overlap in the answers.

The expected payout is negative so no, not similar to investing. It becomes the opposite, pretty much.

Another thing they may have in mind is ATX PSUs. The pinouts on those for the same physical plug vary not only by maker and model but sometimes even by year. So if you get an aftermarket ATX-to-SATA cable that fits just fine in the SATA plug on your ATX PSU, it may put 12v on the 5v and fry your drives or mobo when you plug it in even if it’s from the same brand.

Don’t ask me why there is a voltmeter on my desk.

Personally I’m too paranoid about security and sus of Intel to be comfortable with vPro but you do you.

That said, I’d go for 1, considering you already have that 6th gen on hand in case you need a spare.

Otherwise 3 or 4 (whichever is available on secondary markets for a decent price) and hang on to that Pentium in case need arises. Doesn’t sound like the extra power draw of an i7 is worth it for this build.

Up to 300 or so could be reasonable if the RAM and SSD are decent.

OK, so let’s cut it down and say we have 4 PCs for someone with a family and home server, each with 4 DIMMs each.

You are saying the first rule of PC building says that this house should have at least 16 unused DIMMs on the shelf. I’d say 2-4 is reasonable if they are all compatible.

“Buy two extra of everything” is a good rule and scales for the individual. “Buy double of everything” is not.

I always heard the first rule as “stay grounded”. Having 1TB of RAM on stock just in case sounds not grounded.

A spare kit or two should be enough for most folks. With one or two spares of everything else so you can test suspicious parts separate from prod.

A bit of redundancy and foresight is good but no need to be excessive about it.

While you can put your root filesystem on ZFS and many people do it, it is considered a little more advanced setup and it’s more common to run ext4 on / and then zfs for mounted datasets on e.g. /var and /home.

A catch with ZFS is that it does not have a compatible license with Linux, which prevents many distros from shipping compiled modules directly. So the most common way to ship it is by DKMS, which (automatically) compiles the ZFS module from source. This is done by installing the zfs-dkms package.

The ZFS version obviously needs to be compatible with your kernel and sometimes it can take a while for ZFS to Linux. Arch does not coordinate releases so especially if you’re not on the LTS kernel, you can run into situations where ZFS is no longer available after an upgrade. Furthermore, zfs-dkms is not in Arch repos but in AUR so you have to build even that from source for each upgrade of ZFS. Not recommended for beginners.

That a partial or failed system upgrade can leave you in a place without ZFS modules is one reason why putting / on ZFS is not more common.

In debian, you just apt-get install zfs-dkms.

Alpine Linux maintainers decided to just ignore the license issue and ship a compiled zfs package including kernel modules.

I don’t believe Ventoy is safe. Too much dodgy stuff.

https://feddit.online/post/605807#post_replies

https://kbin.melroy.org/m/linux@lemmy.ml/t/509282

https://linuxmom.net/@vkc/112906968594601449

Debian ships official live images with desktop environments (KDE, LXDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, GNOME and MATE).

https://www.debian.org/CD/live/

You could try each and see which one you like.

There is also LMDE, Linux Mint Debian Edition. It’s not bad.

https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

No joke. It feels like I’m constantly catching up with Fedora. And I am a person who finds system upgrades recreational. It is not a good pick for OP.

Given your requirements, absolutely I’d also recommend against Bazzite and CachyOS, at least today.

Debian stable. Enable security updates by unattended-upgrades and you can basically go over a year without manually updating (aside from the occasional reboot to activate the newer kernel).

Then if you’re not already into containers, I propose learning about rootless Podman and using that to run your arr stack services. For example using docker-compose and/or systemd services.

If you don’t mind going a little bit more of the beaten track, then I also encourage you to check out Alpine Linux. Their wiki explains how to install it with a read-only root filesystem which it sounds like you’d like. But since it’s early and a commitment, maybe save this adventure for later.

Arch has a like 10x more update churn than Debian or sth and is not stable in the same sense.

For a more hands-on system, or something offline, Arch is still great.

SWIM has a sizable aged library - wouldn’t be surprising with sqlite db corruptions by now - and absolutely no issues smoothly upgrading amd migrating to 10.11. Had sweaty upgrades a few times over the years but this was not one of them.

Rule of thumb for OpenWRT:

In general for consumer routers, Broadcom-based ones like the one posted require a lot of work and hacking to port and maintain. If they’re even working with OpenWRT at all it can be quite dicey and troblesome if you are not very lucky.

In comparison, Mediatek-based models tend to be better supported and smoother sailing.

I haven’t seen much of Qualcomm but I’d guess they fall somewhere closer to Broadcom.

So no, I don’t think it’s a good pick. If OP got it handed down for free it might be worth a shot but I would buy something else if the purpose is to run OpenWRT or any Linux or BSD on it.

Source: Installed OpenWRT on many different devices over the years, including one with the same chipset

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Now if we could just sort the jf collections type in ways other than by date ;)

Sounds like Good First Issue material! (;

There is one part in the post mentioning how to “pad holes” in failing areas. Maybe I should expand it with some details around aligning reserved address space.

Otherwise, corruption of the RAM itself does not usually spread like mold in bread or wear out and fail in similar ways to flash memory.