Dipped my toes into Linux maybe 10 years ago. It was awful and turned me off of it. Also the fact that I occasionally have to deal with some bespoke bullshit distro at work that does nothing that literally any tutorial I google says it will.
But I finally gave it another shot. Girlfriend got a smart TV. I got sick of ads. I had an old Intel nuc laying around that I bought for a dedicated DDR machine but it didn’t go great, so I stuck dietpi and pihole on it. Was still a mild clusterfuck and had dozens of open tabs trying to figure out what was breaking, but by 5am I had pihole configured and running, a plex server set up, and a desktop. Today I got the ftp server up so I can move stuff into plex without messing with flash drives. Still haven’t figured out desktop through ssh but that’s a later problem.
Bad news is youtube ads come from the same domain as the videos so pihole is useless there, but I’m still having fun and very excited about what I can do with a cheap piece of hardware I thought was useless. For the next project I’m thinking maybe trying to de-google my Google home minis and have a locally hosted assistant, but that would probably take a ton of research beforehand.
Suggestions, encouragement, and harassment welcome.
You are fucking one of us now, you know there’s no way back right?
Never you are going to endure the bullshit you are used to. You will look at how the technology has evolved into a massive mind boggling ads infested mess and you will laugh, or cry…
Enjoy our last bit of freedom that we have.
whoa home ddr club rise up
I ended up using a shitty old Dell that worked well enough but I forgot the password and wiped it. Lost a lot of full game simfiles that aren’t on XIV anymore and I’m a bit sad about it. Was able to salvage a few and my ddr max 2 skin thougb.
Raspberry Pi is IMO an excellent tool for learning Linux (particularly CLI, you honestly don’t need a UI for the computer itself) in a low risk environment while also allowing you to build some really useful services (NAS, Pi-Hole, media-server).
Run FreeTube on Linux. It is an alternative YouTube client that is open source and ad free. YT sometimes changes which could break it temporarily. It has been working for me for a year now.
Today I got the ftp server up so I can move stuff into plex without messing with flash drives. Still haven’t figured out desktop through ssh but that’s a later problem.
Just FYI for next time: when you turn SSH on (which should be really simple, BTW… usually you’re asked if you want it during the OS install, and after the fact it should be something like a one-line systemctl command) you get SFTP access with it for free.
