That’s funny since I didn’t even know what Linux was when I started my CS education, nor that there were so many services you could host yourself. I was egged on to try Linux and (eventually) get a small homelab by my uni friends, who were probably more like you

I have my academic bachelors in CS and I’m doing a civil engineering masters on the CS track. So I’m the opposite of your target audience, but I did want to mention something.

Yes there are some fairly technical things like cryptography, natural language processing, and compression algorithms where you will need a good understanding of mathematical subjects like linear algebra, statistics, and group theory.

But apart from subjects like that, you can definitely learn most of what we did at the same pace, or even faster (and even then, something being difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible to learn). You can easily find good resources online to learn languages from Haskell to C. Nobody is stopping you from buying books that are used as course material. Same goes for networking.

Saying all that, I never even learned to work with containers or VMs as part of a uni course. Most of the stuff we learn is in the realm of theoretical computer science. So I probably learned a lot about self hosting the same way you did: the internet and some friends.

• Just like czl I do have seperate apps for each type of data I use. For example Ente for photos and Syncthing for keeping the documents folder of my devices synced up.
• It’s not something I really think about because my data sources are functionally disjoint. (e.g. I don’t have photos from my phone in my documents folder). The only exception is Ente, where I do keep a plaintext copy of the “shared with family” account to display some family photos on our digital photoframe. This also “answers” your next question.
• I don’t have anything set up for when an application stops support. I do however do look beforehand whether it’s possible to extract my data in a way I can migrate to another platform if need be. For example, some services like Ente offer an easy plaintext way to export/backup your data in directories mirroring your albums. That way I could easily head to Immich
• It hasn’t really. I usually do backups by keeping two copies of all my volumes. So running more services doesn’t really impact much of anything.

A sidenote on Nextcloud: it does use the same folder structure in its data volume as it presents to the user. So it’s fairly easy to manage, but you need to update the folder you made the change within the container for it to show up. When we used to keep photo’s synced up with Nextcloud, I could directly access that folder for the photoframe. Since Ente is e2ee I needed to duplicate data in that case

I am mad I didn’t get the summer shrimpin role (I barely use DIscord)

Haha. Yeah we have a seperate “memechat” for non-serious stuff (which went to iMessage in that Signal period) so I just have that one automatically muted on select hours of the day.

I actually mostly use Signal. I got my family to use Signal for a while, but they just ended up sending texts I did not strictly need to see on iMessage. Hence why we eventually settled on Whatsapp

By keeping it open 24/7 do you mean that the app is actively taking screen space or is an unclosed app in the background? I hadn’t actually thought of not swiping the app away after refreshing the timer. And yeah I was looking at OpenWA as well but that’s for businesses.

Fair enough considering Windows also doesn’t respect you. My worst experiences were the times I accidentally clicked on “update and restart” so I just had to wait there after a long night of getting a presentation or homework done. That happened a few too many times in high school.

But I barely handle updates myself these days. I have set it to automatically* apply them live for my year on Silverblue. I have something similar for my phone updating every weekend at night considering I sleep in anyway. This post did remind me how nice it is to not have to worry (or even think) about updates.

*I do manually update between major Fedora releases. But those happen twice per year so yeah.

To to honest my Fedora install used to hang indefinitely 20% of the time I tried to shut it down. So I also became well acquainted with that solution

I was a bit unsure of contacting them because of self hosting it. Thanks for telling me! I’ll edit the post to add the fix if I/they found a way to resolve it.

I don’t get what you mean by organic process. But sure, if you don’t think many people getting into self hosting would look something up like that, I get that you don’t think it’s worthwhile for a self hosting community being present on those platforms.

It’s fine if you disagree with me, but please keep it civil. The reason I’m saying they won’t go to Lemmy is because those hyperlinks will usually lead to the relevant docs, a couple of blogpost, or Reddit. I personally have never seen a Lemmy or Piefed instance in my search results when I looked up a problem.

To give an example: I went to Google and I put in the query “how to start self hosting on a linux server”, which is what I assume someone getting into it would look up. The top site (skipping the AI response and for some reason, Youtube videos?) was Reddit. That’s why it makes sense to me to offer help on a more conventional platform for people getting into self hosting. The people among them who get into federated services will naturally find their place here. They are not forced either way.

They won’t go to Lemmy. Anybody getting into self hosting will not just know what Lemmy is. Nor will they per se care for FOSS to the same extent you do. So having people helping around on conventional platforms seems perfectly valid to me.

They could always advertise a Matrix room and bridge conversations if the moderators really wanted to as well, instead of isolating themselves.

I personally like Cryptpad. It can be self hosted, but you can also make an acount elsewhere considering you don’t want the hastle of maintaining.

Overleaf can be self hosted too

Gnome with a ton of extensions and a Catpuccin theme for gtk apps

I’m mainly going into the negatives because the positives are fewer in number. Though those few do outweigh the negatives I’m about to write about. In my opinion at least

From what I’ve read it’s a lot better than what it used to be, but you can still bump into some weird issues that require more knowledge of your computer (compared to Windows) to get it fixed. Usually it’s audio, Flatpak permission issues or some application that comes preinstalled but crashes anyway. (i.e. Kontact on Fedora’s KDE spin). And in one case NetworkManager just disappeared on the family computer.

Gaming can be an issue, depending on what you like to play. AAA games with an important online component usually don’t work on Linux because of their anti-cheat. Not all of them of course like CS2, Rivals, and Dota 2. It was a bummer since I switched to Linux with the expectation that I’d still be able to keep on playing League, only to see it being unusable after a year. But if your friend group doesn’t play those kind of games (and I got lucky on that part), you’re fine. For example Peak and Gambling with Friends just worked on launch. I didn’t even bother looking at ProtonDB

I’ve seen a lot of people downplay the fact that you may not be able to play the games with invasive anti-cheat. But if that’s the game you (or your friends) like to play, that’s the game you like to play. No shame in that, especially if you don’t care/mind the anti-cheat. It’s your computer, you don’t have to be fully into foss to use Linux and you should (in my opinion) be able to weight the pros and cons yourself.

Another con (for people who just want to use their computer) or pro (for those who like to thinker around) is choice. There are so many distro’s with a ton of DE’s and ways of customising those DE’s where a new user will probably get stuck just deciding what they want to pick. Or you can just as easily look at something more technical and decide what compositor or init system you want to use. It’s a lot and for many users the deeper stuff doesn’t really matter to them.

I wasted* at lot of time tinkering with my Nix configs and my Arch install to not even use either distro anymore. It can get a bit much, especially if the thing you’re tinkering with is your main computer. Now I just have a separate second hand laptop to mess around with now so it doesn’t get in the way of actual work.

All of my most painful issues wouldn’t have been too bad if I just had someone to guide me in the right direction. This became really apparent when a friend of mine bumped into a lot of the same issues I did when he switched. He got his fixed fairly quickly since I was there to explain, for example, what was wrong with his fstab config and why he got into emergency mode because of that.

*It was a ton of fun looking back at it (and educational). But if you go into it with the idea that it’ll help you (in part) with productivity, you’re going to have some regrets with the time you actually spent on it in the moment

Maybe you can use some client to navigate your share in a more pleasant way instead of hosting something new? I never tried that so I can’t recommend anything for that unfortunately

If you are already hosting Nextcloud, the Memories app might fit your needs well.

Immich definitely isn’t a bad option either. It doesn’t take ton of resources, has a clean user interface and is multiplatform. Just like Coolie4 said, you can just try it out with a small collection first before committing to anything.

If you don’t want them on cloud providers because you’re not comfortable them being able to see those pictures, you can also pay for Ente.

Self hosting Ente is also an option, which is what I use for my family

You might also be able to get away with hosting something like Seafile and use directories as albums. But you won’t get random shuffling in that case (My bad I can’t read. This isn’t much better than what you’re doing currently)

Don’t tell me you actually read through the millions of lines of driver code in the Linux kernel

The Bitwarden client, extension and app keep those locally as well. So unless you have a prolonged power outage, you should be fine. Though if you don’t have anyone you need to share passwords with I’d recommend KeepassXC with Syncthing. You can set keybindings with the browser extension