I use Podman on my desktop, but only for that single container (I need Microsoft SQL Server for work). I know they are 99% compatible, including CLI syntax, but in that 1% cases things might break and thus https://selfhosting.sh/ is recommending to stick to Docker for newbies, because almost all tutorials are written for Docker. I don’t know, I might try with Podman, however I don’t really need a steeper learning curve if whatever setup guide for some service that I’m using is not compatible with Podman.

Ok, I will keep that in mind. I’m just wary of what you said earlier:

You can fuck up both Ubuntu and Debian’s upgrades by adding a lot of 3rd-party repos because apt doesn’t safeguard against external repos interfering with the core repos’ dependency graph.

You’re not the first person to tell me not to add too many external repositories on Debian for the same reason.

Maybe I don’t need the new features :)

So the trick is to keep the OS minimal, install only Docker from its repo and install anything else in Docker containers.

Why from Docker’s repo and not from Debian’s? I just did a quick apt search docker and I see docker.io and docker-cli.

So, theoretically, I could run Proxmox on the VPS if it’s running Debian? I read that Proxmox requires a lot of RAM and VPSes are too expensive in that regard. But I might run Proxmox at home, I have a beefy PC with 64GB of RAM, except it doesn’t turn on right now (something died, either the PSU or the motherboard, I still need to have it diagnosed).

One thing I read about is that Ubuntu provides unattended updates, so it can automatically update packages and restart the server (that seems a bit too far ;) ). It’s probably possible on Debian but not out of the box.

That’s where Btrfs snapshots come in handy :) I was on openSUSE Tumbleweed just before this Debian install, but openSUSE gave me trouble with some software and a couple broken distro upgrades (which, in a rolling release, happen all the time — I upgraded once a week) not of my fault (they’re in the process of some changes related to SELinux and my system was unable to upgrade due to some policies — I didn’t tweak anything, it was annoying). So I switched to Debian and it’s been smooth sailing. So far what they say has been true — it’s rock stable, boring even :) Everything just works for me. But I have the default ext4 filesystem and although I do 3-2-1 backup, having automated recoverable snapshots was nice on openSUSE.

Thanks for the detailed answer.

This is why one of the standard steps before upgrades is to disable third party repos and uninstall packages that came from those.

Do you mean a full system upgrade?

I currently have a few third party repos added (like Firefox, Google Chrome, VS Code, etc). So far I’ve been upgrading them along all the other packages with apt.

Yes, I think those are actually suggest. I caught that after I posted. So this screenshot is not the best example.

Oh, I just realized those are suggested packages, not recommended packages! So I guess these are opt-in via --install-suggests. But my question is still valid in general.

As a Linux noob I like your oneliner but I agree with @solxix@pawb.social

A more approachable way to do that would be to use wget and then manually run apt install with the downloaded file. That’s what I’ve been doing. :) Yours is “magic” ;)

I have a similar setup. My PC has disks formatted in Btrfs, so I get copy on write snapshots of my system disk, then have a local Restic backup on a secondary disk and then have an off-site Restic backup in the cloud on the Storage Box.

Thanks for pointing me to Paperless, never heard of it, it seems like it could be useful. I wonder how it deals with languages other than English, if at all.

I don’t get it. It indexes pages which were already visited, right? So in order to find some website I need to first use another search engine. Afterwards, that website is in my browsing history and if I need it again, I don’t need to search for it. So what’s the use case for this project?

Great idea! However, something bothers me. From F-Droid:

This app relies on catbox.moe to upload images and Google, Bing, Yandex, TinyEye, Perplexcity and ChatGPT for search.

I am not familiar with that service, so I went to the website and looked at FAQ:

How long does Catbox keep files for?
Forever. If you don’t want your file to stick around until the heat death of the universe, use Litterbox.

Are you (F)(L)OSS?
no.

Not sure what it is exactly but having my uploaded files stored in some obscure database until the heat death of the universe does not fill me with trust.

I have a Pixel phone and used the screen scanning tech (forgot how it’s called, but it’s the same feature, I believe) for OCR to copy the WiFi password from a photo of the sticker that’s on the router and of course it immediately sent that password to Google and run the search, ugh. I don’t want to send my WiFi password to some website I never even heard about, either.

Can you explain how it works?

Thanks!

May I ask which Hetzner VPS did you choose? I wonder if the Cost-Optimized ones are sufficient. I would be using it with max 2 users, same as you.

If I go with the VPS option I’d like to host Immich instead. But it seems to be hungry for memory, especially with the ML features enabled.

I really don’t understand this “Nextcloud does too much” rhetoric, the standard bare metal installation is basically just Files, Photos, Calendar and Contacts

That’s just my impression based on their website, it looks like a business suite, but I’m probably looking at it wrong. Thank you, the part about the database is important.

A bonus question regarding the 3-2-1 backup strategy. If my VPS is in Germany, but I spin up a Storage Box in Finland, that falls within the boundaries of “off-site backup”, even if both are managed by Hetzner. What do you think? It’s just easiest to setup, I guess. Otherwise I need another cloud provider (perhaps some S3 object storage).

I was looking at this self-hosting guide and scratching my head in confusion. They say $80 nets you a 4TB HDD. Meanwhile, in my country that costs more like $220+. Yes, for an HDD, not SSD (that would be more like way over $500). I see the guide has been updated this year, so either the US lives in another world or nobody has updated the pricing.