Thanks for the great reply! I’m sorry for the appearing of the elitism, I guess that’s rather the wording choice than a real attitude. Personally, I don’t feel like I’m very experienced, so there’s nowhere for the true elitism to stem from. I’m really interested in Arch based distros. But I don’t think I’m going to try them, purely because I’m happy with Arch. Hence, I’m asking others. It’s a curious case for me, theoretically. As long ago, I thought people go with Arch based distros purely because they couldn’t manage to install Arch. But that was quite easy, actually. For some reasons, I really disliked Manjaro, but I haven’t heard of it for a long time. Perhaps that’s my bubble.

There’s some idiotic comments like some guy who literally wasted my time by having idiotic replies, again and again, so I managed to block them. So, thanks for a thoughtful explanation.

I wonder what is the difference with these newer versions, as most of my hardware is Haswell era or even earlier. It works great with Arch + Sway. Or even Fedora with the default Gnome. As I understand it, you talk of the much newer hardware, like 5 years old.

I do agree with you, entirely. My point is, it was the easiest option. I guess self-hosting Headscale should eliminate that, if there’s nothing suspicious with the clients.

Also, I tried Netbird, and it was good, but a bit more complicated. I didn’t like it UX wise, but that could be me not having enough time to explore. I have it installed with my mum’s PC at her home. My infrastructure uses Tailscale now.

Also, there are other alternatives. I haven’t tried them yet. All I wanted to say, there are compromises everywhere, and dealing with the US is the compromise for now.

I’m located in Ukraine, so personally, I wish them what they want to push on me — this administration wants me and my family to die for the orange monkey to steal some more money for himself, betraying his own country; I guess that’s obvious for all of us.

But I just think for me personally that’s rather a vector of my movement rather than changing things momentarily. So, to me, Tailscale was a god send. As I struggled to get through this. Now I understand it a bit better. I’d love to setup WireGuard myself, I just lack some knowledge, and also time plus energy. I hope I’d do that this year. We’ll see. Thanks for enhancing my point, and happy new year.

I’d say the same. About money, I’d formulate this differently: most of the people here would be happy to help for free, I believe. And the author could just ‘thank with a coffee’ kind of thing, if they feel like it. I see that’s as a very nice option for everyone.

With the 3rd part, I’d recommend going with Tailscale, it really helps for folks who don’t understand many things yet, and is super easy to setup. The free tier allows 3 users and 100 computers, so even if you need more, it’s easy to start with that, learn things and then change this aspect.

Personally, I have tremendous issues with paper notebooks. I love them for random notes, but not structuring things. I started a blog a year or so ago, and it was very rewarding to document everything there. My blog is not online yet, but I plan to publish it within a month or so. If things are good, maybe the next week even.

I wanted to tell others that if you want any help setting up a simple blog for yourself, you’re welcome to ping me, I can help you with setting that up, and you may see what difference it makes! I so so so wish I had that done years ago, but at least I started already.

Yes! I literally wrote the guy (or gal) the same thing personally, before reading any comments. Keeping a journal helps so so much! Start a blog if you can, I only started it in 2025 (having some random notes here and there before that), and it’s so so so rewarding!

Also, GPTs help a lot, especially when you’re able to verify the outputs. It’s somewhat challenging, to understand it’s lying, if you’re new to the topic, but I noticed it’s quite good at the simple questions, especially tech ones.

I’ve got an impression that rather a friend than a consultant is needed. Unfortunately, I’ve got none when I needed them so much. But I think I can be someone’s friend, so feel free to ping.

I wasn’t able to read all the replies, but I thought I’d like to state that I quite enjoy the community! So many people willing to help, and discuss things. I wish I’d found the community much earlier, when I just started the self-hosting adventure.

Not the entire country is on fire. Actually, I was thinking of starting one myself (I started, but only for myself, and to test waters, so at this point that’s self-hosted adventure: I have a few servers in just three locations). I’m in the west, so it’s quite stable here, more or so. However, we do have blackouts at this moment. One location is the office building, which has lots of solar panels, so that very server never went offline!

My concern is, I don’t know if/how that could be abused by Russians. Especially now, during the active war phase.

I’d love that to be a thing for someone who needs it, and it could be some support for the local economy either, so win win for everyone. But I’m very hesitant of the bad actors. Unfortunately, I don’t have the needed knowledge (meaning deep knowledge of some edge cases) at this very moment, but I keep thinking of buying a somewhat large land mass for a house plus a separate building for servers and all that. I imagine it won’t be something of a real data centre, but it might be a decent one (one day).

I’m not aware of any projects like that, I’m a foreigner here.

Why would you want one?

How was Atomic Fedora for you? I really want to try it somewhere. I tried on my own machine, but for me Arch is just better. But for someone’s managed computer (a family member, more likely), I think that’s a really cool system.

Not much from me, but it wasn’t clear to me whether you were successful with WireGuard. I’m not, till today! So I can’t recommend Tailscale more! Others recommend things like Headscale, or others, I plan to migrate to them one day. But so far, Tailscale was really good for me.

Hey, but that’s barely an explanation. I don’t force Arch on you, I am just curious what specifically you like about this fork. Is it some DE being pre-installed and pre-configured? Why would it matter for a server then? Or is it something else? If so, do you mind sharing more? Perhaps you have some blog about that. I like reading people new to Linux.

I don’t want to spill some memes worth Arch elitism here, but I just doubt Arch derivatives crowd knows what x86-64-v3 thing is. Truth be told, I barely understand that myself. So I guess the difference should lie somewhere else. My previous research showed that the crowd is afraid of no installer installer, but these days Arch has some kind of installer, doesn’t it?

I’m just struggle to grasp what does it have, what those defaults are? A DE and whatnot? Is it just an opinionated Arch? Looks quite popular for everyone and their dog to have their own opinionated Arch this year, isn’t it?

That may work for a family, but won’t work for a smart company that uses chat occasionally. We’re having like three managers who’d use the chat all the time, while the rest of the company may send 10 messages a month. Company subscription price would be an absurd one for that situation. We’re able to self-host any chat solution, yet I’m not sure which one. It looks like none fits the criteria, with the exception of Matrix perhaps. But I haven’t hosted it myself yet, and it looks like they’re looking for ways to motivate self-hosters just not do that.

That’s why I’m asking, what’s the difference? Which defaults? I have never used CachyOS and have no idea what it brings to the table. I use Arch for ~7 years, and I’m no looking for a replacement. Especially an Arch based one. Yet, I’m curious of the difference, and why one would want Cachy, especially as a server.

I haven’t noticed as I have zero NVidia GPUs among my computers and servers.

Have you explored what it takes to self-host a notification server? I explored Zulip, and it looks similar, but I haven’t explored the notification server yet.

Why would you want it? Especially for a server. If you can just use Arch. The installation part takes 5 minutes, if you’re not doing it the very first time. My very gist Arch server is about 6 years now, no need to reinstall, always updated.

I did, while it mostly okay, I don’t like the mobile notifications limit. Even for a family, ten people is quite small, as inviting a couple of friends would reach the limit.

With all the chat options, I’m looking for a self-hosted fully controlled version. So for me, that’s a bit weird that a self-hosted version is crippled in any way. If Zulip allows me to self-host the mobile notification thingy, then I think it’s a good alternative. I haven’t explored that yet.

Among other things, I quite like the blog, especially travelling photos. There’s some ‘old Internet / old blogosphere’ vibe in it.

Nothing really add to the topic of having a MacBook Air M2 with Linux. Glad it works well, I’m eyeing an M1 one for myself. Yet my Retina (2014 model) works perfect with Arch Linux (including sleep), so I’m patiently waiting for it to break. And at the same me I hope it would work another decade, so good it is. Battery life is quite great, it’s between 3 to 4 hours with battery being at 50% of capacity. So, I expect the new battery could give me up to 8 hours, which is pretty impressive for me. In reality, I don’t need a session for over an hour or two. The only thing I miss is USB-C charging, as that way I could charge with anything when I have no charger on me. Again, in reality, it’s a pretty rare scenario.