I’ve installed Debian Buster, Bullseye and Bookworm on these systems from the netinst ISO, with no tweaking needed. Trixie is the first release where I’ve been unable to do this, and even upgrading the system doesn’t work (hits a memory deadlock on boot).

Does it support a server installation (no GUI)?

Even if I avoid the installer (e.g. by cloning an existing system, or by installing an older version of Debian then upgrading it), and have swap space, the kernel hits a memory deadlock on boot. I suspect it’s deadlocking before swap is initialized.

I’ve considered this, it just might be a pain to keep up to date with kernel updates. I guess I could create an appropriate config and then automate the builds.

I also forgot that Debian has a cloud-specific kernel (linux-image-cloud-amd64) which excludes a bunch of drivers. I’ll try that out too.

The other thing on my list to try is mmdebstrap with a basic Debian install, using runit or openrc instead of systemd.

Interesting - I’ve never heard of this but it looks useful. Love that it supports OIDC. Thanks for the link.

Syncthing is pretty good.

I tried seafile and it kept going down and corrupted a lot of files after an unexpected server shutdown. It shared the corruption to all the local files on every app/pc I had it shared to.

This sounds like an issue with your server rather than with Seafile specifically. Was the unexpected shutdown due to a power outage? You should have a UPS so that it can properly shut down during outages. You’ll hit similar issues with any other system otherwise.

That’s true, but the stickers weren’t much work so I figured I’d try them out.

paperless treats it as a single ASN number row and reports the highest used.

This is OK as long as you consistently use the QR codes to assign ASNs.

If your scanner supports scanning to a network share, install Samba on your Pi and share the paperless-ngx incoming directory. My ScanSnap iX1600 supports this, but I’m not familiar with other models. I had to configure the scanner using the Windows app to add the SMB details, but once it’s configured, it works without a computer attached.

Paperless-ngx also supports email. You can set up a separate email account for it, then forward it any documents you want to keep to it.

For documents you need to keep a physical copy of, use ASNs (archive serial numbers) to correlate the physical and virtual copy. You can use QR code stickers to automatically set the ASN in paperless-ngx. I posted a nested comment with more details about this.

Consider using paperless-ai to use an LLM to tag and title your scanned documents automatically. It needs a webhook to be configured. Consider a local model if possible, and if you want to use a hosted model, review the provider’s privacy policy to ensure they do NOT train the AI on user content.

And file away your scanned papers separately,

I’d recommend using ASN (archive serial numbers) for documents you store a physical copy of, following the recommended flow

I printed ASN QR code stickers, using the smallest Avery labels I could find (Avery 5267 in the USA, L4731REV-25 in Europe) along with their free online design app.

For documents I want to keep, I stick a QR code sticker on them before scanning. Paperless-ngx automatically detects the QR code and sets the ASN. I then file it away in a folder that’s sorted by ASN. When I need to find the physical copy again, I first look in Paperless to find the ASN, then find the document in the folder (pretty quick since all documents are sorted).

You’ll need to set the following settings:

PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_ENABLE_BARCODES=true
PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_ENABLE_ASN_BARCODE=true
PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_BARCODE_SCANNER=zxing

It’s also worth checking debrid services like Real Debrid, Premiumize, TorBox, AllDebrid, etc to see if they have the torrent cached, if you have an account at any of these services. Sometimes there’s torrents with 0 or 1 seeds that are still cached, especially if it’s a movie or TV show.

If it’s cached then you could just download it at full speed from the cache then use those files to seed.

This is how all language package managers work, unfortunately

npm does actually support signing and provenance (tracking how the package was built), so in some ways it can be more secure than other package managers. https://docs.npmjs.com/generating-provenance-statements

If you use one of the CI/CD systems they support (currently Github Actions and Gitlab CI), it can attach a signed attestation to the package stating the commit hash that was used to build the package, along with the steps taken to build it. This is combined with trusted packaging using OpenID Connect with short-lived tokens that are only obtainable in the correct CI environment, rather than using access tokens or username and password.

It only supports some CI systems because they have to guarantee that the connection between the CI system and npm is secure.

Some of the recent issues have been attacks on the CI system, rather than npm itself. For example, a Github Action that’s only supposed to run for commits to the main branch, but unintentionally runs for some subset of pull requests too.

Of course, all this stuff is optional, and pushing to npm directly from a developer’s computer still works and is still not verifiable at all.

I think the best approach is what Flathub/Flatpak, F-Droid (Android) and Composer/Packagist (PHP) do. You provide your repository URL, and they build the code on their end. Packages are always guaranteed to be built from code in the repo.

Debian Linux is also moving towards requiring repeatable builds, meaning that a package built from source should be byte-for-byte identical to the package in the repo.

Password protect it and just let friends use it? Or have it just for yourself :D

I just posted a comment about this :D

https://romm.app/

https://romm.app/ - Self hosted game ROM manager that lets you play retro games directly in the browser (using RetroArch cores compiled to WebAssembly).

https://retroassembly.com/ is a similar project.

There’s also https://gamevau.lt/ which is like a self-hosted version of Steam, for DRM-free games (like from GOG).

Game servers? https://linuxgsm.com/. Have an Unreal Tournament 99… tournament with friends.

Companies sometimes sell their own first-party data, but not nearly as often as people think. If a company has data that other companies don’t have, a lot of the time they’ll want to keep it for themselves, since it can give them a competitive advantage over other platforms.

If Amazon knows what movies and TV shows you like, they’re going to use that data to improve ad performance on their own platforms - suggested content on Prime Video, product ads on Amazon, etc. They’re not going to give it to some other company to use.

The one major exception to that are data brokers. These are companies that only exist to sell data. These are less well known companies. They often use public data and combine it with things like supermarket loyalty data and purchase history.

For a beginner, I’d probably stick to Github initially, just because there’s so many guides and tutorials on how to use it, and their free plan is still pretty generous.

A lot of the knowledge is transferable though. If you do want to try something else, Codeberg is pretty good for open-source.

To just learn about Git, you don’t even need a host like Github or Codeberg. You can have a Git repo just on your computer, and still get a bunch of the benefits of source control - a full history of everything, separate branches and worktrees so you can have multiple incomplete changes and switch between them, etc.

Or Forgejo, which is a fork of Gitea and is what Codeberg uses. They explain their advantages over Gitea here: https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/

The tl;dr is that Forgejo is maintained by a non-profit whereas Gitea is maintained by a for-profit company, and Forgejo is completely open-source whereas Gitea is open-core with some features only available in their hosted service. Forgejo also has better testing and a bigger focus on security.