It depends how much they’ve got to offer beyond AI. If the only thing they offer is AI (like OpenAI), yeah, they’re in trouble.

Turns out when you build your entire business on copyright infringement, a. it’s easy to steal your business and b. you have no recourse when someone does.

It probably downloads remote images in PDFs too, but I don’t know that for sure.

Installing Linux is super easy. Just set up a boot USB stick, then boot to it and follow the instructions. Make sure there’s no data on the computer you need, cause you’ll be reformatting the drive.

Then start by learning Docker and Docker Compose. Watch some YouTube tutorials. Docker will make everything easier for you. Docker Compose is like magic.

You should also learn how to use your firewall. UFW is easy to set up and use, but whatever comes on your OS natively, if it has one, should be fine.

If you want to set up a RAID, use something that is self-healing, like btrfs.

The more comfortable you get with the terminal, the better time you’ll have. Learn all the little programs, like ls, cat, grep, nano, tar, ps, df, du, dd, find, etc. Learn how to read Man Pages because they will help you a lot.

Don’t be afraid to try things out. If you’re worried you’ll hurt something on your real server, try it out in a virtual machine.

Compartmentalize everything with Docker. The only server running on your bare metal should be your SSH server, and maybe an administration service like Cockpit. Everything else can be reverse proxied with something like NPM (Nginx Proxy Manager). And of course, run that in Docker Compose too. That would listen on ports 80 and 443, and everything else would get its own port that only NPM connects to.

As for the OS, I’d recommend Fedora, but really any of the big distros should work fine for you. The nice thing about Docker is that you don’t need to worry about the environment for your services. It runs almost everything virtually, so as long as Docker runs on your OS, everything should run fine (given there’s an image for whatever architecture you’re running, X86 or ARM).

If you want a domain name, you can set up something like Cloudflare with ddclient to point to your IP address even if it changes. You can read more about Dynamic DNS to learn how to set it up with whatever registrar you have if you’ve already got a domain name. You don’t need ddclient if you’ve got a static IP from your ISP.

Then for encryption, you can set up Let’s Encrypt certificates. They can be set up and renewed automatically with Nginx Proxy Manager.

If you’re not yet familiar with it, learn how to set up a reserved IP address on your router for your server. That way DHCP will always give it the same IP address. Then you can forward ports to your server so you can access it from outside. I’d recommend against forwarding your SSH port, and instead use an OpenVPN server (there’s a Docker image for it) to connect to your internal network remotely.

If everything is behind NPM, you can use different subdomains for your different services. You use a wildcard SSL certificate, and assign each host to whatever port you configured your service to in its Docker Compose file. So, you might have an Immich server listening on port 8100, and a Jellyfin server listening on port 8101. Then, you can set up reverse proxy hosts in NPM for immich.yourdomain.com pointing to http://localhost:8100/ and jellyfin.yourdomain.com pointing to http://localhost:8101/.

I hope that helps. Good luck and have fun! :)

Good advice.

Cause they work better. Brand new ads, awesome new subscriptions. Flashy new AI features that definitely work super well and are definitely useful.

/s

I use a Framework 13, and I absolutely love it. The build quality isn’t quite as good as Apple, but it’s still exceptional. The Linux support on it is top notch.

Setting up your domain with a provider is not too difficult. You just have to add some DNS records. Most places will check them once you’re done and let you know if there’s anything wrong. The hardest part is that every domain registrar has their own DNS management interface, so you might have to read a few guides from your registrar to navigate it. It’s definitely worth doing though. It’s really nice to have your own dot com.

Yep. My dad said it’s working great for him.

Yeah. I had to go into the settings and change some setting to get it to work with keyboard input.

I had the same experience with my parents. They have a Samsung TV and the Jellyfin experience was awful.

I ended up getting them a little N100 mini pc and installed Bazzite and the Jellyfin app from Flathub. You can configure it so it knows it’s on a TV, and responds to keyboard controls. I got them a remote from a company called Pepper Jobs that gives keyboard input and now they have a great experience with it. Even my mom, who’s a big technophobe, loves it.

My dad also has an LG TV in his workshop that doesn’t have a working Jellyfin app (cause it’s ten years old), and he uses the Jellyfin app for his Xbox on that one.

And that’s why open source is best.

Yep. You are 100% right about that. It’s the best thing to be independent, but it’s so fucking hard because we’ve all just let these big email providers take away this wonderful system from us.

That’s why I’m super picky about which blocklists I use for my own email service. If a blocklist charges for removing your IP, or even if they make you jump through unreasonable hoops, I refuse to use them.

I also have to check regularly to make sure my own IPs aren’t on any lists. Apple is the worst, because they use a blocklist provider that has terrible communication and service unless you pay a huge subscription fee.

(One point though, it’s not the domain that goes on the blocklist, it’s the IP address of the SMTP server. You can use a custom domain name with most providers, then you’re using their SMTP servers, so their IP addresses. If you’re unhappy with them, it’s pretty easy to switch providers for your domain, then you get to keep the same email addresses.)

As someone who runs an email service, you are 1,000,000% right. I think I had literal nightmares about it.

Yeah, you can rent a virtual host and set up an email server on it. You gotta make sure port 25 is unblocked, which sometimes requires payment (Azure charges for it). Otherwise, you’d wanna look for a specific email hosting provider. You also would need to make sure the public IP you get isn’t on any spam lists, which can be a huge pain in the butt.

On my service, I specifically don’t use any spam lists that you have to pay to get off of, but a lot of places do (like Apple iCloud).

I don’t think Thunderbird is a direct alternative to Gmail. The best alternative is to own your own domain name and use your own email server, but that’s really impractical for most people. At the very least, owning your own domain name that you use for your email is way better than relying on a service that locks you in with their own domain name.

It’s not super easy to set that up, but it’s easier than most people probably think it is. A service with imap support will let you take all your old email with you if you switch providers.

My own email service, Port87, doesn’t have custom domain support or imap, but I’m working to add both of those features. Any service you use should have both of those if you want to be independent.

I’d imagine not very much. I don’t know how to measure just the GPU. It doesn’t have any desktop installed, so it’s only ever rendering a console. It can transcode tons of 1080p streams at once, so even a transcode probably doesn’t draw much power. The CPU is the hungriest part, and that’s mostly idling too.

That’s awesome! Yeah, I’ll definitely check it out. Thank you!

Sorry, but I don’t know. I use an A380 in my system. I got it before the A310 was available.

That’s really cool! I just run the vanilla server, but maybe I should check out Paper. Can it import worlds from vanilla?