Tbh I forgot about giving access to others, my homelab is for me only lol

Isn’t it easier to set up a VPN than expose it to the internet?

If you’re very quick about it, iOS 26.3.1 is still signed so you could do the update and downgrade using iTunes if it does ask. You would have to factory reset the phone to downgrade again though and Apple could potentially stop signing it at any point leaving you stuck on 26.4

Ah I see, I didn’t realise you’d got rid of the old backups. Glad you managed to get most of it back!

And at least you have an off site backup, I still haven’t found a decent way to do it that isn’t prohibitively expensive

If you hadn’t got lucky with the backup array would your existing off site backups have been any help or were they too out of date?

Hopefully you can find something suitable, sounds like a Surface would be ideal if you can find one for a decent price!

No problem! What are you planning on using it for? I’ve had a look at the specs and it looks like the surface 3 is quite a lot weaker in single core performance, but multi-core seems about the same. It also only goes up to 4GB RAM, if you’re wanting to use Waydroid that probably won’t be enough as I struggle a little bit on 8GB (if I try to do split-screen in Waydroid it seems to run out of memory and one of the apps will crash). Despite that this one has enough power for what I use it for, although if I had paid for it I’d probably want a bit more power. It probably depends what price you can get one for.

Battery is hard for me to comment on, as well as the lack of Windows 11 support the other reason it was on the scrap pile at work is because they were complaining they got less than 30 minutes battery life out of it. I suspect a lot of that was because they used it outside so it got too cold. I’ve been getting about 2-2.5 hours out of it since I got it home which isn’t that great for a tablet, but good enough for me especially since it was free! I don’t know to what extent the battery has degraded so it may be possible to get a unit that lasts much longer. I think the one I have was originally purchased in 2018 so it’s fairly good for a 7 year old battery! The battery life is probably the biggest risk of buying a used one.

Having said that I’m not sure you’d ever get iPad levels of battery life from one, it’s more of a laptop that happens to be in a tablet form factor so even brand new its closer to a laptop in terms of battery life.

Sleep seems to work ok, although for some reason it takes 2 or 3 button presses to wake up as the screen immediately turns off again after the first press.

Which model have you found? Mine is a first generation Surface Go so I didn’t think there was a previous model?

I’ve honestly been quite impressed with it so far though, it seems to run Linux quite well! I didn’t even have to use the Surface kernel as everything worked fine with the standard kernel. The touchscreen worked fine straight away with no config needed. The gyroscope works as well for auto-rotate, although you may need to do a bit of config to get your DE to recognise it (there’s a GNOME extension to fix it). I even managed to get secure boot working with custom keys.

I found it a bit tricky at first as it was difficult to find an on screen keyboard that had extra keys such as tab, eventually I switched from KDE to GNOME as their on screen keyboard was the best. You probably won’t have that problem if you’re getting the keyboard cover anyway, and tbh if you don’t need a good on screen keyboard KDE may be the better choice for a touch screen.

I’m also quite impressed with Waydroid. There is a bit of a performance hit from it being virtualised rather than an actual Android tablet, but considering how weak the CPU is the performance is still pretty good. Its fairly noticeable if you compare the performance of a native web browser vs an Android browser running through Waydroid, but depending on what you’re doing it’s nice to be able to run Android apps since they’re more touch focused. It also doesn’t have perfect compatibility, I couldn’t get IronFox to work at all.

The only bit that was a bit dodgy was the camera, you need to install libcamera for it to work and even then some programs don’t recognise that you have a camera, or if it does you just get a green screen. But I have no need for the camera so I don’t really care. Switching to the Surface kernel didn’t help either so I’ve stuck with the standard kernel.

Governments have been pushing for more censorship and surveillance long before AI came onto the scene

Feel free to ask me in a few weeks and I’ll let you know! I’m going to try Waydroid as well, then it’s basically an Android and Linux tablet in one

Yeah Linux is great at resurrecting obsolete devices! This one was in the trash pile because it can’t run Windows 11. I can’t really comment on whether it’s a good idea to buy one though since I got this one free and I’ve not done much with it yet. It’s missing the keyboard cover and pen as well so I’m using it as more of an iPad/Android tablet alternative than a laptop.

Not sure if you’ve seen but there is a custom kernel for surfaces that you can install which should get most stuff working: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface?tab=readme-ov-file

They have a feature matrix so you can see which features should work depending on the model. However I haven’t tried installing it yet because the surface go is so old everything except the camera seems to work with the standard kernel.

Do you have any recommendations for a reverse proxy to use or resources on how to set one up? It’s not something I’ve properly looked into yet

I hadn’t considered OwnCloud because I thought it was pretty much the same as NextCloud but mainly aimed at enterprise. Does it have any advantages over Nextcloud?

I haven’t got round to setting up https yet since I only access my server via my LAN or Tailscale. When I do get round to setting it up I might use a reverse proxy rather than configuring it for every service. I also need to work out how to do automatic certificate renewal and if that’s even worth doing, so I don’t want to be forced into half-assing it for Nextcloud before I’m ready to do it properly. With Nextcloud specifically I also don’t like the fact that you can’t change the domain after the initial setup, using the community edition via http seems to get round that problem as well