Mordikan

“Rules for thee, not for me”

As a networking guy, for homelab setups the router is not core of your network. That role falls on the switch. In a perfect world, you’d have a layer-3 switch handling traffic between segments and only send traffic to the router for egressing the network or a few other cases. But in the real world, you have to start somewhere and that’s what you did. Don’t let anyone tell you that you did it wrong. If someone can’t make things work without having the perfect equipment, its probably the wrong hobby for those people.

Regarding network-wide adblocking, I had a squid proxy running that did this. Every machine was issued a self-signed certificate and the connections were basically MITM so I could check the calls being made. You can run into some issues with SSL-pinning in Android or things like HSTS for common websites sometimes, but overall it did function pretty well after tweaking.

If you do decide later to replace your existing router, I’d suggest trying to build your own. My current router is a mini-PC with dual NICs running Arch configured to do packet filtering, routing, a few automations, etc. It was refurbished and cost me about $80 USD. Its a really good experience in building servers and learning how various routing protocols work.

You could try Arch with dwm for the display manager. That will run on a Samsung 905S3G pretty decently well.

You can but its dependent on the phone and USB-C adapter being used. Originally I was attempting to use 5G cellular as backup internet via a refurbished Samsung A54 5G. I was able to build the GRE tunnel between the phone and router, but the phone would either charge or provide ethernet, not both.

I would again fallback on my original statement that non-technical users don’t have issues with Linux so making it “easier to use” is not actually asking to make things simpler, its just another way of saying “make it Windows”.

One thing I think is a very viable use case for AI is parsing search engine results.

I’d never turn over decision making to AI, but having it churn through relevant data on setup or troubleshooting does make that process a bit easier. It’s still not perfect and just reading some suggestions it generates I just have to be like “yeah, that’s stupid, I’m not doing that”. I think if you learn a subject and then are just using AI to assist and not lead the way, you’d do fine.

The biggest problem we have right now is companies trying to make money off the hype and trying to push AI into some part of their company so they can say they are AI-positive to their shareholders. For every 1 good use case, there are probably 100 bad. But the reality is even a bad idea if implemented correctly (in terms of revenue - not actual function) can be successful and dig that hole a little bit deeper.

The problem with this idea is that you could basically summarize it as being “difficult as a new user to make advanced changes”.

Your average non-technical user does great on Linux. There’s nothing to unlearn from Windows. Its the Windows “power users” that crash and burn because they keep trying to force Windows logic into a non-Windows environment, get upset about it, complain it doesn’t work, and then leave.

I’m not sure what basic feature you’re referring to, but if you are installing dependencies than that is not a basic feature. That is additional software that probably maintains its own configuration. I would also argue that a non-technical user, much like they would in Windows, is not going to be trying to make changes like that anyway.

In the end, I think this is the real issue:

But even as a very experienced desktop computer user…

No, you are not a very experienced desktop computer user, you are an experienced Windows user. In Linux, you are a new user trying to leverage the non-applicable OS you came from and struggling because of that.

I’ve been looking for a new book server and discovered Booklore/Grimmory as well. Here is the history I can find on it as some of what people are saying is not 100% correct.

1. It was not vibe-coded. The original project predates genAI, so that wouldn’t have been since. I think some of the newer code might be, but the core seems unchanged.

2. The security issue mentioned is an API authentication bypass whereby book files were exposed if the endpoint was reachable (CVE-2025-62614). This has an 8.7 rating on severity, but realistically the end result is your books could be copied.

3. Licensing. This is the real skullduggery in my opinion. The maintainer had plans to switch from AGPL-3.0 to BSL. That might not be legal and it cuts out any contributors and sets the project up for monetization.

My concern with Grimmory is that it is too embedded with the flaws of Booklore. In testing it was really sluggish on mobile. I still need to do more testing, but aside from being graphically nice, it didn’t feel that stable. I was hoping to move away from Calibre-Web due to auto-importing not being supported, but in the end, I’ll likely just write something to support this on my end.

If I’m being completely honest, it sounds like you hit a problem and then just kinda gave up (I’m not trying to sound mean or anything - please don’t take it that way).

If I were in that situation I would probably drop to a terminal (ex. CTRL+ALT+3) and try to find what failed (journalctl). Especially if the screen just stayed black I would probably wonder what packages I just updated. I’m not going to remember, but it’s probably something graphical. Maybe I installed nvidia dkms packages and I have a mismatch or I decided to try out a different login manager and it happens to not support Wayland or something. Snapshots would be my last resort, not my first.

As far as NixOS, I love it. Its incredibly stable and the declarative language is really handy to write in. I’m not aware of any graphical store though (outside of maybe some github project). Its declarative meaning you write the configuration.nix file and import any secondary files into the config. And packages are installed declaratively:

environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    pkgs.gnome-tweaks
    pkgs.gnome-control-center
    pkgs.gnome-terminal
}

I would say if you are wanting GUI that NixOS is probably not a great choice. I mean just to get installed package version, you’re going to have to do a one-liner (mine for example):

#!/bin/bash 
find /run/current-system/sw/bin/ -type l -exec readlink {} \; | sed -E 's|[^-]+-([^/]+)/.*|\1|g' | sort -ui

The problem with religious texts is they are so badly written that essentially anything you want to do is permissible. Look at a comment you made:

The basics argument is taking anything from anyone without their consent is morally wrong and haram.

Who did take from? You couldn’t have taken a game from a developer/publisher if its pirated. You took it from a bittorrent seeder. Did they provide consent? Yes, they were seeding it to you.

If I tell you a joke that I heard from someone who heard it from someone, etc. did I steal the joke? At what iteration of copying something does it stop being theft? Is it theft to begin with to make a copy?

So like a virtual KVM switch? Barrier was discontinued, but I think solutions like Synergy, Deskflow, or InputLeap still exist. There might be a better community suggested alternative to those as well.

A lot of flatpak stuff requires pieces of the Gnome environment, but that doesn’t mean its installing the Gnome DE to your machine if that’s what you mean.

A well-designed CLI? Maybe sed. A badly designed CLI? Probably also sed.

This is the definition of a zero effort post.

You don’t want to put forth the effort to bug hunt, you want an AI agent to bug hunt for you. You don’t want to learn to even setup the agent, you want other people to explain step by step how to do that for you.

I’m assuming you aren’t even going to review before it submits. Honestly though, how would you review it given you don’t know anything about the topic its submitting on.

No, that’s not how the new EU legislation works. The new laws build off existing Digital Services Act (DSA) and legacy E-Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC) requirements. The DSA states again that you would have to lock down access to the material (once you become aware) and then inform authorities.

All site operators maintain safe harbor with EU authorities unless those two points are broken. In both US and EU pending legislation, no requirement to scan all STLs is required, so you do not have to automatically check all files like you mentioned.

I wouldn’t let that be a deterrent to starting an instance. Just make sure you understand the obligations you have as site owner when it comes to misuse. Maintain good logging and follow legal requirements (which in the US is locking down and preserving evidence and reporting to law enforcement hotlines - depending on the nature of the misuse).

Its the Chilling Effect. Fear of breaking a law (even if that law ends up not being applicable to you) is enough to scare people into complying with it. I’ve seen companies worry about GDPR that have no presence in the EU. Yes, the EU could still fine them, but they wouldn’t have to actually pay or even acknowledge it.

And how exactly would that be breaking the law?

Systemd isn’t an operating system provider and has no legal obligation to make any change.

I think the supply chain issue is probably the most pressing out of all of them. The other points people have are either non-issues or a result of dropping usage hogs into existing electrical infrastructure. Infrastructure can be updated, though.

Supply chain is different. There isn’t a supply shortage of chips, its that profitability dictates you should sell them to datacenters or adjacent industry. Unlike infrastructure where you can just build out more, adding more supply for chips just means you have more to sell to datacenters. Since the demand is there, end of day profits will always win.

Saw it was already commented about CO2, so I thought I’d counter-point your environment claim regarding water usage (since that is something I’ve seen a lot of too).

The ISSA had a call to action due to the AI water use “crisis”: https://www.issa.com/industry-news/ai-data-center-water-consumption-is-creating-an-unprecedented-crisis-in-the-united-states/

68 billion gallons of water by 2028! That’s a lot…right? Well, what I found is that this is somewhat of a bad faith argument. 68 billion gallons annually is a lot for one town, but those are numbers from a national level and it isn’t compared to usage from anything else. So, lets look at US agriculture (that’s something that’s tracked very well by the USDA): https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Census22_HL_Irrigation_4.pdf

That’s 26.4 trillion gallons of water annually. So, AI datacenter represents 0.26% of agriculture consumption. If AI datacenter consumption is a crisis, why is agriculture consumption not a crisis? You could argue that agriculture produces “something useful”, but usefulness doesn’t factor into the scarcity of a resource. So, either its not a crisis, or you are cherry picking something that has no meaningful outcome to solving the problem.