Debian.
It’s pretty great for desktop stuff these days. Basically Ubuntu minus the shit. Any desktop you want, it’s got live installers now (several different ones with different desktops), it’s got nonfree firmware on the disc, they’ve really upped their game.
(And if the recent systemd stuff skeeves you out, you can toss out systemd, even. It’s not for the faint of heart though.)
– Frost
yes please! We’re using OpenRC on Debian right now, it’s very nice. Way less annoying than systemd.
– Frost
It totally does! We used to use it on Mac, back before we switched to Linux.
– Frost
Ah yes, the literal embodiment of “announcing the new OpenTormentNexus!”.
The homeserver doesn’t have to be fancy. We’re running all our stuff off a Dell Vostro from 2012 we got for like $30 on Craigslist. (It did need another $30 replacement PSU though. And it has 8GB RAM and a 500GB SSD which is nothing to sneeze at for a machine that cheap and that old.)
Funnily enough, Gajim from Flatpak (1.9.5) does drag and drop just fine!
I can’t remember what version we’ve got on our laptop– [can’t we just check packages.debian.org?] right! It’s 2.1.1-2, apparently. Good to hear that 2.2.0 is non-adwaitified, that sounds like a good place to fork from.
– Frost
This is why we run Gajim 1.9.5 in flatpak.
Which. Got removed from flathub, so to install it on our laptop, we had to do some kind of weird flatpak sideloading thing.
On our laptop we’ve been using Gajim 2.something from Debian 13 (our desktop runs testing so we can’t do that there). It’s not Full Gnomified. It also locks up whenever we try dragging a picture into the chat window to send. So… yeah.
Someone should fork Gajim pre-2.
The moment you get a TLS cert, it’ll show up in Certificate Transparency logs and apparently the attack bots scan that for targets.
You can totally do that yeah!
We have our stuff set up so inbound VPS traffic (for HTTPS) comes in on port 4430, while LAN traffic is on 443. It’s not done for firewall reasons, it’s so we can pass the client’s IP through with Nginx’s proxy_protocol feature, but you could just make your local-only services not listen on 4430. Boom, done.
Fail2Ban on the VPS is probably good. On the home server, it might just lock out the VPS (since everything comes from there).
Anyway yeah, I’ve got a whole guide on this sort of setup! https://frost.brightfur.net/blog/selfhosting-with-a-bounce-vps-part-1/
– Frost
We use Nextcloud. (It’s honestly about the only thing we use Nextcloud for.) For adding events and checking stuff we just use the web UI; it’s also synced to Kalendar/Merkuro Calendar on our desktop and we get calendar notifications that way.
– Frost