I run Truenas scale on home server and on the off-site backup at a friend’s house. ZFS Snapshots get synced to backup server nightly. The snapshot system is nice because it only needs to send what has changed since the last synced snapshot.

Now that I have it setup it is mostly no effort on my part. But the initial ramp up to understand Truenas and ZFS was a second job for a few weeks. HexOS may be good choice if you want the power of Truenas but the handholding of setup wizards and such. But HexOS is currently $200 and Truenas is free. Pay in time or dollars.

Linus has literally talked about that multiple times. He learns just enough to cover what is needed for the video, does the video, then forgets most of.

They are more entertainment and light education. They are trying to target a very wide audience, so they can’t really do deep on things. For actually learning I like LearnLinuxTV and LawrenceSystems.

I would personally use Debian as my first choice then use Ubuntu if there is a reason to use it over Debian. For example Ubuntu will often integrate drivers for new devices faster than Debian. But if you are dealing with hardware released more 1 year ago, I wouldn’t worry about that. Also, some applications will specifically call out Ubuntu as their supported distro.

Chrome Remote Desktop works if she uses the Chrome browser and you only need occasional control when she present to authorize you getting access to her computer.

If your Internet connection is 1g or slower just about any desktop built in the last 10 years should be fast enough. The critical thing is having a good network card. Intel is generally very reliable for network cards and you can get used ones on eBay for not to much.

The suggestion I have heard is to have the remote machine connect to the machine on a schedule and pull the backups onto itself. Then your local machine doesn’t have direct access to the backups, making it harder to compromise the backups if hacked. But this also assumes the backup machine is locked down and isolated so it is lower risk than the local machine.

I think more important than which distro to choose is you setting up remote access for yourself. Tailscale and maybe rust desk or something would be a good idea. Or if you want to go further a vpn connection to a KVM device, some of them support being able to wire into the power button so you have full control. I would also have their account info in your password manager. Then you don’t need them to remember anything because you can do it when needed.

I just googled that model number and “Linux support”. The first result was the Brother website for driver downloads, which does include packages for linux.

This video has a similar discussion about the C++ programming language vs other programming languages that are theoretically better. https://youtu.be/I7fEsbksKRE?is=T53DqwVNM3ps97JY

The summary: An imperfect solution today is nearly always used over the perfect solution that will arrive at some unknown time in the future. Also momentum is a thing.

I have been happy with https://batterysharks.com/ . Just keep in mind batteries are heavy so shipping costs are high.

I read that as “Padan Fain” at first glance and was confused by The Far Side and Wheel of Time crossover.

I agree with having the server run Proxmox like others have said. Check out these YouTube channels for helpful information/guides:

LearnLinuxTV

LawrenceSystems

CraftComputing

Makes sense. Trained on software engineers working that pattern for decades.

I just started playing with Dockhand and it looks like it has a built in update schedule mechanism. It’s fills a comparable role as Portainer, so maybe check that out.

I would make an FAQ. I think for getting tone it is important to know what things are hard facts, what things are more subjective preferences, and what’s things are “we had to make a choice between options with no clear ‘best’ option”.

I would be inclined to think that if you are just renting a machine or VM and all the configuration/maintenance is your problem it would be close enough. But I am not a mod and don’t want to be.

I have a Pfsense router and run HAproxy on it. Most of the services I have run on 3 VMs in a Docker Swarm. HAproxy can point to all three and just uses the first to respond. I think this is what you are going for. I haven’t tested how robust this solution is because my primary motivation was wanting to play with Docker Swarm once I accepted K8s was not worth the effort.

I am no expert, so grains of salt and such. But my assumption is that it’s a marketing expense. They get a lot of people familiar with cloud flare services and some of them later need a professional level solution. So people use what they are already familiar with. This is the same reason why tech companies provide hardware/software to schools for cheap/free.

It will be controlled by Truenas not Proxmox. Truenas can add swap space to each drive automatically: https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/truenas/11.3-U2.2/storage.html

But you probably already have existing drives so that doesn’t help. This might though: https://wiki.debian.org/Swap

But be aware that Truenas is design to be an appliance and doesn’t really want you tinkering under the hood. So you may have to manually add the SWAP after each boot of TN.

I would guess the best long term fix would be moving services out of the TN VM and into a different VM.