I can recommend the nanopi r4s, supported by openwrt, ipfire and I think opnsense. Ive been using it as my main router for almost a year now on a symmetric 1Gb connection. Best part is it’s super cheap and tiny

Yes to unified inbox, not sure about exchange but works well with IMAP

External drive? Is it a usb drive? If it is you might be best pulling out the drive and connecting it to a sata port. The mount as read only and do what everyone else suggests

Did you know K-9 mail is soon to be thunderbird mobile

I had a fake item sent to me, reported to eBay to request a refund, got an immediate refund, seller asked to return the item. I said no, its fake I’ll bin it. Left negative feedback that the items are fake. eBay then removed the review and let the seller keep selling. At least he had one less item to sell and was out of pocket on postage

I went through this at the beginning of the year, it get 900/900 fibre, settled on openwrt running on a nanopi r4s. My other options were a nanopi r6s with openwrt, or nuc type hardware/server running something like pfsence/opnsence etc. The openwrt install took about 5mins then a couple of hours of exploring various menus options etc, which I didnt end up changing.

The r4s doesn’t have eMMC where as the r6s does. I just left the SD card as rw, I’m not too concerned about failure, I’m hoping for some wear leveling built in, if not SD cards are cheap. I should probably clone the disk and have a cold spare SD card.

Storage wise I’m using 17. 63MiB of 29.38GiB, I think I may have bought a too big SD card Ram usage is around 88MiB of 3.87GiB I have got a couple of more things to set up like wireguard but as it stands I’m glad I went the openwrt route over a full server install

I looked at the nanopi r4s and the r6s when I replaced my router. I did consider doing it all myself but in the end settled on the r4s running opwenwrt, I think it took all of 5mins from download to working system. The benefit been the openwrt image has uboot included so only one image need writing, also web interface out of the box

Don’t think of it as an installation, it’s writing image files to disk. I prefer using gparted or disks when working with partitions. Then use dd for the actual writing as I can quite easily see I’ve got the right partition from gparted/disks. Got that wrong a couple of times 😅

Consider this; you were taught Microsoft <product> in school as it’s used in work environments, Microsoft <product> is used in work environments as it’s taught in schools or the person making the decision was only taught one product.

Why do you think Microsoft is giving free upgrades from windows 10 to 11, same thing from XP upwards. It’s vendor lock in, and that’s bad for many reasons

No offence, but have you been living under a Microsoft shaped rock for the past 30 years?

I’ve been down this road, java Minecraft is fine, bedrock Minecraft is not. Most people and cross platform play Minecraft use the bedrock version. It’s literally Microsoft saying FU linux

I’ll counter the other comments. It’s not any more difficult to maintain than any other service. What is a pain is the spam, and as I run it for a business the users. The biggest problem I have is other mail servers been incorrectly configured for SPF, DKIM and dmarc , usually it’s things like external billing platforms that have been integrated incorrectly by customers and suppliers. Spam is now starting to come though with all the proper headers for SPF and DKIM

I did see a m.2 based expansion card based on ASM1166 chipset, or failing that a sata port multiplier, but those depend on the data port supporting it

It all depends on how paranoid you feel. If the device has a hardcoded IP addresses changing the DNS won’t do anything. The only way to block that is by using a firewall external to your device and blocking it that way. You can get malware/backdoors in all the places you mention, and even built in to usb cables as well.

In the end the question becomes who can you actually trust, and how sensitive is your data. At some point you have to trust someone and potentially give any some form of data/information, otherwise you are just living in a bubble with no access to anything.

Personally I don’t believe anyone is interested in my data/info for anything other than selling adverts towards me, and potentially trying to steal money via scams, fraud etc.

I run a pixel 6a, some people will tell me that Google has all my data, and they are right, however I know what they have and can be pretty certain that I’m not going to have random crap and potential malware on the CPU or chip on the board, and it also receives regular updates.

Any app you run the phone (unless root enabled) will have to run on top of whatever rom you have installed, and is ultimately controlled by the Rom. It probably isn’t but again depends on level paranoia and trust you have. The paranoid route would be to build your own version of android from source on something like a fairphone.

Are they actually called Important Folder (ABC), it might be truncating the name at the spaces, and giving the same folder name 3 times, Try Important_folder_a etc.

The amount of times I’ve had this argument in the office is untrue. I think the default values aren’t stored in the docx file or something like that, but when you manually set a value it does store it in the docx.

Then you have the whole proprietary blobs in a “open” standard to deal with.

The worst offenders are people who format with tabs and spaces and wonder why it’s all messed up.

If you have to use a program that is windows only you have to use windows. I could move our entire company over to Linux if it wasn’t for SOLIDWORKS been windows only.

Wine can be an option but I’ve found it very hit and miss on some of the more obscure windows only programs

In the past I’ve used virtual box (virtual machine) in seamless mode, so it looks just like a window in Linux. I can’t remember why I stopped, I think it was down to licencing and oracle buying it.

Exactly all programs should be web based cloud subscription only. We don’t want that filthy code on our rgb nvme drives

I’ve done it before where a newer version of a program is available that hasn’t been backported, just need to watch the dependencys. Sometimes it works out fine, othertimes you need a second package or 2 to update, othertimes it’s time to upgrade to the latest bleeding edge release of the OS

Oh and sailing, kayaking/paddle boarding, bike rides, at the beach in waves, generally anything that involves getting wet