The biggest perk for me for a dedicated NAS is redundancy and hot swap ability.

It is inevitable that a few of your spinning disks will die and need to be replaced, a proper dedicated NAS box will let you pop out and swap that drive and then the NAS software will rebuild the array for you with no data loss.

Obviously you can do most all of this with a normal desktop, but it’s generally easier with the right hardware.

I custom built mine running Truenas which was way cheaper then a dedicated NAS, but also I’m an IT turbo nerd so I wanted to do the whole thing myself.

What do you think the odds are that some of these make it state side?

Most of the address and numbers they do have are off or old.

I moved through a lot of places in college and one of those 5 are usually what shows up.

Now that I think about it I did used to sign up for a bunch of religious mailing lists before I would leave an apartment because I thought it was funny.

I want someone to prove his LLM can be as insightful and accurate as paid one.

Are you using LLMs as search engines?

Bold.

I use Gemma, LLama 3.2, and Deepseek to either fix formatting, summarize documentation to give me commands for Linux software, and write simple code structure for me to refine into working code.

Sure it takes longer to generate than a cloud compute would, but

1. privacy obviously. I know you dismissed it but that’s really the biggest reason anyone will have.

2. this feels better environmentally. I actually don’t know if that’s true, but it objectively touches less computers for such simple tasks. It would be wasteful of infrastructure to do it over the web.

3. it’s just cooler to have a conversation with my computer. I’ve learned a lot about how the whole process works and that’s more valuable to me as a non dev than just getting the end results.

My “production” home lab is 3 Optiplex 3050 with i7-7700. They work great and are pretty low power.

You got into Self Hosting for unreasonable ideological reasons

I got into self hosting to avoid AWS Fees

We are not the same

This is something I tell people all the time. It’s just as easy to troubleshoot on Linux as it is on Windows the biggest issue is that most people are just kinda innately aware of Windows troubleshooting by virtue of the fact that they’ve been doing it for so long. Linux is probably just as complicated skill wise, but most people just aren’t used to it yet.

And that’s especially true for gamers. If you’ve gone through the dance of tweaking BIOS settings or DDU removing drivers and reinstalling them, then you’re probably gonna do fine on Linux. The only difference is sometimes there won’t be a GUI you have to go hunt down. It will be like 3 commands someone has already written out for you that you copy/paste into the CLI. Which is WAY better in my opinion.

Pop OS

Lots of people were hyping it in 2019/2020 so I thought I’d give it a try as my first real Linux experience. It works great and has a Nvidia driver option when I need that. So I never really tried to switch.

Distro hoping never appealed to me, but I did try Fedora, Manjaro, Mint, Ubuntu, and Debian 12.

I use Kali for work and considered swapping to XFCE DE but pop is fine.

No bro! I promise bro! It’s just because Michaelsoft isnt tracking and indexing that info. I promise this next micromanaging software won’t be as bad! The next one will be as good as teams bro! I promise!

Got any recs? I can generally talk my company into paying for most anything education wise, but Udemy style courses work with my ADHD the best.

Thanks! I’m still on reddit brain.

Yes! Gods damn it. I had that up an everything on my second monitor.