That’s hardly any time. I’d be curious for your experience >12 months.

No joke: I just built a low-end server based on DDR3. Got 32 GB for 40 EUR.

Better to use apt-get though. That way you don’t even need to bother with the dumpster fire that is Windows 11.

The question is: how long have you been using it?

Sooner or later, stuff will break on an Arch-based system, and a beginner will not necessarily be able to fix it. So I wouldn’t recommend any Arch-based system to beginners.

Good advice on the Ventoy front. It makes trying out things very comfortable, if you have a large enough thumbdrive (>32GB).

Don’t push beginners towards immutable distros such as Bazzite though. Some things there can only be installed within distroboxes, and expecting beginners to fiddle with containers and images of other distros is way more than they should have to contend with.

If that seems like too much I’ve heard Linux Mint is dead simple and stable.

Yes, it does, and yes, it is.

Predatory

It’s gonna happen for real this time. Cryptocurrency NFTs AI and cryptocurrency will upend the market with how incredible they have been.

You forgot the Metaverse. (Like you should.)

it won’t happen again.

Not to him, no.

I’d fork this just to name it more appropriately: “Glasshole radar”

They found out the hard way that abuse is only tolerated if you have passed a certain wealth threshold.

Appreciate the call to reason. Yet, though this may have been sharply worded, insulting it was not.

This should have many more upvotes. The security incidents quoted at the start of this article have no relation to its actual topic, i.e. the hypothesis that there may be increased fragility of supply chains as a result of AI adoption. While it’s plausible this may happen, the article makes it sound like this has happened when it clearly hasn’t. In other words: it’s little more than “hurr, durr, AI dangerous”.

Except AI is trash at doing what it’s advertised to do, it makes everybody dumber, and its shills will blame you once it inevitably mucks everything up.

We don’t even have “AI”. We have LLMs, aka chatbots, aka glorified digital parrots that, just because they’re eloquent and sound competent, management with little to no technical expertise feels can replace large parts of the workforce.

If we just called it “cyberparrots” instead of “AI”, maybe more people would their limited utility and the utter folly of having these take over ever larger portions of business procedures.

Vista, more likely. Win 7 wasn’t a chonky one (for the hardware of the time).

If you’ve got that experience under your belt, you’ll be just fine. I haven’t tackled zfs myself yet (I’m lacking the RAM, plus I was put off by the ECC RAM recommendation). But I know it unifies a lot of the things you’re already familiar with under one roof (volume management and journaling) and adds more cool features (snapshotting, RAID, encryption, bitrot protection) without you having to combine and manage several different technologies (mdadm for RAID, LVM, LUKS, …). I did that on my main rig and it turned out to be rather complex. Hence the switch to btrfs to at least squash a bit of complexity.

If you’d rather continue working with the storage technologies you know and avoid zfs, you may want to look into other OSs than TrueNAS (because that is zfs only). Two I’m running and can recommend are

• Open Media Vault: great for beginners (friendly, though dated-looking web UI), but Debian-based underneath and hence reasonably flexible if you know your way around the CLI, which you probably will. Case in point: mine is no longer just used as a NAS, but runs somewhere between 10-20 Docker containers, and I rarely touch the webUI these days.
• Proxmox: You mentioned VMs, so you’re probably familiar with this one. I like its flexibility, allowing me to run each VM tailored to its purpose: a NAS VM for network shares, a hardened, minimal VM for publicly available services and Wireguard access into the network, an LXC as a local DNS server…

Props for the powerful DIY! You’re right about the pre-built models. I’m coming from a QNAP one, and while they’re good for learning the ropes, they’ll become pretty limited after a while. That, and the shit they’re trying to pull with proprietary HDDs.

A self-made rig gives you a lot more flexibility, although it requires you to learn a bit more. But seeing that you’re already getting comfortable with GFS, I guess you’ll manage just fine!

cocks revolver

“Give me liberty or give me death!” Classic!

Same. Scored two 16TB drives and a 4GB in summer of 2025 (by pure chance though). They’re now 150%-200% the original price. Cannot wait to see this bubble pop.

SSDs were first, actually, with HDDs now following suit.