APU board? They are going EOL soon, but these devices are built like a tank. Full Linux x86_64 support, coreboot bios. https://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm A few sellers in the EU still have them.

In case you get stuck again and need more games:

• DevilutionX (free, open source, needs gamedata) lets you play Diablo1 on Android, very good time killer (you might need to fetch the gamedata somewhere)
• Out There: Omega (paid but one time purchase) is a relaxed starship roguelite
• Battle For Wesnoth (free, open source) fantasy style tactical game
• Jagged Alliance 2 Stracciatella (free, open source, needs gamedata) - Jagged Alliance 2 on Android, tactical RPG, great timekiller like classic UFO or the old Fallout games.

Notable mentions: WorldOfGoo, Human Resource Machine

I use a mixture of systemd-nspawn and different user logins. This is sufficient for experimentation, for actual use I try to package (makepkg) those tools to have them organized by my package manager.

Also LVM thinpools with snapshots are a great tool. You can mount a dedicated LV to each single user home to keep everything separated.

SSDs are not really good for long lasting backups. They hold data by electric charge, if you unplug your SSD and store it, then it might loose its data after just a couple of years. HDD “spinning rust” still has its merits when it comes to long term data storage, they hold their magnetic data longer without fresh power.

After many years of using multiple devices and even servers with Archlinux installed it never broke because of an update (spoiler: I use systemd-boot instead of grub). If a system is to be used by a less experienced user, just install linux-lts Kernel instead.

Unstable does not mean it crashes/breaks often, it just means it does not guarantee to not bump to the newest upstream version and that it does not do backports. This can be a problem when using unmaintaned software that does not like using a recent python/php.

This is also great because if you find a bug in a software you can report it to upstream directly. Debian maintainers only backport severe bugs, not every one of them. It can take over a year for new features to arrive - especially painful with applications like gimp, krita, blender, etc. You can use debian-unstable of course, which is close to upstream as well.

where?

Do not expect you can offer this service for a competive price against cloud prices. Caring for a company IT system is a big challenge and requires more work the more users there are.

For a company this size: make a clear contract. Consider how much time you need for setup/installation, monthly hours for maintenance, monitoring and at least daily(!) backups. Let them choose if they want it with a failover and charge for the required hours and material. Also put in the contract when they can expect support from you, including a clause for a holiday substitute admin (if needed). Then put a pricetag on support hours for holding people’s hands when they “can’t find that file they uploaded a week ago and it is surely a server issue” and put a pricetag on engineering hours for any modifications they might want, like installing any plugins they deem useful for themselves. Hardware prices, traffic, rack space and power should be included as well. Have a good plan for updates, choose your distro wisely, do not rely on autoupdates.

Play all this through in your head, add up the hours, choose a fair rate and then you have your pricetag.

Cloud will always be cheaper, because they have their infrastructure already deployed. Building from the ground up is more expensive, but I think it is worth it. Will they?

But…isn’t unsupervised backfeeding the same as simply overtraining the same dataset? We already know overtraining causes broken models.

Besides, the next AI models will be fed with the interactions from humans with AI, not just it’s own content. ChatGPT already works like this, it learns with every interaction, every chat.

And the generative image models will be fed with AI-assisted images where humans will have fixed flaws like anatomy (the famous hands) or other glitches.

So as interesting as this is, as long as humans interact with AI the hybrid output used for training will contain enough new “input” to keep the models on track. There are already refined image generators trained with their own but human-assisted output that are better than their predecessor.

Well, NASA trusts Linux enough to send it to Mars. They build rockets, so it should be good enough for flying busses. Unless you don’t trust your software engineers, but then having them build a custom microkernel OS instead sounds not much better.

I still like reading manga on the kindle paperwhite, the eink display is much more easy on the eyes and the weight and battery life are far better than any full blown tablet. Calibre can easily transfer/encode the comics to it, so no proprietary software needed.

i never knew! fantastic!

systemd-path is the cleanest and most portable solution. You define a path service to watch your directory for changes and trigger another service to perform certain actions then. It uses inotify.

https://man.archlinux.org/man/systemd.path.5.en

Here is a full example from our currently so beloved redhat: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/introduction-path-units

Set it to airplane mode the day it arrives and never let it go online with the stock firmware if you value privacy - these beasts even send amazon the page you are reading currently on. Calibre is the best tool, it autoconverts anything if needed. It also has an RSS-to-newspaper feature that can create a custom newspaperlike magazine from your favorite feeds for you. Reading manga on Kindle is really fun.

Regardless of the distro, unless you use Kernel live patching (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel_live_patching) you should boot a new Kernel when it is released by your distro with a security warning. Running unpatched old Kernels just for 100% uptime is not safe.

Oh and, I never had issues with Arch changing spontaneously - what event are you speaking of?

We use Ansible as well, it keeps all servers happily upgraded and all packages in working order - even the weirdest custom software instances. Nodjs is available as lts packages im arch and it, again, just works.

I have zero issues with upgrades on desktop and server except once last year when my old Core2Duo notebook I use in the kitchen did not suspend correctly for a whole week until the Kernel bug was fixed. (I ran linux-lts for a week, it was… smooth sailing).

During that time we had 3 failed migrations of old PHP software to the new Ubuntu LTS and were fighting almightly RHEL because it simply did not provide the packages the customer required - we are now running an Arch container on the RHEL box…

I know this discussion is a little bit like religion, and obviously luck and good circumstances play a role. We both speak from experience and OP can make their own decision.

Once a year there is a manual intervention. Last one was the repo merge, and that did not even break then. Before that… hmmm… I dont even remember.

On Desktop with nvidia and a lot of other AUR stuff it is more work, but the servers run smooth as butter.

Disappointing that 2/3 of the remaining users seem to vote for reopening.

I have a GPD micro running Archlinux just fine. HDMI was flaky, but I havent tested it in a while.

if you enjoy this, there are various CTF “crackme” challenges available - the most famous one being the radare2 tutorial crackmes. The have different diffuculties from really easy to mind-bendingly difficult.

My vote is Archlinux. Debian is sometimes a little too “optimisitic” when backporting security fixes and upgrading from oldstable to stable always comes with manual intervention.

Release-based distros tend to be deployed and left to fend on their own for years - when it is finally time to upgrade it is often a large manual migration process depending on the deployed software. A rolling release does not have those issues, you just keep upgrading continuously.

Archlinux performs excellent as a lightweight server distro. Kernel updates do not affect VM hardware the same they do your laptop, so no issues with that. Same for drivers. It just, works.

Bonus: it is extremely easy to build and maintain your own packages, so administration of many instances with customized software is very convenient.