She doesn’t install apps, Her config is what she needs. But nixOS install is pretty simple if you can copy paste text.
You go here https://search.nixos.org/packages
Search for a package, and click if you want permanent or ephemeral app and paste the code into the shell or into your config file.
Run a rebuild
Pretty easy
My wife is on NixOS, because she wanted a system that would be exactly the same if it died. She doesn’t know Linux from Mac or Windows; She doesn’t care about privacy or where apps come from, only that it operates the exact same everyday. (And Windows could not satisfy this requirement)
Yeah, TinyCore Linux needs 16GB I think. 8GB you might run BusyBox or something
Amazon sells 24 GB ones…
There might be a paid way. At work we have our phone numbers tied into zoom which ties into calling other phone numbers. It is used as a backend switchboard. So you could have a zoom number as your signal number which routes to your landline. Maybe.
Deja DUP has auto validation also. But besides “backup” I think everyone suggests using ZFS that auto heals bit rot. And don’t trust unplugged SSDs, they can suffer bit rot quickly if stored in a hot location
Opensuse has full disk encryption. https://news.opensuse.org/2025/02/20/setup-fde-on-opensuse/
If you want to try to get Linux on the main drive working (since USB works but isn’t ideal) there are a few things I encountered.
-some distros just didn’t like my hardware. Failed to install, or installed but boot would get errors and halt. The remedy was using an rpm distro rather than deb based (I tried about 10 debs, the rpm ones acknowledged the bios error and moved on)
-secure boot can be a bit of a pain. If you don’t want to deal with it, Turnoff secureboot, and in some cases EFI and use legacy BIOS mode.
-if you want Secure boot and EFI. Allow USB boot in BIOS, do the install and ensure it is building a GPT disk with an EFI partition. At the reboot stage it should ask if you want to enroll keys, say yes.
If during reboot it does nothing or boots to windows(assuming you have windows drive). Go into BIOS and choose secure boot option where you can pick which Secure OS it found and move that to top of boot list.
-if it is not those things it is often nvidia on Wayland or X issue on laptops. If you don’t want to mess with installing a GPU switcher, you can often set your laptop to discrete graphics before install and bypass the two GPU issues
You can use any open port and port forward at the router, or is CG NAT only 80
Just setup wireguard on your server, add masquerading and ip forwarding. That single wireguard in, will give you full access to your lan
2.5admins is a great show even if you aren’t an admin.
Still been going with multiple shows. I don’t think it was “dropped”, if I recall Chris bought back the rights to his own shows, so he could manage it himself. There was some controversy when the head managers let Joe Ressington go, bypassing Chris (as Joe’s Manager). Seemed things got set in motion to go independent after that.
Even with wine profile and setting Windows version to “emulate”?
Yeah it definitely is a pain for adding multiple machines.
I can’t offer technical network advice on vps headscale; Personally I’m not confident in my network skills. I would be more inclined to go through the pain of manually setting up wireguard instead of having a tailscale or headscale service-- and skipping the middleman so to speak.
Edit: setting up a new system this month, Tumbleweed has moved to SE Linux Enforcing as default. It provided some ssh and samba challenges at first until I learned about setting SEL policies. So maybe hardening with SE Linux would also be smart. For example I could SSH remotely into my machine but due to policies being locked down I could not run user bash, or even see contents of the home folder.
You are lucky. Underground cables? We are West Coast of Canada, generally fine all summer, but November is windy season and maybe once a year it is out for a few hours when trees have taken out power lines. Its the undervolt or overvolt that people don’t notice unless they monitor it. My UPS sometimes kicks in for a minute or two, and the report shows 100v instead of 110v, or sometimes a surge of 129 for a brief period. 15 years ago I never cared, till I was doing workfrome home design contracting, and lost a whole days work to power outage and corrupted files. The UPS became cheap insurance.
Cyberpower 1500 AVR for me. Router, WiFi, and server run off of it. It has kept me going on the internet during power outages as well as ding voltage correction when we have under or overvolt power moments. And I use the cyberpower Linux app they provide to set server shut down time based on battery level. It has saved my equipment a few times. We have occasional wind induced power failures here (overhead power lines) and had a crow land on a transformer and explode which immediately triggered the UPS to clean the sudden blip. Also had an HP laptop power charger fuse itself internally and UPS detected the short and shut down all power. Without that UPS, the pack might have overheated if the panel breaker didn’t sense the short.
Its good for keeping your firewall or other services running, like homeassistant, during powered outages. But UPS also corrects power when it is dirty and protects your equipment.
Yeah, I find it simple, but I’m used to text edits driving batch files etc. Daily driver I use Tumbleweed, the Yast zypper GUI gives you select and apply for pqckages, no command line needed.