I’m fairly certain the RAM is soldered and capped, but it has 16gb, so more than I could reasonably touch anyway. It has a 500gb soldered SSD, but I know there’s a slot for another. The only reason I wanna ‘start’ by getting a rack and hard drives is because I watched my friend lose his mind one weekend while he migrated multiple terabytes of data and he has since repeatedly recommended keeping the storage separate and plug and play, haha.

I’m 100% down to give all this a shot, though. As soon as I upgrade, this laptop is immediately getting recycled into the first step server (and very probably the final step unless something drastic changes in my life).

Wow, I really loved this analysis. It’s so coherent and clear on reflection, I really have trouble believing any other interpretation is as accurate.

The unfortunate reality is ‘what I’ve got’ is a 6 year old laptop that represents 60% of my net worth. 😅 Hopefully soon that will change, but for now, I’m taking the free/borrowed friend’s setup.

My game plan in the future is just to turn this laptop and a couple hard drives, though. I think comments like yours and a couple others have convinced me I really don’t need to invest all that much to get started, or really finished with the setup.nif you’re running all that on 8gb of RAM, I think the only thing I’m missing is the storage.

My friend shook me of any notion that I needed all that much, haha. I made a joke about getting a room set up for this and he shamed me by showing my resource use versus his. 🤣

Realistically, I think the only thing I’d ever end up needing is a ton of hard drives. That’s like… the biggest physical thing I need and as someone else in the thread pointed out there are some pretty solid smaller racks for that. My “starter” setup is going to be my current laptop when I upgrade in a year or so.

Edit: Whoa, that sounds like an incredible setup! All that is running fine on 16gb of RAM? Man, I really just need to do more reading about this so I can get a better sense of how all this works.

Hahaha, my friend said the exact same thing. He was debating downsizing and then moved into a house. Once he got situated, he was like, “Fuck it. This is the server room now.” It worked out because it heats that side of the house during winter. 🤣

Ooh, thanks for the tip and the link, I’ll join that community as well! As far as I can tell, just based on what my friend has taught and what I’ve read, these smaller racks are basically all I’d ever need. I’m just a weeb who likes to read… and maybe host a PDS. Possibly a Lemmy instance. And you know, it would be nice to handle my own password manager… (I promise I’ll stop).

I built one myself a year ago. I have a small pcengine APU Box for OpnSense firewall, two Lenovo tiny boxes as Proxmox hosts that run as a high available cluster, and a Mini PC with a JBOD as NAS.

I understand some of these things now! :D (Also, that is such a cool setup. That’s exactly what I wanna end up with!)

His use-case also went up over time, too. I’m in no way qualified to explain, but he trains neural nets for his PhD and does some remote work stuff for some people on his team. As insane as that thing sounds, he’s one of the most frugal people I know and this is like the one thing he really splurges on, and as far as I can tell, he’s not quite using all of it but it’s close.

I definitely don’t see myself ever getting quite that crazy with it, but I definitely want a slice of that capability for myself. If just to host all my tentacle porn. 😔

I see Linux being more and more widely adopted in Europe, for one. I imagine there will be an ‘EU standardized’ distro forked to prevent any issues of interoperability between government systems. Hopefully, such a widespread adoption for PCs encourages more development for Linux from software devs.

The latter part of your points is what really scares me as well. It’s only a matter of time until “protecting the children” becomes “defining what adult content is” and policing gender, sexuality, and politically inconvenient ideas under the guise of morality.

Call me a cynic, but I absolutely do not believe that companies “know that the days where they can just shrug off child predators using their products is coming to and end”. I don’t believe they give a fuck at all. In fact, if somehow a case made it to court and the court laid the blame at the foot of, say, Facebook, or whatever company, for a child being harmed, they still wouldn’t care because the money they make simply existing as is so wildly outstrips any fine they could possibly be levied that it doesn’t make economic sense to do anything differently.

There is real damage being done now and no one seems to care enough to stop it. Why go through all this negative PR about privacy violations if you can just keep doing the same thing?

Now, I can’t claim to know what the “real reason” these laws are being passed is, but if I had to hazard a guess, it would be because it gives more accurate data on users to sell and it is cheaper to advertise to your users when they directly tell you their age. Now, you can freely show pornographic ads, gambling ads, whatever, to your adults without ever having to worry about buying user data to know who will receive it. If a kid sees porn, well, you shouldn’t have let them on an adult account.

Man, what a nightmare hellscape. And whether you use the service or can’t even afford a graphics card that can do any of this, you’re gonna pay for it as it incentivises developers to focus less on graphics because they’re just gonna be smeared in generative slop anyway.

Its getting harder to avoid dodging these fuckass companies, but I’m not supporting this shit anymore.

Girl* is* 😅 But maybe it wouldn’t be cool to say it that way, lmao

Okay, you didn’t have to completely one up me like that in public. That absolutely is so much better.

To fix the transmission. Lilith’s Tranny’s, it’s like femboy IHOP but with beautiful transgender women working on engines.

My main issue often boils down to the amount of people still on Windows. The huge market there pulls developer attention that way so much that often my choice in software is narrowed down to “the one that has a Linux build”. And sometimes that isn’t even the case and now I need to find a way to simulate Windows for this piece of Software to work in some capacity.

Now, that’s not all that often that this is true, but when it is, it’s annoying.

Oh shoot, I’m an idiot. Tuxedo is what I was looking at. 😅 Thank you for the link!

Yeah, unfortunately I’m stuck with laptops for now. I’ve had to move at a minimum once a year for the last six years or so, so I basically don’t keep anything I can’t put into a pair of hiking bags to lug around with me.

Without getting into specifics, I am ideally taking a temporary job that will give me a fair amount of disposable income, but I’m committed for a year with an option to do a second year.

It’s kind of a rare opportunity for me and I’m not even certain I’ll get it, but if I do, then the price of an upgrade doesn’t really matter to me much, within reason. It’s essentially going to be my only valuable item for the foreseeable future, for work, play, hobbies, all of it, so I don’t mind putting extra money into this to make sure it works well and lives a good, long time. I mean, I’m not gonna throw 4 grand at a laptop, but some of these other pricey ones at like System76 and Framework aren’t off the table for me at this point.

Wow, really? I was just looking at these and they are super interesting. You’re not wrong about that up front cost, though, yikes. What is it that makes them so seemingly modular? Is it proprietary stuff? Or is it just the focus of how it’s constructed? I’d be super leery about getting locked into ‘their ecosystem’ if they suddenly went under or something.

Oof, thanks for the heads up. I honestly think I have a pretty good list of components to double check at this point and it’s driving me away from anything bleeding edge. Whatever I end up getting, it’ll be something that’s new-ish right now, but I’ll be buying it a year from now.

I did check out System76 and even if the price is a bit high, it would be kind of nice to support a company in the EU. That alone has a bit of appeal. I haven’t seen Framework before, though. I’ll look them up, thanks for the tip!