Yes, I’m a geologist by education and career. I self-host a few different services but keep them all on my LAN. Setting up Netbird is on my to-do list, but I’m simply not confident enough in the network security aspects to expose anything outside of a VPN tunnel.
I like Sayonara
Somewhat similar to Skyrim combat with the addition of parrying, dodging, and quick-swap hotkey consumables like potions, throwable potions (called splashes), throwing knives, food, and weapon oils (flame, frost, poison). I think magic combat is much better than Skyrim. Spells have light and heavy attack options, and you can wield any combination of spells and weapons (other than if you have a 2 handed weapon). You can have up to 4 sets of magic and/or weapons in your inventory slots to quickly swap between. Stealth combat is more difficult than Skyrim. Sneaking close to enemies requires more situational awareness, and the stealth skills aren’t as overpowered as Skyrim.
Hardware: what you currently have on hand to play around with.
Software: start with something simple and well documented. Not quite the driver for the learning phase, in my personal opinion.
“Utilities” as you call them: What is useful to you? What do you want to play with or need to improve your personal use case?
I don’t mean to be flippant with my answers here. Do a little introspection and determine what is genuinely useful for you to self host. I personally run Technitium, Jellyfin, a portion of the "-arr"s, Immich, and Navidrome. My family uses all of these services/utilities on a daily basis, so they are useful for me to host. I have some of the services that need CPU and GPU processing power running on my gaming PC and others running on a Lenovo ThinkCenter that I got for free from the IT department at work. They have bins of PCs slated for recycling that work perfectly fine but are “outdated”.
Not arguing that they are outright malicious, just that they are also incredibly inept and flat out stupid.
I do love a good conspiracy, but this administration got rid of competent people on purpose. Everything is helmed by people with the foresight and capabilities barley rivaling toddlers. If they actually tried to plan a false flag attempt, it would have been so transparent and likely not even gotten off the ground. This most recent attempt is simply a symptom of the broad dysfunction, irresponsibility, incompetence, and arrogance of those remaining.
Prime example of Hanlon’s Razor.
Yes! It’s good and you should play it. It does suffer from being made my a smaller team but also shines because of the freedom they had in making it. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t have to be. Play it and enjoy it for what it is instead of looking at all the comparisons to other games.
I’ve used it to run a modest list of Skyrim mods (100ish), and it worked pretty well (although Requiem was very difficult, and I ended up not being able to fully install it). There is a bit of a learning curve, and the wiki provides a decent introduction. It doesn’t cover every single use case but is enough to get up and running. No virtual file system like MO2. It makes a directory for all installed mod files, then drops those into your game files when the mods are deployed through Limo.
Netbird is a zero trust mesh VPN, very similar to Tailscale. My use would be accessing my Jellyfin and Navidrome servers remotely