Dipped my toes into Linux maybe 10 years ago. It was awful and turned me off of it. Also the fact that I occasionally have to deal with some bespoke bullshit distro at work that does nothing that literally any tutorial I google says it will.
But I finally gave it another shot. Girlfriend got a smart TV. I got sick of ads. I had an old Intel nuc laying around that I bought for a dedicated DDR machine but it didn’t go great, so I stuck dietpi and pihole on it. Was still a mild clusterfuck and had dozens of open tabs trying to figure out what was breaking, but by 5am I had pihole configured and running, a plex server set up, and a desktop. Today I got the ftp server up so I can move stuff into plex without messing with flash drives. Still haven’t figured out desktop through ssh but that’s a later problem.
Bad news is youtube ads come from the same domain as the videos so pihole is useless there, but I’m still having fun and very excited about what I can do with a cheap piece of hardware I thought was useless. For the next project I’m thinking maybe trying to de-google my Google home minis and have a locally hosted assistant, but that would probably take a ton of research beforehand.
Suggestions, encouragement, and harassment welcome.
You are fucking one of us now, you know there’s no way back right?
Never you are going to endure the bullshit you are used to. You will look at how the technology has evolved into a massive mind boggling ads infested mess and you will laugh, or cry…
Enjoy our last bit of freedom that we have.
The lengths people will go to avoid using a HTPC with a wireless keyboard and mouse never fail to amaze me
Or even a keyboard with built in touchpad like https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/keyboards/k400-plus-touchpad-keyboard.920-007119.html
I wish there was some kind of open source Roku style remote that worked with Linux. Don’t need a whole keyboard, just want pause, play, etc.
Kdeconnect paired between phone and device will give you a media touch pad for play, pause, skip etc. Once the media is started. You can also config connect bash commands on the device and run them via the phone.
If I leave my PC and won’t be coming back I can hit the lock screen command, or sleep command. Etc
I mean, you can run an infrared remote. I don’t know if there’s specifically an open source infrared remote out there, but I wouldn’t be surprised, as they aren’t very complicated devices.
On the software side, you’re going to want LIRC. It’ll have a list of supported receivers.
kagis
Here’s an open-source infrared remote:
https://github.com/CoretechR/OMOTE
Personally, I wouldn’t care if the remote is open source any more than I would my keyboard, but if it’s interesting to you…
I avoid that because it sucks terribly
I haven’t seen an ad on my television since the Bush administration.
whoa home ddr club rise up
I ended up using a shitty old Dell that worked well enough but I forgot the password and wiped it. Lost a lot of full game simfiles that aren’t on XIV anymore and I’m a bit sad about it. Was able to salvage a few and my ddr max 2 skin thougb.
Raspberry Pi is IMO an excellent tool for learning Linux (particularly CLI, you honestly don’t need a UI for the computer itself) in a low risk environment while also allowing you to build some really useful services (NAS, Pi-Hole, media-server).
Mine runs basically everything in my apartment (Home Assistant), I dumped my antique Synology DiskStation and run Samba + an array of hard drives for NAS (synced offsite of course).
I was a bit leery of running NAS on top of everything else, but this is a Raspberry Pi 4 with a ton of services running on it and it’s still pretty idle. arm64 is a powerhouse (my router is a nanoPi R6S too). Also for context I run Alpine Linux so it’s as barebones as I need it to be.
How do you de-google a Google speaker?
There is a locally hosted home assistant available on dietpi, I just need to see if the home minis are compatible. Would most likely have to flash them if they are even usable. Definitely more research needed.
Oh I see! I tried googling “de-google google speakers” in various forms. Came up with null so I was curious if there was a resource I had missed.
Good luck with your project :)
Run FreeTube on Linux. It is an alternative YouTube client that is open source and ad free. YT sometimes changes which could break it temporarily. It has been working for me for a year now.
Today I got the ftp server up so I can move stuff into plex without messing with flash drives. Still haven’t figured out desktop through ssh but that’s a later problem.
Just FYI for next time: when you turn SSH on (which should be really simple, BTW… usually you’re asked if you want it during the OS install, and after the fact it should be something like a one-line systemctl command) you get SFTP access with it for free.
Suggestion: Try running a web UI/dashboard/front-end for managing docker containers on your NUC. That way, you wouldn’t need a desktop through ssh.
Encouragement: Glad you’re having fun and finding success!
Harassment: Linux wasn’t awful 10 years ago; it just seemed that way because it’s different from what you already know, and turning to random advice/tutorials the web is often a mistake because many of the people who write those things don’t know it super well themselves. You’ll get better results if you accept that it’s a large field of knowledge, and invest the time to learn each component properly instead of cookbooking everything. (It’s not all bad advice out there, though. For example, the Arch wiki is generally a good information source, even if you’re not running Arch.)
Know what, I did see web front ends in the handy installer menu. I’ll check it out.
And I should’ve specified. My experience was awful, not Linux in general. Though I was using mint and following a step by step guide and apt-get update just straight up failed and I quit.
My issue is that it seems so damn esoteric most of the time. Like at work, we have what I’ll call an incidental Linux install. It’s managed by another company, but response time is slow so I handle most of the low level troubleshooting. Someone locked out a user account. I was able to get on as admin, but the commands I found by googling (faillock, passwd -u, and pam_tally) did nothing. Turns out it was pam_tally2. I guess it feels like the skill curve to start is so insanely high. Like what I did with my nuc was dead simple but it still took all night. That said, it was fun and I will continue my exploration until I’m comfortable enough to jump ship from windows on my main pc.
What I recently learned is if ‘pam_tally’ doesn’t work, writing it out and pressing tab multiple times will provide you with all possible commands.
So if you have ‘pam_tally2’ & ‘pam_tally3’ it will list those 2 for you.
Or just press tab and it will give you whatever command you have if it’s the only one.Two years of writing out all commands, files and filepaths by hand before a friend told me about tab.
