Overpriced hardware comes with a boon: It lasts longer. I am by no means an apple fanboy, but when I discovered the 12 year old Mac of my dad still performed like mid-range PCs with Windows, I was quite surprised.
Still not buying their hardware though…
This is exactly the same question I asked 3 years ago when my brother died, and left all his tech stuff to his non-tech wife and kids.
Fortunately I was able to migrate whatever was important to cloud-based services.
But what will happen if this happens to me? I have no other siblings, and I made it a habit not consorting with techies: I don’t like nerds 😉, and I prefer to talk about other subjects in my spare time.
One of the reasons I used to self host a lot is privacy, and because I am an Open Source advocate. So I migrated everything important to commercial offerings which supported both, or at least the Privacy part.
I share a passwords through a password manager with my wife and kids, which gives them the keys to the kingdom. They can use my master password to unlock the doors. I also keep a paper with my most important passwords in a place my wife knows about, and can access without any proof of my death. Joint safes in the bank typically get sealed until the tax people have released the accounts.
Everything which I host myself now is disposable, and my wife knows she can turn it off without a second thought.
Ise kde, not gnome.
Aside from the obvious (company providing all the necessary tools) why not using libreoffice and saving it as M$ excel?
Yes! Been using it for a long time now! Never had any (major) issues!
So pure out curiosity… and science! how many liters of toothpaste did you consume over the last 3 days?
The I can only recommend you to start automating everything you do, to make tour job easier and make more time to slack 😝
Start small, and build on that.
Try Ansible, it is easy and allows you to do some really cool stuff. It helped me migrate 500+ systems from KVM to vmware, where no commercial tool was able to help me…
There is nothing more important than security patches on a system.
I used to work at an FMI, which’s motto was “keep things stable”. Even the ciso department bought that crap. Until we hired a white hat hacker. The only thing given was the name of the company. He managed to get into the building, access an employee’s workstation and install a root kit on one of the most important financial message tracking systems (you know, the one that instructs other systems to transfer money), using a security bug, which would have been patched if they kept a regular (security) update cycle. After shit hit the fan, many people were fired and an update cycle was introduced.
No system is important enough to not patch. And if you believe it is, you’re wrong.
Surprise… Surprise… It’s a snap!
dnf upgrade
And
package-cleanup --cleandupes
Should have fixed it.
You may also want to check up on regulations and laws of your country.
In Belgium, for instance, I am responsible for any and all attacks originating from my PC. If you were hacked and said hackers used your computer to stage an attack, the burden of proof is upon you. So instead of hiring very expensive people to trace the real source of an attack originating from your own PC, enabling a firewall just makes sense, besides making it harder on hackers…
PostmarketOS might be a possibility…
I honestly have no idea. But I discovered it a decade ago when I needed to process a short film. Haven’t touched it since.
Maybe he has yours?
The question is not which tool should I use?
The question is what is it that you want to achieve? That will drive your choice of tools.
I want to mirror my drive can be achieved by a lot of tools. But I want to be able to restore a file I accidentally deleted up to 24 hours with a 1 hour interval is a totally different game.
For backups I am very fond of restic as it does a lot of things in a simple way: encryption, (incremental) snapshots, mounting of said snapshots, support various storage backends, policy based purging, tagging, …
Your tool may not be able to do all you need, like automated scheduled backups, so you will need to also learn cron (or whatever scheduler you may have)
And finally, what about maintenance? What should happen to all those files you’ve synced? How long do you want to keep them?
As long as the OS was supported, updates were available.
But yes, I loaded a nice Fedora on it… 😉