if you’re actually using the waste heat from a PC does that mean its basically 100% energy efficient?

It is exactly as efficient as an electric heater, yes, but an electric heater is one of the least efficient ways to heat a home.

Got a friend or family member willing to let you drop a miniPC at their place?

You could also go the offline route - buy two identical external drive setups, plug one into your machine and make regular backups to it, drop the other one in a drawer in your office at work. Then once a month or so swap them to keep the off-site one fresh.

Also there’s really nothing wrong with cloud storage as long as you encrypt before uploading so they never have access to your data.

Personally I do both. The off-site offline drive is for full backups of everything because space is cheap, while cloud storage is use for more of a “delta” style backup, just the stuff the changes frequently, because of the price. If the worst were to happen, I’d use the offsite drive to get the bulk infrastructure back up and running, and then the latest cloud copy for any recently added/modified files.

I haven’t tried it, but my understanding is it’s still somewhat of a beta feature

A lot of it depends on your distro. I use exclusively Mint and Debian (primarily Debian), and everything works fine on both of those. My laptop runs Debian 13 and has the iGPU and an RTX4070, and one of my servers has both an RTX A6000 and a T400, both being passed through Proxmox into two different Debian 13 VMs. Everything works without issue. Before Debian 13 on the laptop I had Mint 22, and before that Ubuntu 23.10, and both worked without issue as well. The laptop before this one had the iGPU and a GTX1060 I believe, it ran Mint 18, then 19, then 20, then 21 all without any problems either.

That’s how that user types all of their posts. It’s really fucking annoying. They get called out on it a lot, downvoted for it, and just keep doing it for some reason.

It’s got dual graphics cards, with the graphics an Nvidia one. I’ve heard that they are finicky with Linux…

Not really. I’ve been using Nvidia cards on Linux for decades, the complaints are blown way, way out of proportion. Just install the proprietary drivers from the distro’s repos and 99% of the time that’s all that’s needed. The people who complain usually screwed something up, like installing drivers from the wrong source or not installing the meta package for their kernel headers so the drivers can’t rebuild on kernel updates. Just follow the official instructions for your distro and that should be all you have to do, there’s a lot of bad advice floating around on forums and blogs, so just stick to the official docs.

Marketing absolutely works on Nerds, what a ridiculous statement. Just because certain types marketing will push us away doesn’t mean all marketing is pointless. Be honest, let me know what your product does, give me a proper datasheet and a price, and I’ll explore it. Try to shove some hyperbolic BS down by throat while hiding the things I actually care about and I’ll never buy from your company.

They continued harvesting data from users after the users explicitly disabled an option to shut that off. And for that, they owe $4 a person. When are we going to starting fining these companies properly? How about a thousand dollars a person for an infraction like this? Maybe a $98 billion fine might get them to start caring.

OliveTin, gives you a clean web UI for pre-defined shell scripts, with a dynamically reloadable YAML configuration.

There are a ton of things you could use it for, but I use it for container and system updates. A pre-processor runs on a schedule and collects a list of all containers and systems on my network that have available updates, and generates the OliveTin YAML config with a button for each. Loading up the OliveTin webUI in a browser and clicking the corresponding button installs the update and cycles the container or reboots the host as needed. It makes it trivially easy to see which systems need updating at a glance, and to apply those updates from any machine on my network with a web browser, including my phone or tablet.