The first thing I do to, if I need to get the size down, is swap out Gnome for one of the X11 Windows managers, usually XFCE.

I usually do this by starting from the minimal install and building up, as schizo already suggested.

That said, I guess I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Linux Mint is an easy way to get Debian’s core with the XFCE window manager.

Looks like Mint starts at 3GB - 8GB, depending on options chosen?

Disclaimer: It’s honestly been awhile since I really paid attention to my own Linux install size, as long as it’s below 40GB.

the live disk won’t find my Wifi

Oof.

I’m case it helps: I have solved that problem for myself using a $9.00 USB Wifi dongle.

For whatever reason (other contributors facing the same issue?), I have found that every cheapo USB Wifi dongle I have tried has worked perfectly with the minimal Linux images.

I realize I might have just gotten really lucky a bunch of times, but it could be worth a try.

They are solvable problems, and many have already been solved already in some countries.

This is a great point!

Yeah. At least until his yes-men high five him and slap him on the back on his way to board the deep space or deep sea vessel that he designed himself.

But losing 75% of population, I can see some nuclear war breaking out

Seems pretty likely (eventually). I take hope that I’ll be in the direct blast radius, and not a mutilated horribly scarred survivor.

I choose not to think about this one much because it’s well outside my circle of influence.

The current trend sucks, obviously.

But historically, we used to be so much worse to each-other.

There’s reasons (data and practicality) to have faith that things will continue to improve.

But it won’t be enough, for many of us, in many of our lifetimes, so let’s all stay angry and active.

Providing competition against media monopolies is illegal.

If they can’t sell you your memories, they think no one should have them. They will let your memories burn and be lost before they let you own or share them.

They’ll keep this up and they will continue to work to make intellectual property never enter the public domain.

I’m too chicken to be a pirate, myself. But I’m aware that pirates and librarians are the only ones with any intent to preserve works of art for the public.

Annecdotaly, a recent patch had notes that implied it fixes this issue. I got so tired of the dock being unreliable that I haven’t confirmed it, though.

You make some great points.

For anyone having trouble wrapping their head around doing this analysis for themselves, I’ll share mine:

1. I seriously doubt my personal operational security (OpSec) has kept my own federal government out of my business. I might be one of the few people who could have a chance, but I’m not interested in spending my energy that way.

I like to think my OpSec has kept foreign governments out of my affairs, but I’m honestly not sure. I know my government’s rules, because I read my local laws. There’s a lot of governments whose rules-of-engagement I don’t even know what are, and I’m confident that some of my “someone could probably” conspiracy theories are science fact somewhere in the world. Guessing which/how/when is a lot harder, than just suspecting/assuming I’ve missed something.

2. I’m confident that my OpSec is good enough that large corporations know that I exist, but are confused about me. I like it that way because I’m 90% sure they’re colluding to keep my salary lower, and that pisses me off. Thankfully big corporations aren’t motivated to do much more than make it inconvenient for me to evade their net.

3. I’m less confident about smaller businesses, honestly. Like anyone, I use a local dentist and barber. I didn’t choose my dentist or barber for their Cybersecurity practices.

It’s so great.

And the scene is even better on a rewatch.

Yeah. They do still sell Frisbees, though, at least.

Does “Breaking News” on Dropout.tv count…

I have both the official dock and some random USB C multi-connector. The random one is far more reliable, in my experience.

This sounds like an important step toward fully working the right think algorithm.

For example, Republicans tend to have Christian evangelicals and business interests.

Yeah.

But at least the Christian evangelicals’ shareholders keep them so accountable to their core values that the desires of the mostly unorganized pastors leading the business owners have no meaningful say in the outcomes. (This is Sarcasm)

Makes sense. I suspect it may still not work due to Proton likely being compiled for Intel, rather than ARM chips.

If you run into that, you may be able to work around it by logging into the Raspberry Pi, cloning the source code and installing: (if you’re able to get that to work, it’ll likely work equally well on Ubuntu or Raspbian). But it’s not for the faint of heart, they (Proton) don’t include many details, so it looks like there will be a lot of learning about their tool chain. https://github.com/ProtonVPN/proton-vpn-gtk-app#installation

(Edit: Since ProtonVPN is Python based, it may be fine, as long as there’s not too much C in the project. If it works immediately, my gut feeling is it will also work fine on Raspbian, if you need to switch for any other reasons.)

I know a lot of people have Pis set up like this and surely they can’t be administering the whole thing through CLI, right?

We are, indeed. I use a combination of SSH (for quick stuff), and Ansible for stuff I need to do repeatedly.

How do I get a similar setup to my Synology such that I can just get a desktop interface in a browser?

The tool you’re looking for is a ’VNC’ solution. There’s lots of them, and the best ones are free.

You can enable VNC on your Raspberry Pi through Raspi-Config. You’ll also need a VNC client on each device you want to connect from. Fin linked one above, I think.

And now some un- requested advice from me:

You mention running Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi.

If you choose Ubuntu, I believe you will encounter many recipes online that will not work, because Ubuntu does not come with various Raspberry Pi specific tools pre-installed, such as raspi-config.

Raspbian and Ubuntu are extremely similar (this is intentional).

But I have found:

• Many Raspberry Pi recipes will not work on Ubuntu, because Ubuntu does not include Pi specific software that is included in Raspbian.
• Most Ubuntu recipes work perfectly on Raspbian.

I think the Raspbian software can be added on top of Ubuntu, but I’ve never cared enough about the minor differences to even try.

The Ubuntu recipes I have found that don’t work on Raspbian also don’t work on Pi hardware at all, until I compile additional tools from source code. (A Raspberry Pi uses an ARM chip, which is cool, but makes it harder install some software that doesn’t support it.)

C.S. Lewis wrote that every death in our lives is an ending not just to their life, but an end to the unique part of our own life that only happened when we interacted with them.

It’s natural to fear and mourn that ending.

This is great stuff.

My comment from the peanut gallery today is just that there’s no law that CI/CD can’t be kept under control and run in ten seconds.

Given the choice between a slow out of control CI/CD mess, or a shell script, I too will take the shell script every time.

But I am living my best life today, and have a simple shell script in my CI/CD pipeline.

Yeah. I could figure out how to make a PC do all that, but I would rather pay for a Steam console that does all of that for me out of the box.