Brother Printers have a well deserved reputation. They work. You will probably need their proprietary drivers (which you can get from their website), but after that they just work.

I know they make a .deb available, but I think there’s also a .rpm if you’re repping Redhat land.

It’s been a while since I used it, but I think kmymoney has some basic features in that direction.

With the caveat that I last played with Gentoo 20 years ago… I am almost certainly a bit out of date.

If I remember correctly it, it explicitly recommended that you use at least the minimal gentoo live disk to get your system into a running state. You’d be working from the live cd for the first couple of sections before booting into a very basic install on your hard disk. From there you would compile the rest of your system.

Even the minimal disk provides all of the tools that you need to bootstrap the system. Sources for everything else are downloaded as they are needed. Come to think of it, I think the full desktop live dvd was fairly new at that time, in it’s first or second release.

Even at that time the Gentoo manual was incredibly well written and is in my opinion the gold standard for how user documentation should be written. I had been toying with linux for about 3 months at that point and was able to get a working desktop system up and running in about a month , mostly just waiting for things to compile on the slow processors we had back then. I would run a few commands and then go off and do something else for a few hours. rinse and repeat.

Linux has run on ARM procs for some time. Software is a little hit or miss, but most things have a compiled build for it at this point. A lot of the big servers are running ARM processors due to potential power savings.

The popularity of the Raspberry Pi really increased the number of projects with ARM builds as well. It’s been possible to run a pretty decent desktop stack for 10 or 15 years. When the Pi2B came out.

If you happen to run across a project that is not available on ARM you might give a go at compiling it yourself. About half of the time it’s not too difficult and a good beginner project.

Most of the time I use Nextcloud. If I can’t wait for the file to sync I’ll use either email or a jump drive depending on which devices I’m moving data between. I

If I remember that I can, I’ll occasionally use bluetooth to send from my phone to one of my computers.

Last I checked (roughly 2 years ago, preRAM price spike) SBCs weren’t the most cost effective option for self hosting anymore. I would actually look into used thin clients or desktops. Even new, the hardware is often less expensive and more capable than SBCs. Sometimes they’re also more power efficient.

As for community support for the SBCs other than RPi, for most of them it has been close to non existent. Some better than others but the RPi was the community favorite and got all the attention due to its low price at the time.

No. Just no. I trusted Google in the past. Never again.

Meh. Reminds me a bit of the kerflufel when SystemD came out and largely replaced the V init system that came before. A whole bunch of religious adjacent arguments, at high volume with not much intelligence or understanding. It’ll pass.

All I need to know is does it solve a problem I have, does it work, is it stable, and is it secure.

Only warning I’ll give is that you should probably not get too used to your off site LLM models (Claude, GPT or whatever you’re using). Pricing seems unsustainable and the hype makes it feel like a bubble similar to the dot com bubble.

Might want to devote some time to trying to bring your LLM usage in-house. There is no telling who will survive the crash and it’s not always the “best” one.

Why so many downvotes. Looks like a decent project. Am I missing something?

I thought that was what classification standards were for.

My wife preordered the new Flashforge printer (Creator 5). Still waiting for it to come in, but early reviews look interesting.

4 head tool changer design. It’s a little over your budget, ($699 USD currently) and they don’t seem very linux friendly, but it does seem to be compatible with orca slicer. Don’t seem to be as bad as Bamboo though.

Downside is you have to wait for it to ship. They seem to have had some sort of shipping snafu and preorders have gotten delayed. Looks like we’ll be getting ours sometime end of June. Not sure when regular orders will ship.

A couple of years ago, I had an Ender 5. Can’t recommend it. Went through 3 main boards before I decided to start modding it. Never did get it truly reliable.

Not sure. Depends on how many of my family are using our home services that month and how often and from where.

I know I will regularly hit my mobile providers soft cap of 80GB at some point in the middle of the month on just my cell phone.

I figure the household hard line probably sees 3 or 4 TB per month at a minimum.

I fell it’s going to be a bad couple of months for everybody, not just Linux. It’s just with open source, it’s easier for the LLMs to find things that have been missed. And more open when they do because you can see the bug reports.

My first choice would still be Ubuntu, however if you don’t like them RHEL is available for free for homelab’s by jumping through some hoops.

Might also take a look at NixOS. Been running it for a while with no issues.

There have been many over the years. When I first discovered linux (shortly before linux 2.6 was released) it was RTFM (read the f*ing manual " and “each tool should do only one thing”.

I generally use micro on the terminal, kate or gedit in the GUI, depending. No hate towards the others, just what I’ve settled on over the years.

New York plans on enforcing that, how exactly?

In one of their more recent asshat moves:

https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/developer-re-enables-3d-printer-features-that-bambu-lab-disabled-firm-promptly-threatens-legal-action-orcaslicer-bambulab-project-now-shuttered

The only prebuilts or kits I recommend currently are from Prusa. Fairly open and they have a strong track record for reliability.

If you’re willing to build, you might take a look at the Voron project. I hear good things about them, though reliability is largely up to your mechanical and electronics skills. I believe one or two of their builds are roughly in your price range.

That said, my wife recently surprised me by preordering the Flashforge Creator 5 Pro (Not really in your price range) as a gift. They seem to have a fairly solid track record for reliability, though they are not much better than Bamboo in terms of openness. They have other printers and I’ve heard mostly good things about their AD5X and Adventure 5M Pro which are more in line with your budget.

Until about a year ago, I was just using Jellyfin for all of my media. For music I was using the phone app FinAmp.

I set up Navidrome when I ran into a bug that made music playback unreliable. Jellyfin fixed the bug and it’s back to being rock solid, but I still mostly use Navidrome for music.

Honestly I think the only reason why I stuck with Navidrome is that it has better playlist support. Building playlists still sucks but it sucks a little less in Navidrom as it can actually import playlists made elsewhere. Other than that, Navidrome has a better web interface for music.