Yes there are lots of methods to do this. Format the disk to something like ext4, untar a distro to it, then with wsl chroot into the disk, finish installing and configuring everything, then reboot to the new disk. You will need specific time to do an this, but should be fairly straight forward.

I essentially did exactly this for my current setup.

There are other ways to.

My instance of Lemmy doesn’t support down votes, and I’m sure others are the same.

After about a year on void Linux, I would agree. It’s a great, solid, and underrated distro 👍

My always on server hosting 20+ services draws no more than 50w at peak during the night backup, but that lasts maybe an hour or so, normally runs nearer 5w-10w when the hdd’s are spun down and unmounted 22 hours a day. I use an Intel n97 CPU in a mini pc. Navidrome, immich, adguard home, Lemmy, find my device, forgejo, file browser quantum, sterling pdf, valutwarden just to name some of the services it runs easily. Paying 22p per kWh in the UK.

Anything slightly better than a potato will run all of that except the llm’s. To have a useful llm you need to spend circa £1k on a GPU and even then it won’t come close to Claude or chatgpt. Skip the llm’s for now. Just get yourself a solid little server to do everything else you need. Add dedicated hardware specifically for llm’s in future if you really want to. An old used gaming pc will be plenty for your server. I personally use Debian , but there are loads of suitable options available

You miss the point of Linux. Even if major distros roll over, there will be other distros that don’t. If there is a demand for a distro with specific use case, it will be created and released by somebody. The major distros are only popular and major because they serve the needs of the majority. When they don’t, they won’t be major or popular.

But that’s a good thing and the whole point? You can use the big tech internet and all their services, or you can use the non big tech internet and not use their services.

What’s new with this version?

uk can go to 13A peak load on the standard 230v socket, but drawing that for a prolonged period will nuke the socket. 10a prolonged is perfectly safe in the uk.

for media streaming, pi’s turn out to be quite weak and expensive. most people tend to go with a mini pc or thin client, as they are cheaper and better performing.

Totally agree. But it’s accepted globally to pay for holidays which I really enjoy 🤣

Never missed a payment yet. I see the roughly thousand a year I make from it as worth the hassle. A regular income, spreadsheet to track deals expiry dates and direct debit payments. Not much else is required.

Why use credit?
Because liquid capital can be invested and earnt on. If you use low or zero interest credit to buy things, and invest your actual money, you actually end up with more money. I have had £30k on zero interest credit cards for about 10 years now, invested in accounts earning between 4 and 6%. I have to transfer the credit between cards every 2 to 3 years and that attracts a fee of 3%. So in effect I receive 3 to 5% a year on £30k I don’t have.

Not to defend stroll or anything, but there are a few drivers that haven’t completed a full race distance this year. It is a strong metric to use to say a +1 lap finish isn’t finishing a race! I’d say both Audi, Cadillac and Williams drivers haven’t finished a single race either, and Franco collapinto and estaban ocon.

Pay walled

No, I have the file system mounted to my pc with sshfs. My pc comes on and my server gets mounted in fstab using sshfs, and then I can use anything on my pc to interact with the files and data just like it was directly on my pc. I use WebDAV for my android phone to be able to access office files with only office. I also have file browser quantum on the server providing access through a web interface to the files.

Putting everybody on one server defeats the whole purpose of federation, and eventually ends up with a single server owned by a single entity, just like YouTube.

Tell people to find the server that most aligns with their interests, location and philosophy, that is fairly active.

Instead of installing a massive all in one solution, why not install individual services specifically to cover your requirements? Navidrome for music consumption, synching to actually sync files, WebDAV and OnlyOffice for office docs, VLC, Kodi or jellyfin for video consumption, immich for photos, etc.

It will end up being much lighter and more specialised

good response 👍 bad questioning though 👎 i have a nas, with a raid1 array split out with lvm for separate partitions and users on my server, holding 2x2tb ssd’s. This backs up every night to 2x8tb HDD’s. I have a script that i invoke on my machines manually, that runs rsync on important data, and a backup to the nas raid1 array, overwriting the previous invocation. the HDD’s hold out of sync versions running back to 2 months, which i can dip into any time to recover something. so if something does fail, i wont lose anything. I dont hold offsite backups, so if a nuke lands on my house, i will lose everything. Im comfortable with that level of risk, but i know some people arent. however the op wasnt specifically asking about data backup, they were asking about replication, and how to preserve the initial install and setup to be able to revert and replicate. there are better ways to achieve this than just cloning the disk. Build your own actual distro is the best solution and burn it to a usb as a live disk that is easily installed. or just save a list of packages and configs. cloning a disk is a huge amount of out of date data.

What sort of failure? A harddrive failure? I have never had a disk completely fail where every bit of data is unreadable.