Actually that’s what I like about GNOME. I don’t want a ton of customization options, a right-click menu with multiple dozen entries and a settings menu that needs a “table of contents”.

Reduce the UI to such a degree, that you cannot remove anything more without breaking. Thats what I want.

I was reading through the conversations (Screenshots) in the link. And based in what is provider there I do not see a problematic statement by antheas (or how he is called). Maybe more context is needed?

Thanks for sharing this! This is a pretty cool site!

I think you misunderstood me, or I was not really clear. Whatever. My point was not carrying arround the RPi everywhere all the time. But (maybe) having it as a backup if (!) you are concerned to loose access to Veracrypt at some point for some reason (and you where not able to migrate to a different solution in the meantime). If that does not apply to you: very good! No problem, no solution required.

If you decided it is to bothersome/inconvenient to install an application to (maybe) solve a problem - > that’s also totally fine.

But then I am asking myself: Does there exist any solution? Maybe not under this requirements. But then again: Having a not as convenient solution as possible, or having no solution at all. But its up to you. You decide what best fits your needs.

This point I don’t get.

I guess you are afraid that at some point in time you are not able to download Veracrypt from a trusted Source. In this case you can keep a copy of the executable for all the platforms you need. If you are afraid that you might not be able to run it at some point in time (because dependencys are not met): this can be somehow mitigated by the Appimage version of Veracrypt bundling all its dependencies. If you think even this is not good enough: Keep a cheap reaspberry PI with Veracrypt installed arround. Just as a fallback solution to access your drives.

But if you want a cross platform solution, baked directly into Windows, MacOS and Linux … I don’t see this happening anytime soon.

LUKS is Linux only. There isn’t a cross platform way to do FDE on removable media.

You can try out Veracrypt for that. It is supported on Widnows, macOS and Linux and supports FDE on external drives. At least that’s what I am using at work.

There are a lot of things that bother me and could be improved:

Lacking Hardware support for Fingerprint readers: in my Lenovo Yoga 370 i could not (for gods sake) get the Fingerprint reader to work. But I gave up trying a couple years ago. So it might be working now but i don’t know. I know its not the OS fault because it is just missing key Materials and driver support from the manufacturer. But in the end I don’t care whose fault it is. It does not work, and that bothers me.

Not easy to use TPM for LUKS: why doesn’t the installer of any distribution use the TPM module for storing the decryption key for LUKS. Or at least make it an option. They are made for that! TPM is not your enemy. Use them to help you! Better to use TPM (with exported strong recovery key) instead of having no encryption at all or a weak password.

Proper Backup and rollback Baker info the distro: why was only Opensuse able to have an integrated solution for backup and rollback of OS changes and updates? MacOS has this since years (maybe decades…)

No parental control features: Plesse give me things like settings usage time limits and APP access limitation for specific user accounts. I know I can somehow do this via Polkit. But this is not user friendly and too complicated for typical use cases. I am very happy that GNOME is currently working in a solution for this in GNOME 50 (Propably)

At least some form of reality check and accepting reality happened.

This sounds interesting. I tried this like a year ago, but could not get it working. Maybe I should give it a try.

This. I don’t if there even exists a FOSS solution which is as reliable as MakeMKV

OK, then maybe a DAS where your can put your drives in and also add some additional ones. Attach it to one of your Servers and Expose them via smb/NFS.

So something like @[email protected] and @[email protected] mentioned.

Isn’t Gamehub using it to run steam games on your phone?

Personally I also liked

Watch Your Kids: Inside a Children’s Smartwatch : https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-watch-your-kids-inside-a-children-s-smartwatch

In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch: How hard can it be?: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-in-house-electronics-manufacturing-from-scratch-how-hard-can-it-be

I don’t know if there is a (of the shelf) DAS out there that supports using drives with existing data on them and also some additional drives with RAID in the same enclosure.

In case you don’t have some place to store the data temporarily you can just use it as it is and save SE money for a NAS.

Because I am asking myself: if you don’t have a place to store the data temporarily, where is your backup? Sounds like you don’t have one. In this case you can save for the NAS AMD use the external drive as a backup drive attached to the NAS. Win-Win maybe?

For me a similar tasks should be handled by the same device. Network routing and VPN are similar things for me, therefor they are handled by the router.

It also handles VPN connections to other remote locations. So again same things in the same device.

Another benefit (which you can also have on the Server with some additional effort): the router boots up without interaction after a power outage. The Server does not. Them I can connect and unlock (LUKS password) the servers.

As far as I know you cannot (easily) use your own OS in QNAP. You can use your external 8TB drive also for the NAS. Attach it via USB to the NAS and expose OT via SMB as your other shares. But in your case I would not do this. Geht the NAS and use it and use your 8TB drive as it is right now. Thats imho the easiest and good enough way.

You cannot use drives that already have data on them in a Synology. They will be “Wiped” during the installation/initialization process. If you can save the data somewhere else you can put it back on the NAS after Installation. I don’t know if this is also the case for QNAP or Asustor.

you can definetly store data, from a Service running on a different machine, to the NAS. This is the whole point of having a NAS. Limitation is network latency and bandwith. But this is no problem for the typical home user use case. If you habe a special use case you propably already know what you need and how to do it.

Always in the router if it supports it. If it does not support wireguard I would rather (if you are able and allowed to) replace the router instead of using something else.

To be honest, even if you say you want to have your own Hardware: I think you would be better of with an off-the-shelf solution from QNAP, Synology or Asustor. They are easy to use and hard to break if you only need them for basic things like file sharing. And it does not look like you require it to do more. Because all your services are already running on a different system/Hardware.

A 4 Bay solution might be overkill for you if currently an 8TB drive looks like enough storage (otherwise you would have already replaced it if you where soon running out of space). So a “cheap” 2-Bay (with 2x12TB drives in RAID1) based solution would be a good starting point to break procrastination. Imho it is always cheaper to go with larger but lesser drives. AS long as you do not plan to use secondhand drives (large drives are hard to get in the secondhand market).

Maybe Asustor is an Option. Their Software is imho good enough for basic file sharing. And with the possibility to run TrueNAS on them you have an “update” Option for the future.

For me this was a very interesting talk to get some understanding of hiw fex works. Interesting for me was this intermediate representation of the x86 code to run their optimization in.

Also the part about Asahi and hiw they use FEX and how it can be improved was nice.

I like such short overviews without me needing to dig through all the Documentation.