My setup is a bit extreme, but here are my guardrails:

1. All users have the same UID’s on every system. I’m 1000, wife is 1001, son is 1002, daughter is 1003. All these exist on all systems. Our primary group is “family” (gid 10000). Our files are all owned by user:family. This matters because we let them have access to the share of things like home movies and pictures, and I have a TrueNAS with an NFS mount that their user folders rsync to nightly for backup. If you wanna get crazy, you can put in a whole LDAP/freeIPA setup, but that’s a lot (and I did all that as a learning experience).
2. They don’t have the account passwords. I have their password, and if they want to use it, the wife or I have to type the password. When we want them off, superkey+L to lock the computer, and if they reboot it comes to a login screen.
3. If you really go this route, and go the whole LDAP thing, you can also tie that into apps like Jellyfin. I have a huge library of movies and shows, but there’s a folder called “KidMedia” and I literally manually symlink things to that folder if I want them to have access. I set up the phones/tablet with their own jellyfin accounts, and when they log in they only see their media. I also NFS mount that share, so for the same reason, they can watch stuff on VLC from the computer with access control. We also do that with nextcloud, so we can use nextcloud talk to chat internally. The tablets/phones have built in android controls, so the idea is once they’re on their device, they’re free within the ecosystem I set up and they don’t enter credentials other than device unlock.

I built my kids potato computers from the time they were 3-5, which was during covid. They need computer skills nowadays, and it put them at an advantage for covid school. We got them on java Minecraft which was huge for reading, typing, and some basic math skills (they figured out multiplication for crafting things like doors). I made a chart which had icons of things they want, with the word next to it, so they could search and type in creative.

We used Ubuntu Mate. It’s simple, stable, and familiar. They do NOT have sudo on these boxes. As we’ve advanced, they now have firefox (behind a pihole which upstreams to opendns’ family protect), gimp (with a wacom tablet!), inkscape, calculators, tenacity, libre office, and they’re starting to get into some cad to make things to 3d print. You have to come to terms with doing a LOT of patient hand holding, but it has paid off dividends.

It’s a lot for the homeland, but I love zabbix

Fair, my home office is a monument to too much free time, a hoarding habit for ewaste, and a wife who works weekends and overnights.

That is a self-made soldering kit box I made when I was in college and had to haul it around a lot. I have actually been meeting to replace it with something more permanent now that I’m a grown up with my own house. I have an air flow soldering rig which doesn’t really have a home, and I could have a much better use of space. I have my brocade ICX6610-24 next to that which I’ve been programming for way too long, and a whole bunch of 3D printer parts on top of that.

I’ve done some of that, recently I have an old putty knife and I will put it right against the crack and just hammer it which will unstick it enough that I can pull it off. Newer drives definitely have weaker magnets than some of my much older ones.

I started collecting in probably 2007, so manufactured before that for sure.

That’s rad, and you did an amazing job keeping them whole. Recently I have been wrapping them in cloth, then the kids form clay around them for various fridge and office magnets.

For sure for sure. What is your preferred mechanisms for feature requests? Small things, like in the browser pane, could we get buttons to launch terminals directly in the connections tree on the left, so I can launch the terminal without having to open the file browser for that connection, or likewise, adding a link in the connections pane to jump straight into the file browser? I envision a workflow where I keep 1 view open and can launch into file browsing or terminal directly from that view.

Have you considered embedding a terminal editor in the actual program? I use mRemoteNG on windows, and the integrated rdp/ssh with a sidebar full of bookmarks is the dragon I’ve been chasing on linux.

If this had remmina and vnc, and could embed terminals, it’d be a huge feature jump in my book (though it’s already great as a better way to manage my ssh sessions)

For real though, I loved those. That wireless Logitech one with the volume dial lasted me a decade.

I manage a lot of systems, so just click to open a ssh session in a new tab. I usually have shell aliases, but a bookmark that could set the title of the tab to the hostname and account for easier nav would be my goal. Being able to dynamically open tab groups too would be good, like if I have a dev/prod/SQL server for an app I could 1-click to open a group of 3 tabs

I’ve been looking for a terminal with better bookmark support; I use mRemoteNG on windows for my RDP/SSH work, and I haven’t been happy with any alternative on Linux that handles session bookmarks like that. I’m curious to try this.

Yes. Look here, the plan is per-device, and the capacity is unlimited: https://www.crashplan.com/pricing/ . I think the restore would be extremely painful, it’s not a fast pipe, but the bigger you go that’s gonna be an issue no matter what.

They used to be but I’m not sure now; I think when they release the full self-manufactured ones I will want one.

I have had an s76 wild dog which was amazing for an 11 year run, and I just replaced that with a meerkat. I also have a thelio which has been flawless. System76’s desktops are amazing.

In 2013 I bought a darter and it’s the worst laptop I’ve ever owned. I went through 4 keyboards and still it doesn’t work, also the wifi radio is under the keyboard and you get a 50% signal reduction when typing. It had one of those trapdoor Ethernet ports which broke, so I basically became a dead device. That is an old metric, but it scared me off from buying laptops from them until they get their own hardware pipeline for them.

I don’t have the exactly solution for you, but I went through this a while ago and came up with using openLDAP for this. It’s not tidy at all, but it was a tremendous learning experience, and I documented it in 2 blog posts which may be interesting to you; I doubt you’ll want to do what I did, but it was informative and has worked flawlessly since. I documented some of the flaws I found in options I considered at the time:

https://www.surfrock66.com/my-experience-guide-setting-up-openldap-for-pc-webapp-authentication-on-ubuntu-20-04/

https://www.surfrock66.com/openldap-kerberos-and-sasl-my-experience-in-the-homelab/

I’m not an expert, but I’ve been using TrueNas Scale since I cut over from TrueNAS core, and before that Freenas, since about 2010. I have a bunch of lessons and assumptions, but someone can correct me if these are misguided, they’re my tl;dr of knowledge.

1. Your data drives should be in sets of 3 for a raidz1, or 5+ (I use 6) for a raidz2. While technically the minimum is 2 or 4 respectively, best performance and protection comes in sets of 3. This is a good synopses: https://superuser.com/a/1058545 In that case he points out that a 3-way mirror also works but then you lose a lot of the data integrity checking that comes with ZFS. I keep an offline spare; in your situation putting 3 drives in with a RAIDZ1 and keeping one in the drawer would give you ~8TB of capacity protected against bit flipping and drive failure. This is a better description of the raid levels: https://calomel.org/zfs_raid_speed_capacity.html
2. In terms of just storage, that system will be fine, though ideally you get ECC RAM; that’s often a bigger swap, so if you can’t change that, so be it. It does matter in terms of integrity checking. The more containers you run, the tougher it gets to spec out. I have a separate proxmox hypervisor and routinely have 4+ jellyfin streams going at a time, so it wouldn’t be enough in my case, but you’ll have to experiment and scale. I will say, even though a separate proxmox box comes with a lot of headaches, it was more important than any schooling I ever did in terms of my IT career. Networking, monitoring, access control, suddenly I have a solution to every IT problem I encounter and I have experience with it.
3. Personally, I do a 2-disk mirror for the OS, and then multiple 3 or 6 disk vdevs for data. If you lose the OS drive and it’s just 1, that’s fine if you have backups to just restore, but I find swapping in a cheap ssd is better. I use cheap-as-dirt 64G SSD’s as the boot drives, and if one dies, you can swap it and replace it in the UI, no problem. You can technically use 2 mis-matched sized disks, but it’ll fuss at you.
4. Start with TrueNAS Scale as just a storage device; ideally that needs to be close to the hardware and not virtualized. In the beginning, especially since you’re likely dealing with 1 pool, just make 1 vdev for everything. You can make folders in there, or datasets, and play with partitioning data, sharing data to other computers, etc. I use NFS sharing AND iscsi luns to my proxmox, and ultimately I’m in 1 big dataset with multiple vdevs in it. Add your things like homeassistant one at a time; going through it will show you how you sort storage, how you provision it, etc. Over time, things grow; this will not be your final configuration, most people expand over time. You may decide “I want bulk storage in one vdev, I want containers and vm’s in another.” When you expand, that’s when you split things off and make more nuanced decisions. That will come from better assessing your needs.

You mention Jellyfin…my struggles with that were never storage. My struggles there were networking; it was a big part of why I decided to upgrade my server networking to 10G, which supported running Jellyfin on another hypervisor and having all that go over the network.

For a long time my setup was mate with Compton and awesome but I had to switch to just mate as my family and kids started using the computer more. Mate’s gtk suite is lightweight and complements awesome well as it gets out of the way, and caja/pluma/etc worked well with very few rough edges.

I agree, I had a darter that was garbage…but both my wild dog and thelio have been spectacular, and I trust their hardware and PCB dev absed on success in the thelio custom PCBs and launch keyboard. I think judging them by their clevo rebrand isn’t as valid as judging them by the launch and the thelio. If I needed a laptop, I’d strongly consider this