Pika Backup for /home/ to an external drive. It’s an automatic solution with a simple GUI that serves as a front end to Borg iirc. Lets you easily browse and mount old backups. Anything outside of my actual personal files can be recreated or restored trivially, so I don’t care to back them up.
I also have a manual dump of /etc/ but i change it so infrequently that it doesn’t really need looking after.
Nautilus in general is my biggest gripe with Gnome. I despise it so much that I’m willing to abandon ship to KDE when Plasma 6 reaches my distro.
I really like LXQt for VMs. It is lightweight and fast enough to provide a very snappy environment, even beating out something like XFCE. With LXQt I get the minimally viable desktop environment with a panel, notification handler, etc.
Though most recently I have been using XFCE specifically because its notification widget gives me more info in the preview.
Desperately waiting for Gnome Nautilus to not suck major ass (type ahead search, faster performance… hell, just make it like Dolphin, pretty much).
My setup sounds very similar to terminhell’s. I have a server where the host is running Proxmox and I have a dedicated little Debian VM in it to run PiHole. It has been very reliable and stable in the four years since I’ve set this up.
To get ad-blocking on the go I set up Wireguard for myself and my gf so that we are always on my VPN when we are off my local WiFi. This has been functionally set and forget.
I haven’t used AdGuard so I cannot comment on it, but I have not been found wanting in the slightest with PiHole.
I have 225k domains blocked with the combination of filter lists I use. I just use a few of the good ones. You can find good lists here. https://firebog.net/
I don’t get it. You could have probably maintained a Debian Sarge install and upgraded it all the way through to Bookworm. I’m kind of surprised they don’t provide an upgrade path in place for Raspian when Debian can manage it.
So by chance I was in university and invited into what by my roommate. I literally bought more internet bandwidth from my uni to handle an early freeleech event where I got to mega game the system (By accident! I didn’t really know what I was doing. And good thing it was a private tracker because I was on a bare connection. I didn’t know what A VPN was at that time, much less how to hide my identity online).
I thought my ratio was totally unfair so I never really abused it, but that’s kinda the problem. Only by chance I had like a 500 ratio, whereas someone like you had no chance ever to catch up to the earlier established players. Even though I wasn’t a victim of the ratio, the concept of your story is just another reason why I dislike private trackers.
That said, the best thing about what.cd was just how well organized and categorized it was. Library of Alexandria style shit, now lost to us. Plus the forums with some real music-heads were great, too, and you could really expand your music horizons by talking with those people. I liked that it was NOT a Reddit-style forum, so when something new dropped everyone had a say. Upvotes didn’t influence that kind of conversation. At any rate, I stopped pirating music so much maybe beginning in 2013 or 2014, but every time I look now the uploads are either 320kbps (overkill bitrate, garbage ancient codec) or FLAC (nice for archiving, but not what I want). So I end up DLing FLACs and then converting them into 128kbps Opus. It works, but my music horizons aren’t broadened without that what community. I guess all I mean is I don’t miss the private nature of what, but I do miss the community.
I prefer public trackers and torrents just because I don’t like gatekeeping piracy. I want those bits to be distributed as far and wide as possible. So anything I get and/or seed will be public.
Even if there are bad peers that don’t give back (which there are many), plenty enough times it’s just people with shitty under served Internet connections. I’m fortunate enough to have a good enough connection where that doesn’t bother me.
Notepad in wine is pointless compared to something like gedit, which you have, or similar editors like geany or kwrite. Cinnamon might even have their own basic text editor. And then there are further options like mousepad from the xfce project or featherpad from the lxqt project.
Notepad in wine will just lead to frustration because of poorer integration.
Finally, I just saw your edit and I think you’re spot on. Not because of ARM, which is actually decently supported, but because running an OS off of a microSD card is slow and tedious. It just isn’t made for that quick, small random access.