Neocons were never that bright.

Might as well reinstall at this point and for future reference. You shouldn’t just delete your network connection and firewall and throw stuff at the wall to fix it. A lot of this stuff is set up by a script during install and it only runs once so if you break it, you are going to need much deeper knowledge to fix it without a reinstall. You likely made new problems which makes finding your actual issue nearly impossible now. If you have a single issue it’s easier to find. If you have two issues there is no way to know if anything you did actually fixed it unless you get lucky and fix both issues at once.

This sounds obvious but I recently didn’t realize that you had to click on the network connections and actually click, connect, to get it to connect on Ethernet in my distro. This is a quirk that I didn’t realize that Linux had. Windows just automatically connects to Ethernet, Linux probably doesn’t do this because it’s a security risk.

This seems like the type of issue that chatGPT could really help with. With a few console commands you could verify that the system is seeing the network adapter and is communicating with it properly and try to list the networks directly, giving you a better clue as to where the chain is broken.

Either way might as well reinstall at this point.

Ah nice, sometimes different versions work better. GE is a must have for .net heavy games.

Don’t forget to grab protonup-qt so you can easily install proton GE which has better .net support so more games work.

Some cloud backups offer lifetime deals which can be a good second backup.

As for self hosting. You should buy a domain, use a dynamic DNS service. This doesn’t cost much but is very useful. Get a decent router that isn’t superhackable. Get something like fedora for your servers, the os.tree file system is good because if you break your machine with updates you can just roll back.

Randomize your ports, be careful what you expose behind open ports, be careful what you install on your server, and run stuff in containers. Also block port scanning.

As for learning you are just going to have to research. For servers you need to open ports for whatever you are using, like a webserver, file server, etc. you need to be mindful of security. Keep it updated. You should keep your server separate from your main machines if possible and disable your main machines ability to port scan your server by using a VPN or something on your server.

It’s not all that difficult. Just watch some videos and passively absorb this knowledge.

As for backups, you should invest in one of these lifetime plans from a cloud provider. Maybe create separate accounts that you only use for your server stuff to help keep the details from getting leaked. (Email accounts, passwords, etc) On top of this you should have a second backup which I recommend hosting yourself so you can learn. This way your data should be safe.

In your backup server, you should run mirror raid, this way if you lose a drive, you won’t lose your data. Parity raid is t quite as good because you could lose a second drive while rebuilding. It’s cheaper for the amount of space, but you can just invest in a couple of high density, enterprise level drives from a reputable brand. Run mirror raid, and backup your files. Throw in a small SSD for the OS, and a medium SSD for cache. You can go as cheap or expensive as you want.

Get some remote management software. Since you aren’t super technical, use a remote desktop system. Just make sure it’s a good one that is well maintained because this is a big single point of failure in your security.

If you install a web browser on your server, disable scripts and ads, and only use it to download stuff you need from GitHub or something. Try to avoid exposure to sites which may have vulnerabilities.

As for the server. Using VMs and containers, you can use it relatively safely for many things. You could even use cloudfare if you wanted for additional security so your servers actual IP is not ever in the wild. People will only see an IP for that particular port and server VM. This is a bit overkill maybe.

You can run a backup server, web servers, game servers, you can host your own DNS, you can run media servers, and even your own private VPN or local AI models. There is tons of stuff you can do with a server.

Also don’t forget to set a reminder to reregister your domain name!

The simplest setup would be an old computer with a bunch of hard drives attached, maybe an old desktop, maybe a laptop with a powered USB hub. This is all you really need to get started.

Never owned one of their products, not even once. When I realized the iPod didn’t support USB file transfer and they forced you to use iTunes, I knew that they were a bad company and I vowed to never use their products.

On Nvidia it doesn’t support game mode, so it just boots into the desktop, and also you can download a version that boots directly into the desktop or just tweak the files to make it the default.

No you can pretty much do everything the same. The biggest difference is the distro it’s based on, bazzite is based on fedora, you use “sudo rpm-ostree install” to install packages. Fedora has a system where it layers packages onto an ostree so if you have an issue you can boot from an old one.

Rpm is only needed for system packages, most packages can just be installed via a flatpack in the package store, which is all free and open source software.

Bazzite is a great starting point. It is pretty much turn key, while having the best performance and proprietary drivers. It already has everything installed to get emulating windows apps working easily out of the box. Wine, proton, steam, the proprietary drivers. These are all things you are going to want probably and this will save you a headache and several days of trying to get the system setup.

Make sure you disable UEFI and choose legacy boot in your bios if it’s available and also disable the TPM in the bios if available. It will work with those enabled, but it’s buggier and the TPM causes performance issues. Linux doesn’t need these and they are artificially imposed by Microsoft and the big corporate OSes, but they suck compared to the original simple standards for bootstrapping. I’m not 100% sure how well this works on everything. It’s possible some newer cards might require UEFI boot, but you can just turn it back on before you install.

I recommend KDE as the desktop environment, especially if you are used to windows. It will feel the most natural and familiar to you. I also recommend asking chatGPT to help you with basic tasks like installing system level software. Make sure you specify that you are using bazzite. Once you learn to use Linux its so much better than Windows. The performance is much better in nearly every regard. You can do anything you want with Linux, where windows is extremely locked down nowadays. It also prolongs the life of your hardware, especially drives, since windows spyware isn’t constantly scanning your files and stuff. With proton you will likely see a 5-15% performance jump over gaming on windows natively. The downside is that many popular games won’t work in multiplayer because of the anti heat, and also some trash software like Photoshop won’t work, but the vast majority of windows apps will work just fine, even multiplayer. The developers have to go out of their way to make multiplayer games not work on Linux, so it’s pretty rare, even if many of the bigger studios do it. You can dual boot windows for this if you really want to, but windows will constantly try to screw up your boot and stuff so you have to be careful. I would say just not support those companies which go out of their way to not support Linux. They are anticompetitive and anti consumer.

The learning curve for Linux isn’t quite a cliff now, it’s still steep, but with bazzite it’s much easier then it ever has been. It mostly just works from a simple gui install, and there isn’t really anything you need outside of this base install. Perhaps you want to install, protonup-qt so you can install proton GE, which has better support for some games that rely heavily on .net code, like space engineers.

Don’t use the open Nvidia drivers they are not as good. Most people’s problems with Nvidia probably come from this. I recommend bazzite for a Linux newbie, because it installs the best driver automatically and is very easy to use. Just get the distro that’s made for Nvidia with KDE.

Never had this issue. I just use Firefox.

Please don’t post this trash propaganda on lemmy.

I think it supports most of the common bands.

I haven’t received it yet but apparently not good. It’s a $200 phone. I mostly want it because it runs Linux natively, has a regular unlocked bootloader that isn’t designed to be frustrating like android phones, and can send display over USB-C so it’s like a regular computer. You can run anything like emulating windows apps, you could install steam on it technically by putting it in an emulation container, but the chipset is very old at this point, and so you aren’t going to be emulating anything remotely modern on it. It is just a PC in your pocket though. You have a package manager, you can install many different Linux distros on it. You can get a LoRa radio mesh case for it, a physical keyboard/battery case, which I will probably get eventually. I think it’s worth the 200 dollars. I really want to get away from android. It’s hard because everything from Arm CPUs to the modems are completely proprietary. The only reason this device exists is because the design docs got leaked.

It does have phone, sms, and your standard phone stuff. You can get several different desktop environments like plasma mobile or gnome mobile and several others. It has 3 GBs of ram, and the OS usually takes up around 500 MB. It has dip switches to disable the hardware like the camera, cell modem, wifi, bt, etc. It would be a great device for taking to defcon.

I just ordered a pinephone, haven’t received it yet. The pinephone is the best native option in the U.S right now but you can get some unlocked smartphones with better hardware and install Linux it’s just a bit of a headache.

The general consensus is that it’s pretty low power, being one of the only chipsets that has publicly available design docs for it. It’s a mid tier 2015 era chipset. It a bit slow but works as a phone. You can probably emulate android apps in it.

I use mojeek, and startpage sometimes. Ddg is too influenced now, they do the same stuff Google does. Brave is run by people who hate LGBT people so I can’t support them in good conscience.

No, they don’t have to. The corporations are the ones who want to control everyone. The U.S government is just a tool for them. The politicians are basically just actors at this point.

I mean, let’s not get crazy now.

That’s not really company imposed spyware though. If I thought in any way that my boss was trying to make me install spyware I wouldn’t the very least install it in shelter, something that has been disappeared during the Google play store purges. You can still find the apk online atleast until Google kills android soon with their ban on user installable software outside of the play store.

Cool, I have some ideas as well, like maybe write a script that hashes configuration files that needs a secret password to put into edit mode, if the config changes without being out into edit mode first, disconnect the server. Maybe use a raspberry pi that’s hidden from the network to do this. I know that wouldn’t work for large websites maybe because they can’t afford to go down for hours at a time, but it would give you an additional layer of security for sensitive stuff. I’m more into game programming but I know how exploits work and stuff. I’m pretty sure many types of things like this already exist in the market. One idea I had was pretty neat. Basically in your eula you reserve the right to hack back people that try to hack you, and you have an automated system that uses some known exploits to get a ping or maybe install a rootkit on anyone who is trying to mess around in your system. Later you can just get on and deanonymize them. This requires you actually spend time researching your own zero days. People in defcon hacking competitions do this. They are sort of masters with decompilers and hex editors.

Yes i never saw this feature until I discovered shelter which uses this to protect your personal info.