I have been running this for a year on my old HP EliteDesk 800 SFF (G2) with 64GB RAM, and it performes great on the smallest models (up til 8B) only on CPU. I run Ollama and OpenWebUI in containers/LXC in Proxmox. It’s not as smart as ChatGPT, but it can be suprisingly capable for everyday tasks!
OtterWiki looks awesome! The combination of markdown, git and a web interface is powerful.
Nice! It can also connect to a remote instance of ollama 👍
I use Navidrome, it’s a single binary and gives you your own Spotify, kinda. It can be use with many other apps, in addition to the web interface, as it supports the subsonic protocol.
Fedora has been “just working” for me for the last couple of years. It is my go to for older relatives for that very reason.
Fedora Silverblue downloads new OS versions in the background and boots the newest version after a reboot. I use this for older family member who’s been traumatised by Windows updates. I have also turned off notificantions that show up after a new boot with a fresh version.
The same goes for Flatpaks. Just updates without make a fuzz.
Its nice to give old people some peace of mind regarding their computing needs!
Fedora has been my default choice for non-techies in my family the last couple of years and it has been glorious!
All they need is a browser with uBlock, maybe an email reader and LibreOffice. With Silverblue, eveything updates automatically, and upgrades between major versions is a one-click operation. Easy rollback gives me peace of mind.
All they need to know is where the Super key is located on the keyboard. When pressed, it shows the dock with all apps they use and all open windows. Double-tap the Super key and you see all apps, but that is usually not necessary.
I also use the built in remote desktop feature (RDP) in conjunction with a Wireguard connection to my home network. So nice and a joy to never have to fight teamviewer again 😝
Check out Anytype! It is a local-first cross-platform app with Notion-like features, and it has a Kanban view. It is SUPER customisable, I have set it up with a PARA workflow that fits my needs.
Does it support Podman yet?
I have a couple of these (only the G2 and G3 SFF) and they consume between 6-10w when not under load, and they max out at 35w (or 65w depending on CPU). I run proxmox with 64gb ram and they are surprisingly efficient.
I never notice any update times, as the default in Fedora is to auto-update (I think?). Everything is just always up to date.
Edit: coming from ten years of Arch, this has significantly reduced my time fixing things related to an update 😆
It does share dependencies, but in a different way than a regular package manager. You share runtimes and base apps: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/dependencies.html
It actually works great for slightly more complex stuff to, like converting markdown to HTML etc. Caddys documentation is made using Server Includes for example.
I have done this, but instead of PHP, I have used Server Includes, which is a performant and simple way to add repeating headers and footers etc without extra dependecies. Nginx, Apache and Caddy all supports Server Includes, but with different syntax. I have used Caddys templating language, which I am most comfortable with.
Podman is great, but a lot of confusion arise from the rapid development the last ~year and the fact that different distros have relatively old versions in their repos.
I recommend using the latest Fedora Server and defining your containers as quadlets. Also, on Fedora, yoi can install Cockpit (and cockpit-podman) and get a decent webgui to manage your host and container.
I should just write a blog post about this instead of typing this up on my phone in bed 😆
If it’s a personal server for yourself and maybe some friends and family, I would rather use GoToSocial, as it is much more lightweight and is less complex to set up and maintain.
Nice, support for Android apps is just casually mention almost as a side note 😎
Proxmox does VMs and containers (LXC). You can run any docker / podman manager you want in a container.
Benefits of having Proxmox as the base is ZFS / snapshoting and easy setup of multiple boot drives, which is really nice when one drive inevitably fails 😏
There are still edge cases, but things have improved rapidly the last year or two, to the point that most docker-compose.yaml files can be run unmodified with podman-compose.
I have however moved away from compose in favor of running containers and pods as systemd services, which I really like. If you want to try it, make sure your distro has a reasonably new version of Podman, at least v4.4 ot newer. Debian stable has an older version, so I had to use the testing repos to get quadlets working.
It has RSS built-in, but since it is a static site generator, it does not support ActivityPub out of the box. But I do think I have seen implementations with some custom JavaScript.