richneptune
I cut my teeth on Usenet so web forums always seemed so backwards and limiting compared to that. My earliest experience of being an actual user of them was probably the eurogamer forums and a few proboards “free” forums hosted by a few websites in the early-mid 00’s and still it just felt so clunky!
I’d say that Ubuntu is a great choice because there is a lot of support out there, in articles/support forums and apt repos for most things that you can just drop in. Even if you want to run the latest bleeding edge kernels the ppa support is excellent. For me it’s a pragmatic choice of distro even if ideologically I’d prefer to run plain Debian.
I’m rooting for OP, though. Starting their Linux journey on hard mode is something to be lauded!
I loved this one. Before broadband internet was common a number of us would download our Linux ISOs from questionable websites in our university computer lab and then take our files home on floppy or zip disk. I remember once my friend got trapped in a number of popups which claimed to have pictures of “Britney Spears Nude!!!” and I loudly asked him “what does ‘Britney Spears Nude’ mean?” in the full lab and then watching him panic close down everything.
Golden days!
So many!
MS Comic Chat and their weird VR Chat, the former was always very lively and a great introduction to the world of IRC, the latter was just experimental and trippy.
Usenet and finding lively discussion, flamewars and so much porn and spam under one roof.
Instant Messengers like ICQ and AIM being the lifeblood of the social world.
I think the thing I miss the most is that there was so much to discover and discovering it was very much a word of mouth thing, you had to find links from friends, follow webrings and pointers from sites that made it onto Altavista and Yahoo (or astalavista for the less legit stuff), now everything is consolidated onto a handful of platforms, it feels less open than ever.
BBC News. They do a fairly good job of being impartial since both main party voters here in the UK hate it and accuse it of being biased to the opposition!
Keeping my computers, phone and the firmware of any devices up to date. Doesn’t matter what it is, I like the latest and greatest.
Consider my SIP VoIP gateway, I maybe make one call a month through it and get a couple of scam calls a week, it’s stable as hell. Yet the second I get a notification saying there is a new firmware version I’m downloading it!
I can’t point to any decent resources, but in your shoes I’d probably download a Debian based distro that’s similar to what you used on your pi’s (Ubuntu server or Debian itself), learn how to use docker (see the other post where a user is asking about containerisation today for community responses) and set up a reverse proxy like Caddy to safely host your content on your lan and once you’ve got it working on there then think about internet access and whether you want to go down the VPS/Cloudfront route for public access to your goodies.
Given how Plex is trying to diversify away from self hosted content, give Jellyfin a spin - it’s surprisingly good and supported by anything with a browser, iOS, android, firestick, kodi or whatever!
I don’t use Tiktok but I gather that this is a big problem over there as well, so it sounds like Twitter is working just as well as the site it’s riffing off.
Apologies: Answered too quickly and missed out the homepage requirement. I’ll leave my answer up anyhow.
Webmin has a fail2ban status page, it’s also pretty useful for creating/maintaining your existing jails.