The secret ingredient…is crime.

Security from the evil villains who want to block ads. Jesus would have wanted everyone to watch ads as god intended, and these degenerates need to be taken down.

E-ink is easier on the eyes, especially for extended reading. Same for the lack of backlight.

The screen is bigger than a phone.

The battery lasts much much longer. Reading doesn’t need to kill the phone battery when it is on it’s own device.

Reading can be done in places where phones are not permitted (I take my Kindle with me when I take my kids to the pool).

Readers can be cheap enough that it isn’t really a problem having both devices.

It might work for you, give it a shot.

But I found it was never really a viable use case to have a desk and monitor and KB+M and USB hub and charger…yet somehow be more inconvenient to have a laptop.

Androids don’t have great performance on desktop mode. It’s noticeably slow and kinda less responsive.

Almost no app is made for KB+M interface and a big screen.

Browser interface isn’t as you expect compared to PCs (context menus, extensions, link handling that might go straight to some app, etc).

It’s hard to describe completely, but it’s just a really poor experience that doesnt work at all for me. If I were going to rely on a portable device with me, then I would just use a Steam Deck to actually have a proper PC. I got a small 13 inch laptop for £150 with an 8th gen Intel and it works infinitely better. The only reason I would connect my phone to a monitor is for emulation gaming.

I’m sure others will chime in to disagree…but Samsung Dex has never been able to replace a laptop for me. Even an 8 year old laptop will do basic tasks better than trying to make the Android desktop experience work. Most apps aren’t designed for this. I’d recommend sticking with your phone and buying a used dirt cheap laptop.

Phones are not at all worth upgrading within 5 years for most people. Laptops and PCs don’t need upgrading in even longer. The cycle of trading in for new devices is a scam that everyone seems to be happy to fall for. The most dysfunctional this gets is where people do this with cars!

Or of the laptop has a serious hardware fault and is beyond repair, then pick up a keyboard from a thrift shop for a couple of bucks and type on your phone.

Or if it is just for the purpose of using a word processor, then any ancient laptop can be picked up on Facebook marketplace. I can see plenty of decent options listed in my area for <£50 (I appreciate this may be a lot to spend for some though).

I never played this all the way through. I’ve just gotten it ony PS2 emulator. Looking forward to it.

For home LAN use on the Steam Deck, the built in Steam streaming is very usable now and much much better than it used to be.

Thanks. I do know almost all those commands, but I’m not quite comfortable with using konsole/SSH exclusively yet. KDE is what I’m most familiar with from my desktop PC and I thought it would be easier to set up knowing where settings etc are. Also I use a Guacamole Docker app to access the server’s desktop (my personal machine) when I need to do some personal task while at work. That may change as I get better at this and learn more.

Edit: I don’t want to mess with the server now, but I’ll try to put LXQT at some point to save some resources. I don’t trust myself to remove KDE cleanly and install a different a different DE without destroying the setup.

Notes app is a good idea. I might have a look at options.

Actual is working really well for me for budgeting.

What are you running on your server? I’m looking for more ideas.

I’ve got loads of stuff up and running, but now it is all quietly functional and I’m withdrawing from the enjoyment if setting up something new. I’ve recently had to delete a couple of Docker apps which weren’t really very useful for me, but I enjoyed setting them up and liked seeing a long list of healthy containers in Dockge.

I’m new to all this.

Synology: I was using Synology before and getting started with trying some Docker containers. The Synology was very underpowered and containers kept crashing or being shut down (from resources running out I guess) so I wanted to upgrade.

Comments seemed to suggest it is best to keep the Synology as purely a NAS and use a mini PC for compute, so that’s what I went for. Got a 12th Gen Intel mini PC pretty cheap on eBay to play around with.

Debian - I’ve put Debian with KDE on the mini PC server. I was looking into TrueNAS or Unraid to consist what I should try learning. My brother (rightly) said there’s no reason to over complicate things when I don’t need functions of those OS and don’t understand them. The one place the Linux community seems to be united is in recommending Debian for a server for being rock solid and stable. I’ve been very happy with it.

Spent my week off figuring out Docker, mounting NAS drives on the server PC, troubleshooting the problems. Got a setup I’m really happy with and I’m really happy I went with Debian.

I wouldn’t expect it to. I think mythbusters did an episode on this, and it took the strength of one of those car lifting magnet cranes to damage an HDD.

Like many things in my life, this remains 75% complete “good enough”. This lives behind a huge backboard behind my TV. Said backboard is slanting because it is leaning against the wall and I still haven’t mounted it to the wall properly. You can even see some glass panels leaning against the wall, those are some shelves I’ve been meaning to put in… For the past 6 years.

The router, fibre internet entry point and LAN connection in the wall (to upstairs) are all behind d the TV there… So everything is just dumped there.

I’ll paste a comment I made about this recently (with updates). My question is: what is a good solution to keep a music folder backed up (lives on my server NVME partitioned boot drive, but want it backed up automatically to my NAS HDD)? Also: how can I back up my Docker setup in case I screw it up and need to set it all up again?

I used just a Synology NAS with Docker containers to begin with but outgrew that. Now I have a mini PC with a 12th Gen i5 (picked up cheap on eBay) for computing and the Synology NAS is just a NAS.

Docker containers:

Glutun (VPN), qBittorrent, media managers (sonarr, radarr, prowlarr, flaresolverr), Jellyfin (video streaming), Paperless NGX (document upload), Immich (photo upload), watchtower (auto update Docker containers), Plex (because my wife+friends aren’t used to Jellyfin yet and it takes a while to transition them to unfamiliar technology), Actual (budgeting), Syncthing (file sync, update: removed this, not needed, actually need a backup solution), Element server (chat server just for myself, I make channels to cross-share snippets of text/links/images to myself, accessible on any device).

Still need to set up Lidarr and Beet for my music management (update: tried these last night and don’t really need them). Also need to find a good exercise logger, set up Guacamole remote access interface (update: done, happy with this), learn to use Dockage to replace Portainer (done, happy with this), set up an RSS docker app (update: done, still messing around with FreshRSS) and audio bookshelf for podcasts and audiobooks. Haven’t got the guts to approach Home Assisstant yet.

I stopped looking for a notes app and use Joplin to sync with my Mailbox.org account, but I might look for a Docker solution for notes.

NoMachine runs on my server PC for remote desktop. The server PC runs Debian with KDE (because I’m familiar with setting up what I need in KDE, which is the most superior of all desktop environments).

Synology handles making my apps accessible externally (from Synology.me reverse proxy addresses).

I used to use the Marius Hosting site to set up Synology Docker containers. Now I just copy his YAML data and edit it for my server. So I still use those guides.

I’ve written a noob guide notes for myself to set this all up again in case I destroy it somehow (already happened once). Really enjoyed using my week off to learn all this.

I’ve learnt it from scratch in my week off, spending 2 or 3 hours on it every night for a week (although this might be underselling it as I had become familiar with desktop Linux over the past year and had a superficial idea of Docker containers with my Synology NAS). But still it’s not as big a deal as you think once you find some good resources. I’m going to comment about my setup after this in this thread… Have a look.

Main resource that helped me was Marius Hosting and ChatGPT got me out of trouble when I got stuck by deciphering logs for me when things didn’t work.

Others have posted longer term solutions (bigger cup, skill issue, etc). In the immediate situation you have some options:

1. Decant to another cup. There’s no way to do this without creating a mess.
2. Put a plate under the mug and carry it back to the desk with a couple of paper towels to clean up the mess (if work is urgent)
3. Leave it on the counter and sit there for 5 min till the top can be sipped before going back to the desk (if work can wait)

I’ve just finished setting up exactpy what you describe (Synology NAS and Debian mini PC server) and it is working so well. Why do you need a more powerful NAS? If you use it for just storage you won’t really be falling short of NAS compute power.

I considered adding the drives directly to the mini PC as well, but I’m happy I’ve kept the Synology for the best of both worlds. Synology makes it so much easier to share the storage, set up reverse proxy, provide constant 2 way sync with my online cloud WebDAV service, etc.

I’m in the same boat. My 2 bay Synology is enough for my storage, but the apps and Docker containers are bringing it to its knees. I’m keeping the Synology and adding on a mini PC to run docker containers.

Found a mini PC with an i5-12500T for £240.

I’m a noob at this stuff, but I’m hyped to get more stability in what I host and start using more demanding services.

Are Nintendo’s shit practice’s going to make any difference to people falling over themselves to buy their stuff?

Best selling console of all time, you say?