Maybe trying with some Raspberry Pis for your services (takes up less space, low power) and building a dedicated machine for the NAS, as suggested by @hodgepodgin@lemmy.zip, but that’s a whole different budget.

Otherwise, maybe going for some mini-pcs, more recent second-hand PCs (stronger CPU for video encoding) or just more RAM and more disks.

I guess the final price will depend on what exact machine you can get your hands on.

Nice project!

Given the tight budget, here is what I would do, especially if you are not too constraint by space and don’t mind a few extra watts of power consumption. The Raspberry Pi are getting expensive, and the 200USD will barely get you a RPi5 nowadays. You said there is no market for you for second hand sever hw, but I’m guessing it should not be too hard to get used office desktop PCs.

• Get two of these. Maybe Optiplex or Thinkstation. You can probably get something decent <50USD each.
• Get two small SATA SSDs for the OS (128 - 256GB), around 30USD each.
• Get your storage drives. You should get 3 of them so you can have ZFS raid redundancy.
• On one machine, install TrueNAS and your storage drives. Default RAM is probably enough.
• On the other one, upgrade the RAM to 8 or 16 GB (~50USD), install your favorite Linux distro, and you can run your services, accessing the storage with NFS!

To me it feels safer (against my own mess-up) to separate the storage and the services, plus this setup is fairly upgradable. You’ll probably have space to add more storage drives, even maybe a cache SSD; increase the RAM; add a third machine etc.

Of course it’s just one idea, maybe other another layout might fit your use-case better, idk.

Good luck!

Don’t let the prospect of beheading get on the way of your dreams!

Thumbs up for the thorough recap!

I am dailying Aeon for a while, which is a OpenSuse + GNOME version of Bazzite, which I also tried. I can highly recommend both!

Guess I’ll pronounce it Kh Duh from now on!

Found the KDE user!

From the post title I assumed that OP was referencing the album as well.

As a Mastodon album I think I might prefer Blood Mountain, but the song Blood and Thunder is such a banger!

HARPOONS THRUST IN THE SKY

Kazuma Kazuma !

Nvidia GPU can be troublesome on Linux indeed. Mint might not be the best option in that case. If you are flexible, distro-wise, I cannot recommend Bazzite enough.

You can get an image with all the needed Nvidia drivers and configs, that should bring you the smoothest possible experience with your hardware, especially for gaming!

Good luck!

Injecting bleach would surely help, as per one very stable genius.

Such a good collection of resources! Thanks for sharing!

That’s great! Love to see more GN and Lvl1 collabs!

Wow sweet project! Best of luck to you!

I don’t have much advice to give, maybe you can look into the seeed new line of tiny USB-C MCUs, they look neat and easy to work with!

I was wondering about that 6-keys thumb cluster though. It looks unwieldy on such a tiny board. Got any prior experience with that ?

Came here to say that. If you actually plan to daily a meme distro Nyarch is probably your best bet imo!

Great to hear you’re willing to move to Linux!

Like other comments pointed, there is no such thing as “most secure”. It’s a deep rabbit hole and it’s better in general to assume that any device connected to the internet is at risk. Hell, any storage can be compromised if the entity interested put enough effort into it.

I recommande reading the page on Privacy Guides, it gives a good overview. In general, you should consider your thread model: what is you situation and why do you want security or privacy for?

• Regarding security, I would say for a general case, any modern, popular Linux distro with full disk encryption is probably good enough and as secure as any other OS. I would recommande going with a Fedora Silverblue or an OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but the more popular Ubuntu or Mint are great as well for new users.
• If you also want “good enough” privacy, you should focus more on the software you are running, and the situation of your data, especially in your usage of your web browser. But that’s a different topic entirely.
• If you actually want more advanced security though, that’s where it becomes difficult/fun. You need to consider what you are trying to protect yourself from, specifically. Virus? Maybe a compartmentized OS like Qubes might be a solution. Physical access to your device? You can get a dead man switch that kills you system disk if your laptop is taken away from you. You want to hide your OS install from a security inspection? You can set a deniable full disk encryption with a facade OS that protect your from a rubber hose attack. Probably many other things exist I am not aware of.

But anyway, if your question is “Is a Linux distro at least as secure as my previous Windows”, the answer is definitely YES imo. And if you want MOAR, it’s gonna be a fun ride!

[edit: and yes, updates! Update you system plz.]

FIFY

Shameless self-promotion

Emacs btw