I have used arch on this same install since 2019, before that, 2016. (Just because I wanted to get my old system back ASAP and was comfortable with the process)
If I had to do it over, I would test out openSUSE tumbleweeb or endeavor, but if you have your system that works and you like it, there is absolutely nothing to gain by switching.
If you just want to explore or do it as a hobby, use an old SSD and test out different configs on a seperate drive (you can pick up a 128 or 240GB SSD for like $25) but the only differences are package managers and DE.
Ha, your first sentence is just plain wrong. It was quite broken under “normal” usecases with per-DE bugs.
For example, on KDE, about 1.5 years ago the bug finally got fixed where your Wayland session would completely crash if your monitor lost any signal whatsoever (monitor sleep or shutting off the monitor). If you ask me, that is an very standard usecase without which there is no world where said action crashing the entire session would be considered ready for general use.
I think we are there now, just some visual glitches nowadays, also some recent glitches with monitor sleep, but Wayland very rarely crashes anymore.
The only option I could think of would be integrating an industrial oil tank sensor.
A wire sensor that uses Time-domain-reflectometry would likely be the best, but expensive. This uses a corrosion resistant cable and uses wave reflections when a pulse changes mediums (air to oil) in order to give a level reading.
More difficult to DIY though. You have to know what you are doing.
Ultrasonic sensor might work, but it depends on if oil for home heating gives off fumes that would interfere with it.
Otherwise another DIY solution would be optical sensing like a ToF sensor. Maybe the most realistic for easy integration in ESPHome, but like the ultrasonic sensor, you would have to protect it from a full tank contaminating the sensor with oil.
If the tank is plastic, a capacitive sensor could work too.
You are not supposed to have smoke alarms in the bathroom or just outside of a shower bathroom for this reason actually. Also not in the kitchen. A heat detector is recommended for the kitchen.
I had alarms that would go off specifically in the winter in our stair tower because it was a 200 year old house that was renovated badly with no insulation.
Even my Fibaro smart CO alarm got bugged and drained its entire battery in 2 days because it was in a 5-10C environment (within their specs, but they simply lie on the specs).
From my experience, any life saving device simply can’t handle moderately cold temperatures at all, which is honestly extremely ridiculous to me and very dangerous.
Your problem, if dust related would likely be because you are using optical alarms which are easily susceptible to dust. If that is the case, you could try replacing those with ionization alarms on the 2nd floor. Ionization detects flaming fires better and optical detects very smokey fires better.
I may be misunderstanding flatpack, though I do understand the draw of all dependencies in one package.
One of the big things that drew me to linux some years ago was “oh, you don’t have to reinstall every dependency 101 times in a packaged exe so the system stays much smaller?” As well as in-place updates without a restart. It resulted in things being much much less bloated, or maybe that was just placebo.
Linux seems to be going in the flatpack direction which seems to just be turning it into a windows-like system. That and nix-like systems where everything is containerized and restarting is the only thing that applies updates seems to be negating those two big benefits.
Upload speeds of the average person make general internet use while connected to a home VPN much worse. For example, my mobile nework is at least 10x faster than my home network upload speed if I am in a place with 5g. I’d much rather connect to my paid VPN provider where the speed difference is barely noticable.
Not to mention even if people are using a VPS, it might be very far away and severely impact speeds.
Everything you want is definitely possible for the budget.
I used an old I5 laptop with 4GB of RAM for a year or two. If you need a lot of storage, an old HDD will be fine usually. A raspberry pi 4 or 5 will be slower, but would still work, but if Norway prices are anything like belgium, an old I7 laptop sips power and will save money in electric costs
A few tips:
Run nextcloud all-in-one or spend some time optimizing nextcloud. It will help performance a lot
Unless you are a serious photographer, use Immich, 100%. Immich is a google photos replacement that has a bunch of good user features like accounts and good security and sharing that photoprism just doesn’t. Photoprism is really geared towards professional photographers.
transmission + wireguard container for a VPN is the way to go …
radarr/sonarr/lidarr & prowlarr are good to use with transmission
The distribution “managed by a single person” depends on hundreds of people working on different sofware to keep up. It’s not “one person doing better than the thousands of Microsoft employees combined” implication they are pushing
Windows 11 beat the linux distros by up to 20% in 1% lows which are argued as much more important by most tech reviewers. It wasn’t consistant at all which means that there was a giant margin of error.
I love linux and linux gaming has gotten radically better, but I am tired of tech “journalism” literally just cherrypicking, misleading, clickbait trash.
Hey, just to let you know, software raid nowadays is quite a bit better for home NAS that hardware raid. I would suggest using ZFS and zpools as a software raid.
If you are already past that point though. As far as sharing, if you are just using it as a small home server or NAS and want things simple, you could just use TrueNAS. It would make things much easier.
If you are running your main computer and sharing the files, I would suggest trying NFS instead of Samba. Samba shares are notoriously unreliable and buggy. Windows has NFS support for a while now for your other machines blog.netwrix.com/…/mounting-nfs-client-windows/
Pretty easy to set up, can be taken out to not be modified at run time unless you want plus not being stolen with the computer itself.
I see only drawbacks with a TPM for a computer system like that. In embedded credentials, mobile applications, cold credential storage, etc… it works very well, but it doesn’t solve any problem that someone tech savvy doesn’t have a better solution for, in my opinion.
If you are a big enough target for an evil maid attack, you are either good enough to circumvent it better than an embedded TPM, or you are rich enough to hire someone who is.