Consider immutable, I use ublue-kinoite (fedora spin ‘with batteries’) and use a distrobox Arch for the AUR and development, best of both worlds, rock stable main OS, cutting edge rolling release as needed. I’ve been very happy, and if you’re using for uni and work, reliability should be a consideration.
Your biggest bang for buck is with cheap second hand drives, keep a spare on hand to rebuild the array / volume when one dies. You should be aware that the number of drives in the array directly affects the amount of usable space, 2 drives 50% of total available (a direct mirror, to compensate for the loss of one drive), 3 drives you get 66%, 5 gets you 80%. Say you get 6 4Tb drives, keep one as a spare and the remaining 5 will give you 16Tb usable (with one lost to parity so you can survive one disk failure). You then immediately want to save for a 16 Tb external drive for offline, preferably offsite backup (RAID is not Backup!). As others have wisely said, anything can be used to host, but aim at the most power efficient. If necessary get a PCI card for more SATA or SAS ports. Identify high value, small files, documents, current work, personal photos, source code and so forth and arrange for cloud backup, preferably with local encryption so you needn’t trust the cloud provider, preferably in at least two places (so one can go tits up or enshittify without bothering you). You’d be surprised what fits into a free 10Gb account if you triage well.
Ya, but you’re overlaying all that stuff, codecs, nvidia, etc. ublue works out of the box and updates are quicker due to not having to re-overlay everything. It’s just less friction. Also it comes with automatic updates enabled which is really nice (and safe in an immutable, intrinsically rollbackable environment)
NixOS is the new Arch… (cat, meet pigeons) Unfortunately It doesn’t have as much basic training as Arch did (which archinstall obviates, not that I think this is a bad thing, it’s time is here), which did so much to improve community. Unfortunately NixOS’s doco is woeful, while ArchWiki is gold standard.
I say this as an ex Arch type who moved to Fedora, now ublue-kinoite, waiting for Nix to mature enough to daily (although I do have a T440p with 3 boot drives not doing much, hmm)…
Anyone able to compare this with your own SearxNG instance ? I recently set one up, bit of pain in that, but being able to blacklist content farms has been really nice (bye fandom) and the list provided really improves coding search. Choosing what search engines I like (and adding new ones) really helps deshittify search results, bangs, pipe it hrough a vpn etc… Haven’t dived that deep and it’s already leaps and bounds better than my previous search experience.