> How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it".
As other commenters have stated, maybe this isn't the best place to ask.
I'm definitely in the "almost all of it" camp. I have Diablo II game saves on my desktop that are carried forward directly from my Windows 98 SE box circa 2002-2003. As well as Linux ISO's I acquired on Kazaa while still on dial-up internet.
Well that's your problem right there. The home labber setups are for experimentation or "hot rodding" purposes and they typically way overbuild their solutions.
What most people need is an old desktop in a corner somewhere (preferably close to your router so you can get to it with an ethernet cable).
It's won't be Grandma proof, but if you're remotely technical you can write a docker compose file that glues together some useful home server utilities that sound interesting to you.
My setup is roughly speaking: Ubuntu LTS, ZFS (with 4 disks in a RAID10 style config), and a docker compose file that runs plex, transmission, syncthing, vaultwarden behind an nginx-proxy[1] container that even automagically renews my Let's Encrypt certs for me (though it's probably even easier if you use a Cloudflare tunnel).
If you're confident all your apps are available on these platforms, the storage part is easier with something like TruNAS or Unraid. If you don't need storage at all you can slim down your hardware a lot and just use a raspberry pi.
IMO, just find an old beater machine and get hacking :)
I moved my DO server to a pi that was gathering dust. I agree, folks need to get off the cloud, find an old laptop or an old $40 mac mini, they are usually low power enough.
What makes it grandma proof is software that makes it extremely simple, which is like a home appliance, which is within the realm of possibility.
The simpler way to go on most fronts is some form of Proxmox with things like the above managed, it takes care of much of the overhead and doubt on it's own or through a reasonably point and click interface, which could be pre-configured.
I assume this isn't the case with every machine, but every hardware I've ever owned (including the Framework 13, which has pretty good Linux support) has had worse battery life under Linux (mainstream distros like Fedora and Ubuntu).
To say nothing of the truly excellent battery life Macs these days get.
That's the only reason to avoid Linux on a laptop these days, IMO.
Have you tried a ThinkPad? They have official support for Linux and generally have excellent battery life. At least that's been the case for me on my ThinkPad Z13 running CachyOS. I did install TLP for better battery life, but TLP is a must-have for all Linux ThinkPad users anyways.
I'm a little gun-shy of getting another Dell after two bad machines in a row (two separate models with swollen batteries < 3 years old), but I'll admit the 14 looks nice now that they've brought back the physical function keys!
I'm waiting to see some other reviews of the Omarchy and Dell XPS combo on battery life. DHH has overhyped some things in the past - he posted a screenshot on X last week showing ~40 hours battery life remaining on the Dell.
But it's so good to see the Windows side catching up to Macs now. So tempted to try out Omarchy on the XPS.
Yep. Personally I run it via docker (my home server setup is just a compose file) but they have OS installers for MacOS/Windows/some Linux distros, as well as a raw .NET .dll[1] you can use to run it anywhere you have the .NET runtime.
We attempted a move to mono for backend web services maybe 3 years before .NET Core released, and it was a complete no-go. 10x reduction in performance on the same hardware.
This wasn't specific to our workload either. I was big into the game Terraria at the time, and I saw similarly poor performance when running it's game server under mono vs .NET 4.x
While some of the mono toolchain was integrated into .NET Core, CoreCLR was a rewrite and immediately solved this problem.
Great context, thanks! I knew it worked (I closely followed mono development at the time) but I didn't have a windows license/windows machines at the time it was ongoing to compare it to. 4x is pretty bad, any ideas what went wrong? Lack of jit maybe? I forget the exact architecture of mono at that time, being like 20 years ago...
It did have a JIT, it just wasn't a very performant one. I recall the GC implementation also being quite slow. GC is an area where .NET is still making strides.. we got a new collector in .NET 10.
> I don't get to see them really in the Linux ecosystem
Sounds like you're just in a part of the ecosystem that doesn't touch C#. Aside from gamedev, C# is mostly a back-end web language, and almost all new builds are going to deploy to some Linux based serverless offering or something like Kubernetes. At my work, we're a mix of Python/Typescript/C# deploying to Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud Run.
As for the language, your parallels to Java are accurate but outdated. Older versions of C# were very very similar to Java, but C# progressed when Java didn't. For better or worse (depending on your tastes), C# is more comparable to Kotlin or Swift these days than Java.
That's to say nothing of C#'s contributions to other programming languages; async/await and unsafe{} blocks were both first seen in C# before being adopted elsewhere.
As other commenters have stated, maybe this isn't the best place to ask.
I'm definitely in the "almost all of it" camp. I have Diablo II game saves on my desktop that are carried forward directly from my Windows 98 SE box circa 2002-2003. As well as Linux ISO's I acquired on Kazaa while still on dial-up internet.
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