Don't throw away your old PC—it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy
I'm currently running some stuff out of an old laptop which I also have tucked away somewhere and just... remote desktop in for most of the same functionality. And even if you can't be bothered to flip it open in the rare occassion you can't get to the points where the OS will let you remote in, there are workarounds for that these days. And of course the solution to the "can't hook it up to a keyboard and mouse" in that case is the thing comes with both (and its own built-in UPS) out of the box.
Nobody is saying that server grade solutions aren't functional or convenient. They exist for a reason. The argument is that a home/family server you don't need to use at scale can run perfectly fine without them only losing minor quality of life features and is a perfectly valid solution to upcycle old or discarded consumer hardware.
I think the self-hosting community needs to be more honest with itself about separating self hosting from building server hardware at home as separate hobbies.
You absolutely don't need sever-grade hardware for a home/family server, but I do see building a proper server as a separate activity, kinda like building a ship in a bottle.
That calculation changes a bit if you're trying to host some publicly available service at home, but even that is a bit of a separate thing unless you're running a hosting business, at which point it's not a really a home server anyways, even if it happens to sit inside your house.
I mean... my old PC burns through 50-100W, even at idle and even without a bunch of spinning hard drives. My actual NAS barely breaks that under load with all bays full.
I could scrounge up enough SATA inputs on it to make for a decent NAS if I didn't care about that, and I could still run a few other services with the spare cycles, but... maybe not the best use of power.
I am genuinely considering turning it into a backup box I turn on under automation to run a backup and then turn off after completion. That's feasible and would do quite well, as opposed to paying for a dedicated backup unit.
No.
I had that laptop before I tried to move it to Linux and I'm not buying a new one. It does work under Windows.
This is not my laptop not supporting Linux, this is Linux not supporting my laptop. Because I already own the laptop. If people weren't trying to cheerlead for their preferred OS for other reasons than... you know, whether it's good or not, this wouldn't even be a discussion. In fact, half the "Windows sucks" angles these days are down to "Windows 11 doesn't support specific pieces of pre-existing hardware". Which, you know, is the exact problem I'm having here.
Now, would ASUS finally paying attention to the ecosystem make it easier for a whole bunch of people to move over? Sure. Of course. But that doesn't contradict my previous statements.
Riiiiiiiight.
Man, social media is a trip.
I have an ASUS laptop that maps its multiple speakers incorrectly under Linux, it's been killing me for months and I'm now considering it. I was not prepared for the realization that the Linux path forward would be to just pay by the bug fix.
What the hell just happened there? That was some weird breakdown.
I mean, I guess you didn't catch the post of the person explaining why Diablo doesn't work properly (Fedi threading issues, presumably?) but maaaaaan, that's some off the rails unprompted weirdness.
The actual answer is below, but I'm constantly surprised about Lutris being proposed to GoG as opposed to Heroic.
I mean, Lutris is more flexible and you can build more stuff into it, but it's extremely fiddly and not as well supported. As long as you only care about GoG or Epic, Heroic is just hands-off and Steam-like. I actually prefer it to Galaxy on Windows.
Yeah, but nobody would argue that GameStop was dying in 2002, which is seven years into GameFAQs existing and very much the heyday of Prima and other dedicated print guide writers. Seriously, it just doesn't line up. GameFAQs and print guides were servicing the same need.
Again, I'm not saying it didn't have an impact. I'm saying if Prima guides existed as standalone publications in dedicated gaming stores it's partly because GameFAQs had killed monthly print magazines as a viable way to acquire strategy guides for games, so you instead had dedicated guide publishers working directly with devs and game publishers to have print guides ready to go at day one, sometimes shipping directly bundled with the game.
And then you had an army of crowdsourcer guide writers online that were catching up to those print products almost immediately but offering something very different (namely a searchable text-only lightweight doc different from the high quality art-heavy print guides).
Those were both an alternative to how this worked in the 90s, which was by print magazines with no online competition deciding which game to feature with a map, guide or tricks and every now and then publishing a garbage compilation on toilet paper pulp they could bundle with a mag. I still have some of those crappy early guides. GameFAQs and collectible print guides are both counters to that filling two solutions to the equation and they both share a similar curve in time, from the Internet getting big and killing mag cheats to the enshittified Internet replacing text guides with video walkthroughs and paid editorial digital guides made in bulk.
Well, I'd argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn't have purchased GameFAQs. At the very least it served to bring people over to their media ecosystem, and I wanna say they did serve ads and affiliate links on the site proper (but adblocker is also old, so it's hard to tell).
Video contributed, for sure. This is a process of many years, the whole thing was evolving at once. But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn't fit the timeline at all. It's off by 5-10 years, at least. Guides weren't residual in the 00s when GameFAQs was at its peak and being bought as a company, they were doing alright. It'd take 10 years longer for them to struggle and 15 for them to disappear. You're two console gens off there. That's a lot. If guide makers like Prima were pivoting to collectible high end books out of desperation you'd expect that process to have failed faster than that.
Instead they failed at the same time GameFAQs started to struggle and get superseded, so I'm more inclined to read that as them both being part of the same thing and the whole thing struggling together as we move towards video on media and digital on game publishing. That fits the timeline better, I think.
In any case, it was what it was, and it's more enshittified now. I've been looking up a couple details on Blake Manor (which is good but buggy and flaky in pieces, so you may need some help even if you don't want to spoil yourself) and all you get is Steam forums and a couple of hard to navigate pages. The print guide/GameFAQs era was harder to search but more convenient, for sure.
It's not a "even if some existed" thing, Prima operated until 2018. I personally remember preorder bundles with Prima guides for 360 era games and beyond. They published incredibly elaborate collector's hardbook guides (that honestly doubled as artbooks) for stuff like Twilight Princess and Halo 3, all the way to the PS4 gen.
Even granting that "booming" is probably a bit hyperbolic, if GameFAQs being free in 1995 was going to kill them, bleeding out would probably not have taken 23 years. The death of retail, print and physical games probably hurt print guides way more than GameFAQs ever did. You didn't buy those because you were in a hurry to solve a puzzle or look up a special move. They were collectibles and art books first and foremost.
FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn't as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think. At least that's what IGN was doing, and they're the ones that went hard on that front first. Also for the record, that probably had something to do with IGN and GameFAQs being affiliated for a while. GameFAQs was bought off by CNET in '03, it was definitely part of the big online gaming press ecosystem. I can see how IGN thought they could do better.
I don't know that the timeline works out there. GameFAQs is, as this post reminds us, pretty old. Even assuming that it didn't break out until the very late 90s or early 00s as THE destination for guides, there was certainly a booming editoral market for highly produced guides all the way into the Xbox 360 era.
I'd say it was responsible for the press not focusing on guides as much and instead refocusing on news and reviews. And then news and reviews died out and the press that was left refocused on guides again because by that point the text-only crowdsourced output of GameFAQs was less interesting than the more fully produced, visually-driven guides in professional outlets. And now... well, who knows, it's a mess now. Mostly Reddit, I suppose?
I mean... MK1 predates it by what? 3-4 years? Which in 90s tech time is an eternity.
MK fatality guides were mostly in print. Magazines were all over that type of stuff at the time. But it wouldn't have been strange to get a familiarly formatted ASCII guide for them with, say, your pirated floppies of the DOS or Amiga versions.
Hm... I'm a bit mixed on that, because GameFAQs became relevant a bit later than that, but at the same time that type of format for ASCII game guides predates GameFAQs being the main place you went to get them, so... it evens out?
I probably didn't start going to GameFAQs for this stuff until like 2000, but I certainly was using text guides for games in the 90s.
"A spine" as opposed to... being afraid that you're mean to me?
I mean, I've been around. I think I can picture worse than you can do by talking to me, going by our interaction so far.
Also, the idea of "meet me behind the gym" but with Nostr is just about the most hilarious thing I've read on social media. We live in the dumbest dystopia. OP may have been correct for the wrong reasons.
Dude, don't.
You're gonna get fired at some point. Just go with it.
I mean, from the tone of the post I'm assuming you're in the US, which sucks because... yeah, having labor protections really takes the edge off that reality. I genuinely don't know what it takes to privately give yourself a cushion of a couple of years, the way most other developed countries do.
But getting laid off in tech? Yeah, it will happen. And then you'll get rehired somewhere else. Or do contract work. Or start something else on your own with some former co-workers. Working in tech is stressful but doable. Working in tech with the assumption and absolute necessity to keep your current job indefinitely is untenable.
I'm lucky to have... you know, a social safety net that gives me the ability to operate in that environment without having to organize it through my own financials, but if you don't... well, I'd suggest figuring out what it'd take to do it yourself, setting it up and then stop worrying and love the bomb.
See, the irony of this comment is that projecting some entirely made up narrative onto the motivations of other people is exactly the sort of self-destructive self-righteousness that seems to be harming the OP in the first place.
FWIW, I had in no way considered the moderation policy of this "place", whichever "place" you're referring to, at all.
But feel free to reach out to me privately to give me whatever reply you think I "deserve". Which is also some chilling degree of self-righteousness, frankly. You're not social media Batman doing justice by insulting people, along with the rest of world saving that's not on you or the OP.
I'm not attacking the OP.
I'm arguing the sense of despair they feel is a consequence of an inflated sense of their own individuality and relevance.
The problem with being stuck in that spiral is that if you parse being told you're not in charge of saving the world single-handedly as an attack you're locking yourself from getting out of that spiral, and if you don't break out of thinking you're in charge of saving the world single-handedly you also get stuck in that spiral.
So hey, is it a harsh thing to hear? Probably. But also, if you go on the Internet to ask about it, maybe hearing it isn't the worst thing that can happen to you as a result. It's likely better than some pity party about how the world is going to end because everybody is evil, which is, frankly, probably a terrible thing to do to a person coming at you from that perspective.
Holy, crap, is presenting a quasi-monopoly from a libertarian billionaire's private company as a "stable and generally positive status quo" a dystopian thing to say.
I mean, in the grand scheme of 2025 it's at the very bottom of the real billionaire problems of the world, but just as a sentence. Yikes.
That's not true at all. Synology will sell you 24 bay rack mounted devices and 12 bay towers, as well as expansion modules for both with more bays you can daisy chain to them.
Granted, I believe those are technically marketed as enterprise solutions, but you can buy a 12 bay unit off of Amazon for like two grand diskless, so... I mean, it's a thing.
Not saying you should, and it's definitely less cost effective (and less powerful, depending on what you have laying around) than reusing old hardware, but it does exist.