ah definitely. I haven’t tried it out yet but I think they improved that in plasma 6.1. although that’s absolutely the point you were making: lots of things that used to work fine on X11 that Wayland just doesn’t have yet.

yeah with the exception of krita (which runs fine on xwayland, even with a tablet) I’ve been able to run 100% Wayland, with sway for work and KDE for home, but my needs aren’t too wild. I’m sure a lot of users feel like the rug was unnecessarily pulled out from under them; change that feels like a regression even for very good reason will almost never feel like reason enough if it’s your shit that gets worse, definitely.

still, I think you’ve got to get people using the thing if you want the thing to get better. probably more casual users didn’t even notice when gnome moved over, for example. but probably even the most casual user ran into some problem, and that’s a bummer.

out of curiosity what use cases/software has stopped you from running Wayland? I do miss the magic of tunneling an X session over SSH, that felt like dang magic in the early 2000s.

I mean that’s a fair question, because I feel like mostly the advantages are, hm, not “theoretical” because it’s an actual advantage, but not something you’ll really encounter day-to-day. better security for example. but generally who cares because if I interact with something malicious I’m probably owned anyway.

originally I was interested in it because of fractional scaling, but I think that works in X11 for the most part now?

at this point it’s mostly about using the bleeding edge stuff so I can help find problems. I do find that when it works it works very well, and the experience of using a Wayland desktop is less wonky: fewer weird rendering glitches when dealing with multiple monitors, connecting and disconnecting my laptop from a dock, etc. I find this works better with Wayland, but I wouldn’t say “so much better that you must move to it today” if you’re happy with what you have.

similarly full-system stability has been better, and I have fewer crashes that take down everything, I feel. it’s perhaps subjective though: I’ve been running it for so many years maybe all I’m experiencing is that the software I run has become better in general.

so: I don’t think it’s a night-and-day life-changing experience or anything, but it does feel modern and stable, and it’s definitely where things are heading so why not get used to it now, and help to improve it, is my thinking.

I’ll check that out, thanks for the recommendation. as for it defaulting to X11, it’s no issue because the Wayland session is also available and has been absolutely solid for me, I was just surprised that it wasn’t the preferred session by the distro.

I can’t speak to MicroOS but I have been running Tumbleweed for about a month. normally I run arch.l, but wanted to try something new for a change, and I was interested in trying out a full DE as I typically run sway.

I’ve been extremely impressed with KDE; I assume you feel the same if you’re looking at Kinoite, but feels worth saying out loud for other readers.

Tumbleweed, for an Arch user, is fine. it installed fine, was reasonably sane out of the box (although defaults to X11, not Wayland) and it’s been perfectly stable for the month I’ve run it. Doing development on it is very easy, and it comes with a non-root docker setup script out of the box which is nice, and I’ve had no issue building software on it. YaST is powerful but has an awful UI.

However: it has the same problem as Ubuntu for me, which is that if you want software from outside the repos you have to trust other repositories and trust their keys, and they often want to replace packages, and finding out if they are built safely can be quite challenging. compare this to Arch, where you can easily read a PKGBUILD and they almost always download sources direct from the developer/vendor, and they very rarely replace other packages. So I find it hard to trust this system’s integrity over time; where are my packages coming from? So in the end I’ll probably go back to Arch, or maybe try out Endeavour, but if this doesn’t concern you then I think Tumbleweed is a capable distro that’s easy to get up and running.

I’ve used rclone with backblaze B2 very successfully. rclone is easy to configure and can encrypt everything locally before uploading, and B2 is dirt cheap and has retention policies so I can easily manage (per storage pool) how long deleted/changed files should be retained. works well.

also once you get something set up. make sure to test run a restore! a backup solution is only good if you make sure it works :)

take a look at owntracks, it’s very “roll your own” but might get you a ways toward what you’re looking for.

I got out of the “surplus hardware” a while ago; way too expensive and noisy to run, so super recommend ditching the poweredge. for home use, I ended up just going with a USB3 JBOD for storage, and a Intel NUC (which I think they don’t make anymore). it runs a ton of virtualized servers under kvm, a virtualized NAS, all without issue because it honestly spends most of its time nearly idle. point is: it’s definitely nice to have it all in one case and with high speed storage but maybe having to find something that can house a ton of drives isn’t a strict need if you aren’t actually going to put a ton of load on it.

I hadn’t heard of CasaOS before; looks very cool. I am currently on TrueNAS and it’s been fine, but I had been running it in a VM because it wasn’t a good fit for running other things along side it. This seems like an interesting solution, thanks!