Back 2 thin client

It’s cool that you got downvoted for answering this question. You can take em out of reddit but you can’t take reddit out of them.

The thing that stops google (or proton for that matter) is that you don’t give them the keys.

Uhh it stands for host bus adapter I think. It’s the word for a sas add on card. They make about a million different kinds that are all secretly the same card and just have different numbers of plugs, location of plugs, card dimensions or interfaces and support different protocol versions.

An hba will let you plug up to any sas thingy and talk to it. If that thingy is an enclosure then all the drives in the enclosure will be directly addressable as if they were directly plugged into your hba inside your computer instead of connected to your computer by a wire.

Sata is physically and electrically one way backwards compatible with sas, so a Sata drive can plug into a sas enclosure but the reverse isn’t true.

Email isn’t and can’t be made private without something like pgp.

A company that handles pgp for you can be legally compelled to give up the keys.

Windows sandbox like everyone else is saying is a great answer, but bear in mind if you’re sufficiently paranoid or security conscious that many, many exploits exist to escape VMs and sandboxes. Esxi and cell phones pretty much made that happen.

Keeping a cheap old computer to run weird bullshit on isn’t a terrible choice if you’re truly worried about it.

Some linux or windows and mergerfs plus snapraid running on some old computer lets you make use of many mismatched drives.

Some linux or windows will give you a platform from which to enable file sharing. If you want a web management interface on top of it there’s a lot of those but it’s not strictly necessary.

Mergerfs merges several filesystems into one big filesystem. It will blob directory matches together, so if two or more of your disks are windows c drives for example it may be worthwhile to make a unique root folder on each drive that contains everything else.

It sounds complicated but actually it’s the simplest thing in the world.

Snapraid makes parity snapshots when you tell it to. It needs at least one drive to use for parity that’s as big as the biggest data drive. It’s different than real raid or zfs because the parity you can use to recover from isn’t real time, it’s as old as the most recent snapshot.

There are many benefits to that arrangement instead of zfs or real raid. If you want to know the trade offs I can elaborate.

The benefit of what’s described in all of the above is that you can use anything to run it instead of needing a nas appliance, which in my experience are hot nasty dogshit until you spend as much money on it as you’d need to get a used 1u server and drive shelf and at that point just get the more reliable, capable device with very broad documentation and widely available parts and service.

If you choose to use an old computer and just hook up all the drives, that’s great and old computers are easy to find and will work fine. The power use is truly negligible but if you were to get a smaller, ostensibly more efficient pc like a crappy little sff dell, you could slap an hba with external ports in it and attach that to some sas enclosure and use all your drives that way with (maybe?) less power draw.

E: I made the same post twice. Age is a harsh lash under which to suffer.

You use mergerfs/snapraid for this. You need one extra drive as big as your biggest drive to do snapraid.

Mergerfs mashes all the drives into one big filesystem, so if you don’t want file name collisions then put a unique root folder on each drive. It’s a pain if you’re serving up drives yanked directly from old pcs but it’s a blessing when you want to make maximum use out of each drives free space.

Snapraid makes a parity snapshot when you tell it to. It needs as much space as the biggest device on your mergerfs. Its perfect when you don’t care if you lose a days work and don’t need bulletproof 100% uptime. If you’re like me and use secondhand drives exclusively, it offers the ability to do n parity which will let you recover from errors that span n disks.

These two systems function independently of each other.

Set all this up on some computer with the drives in it. I think both packages support windows but I’ve only used em under linux. There are a million tutorials on this.

If you don’t have a case/psu/cables for the number of drives you need, it’s better and cheaper to find an upgrading gamer with an old one they can sell you than to get a good, functional usb enclosure. If you plan on making a hoarding habit out of this, a drive shelf and hba with external ports is an affordable solution.

Are you sure the animations it’s giving you are ai? Android recently got the thing where the phone actually takes a short movie and picks a frame, processes it and hands it to you as the “picture”.

Thanks for the informative and detailed answer! I’ve only ever installed and used arch for fun so the finer points of how pacman handles manually installed packages never came up.

You said mostly safe, what kinds of issues can doing what you just described cause? You said pinning it through pacman would be an unsupported partial upgrade, even though that would give the package manager visibility on what you’re trying to do it would result in types of dependency resolution that aren’t supported or tested for I imagine?

Yeah I didn’t want to make the bold and refreshing assertion that arch isnt appropriate for situations where gracefully handling an old package is a requirement but that was my initial read on the situation.

I’m not as familiar with the aur as I am with apt and now dnf, is there a function to keep it from automatically installing something newer? That’s why I meant when I referred to pinning.

If arch doesn’t have version pinning then switch to a distribution that does.

Debian has version pinning, nvidia runs a third party repository and it has a pinning package you can install to get and stay with the 580 branch.

Pardon, your replies in this comm. It’s not precise language on my part but I think the meaning should be clear.

Without knowing what games you want to run or what your budget is it would be hard to give more helpful input than “anything will work, give serious consideration to not virtualizing”.

If you care about your country’s laws why would you purchase a service subject to kyc laws in order to break your country’s laws in order to be on public trackers?

Just use a paid vpn with port forwarding like air or something and get on a private tracker for games. It’s easy, all it takes is consistency and organization. The sooner you start, the sooner you can finish.

E: it may not be clear what I’m saying. Kyc is short for know your customer. Places that offer services or process payments are subject to kyc laws that make it a requirement that the processor or service provider have records of who they’re handling the money of or selling services to. It’s relatively easy to purchase a vpn while bypassing kyc but buying a vps (virtual private server, the type of service that a seedbox is) using a chain of tools and payment handlers that bypass kyc is much harder.

When you say that the seedbox provider you’re considering will forward requests or delete your account it’s kyc laws that create the terrain that forces that set of behaviors.

If you’re worried about your country’s anti piracy laws coming down on you for using public trackers then using a seedbox service that’s legally required to be able to be tracked to you (because they have to know their customer) isn’t a way to bypass that.

You’re gonna have to learn to bind your client to an interface no matter what, but getting off public trackers is a great way to avoid legal problems.

What were you looking for, models and specs?

E: you are absolutely looking for models and specs. I assumed you were just feeling around to figure stuff out because of your other posts in this comm. My apologies.

The short answer is that it doesn’t matter for the requirements you’ve given. Just to make sure I wasn’t lying when typing that I created and ran a windows 11 vm under kvm running on Debian installed on an old thinkpad from ten years ago and it ran fine. The specs were i5-3320m 16gb ram. I was able to start and run affinity and nuclear throne. I only made a 30gb qcow device for that vm so you probably don’t need a 1tb disk…

Assuming you want to run more modern games, both the recent (<5 or so years ago) intel and amd integrated graphics perform decently on 1440 and 1080 which is what a lot of laptops have for screens.

Laptops with replaceable ram are rarer than they once were, but can still be had and any laptop with ddr4 will be less expensive than one with ddr5. You don’t seem to have any use case that needs faster ram, so that’s a cost/performance tradeoff you may be willing to make.

I would personally stay away from “gaming” oriented laptops because they’re generally optimized around performance and price with build quality, durability and longevity left by the wayside.

So for specs I’d say a recent cpu with igpu (it’s hard to find one in a lap nowadays that doesn’t have the igpu!), 16gb of ddr4 if it’s upgradable and 32gb of ddr4 if it’s not and maybe 512gb of storage if it’s soldered and 256 or whatever if it’s not.

Again, if you have specific games you want to run then that changes things.

Most games run good under wine/steam. Most of the ones that don’t are using programming techniques intended to catch a vm, hypervisor or host os like anti-cheat.

So you can probably take gaming off your vm uses list. If you can’t because you wanna run games that use anti cheat as above, skip to the bottom of this reply.

I do not use affinity, but my experience with applications that have an “output” like design, modeling or productivity is that it’s often not worth it to run the under some compatibility layer or virtualization system. Every time you start that program up you need it to run so you can blast out an idea, show someone how the project is going or open something someone sent you and it’s infinitely more frustrating to have to figure out what changed since last night to make it not work or cause the magic marker brush (and only the magic marker brush!) to cause an immediate crash. This might also be a “jump to the end” scenario. Try it first and see though!

Windows 11 has relaxed requirements for its iot versions. It both loads less into cache and requires less memory in addition to opening up to CPUs as far back as third and fourth generation Intel core chips from 14 years ago. So use that version of windows for your vm and you can easily scrape by with 16gb of ram if you see yourself needing to.

Most people like amd gpus better on linux, I tend to like nvidia better at the moment. I have a lot of experience with linux and high tolerance for troubleshooting though so your mileage may vary.

This is some counterintuitive input and I will not be answering questions about it, take it or leave it: if you plan to keep your computer for a while, buy something with a cpu manufactured on the largest “process” you can reasonably accept. As chips’ features get smaller and smaller it takes less time and energy for electromigration to fundamentally change their behavior.

If you find yourself needing to run games or even software packages that care deeply about knowing they’re on bare metal windows, just dual boot. It will only take a little time to boot back and forth and the only prerequisites are learning your distros grub repair process for if windows overwrites your bootloader and keeping backups so you don’t panic which you should be doing anyway.

Massive institutional presence in education, mit/bsd license culture, unexamined reliance on package/library manager.

I’m not mounting a criticism of the languages themselves, their usefulness or goodness (whatever that means), just using them to triangulate on the cohort of developers who are in a particular situation.

Do you have a 12k or 16k one?

You are correct however I think there are unique conditions that rust/js/python devs are living under that makes it more prevalent.