I don’t keep a Swiss army knife set of distros anymore. I put tumbleweed on a USB. It’s rolling so I update it when I plug it in, then do what I need to do.

I used to have a USB with Ubuntu LTS and whatever the newest Ubuntu was. Then another would get something else that I needed/wanted. I always ended up wiping the drive and adding the newest release every single time. I was always out of date by the time I needed one of them for boot repair or something. This was also a time when persistence… Wasn’t very persistent. With tumbleweed I can install whatever I need and it’s there next time. I’m sure you can do the same with any other rolling release, but tumbleweed is in my opinion on par stability-wise with incremental distros. It’s my first grab whenever I need to check a PC. If I need another distro or boot USB, I can make it from this one with a second USB. I suppose the only thing I can’t do is make a bootable USB if the computer I’m on can’t access the Internet

That’s only after taking away all the toys they pulled out instead of doing anything to get ready for the last 30 minutes.

I really like my synology DS216j. Pretty much all I use it for is as a file server and storage, mostly because it can’t really do much beyond that these days, but it sure does handle that like a champ. I’m not trying to run a business with multiple users on it, just me and the family, which means mostly just me and my projects. It was super easy to set up in my early days of home networking knowing that I wanted a central location for storing my files from different devices and holding my expanding media collection. I think I saw that it had been running for over a year (would have been several years, but we get power outages occasionally and it’s not on a UPS) without a restart when I increased my storage, and it’s been running without issue since 2017. I’m planning on upgrading to a device that has 4+ drives sometime soon to make expanding and redundancy easier to handle, but it’s a hard sell when this one is still chugging along.

I think it helps that I’ve always had a raspberry pi or other computer do the tasky things, so I never got entrenched in trying to make it do anything other than be a dlna/upnp server for media and shared file jockey for everything else.

You don’t need to pop it out to DD the SD card, you can do it while it’s running. I like to pipe DD through gzip to get a compressed image as the output so I’m not sitting on 16gb file for 3gb worth of files.

I’ve had a basic DLNA server running for over 5 years and just set up jellyfin about a month ago and it’s an absolute game changer. It has the functionality of a good streaming service except using your own media. It searches databases and matches it to your files so you get some really good images with the interface and information about the media. Plus it remembers what you’ve watched and how far you are into episodes and movies. Which is perfect if you have two or more TVs or devices you watch on.

It’s changed my partners preferences on how they watch shows. They hated watching anything on my server because they have ADHD and it’s impossible for them to figure out what they were watching and where they were in it, not to mention trying to navigate my lack of organizing anything. Jellyfin fixes that. Now I just plop a show into the shows folder, or a movie in the movie folder and it’s dealt with.

In my experience the jellyfin app on my LG TV works phenomenally. The media app is absolutely horrendous, it takes several minutes to list media files every time a new folder is opened.

Jellyfin has been a game changer specifically in keeping track of what I’ve watched and how far into an episode or movie I am. Everything else is a bonus.

It is said to have evolved from some sort of flying manicotti.

With my step kid I’ve basically just told him I’m not making anything else for him if he doesn’t like what I made. If he won’t eat it, he can have fresh vegetables and/or last night’s leftovers instead. I give him some options before I start cooking, so he knows and has some say in what dinner is.

The exception is if I make something that’s objectively gross. I’ve had a few frozen package dinners that looked good but were outright nasty and made sandwiches instead.

I hate to admit that I love using these micro business computers, but they’re pretty awesome. Stackable, powerful, upgradeable, cheap second hand or refurbished. I’ve considered nucs, but you can find buckets of these for cheaper.