@alexanderdyas I also used the free tier Oracle ARM VM but went with Redeck in a NixOS Incus container accessible only over Tailscale.

https://readeck.org/en/

@gtronix When you create a NixOS container you need to enable nesting support:

"incus launch images:nixos/unstable nixos -c security.nesting=true"

@gtronix I wrote a blog post a couple of months ago about turning a cheap refurbished mini PC into an Incus node.

https://blog.hetherington.uk/2025/01/setting-up-incus-with-zfs-on-nixos/

@latenightlinux Ok, so I’m out on a walk and now listening to the episode and laughed out loud when you said you’ll get emails about Nix. Seems I’m “that guy”.

But that you knew people would suggest it means maybe there’s something others see that you’re overlooking and it would be a good idea to try it out.

I know because I was exactly the same a couple years ago and scoffed at NixOS. Now it’s my preferred distribution (especially as a base for Incus/virtualisation).

@latenightlinux Maybe branch out beyond Ubuntu and give #NixOS a try.

Also #Incus for VMs and light-weight system containers. It'll work great on one of your mini PCs.

Here's a guide i wrote when i picked up a cheap refurb Lenovo m910q one litre PC (remove the "kvmgt.enable" line if using earlier than 5th gen/older than 9th gen Intel core or AMD CPU). It even uses your favourite filesystem throughout:

https://blog.hetherington.uk/2025/01/setting-up-incus-with-zfs-on-nixos/

@joshaspinall @gyptazy The latest version of TrueNAS just switched to Incus for their VM and system container management.

@gyptazy What a great and thorough post.

You mentioned the consistency of commands between VMs and containers; that's one of my favourite features too. I also like that the client is available on so many platforms.

I run macOS as my daily and being able to interact with my VMs/containers is great.

For webui i just run "incus webui nodename:" on my local machine, no browser TLS certs required.

I set up a refurb mini PC with Incus as a single node a while ago: https://blog.hetherington.uk/2025/01/setting-up-incus-with-zfs-on-nixos/

@stfn @joeress It's the broken electoral system we use. First Past The Post lets a party win on a tiny fraction of the vote.

After 14 years of Tory misrule people voted tactically and only a small shift in votes was enough to hand Labour a massive majority.

Instead of offering hope & change Labour continued with terrible Tory policies & launched right-wing policies of their own bleeding voters to the Greens & LibDems.

With Tory voters defecting to Reform it was enough to cost lots of seats.

@Zergy I'm planning a new post for when Debian Trixie releases with Prosody 13, but here's one i wrote a few months ago for Debian Bookworm and Prosody 0.12:

https://blog.hetherington.uk/2024/12/setting-up-xmpp-prosody-on-debian-bookworm/

@joeress The only Podcast in my player that doesn’t fall under one of your unwanted categories is We Hate Movies: https://www.whmpodcast.com/

@sebastiaanfranken @ai6yr In modern machines it's in /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM . Libvirt 11.2.0 supposedly added support for passing that ACPI table to the VM without using qemu arguments.

@latenightlinux I've got one VPS still on Debian Stable but everything else (VPS, home server, laptops) now run on NixOS as the base OS.

I also have Incus installed on most of my headless systems for VMs and System Containers, and in those containers/VMs i tend to stick with Debian Stable (or, rarely, AlmaLinux).

@avlcharlie Apple tends to provide 5 years of new major OS versions and then a further 2 years of security updates for iPhones.

As the iPhone 11 was released in 2019 then you're probably right about it not getting iOS 19, but it should still get security patches for the next couple of years.

Ultimately we don't usually know when a phone is EOL until the next version of iOS is announced and Apple lists the phones supported by it.

@caseyliss @WTL @b3ll Yeah a Mac Mini is just not a good choice for this sort of use case.

If you want a small device (similar volume to the older Mac Mini design) for OCI (Docker-style) containers i picked up a Lenovo m910q mini PC for £50 a couple of months ago. £10 for another 8GB RAM and it was ready to go.

I run Incus on it for system containers and VMs, but it would also be good for OCI containers.

A wrote a blog post on setting it up with ZFS, NixOS and Incus:

https://blog.hetherington.uk/2025/01/setting-up-incus-with-zfs-on-nixos/

@apodoxus LocalSend.

https://localsend.org/

@jnv @gray I've done battery replacements in-store a couple of times.

You book a “Genius” appointment (selecting battery replacement as the reason) and get your time slot. Turn up for the appointment and they run a diagnostic and make note of any external damage, scuffs or marks.

Both times i've had it done i booked a late morning slot then went for lunch and a wander round the shopping mall/town. An hour or so later it was done and ready for pick-up.

@flyingpenguinMwauthzyx I host things that i want to be publicly accessible (websites, #XMPP, etc) on a VPS.

The stuff that's private and only generally needs to be accessed from home runs on my home server. The home server also runs #Tailscale so i can access it remotely should i need to.

@mrc The gallery is a quick way to get pre-packaged VMs but the images are quite old by this point.

Unfortunately Ubuntu don't seem to release an ARM64 desktop ISO but Fedora do, so i grabbed the ARM Live ISO and gave it a whirl.

https://fedoraproject.org/workstation/download?beta

As i'm on an ARM Mac Mini i chose “Virtualize”, added the boot ISO and left the rest of the settings as default.

When you boot into the VM you’ll get “Display output is not active.” until it finishes booting, then it's clear sailing.

@mrc UTM will let you run both ARM and x86_64 VMs. It even has a gallery of pre-built distros that can be downloaded.

You can download it for free from their website or pay a small amount for the App Store version to aid development.

https://mac.getutm.app/

@dhry

Geary is probably the closest to Apple Mail.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary