Rclone does provide a docker image, too: https://rclone.org/install/#docker

I'm probably going to set this up soon myself, as I am in the process of building a little home server for my family.

I meant on your own system, running the backup software, since it sounds like Duplicati isn't the best choice. Borg is a great backup program but it's made for Linux. Kopia is cross-platform.

Sorry, I don't have a go-to recommendation for the receiving end. In theory anything that can host WebDAV, SSH/SFTP, or an S3 endpoint would do the job.

What platforms are you working with? Borg might serve you better than Duplicati, but last I checked there's no official Windows version.

There's also Kopia. I haven't used it much personally but I've heard good things. It supports a range of upload protocols: https://kopia.io/docs/features/#save-snapshots-to-cloud-network-or-local-storage

This is specifically about KDE's own Linux distro, which is still in alpha.

Oh, looks like you're right. Thanks for the correction.

Go piecemeal. Proton is a good deal if you actually use all their services, otherwise it's overpriced.

For mail, mailbox.org, posteo.de, and fastmail.net seem to have good reputations. They'll all allow you to bring your own domain (edit: not Posteo, my mistake), which I highly recommend so that it'll be easy to switch providers again when whichever one you choose turns to shit (yes, I say when, not if, because I am just that jaded at this point).

For passwords, there are a lot of choices, but the most future-proof is probably to keep a local Keepass DB and sync it across devices any damn way you want. Bitwarden used to be good but I don't know anymore. They've backed away from open source a bit recently, and I can't even tell at a glance what their free plan offers anymore. Maybe look at https://vaultwarden.com/ instead.

For VPN and storage...I dunno. There are a lot, and most of them seem kind of shady tbh. I'd be interested in hearing others' advice on this since I'm not sure what's good these days.

Edit: I'd REALLY like to hear recommendations for Docs and especially Sheets. Everything else I've used is a UX nightmare, particularly on mobile.

No. Absolutely not.

The year-to-year advancements of the Pixel series are minimal. I upgraded from a 7 to a 10 and it was really more of a sidegrade thanks to the P10's shitty GPU.

I'll consider upgrading when the base model gets 16GB of RAM or if they ever make a SOC that's a significant upgrade.

Oh for fuck's sake.

Terrible idea. Let's blind you and everyone around you! Great for bed and movie theaters!

I can’t say if it’s difficult to revert because I’ve never wanted to

Same.

If you never do anything advanced, it's as easy as any stock UI.

If you do want to do advanced things, it's probably your only option because most stock firmware is ass on consumer-grade devices.

Most things should work just fine. There's not all that much that requires x86.

So the real question is, what does your mom need/want? NextCloud? Jellyfin media server? Ente photos?

Maybe just a media center? Basically an Apple TV on crack?

Hypothetically speaking, of course. Like O. J. Simpson's book "If I Did It".

That's a good question and it's hard to say for sure. There've been some advancements this year in offloading, using both VRAM and system RAM together. With MoE models and predictive loading you can get pretty good results that way...sometimes. I've never tried it myself, though I really should because my 24GB GPU is a serious bottleneck.

You could also think about getting a 512GB Mac Studio (coming soon). Not as fast as a GPU, but maybe faster than a GPU/DDR5 mix? And definitely cheaper per GB.

I realize now that the truly biggest models need way more than $40k of hardware. The biggest Qwen3.8 is 2.4 TRILLION parameters. Yikes.