First my specific questions, down below more info:

• how do you use ansible? Is there a good source for roles or playbooks to set up services? I feel like ansible is 30% more headache right now during config.
• how do you deal with motivation loss?
• how do you deal with the overwhelming amount of choices and information and disciplines (networking, storage, VMS, Linux..) that comes with selfhosting?
• how do you find the sweetspot between ease of use, ease of set up, security, redundancy? I feel like I am maybe too pranaoid to loose my data again (dropped a hard drive many years back, I lost all of my projects)
• maybe overall, how do you manage your perfectionism?

Thanks a lot! I hope you have some insights for me.

More info

Soo I have a motivational push to work on my server every few months for a few weeks or months. I always make progress and I feel like I landed on a good solution by now. Its the third time I redid my setup, everytime I got closet to what feels like the perfect setup for me.

I have a vps for headscale, a home server with proxmox for the rest.

Last push I switched from manually configuring and documenting to ansible. I like ansible, but its also a pain and not as fast to set up my server as just installing it and fiddeling around manually until it works.

My problem is: I want to do it right, so my server is robut with enough redundancy to move all my cloud stuff to it. But I am still kind of a noob and still learning and figuring things out.

My fear is, that if i don't document well or not use ansible, I will be hating my life once my server dies and I have to restore my data and also set um my services again in a few years.

So ansible seems like the only valid choice here, together with proxmox to be as flexible and future proof. But I am burnt out again and lost Motivation even though I am close to my first goals and running services.

Thank you for reading :)

In other cad programs i use two points of a sketch to extrude a feature. In freecad it does not seem to be possible. What are your recommended workarounds for that?

I would like to extrude the base not just from the face of the sketch, but from point 1 to point 2 on the side view sketch. This workflow proved very robust in other cad tools, but I cant get it work in freecad.

Thanks a lot in advance!

Hi! I started to fiddle around with freecad a little again tonight. I still find many things unintuitive. And I just watched a video about master sketches, because they are essential in my workflow on other programs. It makes it soo much easier to keep the overview and change little things quickly because I don't have to search for the responsible sketch.

In this video the person demonstrates at around 9:15 how to use the master sketch as a reference in the sub bodies. I can get used to only get one body from a sketch, but man, how many steps does it take to just reference a sketch?! You even need to use a differen workbech, use the clone tool, but not this one and then drag and drop the duplicate into the same body you are working on? Why?! I mean the sketch is right there, just let me click it!!

This got me wondering it those rough workflows are just designed badly or if this is a limitation of the engine or whstevery it's called, that freecad is based on? Because in my limited programming mind it does not make a difference what file is referenced. If it is some file on a directory above, just use something like "./" Before to go up one directory.

And I think those little things that just work in other cad software, makes freecad so much less approcavhabel and so much harder to jump in.

If I want to make a complicated part, that is not just a box with a hole, I don't want to Google around until I found a solution, I want the intuitive solution to work without 3 extra steps. This just hinders my design process a lot.

Maybe someone knows how freecad works on the background and can explain why freecad works like that.

Thanks!

Hey there! I love the idea of freecad. But I have so many troubls learning it. I started with fusion360, used solidworks for some time, used inventor a bit and use onshape mostly now. So I think I know how to navigate and learn new cad software. But its not as easy with freecad sadly.

I Would love this product to be more accessable and easier to use and undertand. What can we do besides jumping in on developing ourselves?

Switching form fusion or onshape to freecad feels like switching from python to assamlby.

So how can we help to improve freecad and make it a more usable program? It seems as if the devs try to reinvent everything and every menue compared to all other cad programs i have used. I am totaly fine with some issues or bugs, but i feel like its not up for success currently.

Thanks a lot, I hope you have some ideas