I don’t have any personal experience with TUF laptops, so I can’t really offer an informed opinion on it. But I assume that’s just the slightly more plastic version of their other laptops, so it’s probably no worse than any other Asus laptop, though maybe a little less durable if you’re dragging it around everywhere.

I’ve had reasonable luck and been reasonably happy with Asus laptops, specifically the G14 and G15 models.

Currently have a 2022 G14 (the all AMD one wth a 6900hs and 6700s) and it’s… fine. It’s hot, loud, and has lousy battery life but that’s just gaming laptop life.

Only thing I would comment on Asus laptops is their fans are absolute shit and you will - not may - have to replace them after about a year. I’ve had 4 Asus laptops and all 4 of them have fallen prone to this specific failure. It’s easy enough to do (a couple of screws) and like $15 for the fans, but still, it’s a pretty consistent failure.

Afaik no, you’ll still get flagged from NPCs but I’m also not going to go test it :)

I’m still waiting for .rar so I can buy unregistered.rar, which is the way it’s meant to be.

Because it’s no longer 1996 and there are domains beyond ccTLDs and com/net/org?

I understand not liking Apple, but my point was more that x86, even good x86, is still literally hot trash if you want anything resembling modern performance.

I really hope that someone steps up with ARM-based laptops that can natively run Linux (because screw Microsoft and the shitty ARM stuff they’ve done to date) and that they ship at a reasonable price and with sufficient performance. Until then, the sole vendor that can provide cool-running, silent, high-performance ARM with 15ish hours of battery life is… Apple.

No, not really: even at idle the fans are still moving air, and the laptop is warm enough that you can notice it. You CAN force them off, but then you’ve got a laptop that gets unbearably hot pretty quickly, so that’s not really a workable tradeoff.

I’ve honestly just kinda given up and use the M1 for everything because it literally never gets warm, and never makes a single sound unless I do something that uses 100% CPU for an extended period of time.

Windows task manager is a poor indicator of actual clock speed for a number of reasons, one of which is that it’s going to report the highest clock speed and not the lowest one, which in highly multi-core CPUs isn’t really representative of what the CPU is actually doing. Looking at individual core clocks and power usage is more indicative of what’s actually happening.

That said, I’ve had pretty bad luck with x86 laptops with the higher-end CPUs; even if you get them to fantastic power usage they’re still… not amazing. I managed to tweak my G14 into using about 10w at idle, which sounds great, until you look at my M1 Macbook which idles under 3w.

If thermals are really a concern, you may want to look at the low voltage variants, and not the high performance, though that’s a tradeoff all on it’s own.

Yeah pvp has, effectively, been completely disabled. The ONLY way it flags is if you manually enable it - even the quests that would auto-flag you won’t.

Enjoying this quite a lot, even more than the “unofficial” way of doing it on Classic servers with an addon.

It feels like, for the first time in a VERY long time, an actual game with slightly more to it than getting a purp that’s +2 iLevel from your last purp, so you can grind another one that’s +2 iLevel from that one.

Goons are responsible for the destruction of so many good things on the internet. Best $10 I’ve ever spent.

Eh, I wouldn’t go about ‘the self-hosted admins didn’t do anything!’. There never really was a time when the majority (or even a meaningiful minority) of users hosted their own email.

In the beginning, you got your email address from your school or your ISP, and it changed whenever you left/changed providers, so the initial “free” email came from the likes of Hotmail (which rapidly became Microsoft), Yahoo (which was uh, Yahoo), and offerings from the big ISPs of the era, like AOL and whatnot.

You still had school and ISP email, but it just rapidly fell out of fashion because your Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL email never changed regardless of what ISP you used or whatever, so it was legitimately a better solution.

And then Google came along with Gmail and it was so much better than every other offering that they effectively ate the whole damn market by default because all the people who were providing the free webmail at that time didn’t do a damn thing to improve until after Google had already “won”.

So if you want to be mad, this is firmly Microsoft and Yahoo’s fault for being lazy fucks.

Keep in mind that you’re going to be retrieving and storing a huge amount of data running these scripts, and you should expect to need more than a $5 1gb of RAM vps to do it without it being a shitty broken experience for you.

We’re talking dozens of gigabytes of storage for the database, plus effectively a need for an infinite amount of storage for the image caching, plus enough RAM and CPU resources to effectively process the whole Threadiverse.

That’s a misquote: it’s “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism”. It’s basically saying that you, as a consumer, cannot legitimately make ethical decisions when buying, because the entire system is built on being exploitative, and thus any decision you make cannot be ethical because the choices you have are already the result of exploitation by the time you’re making the decision.

A good example is the “going green” fad: it does not matter which consumption choices you make, because your choices are effectively irrelevant. You spend a little bit more money for the “green” product, and that money will go directly to megacorporations that are exploiting and polluting on a scale that so outstrips your ability to combat it. Thus, your “more ethical” choice did absolutely nothing but fund the exact same polluters and environmental exploiters as if you had not made the “green” choice in the first place.

I killed all delivery nonsense a while ago. It was like 4 fees plus a demand for a tip on top of inflated prices; go to the restaurant and pay $15 or pay DoorDash $35 for the same shit? Fuck that, I’ll drive and pick my own damn food up.

And bonus, if half of it gets eaten in the car - I mean “wasn’t given to me by the restaurant”, sorry - at least I’m the one who ate the damn thing.

Anything on the public internet is some amount of risk.

It sounds reasonably configured, and for a single service that’s been fairly robust, the only thing you really should make sure you’re doing is updates - better if you configure automatic updates, so you don’t even have to think about it.

unattended-upgrades is what you’d want on a Debian-alike for updates, and Overseerr depends on how you installed it.

Another point of view is that OSS and Linux is absolutely amazing.

With a very limited set of exceptions, you can grab Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever, make a USB boot drive, and be in a GUI and shitposting on the internet in about 5 minutes.

Linux has grown tremendously from when I started using it, which was when you’d probably have to end up editing a config file for X11 to add the modeline so X knew the resolution and refresh rate of your monitor because there was no auto-configuration for anything more than like 640x480@60hz (and even that might not work).

And in just a few years we went from very very few games working with Wine, to damn near everything that doesn’t need ring0 rootkits working almost perfectly.

So yeah, it’s not perfect, but it’s absolutely light years from where it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago and maybe focusing on how great it actually is vs bemoaning the things that still need work will help keep you motivated.

That said, at the end of the day software is just a hammer: you use it to build something. If Linux doesn’t work but MacOS does, or Windows, or whatever does then use what works. There’s no point in using something that doesn’t do what you want to the point that you’re angry/stressed/tired of dealing with it, because life is way too short to spend all your time fighting broken software when all you wanted to do was draw a picture or play a game or watch a movie or whatever.

They’re not wrong in that most people aren’t suited to or should be running what is effectively public services for other people from some surplus Dell R410 they found on eBay for $40.

That said, it’s all a matter of degree: I don’t host critical infra for people (password managers, file sharing, etc.) where the data loss is catastrophic, but more things that if it explodes for an afternoon, everyone can just deal with it. I absolutely do not want to be The Guy who lost important data through an oversight on an upgrade or just plain bad luck.

But, on the other hand, the SLA on my Plex server is ‘if it works, cool, if not I’ll fix it when I can’ and that’s been wildly popular I haven’t had any real issues, because my friends and family aren’t utter dicks about it and overly entitled, but YMMV.

TL;DR: self-hosting for others is fine, as long as the other people understand that it’s not always going to be incredibly reliable, and you don’t ever present something that puts them at risk of catastrophic loss, unless you’ve got actual experience in providing those service and can do proper backups, HA, and are willing to sacrifice your Friday evening for no money.

Alternate option: see if the performance of the various cloud gaming providers meets the mom approval factor. She’s not playing anything the extra latency is really an issue with, and you can then avoid the hot, noisy, expensive gaming laptop category entirely and just get almost ANY laptop your mom likes, instead.

UptimeKuma is what I use; it’ll watch tcp connections, docker containers, websites… whatever. And the notifications are pretty comprehensive and probably cover anything in 2023 would want to be using.