low level format

What do you mean?

TL;DR: Everything should work well with default settings, no special actions required.

First of all, partitions must be aligned to sector size (multiples of 4096). Most partitioning tools align partitions to 1MiB by default nowadays, so this shouldn’t be a problem, however if the disk is already partitioned, check the partition offset. For ext4, as well as most modern filesystems, default block size is 4KiB, so you don’t need to pass optional parameters to mkfs. For cryptsetup luksFormat there are also two things that must be set correctly: --align-payload (2048 512-byte sectors by default, equal to 256 4096-byte sectors, no need to change), and --sector-size (for 512e device it should be set to 4096 bytes automatically, no need to set manually).

If you don’t need issue tracker, wki, CI etc., cgit will be enough. If choose from gitlab, gitea and forgejo, use forgejo.

In theory, Mac’s Mach-O executable format supports multi-architecture binaries that can work on both arm64 and x86_64. But I know nothing about Apple’s plans to drop support for x86_64 in X-Code. After this happen, developers will provide arm64-only binaries.

More Than 400

1579

I don’t use Arch BTW.

My plan is to load up on canned stew and buckwheat.

I promise, maintenance it basically zero after a proper setup.

Well, it was close to zero for me until the last year dovecot update (2.3→2.4) that has broken old configs. I’ve spent a lot of time fixing them.

If it was painful for you, this does not mean nobody should even try. FMPOV my mailbox contains too much personal information to host in in the cloud.

I’d try Maddy if I were going to setup my personal email server now. But I already have postfix/dovecot/all-that-shit up and running for years.

Do you mean full text message body search or just headers (To/From/Subject etc.)? Claws Mail is very fast when searching in headers, but not in message bodies.

IMHO this is fine for such large files.

Arch and its derivatives look like the trend

It’s because nobody writes “I use Debian BTW”.

tcpdump?

Yes, it is normal.

# fail2ban-client status sshd
Status for the jail: sshd
|- Filter
|  |- Currently failed: 10
|  |- Total failed:     4433
|  `- Journal matches:  _SYSTEMD_UNIT=ssh.service + _COMM=sshd
`- Actions
   |- Currently banned: 27
   |- Total banned:     668
   `- Banned IP list:   2.57.122.194 45.148.10.183 195.178.110.30 2.57.122.208 92.118.39.195 103.74.123.88 92.118.39.23 2.57.122.196 92.118.39.197 45.148.10.151 92.118.39.236 178.20.210.185 68.178.161.186 80.94.92.183 92.118.39.63 2.57.122.197 2.57.122.191 2.57.122.189 80.94.92.171 94.156.152.18 14.225.7.70 45.78.198.199 211.253.9.160 159.224.213.138 1.214.42.172 103.239.165.114 77.239.111.233

My choice is OpenWrt and specialized hardware. It is much better suited for home use and has much lower power consumption (i.e. silent). Right now I’m looking for replacement for my home router and going to buy one of Banana Pi boards. However in the US the optimal choice may be different.

mdam doesn’t work on either my Trixie or 26.04 install

What? Do you mean it is incompatible with Mac OS software RAID implementation? This does not mean it doesn’t work. You will also be unable to read your software RAID if you insert disks into hardware RAID device.

Much more common than is should be.

The current stable release is Debian 13. Choosing 12 is nonsense.

If you are choosing between Fedora and Debian, definitely go with Debian. Fedora evolves too rapidly for professional use, and its administration requires excessive effort.

I didn’t try many of them. I use Ansible for my job, but sometimes I hate it. I would try Terraform/OpenTofu or Salt if I were looking for alternative.