I’m using nebula to remotely access the raspberry pi in my home network and it mostly just works. The dual setup for nextcloud might be a bit more tricky, at least if you want to use HTTPS. You’ll probably have to set up a reverse proxy in Nginx for at least one of the routes, since they need different certificates (although since Nebula already authenticates and encrypts your traffic, HTTPS is probably not necessary there).

That can be a good solution at least if electricity costs are not a big deal. If power is expensive in your area, it might be worth to buy something more power-efficient, like a raspberry pi (assuming they’re not completely sold out right now).

No company is just going to host a server for you for free, a (virtual) server for running nextcloud will cost you at least a few bucks a month. As others have already said, you can run a server at home on your own hardware, but this is also not free (hardware cost, electricity, etc.) and you will additionally have to deal with any hardware issues & replacements yourself.

I think Plex is not open source but is there any reason against Jellyfin? As far as I know, they also have apps for most smart TVs in case that’s what you mean by navigating with a remote.

In my experience, a good way to get a polished desktop with a tiling workflow is to use KDE / GNOME with a few extensions & i3 shortcuts. Unless you really care about customizing every part of your DE, the work of configuring i3 to match a proper DE in terms of polish might not be worth it.

I previously used GNOME with the Forge extension and a few simple extensions for a workspace indicator, disabling the workspace switch animation, etc. This worked quite well but since GNOME is not very configurable, you have to do a lot of that through extensions (e.g. disabling the workspace switch animation & popup). This is particularly annoying since GNOME updates tend to break extensions.

For that reason, I recently switched to KDE. Polonium is a very nice tiling plugin for it. Since KDE is pretty customizable, I didn’t really need a lot of other extensions to support my workflow. It’s mainly a matter of configuring keyboard shortcuts and a few other settings. I haven’t used KDE long enough to say how stable everything is under updates, but from what I’ve heard it should be a lot better than GNOME.

I personally use NixOS and Home Manager with the Plasma Manager module for KDE. It’s a steep learning curve but if you have fun learning new stuff it is worth it in my opinion.

Otherwise, a GNOME / KDE tiling setup will probably also be mostly reproducible if you just track your dot files. There’s always a bit of manual configuration but it’s also difficult to completely avoid that with NixOS (although probably possible).

The main difference of NixOS to other distros is that you configure your system declaratively. This means that installed system settings (e.g. user accounts, enabled drivers, etc.) programs and potentially also configuration for individual programs is all defined in a single place. The disadvantage of this is that a lot of stuff works differently than on “normal” distros and that it tends to have a rather steep learning curve. Unless you’re prepared to invest a significant amount of time into it, you should not install NixOS.

That being said, the topic is a lot more complex (for example, one can also use the Nix package manager on other distros than NixOS), so if you’re interested, here is some more discussion on the topic:

• https://lemmy.world/post/198362
• https://sh.itjust.works/post/223521

You’re right, Hades is not a very strategic game. There are some synergies between the power-ups, but mostly I just pick the ones that suit my playstyle. I’d also say that the power-ups in Hades are just there to mix it up a bit (and not really a core part of the gameplay loop).

I’m currently playing Hades (a top-down, isometric brawler). The gameplay is really fun and with different weapons, skills & upgrades per run, it stays entertaining for a long time. The story is simple but engaging, and after almost every run, there are some characters with new dialogue that tells you more about it.

I’ve been using it for around a year and really like it so far. It is however very different from almost every other linux distro, so I would think carefully about it before switching. If you’re not prepared to invest significant time and/or don’t really care about the advantages of NixOS, you should stay away from it.

Pros of NixOS:

• Declarative configuration: This is probably the main selling point. The whole system configuration and installed packages are neatly in one place. Using home-manager, this can also replace config files for many programs. All of this is especially useful if you share that configuration between multiple devices.
• System rollbacks: If something breaks, simply boot into the previous generation.
• Very customizable system: You can freely choose your desktop environment & basic system packages.

Pros of Nix in general (you don’t need to install NixOS for this):

• Huge package repository (also very up-to-date if you want to use the unstable channel)
• Consistent developer environments that can easily be shared

Cons of Nix & NixOS:

• Very steep learning curve: You essentially have to learn (the basics of) the Nix programming language.
• There are often many ways to do things without any clear recommendation: Channels / Flakes, whether nix-env should be used, etc.
• The documentation isn’t always great (although it is improving)
• If something is not packaged in nixpkgs, it can be difficult to run it, since NixOS doesn’t follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. There are some tools to run flatpaks, appimages and arbitrary executables, but especially the later might not always work out of the box.

Judging from the frequency at which they publish blog posts about major features, development is going really well. I’m looking forward to trying it to see whether it’s actually as good as it seems (although it will probably still take quite some time until it’s mature enough to use productively).