I used to like the Pixel a line, which clocks in at around 370 EUR / 435 USD for a new 9a where I live. My next one's likely going to be a FairPhone though, because fuck Google (and it's a European manufacturer).
This should have many more upvotes. The security incidents quoted at the start of this article have no relation to its actual topic, i.e. the hypothesis that there may be increased fragility of supply chains as a result of AI adoption. While it's plausible this may happen, the article makes it sound like this has happened when it clearly hasn't. In other words: it's little more than "hurr, durr, AI dangerous".
Except AI is trash at doing what it's advertised to do, it makes everybody dumber, and its shills will blame you once it inevitably mucks everything up.
We don't even have "AI". We have LLMs, aka chatbots, aka glorified digital parrots that, just because they're eloquent and sound competent, management with little to no technical expertise feels can replace large parts of the workforce.
If we just called it "cyberparrots" instead of "AI", maybe more people would their limited utility and the utter folly of having these take over ever larger portions of business procedures.
I installed GOS on an old Pixel 4a I had lying around. It seemed OK so far, but I didn't do a lot of testing. Are you running it with sandboxed play services? How well does that work as compared to MicroG under CalyxOS?
If you've got that experience under your belt, you'll be just fine. I haven't tackled zfs myself yet (I'm lacking the RAM, plus I was put off by the ECC RAM recommendation). But I know it unifies a lot of the things you're already familiar with under one roof (volume management and journaling) and adds more cool features (snapshotting, RAID, encryption, bitrot protection) without you having to combine and manage several different technologies (mdadm for RAID, LVM, LUKS, ...). I did that on my main rig and it turned out to be rather complex. Hence the switch to btrfs to at least squash a bit of complexity.
If you'd rather continue working with the storage technologies you know and avoid zfs, you may want to look into other OSs than TrueNAS (because that is zfs only). Two I'm running and can recommend are
Open Media Vault: great for beginners (friendly, though dated-looking web UI), but Debian-based underneath and hence reasonably flexible if you know your way around the CLI, which you probably will. Case in point: mine is no longer just used as a NAS, but runs somewhere between 10-20 Docker containers, and I rarely touch the webUI these days.
Proxmox: You mentioned VMs, so you're probably familiar with this one. I like its flexibility, allowing me to run each VM tailored to its purpose: a NAS VM for network shares, a hardened, minimal VM for publicly available services and Wireguard access into the network, an LXC as a local DNS server...
(though CalyxOS is paused for an interal audit or something)
More like "Nick Merrill (the guy who fought NSL letters in court and started the project) and the lead developer departed without a single word and took the project's signing keys with them". You draw your own conclusions, but for me (a long-time CalyxOS user) those were huge red flags and caused me to settle on iodéOS for my new home.
Props for the powerful DIY! You're right about the pre-built models. I'm coming from a QNAP one, and while they're good for learning the ropes, they'll become pretty limited after a while. That, and the shit they're trying to pull with proprietary HDDs.
A self-made rig gives you a lot more flexibility, although it requires you to learn a bit more. But seeing that you're already getting comfortable with GFS, I guess you'll manage just fine!
Same. Scored two 16TB drives and a 4GB in summer of 2025 (by pure chance though). They're now 150%-200% the original price. Cannot wait to see this bubble pop.
That's a much more sophisticated setup than mine! It may even be overkill (depending on what it is you want to host, and to how many).
I've been running two enterprise-grade Toshiba 16TB drives in a btrfs RAID1 since last summer. No SSD for caching (though the OS and my Docker containers run on one, with regular syncs to the slower spinning drives). No complaints so far.
The worst part is that we don't something, and by saying something, I mean boycott them.
Boycott is under way. In my bubble, people are ditching American goods and services left and right, including Windows. The combination of "Murica first" (fascist edition) and big tech overreach has prompted people to make good use of their middle fingers.
Dies. Mein Haushalt meidet seit 2025 US, wo es geht - von der Festplatte bis zum Wertpapier, vom Online-Dienst bis zur Zahnpaste. Und das macht Schule! Allein in der zurückliegenden Woche erreichten mich Fragen nach europäischen Amazon-Alternativen, KI und degoogled Android. Da draußen bewegt sich was!
I used to like the Pixel a line, which clocks in at around 370 EUR / 435 USD for a new 9a where I live. My next one's likely going to be a FairPhone though, because fuck Google (and it's a European manufacturer).