cerothem

My experience is the opposite, WhatsApp is my most reliable bridge requiring exactly zero intervention to reauthorize or troubleshoot.

Your right you still have to have the app because of how it works. But you can’t bridge the calls anyways, I just have message notifications off.

This isn’t about continued uptime. It’s total time on. Rebooting doesn’t reset this figure.

Opnsense or pfsense are good options. Most people would suggest the former.

If you use your existing router as an AP you need to ensure it has a different IP address then your firewall and turn off DHCP.

If buying APs most would suggest unifi access points for their features and ease of use.

The *sense options let your use wire guard, openvpn, or others like tailscale, tinc.

For hardware any dual nic (in the speed you want) any n95, n100, n150 mini PC should more than meet your needs.

I would consider zoraxy.

https://github.com/tobychui/zoraxy

Single go binary, works on Windows natively if you need that and somewhat more feature rich than npm (if your not custom writing configs)

For the ones I imported it seems like the location data is still there

https://takeout.google.com/

Export your photos with take out

Then use immich-go to import

https://github.com/simulot/immich-go

Ubuntu is based on Debian, by the nature of that it will have more things than Debian.

Ubuntu generally has more cutting Edge features and tools by the nature of what it is, but the company supporting it also is pushing snap files for compatability containers which may or may not be your cup of tea.

Debians official packages can sometimes be a tad older since their ideology is stability over everything else.

A popular hypervisor distro proxmox uses Debian as the base for it’s great stability.

Honestly the best thing to do is just start trying things and don’t only rely on your own stuff until you have a good understanding.

Just get an old computer and install an os you want to learn, worst case you break it and reinstall.

I suggest proxmox since you can lean on community scripts and can backup and restore any containers pretty easily if needed.

But as with anything don’t go in expecting to be perfect, just get started, break some eggs and learn from mistakes. You will learn what you like about it, what you would change and you can burn it all down and start again if you want as well.

If you use tailscale you could pretty easily get similar results.

Tailscale to broker connections between devices and then access with the tailscale IP address

Here’s a very old flow chart I made for some folks that didn’t want to use Linux. Though it mostly applies to any serup