You ask how people handle how many adds are shoved when using their devices. I think it’s due to the slow immersion into them over the years. Early web was mostly banner ads which became flashy and distracting. It started around that time and people being people, most just never really thought different as that’s the way the WWW is.

For those of us who run adblockers or use an ad-blocking DNS, and have done so for many years, it is quite jarring to see the unfiltered ad-infested scape of the web. (Most commonly when installing an new OS and not yet setting up the DNS) Some people are happy with them as every search engine ad link they click works and they go about their merry way.

If you are using Authentik, it will work good, but may be uneccessary if all you want is secure authentication, this is becuase Cloudflare does a “Zero Trust” model in which only approved email addresses, would be able to acess your site which you have to manually approve, otherwise, they get hit with the Cloudflare wall. This is completely free and voluntary!

In terms of Cloudflare, I assume that you have your domain all set up with the DNS servers pointed to Cloudflare from your domain registrar. This is probably the hardest part of it all. Then, it’s just a matter of setting up your redirection to your server. I used to use them but haven’t been in it for about a year now for my domains. They are a good company and will certainly help with your site’s security.

Nginx Proxy Manager is like the reception desk for all traffic, when WWW comes in and asks for site.example.com NPM sees that and matches it up with the IP address/port of your server and sends it on it’s merry way. If you are using Cloudflare Tunnels, and after you install their tunnel adaptor, you can skip NPM and just point to the IP and internal port on your server. Pretty straight forward in that area. They have great documentation on how to do this to get you started.

Basically, if you use Cloudflare tunnels, you can skip NPM and free up some resources if you want as it will be redundant. So, then Authentik comes in and can act as a traffic cop and protect all types of pages, ones with log in and those without.

I’ve been using this for several months, it works very well with Pocket ID. :)

I use Pocket-ID for my OIDC and it was easy to set up with Tailscale, you just have a custom domain which I do and I just login with my OIDC Account which is 100% self hosted on my local server.

I switched from Stirling to this a few months ago and it’s one of those tools you use once in a while, but not all the time. It’s a good tool to have when you need it and I gladly keep it on my server for those just in case times!

I moved my setups to Pangolin and placed it on a VPS and then just have been using it since and is about the same as I could run it with a CDN such as Cloudflare. I know Cloudflare has better security with things but I also use Crowdsec which has been nice for keeping most things away. I host my email through Mxroute so it’s never an issue. While Cloudflare has been very stable for years, this last outage didn’t affect me like it would have, although I’m just use the stuff or my purposes.

I left Cloudflare because I was ready to move away from there and found that Pangolin offered what I was looking for. No hard feelings either way toward Cloudflare at all.

Already there. :)

Thank you for allowing Flathub to publish this! I’m on an immutable OS and this works great! Color me impressed with the auto SSH key import! :)

As other’s have said Brother. I can honestly say they are one of the few companies which still make Linux drivers for their printers. I’ve been using their monochrome lasers.

They are workhorses as well, I’ve seen several out in the field printing well over 100K pages and still going strong. The best part about Brother I think is they also allow free access to their service manuals which will tell you more than you may ever want to know about your Brother Printer. :) I had an older HL-L2240 (USB Only) I bought about 9 years ago in a thrift shop and it ran faithfully on a network print server at my home until it stopped feeding paper. It probably needed a new pick up roller set, but it was a bit slow and I felt it was time to upgrade, so I now have a Hl_L2420_DW wireless which out of the box on my Fedora linux system installed and runs flawlessly. They are generally under $200 (around $130 at Wal-Mart for example).

They also do not limit you on your laser cartridge if you go that route, in that you can usually buy after market toner and drums without it ever complaining or locking you out.

I keep landing back to Proxmox, My primary use is to run the Home Assistant OS VM which is quite fantastic there. And also, I have NFS sharing setup on the Proxmox server so I can share it between my machines and my home Linux boxes. I’m on Proxmox 8 though and not 9. Debian 13 with Proxmox 9 it turns out at least when I tried it, is really locked down now for running Docker via the host. (Proxmox machine) With Proxmox 8, I can still install Docker and run my containers there, then use Portainer to manage them sometimes, but rarely now days. You can also probably do it the “Correct way” as some may believe by setting up a VM or LXC in Promox to host docker containers. I do that with one subset of containers but not all.

Another option you may want to consider is XCP-NG, which is another hypervisor and IMHO ran Home Assistant a tad bit faster for me, but it will not allow you to mount existing drives without erasing them (I can’t do that with my disks). Additionally,  it seems to be on an out of date CentOS build which is no longer updated. (My notes from this are from a year ago when I tried it and I think some of it has changed, but for storage: https://docs.xcp-ng.org/storage/) You can see what’s going on there.

Most people will say to host Truenas or something like that in a VM via Proxmox but honestly, it isn’t too difficult to set up with a tool like Cockpit to manage the shares. I’ve played with most of the setups recently and recently tried going with a Debian 12 install on bare metal with the Home Assistant VM running which I could, but I had more crashes with the server and it never started the VM in spite of being told to do so. I honestly didn’t stick around though, so YMMV if you go that route.

Pocket id is my go to. I used to use Authentik, but it was overkill for us. Pocket ID is pretty simple to use and has a very nice interface to add your users and clients. Uncluttered and straight and to the point. Pocket ID doesn’t use UN/PW Combos. Instead, you use Passkeys as in webAuthn devices to log in, which IMHO is one of the better security paths.

https://github.com/pocket-id/pocket-id

For those that don’t want to go back to the Dark side (Reddit), the post referenced a theme (Grey Layout global theme) which got KDE Dev’s involved who in reaction removed the listing from the store.

In short - the theme ran code to run a rm -rf on the user’s drive which wiped everything during install. Aside from backing up your data religiously, be sure to inspect the code instead of blindly installing for now. KDE Dev’s said they will need to do better so I expect some changes are afoot to provide better security.