I’m on Debian but have been using GNOME with its built-in RDP server since it’s Wayland compatible… But before I did that I had also set up XRDP so here’s a few ideas :)

I just installed Debian with XFCE. I installed XRDP but for the life of me I cannot get it working.

Are you using XFCE with Wayland or X11? XRDP currently only works with X11. Make sure the user you are using to RDP with is able to log in normally with XFCE + X11 before attempting RDP.

Also RDP logins only work with Linux users that are not currently logged in at the desktop so make sure you’re logged out before testing.

Also double-check that the xrdp.ini file looks right, particularly the incoming port it is configured to use. (on Debian it is in /etc/xrdp/xrdp.ini). When I initially configured XRDP the port setting was strangely configured, it was set with port=vsock if I remember correctly and that wasn’t working… I had to change it to a regular port number. Also consider changing the port number if necessary, I had to change mine but only because Gnome’s own RDP server was already using the default port 3389. (if you change xrdp.ini settings make sure to restart the xrdp service)

Also double-check that the XRDP service is active and running (sudo systemctl status xrdp) - on my end the service would stop running when the port number config was wrong which meant it was no longer listening to incoming connections.

You don’t need to but #1 could be a bit easier if you prefer multiple torrent clients/instances for organization. qBittorrent / Deluge can run multiple instances so you could have like qBittorrent “A” instance pointing to your internal SSD and qBittorrent “B” instance pointing to your external HDD. That’s just a quick example but I’m sure Transmission and other torrent clients can do the same.

The only tricky bit with multiple torrent clients is that they’d each need their own incoming connection port if you intend to be fully connectable (port forwarded). That may not be feasible if you’re using a VPN that only gives you 1 port forward but otherwise it’s doable, depends on your setup.

In qBittorrent what is the Status of DHT, PeX, LSD when you click on the torrent and click its Trackers tab?

I’m on CGNAT

Your own torrent peer is not and cannot be connectable (port forwarded), unfortunately.

Not sure if you’ll be able to get much improvement, it’ll always be slow or impossible depending on the amount of connectable peers in the torrent swarm. But you should be seeing okay-ish speeds if the torrent you’re trying to download has tons of connectable peers. Does the torrent you’re downloading have a lot of seeds/leeches on it?

PS - If you’re saying everything usually works fine then something changed, could try restarting your internet router just to rule that out.

Most AppImage files are full compiled applications on their own, no need to “install” anything. Just run them directly to start the application.

You may need to expand in your post what it is you’re doing exactly? Or maybe you downloaded the one Appimage that is an installer for something and it is designed to remove itself after installation? Doubt that is what is happening but can’t entirely rule it out.

The link is from February 1st, about a blog post in January. I clicked here thinking Bitwarden just raised their subscription price again haha.

The last ancient USB to PATA only adapter I once had did actually support SMART stats, but apparently the adapter’s firmware didn’t support drives over 128GB

So close, you almost had it!

Same, been thinking of just keeping an eye out at thrift stores and such for an antique USB drive enclosure… one that isn’t a Maxtor OneTouch, heh. Or maybe my idea of a janky PATA-to-SATA connected to SATA-to-USB will actually work for SMART info by some miracle.

If I had more space for storing old tech I’d maybe just adopt or buy an ancient desktop that actually has PATA ports in it. I’ve actually seen them come up on Craigslist, like ancient Compaq desktops from back in the day before SATA existed.

Your post title and post body are asking for two different things :P Tons of SATA to USB adapters and drive enclosures work well on Linux, that part isn’t too difficult.

But what you probably want is one that has both UASP support and TRIM support for best SSD support. Here’s the tricky part, even if the adapter or drive enclosure has TRIM support that doesn’t mean it was auto enabled in the Linux system it was plugged into. Often times Linux can’t tell if an adapter or drive enclosure has TRIM support so the safe thing to do is to not enable it by default. That means you can see the drive supports TRIM, hdparm says the drive supports TRIM, yet when you run fstrim it still complains that TRIM isn’t supported.

Take a look at

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_state_drive#External_SSD_with_TRIM_support

and https://glump.net/howto/desktop/enable-trim-on-an-external-ssd-on-linux

If you already have an external adapter or enclosure that claims TRIM support but it isn’t working in Linux maybe try to enable TRIM and see how it goes?

For what it’s worth I do have a drive enclosure, with ASMedia ASM1351 chipset, that claims TRIM and UASP support but by default fstrim still won’t run TRIM on any drives inside it. If I get some free time maybe I’ll see if I can get Debian to enable TRIM on the device just for testing but it could be a bit.

EDIT: Confirmed the instructions in archlinux seem to work and I was able to temporarily enable TRIM on my external drive enclosure to successfully run fstrim on an SSD inside it. I only did a quick test, setting provisioning_mode to “unmap” so it’ll lose TRIM configuration once I disconnect the drive or restart the system. You’ll probably want to go the extra step and set up udev rules to keep it enabled.

Tested on Debian with a Startech S251BMU313 (USB 3.1 enclosure for 2.5" SATA drives with ASMedia ASM1351 chipset). In theory the archlinux instructions should work with any external USB adapter or enclosure with TRIM support.

Also note the instructions are a bit confusing, I did notice that running sg_readcap immediately resets the configuration in provisioning_mode so in my case I had to avoid re-running sg_readcap after enabling “unmap”.

EDIT2: Forgot one important tidbit :P for whatever reason the actual echo “unmap” command in archlinux would not work for me, I think you may need to have root permissions to actually do that? Instead I ran this with my non-root admin user:

echo unmap | sudo tee /sys/block/sdX/device/scsi_disk/*/provisioning_mode

Replace sdX with the drive device you’re working with. I’m not entirely sure why the above command works for me in Debian, and not the archlinux version, but figured I’d document it here just in case.

That’s good info! I’ve been looking around for a PATA to USB adapter with SMART support and haven’t had a ton of luck narrowing one down. Thinking offhand I may need to cobble together a PATA-to-SATA adapter connected to a SATA-to-USB adapter to actually get some SMART info moving from a PATA drive via USB. It’s not the only way to do this but it would be a lot easier if it can be done via USB :/

Also some fun info since you mentioned PATA adapters - The Maxtor OneTouch II is a terrible ATA enclosure, especially on Linux. For whatever reason the built-in chipset does some sort of disconnect right at the end of long operations like formatting, partitioning, etc. so you’re never entirely sure if the command worked correctly. I guess it was designed with Windows in mind, or maybe its Linux compatibility isn’t 100% there. And of course no SMART info gets passed through.

Right now using a pfSense router, it’s been working well but I’ll eventually replace it with hardware to run OPNsense (pfSense fork) when the time comes.

If you’re mainly just worried about wireless I’d just look into something to run OpenWrt or maybe FreshTomato if you’re sticking to older hardware. I have an older Linksys wireless router that is compatible with FreshTomato firmware so it’s been running on that and works well for my own usage, nothing fancy.

Feels like the article is slightly off base, the people today looking for something physical and memorable have been buying vinyl. In 2026 most people I know don’t have a CD player let alone a CD burner. But lots them do buy and play vinyl and have record players for that purpose.

Or… if the article is just a nostalgia deep dive then why the commitment to CDs? You could do the same passing around USB sticks if the purpose is to share music with friends.

Also wonder if the article writer’s own discs actually still work, burned discs don’t last that long. They mention having a whole box of old discs but I don’t know if they actually tried to play them and checked them for errors. A while back I was doing some data recovery for a friend who had all her stuff burned to discs over the years, turned out about 20% of her discs were either unreadable or full of errors.

I was reading into this recently too. My understanding is that Debian + LibreOffice install the Liberation Fonts by default so usually you don’t need to worry about documents using Ariel and Helvetica (Liberation are metrically compatible replacements).

After further reading I ended up also installing the Crosextra fonts, the advantage of those two is that they are metrically compatible with Microsoft’s Calibri and Cambria. Once installed in theory LibreOffice should be able to open documents that had those Microsoft fonts and auto replace them with the open versions. (there’s a setting in LibreOffice to force font replacements but it didn’t seem like I needed to do that in my case)

Some more info on that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croscore_fonts#Crosextra_fonts

The Crosextra font packages in Debian

https://packages.debian.org/trixie/fonts-crosextra-carlito

https://packages.debian.org/trixie/fonts-crosextra-caladea

Also interestingly - if you do really, really want some of Microsoft’s fonts they are free to install but I don’t think you actually get a license to distribute/publish with them. I didn’t bother installing these but could be useful for someone with tons of old MS Office documents with lots of random MS fonts.

https://packages.debian.org/trixie/ttf-mscorefonts-installer (need to enable contrib in your apt settings to be able to apt install those)

but a friend told me that to get one I either need a VPS with a public ip (which just takes all the fun out of selfhosting) or purchase a static ip

Neither of those are requirements. Just buy a domain at a registrar that allows you to dynamically update an IP address with a domain you have there. Look into DDNS update scripts and/or your own internet router, many routers have that feature built-in already.

My system completely locks up every few hours. It’s not just a DE crash; the entire machine becomes unresponsive. The mouse and keyboard are completely dead (no cursor movement, Caps Lock key doesn’t toggle).

Before you rule out a DE (or Wayland issue), are you 100% sure the entire system is unresponsive? Like is it still online and responding to ping or SSH? Just to be sure try enabling SSH on the system - then set up a spare laptop/computer on the same network that can normally ping or SSH to your Linux system. Next time the issue occurs test to see if the Linux system is truly unresponsive by checking if it is still responding to pings and allowing you to SSH into it.

If you don’t have a spare laptop/desktop but do have an Android phone you could do the same with Termux.

Also if you can SSH into it you should be able to force logout your own user, that would bring your Linux system back to the login screen and you’d then be able to use mouse/keyboard normally again. (run “who” to view logged in users, run “pkill -u your-username” to kill and logout the user, may need to run those with sudo)

Only reason I mention it is that I have an ancient desktop that exhibits similar behavior occasionally but my system is still alive on the network. So far for me it seems like it might be a Wayland + Nvidia + GNOME issue. Once I switched back to X11 it doesn’t seem like the issue occurs anymore.

Some ideas:

• You could try changing some of the power save settings when you close your laptop lid to see if it helps. I have a spare laptop that used to get stuck with a scrambled display when going into suspend then waking up, it ended up being easier just to disable suspend altogether… I think for whatever reason Hibernate actually behaved better than suspend in my specific case. Granted its been a while since I retested all that against the current Debian version. Take a look through https://wiki.debian.org/Suspend for some ideas

• It’s possible Nouveau is still a bit buggy with suspend/resume, plus maybe when paired with hybrid/optimus graphics mode? I don’t have a solid solution for that but it could be worth experimenting with the regular Nvidia driver, Debian has a pretty detailed how-to on setting it up https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers … in particular take a look at enabling NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations (see https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Wayland_configuration) to help with suspend/resume, maybe the driver along with that setting will do the trick? The big caveat here is that same Debian page mentions

Warning: enabling NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations will cause the driver to malfunction on laptops with Optimus hybrid graphics.

and it does sound like you have some sort of hybrid graphics setup, so I can’t say if enabling it would be helpful or very bad in your case. :/

• I wonder if the issue is manifesting due to the hybrid graphics? I haven’t played around with one of those type of configurations but maybe you could go into your laptop’s BIOS and try disabling one of them so you’re always using the Nvidia graphics, or the AMD graphics?

• Speaking of BIOS, kind of a longshot but you could double-check if your BIOS is up-to-date. Power saving issues could just be due to buggy firmware particularly with laptops. But sometimes you’ll just have to look for workarounds if the firmware itself quite right and the laptop vendor never fixes it.

from the article

The issue appears mainly on Samsung laptops and can prevent users from accessing files or launching applications.

Having a computer that cannot launch applications, let alone access files, is basically the same as not having a working computer.

I guess using AI to moderate AI and bots wasn’t working out.

Maybe they’ll pivot to being a site similar to Moltbook, just bots moderating other bots that are conversing with each other. Sounds like they were almost there.

Assuming you already have a valid Windows .iso installer:

Just use Ventoy (it can be used on Linux as well as Windows).

Or if you have access to a running Windows system then Rufus or YUMI are other options you can use.

Bazzite definitely doesn’t want you to use Windows NTFS formatted drive partitions and it isn’t supported https://docs.bazzite.gg/Gaming/Hardware_compatibility_for_gaming/#ntfs

You could try to see if the drives at least show up in whichever disks application Bazzite uses (GNOME uses the “Disks” application so maybe it’s the same for you), if it’s in there you can click the partition and see what options you get for mounting it, if at all possible.

But I think in general if you were planning to use Windows NTFS drive partitions then Bazzite may not be the best distro to use.

Similar to the other comment, not sure if you’ve ruled out writing a Python script? For what you’re describing Python would be able to easily tackle your requirements and still be readable since it’s just a script you can launch whenever you need. Python is also pretty easy to pick up so if you’re familiar with scripting then it could be a fun learning experience (if you don’t already know it).

Other scripting languages could work too, just feel like Bash will be less readable if you’re writing a massive script like that.

Mastodon, Lemmy, Reddit and other social media platforms restrict users who connect through TOR or a VPN

That’s not network-wide, each Lemmy/Mastadon instance can do their own thing in regards to Tor or VPN. Find an instance that allows that or run your own.

Not sure if Reddit changed recently but I just tested logging in/out of an old Reddit account via Tor and it worked fine. But I mostly avoid Reddit nowadays so can’t be sure my posts/comments would work there. Also note their Tor site still works most of the time, you can actually view Reddit that way if you wanted https://old.reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqnwfj4ooad.onion/

(posting this comment via Tor)