It's seems to have been common sense for a while now that Windows has good-enough security software that you don't need 3rd party tools but is it actually the case now? Is there anything to lose or gain from trusting 3rd party with this stuff?

Edit: I've just purchased an Unraid license. I'll give it a go and it may not turn out well, but for the time being, the question is settled. I appreciate everyone for providing insightful and informative answers!

Hey everyone,

I've recently bought myself a NUC (NUC11TNHi3) that I intend to run as a home server, using many of my external USB drives as the storage.

My use case is very narrow. I'll use it as a Plex server and seed/leech torrents with it.

I've never built a home server like this before (I did dabble with it on a RPi, but that was just for PiHole), so I've never had to research what operating systems are available to me. After some research, I narrowed it down to two options.

1. Windows
   This option is the most straightforward given that it's the system I'm familiar with the most. My use case is also very narrow, so I could set everything up in a couple of hours. All I'd have to do is install Plex server, a torrent client, exposing them to the outside world with port forwarding or Tailscale (never used it before but seems easy enough), and share my external USB drives locally so that I can access them using my regular desktop computer at home. The downside of this is that Windows can be finicky. I'd also prefer to have my drives pooled under a single drive. A cursory research suggests that Windows can do this as well, but not in a way that inspires confidence.

2. Unraid
   I hadn't heard about this since last week, but it seems like a nice option. It costs money, it's proprietary, and I'd likely have to reformat all my NTFS drives to be able to use it but I was wondering if this would be the best long term solution. The learning curve will be there. Arrays, cache drives, share drives etc. are terms I'm not familiar with (though I can guess what purpose they serve) so it will be more time consuming to set things up properly. But given how narrow my use case is, as elegant a solution as it seems, is it necessary? I'm only considering this because seems like this is the best purpose built OS in the market right now.

Some clarifications:

• I'm sure someone will suggest a Linux distro. I have used Fedora as my main OS for a couple of years and I was quite happy with it, however I could never wrap my head around the Linux permissions structure, which Plex is awful with, as it creates its own user and look for drives under that user. I must have spent hours and hours to make Plex read my external drives properly before, but I've never managed to make it do so without some sort of hacky way and I don't want to do that with my home server. I don't want to have any doubts that things can go wrong. I want something that just works. (If only Synology had a capable device that could handle multiple simultaneous 4K transcodings. I'd have just throw my money at them instead of buying a NUC.)

• My use case will remain narrow. Maybe way down the road I can automate stuff with Sonarr or Radarr or stuff like that, but I don't think I'll ever consume enough recently released stuff to justify it. One thing is for certain, I'm never going to host my password server, feed reader, or something like that on this device.

That's about it. What should I do?

Given that I'm a novice is this area, I'd be all ears to listen any other related or unrelated advice for someone who's just starting to build their first home server.

Thank you in advance.

I use Slack, WhatsApp, Discord and Facebook's Messenger. On my computers, rather than installing dedicated apps, I've always just used these services' browser versions. It allows me to block ads with my browser's ad blocker and modify the UIs with other extensions that I use.

But in terms of privacy — and more specifically, in terms of what the service has access to outside of their own walled gardens — is there a difference between using these services through a browser or their dedicated apps? I use both Windows and Mac computers, if that makes a difference. My browser of choice is Firefox and I run the services in their own containers.

On my phone, I just use the provided apps and get notifications that way. I am well aware that most of these protocols are not great for privacy to begin with, but I'm not currently looking for other messaging systems.

I've seen some tutorials that suggest installing the Amazon app store and then using a workaround to sideload apks. There's also emulators like Bluestacks. I'm curious as to what people prefer and what apps they've found useful.

I'm running Windows 10 now, and I understand I can still use Emacs, but I'm seizing the opportunity to give it a shot to other tools. In part because I'm not sure how "native" my Emacs setup would feel on Windows, but also because I reached a point of "tinkering fatigue" and I want things that require less maintenance.

I used Org Mode a lot and was thinking if there is something with a similar feel that is more plug-and-play. Programs like Notion, Obsidian, and Roam Research are like that, I think.

These are some of my requisites:

• FOSS
• markdown or org markup
• I don't wanna pay for anything, ever
• plug and play
• text-based
• easy export and backup
• keyboard-centric or keyboard-friendly
• can be used offline
• local database can be synced using Dropbox
• Emacs-like and/or Vim-like keybindings

I currently dual-boot Arch and Windows and just use the Windows EFI partition in Arch as well, however I only have about 13 MB of space left on it.

I’d like to try installing Gentoo on an extra SSD I have with nothing on it, but don’t really want to have a second EFI partition if I can avoid it.

So my question is, can I shrink the Windows main partition towards the right and expand the the Windows EFI partition into the newly freed space?

I'm a longtime Linux user, and I haven't used Windows in a while aside from just launching games from Steam on my living room computer, but my new work laptop is Microsoft's flagship Surface Pro 4 so I figured it'd be the best experience you can have on a Windows machine.

I got the laptop in yesterday, and here's the summary of my experience:

• I am required by IT to use Chrome. To install Chrome, I had to click through no fewer than three "Are you sure you don't want to use Microsoft's more secure, faster browser?" banners to do so.

• When I plug in my external monitor, by default, the two monitors were mirrored; when I went into display settings, it didn't show the external monitor until I closed and reopened the settings menu.

• I have an Apple Magic Touchpad 2, and I had some issues getting it set up on Ubuntu 20.04 when I initially got it. These problems are now solved on the latest version of Ubuntu, but I was expecting a nice contrast in a good plug-and-play experience on Windows. Instead, I had to install sketchy drivers from some random GitHub page to get it to work properly.

• I've had some minor annoyances with my audio interface (a Zoom R-22) not being set as the default when I want it to be on Ubuntu, and I was really looking forward to getting a smooth video calling experience with my nice mic and interface on Windows. Lo and behold, the R-22 audio input - the whole reason I have it - doesn't work at all, at least in the Zoom video calling app.

• On Ubuntu, I use QV4L2 to configure the framing, zoom, exposure, etc of my camera. It's a bit clunky, and I was looking forward to having a smooth experience with this on the premier business OS. Unfortunately, the camera on this laptop has extremely aggressive aperture priority mode enabled, and there is no first-party app to configure it! The documentation tells me to go to Settings -> Devices -> Camera but there is no such menu item. So, I just look either washed-out or ultra-dark in every video call.

• After running Windows Update and rebooting, I was greeted with a full-screen and quite annoying to exit tutorial for Microsoft Teams - an app I did not install, because my company uses Slack.

This in addition to some setup papercuts, but I think those were probably due to my corporate IT's process rather than Windows itself.

Is this common? Do people who use Windows just... put up with this kind of thing? Or am I having an exceptionally bad experience for some reason?

I don't use Windows 10 all that much, but there's a Windows laptop in the house that I use from time to time.

I generally wait like a year before upgrading, but I heard Windows 11 has better support for running Linux GUI applications with the Windows Linux Subsystem 2. Command-line Emacs is fine but is not exactly the same and there is no clipboard integration. That is the sole reason I'm thinking of upgrading. I don't care about any details or aesthetic changes, since I'll just make everything look and feel more like Windows 7 anyway. I just wanna know if it's stable enough, and if it will get in my way.

Thanks!

I've got a 2TB Toshiba drive (formatted as NTFS) that has become very slow and I was wondering if anyone here as any ideas what the problem could be and how I could fix it. All the data I'd need off the drive is backed up, but I would at least like a drive to put it back on to!

In short, it became slow after I had to force power-off the system it was connected to (Pop OS installed on another external drive which I unplugged by mistake) and I haven't bothered to try to fix it in the six months since.

I've tested it on Pop and it takes about 10-20 minutes to mount, and 2 minutes to unmount and safely remove. The data itself seems fine but performance is slow, accessing a 20MB image takes several seconds and selecting the drive in GNOME Disks caused it to freeze.

The drive sounded louder than normal, especially after plugging in.

On Windows, the drive was recognised and browsable immediately, but browsing through folders was very slow - opening some folders causes Windows Explorer to freeze for a while. Some of my double-clicks were mis-recognised as click-to-rename, which took several seconds to activate and during which time Task Manager reported the average response time between 5000 and 11000 ms.

Attempting to load an audio file resulted in lots of buffering. Task Manager reports an active time of 100% (even when not loading files or folders) and the activity never exceeded 100 KB/s (and doesn't sustain it for more than a second). Ejecting the drive takes forever - after ejecting it using the tray icon, the tray icon is not removed (even though there are no other drives connected or listed) and the active time is still 100% with the indicator LED blinking non-stop. The system did not enter sleep right away after me asking it to either.

All of that to say, does anyone know what the issue could be, or how I could find and fix it? Thanks!

Edit: fixed and normal functionality restored (at least so I can check the drive a bit easier) using Scan & Repair in Windows (see my comment).

It started a day or two ago. Three threads (I think?) jump from nearly 0% to 100% and go back as soon as I open task manager to try figure out what's causing it. My first thought was a virus or bitcoin mining trying to hide itself (though isn't that done on GPU's?), but Windows' Defender came up empty handed.

I know certain OS apps, like automatic VIRUS scans behave similarly, stopping when you click or type, but this culprit seems to only react to opening the task manager. It also doesn't start again until task manager has been closed for a while.

I am stuck on Windows 10 for the time being, and I wish to make it function similarly to the arrangement I have on Linux, using xcape and xmodmap. This is what I need:

1. Caps sends Escape on tap and Control on hold
2. Tab sends Tab on tap and Alt/Meta on hold
3. Escape sends Caps (I rarely use this one).

I find this setup extremely comfortable. Is there a way to achieve this on Windows (that a layman like myself could do?).

I promise this is a genuine question and not a Windows hit piece.

Every Windows computer I've ever had has slowly gotten laggier over time until my impatience has forced me to reinstall the OS to get the speed boost that comes with a fresh copy. In the schools I've worked in, computer labs and carts full of Windows machines have slowly sunsetted, becoming wholly unusable over time. I think Chromebooks have taken over education in part because they have a snappiness to them that sticks around for a long time, unlike the decay demonstrated by Windows computers.

In my current job, I was issued a Windows computer and a Chromebook at the same time, when I was hired. The Chromebook is still chugging along just fine, but the once fresh and quick Windows computer is now ramping down. I know it's not because of startup or background programs latching on over time because I don't have admin rights and thus can't install anything! I'm not a power user either. I really only ever run a browser with minimal tabs, along with the very occasional instance of office software and/or PDF reader. That's it. And what used to be instant and quick is now like... trudging... through... sludge...

Is there some fundamental design flaw in Windows? Am I finding a pattern where none exists? Do I not have enough experience with other OSes to know that this is true for them too? I'd love someone's insight on this topic.

Hi, hope this is the right place for this question. I'd like to learn Autodesk Fusion 360, but all of my devices are running either Ubuntu or ChromeOS. I've tried to get F360 running on my ubuntu desktop with both Wine and Lutris but I haven't had success. There is also a web application for F360 but it is feature limited.

It seems like the only way to get this program running is to use a virtual machine, but I don't have much experience in this area. Do I need to buy a windows license and set up my own VM or is there a service where I can rent time on a preconfigured VM somewhere?

Thanks for reading, hope to hear your suggestions.