I can confirm I’m a newer user (not a normie) to Nextcloud and I don’t know or really care what it uses because it works so I haven’t had to learn what it is or how to debug it.

I second that. Even my lower-midrange laptop from 3 years ago (8GB RAM, Integrated AMD GPU) can run a few of the smaller LLMs, and it’s true that you don’t even need a GPU as they can run in RAM. And depending on how much RAM you have and what GPU, you might find models performing better in RAM instead of on the GPU. Just keep in mind that when a model says, for example, 8GB Memory required, if you have 8GB RAM, you can’t run it cuz you also have your operating system and other applications running. If you have 8GB video memory on your GPU though, you should be golden (I think).

I completely forgot about the Linux Upskill Challenge! I should have mentioned I’ve been running Linux as my desktop operating system for almost 3 years, and I’ve been tinkering with it quite a lot throughout so I’m quite familiar and very comfortable with the command line. I shoukd go through the Linux upskill challenge so I can fill in any knowledge gaps though. Thanks for reminding me!

Yup. I’ve been using Eternity and I like it but it doesn’t mean you would.

I feel almost obliged to ask: what are you running on this monster of a setup?

Is Hugo good for, say, a portfolio website? I know its good for blogging, but I’ve been thinking about a simple portfolio website hosted on Gitlab pages (I wish I could selfhost, but I can’t due to a lack of hardware and restrictions from my student accommodation and their network policy), and was wondering if Hugo would be a good choice for a portfolio website, maybe just having one page per project or something like that?

I really like the idea of user-friendly selfhosting (which is essentially what this company is offering, I mean hell, I’ve had similar business ideas floating around in my head too) BUT any company that has:

1. an in-the-know marketing team

2. Any employees that are somewhat technical enough (which should be guaranteed for a company with this sort of product

3. NOT a scam

Would know what a HUGE risk reputation-wise it is to showcase crypto-related selfhosting on the FRONT page. It’s like a “build-a-red-flag” or “destroy-our-reputation” speedrun. Even IF you want to offer this, anyone in-the-know with at least 3 braincells would bury this deep in the page and make it difficult to find (if they were well-intentioned in the first place) because at this point anything crypto, especially being the main offering, is a huge red flag.

If instead, they offered a nextcloud instance, for example, or Pihole as an adblocker, or some other good and common services, maybe a selfhosted VPN (or maybe not, because of the stupid and misleading ads of VPN companies), they would be seen as 100% more legit.

Edit: Just checked their marketplace and they have:

Jellyfin

Vaultwarden

FreeGPT-2

Gitea

Matrix

Nextcloud

Their own service for TOR pages

Ghost (a blogging platform)

SearxNG (a search engine)

I mean, add Wordpress, Pihole and some other friendly services, and advertise THOSE!!! Build your own Google (SearxNG)! Build your own MS Office online and OneDrive (Nextcloud)! Build your own Github (Gitea)! Build your own Discord (Matrix)! Build your own password manager (Vaultwarden)! Build your own Netflix (Jellyfin)!

As a fellow teenager and a FOSS enthusiast, Linux user and Linux tinkerer and hobbyist, I’m glad to see there are more people my age getting into the FOSS space.